Category: News Feeds

Unless you have been living in a well-ventilated cave with no internet, you have heard about novel coronavirus or COVID-19. While coronaviruses have been around for a long time, this newly discovered version has no cure and can be fatal, particularly to the elderly and those with weakened immune systems. While some may find this analogous to the flu, this novel virus is serious enough for some cities and even a country to quarantine their entire population in order to try to control the spread.

It has caused a global panic. While I have tried to stay calm, educate myself, and even joke about the virus, I must admit that it is starting to concern me.

I am not scared of the virus itself. I have done my best to minimize the chances of exposing myself to the virus. That means spending more time working from home. I have encouraged clients to send paperwork via email and the cloud. For those who prefer the old ways, I accept regular mail and offer to reimburse them for postage. Since this is tax season, I and other tax professionals have voluntarily self-quarantined ourselves for the next month and a half.

Despite the precautions, I have accepted that I will eventually be infected. This is not because I have eaten at four Chinese and two Korean restaurants in the last week and a half. It is not because I didn’t purchase 36 rolls of toilet paper. Most likely it will simply be because I was at the wrong place at the wrong time. I might be strolling at an empty park and Patient Zero just happens to jog past me.

If I do get infected, I take solace knowing that statistically, I am likely to recover. But for the sake of others, I have made plans in case I need to quarantine myself. This mostly involves renewing my Playstation Plus and Disney+ subscriptions.

So what scares me about the coronavirus? The chaos it has caused.

First, it has turned social media into a trainwreck. People are posting pictures and videos of the long lines at Costco. Or the empty shelves where bottled water and toilet paper used to be. Or the rushes to stores that are reminiscent of midnight on Black Friday. Or you might see crowded emergency rooms where people are treated by people in full protective gear. Or stressed out health care workers complaining about the lack of resources and giving ominous warnings. All of this might give some the impression that the rapture is upon us. I get that most people are posting these things with good intentions, but it might not have the effect they desired.

Also, we are getting conflicting opinions, even from health care professionals. Some are saying we should shut down everything and quarantine everyone as they did in Wuhan and Italy. Others are saying to simply wash your hands for twenty seconds, stay home if you feel sick and be careful of your surroundings. I am willing to blow off tirades from internet armchair immunologists, but when credentialed, impartial (hopefully) professionals give differing opinions, it is hard to determine who is credible.

Finally, the timing of this outbreak couldn’t have been worse. As this is a presidential election year, the media has been sensationalizing information and have entertained farfetched accusations and conspiracy theories. Media personalities are saying and doing whatever they have to do to ensure that their candidate or political party controls the government. For the good of the country, of course.

As lawyers, we are trained to advocate for our clients. And while I won’t get into details, I am sure some of us are using the coronavirus to our advantage.

But we are also trained to search for the truth, even if we are not medical professionals. This means detecting bias and speculation, qualifying experts before allowing them to give their opinion, and generally rejecting hearsay.

My hope is that we as lawyers will calm the panic and help people make educated choices by calling out the liars, profiteers, and opportunists, all of whom are taking advantage of this panic for their own personal gain. In these divisive times, we might not change many peoples’ minds, but it is worth a shot. And we should do our best to keep politics out of this. Lives are at stake. There will be grave consequences for any politician who maliciously tries to prevent the public from getting the help they need.

The coronavirus is not only becoming a pandemic, but also a “panicdemic” which is as scary as the virus itself. While the pictures of the long lines at Costco might be informative and even funny, they can unintentionally keep the panic going. To this day, I am still not clear how toilet paper became the new hot commodity item. While lawyers are not medical professionals, I am hoping that we can help those in our sphere of influence see through the lies and sensationalism. We will still debate on what is the proper response to the coronavirus, but as long as the smoke and mirrors are out of the discussion, I can feel less scared about the future.

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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.

From donor-conceived persons finding out that their mothers’ doctor is their biological father to a sperm bank threatening a client with legal action for using 23andMe and stumbling upon the sperm donor’s mother, I thought I had written about it all. But the latest sperm donation-related lawsuit, filed December 2019 in the United States District Court, Central District of California, is a new level of unexpectedness.

According to the complaint, Plaintiff Bryce Branzell considered becoming a sperm donor in 2008. He provided a sperm sample that was to be used for testing to determine if he would qualify to be a donor. However, immediately after providing his sample, and before even leaving the premises of the sperm bank, he changed his mind. He decided he was not comfortable having children biologically related to him out in the world that he would not know. He let the sperm bank know about his change of heart and was informed that they would not even run testing on his sample, but would destroy it. Simple enough.

Around that same time, a woman named in the complaint as “C.C.” purchased sperm from the same sperm bank Branzell had visited. C.C. looked through profiles and carefully selected a donor, prioritizing that the donor must have agreed to be “open,” meaning that the donor agreed to be identified to any resulting offspring upon turning 18 years of age. C.C. failed to conceive with her first selected donor, but selected a second and became pregnant. Yay!

Donor Siblings = Diblings. In the meantime, the sperm bank gave access to their clients, including C.C., to a website that allowed clients to connect with others that had used the same donor. C.C. connected with another woman, L.M., who conceived with the same donor. C.C. gave birth in July 2009 and L.M. gave birth the following month. The two became fast friends. And, as the complaint explains, “the mothers informed both children that they were conceived with the same donor’s genes, and that the children were half-siblings as a result. This familial relationship was important to both mothers, and to their children.” Diblings! (A now-common term for donor-related siblings.)

Enter The DNA Test. Of course, like so many of these case, surprising facts came to light after the mothers decided to use home DNA kits to learn more about their sons’ ancestry. It turns out, their sons were not, after all, related to each other. L.M.’s son was, as expected, related to the open-ID donor selected by both women. C.C.’s child, however, was not. Instead, her son (T.C.) was genetically related to Branzell — remember him, the gentleman at the beginning of the article who was told his one sample for testing would be destroyed?

C.C. discovered the nongenetic relationship to L.M.’s child right away, the rest of the pieces took a bit of luck. Through the coincidence of Branzell’s half-sister taking a DNA test with the same company, Ancestry.com — and seeing C.C.’s child show up on the platform, the connection was discovered. Branzell, in the meantime, was married with young kids, and was definitely not expecting a DNA test to show that there was a child out there related to him, that he did not know. You know, specifically, what he had feared and why he had changed his mind about being a donor.

Apparently, somehow, instead of destroying Branzell’s sample as the sperm bank said they would, they instead gave it (or at least a part of it?) to C.C. in place of the sample of the donor she had carefully chosen. The complaint astutely notes, “It is hard to imagine the sequence of events required to make an error like this.”

Branzell has brought suit against the sperm bank. Of course, most assisted reproductive technology-related cases have been like trying to fit a round peg in a square hole. Without specific law, courts have struggled with the various causes of action not fitting well and have especially had difficulties determining damages. How does a court value the harm done in this scenario?

The Causes Of Action. Which did they choose here? At the time of the amended complaint on February 28, 2020, Branzell had brought claims based on the following eleven causes of action:

• negligence
• violation of California’s constitutional right to privacy
• invasion of privacy-intrusion into private affairs
• trespass to personal property
• conversion
• breach of fiduciary duty
• intentional infliction of emotional distress
• negligent infliction of emotional distress
• violation of California Business and Professions Code section 17200 et seq. (prohibits unlawful, unfair, and/or fraudulent business acts or practices)
• violation of California Business and Professions Code section 17500 et seq. (prohibits any unfair, deceptive, untrue, or misleading advertising)
• fraud

I had a chance to speak with one of plaintiff’s counsel about the case. Interestingly, Marcus Spagnoletti of the Spagnoletti Law Firm did not express any ill-will toward the “industry.” Instead, he took the time to stop smoking a cigarette in his headshot to express a deep appreciation for assisted reproductive technology and, specifically, sperm banks. As a father himself, he believes that sperm banks provide a valuable service, allowing hopeful parents-to-be to have the opportunity to experience parenthood.

However, Spagnoletti explained that his client, a former Marine with a wife and young kids, felt a duty to bring this suit in order to protect others from having this happen to them. Spagnoletti sees his role as fourth or fifth down the line of protections to stop something like this from happening. There should have been something else — protocols, regulation, etc., that prevented this. Since those failed, he believes it is necessary to bring a lawsuit to find justice for his client and stop others from being placed in this emotionally wrought position.

Given the struggles courts have had in this area — but also the clear need for accountability for industry players and justice for those harmed — we will be following this case with interest.

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Ellen Trachman is the Managing Attorney of Trachman Law Center, LLC, a Denver-based law firm specializing in assisted reproductive technology law, and co-host of the podcast I Want To Put A Baby In You. You can reach her at babies@abovethelaw.com.

Fox News loves putting Alan Dershowitz on TV so they can trumpet that he’s a “Democrat” willing to support Donald Trump and complain about Black Lives Matter. Without his purported Democratic affiliation, Dershowitz is another generic MAGAhead, a distinction that could force Dershowitz to face the worst fate imaginable: not being on TV.

But Dershowitz is also cast as a Johnny-come-lately to the right-wing ecosphere which keeps him just alienated enough from his new audience. That appears to be a bit of a problem for him, so, weary of his brand as a Democrat in name only, Dershowitz is now going all Endgame to repair the timeline of his own life so he can be his current flavor of quasi-Republican all along. Just one who was viciously tricked by the Democrats.

“I think President Obama, for whom I voted twice, and would now reconsider my second vote for him, he conned me,” Dershowitz stated, according to TheBlaze “He called me into the Oval Office and he said ‘I have Israel’s back’ and I didn’t realize what he meant is to put a target on it and stab them.”

The crux of Dershowitz’s complaint was a UN resolution that the U.S. didn’t even vote for — but that the U.S. didn’t veto over unanimous 14-0 passage. The resolution scolded the Netanyahu government over its support for settlements in disputed territory and, in fairness, called out Palestinians for contributing to turmoil in the area. Since the resolution had all the influence of a frowny face note and came out at the exact same time that the Obama administration handed Israel a military aid package that Netanyahu even called “historic” only the most hyperbolic observers thought this resolution amounted to some kind of betrayal.

Dershowitz’s argument for why “handing a country tons of weapons” is less important to a nation’s security than “allowing a bunch of people to toothlessly complain” is his belief that the symbolic move “legitimized” criticism of Israel among American liberals. Dershowitz equates this kind of criticism to anti-Semitism given the conflation many make between criticizing contemporary Israeli government policy with the question of whether or not Israel has a right to exist at all. These are obviously severable ideas, but there’s an argument to be had that the former is deployed to Trojan Horse in the latter.

However, if there’s any trope out there Trojan Horsing anti-Semitism into mainstream political discourse, it’s probably this one that Dershowitz steps seamlessly into:

“I have some information as well about the Obama administration — which will be disclosed in a lawsuit at some point, but I’m not prepared to disclose it now — about how President Obama personally asked the FBI to investigate somebody on behalf of George Soros, who was a close ally of his,” Dershowitz affirmed.

It’s possible to think George Soros is a globalist banker quietly using his influence over a black guy to get the deep state to spy on people in a way that has nothing to do with his being Jewish but it’s definitely a popular idea among the anti-Semitic corners of the internet. It seems like the sort of thing someone wouldn’t want to “legitimize” by trumpeting it on a broadcast when you’re admittedly not ready to go to court with it. Feels a bit like throwing gasoline on the alt-right fires for no reason.

In any event, we’re all excited to see where the Dershowitz legacy lands next. Let’s just hope all this tinkering doesn’t end up with Claus von Bulow killing Ron and Nicole.

Alan Dershowitz Says He Was ‘Conned’ By Barack Obama – Says He Would Now Reconsider His 2012 Vote For Him [Union Journal]

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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.

Unless you dive deep into legal nerdom, law review articles aren’t usually something to get excited over. Oh, I’m sure the authors (and their moms) are quite happy over the achievement, but there are so many published every year that, unless the subject directly related to your legal specialty, new articles come and go with barely a notice. That is decidedly not true of Eastern District of Wisconsin District Court Judge Lynn Adelman’s latest piece in the Harvard Law Review.

The article goes hard after the Roberts Court and the conservative majority who has made it their mission to move American jurisprudence to the far right. A move Adelman calls out as “undermining American democracy.” He begins by pulling the mask off the veneer of impartiality that John Roberts, in particular, loves to drape himself in:

By now, it is a truism that Chief Justice John Roberts’ statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee that a Supreme Court justice’s role is the passive one of a neutral baseball “umpire who [merely] calls the balls and strikes” was a masterpiece of disingenuousness. Roberts’ misleading testimony inevitably comes to mind when one considers the course of decision-making by the Court over which he presides. This is so because the Roberts Court has been anything but passive. Rather, the Court’s hard right majority is actively participating in undermining American democracy. Indeed, the Roberts Court has contributed to insuring that the political system in the United States pays little attention to ordinary Americans and responds only to the wishes of a relatively small number of powerful corporations and individuals.

And that’s the opening paragraph, y’all.

Adelman then traces the jurisprudential influences to show how the long arc of history has been bent not just to the right, but the far right under the Roberts Court:

[I]n the last third of the twentieth century in response to a number of economic and political developments, including the egalitarian movements of the 1960s, corporations and wealthy conservative donors began to invest large sums of money in promoting conservative ideas. At the same time, a conservative legal movement emerged, and it provided the context in which all of the members of the Roberts Court’s conservative majority came of age. I note that in conjunction with several other developments, the conservatives’ aggressiveness has contributed to causing economic and political power to became increasingly concentrated at the top. As a result of this concentration, government policies have become less and less responsive to the needs of ordinary Americans. I point out that under these circumstances, it would be highly desirable to have a Supreme Court that could at least play some role in righting the ship as the Warren Court did in the 1950s and 1960s when it addressed such long standing deficiencies of American democracy as segregation, malapportioned legislative districts, and a brutally unfair criminal justice system. Rather than counteracting the anti-democratic trends in the country, however, the Roberts Court reinforces them.

Adelman keeps hitting at the Roberts Court throughout the article, resulting in this dire warning:

We are thus in a new and arguably dangerous phase in American history. Democracy is inherently fragile, and it is even more so when government eschews policies that benefit all classes of Americans. We desperately need public officials who will work to revitalize our democratic republic. Unfortunately, the conservative Justices on the Roberts Court are not among them.

But of course, since it is a federal judge taking a political stand, there’s a fair amount of handwringing going on about whether it is okay that Adelman said what he said. But as Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern write for Slate, turnabout is fair play. Conservative jurists make it a habit to “own the libs” — a trend that has only gotten worse since Trump appointees have flooded the federal bench — and Adelman’s writing is no different:

Is it somehow over the ethical line when a progressive judge puts these observations into writing?

Five years ago, we’d have said yes, it goes too far. Under any set of ordinary circumstances, it is always better for life-tenured jurists to stay in their lane, avoid partisan political criticism, and work to preserve the vitally important norms of judicial independence and nonpartisan, oracular judicial temperament. But there remains the question—possibly the abiding question of our time—about whether only one side can remain beholden to norms when the other has eviscerated them.

Evisceration is not an exaggeration. Judge James Ho, a Trump appointee to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, has assumed the role of robed Fox News commentator. He disparages women who get abortions, as well as judges who uphold their right to do so. He claims that we can stop mass shootings by shielding police from lawsuits when they accidentally murder innocent people. He intentionally misgenders transgender litigants—as does his colleague, Kyle Duncan, a fellow Trump appointee. Another judge on the 5th Circuit, Edith Brown Clement (a George W. Bush appointee), penned a partisan attack on her colleagues. And, under the influence of Trump’s judges, the 5th Circuit as a whole has begun defying Supreme Court precedent in a series of blatantly political decisions.

There’s something glorious about the clear way Adelman lays out his argument against the Roberts Court, especially for liberals who’ve taken so many Ls over the course of the Trump administration. But the real judge of the validity of Adelman’s arguments will be history.

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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).

This is the first positive test of which we are aware in our community, which is why I’m writing to all of you. If we learn of other positive tests, we will continue the practice of notifying those within our community known to have had close contact with the person in question.

— an excerpt from an email sent by Dean Trevor Morrison of NYU Law School, explaining to students that a faculty member has tested positive for coronavirus. While the faculty member is not teaching this semester and had not been on campus within the past week, they were on campus several times “between eight and 15 days ago.” Anyone who came into direct content with this faculty member has been notified of the diagnosis. NYU Law recently moved all of its classes to an online format as a way to protect students and faculty from contracting coronavirus.

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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.

This is not ideal mutual aid support, but these are not ideal times. If you absolutely have to attend recovery meetings in person, it is understandable. Please practice the hygiene protocols set out by the CDC.

For those of us whose recovery involves mutual aid support such as the rooms of 12-step, coronavirus (COVID-19) presents unique challenges and balancing considerations. We have to protect our own health and stay sober while also recognizing the negative impact such social contact can have during the pandemic. Let’s be honest, the rooms we walk into to share our experience, strength, and hope are not always the most cleanly. However, there are options that, while not perfect, can give us the support we need while being socially conscious of how our actions impact others.

This resource will also be helpful if you must self-quarantine, and therefore cannot get to meetings.

An online resource that is user-friendly, offers complete anonymity, and a wide variety of mutual-aid support ranging from 12-step to Smart Recovery, including video meetings, is “In The Rooms.”

To be clear, I do not view this as the ideal mode of support, but it is an option and as anonymous as a person wants to be. It can be a steppingstone to more brick-and-mortar modes of recovery.

In the Rooms is an online social network dedicated to the global addiction-recovery community for people seeking help or in recovery, and their family, friends, and allies of recovery worldwide.

They put it as follows:

We are not trying to replace Face-to-Face fellowship meetings; rather, ITR is a safe and secure place to come and socialize the other 23 hours a day you’re not in a meeting and to connect with other recovering people around the world.

InTheRooms.com transcends the boundaries of all 12 steps and non-12 step fellowships socially while maintaining the integrity of each by having 40 different fellowship groups represented. ITR currently has the largest AA / Alcoholics Anonymous (208,000+ members), NA / Narcotics Anonymous (155,000+ members) and Alanon (26,000+ members) groups in the world.

For the first time in history, this allows the social interaction between fellowships not found when attending regularly scheduled meetings of any one of these fellowships. We are bringing together members of the global recovery community socially to experience a vast array of tools that can be used to enhance and expand one’s recovery experience and social connectedness.

The site is not only conventional 12-step support.  You will be able to find:

• Faith-Based meetings
• Yoga and meditation meetings
• Refuge Recovery, which is Buddhist Recovery
• Meetings for agnostics in both AA and NA
• Support for family members
• Meeting for grief and codependency
• Meeting for people suffering from chronic pain
• Meetings for people on MAT (Medically Assisted Treatment)
• Closed specialty meetings for men and women
• Non-12-step meeting for Sex Addiction

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Brian Cuban (@bcuban) is The Addicted Lawyer. Brian is the author of the Amazon best-selling book, The Addicted Lawyer: Tales Of The Bar, Booze, Blow & Redemption (affiliate link). A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, he somehow made it through as an alcoholic then added cocaine to his résumé as a practicing attorney. He went into recovery April 8, 2007. He left the practice of law and now writes and speaks on recovery topics, not only for the legal profession, but on recovery in general. He can be reached at brian@addictedlawyer.com.

First of all, speaking of student loan debt, thanks to all of you who purchased the Your Debt-Free JD eBook last week. You’ve actually propelled it to being the number one new release in the admittedly obscure legal education category on Amazon. Cool. I’m really looking forward to hearing what some of you have to say once you’ve gotten through it, and to seeing some (hopefully five-star) reviews. I’m also working on getting Amazon to produce an on-demand physical, touchable, real-life paper version to assuage the surprising number of you who expressed an interest in that, so stay tuned.

Second, Joe Biden’s record on student loan debt really sucks. In the early 2000s, as a senator for the great State of Delaware, Biden fought mercilessly to prevent borrowers who fell on hard times from being able to discharge in bankruptcy student loan debt taken on from private lenders.

Now, keep in mind that Uncle Joe wasn’t talking about federal student loans, the kind of life-draining intestinal worms (uh, financially speaking) that most of us are familiar with. No, by the early 2000s, public sector student loans were already next to impossible to shed in bankruptcy, and had been for close to three decades. Biden, rather, was protecting those poor private sector lenders who were peddling a far more vampiric product and were, I’m sure totally coincidentally, some of his largest campaign contributors at the time.

Biden’s early 2000s argument was that too many people, flush with overconfidence from obtaining an education, were discharging their student loan debts too easily. This supposedly caused interest rates to rise for everyone else. And to be fair, that was a more widely held view back then. But it wasn’t a particularly good widely held view, even at the time. There were already lots of safeguards in place to keep people who could afford to pay off their private student loan debts from frivolously discharging them. These were called “bankruptcy judges,” and they would, you know, “judge” whether people’s private student loan debts should be discharged.

At a 2001 hearing, Joe Biden said that he and his sons took out large commercial student loans to get through law school and didn’t discharge said debts, but instead worked hard to pay them off. “Something is wrong with a system that allows guys like me getting out of law school discharging our law school debt front-end,” Biden said at the time, ignoring the fact that the system did not in fact allow a guy like him to discharge his debt, which anyone with ears had just heard him complaining about. At this same hearing, Biden additionally told a bankruptcy judge who was testifying that he was “fully [sic] of malarkey.” Neat.

Ultimately, Biden led a handful of Democratic defectors in support of the Republican bill that became the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. Ever since, private student loan borrowers who qualify for bankruptcy have nevertheless largely been unable to discharge the sums they own to private financial institutions. Far from reluctantly supporting the bill in order to temper its cruelest provisions, as he has since tried to frame it, Biden was actually an enthusiastic cheerleader.

Maybe none of this matters. Now, Biden strongly supports making it financially feasible for more Americans to afford the higher education they need to compete in the global workforce. With all the remaining major presidential candidates pushing 80, it doesn’t seem fair to run the better part of a century through the bullshit Democratic purity test gauntlet. Lord knows I said some dumb stuff back in 2001 myself, such as, “Yes, I do want to go to that Sugar Ray concert.”

One thing I can guarantee though is that whatever Biden does with student loans in the future, it’s going to be a hell of a lot better than what Trump has done and will continue to do over the next four years if he’s re-elected. I just wish Biden would get a little better at owning his mistakes. If Biden really wants to be the anti-Trump, perhaps a good way to demonstrate the contrast is to at least occasionally admit a past error.

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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.

It’s always difficult as a pro se defendant to figure out if your handwritten motions are losing because the judge is secretly working with the Klan to keep you down or if it’s because you’re babbling nonsense about maritime court.

This guy decided to take his objections up directly with the judge and it… went poorly.

Is this funny? Obviously. Is it also sad? Yeah.

Often, pro se defendants are left to flounder making procedural errors that could be easily remedied if they had resources available to them. In this case, he’s lucky enough to have that very embarrassed attorney next to him that he’s not listening to. But many more defendants have nothing and when people offer the slightest of helping hands they risk getting fired for their trouble. So don’t forget that sometimes the tomfoolery we see is really our fault as lawyers for leaving people adrift.

But I’m not convinced the judge was really sleeping with the prosecutor here.

Earlier: Court Clerk Helps Free Innocent Man and Gets Fired For Her Effort
Would You Watch ‘Law & Order: Liquidated Damages’?

I am willing to bet that many of the people reading the title of this article have no idea what the abbreviation “CYA” means. The first time I ever heard the term was when I was an ROTC cadet, and I was told that it meant to “cover your ass.” In essence, if someone thought that they had to follow misguided orders, or pursue a flawed strategy, they would make sure to have witnesses, or perhaps something in writing, to provide evidence that they were not responsible for the consequences. This attitude is not exclusive to any field, and I am sure that many of us have heard of the term “defensive medicine” to describe a similar practice in the medical field where doctors cover their butts to insulate themselves from malpractice claims.

The legal industry is also ripe with this kind of attitude. Lawyers, like all other professionals, are nervous about being accused of malpractice, so attorneys often cover themselves to avoid malpractice liability. However, attorneys also simply try to cover their butts so that they don’t look bad in front of their bosses. Nevertheless, sometimes a cover your ass attitude can get in the way of serving clients, and attorneys should make clients the priority over insulating themselves from blowback.

Lawyers are often forced into covering their butts because clients wish to pursue a strategy which can result in negative outcomes. For instance, I once worked at a firm that was tasked with serving local subpoenas for an out-of-state proceeding. The out-of-state law firm insisted on making the subpoenas returnable sooner than the mandated time period required by local rules. I conveyed this to the out-of-state paralegal that was assigned to the case, and she told me that we should just go forward with signing and serving the defective subpoenas anyways.

I spoke with my boss about this situation and suggested that we discuss the matter with the out-of-state lawyers who were working on this case. I suggested that perhaps the paralegal did not know the importance of timeframes with the subpoenas, but maybe we could convince the lawyers to use the correct timeframe with the subpoenas. The partner ended up telling me that it was not our problem that the paralegal had dictated that we serve defective subpoenas. He simply told me to write a memo to the file memorializing the conversation I had about the defective subpoenas so we could cover ourselves if the situation blew up in our faces.

Naturally, the short-served subpoenas became problematic, but we were able to tell the client about our conversation concerning the defective subpoenas, and we didn’t receive any blowback. In fact, our firm actually got more work sending out another round of subpoenas. However, it would have been more efficient to simply fix the problem in the first place rather than focus on covering our butts. This would have resulted in a much better outcome for our client even though it required us to go that extra mile.

Sometimes, attorneys focus on CYA because of internal firm politics, and this does not serve the best interests of the client. I once had a case as a “baby lawyer” that required someone from our firm to head to Long Island for a deposition. The senior associate told me that he wanted me to take the deposition because he did not want to get on the Long Island Railroad and schlep a few hours to the deposition and back. Since this was in the early part of my career, I was pretty excited to go on the deposition, even though I was somewhat inexperienced, and the senior associate knew more about the case.

However, the partner ended up finding out that the senior associate had pawned the deposition off on me, and he probably understood that the senior associate was just being lazy when assigning me the deposition. The senior associate then proceeded to write an extremely long email to cover his ass, and the message discussed in detail all of the tasks that the senior associate had to do in the office and why he could not cover the deposition. It must have taken the senior associate a substantial amount of time to review his outstanding tasks and draft that email. However, the senior associate should have just taken the deposition himself and not wasted so much time justifying his actions so that he could cover himself in front of the partner.

Of course, there are situations when it makes sense to cover your ass, and lawyers more than other professionals know best how they can avoid liability if a situation blows up. It is often a good idea to memorialize some oral conversations in an email, and speak by phone in other contexts. Furthermore, providing advice to clients about how they can cover their asses is a huge part of providing quality legal representation.

However, attorneys should try not to cover themselves if it will have a negative impact on the client. It is far better for attorneys to help clients fix situations than insulate themselves from liability.

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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.

So our germophobe president has probably been exposed to coronavirus, which is also having all sorts of other effects on things—I don’t really know, I haven’t been paying much attention to what’s going on immediately north of me or whatever. But, you guys, it’s getting serious now: It’s getting closer to Steve Cohen.

A spokesperson for Point72 confirmed that an employee at its gleaming new offices at Hudson Yards became a confirmed case of Covid-19 on Monday…. As a precaution, all the employees on the 14th floor were sent home as deep cleaning of the office began today. The source added that the company intended to remain fully functional as most employees can work from home.