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Noting with regret and sadness, the sharp rise in contradictions within the State, the lack of political cohesion, the serious closure of political space particularly the overt use of the Covid -19 pandemic to suppress and repress the citizens, the continued monopolisation of media spaces and the broken down social contract.

Further noting the massive increase in corruption and arbitrage, and vested self interest, in every sector of the economy including command agriculture, fuel, Covid-19 donations, procurement and commodities.

LOCATING Zimbabwe’s multiple faceted crisis, to the unresolved crisis of legitimacy, and the stolen election of July 2018.

REALIZING that the Lockdown has been abused to lock down only the people and the MDC Alliance and to further ambush the people with the Supreme Court judgement and recalling of People’s MPs.

Concerned that the concerted attacks and desperate measure unleashed by the State, Zanu Pf and Mr Mnangagwa on the MDC Alliance.

Further concerned by the regime’s obsession with the MDC Alliance at the time when the country faces unprecedented multiple crisis including an economic meltdown, Covid-19, hunger and starvation.

Further concerned by the brazen capture and use of State institutions to further undemocratic power retention agendas of Mr Mnangagwa and his illegitimate cronies.

CONVINCED that what is being witnessed is a war by Mnangagwa and ZANU PF through proxies against the MDC Alliance has not forgiven the party for defeating him in the 2018 general elections. The end game is to totally annihilate the opposition and establish a one-party state.

Further Convinced that the biggest ‘crime’ that MDC Alliance and its candidates committed was to garner over 2 million votes in the last Presidential elections; which is a serious threat to the system and reason for these frantic efforts to destroy or eliminate the MDC Alliance.

AWARE that:
They wanted MDC Alliance to join POLAD.
They wanted MDC Alliance President to accept to be Leader of Opposition in Parliament.
They wanted MDC Alliance to accept the stolen election outcome.
They want to tell MDC Alliance who to partner and how to oppose.

They wanted MDC Alliance MPs to recognize Emmerson Mnangagwa as legitimate President of Zimbabwe after the stolen and disputed 2018 general

election.

THEREFORE, in this context, the National Standing Committee of the MDC Alliance met today in Harare and made the following resolutions

(1) Supreme Court judgement

(i) The NSC noted the judgement of the Supreme court that was handed down on the 30th March 2020 in the matter of MDC Case No SC56/2020.

The NSC categorically restates that, the party, the MDC Alliance was not a party to this litigation.

(ii) The NCS restate that a political party is a voluntary organisation of willing people and the MDC Alliance, was created through the voluntary agency of the Zimbabwean People whose right to form a political organisation is protected by the constitution of Zimbabwe and cannot be interfered by any power or authority.

(iii) The NSC noted the undisputable legal fact that the MDC Alliance is a separate legal entity from the MDC-T and participated in the election of July 2018 as MDC Alliance and that same entity held its congress in May 2019 as MDC Alliance.

(iv) The NSC restates that any attempt to infringe or impinge on the existence of the MDC Alliance is an assault on the Constitutional right of the same.

(v) The Supreme Court judgement has engendered illegalities and created unconstitutional outcomes which include the following,

• extending the terms of office of the 2014 structures which were elected in October 2014 with the terms, therefore, expiring in October 2019.
• The judgment also conflates three different organisations the MDC, the MDC-T and the MDC Alliance (the latter two which competed against each other in the 2018 election).

• Ignoring the juridical fact of the MDC Alliance being established by virtue of participation in the 2018 elections.
• Ignoring the juridical act of the MDC Alliance congress of May 2019.

(2) The recall of MDC Alliance members of Parliament

(i) The NSC notes that a separate independent the MDC Alliance participated in the election of July 2018.

(ii) That being so, the NSC condemns as wrong and false, the decision taken by the Speaker of Parliament and the President of the Senator in recalling 4 members of Parliament namely, Our Chair Thabitha Khumalo, Our secretary general Chalton Hwende, Lillian Timveous, and Prosper Mutseyami.

(iii) Only the MDC Alliance has the power to recall its MPs. No-one else has the mandate to do that except only the MDC Alliance.

(3)  The position of MDC Alliance in Parliament

(i) Pursuant to the above, the NSC resolved that with immediate effect the MDC Alliance suspends the membership in parliament by its members of Parliament pending consultation with the electorate and other stakeholders on the way forward.

(ii) For the avoidance of doubt this means that no MDC member shall attend any parliamentary committee or the sitting of parliament or any official business of parliament until such time as a decision is made.

(4) The Protection of the Struggle

(i) The MDC Alliance has noted that Morgen Komichi, Douglas Mwonzora and Elias Mudzuri have decided to cooperate with Zanu PF and the state.

They therefore have expelled themselves from the MDC Alliance and are forthwith relieved of their positions and membership in the party. They are further withdrawn from all positions to which they had been deployed by the party. Replacements have been made and shall be announced in due course.

(ii) The party resolved to take all the necessary steps to recover all the gains of the peoples’ democratic struggle.

(iii) The Standing Committee noted the perverse and insidious attempt by Zanu PF and its proxies to dismember the MDC Alliance by executing a coup against the legitimately elected leadership of the MDC Alliance under the guise of implementing the equally insidious judgement of the Supreme Court which seeks to foist Zanu PF proxies as leaders of the MDC Alliance in brazen violation of the MDC Constitution.

(iv) The MDC Alliance will not accept the holding of a Zanu PF organized extra-ordinary congress in the MDC. Zanu PF cannot write another political party’s constitution and hold a congress on its behalf to impose a puppet leadership.

(5) On Covid-19

(i) The National Standing Committee took note of the COVID19 pandemic and the dislocated livelihoods of the vulnerable and the majority of Zimbabweans who are surviving in the informal sector.

(ii) The illegitimate regime has provided no safety nets whatsoever to assist the despondent Zimbabweans. They have instead destroyed the vending stalls where the majority of Zimbabweans are seeking a living through informal trading

(iii) Pursuant to our Agenda 2020 program of action, we put forward the five fights that we, the people of Zimbabwe must pursue this year. They are as follows;

• The fight for a people’s government, reforms and return to legitimacy.
• The fight for a better life, dignity and livelihoods.
• The fight against corruption.
• The fight for rights, freedoms, security of persons and rule of law.
• The fight in defence of the constitution and constitutionalism.

We now call upon the people of Zimbabwe to build a broad consensus and united front of all progressive citizens to address the national crisis.

Launching the updated GHRP, UN Humanitarian Chief, Mark Lowcock called for swift and determined action to avoid the most destabilizing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The revised GHRP includes nine additional vulnerable countries: Benin, Djibouti, Liberia, Mozambique, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, Togo and Zimbabwe, and programmes to respond to the growth in food insecurity.

In the GHRP, the United Nations and humanitarian partners in Zimbabwe have appealed for US$84.9 million to respond to both the immediate public health crisis and the secondary impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on vulnerable people in Zimbabwe.

Noting that the request was in addition to the US$715 million appeal for the 2020 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) launched on 2 April 2020, the UN Resident Coordinator in Zimbabwe Maria Ribeiro said, “this additional appeal is part of the GHRP which will contribute to Zimbabwe’s national response  on COVID-19, particularly addressing the most vulnerable, including children, the elderly, women, people with disabilities, people living with HIV, refugees, migrants, and those affected by drought and food insecurity.”

The COVID-19 addendum to the HRP seeks to mobilize emergency funding for UN agencies and NGOs to provide support to public health emergency response to contain the spread of the COVID-19, through health programming, risk communication and community engagement, infection control and prevention, and provision of water supply and increased hygiene and sanitation intervention.

Expressing her appreciation for the strong partnership with Government, donors, development and humanitarian partners, Ms. Ribeiro called on all humanitarian and development partners to redouble efforts to ensure timely and adequate response in order to mitigate the triple crisis of socio-economic challenge, drought and COVID 19 in Zimbabwe.

Post published in: Featured

The news does not come as much of a surprise.

Neiman Marcus filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Thursday in Texas, following multiple reports in recent weeks that the Dallas-based luxury retailer was discussing the possibility of doing so.  

According to court documents, the company said it expected to emerge from bankruptcy in early fall, the Dallas Morning News reports.

The legal research startup ROSS Intelligence came out fighting this morning in response to a lawsuit filed against it yesterday by Thomson Reuters alleging ROSS surreptitiously stole content from Westlaw to build its own competing legal research product.

ROSS says it had no need or desire to obtain Westlaw’s copyrighted material — releasing documents which it says prove this — and it suggests that the lawsuit is an anticompetitive tactic to prevent ROSS from obtaining new funding or merging with another company.

“We never asked for or used proprietary data from Westlaw,” cofounders Andrew Arruda, CEO, and Jimoh Ovbiagele, CTO, say in a blog post published this morning, denying the lawsuit’s allegation that ROSS induced the legal research and writing company LegalEase Solutions to use its Westlaw account to download massive quantities of Westlaw data and forward it to ROSS.

ROSS also issued a press release denying the allegations.

This data would have been useless to ROSS, the post says. “Not only could we not map this proprietary data to the case law in our database, our technology does not attempt to generate editorialized answers; instead, it aims to recognize and extract answers directly from the law using machine learning.”

The only motive for Thomson Reuters to bring this lawsuit would be to shut down a promising competitor, Arruda and Ovbiagele assert.

“By filing this lawsuit despite its lack of merit, Westlaw is interfering with our chances of securing more funding or merging with other companies, which we need to do in order to innovate and compete with Westlaw,” they say. “This is not the first time Westlaw has used litigation as a weapon.”

Earlier this week, as I reported on my blog yesterday, Thomson Reuters resolved a lawsuit against LegalEase based on the same facts, entering into a consent judgment and stipulated injunction that prevents LegalEase from reproducing Westlaw content, using bots to access content, and sharing its Westlaw credentials.

To substantiate this, ROSS released emails that it says show that when LegalEase did once send unsolicited Westlaw content, ROSS immediately told them not to send such proprietary information.

The first email is from the ROSS engineer who discovered the data, alerting the project lead. He said, “they [LegalEase] include a lot of what seems to be Westlaw headnotes, footnotes, and other stuff. If it’s possible for them to send us cases without that it would be much better as that is added noise.”

The second email, ROSS says, is from its project lead to its primary contact at LegalEase about the unwanted data. It said: “Iif you can send us cases without that extra info, that would be great. Thanks.”

LegalEase then responded, “Yes. We can do that.”

ROSS also made available this morning the statement of work agreed on between ROSS and LegalEase. Below is an image of part of that statement, and you can click here to see a PDF of the full document.

“In 2017, we started work with a contractor called LegalEase to build datasets to train our artificial intelligence (AI) systems,” the blog post says. “We needed legal questions mapped directly to passages from case law that answer those questions. It was crucial that the passages mapped directly to case law in our database because we wanted to teach our system to give on-point answers directly from primary law.”

The statement of work requests LegalEase to research various legal research topics and questions and create a series of 120,000 memos, each containing a legal research question and reference list and four to six quotes from case law that answer the question.

Nothing in the statement of work specifies the legal research database to be used or explicitly suggests that LegalEase should provide any content that is copyrighted.

In their blog post, Arruda and Ovbiagele say ROSS has been on a mission to democratize the law through better legal technology.

“We recognize that for decades the legal research market has been dominated by Westlaw — with its bloated, expensive, and unintuitive products that provide bad results,” they write. “We knew there was a better, and more affordable, way.”

They say that ROSS has already spent $100,000 to comply with subpoenas in Thomson Reuters’ prior lawsuit against LegalEase, and they urge “friends and supporters” to help ROSS in this fight.

“We are asking our friends and supporters in the legal community to help us fight this unfair attack and allow us to continue building products lawyers love,” they write. “We believe that better legal technology can enable better access to justice at its core.”

“We will continue to fight for free access to the law,” the post says, “and look forward to showing the world Westlaw’s true colors.”

Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day!

According to data collected by ALM for their 2020 Am Law 100 ranking, which Biglaw firm had the greatest revenue per lawyer?

Hint: The firm pulled n $3,329,000 per lawyer last year.

See the answer on the next page.

A few weeks into the U.S. pandemic crisis, when everyone was still adjusting to stay at home orders, I had the pleasure of interviewing Will Meyerhofer, a Biglaw attorney turned psychotherapist.  Will’s background and experience give him unique insights into the mental health issues attorneys face every day. In the webinar, Will talked about the pressures facing lawyers during the forced isolation, and tips for staying sane during troubled times – and all the time. After all, wellness issues may be heightened right now, but they didn’t come out of nowhere – and they won’t be going away once we all head back to the office. The current situation offers legal professionals an opportunity to critically examine the reasons that attorneys suffer from high rates of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse, and take the time to address those issues in the long term. 

To kick off Lawyer Wellbeing Week, we reviewed some of the top tips from that webinar. Check them out below:

1. Remember: You Are Not Alone. One of the upsides of social isolation is the fact that we are all going through it together. Is it still stressful? Absolutely. Is it nice to know that other people are also incredibly stressed out? Also yes. In the day to day of law firm life, it is probably true that many of your colleagues are also feeling overwhelmed and unappreciated, but it is not considered acceptable to discuss these feelings. During the COVID crisis, it feels like a curtain has been lifted, allowing people to confide in each other. If we walk away from this crisis with one thing, it should be the ability to acknowledge the pressures we are experiencing every day. 
2. Take it One Day at a Time. A familiar mantra for any lawyer who has come through AA or another substance abuse program, the COVID crisis has given us all the opportunity to really sit with this lesson. The uncertainty associated with a pandemic (Who will become sick? When will everything be normal again?) is not dissimilar to the experience of getting sober, and that experience can guide us all during this time. It doesn’t matter when your state lifts their stay at home order, or when your law firm opens its offices, or when the last coronavirus case is diagnosed in the United States. What matters is getting through today. 
3. Make a Gratitude List. One of our faculty members recently shared an amazing tip – make your computer password a reference to something you love, so you always remember something good when logging in. It can be really hard to remember the good things when you are encountering a barrage of scary news, your practice is overwhelming, your clients are suffering, or your business is slowing down and you are worried about finances. But there are always good things happening as well. Check in with yourself and reflect on what you are grateful for: your partner, your kids, some time to yourself? A really great TV show, good food, or a friend who shared a funny meme? Write it down and check in when you are feeling down. 
4. Do Something For Someone Else. We are social creatures, and we thrive on two things: meaningful connection, and feeling useful. Check in with your friends and your community to see how you can contribute. Maybe you can deliver groceries to someone in quarantine, do some pro bono work to help people impacted by the COVID recession, or just chat with a friend who lives alone and is feeling lonely. 
5. Have Fun. In therapy terms, this is called “regression in the service of the ego,” and it’s vital to maintaining well-being. Make sure you make time to read trashy (or great) novels, watch a comedy on Netflix, play an online game with friends, or just watch some cute, funny Youtube videos. It’s not procrastination if you are affirmatively taking time out of your day to do it!

For more tips on staying sane, right now and in the long term, check out the recording of How to Stay Sane, Productive, and Healthy in Isolation: Wellness Strategies for Attorneys During the Pandemic, or some of our CLE programs on improving attorney wellness. 

Related Content: 

1. 10 Ways Law Firms Can Support Their Employees During the Pandemic
2. What Attorneys Are Watching In Every State (Map)
3. ABA Makes Lawyer Well-Being A Top Priority

BakerHostetler is a pretty big law firm, with over 900 attorneys they clock in at 39 on the National Law Journal’s 2019 ranking of firms based on size. With that many attorneys it’s not a surprise the firm also does well when it comes to gross revenue, making $732,494,000 last year. But as we well know at this point in the COVID-19 crisis, that means nothing when talking about austerity measures.

So what’s going on at the firm? Sources report there are pay cuts across the board with associates and staff (making more than $80,000 or $70,000 depending on the market) seeing a 10 percent cut, 15 percent for counsel, and partners will see unspecified reduced distributions. But BakerHostetler’s take on the the cuts is different than at most firms.

Because they say it’s a 10 percent cut, but then you have to read the fine print. It’s 10 percent annualized, meaning in upcoming paychecks greater than 10 percent is being taken out (roughly a 16 percent cut going forward) in order to lead to a 10 percent cut for the year. Which is the opposite of how most Biglaw firms are announcing their pay cuts, most places are saying associates will have a X percent pay cut which is a number less than X annualized.

This is how the firm explained the cuts in an internal slide:

At least the firm is not laying anyone off at this point.

We reached out to the firm for comment, but have yet to hear back.

If your firm or organization is slashing salaries, closing its doors, or reducing the ranks of its lawyers or staff, whether through open layoffs, stealth layoffs, or voluntary buyouts, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Our vast network of tipsters is part of what makes Above the Law thrive. You can email us or text us (646-820-8477).

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

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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).

Ted Cruz, Harvard Law class of 1995, has had it with those damn dirty lawyers and their filthy lawsuits.

“If we do nothing, there will be an onslaught, a tidal wave of lawsuits going after every small business in America for opening up and risking COVID-19,” the senator thundered to Hugh Hewitt (U. Mich. Law, 1983) on his radio show Wednesday.

“That’s not an acceptable course of action,” he added, before going on to predict that “Chuck Schumer Nancy Pelosi will go to the barricades to protect the ability of the trial lawyers to sue everyone and try to extract billions from the system.”

Cruz’s anti-lawyer position is shared not only by the White House, but also by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who vows that no further stimulus bill will pass without liability protection for businesses from suits by employees or customers sickened on the premises.

“We’re not asking for some type of immunity. We’re asking for a safe harbor,” Chamber of Commerce vice president Neil Bradley told NPR’s Morning Edition. “So the CDC, OSHA, state public health authority issues recommendations. A business does its best to comply with those recommendations. That should be a safe harbor for them against those type of frivolous lawsuits.”

The American Legislative Exchange Council, aka the conservative lobby group ALEC, sounded a similarly reassuring note.

“There needs to be a measured approach, and there needs to be protection from certain liability,” ALEC staffer Ronnie Lampard told Bloomberg Law. “We want to say if the organizations and employers are complying with certain rules and regulations, those companies should be immune from certain liability.”

The problem with this is that there are no rules for safely reopening America’s businesses because the White House blocked the CDC from releasing them. The AP reports:

A document created by the nation’s top disease investigators with step-by-step advice to local authorities on how and when to reopen restaurants and other public places during the still-raging outbreak has been shelved by the Trump administration.

The 17-page report by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team, titled “Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework,” was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen.

It was supposed to be published last Friday, but agency scientists were told the guidance “would never see the light of day,” according to a CDC official.

According to The New York Times, the CDC’s detailed plans to safely reopen child care facilities, schools, day camps, religious institutions, employers with vulnerable workers, restaurants, and mass transit was scrapped last week by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (A. A. Univ. South Florida) who called the rules “overly prescriptive.”

“Guidance in rural Tennessee shouldn’t be the same guidance for urban New York City,” one White House official told CNN, ignoring the fact that literally every section of the leaked CDC guidance advises “collaboration with local health officials and other State and local authorities who can help assess the current level of mitigation needed based levels of COVID-19 community transmission and the capacities of the local public health and healthcare systems.”

The White House was also worried that crazy, stringent guidelines like actually requiring food service workers to wear masks might provide a basis for those icky lawsuits Republicans are so desperate to avoid. They prefer to couch recommendations in soft language, devoid of any legal meaning or enforceable standard.

So the CDC’s actual guidelines got supplanted by the bland pablum from the White House about Opening Up America Again. And the country was saved!

Well, business owners were saved, anyway. The rest of us who have to get sick at work are f*cked.

Cruz predicts ‘tidal wave’ of lawsuits against reopening small businesses without legislation [The Hill]
AP Exclusive: US shelves detailed guide to reopening country [AP]

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Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott may be trying his damnedest to pretend COVID-19 won’t mess with Texas, but that doesn’t mean folks in the state aren’t feeling the pinch. And that goes for the legal profession as well. Midsize Texas firm Munck Wilson Mandala recently announced they are taking some coronavirus austerity measures.

In a press release on the cost-cutting moves, the firm said they were reducing compensation for partners, associates, exempt directors, and managers, and some partners have voluntarily deferred the entirety of their compensation for the next three months. While the firm added they have no plans to reduce attorney headcount, some staff were furloughed or had their hours reduced, but all employees will still get their benefits.

Managing partner William A. Munck said this about the cuts:

“There is tremendous uncertainty in the economy right now, brought on by the ongoing pandemic,” said Munck.  “We are taking precautionary measures to better position the firm and to ensure our workforce and clients have what they need.”

He also noted that the moves were designed to maintain cash flow:

“Our intent, like so many other businesses, is to maintain access to cash while evaluating the impact of this pandemic on our clients’ businesses and, as a result, MWM’s long-term finances,” said Munck.   “The executive committee intends to revisit the compensation adjustments in three months subject to changing circumstances with the pandemic.”

And that means the firm’s intention is to treat the salary cuts as mere deferrals, “to be paid by the end of the year or when practical.”

If your firm or organization is slashing salaries, closing its doors, or reducing the ranks of its lawyers or staff, whether through open layoffs, stealth layoffs, or voluntary buyouts, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Our vast network of tipsters is part of what makes Above the Law thrive. You can email us or text us (646-820-8477).

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

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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).