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Sorry about that whole “pandemic” thing, America, but Rand Paul’s got a point to make here!

After the House passed a bipartisan coronavirus relief bill last week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Republicans yesterday “to gag and vote for it,” postponing the regularly scheduled rancorous posturing and point-scoring in light of the hundreds of thousands of people who just found themselves without a paycheck. With unanimous consent of all 100 senators, the bill could be fast-tracked for immediate approval.

“We’re able to rise above our normal partisanship and many times our normal positions because these are not ordinary times. This is not an ordinary time,” McConnell said, according to NBC.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin underlined the point yesterday at luncheon with Republican senators, warning that, absent immediate corrective action, we might be looking at 20 percent unemployment. Don’t worry, though, they dispensed with their regular buffet line, so your favorite septuagenarian obstructionists should be totally fine. Whew!

But everywhere Rand Paul goes, there he is. The senator is holding up free coronavirus testing, expansion of Medicaid and food stamps, and unemployment relief to offer an amendment to end the war in Afghanistan. Which is an important issue, and also, dude, you’re really doing this NOW?

Oh, but he is! Senator Paul has a point to make, so he’s insisting on an amendment to the House package — undoubtedly the first of many relief measures — which will give him time for useless floor debate on ending the war in Afghanistan. And without unanimity, the bill has to go through regular process.

This amendment has absolutely zero chance of passing, but by God old Rand is going to stage this interpretive dance in Congress if it’s the last thing he does. Just the way he did when he held up the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund last June to make a point about balanced budgets. Because Rand Paul is a man of principle!

Which will no doubt be a great comfort to the millions of Americans staring down weeks trapped in the house wondering if their jobs will be there when this nightmare is finally over with. Never change, Rand!

Senate coronavirus vote delayed after Rand Paul pushes doomed amendment [NBC]

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

As mentioned in prior articles, many attorneys focus far too much on insulating themselves from liability. Indeed, lawyers are often afraid to look bad in front of their bosses or face malpractice claims, and this sometimes forces many attorneys to cover themselves at the expense of their clients. One reason why attorneys may focus on shielding themselves from blowback is because partners at a variety of law firms often concern themselves more with assigning blame when something goes wrong than simply solving issues. Nevertheless, partners should focus less on assigning blame and should strive to spend the most energy possible finding solutions for clients.

Lawyers, like every other type of professional, mess up from time to time. Sometimes, attorneys screw up because they are inexperienced and do not know the correct procedure or substantive law to solve an issue. Pretty much every “baby lawyer” has a hard time figuring out when notices to admit need to be responded to, when paperwork needs to be filed, and all of the other practical legal strategies that professors don’t teach you in law school. In addition, lawyers sometimes mess up because they are too busy. I once worked at a firm where attorneys were responsible for handling hundreds of cases, and it was naturally easy for something to slip through the cracks with such a workload.

At some of the firms at which I worked, partners were not particularly focused on assigning blame, and used mess-ups as teaching moments. If something was not filed properly or was filed after a deadline, this was typically a good learning experience for how to properly litigate matters. Most screw-ups can be fixed, and few will kill a litigation matter or deal. As a result, there was usually ample opportunity to focus on solving problems and learning for future situations.

However, I also worked at firms where partners spent far too much time trying to figure out who exactly screwed up when something went wrong. These partners were like Captain Hindsight (there is a long history of Above the Law writers citing to South Park!), trying to piece together email chains and other evidence needed to figure out precisely who was to blame for a misstep. While it may be important to find out who is the weakest link on a team to guide future employment decisions, it was often absurd how much time and energy partners spent on figuring out who had messed up.

When I worked in Biglaw, I was once tasked by a partner to assist her in an investigation of who had screwed up on a particular project. Our team had written a motion that had been denied by the judge. In a footnote of the judge’s opinion, the judge said that one of our citations did not stand for the proposition that we said it stood for in the brief. Since it is uncommon for a court to point out such a misstep in a footnote, we were somewhat embarrassed in front of the client for this issue.

Since I hadn’t worked at the firm when the motion was briefed (and could therefore not be assigned any blame) the partner tasked me with figuring out who was liable for this situation. While I can understand why a firm would want to do a retrospective on how the faulty citation ended up in the brief, this more introspective type of assessment was above my pay grade. I was simply tasked with determining if there was actually a mess-up and who was responsible for dropping the ball.

Somehow, word got out to other associates that I was conducting this project, and one of the associates who had worked on the brief called my office phone. He told me that the brief was written under enormous time pressure months ago, and the associates were not able to cite check and proofread the brief as much as they ordinarily would. The associate subtly requested that I spin the situation in the light most favorable to the associates that had worked on the brief.

I ended up telling the partner that the proposition that was cited in the brief was in the case cited, but simply in a different place in the opinion than the location referenced in the citation. It was a stretch to make this assertion, but I wanted to protect the associates and just complete the task investigating the mess-up with as little blowback as possible. However, there was really no reason to focus so much on assigning blame, and we could have simply changed our procedures moving forward without worrying associates that they might face serious consequences from a relatively minor mess-up.

Again, I’m not saying that it is bad for law firms to be reflective and assess on how they messed up and how they can improve in the future. However, partners should not perpetuate a culture where blame is delegated over focusing on how to solve an issue. Needlessly assigning blame can hurt morale and divert resources away from fixing problems.

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.

The USNWR rankings are out, not that anyone cares right now. Until the coronavirus lockdown is complete, there are really only two law schools out there so let’s rank them like U.S. News would:

1. The Zoom School of Law
RNP. Blackboard

Congratulations on joining the T1!

To commemorate this bizarre time in your professional lives — a time you’ll be telling the 2042 summer associate class all about over cocktails at an outing to an oceanside resort (given climate change models, we’ll assume this resort is in Tennessee) — you should get some swag! And while you’re at it, contribute to a good cause.

The folks over at Law School Memes for Edgy T-14s have a Zoom School of Law shirt celebrating your new law school with the proceeds going to fund food banks — which is a critically important cause with everyone losing their jobs around the country:

We, the admins of Law School Memes for Edgy T-14s, are very excited to share our school spirit with the world! 100% of the proceeds from this campaign will be donated to Feeding America, which funds a network of food banks across the US. The importance of food banks is ever increasing as schools around the country are closing, eliminating the source of two meals a day for millions of kids. Every dollar donated to Feeding America provides ten meals for families facing hunger. So rock your Zoom School of Law pride, show your grandkids this memory of what law school was like, and help us fund food banks nationwide.

Be sure to grab a shirt here.

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.

I am going to take a controversial position and say that coronavirus is bad. As I write this, on March 15, 2020, 60 of our fellow Americans have been felled by the coronavirus. Five-dozen deaths is not a trivial amount, and there are surely going to be many more before things get back to normal.

Still, I sort of get what Donald Trump was initially trying to mumble his way through on this one. It’s weird which deadly threats we choose to do something about and which we just happily ignore.

Regular old influenza killed 79,000 Americans over the 2017-18 flu season. Over the 2018-19 season, we did a bit better, losing only an estimated maximum of 57,300 of our countrymen and countrywomen. The sum total of what we’ve chosen to do about this is hang up those little flyers around offices passively suggesting that people get a flu shot that is only going to be 40 percent to 60 percent effective anyway. If we shut down public life every flu season like we’re doing right now due to the coronavirus, we could absolutely save thousands of flu victims.

Flu is kind of the low-hanging fruit in this analogy, but all sorts of other preventable things are killing thousands of us every time we all walk out the door. We fatally drove our vehicles into each other 38,000 times last year in this country. We Americans fatally poisoned 69,029 of ourselves from February 2018 to February 2019, by going out and getting, and then ingesting, far too many drugs. We shot to death 39,773 of ourselves in 2017, the last year for which reliable gun death data is available. Lots of things we could have done to prevent these deaths would have fallen far short of shutting down international travel and tanking the economy. But we didn’t do much.

If you go outside today, you’re still way more likely to get creamed by a truck or shot by your neighbor than to develop a fatal case of COVID-19. But everyone’s collective panic about one new possible way to die is ironically going to have the unintended result of preventing a lot of us from departing apropos of the many way more likely ways to die that are already out there.

In 2013, researchers at the Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing in the Netherlands released a comprehensive study looking at business cycles and mortality rates between 1950 and 2008 in 19 developed countries, including the United States. What they found is that a particularly strong economy can kill you.

“In developed countries, mortality rates increase during upward cycles in the economy and decrease during downward cycles,” one of the researchers, Herbert J. A. Rolden, wrote. For every one percent increase in GDP, researchers found that the death rate for older men (age 70 to 74) in developed countries increased by about a third of a percentage point. The death rate for middle-aged men (defined as those age 40 to 44) increased even more than it did for older men, by 0.38 percent. Surprising no one, a surging economy wasn’t quite as dangerous for women, but older women and middle-aged women still saw 0.18 percent and 0.15 percent increases in their mortality rates, respectively, for every one percent boost to GDP.

To give you an idea of what this means, the current overall U.S. death rate is 8.880 deaths per 1000 people, so a 0.38 percent increase in that would be about 8.914 deaths per 1000 people. In a country of 372.2 million people, that’s an extra 12,655 deaths per year.

Researchers haven’t exactly nailed down the mechanisms behind this effect. I’d say it’s pretty intuitive though to think that when more of us have money to drive around frivolously, to buy guns with which to shoot ourselves and one another, and to purchase unregulated drugs, probably more of us are going to die.

So, it’s strange that we’ve decided to take one threat seriously and basically shut down public life over the 60 American deaths it has caused (so far), while doing next to nothing about hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths we were already facing every single year. But hey, even if the threat posed by coronavirus turns out to be overblown, at least we’re not totally wasting our time here. The economic fallout from the coronavirus panic is probably going to be enough to save thousands who would have died of entirely different dangers but for all of us staying at home. We could do worse than doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.

Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

* Michael Cohen’s lawyers have argued that President Trump’s former personal lawyer should leave prison early because of COVID-19. A lot of lawyers seem to be making hay of the COVID-19 pandemic. [Yahoo News]

* A San Antonio attorney has been arrested for firing a gun outside of his ex-girlfriend’s workplace and stealing from her car. [San Antonio Current]

* Apparently, attorneys in Kentucky can threaten to kill each other without fear of facing bar consequences. [Courier Journal]

* A Texas inmate’s execution has been delayed because his attorney argued that holding the execution might help spread COVID-19. [CBS News]

* New York has suspended debt collection efforts due to issues surrounding COVID-19. Don’t go crazy on your credit cards, the suspension is only scheduled to last 30 days. [Hill]

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.

According to USNWR’s 2021 law school rankings, which law school rose the greatest number of spots in the ranking over last year?

Hint: The school is up 25 spots. Impressive. But with a ranking of 107, there is still a ways to climb.

See the answer on the next page.

COVID-19 and the resulting social distancing and self-quarantining have caused health, child, and financial issues prompting  palpable anxiety, fear, and concern. It has also brought nuclear families closer, resulting in a multitude of activities to make time spent at home as active and as meaningful as possible, including online learning, movie marathons, and good old-fashioned board games. There are multitudes of online worships, including Continuing Legal Education courses, giving direction during these trying times, when personal contact is recommended and sometimes demanded.

The streets of my leafy suburb are lined with folded cardboard boxes and bags of trash. It would seem that in these strange times people have been “nesting,” the term used to describe cleaning and organizing before the birth of a child. Social distancing has resulted in overwhelming and unexpected hours at home. Closets not recently opened, basements rarely entered, and crawl spaces never explored have become mini travel destinations for those who find themselves getting to know every inch of the houses they work so hard to pay for and maintain, but never get to appreciate enough.

Given the medically based impetus for this current societal and  home-based lifestyle, what better time to deal with estate planning? As a trusts and estates practitioner, I often get phone calls around the new year when people make resolutions to get their affairs in order. Similarly, when tragedy strikes, such as the death of a celebrity (Kobe Bryant, for example) people realize the fragility of life. So too, as each day brings more closures and more quarantines, the need for estate planning becomes more real.

At a minimum every adult needs a last will and testament, power of attorney, and health care proxy. The last will and testament, drafted by an attorney, will direct the disposition of your assets and the guardianship of your children in the event you die. In the event you die without a last will and testament, the state intestate laws dictate the beneficiaries of your assets, and a judge will determine who gets custody of your minor children. A trustee may also be appointed under one’s will to manage the inheritance of a minor child.

A power of attorney authorizes an agent to stand in your place regarding financial matters in the event you are unable to act. Such activities include filing taxes, banking, purchasing and selling real estate, and filing for governmental benefits. A health care proxy is used when you are unable to make medical decisions for yourself. As such, it is imperative that  your wishes are known to your appointed agent in the event you cannot speak for yourself. Other concerns for estate planning include checking beneficiary designations, purchasing life insurance, and speaking with the elders in your family about their estate planning.

Many attorneys are now working from home and have the ability to “meet” with clients telephonically or via internet. For estate planning, this practice works very well. Zoom, Facetime, and conference calls are all good mechanisms for discussing matters pertaining to a last will, power of attorney, and health care proxy. In most states, however, the document signing must be in person before a notary and witnesses. Nonetheless there should be little impediment to doing the legwork for estate planning: discussing the documents, contemplating appointments, and finally drafting and reviewing. In these unique times when individuals may have more flexibility or, perhaps, time in terms of dealing with their own matters, perhaps we can move estate planning up a few pegs on life’s to-do list. Let us take advantage of these nesting times by not only physically cleaning and organizing our households, but mentally and legally preparing for our futures, in good health and safety.

Cori A. Robinson is a solo practitioner having founded Cori A. Robinson PLLC, a New York and New Jersey law firm, in 2017. For more than a decade Cori has focused her law practice on trusts and estates and elder law including estate and Medicaid planning, probate and administration, estate litigation, and guardianships. She can be reached at cori@robinsonestatelaw.com.