Category: News Feeds

ATL has been full of reports about Biglaw firms cutting draws, salaries, and furloughs. There have also been and will continue to be layoffs, whether they’re called “stealth layoffs” or some other furtive term. A layoff is a layoff is a layoff; there is no other way to put lipstick on this pig.

I was laid off some years back. It’s never a pleasant experience, and even now, years later, I wonder what was the true story behind my departure. Take it from me, you are in shock because you can’t figure out what happened. Did you not bill enough hours? Did your client development efforts suck? Did you piss off a major client? Were you an employee that took up a lot of HR-related time with your various issues? Was this an opportune time to get rid of an employee who had performance-related issues that no one really wanted to confront? Were you a conduit or a lawyer? Some managers only want conduits, micromanaging lawyers to the nth degree. Order takers and fact finders, but not lawyers.

Rahm Emanuel, who was President Barack Obama’s first chief of staff and, later, mayor of Chicago famously said, “[N]ever let a serious crisis go to waste.”  That crisis gives you an opportunity to do things you didn’t think that you could do before.

As an employer’s in-house employment lawyer, I always felt it was better for both the employer and the employee if separation, e.g. layoffs, could be done in a gracious, graceful, and dignified manner, instead of the “you’re outta here” that some employers seem to prefer. One Biglaw firm thinks my way is the right way to treat departing employees. Right now, the layoffs are support staff onl,y but with the world in such flux, I think that at some time, not just Ropes & Gray but other Biglaw firms will be forced to go the layoff route for lawyers. Hopefully, other firms will adopt that model and provide severance to attorneys and continuation of benefits for some prescribed period. That concern for your colleagues goes a long way and helps to cushion the financial and ego blows.

For those of you who haven’t been laid off … yet, but are feeling the effects of death by a thousand salary cuts, it’s hard going now especially when law firms aren’t reducing billable hour requirements in light of all that is going on. Does anyone even care what is going on in attorney and staff personal lives right now? Don’t bother to answer; it is a rhetorical question.

Will kids be asking their lawyer parents how many hours they billed during the pendency of the crisis? I think not. Yes, we all understand that our profession is now a business and is being treated as such, more’s the pity. Do we lack the empathy gene?

So, those of you who have been laid off, stealthily or otherwise, or have seen your salaries chopped, please don’t be embarrassed or ashamed or afraid to talk about what has happened. Don’t skulk in the closet. Today, that closet would be very full of others similarly situated if it weren’t for social distancing.

About a decade ago, a friend lost her highly visible job. She slinked around, wouldn’t leave her house for several years because she thought everyone would be talking about her. If we know anything about our colleagues, it’s that they are extremely self-absorbed, so the idea that her job loss would be on anyone’s radar was laughable, and I said so. I  also said that in 2010, when she lost her job and the economy was in the toilet, being laid off was essentially a badge of honor as it happened to just about everyone in one way or another, and there was nothing to be embarrassed about. The same holds true today perhaps, even more so. If the 21st century has taught us anything, it’s that layoffs are part of the economic landscape, and that you must take care of yourself first. This is not your fault. Remember that.

It’s okay to wallow for a little while. Layoffs, furloughs, and salary reductions are enormous blows to the ego, and the likelihood of finding similar employment right away isn’t great, given the number of legal jobs lost last month. Right now might be a good time to get up to speed on practice areas such as bankruptcy/restructuring or the myriad of employment issues arising from the impact of COVID-19, areas where there will be massive needs and in which you may be interested.

This time it is not going to be like Y2K where attorneys ran around saying the sky was going to fall on January 1, 2000, (only dinosaurs may remember) and it turned out the sky did not fall. Doom did not arrive. Chicken Little survived. There was no cascade of legal work.

I think there will be a lot of work for lawyers (not M&A and not litigation until the courts laboriously unwind the knots they are now in.) You won’t have to be in Biglaw to partake of what will be out there. Figure out what you want to do next and get prepared. I think that if you exhibit knowledge and skills that will be needed, you will eventually find a place for yourself. Network (I still hate that word) but reach out to your weak ties, not your strong ones. While it sounds counterintuitive, it’s those weak ties that may lead to your next gig.

Your next gig may not be what you dreamed of, but right now dreams take a back seat to the reality of the pandemic world. As everyone says, we are all in this together.

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Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for over 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.

Yesterday was the deadline set by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin for public companies to return federal bailout money they took under the Paycheck Protection Program. Failure to do so, he warned, would lead to an audit and possible criminal liability. Oh yea, and while returning that money, those companies should also send a floridly-worded apology note for their transgression of the completely clear and unchanging terms of the program.

Surely, then, everyone made sure to get their checks in before the deadline and the collapse of the U.S. Postal Service?

Joe and Kathryn discuss the possibility of a rise in frivolous lawsuits from aggrieved customers refusing to wear masks in stores. Or at least these would seem frivolous, but with the way elected judges have been handling stay-at-home orders, it’s entirely possible someone’s going to actually win one of these and force some small business into a bind.

For the past month, most states have imposed lockdown orders in an effort to control the coronavirus. They are now slowly beginning to reopen, one sector at a time.

It is hard to say what the motivation was as some think that it is too soon to reopen. Did we flatten the curve? Is a promising vaccine just around the corner? Or was the government worried about the catastrophic economic impact of a prolonged closure? Or were they worried about civil unrest?

Some are predicting a second wave of outbreaks as a result. Assuming that is the case, it is likely that governments will impose another lockdown. Will it work? Will the public accept it? Let’s look at it from a legal, practical, economic, and political perspective. I will first look at whether these lockdown orders are permissible under the U.S. constitution.

I am not a health professional so I won’t argue who is right or wrong about the coronavirus. Nor will I get into specifics such as whether hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for COVID-19. My LLM in Taxation only allows me to say that if you purchase hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, then the purchase is tax deductible if your itemized deductions exceed your standard deduction during the calendar year.

Instead, I will only rely on general, universally accepted facts about the coronavirus. First, the virus can generally be transmitted through close contact with other people. Second, many infected people do not show symptoms of the virus but can still infect others. Third, the best treatment for most infected people is to stay home and take care of themselves. Lastly, most of the fatalities come from the elderly or those with compromised immune systems.

For the most part, lockdown orders placing restrictions on businesses, schools, entertainment activities, and social gatherings have been found to be constitutional. The Michigan Court of Claims held that the governor’s stay-at-home order does not violate federal procedural or substantive due process. The opinion noted that a person’s liberties are subject to society’s interests. And one of these interests includes being protected from a highly communicable disease.

However, courts have held that lockdown orders can violate certain provisions of the Constitution. For example, orders that forbid gatherings for religious services can be unconstitutional infringements to freedom of religion. For example, a Kentucky district court struck down a ban on drive-in church services. A Kansas court held that churches must be allowed to conduct services so long as they implement measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The reasoning was that since other essential activities are permissible so long as certain health guidelines were followed, religious gatherings should also be allowed with similar health guidelines.

Also, one Kentucky court has held that executive orders limiting travel outside the state is a violation of the Constitution’s right to interstate travel. The court stated that it would be inconsistent to disallow visiting friends and family members just because they happen to live in another state. Also, the ban would create massive traffic jams for the many cars that pass through the state.

Courts have mixed reactions concerning whether lockdown orders can apply to abortion clinics. A federal judge blocked the Tennessee Governor Bill Lee’s executive order to limit surgical abortions during the COVIC-19 pandemic. But the Fifth Circuit restored Texas’s ban on most abortions citing the pandemic.

From these decisions, it appears that courts will uphold a state’s lockdown order unless it violates another section of the Constitution or infringes upon a fundamental right. The Michigan court stated that it is not the courts’ job to second-guess the legislature’s efforts to fight the pandemic.

The contradicting abortion decisions are not surprising. The issue is a controversial one as conservatives are trying to find a way to get a case before the U.S. Supreme Court in an attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The cases show that courts are sympathetic to the right to practice the religion of their choice. But the rulings suggest that they are unlikely to allow — at least for the time being — traditional religious gatherings where people congregate closely. This might change as we learn more about COVID-19. If future outbreaks are found to have been originated from religious gatherings even with protective measures taken, expect governors to take more restrictive action and courts are likely to be less sympathetic.

Finally, the lethality of a disease will also play a role on deciding the constitutionality of a lockdown order. What if there was an Ebola outbreak? There is no cure for the Ebola virus, and the fatality rate is higher (and more gruesome) than COVID-19. It’s safe to say that courts will look at lockdown orders more favorably if the disease is more lethal.

Intuitively, it would appear that lockdown orders would not have much trouble passing constitutional muster. But the courts have held that the Constitution will not allow absolutes. A person does not have an absolute right to liberty. At the same time, the government does not have an absolute right to lockdown whoever it chooses. If there is a second outbreak of COVID-19, state and local governments should not be afraid to do whatever they think is necessary to control it. But they should take steps to ensure that religious services and other fundamental rights are protected by not unfairly restricting them.

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Steven Chung is a tax attorney in Los Angeles, California. He helps people with basic tax planning and resolve tax disputes. He is also sympathetic to people with large student loans. He can be reached via email at sachimalbe@excite.com. Or you can connect with him on Twitter (@stevenchung) and connect with him on LinkedIn.

In an unscientific but undoubtedly accurate poll of judges around the country conducted by the National Judicial College, it turns out that courts are overwhelmingly preferring Zoom for their remote hearings.

The College emailed a survey to more than 12,000 judicial alumni nationally and received 702 responses, revealing that 48 percent are employing Zoom for these parleys with WebEx coming in a distant second at 25 percent. Beyond the top two, the survey found that judges deploy:

Skype (9.69%), Microsoft Teams (9.12%), GoToMeeting (6.13%), Google Hangouts (3.85%), BlueJeans (3.56%), CourtCall (3.13%), Adobe Connect (0.14%), and Other (10.54%).

Considering Microsoft owns both Skype and Teams I guess they’re doing well during this pandemic, but one wonders how much more they could’ve dominated had they not taken the dominant video conferencing tool in the world and run it into irrelevancy over the past decade. If you know someone who thinks Bill Gates caused COVID to increase his grip on global power, remind them that Gates has completely f**ked up the most logical way to profit off it.

Full results of the judicial survey are available here.

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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.

It may be hard to remember this now, but once upon a time people went to work in offices, riding commuter railroads and the subway into Manhattan, walking on crowded streets without face masks and riding in packed elevators up to their workstations, even though the last few months have proven this was completely unnecessary. And it may also be hard to remember that some of these offices were home to hedge funds, and that some of these hedge funds had a reputation for being a bit of a boys’ club.

Sitting on a bed in her two-room lodgings in Harare’s poor Mbare township, Pamire told Reuters she had exhausted the little food she had stocked up during the first 21 days of an extended seven-week lockdown.

“We just eat once a day now. I wish the government could give us food to feed my family,” Pamire said.

Before the coronavirus outbreak, 7.7 million Zimbabweans faced food shortages after a drought and cyclone in 2019 and patchy rains this year, linked to climate change and worsened by rampant inflation and a foreign exchange shortage.

Now it faces a triple threat of climate breakdown, monetary woes and a new economic crisis caused by the lockdown.

The government’s latest figures show that 8.5 million Zimbabweans are now food insecure, while international aid agencies say up to 45 million people face hunger in southern Africa due to climate-induced food shortages.

The government has promised a food grant of $2.4 billion Zimbabwe dollars ($96 million) targeting 1 million people for six months, without saying where it would get the money.

It is pleading with donors, who would normally be reluctant to help because of its debt arrears, and this month it received $7 million from the World Bank.

Pamire said she had registered with social welfare officials but she, like many others, has yet to receive anything.

That has left the burden to fend for the family with her 19-year-old daughter Anna, who sells ice lollies and bottled water at Mbare vegetable market at the risk of arrest by police because it is illegal.

“At times in the evening when we don’t have maize-meal, mum will just tell us to have the ice lollies and water and we will just go to sleep,” said Anna.

On a good day Anna sells a pack of ice lollies for 110 Zimbabwe dollars ($4.40). After buying new stock, only $1 is left for the family of seven to buy food, including the staple maize-meal and sugar and cooking oil.

Pamire, who lives with her four grown children and two grandchildren, used to buy clothes and shoes from Zambia for resell at home and earned $100 after a good trip. But the border is closed, her passport expired, and she does not have money to renew it.

The market where Pamire’s two adult sons carted goods around for a fee has been shut for six weeks, just like all informal markets from where millions of Zimbabweans were earning a living.

Post published in: Business

* A teenager in Alabama is on track to be the youngest lawyer in that state’s history. Hollywood should turn this lawyer’s story into “Doogie Howser, JD”… [NBC News]

* Attorneys for Michael Flynn have filed a petition for a writ of mandamus asking that the judge overseeing his case be recused. [Fox News]

* Singer John Legend “sang” the praises of a candidate seeking a district attorney’s office. [Oregonian]

* Workers at McDonald’s have sued the company for an allegedly insufficient response to the COVID-19 pandemic. [NBC News]

* The NCAA has lost a major antitrust lawsuit, which could open the way for college athletes to receive more compensation. As a Division Three athlete myself, I was happy to just get meal money… [USA Today]

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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.