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Reed Smith finds itself defending against a lawsuit from a former attorney, Aaron Chase, who alleges the firm fired him in violation of the Family and Medical Leave Act, the New York State Human Rights Law, and the New York City Human Rights Law. The lawsuit also says Chase is looking to amend the complaint to add claims of discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The complaint, which in addition to the firm names co-chairs of the firm’s global regulatory enforcement group, Michael Lowell and Jennifer Achilles, as defendants, alleges Chase was retaliated against after suffering a concussion on vacation in September 2019. As reported by Law.com, Chase alleges that while suffering from the ramifications of the concussion in October 2019, Achilles brought up an error that he made on a case. She also is alleged to have brought up previous mistakes that Chase says she never mentioned prior to suffering from the concussion:

Chase responded to the criticism by stating he didn’t believe the error would have occurred without having suffered the concussion, to which Achilles allegedly said “It’s unfortunate that the thing that broke the camel’s back happened while you are suffering from a concussion, but you did basically the same thing a few months ago, so I don’t think it was the result of the concussion,” according to the filing.

The complaint alleges that shortly after that conversation, Achilles said she no longer wanted to work with Chase, and suggested he find work with other partners.

Chase took leave under the FMLA from October 24, 2019, to February 27, 2020. He says he was removed from his cases while on leave, and when he returned to work, had a difficult time finding assignments. According to the complaint, the October performance issue was never mentioned to Chase again… that is until he was terminated on May 8th. Chase is seeking compensation for past and future earnings, as well as punitive damages.

The firm denies the charges in the complaint, saying:

“Mr. Chase’s allegations are unfounded, and we intend to defend this case vigorously. Reed Smith routinely makes personnel decisions as we evaluate performance and productivity across the firm. We invest a great deal in all of our talent so they can be successful in supporting our clients and in pursuing their own professional goals.”

While plaintiff’s attorney, Lawrence Pearson of Wigdor, also had a statement on the lawsuit:

“By removing Mr. Chase from all of his cases before he returned from a protected medical leave, then failing to reintegrate him into the practice upon his return — which the firm’s own policies call for — Reed Smith has made its discriminatory animus crystal clear. We look forward to working to vindicate Mr. Chase’s rights in court.”

You can read the full complaint below.

If you were wondering why it still costs 10 cents per page to get something off of PACER when indexed databases everywhere else online are entirely free, you’ve got company in the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. The Federal Circuit issued an opinion this morning affirming a lower court ruling that the federal judiciary has siphoned money from the PACER revenue stream for unauthorized purchases.

In other words, that the federal judiciary imposed a financial burden on non-profit, low income, and pro se litigants and used it for a slew of projects unrelated to expanding public access to the courts.

We agree with plaintiffs and amici that the First Amendment stakes here are high…. If large swaths of the public cannot afford the fees required to access court records, it will diminish the public’s ability “to participate in and serve as a check upon the judicial process—an essential component in our structure of self-government.” … Such concerns bolster our rejection of the government’s more sweeping interpretation of § 1913 Note as permitting EPA fees high enough to cover all electronic access to court information.

The result isn’t particularly surprising when you remember that the panel asked the attorney defending PACER’s budget, “Do you have a lot of trouble answering questions generally in life or just when you come in front of the court?” Oof.

Not since F.W. Woolworth has an entity profited so handsomely off of a dime-based business model. PACER reportedly brings in $140 million annually, which it claims is necessary to cover its $100 million operating costs. Why a no frills, difficult to search, design nightmare of a document repository would require $100 million to operate is a mystery.

And the Federal Circuit agrees.

You can read the opinion on the next page. I grabbed it off the Federal Circuit homepage where it was prominently featured. I tried to get it off of PACER and it was on page 3 of the search results. That’s what $100 million will get you apparently.

Appeals court rules that judiciary misspent funds from court records fees [The Hill]

Earlier: ‘Do You Have A Lot Of Trouble Answering Questions Generally In Life Or Just When You Come In Front Of The Court?’

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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.

Plaintiff side contingency work isn’t for every firm. There’s a huge risk/reward gamble and fortune (read: contingency fees) favor the bold. Even though that’s an accepted maxim of the legal industry, some fee requests are large enough to turn the heads of even seasoned legal watchers. Such is the case of the latest fee request of Quinn Emanuel.

As, well, a bunch of outlets have reported, the firm is seeking $185 million in fees for their representation of insurers suing the federal government under the Affordable Care Act. As the firm has noted in its court filings, that is only 5 percent of $3.7 billion settlement: “If approved, a 5% fee would represent one of the lowest percentage rates ever awarded to class counsel, even in cases with multibillion-dollar recoveries, such as this.”

But as the ABA Journal notes, translating that to an hourly rate is $18,500 an hour, which is quite the bonus:

Translated into an hourly fee, $185 million represents a bonus of 18 to 19 times the law firm’s normal billable hourly rate. The firm said the amount is reasonable under a “lodestar cross-check” that involves calculating the product of lawyers’ hourly rate with the number of hours worked, then applying a risk multiplier to compensate for the risk of no or reduced recovery.

As Geoffrey Miller, professor at New York University School of Law, told Bloomberg Law, while the 5 percent seems reasonable, that multiplier number will still be taken into account:

Miller said Quinn Emanuel’s 5% request was “reasonable,” but noted that a multiplier of 18 was “extraordinarily large.”

That dynamic is somewhat common in cases with huge awards, Miller said, and makes it hard to handicap how a judge will view Quinn Emanuel’s fee request. One factor working in Quinn Emanuel’s favor is that the insurers chose to be part of the class and knew the fee could be as high as 5%, Miller said.

But in the end, as Miller notes, there isn’t a precise formula that will carry the day, but instinct, “Ultimately, the judge will decide based on his or her instinct.”

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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).

With everyone working from home, firms face new security risks they probably weren’t prepared for. Joe and Kathryn check in with Brian Schrader, CEO of eDiscovery and digital forensics firm BIA, about working from home, the new vectors of discoverable data being created by COVID, and the importance of training everyone to, well, not do dumb things with their computers.

Another day, another ranking for lawyers to ogle in a search for meaning as they attempt to get through the day’s billables during a pandemic. Despite all the unrest and change in the world thanks to COVID-19, this is still the life of a Biglaw attorney, always on the hunt for confirmation that their firm is the best firm, the one that’s hitting all of its essential metrics year after year. If that sounds like you (and you might as well admit it, it probably does), then you should check out the latest offering from the American Lawyer, the annual A-List ranking.

Are you somehow unfamiliar with this ranking? Here are all of the metrics that it measures to determine which Biglaw firms are the best of the best:

The A-List recognizes firms based on a combination of factors, both financial and cultural: revenue per lawyer, pro bono commitment, associate satisfaction, racial diversity and gender diversity (the percentage of equity partners who are women), with RPL and pro bono given double weight. Each metric measures Am Law 200 firms’ relative performance—a firm’s score in a given category is based on its ranking among all 200 firms. Each category, as well as the overall score, is based on a 100-point scale.

With that said, the full top 20 firms and their scores are listed at the American Lawyer. Without further ado, here are the top 10 to satiate your rankings cravings (with the firms’ total scores noted parenthetically):

1. Munger Tolles (92.8)
2. Ropes & Gray (91.2)
3. O’Melveney (89.6)
4. Debevoise (89)
5. Orrick (87.5)
6. Covington (86.4)
7. Paul Weiss (86)
8. Paul Hastings (85.6)
9. WilmerHale (85.5)
10. Skadden (84.7)

Congratulations to all of the firms that made this year’s Am Law A-List.

The 2020 A-List: Amid Upheaval, Firms Focus on Finding Balance [American Lawyer]

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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.

Did the president of the NCBE really threaten to keep bar exam critics from getting licenses? Well, it depends. If you’re the sort of person who thinks a mobster saying “nice little shop you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it” is just expressing well wishes on your business endeavors, then no. But if you’re one of the people residing in a reality-based society, then she absolutely did.

NCBE honcho Judith Gundersen appeared on a panel at Miami Law’s “Power, Privilege, and Transformation: Lessons from the Pandemic for Online Legal Education” virtual conference yesterday. With the July in-person bar exams that Gundersen continues to demand marred by lapses in safety protocols and involving at least one positive COVID case, Gundersen took the opportunity in this serious forum to threaten the people raising public health concerns.

During the event, Gundersen said that she and other NCBE officials:

have been the subject of extreme lack of civility and professionalism and in some cases, conduct that borders on harassment. Character and fitness issues are arising in the way examinees are communicating with Board Staff and Board volunteers.

Harassing people is bad! But if you’re giving this quote its most superficial read, then we may have some bridges to sell you.

We’re talking about a lawyer here (and she’s no less a lawyer just because she never took a bar exam!), so we need to parse these words carefully. Gundersen does not say that anyone has been harassed, quick to say it “borders on” harassment which is the “I can see Russia from my house” of harassment allegations. Nor does she say that she’s actually referred any violations to a Character & Fitness panel, opting instead to vaguely raise the prospect that anyone who chooses to engage with the NCBE just might fall into that category and have their license tied up. So your best bet, she’s conveying, is to not speak out at all.

Lest you think I’m downplaying the seriousness of the risk of harassment, Gundersen included this example of the foul treatment out there.

With all the time in the world to pick an example this was the “bad” one she came up with. Joining a panel to ask her challenging questions. FIRE UP THE DISCIPLINARY COMPLAINTS!!! But seriously, choosing to quote this tweet as an example of what she sees as bordering on harassment sends a pretty clear message to diploma privilege advocates: pretty much everything is potentially a C&F issue in our eyes.

This is a threat designed to chill speech. It’s so textbook it could feature in an issue-spotter if the NCBE were a government actor. Though with the sway the NCBE holds over state governments, it’s pretty close when it’s issuing warnings about using the state regulatory process to penalize its critics. A threat made worse when you consider that in many jurisdictions the NCBE is directly involved in the C&F process by preparing reports for the committees. It’s certainly closer to bordering on a state actor than NCBE critics are bordering on harassment.

Professor Brian Frye characterizes Gundersen’s handling of the COVID crisis as a brand of “moral fascism” which is harsh but hard to deny. The consistent refusal to see criticism of in-person bar exams as anything but weakness, the fixation on creating enemy Others, and the willingness to use threats of state action to quell dissent are all hallmarks of a fractured outlook.

Again, harassment is bad, but being angry, confrontational, salty, sarcastic, brazen, or caustic is not necessarily harassment. Policing “civility” is a well-worn trick of people with nothing substantive to say. It’s an amorphous standard self-servingly defined by the supposed victim. For good measure, it’s usually falsely tied to the concept of ad hominem — the logical fallacy of substituting personal attacks on the messenger with substantive argument. The use and abuse of the concept of ad hominem needs to stop. Saying we need diploma privilege because the NCBE clubs baby seals is an ad hominem attack. Saying we need diploma privilege because the greedy jackholes at the NCBE are risking public health despite a lack of evidence that the exam protects the public… that’s just providing color.

Making fun of the fact that the country’s primary mouthpiece against diploma privilege is a product of diploma privilege is the closest the discourse gets to an ad hominem attack and even that is entirely substantive because it directly challenges the credibility of many of her claims.

But maybe she’s got a point. After all, if she’d taken a bar exam maybe she’d have enough sense of basic professionalism not to have issued this threat at all.

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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.

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Professors Shruti Rana and Cyra Akila Choudhary to our pages.

As summer comes to a close, America’s COVID-19 care crisis is about to explode. Lawyer moms — who in our view encompass all women lawyers with caregiving roles — are accustomed to high-wire juggling acts. Yet as workplaces reopen while schools, childcare, and elder care remain dangerous or inaccessible, the safety net beneath us is crumbling at the very time we need it most. While most of us struggled through spring lockdowns patching together care duties and work, none of us were prepared for an extended period of juggling all of these responsibilities from our homes. For law professors in these circumstances, producing research and scholarship may be a low priority, with the potential for lasting detrimental effects on the profession as a whole.

As law professors, administrators, and caregivers, we have a unique perspective on how this crisis is affecting women in the legal field. We see how the pandemic is affecting women entering the profession, whether they are seeking entrance to law school, finding their way in law school, or leaving law school and seeking bar admission or trying to break barriers in the profession. At the same time, we are lawyer moms ourselves, fighting for a place in legal academia and for recognition and acceptance in a field that remains inhospitable to women, especially women further marginalized by race or other factors.

While balancing these roles has always been difficult due to the lack of adequate family support such as paid parental leave, we believe family care has reached a crisis level because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pressure on women faculty is further multiplied by the structural changes that have followed, such as the move to online and remote teaching for some but in-person teaching for others. Women faculty, especially junior, untenured women, report feeling pressured to teach in-person classes with inadequate safety precautions, while faculty in already precarious contingent roles fear being pushed out of academia entirely due to health or caregiving issues exacerbated by a lack of meaningful institutional support. Female law professors of all ages report that their already disproportionate service and care responsibilities to students have also increased with the shift to online learning, as faculty have become the primary link between students and their schools and as the pandemic increases the stressors on students, staff, and faculty. Compounding these pressures, black faculty and faculty of color more generally have also been coping with the emotional effects of the police killings of George Floyd and others, at the same time that COVID-19’s health effects are concentrating along lines of race and inequality. Women faculty who teach or research about these topics are further subject to online harassment, zoombombing, and other forms of targeting and discrimination.

Women are being forced to make tough decisions about how to allocate their time and resources. Scholarship by and about women may be the first ball to drop. We are already seeing reports from other disciplines indicating drops in the number of submissions by women to journals. “The Lily” reports that in some fields, since the shutdowns began, the rate of submission by men has risen by 50% while women’s submission rate has fallen. Women law professors have reported to us that for them, as for other women juggling caregiving and research, the time and space needed for research and writing is nearly impossible to carve out. It is very likely that the law review submission cycle that has just begun will see a drop in submissions by women scholars. Moreover, we expect that this will cascade into future submission cycles. Without attention and intervention by law reviews and our academic institutions, the loss of women’s scholarship may reshape legal academia. Gains made over decades may be lost.

And this loss is significant. While service work like mentoring junior faculty and students is important, scholarship results in promotion and advancement in the field. Furthermore, women’s scholarship and knowledge production is important in and of itself. The visibility of women scholars sends important messages to students and the profession, not just about the role of women faculty but also about the issues women highlight in their work. Losing women’s voices would alter the landscape of legal thought and public discourse, as well as the makeup of a profession that has only gotten used to the presence of women in appreciable numbers in the past 30 years.

Now is the time for law schools and law reviews to show their commitment to gender equity. In our recent letter to law reviews and law schools, co-authored by several women faculty, we encourage institutions to work creatively with women faculty. Law reviews can take note of the gender balance of their issues and publish shorter and co-authored work. Law schools have already worked to extend the tenure clock for some affected faculty. We encourage them to keep the disparate impact of caregiving in mind and to not penalize women faculty who may meet the stated standards for promotion and tenure even if they, at this moment, cannot exceed them. Just as women’s entrance into the legal profession improved it, support for women faculty benefits us all, especially students and future lawyers.

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Shruti Rana is Assistant Dean and professor of international law at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, Indiana University Bloomington; Cyra Akila Choudhary is Professor of Law at Florida International University College of Law. Published with contributions from Professor Jennifer Hendricks. The letter referenced above was co-authored by Cyra Akila Choudhury, Meera Deo, Angelique Eaglewoman, Jennifer Hendricks, Saru Matambanadzo-Noble, Shruti Rana, and Maybell Romero.

On Monday, the Trump administration quietly published a final rule, effective October 2, that will throw up yet more barriers to legal immigration by making it really expensive. The rule says the goal is “to recover the full operating costs associated with administering” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — the agency that handles applications for immigration benefits. However, the fee hikes are so high that it’s tough to avoid concluding that at least part of the reason is to discourage legal immigration.

Some background: By law, USCIS must assess its fees every two years. Normally, this doesn’t result in a remarkable increase, even though CNN and the American Immigration Council say USCIS has had financial problems for years. Without researching it, I suspect that prior administrations have not disturbed the fees very much because raising them too much would price the target audience — immigrants, who have lower median incomes than native-born Americans — out of the market.

But pricing immigrants out of the market is a goal for the Trump administration. (That includes USCIS acting director Ken Cuccinelli, a guy who once testified before Congress that he is not a white supremacist because that’s a thing that people who are not white supremacists totally need to do!) As a result, they apparently had no difficulty balancing their budget on the backs of the people they allegedly serve.

Here’s a rundown of the fee increases in the August 3 final rule:

• Applying to become a naturalized citizen went to $1,170 from $640, an 83% increase. (Last I checked, they weren’t swearing in new citizens anyway, presumably because immigrants are not generally Donald Trump voters.)
• Applying for a green card — which confers lawful permanent residency and is a necessary step toward citizenship — has been “debundled,” so that applicants have to pay separate fees for each document. This brings the total outlay to $2910 from $1760, a 65% increase.
• For the first time, a fee will apply to asylum benefits. The fee of $50 to apply for asylum might be affordable to middle-class Americans, but probably not to people who are in an ICE immigration jail. And the $550 fee to apply for a work permit is just cruel, since people applying for work permits are by definition not permitted to work.
• USCIS will no longer grant fee waivers for financial hardship unless it’s expressly required by law for the particular benefit the immigrant is applying for. The explanation for this in the Federal Register says DHS “does not agree that individuals will be prevented from filing applications,” because supporting arguments, like facts in general, are optional for some Republicans these days.

There are some eye-popping increases of well over 100% for people in specific situations, but those are the major categories.

They did pull back on two other fees. One was a proposed $275 fee for DACA renewals, which didn’t get implemented because Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf froze fees for DACA renewals the week before the rule was final. That memo also says the program must now be renewed every year instead of every other year, though, so DACA fees are still effectively doubled.

The other fee increase they pulled back was an insane increase of 269% to 492% for historical immigration records, which are mainly useful to genealogists. (In fact, a genealogist first brought this to my attention last year — grazie!) That makes it one of the few fee increases that directly affects native-born citizens, so it got some press coverage, and Mitt Romney sent USCIS a nastygram about it. They’re still hiking the price of a record about 300%, though, so apparently even white people get punished for caring about their roots.

Some of this has implications for the 2020 election; people who might otherwise be naturalized citizens are going to be slow-rolled out of the franchise. But most of it is the white supremacist long game, an attempt to manipulate the racial/national origin composition of the population. If you’re lucky enough to be a native-born citizen, please express your feelings about this by voting in November.

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Lorelei Laird is a freelance writer specializing in the law, and the only person you know who still has an “I Believe Anita Hill” bumper sticker. Find her at wordofthelaird.com.