Category: News Feeds

You may have noticed that some firms are doling out cash hand over fist as they thank their associates for a job well done during the pandemic. Amid the excitement over bonuses, associates at other firms are gritting their teeth, still waiting to see if the salary cuts they endured thanks to COVID-19 will go away any time soon. As luck would have it, one Am Law 100 firm just made the decision to end employees’ paycheck pain.

Littler, the largest employment firm in the world, came in 66th place in the 2020 Am Law 100 rankings with $590,038,000 gross revenue in 2019, but that didn’t stop the firm from slashing salaries across the board this past spring thanks to the coronavirus crisis. Back in May, Littler reduced compensation for equity partners and corporate management by 20 percent and cut salaries for highly paid nonequity partners and non-attorney senior-level administrative employees with compensation of more than $300,000 by 15 percent. In June, the firm put all other employees’ pay on a sliding scale chopping block, averaging cuts of 10 percent. Those unlucky enough to be unable to work remotely due to their job responsibilities saw their pay reduced by 50 percent.

Now that almost five months have passed, the firm is not only doing a complete about face on its austerity measures but it will also make employees whole for the money they lost during the height of the pandemic.

Sources tell us that during a pre-recorded town hall meeting, co-managing directors Tom Bender and Jeremy Roth announced that all salary reductions had been fully reversed and that all pay would be restored as of the firm’s September 25 pay period. Littler employees were also told that they’d receive true-up payments by or before October 2 to bring them to the levels they would have been at prior to the pandemic. As for those who had their salaries cut in half, the firm is still “working with” them, and no furloughs or layoffs have been made to date.

Littler thanked all of its employees for their hard work as management announced the end of the salary cuts:

Despite the many ongoing challenges posed by COVID-19, we are proud of how our team stepped up to help serve our clients, who are navigating the host of complex workplace issues associated with the pandemic. This collaborative spirit is reflective of our firm culture and we thank all of our attorneys and staff for their continued dedication in the toughest of times.

Congratulations to everyone at Littler. We know the cuts may end soon at additional firms, but let’s hope everyone is made whole, too.

If your firm or organization is slashing salaries or restoring previous cuts, closing its doors, or reducing the ranks of its lawyers or staff, whether through open layoffs, stealth layoffs, or voluntary buyouts, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Our vast network of tipsters is part of what makes Above the Law thrive. You can email us or text us (646-820-8477).

If you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Layoff Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the layoff alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each layoff, salary cut, or furlough announcement that we publish.

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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.

In my previous column, I examined Arizona’s decision to crack open the legal monopoly on law firm ownership and legal services. No one knows yet how impactful this experiment will prove. While some might predict an earth-shattering upheaval, others have been more bearish about the idea that opening up the practice to individuals and companies outside the traditional bar will change everything. When I spoke a few months ago to John Croft of Elevate, a UK-based ALSP, he likened breaking the monopoly to AI: despite the years of promises that computers would be taking our jobs, AI has so far underperformed on its promises of upending the industry.

The more I think about it, though, the more I wonder if Arizona’s experiment is precisely the jump-start AI needs to start living up to its hype in the legal sphere.

A Major Player

While it’s had a muted impact on law so far, in the broader business world artificial intelligence is a big freakin’ deal. Computers are learning to make decisions faster, smarter, and more accurately than their human counterparts on topics that previously were thought impenetrable to computer science. Industry after industry has been experimenting with and adopting AI solutions to improve its decision-making, production, and services. Most any industry you can think of, from transportation to science to art to your morning caffeine fix, is using AI and machine learning to change the way it does business.

To be sure, the science and practice of AI are still maturing and growing, and we’re still figuring out the strengths and weaknesses of our current batch of AI tools. If you don’t mind a tech-heavy, but funny read, I recommend the story of a programmer who took an AI neural network designed for image recognition and tricked it into declaring with 98.9% confidence that a picture of a panda bear was actually a vulture. AI is currently deeply powerful but in many ways also deeply limited. It’s powerful, but we’re not in danger of creating Skynet any time soon.

Those entertaining outliers shouldn’t fool you, though. AI is a major player in business, and it’s here to stay. Just this week, Nvidia, the most valuable semi-conductor company in the world, announced it was spending $40 billion to acquire semiconductor design company Arm. If you’re reading this article on your phone, chances are an Arm design is making that possible. Why would Nvidia gamble half a Warren Buffett on this deal? Per Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, it’s all about artificial intelligence. Nvidia thinks that by marrying its ultra-powerful AI-enabling GPUs with Arm’s industry-leading energy-efficient designs, they can put serious AI computing power in our pockets and on our desktops and dominate a space that’s only going to grow.

Why AI Hasn’t Taken Our Jobs Yet

Given that AI is so hot right now, plenty of thought leaders have been planning for AI to begin replacing attorneys and taking over an industry that, in many respects, seems well-suited to AI decision making. From routine attorney tasks like basic research, briefing, and calendaring, to more complicated concepts like risk assessment and case valuation, there are any number of candidates in an attorney’s practice for the kinds of automation and data analysis that AI provides.

Yet to date, the sky(net) has not yet fallen. Few lawyers, if any, have been replaced by computer terminals so far. The biggest adopters of AI so far have been vendors building tools to help lawyers, rather than put them out of work.

Why would AI have such a muted impact on law when it’s changing other industries to their core? My guess would be that lawyers are the gatekeepers of our industry, and lawyers by and large have little interest in killing their own jobs, or the jobs of high-billing timekeepers. Because only lawyers have been able to practice law, they can’t be replaced, so there’s been little reason for vendors or potential competitors to build the kind of tools that would render attorneys redundant.

Waiting For The Next Unicorn

In Arizona, though, attorneys’ cozy monopoly is being broken up, even if only partially. Big nonattorney-owned businesses may be looking for ways to break into this sector, and those companies have famously little love for the well-paid attorneys on their payrolls.

Think about it: who in the world of private business actually wants lawyers to continue to be paid apart from other lawyers? Whether we work with firms or in-house, clients are constantly pressuring us to reduce our costs and billings. The lower ends of the market have been priced out altogether. There’s a huge market for cheaper alternatives to traditional legal services, one that ALSPs and the Big Four have only begun to scratch given the strictures on performing legal work without a JD. Properly harnessed, AI has tremendous potential to downscale the amount of attorneys actually needed to run a functioning legal business. As the barriers to entry come down, all it really takes is one smart coder with a good idea to change how our business is run forever.

In Arizona, that coder suddenly has access to an entirely new field of potential clients, and the new ability to raise huge capital from nonattorney co-owners. While lawyers have so far been hesitant to sell off equity in their firms, startups trying to break in probably wouldn’t mind at all having a billion-dollar hedge fund backing their disruption play. As industry protections against AI come crashing down, the chances AI fundamentally reconfigures our way of doing business increase exponentially.

If Arizona’s experiment in opening up law to nonlawyers spreads across the country, it could mean that AI’s days of underachieving in the legal space are coming to an end. If traditional law firms don’t take note and plan accordingly, don’t be surprised if you see the vultures start circling.

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James Goodnow is the CEO and managing partner of NLJ 250 firm Fennemore Craig. At age 36, he became the youngest known chief executive of a large law firm in the U.S. He holds his JD from Harvard Law School and dual business management certificates from MIT. He’s currently attending the Cambridge University Judge Business School (U.K.), where he’s working toward a master’s degree in entrepreneurship. James is the co-author of Motivating Millennials, which hit number one on Amazon in the business management new release category. As a practitioner, he and his colleagues created and run a tech-based plaintiffs’ practice and business model. You can connect with James on Twitter (@JamesGoodnow) or by emailing him at James@JamesGoodnow.com.

Yikes. I can understand a firm’s inclination to be transparent with associates, but you have to wonder if it would be better to say nothing at all. And for those associates who thought working for — far and away — the richest Biglaw firm meant of course you’d get market bonuses? Lolololol. COVID makes fools of us all.

So what exactly happened?

Last night, Kirkland & Ellis sent around a message indicating that yes, they are aware that fall bonuses are making their way through Biglaw, but no, you should not expect them. The firm acknowledged the discrepancy between top of the market and what they’re doing and said they’d take the market into account during year-end bonus time, but made no clear commitment.

Read the memo for yourself:

Let’s check in with our Kirkland readers —- y’all, they’re not okay:

Disappointing, since hours did not slow down for Covid, but apparently comp did.

Associates are livid. Despite the general lack of transparency, we were told that our office was up 20% year on year. What a slap in the face to everyone who’s been grinding all year under difficult conditions.

The email doesn’t contain a commitment to true us up, it’s just an anodyne statement that they’ll take them “into account.” What garbage. These cheapskates have been talking for months about how the firm is having a banner year (for instance, the funds group is apparently on track to have a billion dollars of revenue on its own), but they can’t share it with associates.

I’m a senior associate at K&E. I think that what they’re going to do here is roll it into the year-end bonus, then use it as an opportunity to scrimp. So where in years past the average bonus was 1.25x (I snuck a pic of the powerpoint last year and I’m pretty sure that’s what the average was, but I can’t find it now), now they’ll be able to lower it to 1.15x but make it look ok because they’re aggregating it with the year-end bonus. And of course people with below-class ratings are going to get the shaft and they won’t compute them into the statistics about what’s “average”. This is a complete money grab, but exactly what I’d expect from the partnership here.

If you forward the email on your phone, you can see that they were tweaking the “and we intend to be so again this year” phrasing. Like, these guys were definitely on a Zoom call together trying to figure out how to polish this turd without making any true commitments.

Morale is NOT GREAT.

Another K&E person chiming in to describe the mood among my friends as FUCKING IRATE. I like the firm and generally drink the koolaid, but the fact that they call themselves compensation leaders twice in the “sry no bonus” email is ridiculous. Please vote us down in Vault.”

KE associate checking in — they said they would consider fall bonuses when determining December bonuses. But still. Bullshit. Lots of people will just get screwed given the individualized system we have. This is also a fuck you move because it’s pretty clearly a signal to other firms that the KE partners don’t want them to match. Just like Covington’s lame attempt to stop the salary raises a few years ago. Shame.

I am not in restructuring, but I can only imagine how pissed those guys have got to be during this insane year.

This is a slap in the face for associates at the world’s #1 grossing law firm.

So there you go, associates are deeply upset with this development. And remember, traditionally, the firm prides itself on above market — albeit individualized — bonuses. So, whatever numbers (which will be difficult to compare since you know, individualized) the firm comes up with at the end of the year, there’s a pretty good chance that, overall, they won’t be as generous as last year. At least that’s what insiders think; we’ll see what happens come December.

So what do you think? Is this a sign to other firms not to match? Will Kirkland competitors shower their associates with special bonuses? Is there blood in the water? Will Kirkland be able to keep its perch as the richest Biglaw firm? Feel free to sound off by email, by text message (646-820-8477), or by tweet (@ATLblog). A fun or insightful response — we’ll keep you anonymous — could find its way into an update to this story.

Please help us help you when it comes to bonus news at other firms. As soon as your firm’s bonus memo comes out, please email it to us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus”) or text us (646-820-8477). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish.

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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).

Among its other miseries and immiserations, the coronavirus pandemic promised a second epidemic in its wake, one of fraud. And given how eager what’s left of society is to be rid of COVID-19, no sector is as ripe for it as the pharmaceutical industry. From colloidal silver to questionable testing kits to industrial dinosaurs attempting to remake themselves into critical cogs in the fight against the ‘rona on the Federal dime, investors can’t get enough of this kind of thing. And the holy grail, of course, will be a vaccine—a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to gouge governments and eight billion people, all eager for immunity and the promise of a return to normalcy that comes with it.

* Nicki Minaj has scored a win in a lawsuit alleging that one of her songs infringed on another artist’s copyright. Hope there were live performances at the motion hearing… [Vulture]

* If you ever wanted to know the amazing story of New York personal injury powerhouse Cellino and Barnes, check out this article…and listen to the jingle. [Intelligencer]

* InfoWars founder Alex Jones has been denied a delay in a defamation lawsuit stemming from Jones’ statements about the Sandy Hook shootings. [Newsweek]

* The family of a UPS driver who was killed during a shootout in south Florida last year has filed a lawsuit over the driver’s death. [AP]

* Eric Trump is attempting to delay his deposition relating to a probe initiated by the New York Attorney General until after the presidential election. [NBC News]

* IMDB has defeated a lawsuit filed by a lawyer-producer seeking to force the website to change the listed release date of a film. Found out I still have an IMDB listing while writing this… [Hollywood Reporter]

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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.

Last February, the legal research company Casetext launched Compose, a first-of-its-kind product that uses artificial intelligence to help create the first draft of a litigation brief in a fraction of the time it would normally take.

At the time, as I wrote in this February blog post, cofounder and CEO Jake Heller said the product was “poised to disrupt the $437 billion legal services industry and fundamentally change our understanding of what types of professional work are uniquely human.”

While the product initially covered a limited set of core motions related to federal civil procedure and discovery, Casetext said it would roll out other motion collections over time for specific areas of law.

Today Casetext is introducing the first of those new collections — a set of 18 employment law briefs — 16 related to wage and hour cases in federal courts as well as under state law in California and New York, and two Title VII motions that are a preview of a forthcoming larger set of employment discrimination briefs.

This initial employment law collection will eventually be expanded to include two briefs relating to defending against Title VII claims.

The set of wage-and-hour briefs released today cover motions in federal courts to:

• Compel discovery.
• Seek conditional certification.
• Certify a class.
• Decertify a class action.
• Request summary judgment.
• Compel arbitration (applying general contract law principles).
• Compel arbitration (applying California law).
• Compel arbitration (applying New York law).

In addition, for wage-and-hour cases under both California and New York law, the collection includes briefs in support of motions to:

• Compel discovery.
• Certify a class.
• Seek summary judgment.
• Compel arbitration in California state court (applying both federal and California law).
• Compel arbitration in New York state court (applying both federal and New York law).

The two Title VII briefs for for motions to dismiss and for summary judgment.

Draft A Brief in Five Minutes

During a media preview on Tuesday, Heller demonstrated how he could use Compose to draft a brief in support of a motion for summary judgment in five minutes.

As I explained in my February post about Compose, the drafting process begins by selecting the type of motion, the court, the parties, and the position to be taken by the party you represent, for or against the motion.

You are then presented with a treatise-like list of all the available arguments for that motion. As you choose an argument, Compose then shows you the legal standards and rules applicable to that argument. As you see these standards displayed, you simply click Add and it shows up in the draft brief on the right side of your screen.

The lawyer continues this process, perusing the available arguments and standards, and then clicking Add to add a fully composed paragraph to the brief that states the rule, including citations. The text is fully editable, either within Compose or later when the draft is exported to Word.

“Picking arguments to add to your brief is like choosing pastries at a French patisserie,” Heller said when he first demonstrated this product during Legalweek last February.

In Heller’s demonstration Tuesday, it actually took him about eight minutes to draft the brief, but I doubt many lawyers would complain about an extra couple of minutes. And while Compose can be used to produce a fairly substantive draft, it is not a finished product ready for filing. You still need to draft the statement of the case, the facts, and other sections, tie it all together, and put it into the correct format.

More Coverage than A Treatise

Casetext says that its wage-and-hour collection for Compose is comprehensive in its coverage. During Tuesday’s demonstration, cofounder Laura Safdie said that the collection includes:

• 1,102 arguments.
• 5,354 legal standards.
• 25,236 citations.

By comparison, Safdie said that they analyzed a major treatise covering wage-and-hour cases and found that it had just 248 citations in the section related to summary judgment motions. Compose has over 3,000 citations for those motions, she said.

The Secret Sauce

If this were the entirety of Compose, it would be impressive technology. But Compose includes an additional feature, driven by artificial intelligence, called Parallel Search, that makes it even more impressive — and more useful when actually drafting a brief.

Parallel Search uses advanced natural language processing to follow you as you draft your arguments in the brief and then automatically provide you conceptually relevant precedent. Notably, Casetext says this works to find analogous caselaw, even when the cases do not use the same language.

In Heller’s brief-drafting demonstration on Tuesday, he pretended he was representing drug manufacturer Pfizer in a lawsuit brought by a salesperson working as an independent contractor. Using Parallel Search to draft his arguments, he wrote the statement:

“Pfizer’s salespeople work independently and sell on their own, and so are not employees covered under the FLSA.”

Parallel Search then provided cases to support that statement. Although that sentence never identified Pfizer as a pharmaceutical company, Parallel Search understood to deliver cases related to the pharma industry, and it also knew to deliver cases related to an FLSA exemption for outside sales people.

During Tuesday’s demonstration, Javed Qadrud-Din, Casetext’s director of machine learning, said that Parallel Search grew out of Casetext’s own need, in developing Compose, to have a search tool that could find support for legal propositions, even when courts used completely different language.

An example of Parallel Search’s ability to understand concepts.

He offered several examples of how this transformer-based neural network is able to learn to understand words and sentences in context. For example, this statement was entered into Parallel Search:

“Target’s employees were uncompensated while waiting for loss prevention inspections before leaving work.”

It returned the following statement from the case Frlekin v. Apple Inc. (9th Cir. 2020):

“Employees receive no compensation for the time spent waiting for and undergoing exit searches, because they must clock out before undergoing a search.”

Thus, Parallel Search understood that “uncompensated” was the same as “no compensation,” that “loss prevention inspections” were similar to “exit searches,” and that “before leaving work” was similar to “must clock out.”

What It Costs

Casetext sells Compose as a separate product from its legal research service. For now, it is offering free trial access to Compose for anyone who requests an account.

In general, Casetext sells Compose to larger firms on a subscription basis. Firms can subscribe to Compose in its entirety or just to specific collections. Casetext did not provide specific pricing.

When Casetext launched Compose in February, it offered special pricing for solo and small-firm attorneys by which they could purchase access on an a-la-carte basis.

A spokesperson said the company is currently rethinking its pricing for smaller firms to make Compose more accessible.

The Bottom Line

In a study it released in July, Casetext said that compose allows litigators to draft briefs 76% faster than they otherwise would.

Insofar as the study involved only 13 lawyers and relied on their estimates of the time it would normally take them to write a brief, it was not exactly scientific.

But what cannot be doubted about Compose is that it enables lawyers to create a first draft in substantially less time than they would otherwise require.

Not only that, but it provides lawyers a high degree of assurance that they have at least considered all the arguments available to them, regardless of whether they choose to use them.

This argument reflected a legislative amendment from this month.

Further, Casetext says the arguments in Compose are kept current with changes in the law. In an example shown by Safdie Tuesday, an argument reflected a September amendment of a California statute.

Something Heller said back in February still resonates today:

“Compose commoditizes the parts that lawyers never liked working on and clients never liked paying for. At the end of the day, what’s left is the lawyer’s imagination, creativity, intelligence and persuasiveness in the brief-drafting process.”

Casetext calls Compose a game-changer, and this may be one of the few times in the annals of marketing where that is not an exaggeration. If you are a litigator, try it for yourself. It won’t cost you anything. And if you are an employment litigator, you now have even more reason to try Compose.

Have you ever lived in a stale ashtray? A fireplace? That’s what it is like now up and down the West Coast. If you have travel plans to come this way in the immediate future, change them. Do not come. We haven’t seen blue sky, at least here in California, for more than a week. We’ve had the worst smog in almost three decades. Friends who can escape do, to Wyoming or Utah or places further east. Look at the air quality in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver.

But we West Coasters are not the only ones suffering right now. Just say the names “Laura” and “Sally” and those who live in the southeastern United States get it, literally. I’m not about to debate climate change. I will simply say “Res ipsa loquitur.”

We lawyers hate a vacuum. Perhaps that is why we rush to fill silence, figuring that such silence must be bad. If a deponent takes a minute or so to answer a question, we usually note on the record that he has taken 60 seconds or so to answer the question asked. And the implication is that the deponent was stalling, trying to create a better answer or simply being evasive before answering. We all learned in evidence class about silence in the face of an accusatory statement and so we impatiently wait for the answer, and that rush for an answer is not necessarily a good idea.

Hesitation can equal evasion in our world. I don’t think it should. Thoughtful answers, answers responsive to the question don’t necessarily pop out of a person’s mouth immediately. I think it’s like the driver who, immediately upon the light turning green, lays on the horn, as if the few seconds makes any difference. (I do chortle when that driver in a hurry, usually cocooned in an expensive car, must stop at the same light as I do. Tortoise v. Hare, just another example of the adversarial concepts we lawyers seem to thrive on, or if not that, tolerate, as if we had any choice.)

A recent article in Inc. magazine says that both Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos “embrace the rule of awkward silence.” The article says that the rule has always been valuable but today, in a world where everything is “just in time,” “I want it now,” “what’s taking so long?” that rule has become even more valuable.

So, what exactly is this rule? The author of the article, Justin Bariso, says it’s simple: When faced with a challenging question, instead of answering, you pause and think deeply about how you want to answer. This is no short pause; rather, it involves taking more than several seconds (10, 20, or longer) to think things through before responding.

“No short pause?” Uh-oh. How many attorneys have the patience to wait for an answer without thinking something nefarious is going on, we of the suspicious minds? Not many, I’m afraid. It’s reaction that attorneys look for, not necessarily the thoughtful response that answers the question. Bariso says that the rule is valuable as a tool of emotional intelligence, balancing thought and emotion, instead of simply reacting. Much of what occurs in deposition is reaction. Usually deponents have other things to do, and they just want to get the depo over with.

So, in a sense the “rule of awkward silence” is the opposite of immediate gratification. Work with me here. The past six months have shown the limits of immediate gratification. Toilet paper? Wipes? Paper towels? Have we stopped hoarding yet? There are many psychological experiments about immediate gratification, the 1972 marshmallow one probably is the most well-known. Recent research has revealed that the kids do better on the test when they cooperate. Cooperate? What a concept. I wish lawyers would do it more often.

Instantaneous communication has been the watch word for our world. Emails, faxes, and the like must be answered rightaway. Don’t think, just respond. A young lawyer feels that she must answer emails rightnow. No, she doesn’t, especially when responding right away leads to a pissing contest with opposing counsel. Fun, right? Not so much. Whatever happened to time to respond? What about writing something and waiting for a while before hitting send? Whatever happened to time? Where has it gone and what have we done with it?

Yes, the rule of awkward silence is … awkward, until you get used to it. Taking the time to formulate the answer and reply in a way that makes it clear what your answer is, without ambiguity, is a good thing. We are so uncomfortable with silence that we fidget during it. We check our phones, multitask, because the thought of just being quiet and waiting makes us nuts. The concept of stifling ourselves is something we did not learn in law school. Commenting on the length of time that it takes the deponent to answer a question can backfire.

Bariso lists several reasons why the rule is beneficial: it causes you to think critically and not just say the first thing that comes to mind. Spending time before answering can mean more thoughtful answers (this assumes that the answer is not simply “yes, no, or I don’t know”).

Even a little more time can make the answer more confident and assertive. Take time to think before answering a client, opposing counsel, anyone. What’s the rush? Is another minute taken going to make a difference in this pandemic and smoky world? I don’t think so.

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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.

The excitement is building at 383 Madison Avenue. JPMorgan Chase staffers have been slowly returning to their temporary headquarters for months now, but for the first time since March, some of them—namely, senior sales and trading officials, will be required to leave their socially-isolated home setups and return to midtown. This is very, very important, according Jamie Dimon.

Work output was particularly affected on Mondays and Fridays, according to findings discussed by Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon in a private meeting with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analysts…. “The WFH lifestyle seems to have impacted younger employees, and overall productivity and ‘creative combustion’ has taken a hit,” KBW’s Brian Kleinhanzl wrote in a Sept. 13 note to clients, citing an earlier meeting with Dimon.

The president just spent the entire morning tweeting that there’s no way he could lose unless the election is rigged, and the Assistant Health and Human Services Secretary for Public Affairs was fired yesterday for telling his supporters to buy guns and ammunition in a lunatic rant about Democratic hit squads.

There are Trump supporters telling reporters that they’ll commit suicide if Biden wins in November, with one believer in the rampant pedophilia conspiracies flogged in the Trump wingnuttosphere telling Time, “I would honestly try to leave the country. And if that wasn’t an option, I would probably take my children and sit in the garage and turn my car on and it would be over.”

But Bill Barr hasn’t heard anything at all about that.