Category: News Feeds

• Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP)
• Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA)
• Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR)
• Counselling Services Unit (CSU)
• Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights, (ZADHR)
• Zimbabwe Human Rights Association (ZimRights)

• The Economic Rescue and Stimulus Package of ZWL1 billion announced by the President on 1 May to support large and small scale miners is yet to be disbursed to the mining sector. The report notes that the scheme appears to exclude artisanal miners despite their gold going to Fidelity Printers and Refineries.
• In Mazowe, artisanal miners are finding it difficult to comply with social distancing rules. The artisanal miners are not respecting COVID-19 regulations and they are working as usual. In areas where gold rushes occur, social distancing is ignored. At Bhinyapi Mine in Matabeleland South’s Insiza District, COVID-19 regulations on social distancing were largely ignored and violated when there was a gold rush. The area is now overcrowded and there are fears that the coronavirus might easily spread if the situation is not controlled.
• In Bubi there were reports of people who invaded gold claims at night to steal money, gold, and mining equipment. New cases of machete gold gangs and criminals were also reported in Maphisa in Matabeleland on 2 May where a group of seven raided Good Cow Mine armed with machetes and axes and took away 12 x 50 kg bags of gold ore. The police confirmed the arrest of the gangs.
• At Anjin Diamond Mine in Marange, workers reported that no efforts are being made by managers to educate workers on social distancing at the mine sites or living quarters. As for transportation, workers are ferried in overcrowded open trucks to their workstations. In terms of accommodation, one (1) room is accommodating four (4) workers with some using bunk beds, which defeats social distancing. Workers are said to be given sub-standard disposable face masks which are not the recommended N95 and not suitable for mining purposes. Some workers are not using the face masks, while some repeatedly reuse the masks, causing a health hazard.

7.0       Court update
The families of the three MDC Alliance youth leaders who were missing, filed an habeas corpus application before the High Court seeking to compel the Zimbabwe Republic Police members to investigate and determine the whereabouts of the missing persons and report within 12 hours of the granting of the order.  However, before the application could be finalised reports emerged during the evening that the three missing women were found in Bindura South severely injured and traumatised.8.0       Conclusion
The lockdown extension as announced by the President will end on 17 May. As we draw close to the end of the extended lockdown, the volatile political environment is becoming a risk factor for the spread of COVID-19. In light of the above, the Forum:

• strongly condemns the wanton disregard of human rights exhibited through the enforced disappearance, torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of Joana Mamombe, Cecilia Chimbiri and Netsai Marova. The Forum calls on the government and security forces to thoroughly investigate the incident and to ensure that the perpetrators are held accountable.
• calls on the government to intervene for mining companies to provide personal protective equipment for miners including face masks, gloves, safety shoes, and protective clothing.
• is concerned with the increasing numbers of people defying the national lockdown to pursue leisure activities, and calls upon community members to adhere to COVID-19 regulations.
• urges the government to speed up the process of providing food aid to vulnerable groups

Post published in: Featured

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, what is the average profits per equity partner at the top 25 highest grossing Biglaw firms?

Hint: There’s a sharp decline in the second 25, which come in at an average of $2.285 million, $1.603 million for firms 51 to 75, and for firms 76 to 100 $1.462 million. 

See the answer on the next page.

We see this as an extremely valuable learning exercise for these students to well prepare them to finish out the second and or third year of law school and have on their resume a very valuable experience having worked through and lived through this simulated exercise over eight weeks.

[It will be] just like being a summer associate in a law firm.

— Michael Volpe, co-chair of Venable’s labor and employment practice group, commenting on the firm’s simulated summer associate experience at a “virtual” law firm. Venable has teamed up with New York Law School to create and put on this eight-week training program in record time. “I think people recognize what this summer means to a large group of law students who otherwise will lose their summer and will lose out on tremendous opportunities,” said Anthony Crowell, dean of NYLS.

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.

“OBAMAGATE!” the president tweets at us hourly.

“If I were a Democrat instead of a Republican, I think everybody would have been in jail a long time ago—and I’m talking with 50-year sentences,” he told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo, who nodded sagely, murmuring, “It is the biggest political scandal we’ve ever seen.”

Asked to explain, Trump’s explanation was cogent and precise.

It’s very simple. Even before I got elected, you remember the the two lovers, right? Strzok and Page. The insurance policy. She going to win. But just in case she doesn’t, we have an insurance policy. That means that if I won, they’re going to try and take me out. That’s all it means, very simple. It’s an insurance policy. So “she’s going to win, isn’t she darling? Isn’t she going to win?”

If anything, it makes too much sense!

Later Bartiromo pivoted to asking Trump why his campaign was so amazingly successful. Because Maria Bartiromo is a very serious journalist.

Fox News is currently running wall-to-wall coverage of OBAMAGATE! after Acting DNI Ric Grenell declassified the list of government employees who requested to “unmask” the identity of the American citizen picked up on NSA Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court wiretaps. Under this theory, the intelligence agencies got a FISA warrant to intercept the communications of foreign citizens, an unidentified American was picked up speaking to said foreign citizens, national security employees used a bog standard legal procedure employed 17,000 times in 2018 alone to determine the identity of that American citizen, and this is all somehow proof of an illegal conspiracy to target Michael Flynn.

A rational person might point out that, if they knew Michael Flynn was the American being picked on those intercepts, they wouldn’t have had to unmask him. Moreover, as Marcie Wheeler notes, the vast majority of those unmasking requests precede Flynn’s December 29 and 31 phone calls with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, when the incoming National Security Advisor promised to undo the recently imposed sanctions on the Kremlin and requested support for Israel in an upcoming vote at the UN. So whichever foreign agents Flynn got picked up kibbitzing with in the period after the elections when he was already receiving classified briefings as part of the presidential transition — likely Turkish, Emirati, and/or Saudi — it had nothing to do with the Russia investigation.

But whomever Flynn was talking to, those conversations caused a whole bunch of people to freak out. Look for Acting DNI Grenell to declassify those no doubt perfectly innocent transcripts … never.

Over at Fox, there is great sturm and drang because Vice President Biden requested to unmask Flynn’s identity regarding the Kislyak calls on January 12. This proves he was in on the conspiracy, Hannity shouts, without explaining how exactly. Biden couldn’t have leaked the details of the conversation to the Washington Post, since David Ignatius’s story detailing the call appeared the same day Biden made the unmasking request. And by the time the FBI agents came knocking on Flynn’s door on January 24, Biden and Obama were long gone.

Nevertheless, they are sure that Joe Biden is responsible for ordering the NSA to wiretap Kislyak in a devious attempt to pick up Michael Flynn promising to undermine the new sanctions regime. Similarly, Biden forced Michael Flynn to lie to the FBI agents about the call. And then he used mind control to force Trump to appoint Republican Rod Rosenstein, an obvious plant, who would trick the president into firing FBI Director James Comey. It doesn’t take a psychic to predict that Rosenstein would have a panic attack and appoint Robert Mueller Special Counsel after that. All of which is highly illegal, in ways which are very obvious to credible lawyers like “Judge” Jeanine Pirro.

Or, as Trump told the Washington Posts’s Phillip Rucker, “You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours.”

Case closed.

WATCH: Trump Comically Attempts to Explain ‘ObamaGate’ When Asked By Maria Bartiromo [Mediaite]

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

When we talk about practice areas that might actually benefit from the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout, bankruptcy tops the list. And this makes sense, given the big-name bankruptcies that have been filed in recent weeks, including J. Crew and Neiman Marcus.

Here’s another practice that might benefit from current events: white-collar work, both criminal and civil. The space has been a little sleepy in the past few years, as the more robust enforcement agenda of the Obama Administration gave way to a more pro-business, less aggressive approach by the Trump Administration. Just last year, Jack Newsham wrote in the New York Law Journal about a “white-collar slowdown,” fueled by a dip in white-collar criminal prosecutions to their lowest level in 33 years.

(Note: although pundits love to blame President Trump for what they view as an overly lax pursuit of white-collar criminals, it should be noted that the downward trend in white-collar prosecutions began under the Obama Administration. Federal white-collar cases peaked in 2011 under President Obama, and they’ve been declining ever since.)

In the wake of the pandemic, is white-collar work poised for a boom, or at least an increase? From a piece by Tom McParland for the New York Law Journal:

New York lawyers are bracing for a surge of white-collar criminal and civil cases stemming from market volatility caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, former prosecutors told the New York Law Journal this week….

David Miller, a partner at Greenberg Traurig and former assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, said investigations of pandemic-related misconduct were likely already underway, but additional cases also would arise from prior acts that are just now being brought to light.

“I think you’re going to see a combination of both criminal and civil law-enforcement actions,” Miller said. “Either way, I think you’re going to see an uptick in civil and criminal enforcement work later this year.”

Growth areas could include prosecutions of False Claims Act and fraud cases related to government aid programs launched in response to the pandemic, insider trading stemming from bigger swings in the stock market, hoarding and price-gouging of personal protective equipment (PPE) under the Defense Production Act (DPA), and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) cases resulting from attempts to procure PPE in foreign markets.

We are already seeing increased activity on these fronts. As reported by Law 360:

U.S. Attorney General William Barr in March directed the creation of a task force to focus on COVID-19-related market manipulation, hoarding and price-gouging, to be staffed by an experienced attorney from each U.S. attorney’s office.

New York federal prosecutors made waves in recent weeks with a number of criminal cases brought against individuals as part of the nationwide crackdown, including the first-ever charges under the DPA since President Donald Trump signed an executive order invoking the law in response to the pandemic.

And it won’t be exclusively federal. State prosecutors play a significant role in pursuing white-collar crime, and defense lawyers told Law360 that they expect to see increased state prosecutions as well.

(A caveat, though: the pace of these new cases could be a bit slow. Prosecutors are working from home, agents aren’t making as many arrests as usual, and although grand juries are still meeting in some jurisdictions (like the Southern District of New York), jury trials and sentencings are generally on hold.)

What could a pickup in prosecutions mean for the market for white-collar lawyers, both firm-to-firm laterals and lawyers coming out of government, such as U.S. Attorney’s Offices and Main Justice? Once firms return to recruiting as usual, the market should be better than it has been. That might not be saying much — in 2019, the market was so challenging that even assistant U.S. attorneys from the legendary S.D.N.Y. had a tough time of it — but any improvement would be welcome.

But white-collar lawyers should keep their expectations modest, and not pop open the champagne just yet. To borrow a term from the real estate market, there’s a lot of “shadow inventory” in white collar — lawyers who aren’t on the market right now, largely because it hasn’t been a great market, but who will put themselves on the market once it improves. I predict it will still be a buyer’s market, at least for a while.

Which white-collar litigators will be best positioned to get hired? For partners looking to switch firms, the two top factors will be book of business and actual trial experience. For prosecutors looking to enter private practice, trial experience is also critical; it’s a big part of why firms hire former prosecutors, who tend to get far more trial experience than Biglaw attorneys.

Other important factors include a supervisory title and experience, since this helps in garnering clients and press coverage; expertise in the right areas, such as securities, FCA, or FCPA work (more valuable than, say, drug or gang experience); and diversity, which firms are, to their credit, focusing more on in hiring. Having worked on a famous case also helps a lot. See, e.g., the lawyers who worked on Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, who landed at such firms as Gibson Dunn (Zainab Ahmad), Paul Weiss (Jeannie Rhee), Cooley (Andrew Goldstein and Elizabeth Prelogar), Jenner & Block (Andrew Weissmann), and WilmerHale (Bob Mueller, James Quarles, and Aaron Zebley).

If you’re a white-collar lawyer at a firm who’s thinking of a move or a government lawyer thinking of entering (or returning to) private practice, please feel free to drop me a line. I’m happy to chat with you about the market in general and what you can do to position yourself best for a move once hiring returns to normal and the white-collar market (hopefully) picks up.

Lawyers See Coming Surge in White Collar Criminal, Civil Cases Stemming From Pandemic [New York Law Journal]
COVID Crimes: White Collar Cases To Expect From The Crisis [Law360]

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts from Lateral Link’s team of expert contributors. David Lat is 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.

Lateral Link is one of the top-rated international legal recruiting firms. With over 14 offices world-wide, 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.