Category: News Feeds

Real estate may not sound like a splashy specialization, but Texas A&M School of Law professor Thomas W. Mitchell will prove it to you. Mitchell has received a prestigious MacArthur Genius Grant — and the $625,000 stipend that comes with it — for his work reforming real property inheritance law.

Mitchell is the primary author of the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA), which addresses the problem of inheriting common real property that is split between multiple owners. Historically, this often leads to a forced sale of the property, resulting in depressed prices for the property, similar to a foreclosure sale. Under the UPHPA, judges consider both economic and non-economic factors, and when one owner wants a sale and others do not, the UPHPA gives them the right to buy the property at market value. So far, 17 states, including Texas, Georgia, and Virginia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have adopted the UPHPA, and when forced sales do occur under the Act, they fetch open market-like prices. The Act was also incorporated into the 2018 Farm Bill, which helps heirs’ property owners maintain ownership and access government assistance.

Mitchell says he sees the award as recognition that you can really make change and stop injustice:

“When I started nearly 25 years ago, my ideas for law reform to help disadvantaged property owners were considered nearly impossible to achieve. I tell my students that they can make a real difference,” Mitchell said. “No matter how inevitable and seemingly permanent any injustice may appear to be, if you use your imagination and think boldly, develop a strategy, cultivate allies, and remain determined, change can come.”

Robert Ahdieh, dean of the School of Law, notes the work Mitchell has done is something most professors can only dream of:

“From the time I first met him as a law student, I have always been struck by Thomas’ commitment to positively impacting law and society,” Ahdieh said. “With his incredible work on reforming the law of partition, he has managed to do so in ways that are fundamental and lasting — and to which most law professors can only aspire.”

And as for the money? He tells Law.com that will be used to expand his work:

I think of the money as a resource, but even bigger than that is the reputational capital of getting this award and the ability to leverage both. For a while I’ve had ideas that if I had more resources, I’d do X. And the X is—up to this point, I got this award for my work over 20 years on law reform and policy. But that’s basically something I’ve done by myself, at whatever home institutions I had. I didn’t work with others. I don’t have a staff. I don’t have students who work for me. It’s something I’ve done after hours. I’d like to leverage both the money and the social capital to build a center. I would have staff. I would have law students who work for me, and graduate students in other disciplines. I’d have the ability to make a bigger impact because I could systematically look at a variety of laws that have undermined property rights for all kinds of disadvantaged individuals and communities.

Mitchell’s goal is to have 25 states enact the UPHPA by 2025, and this recognition as a Genius will definitely help with that goal.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

Joe and Kathryn have a lot to break down this week. Amy Coney Barrett’s supporters tried to give her a nickname and managed to make an even bigger mess of it. As she begins her hearings, you’ll not be able to get her new nickname out of your head. Meanwhile, Biglaw firms are split on whether or not to give bonuses to associates right now, but Kathryn explains that it looks better to pay now than to wait. And the online bar exams held last week were riddled with glitches, but examiners are committed to pretending it went off without a hitch.

As the second wave of COVID-19 gains steam, this kind of story is only going to become more common.

According to Jamie Hamilton at Roll On Friday, the London office of Jones Day has experienced an outbreak of COVID-19. And while upsetting for those who are impacted, unfortunately, it isn’t all that surprising. People — and law firms — are itching to get back to normal, but the novel coronavirus has different plans.

But what allegedly happened after the outbreak, reportedly in the corporate and restructuring teams, is turning quite a few heads. Unlike Squire Patton Boggs, which shut down their entire Manchester office after positive tests, how Jones Day allegedly handled the outbreak leaves quite a bit to be desired. It seems the firm took a page from Oklahoma Law, and was… selective about who in the London office got a heads up about the outbreak. Roll on Friday reports office wide notifications did not go out, and only certain people with direct contact with confirmed cases got the courtesy of a notification:

The US firm “pressured lawyers to come back to office” and “has now had an outbreak”, a source told RollOnFriday.

The positive cases are understood to have sprung up in the corporate and restructuring teams, which have been sent home. But, in a Trump-like move, Jones Day “didn’t tell anyone in the office” about the outbreak except for those who were in direct contact with the infected individuals, said a source.

It means that staff “are blissfully unaware and still coming in, despite lawyers in corporate and restructuring being tested and/or sent home”, said the source.

We’ve reached out to Jones Day for comment and to find out their procedures for dealing with COVID outbreaks, but have yet to hear back.

With so much uncertainty still surrounding the pandemic, you’d think a major international law firm would err on the side of over communication with their employees, especially with health and safety on the line. However, stories like this show what it’s really like on a law firm’s front lines.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

In the latest twist in the existential nightmare that is 2020, Axios reported over the weekend that they “were hearing” that Joe Biden is considering elevating New York governor Andrew Cuomo to Attorney General in his now likely administration. The story caused a brief flurry of attention among legal analysts before being swamped by the Amy Covid Barrett hearings.

Thankfully, the story comes from Axios, which is the political equivalent of PR Newswire so there’s every reason to believe that it’s not really happening. Whenever a politico wants to generate buzz they can generally trust that whispering it to Axios will land it in the news unvarnished by critical analysis and flagged by “what we’re hearing,” which should be read in exactly the same voice as the president explaining “a lot of great people are saying.”

In this case, Axios cited “some Democratic donors in Cuomo’s orbit,” which probably means “Cuomo himself” in the parlance of Washington, D.C. For his part, Cuomo is publicly denying interest, which is also standard operating procedure when you’re floating trial balloons to Axios:

“100% he’s made zero outreach, has had zero conversations about this and has made his desire to stay in New York clear as day and be governor as long as people want him,” Cuomo’s senior adviser Richard Azzopardi tells Axios.

Could I propose the alternative of not wanting him and not giving the Department of Justice over to a guy whose administration cronies have already landed in prison?

With Bill Barr eroding the integrity of the nation’s law enforcement apparatus to transform it into a Praetorian goon squad to service the White House — an effort that has already reached the absurdity of claiming that defaming rape victims is an official duty of the office of president — the next Attorney General should be someone who restores the office, as opposed to the guy who used blew up an independent ethics commission when it started figuring out that the corruption was oozing out of his office.

Cuomo’s closing of the Moreland Commission was not a federal crime, but if Cuomo’s effort to cast the lack of charges as an “exoneration” sounds awfully familiar, it’s no accident. One hopes that a Democratic Senate would find it problematic to hand over a wounded Justice Department to a guy who denigrated the work of prosecutors probing corruption at the highest levels of his government.

Despite the urging of these “donors in Cuomo’s orbit,” one has to think the Biden camp sees the AG job as a role that needs to be dramatically depoliticized. Sally Yates, who already served as Acting Attorney General, spoke at the Democratic National Convention and has worked as a career prosecutor under Republican and Democratic administrations. For a Department desperately seeking a return to normalcy, going back to the last person who ran it before it went off the rails would be a good start. There are other options, of course: soon-to-be-out-of-work Senator Doug Jones, former Civil Rights Division chief Vanita Gupta, and the man who investigated Cuomo, Preet Bharara.

Hopefully this trial balloon has gone Hindenburg within Biden’s inner circle. But it’s 2020, so who knows.

Buzz grows around Cuomo as Biden’s attorney general pick [Axios]

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Another day, another successful Biglaw firm that won’t hand out early bonuses to its associates. We know it’s only been a few days, but at this point, it looks like Willkie is going to be the sole firm to blow off Cravath’s guidance. Which firm is pissing off its associates today?

That would be Ropes & Gray, a firm that landed at No. 13 in the 2020 Am Law 100 rankings, having brought in $1,903,616,000 in gross revenue in 2019. Sources tell us the firm has decided to politely pass on fall bonuses. Chair Julie Jones and managing partner David Djaha sent out a memo (available in full on the next page) just before 5 p.m. yesterday, leaving associates feeling quite discouraged:

Here’s one of the immediate reactions we received from an associate at the firm:

Predictable yet annoying. I’m on track to bill 2300 hours and crickets from the policy committee. It’s especially disheartening given how little support the firm has given its associates this year.

Eek. It sounds like the powers that be at Ropes & Gray should have given some additional thought to handing out these bonuses. At least the firm is committed to matching these bonuses in the future. Hold on, associates, because Ropes “remain[s] committed to being a market leader in compensation.”

(Flip to the next page to see the full memo from Ropes & Gray.)

As always, we depend on you when it comes to bonus news at other firms. As soon as your firm’s bonus memo comes out, please email it to us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus”) or text us (646-820-8477). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish.

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

An independent analysis of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s tax plan has been released, and it contains good news for anyone earning less than $400,000 a year.

The new Penn Wharton Budget Model accounts for income and payroll taxes, as well as corporate duties. According to this nonpartisan report, Biden’s plan would do very little to tinker with the tax rates of households earning less than $400,000 annually. However, while direct tax rates for middle income earners would be essentially unchanged, these taxpayers would see a slight increase in effective tax rates due to the indirect influence of higher corporate tax rates in Biden’s plan. For instance, researchers calculated that the effective tax rate of the middle 20 percent of earners would increase from the current 16.9 percent to 17.3 percent due to the indirect effects of higher taxes for corporations.

In addition to well-off corporations paying more under Biden’s tax policy, the extremely rich would also face a tax hike, with the top marginal income tax rate increasing to 39.6 percent (what it was before Donald Trump’s 2017 tax giveaway to corporations and the wealthy). Biden’s tax plan would also tax capital gains at the same rate as regular income for top earners (a capital gain is the income you realize when you sell something like a stock at a higher value than the price you got it at), and would impose an additional payroll tax on incomes above $400,000 (right now, payroll taxes are only owed on the first $137,700 of a person’s annual income). Accounting for income, payroll, and corporate taxes, under Biden’s tax proposals, the top 0.1 percent of earners, who make about $3.3 million or more each year, would owe a still relatively modest 43 percent of their income to cover their tax obligations, compared to the approximately 30.6 percent overall tax rate for this group of extremely wealthy people under Trump’s existing taxation framework.

According to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the $3.4 trillion Biden’s tax plan would raise over the next decade would not directly cover the $5.4 trillion price of his spending proposals. However, the macroeconomic effects of his programs — including educational initiatives like universal pre-K, two years of debt-free postsecondary education for all students, and full tuition at public colleges for students from families earning less than $125,000, as well as infrastructure spending on mass transit, water infrastructure, high-speed rail, and clean energy research — would decrease federal debt by 6.1 percent by 2050 compared to current taxation and spending policy under Trump.

Talking about the capital gains tax and the macroeconomic effects of infrastructure spending might not do much to move the average American, if you put it like that. But taxing the rich to fund government services, and to lower the national debt, is extremely popular, and that’s more or less what Biden’s tax policy does.

According to a recent survey conducted by Harris Poll and Yahoo Finance, about 75 percent of Americans either strongly or somewhat support raising taxes if the money goes to fund government services. More than two-thirds of respondents supported higher taxes even if the money only goes toward lowering the national debt. Biden’s tax plan would do both: fund more and better government services, and, compared to Trump’s plan (or lack thereof), lower the national debt.

Trump’s reckless spending has been disastrous for the national debt, yet, we have nothing to show for it. We didn’t get better schools, we didn’t get to rebuild our crumbling roads and bridges, we certainly didn’t get a cogent national pandemic response. The rich got a tax cut they didn’t need, and corporations got to do a bunch of stock buybacks.

Biden’s tax plan offers something different. Rather than giving people earning more than $400,000 per year a handout, Biden wants to fund the things that could actually make America great again: an educated workforce prepared for 21st century jobs, transportation infrastructure that could once again be the envy of developed economies, maybe even the international leadership role on environmental issues that disintegrated under Trump. The ultimate difference, though, is pretty simple: Donald Trump wants tax cuts for millionaires at the expense of everyone else, and Joe Biden doesn’t.

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Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

On Friday, a very serious and presidential– (or maybe Treasury secretarial-) sounding Jamie Dimon gravely intoned about the coronavirus, “I don’t expect normality until summer 2021. We’re going to have to live with this.” And by “we,” of course, he means everyone else, because JPMorgan Chase seems to have put the pandemic firmly in its rearview mirror, and not only in the sense that it’s making people come back into work and dealing definitively with the big questions of the future.

The bank set aside just $611 million for potential future loan losses, far less than expected and the $10.47 billion it booked in the second quarter. Profit doubled from the second quarter.

The bank’s profit rose to $9.44 billion, or $2.92 a share, from $9.08 billion, or $2.68 a share, a year earlier. Analysts had expected $2.23 a share, according to FactSet…. If the economy recovers apace, JPMorgan may have $10 billion more than it needs to cover soured loans, Mr. Dimon said.

* A law school dean accidentally emailed confidential bar exam results and then sent another email asking that the first message be deleted. Ask Michael Scott how successful that usually is… [Charlotte Observer]

* An autopsy suggests that the man allegedly struck by a car driven by the Attorney General of South Dakota died from the injuries he sustained from being hit by a vehicle. [NBC News]

* A female lawyer was roasted online yesterday for criticizing the outfit worn by Judge Amy Coney Barrett at her confirmation hearing. [Fox News]

* The Supreme Court yesterday declined to hear a case about whether President Trump violated the Emoluments Clause by maintaining ownership in businesses that receive payments from foreign governments. [CNN]

* A former lawyer is pursuing a new career as a bagel consultant. Guess that’s one way to make “dough”… [ABC News]

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Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

I commit to you to fully and faithfully applying the law of recusal. And part of that law is to consider any appearance questions, and I will apply the factors that other justices have before me in determining whether the circumstances require my recusal or not. But I can’t offer a legal conclusion right now about the outcome of the decision I would reach.

— Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett, in response to Sen. Patrick Leahy (VT-D) asking her to commit to recusing herself from any court cases related to election 2020. Barrett twice declined to step away from any such future cases that may arise between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in her responses to Leahy.

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.