Category: News Feeds

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Olga V. Mack is the CEO of Parley Pro, a next-generation contract management company that has pioneered online negotiation technology. Olga embraces legal innovation and had dedicated her career to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive than before by embracing technology. Olga is also an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor, and entrepreneur. She founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to participate on corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. She authored Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board Seat and Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security. You can follow Olga on Twitter @olgavmack.

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

According to a new Gallup poll, what percentage of Americans say the Supreme Court handles its job responsibly, an uptick from the prior year’s survey?

Hint: As noted by the ABA Journal, there were cases for folks of every political persuasion to celebrate: ”Democrats celebrated rulings that struck down Louisiana abortion restrictions and rejected President Donald Trump’s push to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the report says, while Republicans lauded decisions delaying the possibility that Trump’s financial records will be released before the November election and allowing faith-based employers to opt out of birth control coverage for their employees.”

See the answer on the next page.

The recognitions keep stacking up for Emeryville, Calif., attorney Erin Levine and her do-it-yourself divorce platform Hello Divorce. Earlier this year, the American Bar Association awarded her its James I. Keane Memorial Award for Excellence in eLawyering, and just a few months before that, the practice management company Clio named her recipient of its 2019 Reisman Award for legal innovation.

But even as Hello Divorce has been widely recognized, it has not been widely available, limited until now to helping users with divorces in California. That is about to change, as Levine is embarking on a plan to roll out Hello Divorce sites in every U.S. state. Within a month, she will launch in Colorado, followed not long after by sites in Utah and Texas. While the rollout to other states will be gradual for the first year, she expects that to accelerate by the second year.

Erin Levine

Levine is partnering with the company Access to Justice Tech and its founder Joseph Scheiffer to build out the technology required for the expansion. In each state into which she expands, she will be recruiting lawyers, mediators and document assistants to help with cases.

“Both Hello Divorce and A2J Tech are committed to making consumer-facing areas of law accessible to the ‘masses’ with a keen focus on the ‘middle class’ who often earn too much to qualify for legal aid organizations but don’t have enough funds to obtain quality and meaningful legal help,” Levine told me.

DIY Divorce

Hello Divorce is a direct-to-consumer legal platform that gives users access to the Divorce Navigator, a web application launched in May 2019 that guides users through the divorce process from start to finish. It integrates with the document-generation software Documate to produce all required forms, and it includes features such as interactive checklists and tutorials.

Hello Divorce charges users monthly fees based on their choice of one of four membership levels. These levels range from true DIY at $99 a month to “divorce with benefits” at $700 a month, which includes two hours of coaching with a lawyer.

Users of the site can also opt to purchase upgrades on an a-la-carte basis that include various legal services, as well as divorce mediation and form filing with courts.

Levine started Hello Divorce in 2017 as part of her law firm, the Levine Family Law Group, and spun it off as a separate company last year. The lawyers who provide legal services through Hello Divorce work for Levine’s law firm.

Hello Divorce also uses legal document assistants to help users in preparing and filing forms. While California permits these affiliated professionals to prepare legal documents, not every state does, and that has been part of the hurdle Levine has had to overcome to expand to other states.

Gradual Rollout At First

In fact, Levine said, it was the combined challenges of navigating ethical landmines, handling marketing and building out multiple versions of the platform that had kept her from expanding into other states. But as the site has seen recent month-to-month growth of 10% or more, she has been able to build out her management team. Between the added help and her partnership with Scheiffer and his company, she is ready to move forward.

“What makes it complicated is that the product has to change from state to state depending on whether they allow non-legal professionals to act without lawyer supervision,” Levine said. She retains an ethics lawyer and will adapt the product as needed to conform to each state’s rules.

The rollout will be gradual the first year, adding another state every three-to-four months. But as she is able to standardize the rollout process and make improvements to the technology platform, she expects the rollout to accelerate.

As she expands into states, she will be hiring and contracting with lawyers, mediators and document assistants to help with cases. Levine says working with Hello Divorce is a good way for lawyers who are just starting out on their own to bolster their practices.

Levine said she’s been discussing expansion with friends and colleagues for months now, and those conversations always ended with them saying, “Maybe it will work.” In her mind, there is little “maybe” about it.

“We know the model is working in California — consumers are happy and lawyers are making money,” Levine said. “At some point, you just have to press go.”

If we have to have a bar exam, we should have an online exam. There’s no reason to put people into cramped indoor spaces for hours on end.

That said, it appears as though online bar exams are, in a word, a “clusterfuck”, so maybe that’s just not something we can do. ILG tried to get Indiana and Nevada ready for online exams in July and failed while ExamSoft managed to get Michigan’s exam completed after crashes and compromises.

Maybe things will be better by October?

Extegrity, the last of the big three potential bar exam providers, has surveyed the wreckage of last month’s exams and declared themselves out of the looming October 2020 debacle.

There are two possible lessons to take from one of the major exam software providers declaring an online exam impossible in the provided timeframe. One, that there simply is no substitute for an in-person exam and everyone should stop complaining and prepare to be locked up with thousands of their peers in two months. That’s the sociopath’s take.

Alternatively, one could just do what the rest of human society has done with 2020 and recognize that some things just can’t happen if we’re going to survive this. The bar exam should be a lot easier to give up then the Olympics because if protecting the public is its goal then we’re certainly not seeing any evidence that exams are getting the job done. Even if long-term abolition is a bridge too far — which it probably shouldn’t be — balancing the dearth of support for the exam vs. the public health risks seems to weigh in favor of the latter at least temporarily.

To defend an in-person bar exam for the 2020 applicants requires knowing deep in your bones that some number of candidates who successfully passed law school are still ignorant of the subject matter required to practice and that a generalist exam covering topics those lawyers will never purport to work on is an effective way of finding those people and that doing so warrants the risk of giving a percentage of all applicants a life-altering and potentially deadly virus.

So, like I said, the sociopaths.

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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.

Look, we have great respect for the institution of the Supreme Court of the United States, but Chief Justice John Roberts has been a disappointment to conservatives, whether it be the Obamacare decision or whether it be a spate of recent decisions all the way through Calvary Chapel.

— Vice President Mike Pence, in comments given during an appearance on the Christian Broadcasting Network, where he declared that Chief Justice John Roberts hadn’t done his part to appease conservative ideals in the course of his work as a nonpartisan Supreme Court justice. Pence continued, noting that “the destiny of the Supreme Court is on the ballot in 2020” and that if reelected, President Donald Trump would “appoint more principled conservatives to our courts.”

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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.

These are challenging times for the legal profession — and challenging times in legal recruiting as well. According to a recent survey by the National Association for Law Placement (NALP), approximately 70 percent of firms have reduced their lateral associate hiring in the three-month period from March through May, while 40 percent have reduced their lateral partner hiring (compared to the same period last year).

In light of the state of the lateral market, here at Lateral Link we feel very fortunate to be quite busy — so busy, in fact, that we are actually growing as opposed to contracting. Today I’d like to introduce you to one of the newest members of our team: Stephen Damato, a Director based out of our Washington, D.C. office.

I asked Matt Rosenberg — the Principal who manages the D.C. region for Lateral Link, who interviewed many other candidates before hiring Stephen — what he found compelling about Stephen’s background and qualifications.

“I hired Stephen because of his track record of success,” Matt explained. “Stephen graduated from Georgetown Law, cum laude, before practicing at Jones Day and Gunderson Dettmer. In addition, it was important to the growth of our D.C. office to have someone with a corporate/M&A background. We are thrilled Stephen has chosen to join our team, and I believe he will be a very successful recruiter.”

And why did Stephen decide to join Lateral Link? Last week, I interviewed Stephen by phone, and we discussed this among several other subjects.

DL: Hello, Stephen, and welcome to Lateral Link! It’s great to have you aboard. By way of introduction, can you tell us a bit about yourself?

SD: I grew up in Northwest D.C., where my fiancée and I currently live, and I went to high school here too, at Georgetown Day School (GDS). I did my undergraduate work at UPenn, where I studied Spanish and Economics. I wasn’t sure of what I wanted to do after graduation, but I had always been interested in law — partly because of the work of my father [Joseph Damato], a partner at Seyfarth Shaw — so I went straight through to law school at Georgetown.

What I enjoyed most at Georgetown Law was getting to know my classmates. I was very social during law school, and I keep in touch with many of my law school friends to this day.

DL: Like many of your classmates, you joined a top law firm after graduating. What practice area did you pick, and why?

SD: I moved up to New York to work for Jones Day, where I focused on mergers and acquisitions. I was drawn to M&A work because of its collaborative aspect. It’s quite social as Biglaw goes, calling on you to work not just with your M&A colleagues but with specialists across a wide range of fields.

I enjoyed getting to know my colleagues at Jones Day, and I really value those relationships on a personal and professional level. And I felt that my approach — treating people with respect, providing thoughtful and practical advice, staying calm, and maintaining a positive outlook — helped make me a successful lawyer.

DL: And then you made a lateral move — good preparation for your new career as a recruiter. What prompted your switch?

SD: My then-girlfriend, now fiancée, got accepted to Harvard Law School, so we decided to move to Boston. I saw the move in cities as an opportunity to explore a different practice area and broaden my corporate practice, so I lateraled to Gunderson Dettmer, where I focused on emerging companies and venture capital (EC/VC) work.

Again, my favorite part of the work was building relationships. Gunderson was also a tremendous place to work, and by nature the deals were smaller, often just me and a partner, so I got to know my clients very well.

DL: Which brings us to today, and your entry into the world of legal recruiting. What has led you to join this industry?

SD: This past spring, after four years in Biglaw, I knew I wanted to come home to D.C., where I grew up. My fiancée and I met here, before we moved to New York and then to Boston, and we knew we wanted to settle down here. And once again, I felt the move in cities was a natural time for a career transition.

I enjoyed my time at both Jones Day and Gunderson, but as I reflected on my career, I realized that the day-to-day work of being a transactional lawyer wasn’t for me over the long term — and that what I found most fulfilling about my time in practice was the building of relationships. So legal recruiting, a field driven by relationships, seemed like a natural fit.

Recruiting would also allow me to leverage my legal training and experience. I went to a great law school, I worked at two wonderful firms in two different practice areas, I had exposure to three different legal markets, and I had lateraled myself. I thoroughly understand the mindset of attorneys in private practice and the considerations that are important when taking stock of one’s career and assessing how to capitalize on development opportunities and pursue future success and happiness. Recruiting would allow me to draw upon all of my knowledge and networks, in a field where I’d enjoy my day-to-day work and be able to add value.

DL: Your thinking makes perfect sense — and explains why so many of Lateral Link’s recruiters have backgrounds like yours. Why did you choose Lateral Link?

SD: I reached out to a number of top search firms, both national and local, and spoke with many recruiters at different places. I had developed relationships with a few recruiters during my time as an associate, which I greatly valued — I found talking to recruiters to be helpful in understanding the market and the opportunities out there — and so I reached back out to them, along with others.

I chose to join Lateral Link for a few different reasons. First, I was drawn to the culture and values of Lateral Link — its emphasis on respect, integrity, diversity, and giving back. Second, I just connected so well with everyone I spoke with at the company; I felt that every single person I spoke with was someone I could trust and enjoy spending time with. Third, I feel very good about the state of the company — how it’s thriving and growing during this challenging time, when many other recruiting firms are retrenching.

DL: Indeed. We feel very fortunate to be doing well right now — and very fortunate to have you join us. Welcome again, Stephen — and I look forward to meeting you in person, hopefully sooner rather than later!

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts from Lateral Link’s team of expert contributors. This post is by David Lat, a Managing Director in the New York office, where he focuses on placing top associates, partners, and partner groups into preeminent law firms around the country.

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Lateral Link is one of the top-rated international legal recruiting firms. With over 14 offices worldwide, Lateral Link specializes in placing attorneys at the most prestigious law firms and companies in the world. Managed by former practicing attorneys from top law schools, Lateral Link has a tradition of hiring lawyers to execute the lateral leaps of practicing attorneys. Click here to find out more about us.

Husch Blackwell has heard your concerns and wants to assure you everything is just fine. As you may recall, earlier this week news broke that an attorney at Husch Blackwell, Lane Ruhland, was spotted delivering to Wisconsin officials signatures to put Kanye West on the presidential ballot. Maybe not the high-powered work you’d expect from a Biglaw attorney, but certainly nothing untoward about it. But then you learn Ruhland, along with others at Husch, represent the Donald Trump reelection campaign.

Let’s drop those receipts, as the kids say, because this just never gets old:

Apparently working for multiple presidential candidates raised some questions among the rank and file at Husch. According to an email circulated internally, firm leadership made clear that a conflicts check was run for the representation of Kanye West and/or his 2020 presidential campaign. They make no mention of how, exactly, this squares with representing another 2020 presidential candidate — and not just representing him on a firm level, the same attorney is apparently working for multiple candidates — for example if conflicts were disclosed and waived or if there’s a limited scope to the representation. Just trust that the conflict has been cleared.

But the firmwide email also makes clear that the “controversial” aspect of the representation (though it isn’t clear if they’re talking about the Kanye campaign or the Trump campaign) isn’t something they particularly care about. And “representation of clients is not an endorsement of said clients’ cultural or political viewpoints.”

You can read the full email below.

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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).

Reading Peter Garnett’s article on vacations as an important part of an attorney’s life and their relationship to the practice of law and servicing of clients made me think about what we decide to do outside of the practice of law and how it can help us become better service providers to our clients. Teamwork is an important part of family life, but I want to focus on what we do outside of our family relationships and how it can help us improve in the practice of law.

I was an avid scuba diver for over 45 years, with over 1,000 dives throughout the world. Fundamental to safe scuba diving is the buddy system. It is universally required that you have a dive buddy each time for safety reasons. If something goes wrong, your dive buddy can save your life. But just like teamwork within a law firm and a law firm with its client, teamwork as a good buddy is the result of proper planning and realizing you have a life-and-death obligation to your dive buddy.

Before a dive begins, you and your buddy check each other’s equipment to make sure that it is operational and in proper working order, to avoid entanglements and other problems during the dive. You also plan out your dive in advance as a team. You study the local map and determine the direction of the current to come up with a dive plan. Once you descend, you look for sea fans, which I call nature’s sea computer, to verify the current’s direction and strength. For safety reasons, you always start your dive against the current and then as you get more tired and have to return, you use the current to come back to where you meet the pontoon boat used to transport you to the dive site.

You have to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each person. For example, Leslie, my significant other, who has been my dive buddy on over 500 dives, has trouble initially descending. As her dive buddy, I initially descend to only 15 to 20 feet to make sure that she can begin her descent. Once she is 15 feet deep, she has no problem. I am the stronger swimmer, but she is much better at conserving her oxygen, so she can last a lot longer underwater.

Teamwork requires that if there is a heavy current, I take the lead in going against the current at the beginning of the dive to make it less taxing for her. When we are underwater for over 45 minutes, especially if it is a deep dive, she continually signals me to check my air gauge to see how much air I have left in my tank so we can do a safe ascent together. During the dive, if either of us sees something that the other would enjoy, we make sure to let the other person know what has been spotted and give them the option of enjoying the moment.

Since I have a good eye, I normally take the lead and look for interesting things whether on the reef or in the open ocean. I continually look in all directions because things change so quickly on a coral reef.

If I am running out of air or she is uncomfortable during the dive, we come up together and return to the boat together. We are a team, and we never abandon the other person underwater. Also, because getting back onto a rubber pontoon boat requires a lot of strength, Leslie goes first so I can give her help in getting over the side of the boat, especially in rough water where the crew is unable to get her tanks off first.

I also bike raced for many years. It is the ultimate team sport. Just as in scuba diving, you need to plan out your strategy before the race begins. In a one-day race, there is normally a sprint at the end of the race. The team knows who the best sprinter is, and the plan is designed for various stages of a race. How do you preserve the strength of your best sprinter so that he or she has the necessary burst of energy to cross the finish line first? During the race there are often breakaways and the team has to make decisions as to whether to chase down the breakaway or stay with the pelaton. The situation can change quickly because that decision is based on how far ahead the breakaway is and how far away the finish is. Also, you have to know how each member of your team is doing at that time because your stamina and the ability to keep up that level of energy varies from day to day and for each rider in different types of terrain. If you want to chase down the breakaway, how many riders do you use to breach the gap and then try to slow down the breakaway group?

The goal is to get as many members of the team in the proper place while every other team is organizing for the sprint. Your planning is supposed to determine which rider or group of riders will initially lead the sprint group, with your sprinter to be in the best position within the final 300 to 500 meters. Each team member has a designated role in the final sprint with one person leading out the best sprinter so that he or she can pick the right moment and be in the right position to draft past you to the finish line.

As lawyers servicing our clients, teamwork has many facets. Critical to the success of any assignment is complete cooperation between the client and his or her attorneys, and this begins at the initial meeting.

The continuation of open and complete communication between client and counsel is an ongoing process, especially in commercial cases where documents produced in discovery can call into question the attorney’s original understanding of the case. It is especially important that the attorney be aware of potential weaknesses in the client’s position in investigations and litigations so that everyone can be properly prepared on how to handle facts that are unfavorable on their face. Teamwork within the law firm is also important as tasks are assigned to various persons and everyone must do their assignment properly and on time.

The lessons we learn outside of the law office have a direct impact on our ability to coordinate with our clients and colleagues at the law firm with the goal of improving the quality of our service to our clients and for the client to obtain the best result.

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Charles Hecht is an entrepreneurial lawyer who had his own firm for 39 years and recently joined Balestriere Fariello as a partner. He specializes in innovative solutions to complex litigation, arbitration, and securities transactions. He values teamwork, which is one of the reasons why he joined a New York City boutique law firm. He and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, investigations by governmental agencies, and securities transactions. You can reach him via email at charles.hecht@balestrierefariello.com.

How can you measure a law school’s worth, aside from the bar passage rates of its graduates? If you’re seriously considering investing in a law degree, then another telling sign of a school’s success — or lack thereof — is its employment rate. Generally speaking, law schools with high full-time, long-term employment rates are preferred over law schools where graduates struggle to find work as attorneys.

But which law schools had the highest percentage of graduates employed in full-time, long-term jobs where bar passage is required or a J.D. is considered an advantage? Thanks to U.S. News, of course there’s a ranking for that.

As you may have guessed, the law schools with the best job prospects are some of the usual suspects, the elite schools found at the tippy top of the U.S. News rankings. Here they are, based on the class of 2018’s employment statistics that were used in the most recent rankings (rounded, excluding graduates with law school-funded positions):

1. Columbia: 94.2 percent
2. University of Virginia: 92.3 percent
3. Cornell: 91.3 percent
4. Penn (Carey): 90.9 percent
5. Chicago: 90.3 percent
6. Stanford: 90.2 percent
7. Northwestern: 90 percent
8. NYU: 89.5 percent
9. Harvard: 88.8 percent
10. Duke: 88.2 percent

You may be wondering how the rest of the T14 placed when it came to their employment statistics. At the tail end of the elite schools, we have Michigan (84.2 percent), UC Berkeley (83.8 percent), and Georgetown (78.5 percent). But what about Yale? As it turns out, at 82.8 percent, the best law school in the nation has the second-worst rating of graduates in full-time, long-term jobs or J.D. advantage positions. Why? Because Yale also has 25 graduates employed in prestigious clinical positions that happen to be school-funded. At the end of the day, Yale still wins.

Where does your law school stand when it comes to its employment rates? U.S. News included information on 30 additional schools for this year’s ranking. Click here to take a look or check out your school’s most recent Employment Outcome Report to find out.

40 Law Schools Where Grads Leave With Law Jobs [U.S. News]

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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.

Looks like Dan Bongino’s fake defamation suit against The Daily Beast is about to cost him some real cash after U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of Florida Jose Martinez dismissed the case and imposed SLAPP fees on the gun-loving media star.

Bongino sued the site in December over a story by reporter Lachlan Markey which noted that the now-defunct NRATV had “dropped” him from its lineup. According to the batguano complaint, readers could only conclude that Bongino been fired, which was defamation per se because it implied “unfitness to perform the duties of an office or employment for profit, or the want of integrity in the discharge of the duties of such office or employment.” This caused the well-known snowflake-hater “pain, embarrassment, humiliation, mental suffering,” for which the only remedy was $15 million.

So Bongino hired Steven Biss, the libelslander lawyer currently representing Rep. Devin Nunes in his various suits against every media outlet in the country and also a Twitter cow.

Biss isn’t barred in Florida, or anywhere in the 11th Circuit, and it shows. He failed to serve written notice on the media outlet five days in advance of filing, as required under Florida law, and then argued bizarrely that the court was forbidden to look at the postmark establishing the date of service when considering a motion for summary judgement.

He disregarded Florida’s single publication doctrine which prohibits recovering twice for the same published statement, i.e. once for defamation and once for commercial disparagement; he ignored 11th Circuit precedent barring shotgun pleadings which “contain[] several counts, each one incorporating by reference the allegations of its predecessors [i.e., predecessor counts], leading to a situation where most of the counts (i.e., all but the first) contain irrelevant factual allegations and legal conclusions.”; and he bungled Florida’s commercial disparagement statute in a laughable attempt to convert the Beast article into commercial speech.

But other than that, NAILED IT. Or, as Judge Martinez put it, “Nonetheless, because the Court is able to discern the basis of the Complaint, the Court will proceed on the merits.”

Sadly, the court was just as unimpressed with the substance of Bongino’s case as it was with the procedure. The entire suit rests on a claim that the Beast defamed Bongino by implying that he was fired. Except, as Judge Martinez notes, that never happened.

Here, even a cursory review reveals that nowhere in the article does it state that Plaintiff was fired—much less that he was fired for cause. The article merely states that NRATV “dropped” Plaintiff from its lineup of conservative commentators. And as Plaintiff concedes, this is in fact true.

Indeed, the article’s subheading explains that NRATV was “downsizing” and Plaintiff’s show was “a casualty of those plans.” The article even reflects that NRATV made “every effort to retain [Bongino].” Such reporting is a far cry from stating that Plaintiff was fired for anything other than corporate downsizing. [Internal citations omitted.]

So, no defamation, no defamatory gist, no defamation per se, no defamation per quod, no defamation by implication, no commercial disparagement and no $15 million.

And unless Biss can come up with a colorable argument in the next two weeks explaining how First Amendment-protected, non-commercial speech can trigger liability under Florida’s commercial disparagement statute, Bongino is shit outta luck. Because Judge Martinez ruled that Florida’s SLAPP law does not conflict with the Federal Rules, and thus the Beast’s legal fees are shifted to the plaintiff.

Ah, well. When life gives you lemons …

Pretty weird that NRATV folded with primo content like that! But don’t dare say that only a deranged lunatic makes lemonade that way, or Dan Bongino will sue you for commercial disparagement and hurting his tender feefees.

Order Granting Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss [Dan Bongino v. The Daily Beast Company, LLC, Case 2:19-cv-14472-JEM (S. D. Fl. August 6, 2020)]

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Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.