Category: News Feeds

Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day!

According to a retrospective survey of partner compensation data compiled by Major, Lindsey & Africa, from 2000 to 2018, by what percentage did compensation go up for male partners?

Hint: For women, compensation only went up 22 percent over that same time period.

See the answer on the next page.

It’s one of the first things a person new to Bridgewater Associates learns, assuming they read the manual. Its right up near the top: Initiates are instructed to “recognize that effective, innovative thinkers are going to make mistakes” (Principle no. 9). They are not, however, to feel bad about those mistakes. They are to love them (no. 10) and reflect upon the pain they cause. (no. 17), because it is unacceptable not to learn from them (no. 8). Well, there sure is a hell of a lot to love, reflect upon and learn from right now.

Assisted reproductive technology (ART) law has generated, on one hand, the most heartwarming practice area, helping bring adorable and loved babies into the world. On the other hand, this area has it all: mixed-up embryos, deceitful donors, doctors using their own sperm with unknowing patients, fights over use of reproductive material, parental rights confusion, denial of citizenship, and gentlemen who substantially encumber their income with child support obligations after giving away sperm at Target. Yes, ART law has become one of the most bizarre and mind-blowing areas of law, where the legal questions are fascinating, and the human toll profound. Check out these latest podcasts that take a deep dive into the issues of ART.

Donor 9623
Just released on Audible (free trials!), this bingeable series is getting rave reviews. A feature on the eight-part series has been The Atlantic’s most popular article for days — not pandemics or wildfires, but this story about scores of parents with kids from the same man, who was sold for a decade and a half as the “perfect donor.” Except it was all a lie.

It’s a case I’ve written about a couple times. The facts are shocking, the legal twists even more so. Professor Dov Fox, author of Birth Rights and Wrongs, hosts, illuminating the thorny stakes: from the pull of genetic ties and the uncertainty of living with medical risk, to what’s reasonable to expect when trying to have a child.

The Georgia Supreme Court is expected to weigh in soon on this controversial area of law. A dozen claims have already been settled or dismissed under doctrines like “wrongful birth.” But this time might be different — at least based on the grilling the justices gave the sperm bank’s attorney over the (virtual) oral arguments in May. Fox delves into all this in the podcast.

The series moves briskly through key players and original evidence to unravel this surreal story. All the episodes are great, but the last one is extraordinary. Fox sits down with the donor himself, the man at the center of it all, and gets answers to the questions we have all been dying to ask.

Sick

Thanks to direct-to-consumer DNA kits, the number of people finding out that their mother’s fertility doctor is also (surprise!) their biological father has been beyond shocking. Depressingly, it’s become almost expected at this point when I get an email that begins “So I received a 23andMe kit as a gift …” Of these doctor-donor cases, that of Dr. Donald Cline of Indiana, has been one of the most prominent. Cline has fathered at least 60 children with his patients, after promising only the use of “anonymous donor” sperm. Sick is described as “an investigative podcast about what goes wrong in the places meant to keep us healthy.” Award-winning journalists Jake Harper and Lauren Bavis explore the personal stories of those affected, and the injustices in our medical system. And it’s on NPR. Which means it’s produced by podcast pros and it’s free!

I Want To Put A Baby In You

Full disclosure. This is the podcast that I co-host. But if you are interested in assisted reproductive technology legal issues, this is definitely the podcast for you. Unlike Donor 9623 and Sick, it is not formatted as a series. Instead, each episode is a standalone interview. It’s hard to choose a few favorites of the almost 100 episodes, but for my attorney colleagues that especially enjoy the intricate legal issues, here are a few not to miss.

Attorney Eric Wrubel — Embryo Mix-Up Shocker. Wrubel is a New York matrimonial attorney who got the call from distraught California parents when they suddenly found out their embryo had been accidentally transferred to another woman who subsequently gave birth to their son, thousands of miles away.

Attorney Kim Surratt — The FBI and Baby-Selling Ring. What happens when an experienced surrogacy attorney sees some major red flags and gets the FBI involved? She helps take down a terrifying baby-selling ring. This is a case of truth being stranger than fiction, and how attorneys can, in fact, make the world a better place.

Derek Mize and Jonathan Gregg — Our Daughter is American, Too. A recent favorite, learn more about the intricacies of the U.S. immigration code than you ever cared to know, and how it can be, and was, used to deny citizenship to the children of same-sex couples. This former practicing attorney and his husband fought back, with the help of Biglaw firm Morgan Lewis and others, and won.

Oh you wanted one more?

Danielle Teuscher and Jill Teitel — Beware of the Home DNA Kit. It’s rare to be able to snag an interview with the plaintiff and plaintiff’s attorney during active litigation, but we did it. And this case is fascinating. Find out what happens with a sperm donor recipient who discovers the donor’s mother through a home DNA test, only to be hit with a cease and desist letter from the sperm bank purportedly imposing a $20,000 fine, and taking away the plaintiff’s property — the sperm vials plaintiff purchased and stored with the bank.

Now we all have something to do while we wait for the next season of Cobra Kai. You’re welcome.

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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.

Alan Dershowitz is suing CNN for $300 million because the network defamatorily failed to quote an full paragraph of his arglebargling about Donald Trump’s impeachment, giving viewers the entirely false impression that the famed lawyer has lost his damn mind.

Yes, for real.

Were you under the impression that Dersh might have ruined his own reputation by going on Laura Ingraham’s show to shout about his “perfect, perfect sex life” in a bizarre attempt to slag his arch-nemesis David Boies, after accusing Boies-Schiller of being “a RICO?”

Or maybe your esteem started flagging at the quixotic attempt to quiet doubters by proving that he never not ever had sex with underage girls when he was hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein, an effort Dersh has bolstered by protracted litigation and public efforts to Zapruder the flight logs to show that he only went to Epstein’s sex island in the company of his wife. Most people might deny it and then shut the hell up, but not Professor Dershowitz!

Perhaps if the retired Harvard professor hadn’t sued Epstein’s alleged victim while simultaneously thrusting himself into the middle of the impeachment hearings, reporters wouldn’t have bothered to dig up his insistence on playing pornography in the common areas at Harvard — for the First Amendment, obviously! — and his 1970s musings on lowering the age of consent.

Might Americans have decided the famed constitutional scholar had lost a step when he took to the airways to assure Americans that he only got one massage at Jeffrey Epstein’s house, from an “old Russian woman,” and he kept his underwear on the whole time? Or when he threatened to sue CBS because a fictional character made a joke about it?

No! Obviously the damage occurred in January of 2020 when CNN failed to quote the entirety of Alan Dershowitz’s speech on the House floor saying that it was fine for the president to wield the apparatus of the American government to aid his own electoral prospects.

See, Dersh said:

The only thing that would make a quid pro quo unlawful is if the quo were somehow illegal. Now we talk about motive. There are three possible motives that a political figure could have. One, a motive in the public interest and the Israel argument would be in the public interest. The second is in his own political interest and the third, which hasn’t been mentioned, would be his own financial interest, his own pure financial interest, just putting money in the bank. I want to focus on the second one for just one moment. Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest and, mostly you are right, your election is in the public interest, and if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.

And while he admits that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer played the whole clip, other CNN commentators just talked about the last couple of sentences, leaving viewers with the possibly mistaken impression that Professor Dershowitz was endorsing a theory that presidents could commit crimes with impunity if they believed the result to be “in the public interest.” (Leave aside that the Government Accountability Office found that withholding congressionally allocated funds from Ukraine was, in fact, illegal.)

The very notion of that was preposterous and foolish on its face, and that was the point: to falsely paint Professor Dershowitz as a constitutional scholar and intellectual who had lost his mind. With that branding, Professor Dershowitz’s sound and meritorious arguments would then be drowned under a sea of repeated lies.

And they did it, on purpose, to punish him for supporting president Trump.

However, Professor Dershowitz appears to have made one mistake. He chose to defend the President of the United States and defend the U.S. Constitution at a moment in time where CNN has decided that doing so is not permitted. For this, CNN set out to punish him and destroy his credibility and reputation, and unfortunately, succeeded.

Darn you, CNN, making the heretofore well-respected lion of American intellectualism look like a crazy person!

Characterizing the refusal to air the whole quote as part of a “deliberate scheme to defraud its own audience… at the expense of another’s reputation,” the First Amendment warrior accuses the network of “intentionally misleading its viewers and hiding the truth from their eyes and ears.” Touting himself as “one of the most revered and celebrated legal minds of the past century” (and so modest!), Dershowitz points to a news cycle where people quit mocking Dershowitz for yammering about his panties for a couple hours and instead mocked him for his defense of the president’s conduct. And for his pains, this great legal mind demands $50 million in compensatory damages, and $250 million in punitive damages.

Hey, quit laughing! It’s not an ignominious end to a glorious legal career. Dersh is on top of his game, ready to take on the world, primed to hit the nude beaches for an impromptu lecture on presidential prerogatives. Look out, Martha’s Vineyard, here he comes!

Alan Dershowitz Files $300 Million Lawsuit Against CNN for Portraying Him as an ‘Intellectual Who Had Lost His Mind’ [Law & Crime]

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

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only changed the way lawyers and law firms do business — it’s also had an immediate impact on continuing legal education.

In response to the pandemic, states have temporarily modified their Mandatory Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) rules. While Practising Law Institute has long been an authoritative source for MCLE compliance, keeping members apprised of rule changes took on an unusual urgency as the world entered its new, socially distanced reality, says Andrew Ottiger, PLI’s Senior Director of MCLE Accreditation and Compliance. “Having worked with MCLE regulators across the country on compliance mandates for decades, our accreditation team quickly realized that states would need to revisit live requirements, deadlines and other requirements in light of the pandemic,” Ottiger explains. “We began compiling and publishing these changes to our website as soon as they were announced, so that PLI members and others could easily access this information in one, up-to-date place.”

Changes to formats include the suspension of live in-person program requirements and the lifting of caps on online (i.e., “distance learning” or “alternative delivery format”) credits. Many states made dramatic changes to their distance learning and self-study caps. For example, Utah suspended its live in-person requirement for both 2020 and 2021. Many states have also extended compliance deadlines — Connecticut and Rhode Island suspended their 2020 deadlines entirely — while others, such as Illinois, have added automatic compliance deadline extensions or no-fee grace periods. Expect some of these changes to be extended, Ottiger says: “…Particularly those orders that relax live in-person requirements. MCLE regulators are mindful of the need for caution during the pandemic. We expect this increased flexibility to translate to increased MCLE compliance as attorneys are taking advantage of the ability to earn more MCLE credits online.”

Biglaw firms face an additional challenge when it comes to managing multiple jurisdictions’ credit needs. In addition to offering a wealth of online live and on-demand programming, PLI is distinguished by the fact that all its programs offer credit in all U.S. MCLE jurisdictions and in all formats. “PLI provides the best opportunity for attorneys and firms with attorneys licensed in multiple states to take advantage of rule changes made in response to COVID-19,” Ottiger notes.

Aside from offering programs that fulfill MCLE requirements, PLI offers another valuable resource to attorneys and professional development managers: the ability to manage and track individual compliance progress with the My Credit Tracker tool.  Available to anyone with a free account on PLI.edu, My Credit Tracker manages credits earned from PLI and allows users to add credits from external providers, offering a seamless way to manage compliance even for multiple jurisdictions.

Thousands of attorneys currently use the tool to manage their compliance, says Ottiger, who adds: “We are always innovating to improve My Credit Tracker.” Recently, the team developed a homepage widget to show users a dashboard snapshot of My Credit Tracker and added the ability for users to view past and future compliance progress, as well as track their carryover credits. “The ability to click back to see a past compliance period or enter a grace period makes it easy for attorneys to manage their compliance when it matters most: deadline time,” says Ottiger’s PLI colleague Laura Sayer, Director, MCLE Accreditation & Compliance, who has played a key role in developing the My Credit Tracker tool.

MCLE requirements can be tricky, particularly when understanding the contrasting requirements for multiple states. “We often say that the most common answer to an MCLE question is, ‘it depends on the state,’” says Ottiger. “It is particularly tricky during these challenging times, which makes it more critical than ever to provide clear and accurate informational resources and helpful tools for attorneys to meet their MCLE requirements.”

Click here for PLI’s up-to-date list by state: Mandatory Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) Rule Changes Due to the Coronavirus Pandemic.

To learn more about PLI’s free tool for tracking MCLE compliance, visit: My Credit Tracker.

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Practising Law Institute is a nonprofit learning organization dedicated to keeping attorneys and other professionals at the forefront of knowledge and expertise. PLI is chartered by the Regents of the University of the State of New York, and was founded in 1933 by Harold P. Seligson. The organization provides the highest quality, accredited, continuing legal and professional education programs in a variety of formats which are delivered by more than 4,000 volunteer faculty including prominent lawyers, judges, investment bankers, accountants, corporate counsel, and U.S. and international government regulators. PLI publishes a comprehensive library of Treatises, Course Handbooks, Answer Books and Journals also available through the PLI PLUS online platform. The essence of PLI’s mission is its commitment to the pro bono community.

You get 10 minutes to cry sometimes. Every single day there was news about somebody getting the coronavirus, someone being shot, riots, election news. Every single day it was distracting. It was hard to just unplug and not pay attention to those things. I needed to find someone who would help keep me accountable. I heard from other people who took the bar that getting out of the house talking in the fresh air helps with memorizing things.

— Abigael Hood, a 2020 graduate of the Oklahoma City University School of Law who took and passed the state’s in-person July bar exam, offering some tips on how to stay focused and succeed in your studies during these incredibly stressful times.

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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.

Mike Corbat may not have much cared for his job as CEO of Citigroup, but he was still supposed to stick around for another couple of years and give Marianne Lake a fighting chance of convincing Jamie Dimon to become Secretary of Commerce or run for mayor or light an M-80 behind him and let his heart take care of the rest and allow her to take her rightful place as the first female leader of a major U.S. bank. Unfortunately, Citi’s woeful risk management infrastructure did what it does, over and over and over again, and reminded regulators that Citi and Corbat hadn’t really done all they promised, sotto voce, to do to fix those systems, and that maybe a highly public reminder to do so was in order. And since Citigroup replaces its CEOs when its regulators take public notice that they’re not up to snuff, Lake’s rendezvous with destiny took a wrong turn, almost as if Citi was processing the transaction.

Everyone knows diversity is a worthwhile goal, but the actual process of getting there can be fraught. One mechanism to encourage diversity in the legal sphere that has gotten a lot of traction is the Mansfield certification process.

For those who might not be tracking, the idea was formed in 2017, at a Diversity Lab event to really hold Biglaw firms accountable for their lofty diversity goals. Modeled after the NFL’s Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview a minority candidate for head coach or general manager vacancies, the idea was to create a system to encourage Biglaw firms to consider women or minority candidates for leadership roles at the firm. The rule — named for Arabella Mansfield, the first woman admitted to practice law in the U.S. — asks firms to consider two or more candidates who are women, LGBTQ+, or attorneys of color when hiring for leadership and governance roles, promotions to equity partner, and hiring lateral attorneys. To be considered “Mansfield Certified” by Diversity Lab, a firm needs to show that 30 percent of the candidate pool for these positions are diverse.

“The goal of the Mansfield Rule is to boost the representation of diverse lawyers in law firm leadership by broadening the pool of candidates considered for these roles and opportunities,” Diversity Lab said in a news release. “Firms participating in the Mansfield Rule are making great strides in diversifying their leadership.”

And the statistics seem to reflect those ideals. As reported by Law.com, those firms that have dedicated themselves to the principle of diversity are seeing a real change in the composition of their leadership:

On the inaugural list of Mansfield Certified firms there were 42 entries, and last year 64 firms could claim certification. This year, we see another upward tick, with 100 firms now Mansfield 3.0 Certified. And next year looks bright as well — 117 firms have already signed up for the Mansfield 4.0 process.

So, which firms are now Mansfield certified? Here are the 100 firms — and those with an asterisk are Mansfield Plus certified, which means the firm’s leadership roles are at least 30 percent racial minorities or women.

Akerman

Frost Brown Todd

Nutter McClennen & Fish

Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld*

Goodwin Procter*

O’Melveny & Myers*

Allen & Overy*

Goulston & Storrs*

Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe*

Archer & Greiner

Greenberg Traurig

Paul Hastings*

Arent Fox

Haynes and Boone

Perkins Coie*

Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer *

Hoagland, Longo, Moran, Dunst & Doukas

Polsinelli

Baker Botts*

Hogan Lovells*

Porter Wright Morris & Arthur*

Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz*

Holland & Hart*

Procopio, Cory, Hargreaves & Savitch

Baker McKenzie*

Holland & Knight*

Reed Smith*

Beveridge & Diamond*

Hunton Andrews Kurth*

Robins Kaplan

Blank Rome*

Husch Blackwell*

Robinson & Cole

Boies Schiller Flexner

Jackson Lewis*

Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr

Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck*

Jenner & Block*

Schiff Hardin*

Brown Rudnick

Katten Muchin Rosenman

Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis*

Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner*

Kaufman Dolowich & Voluck

Severson & Werson

Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney*

Kean Miller

Seyfarth Shaw*

Clifford Chance

Kutak Rock*

Shearman & Sterling

Cooley*

Latham & Watkins*

Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton*

Covington & Burling*

Littler Mendelson*

Shipman & Goodwin*

Cozen O’Connor

Locke Lord

Stinson Leonard Street*

Crowell & Moring

Manning Gross + Massenburg*

Stoel Rives*

Davis Wright Tremaine*

McDermott Will & Emery

Stoll Keenon Ogden

Day Pitney*

McGuireWoods*

Taft Stettinius & Hollister*

Dechert*

Merchant & Gould

Thompson Coburn*

Dentons*

Miller Canfield*

Thompson Hine

DLA Piper*

Miller Nash Graham & Dunn*

Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders*

Dorsey & Whitney*

Morgan, Lewis & Bockius*

White & Case*

Eversheds Sutherland*

Morris, Manning & Martin*

Williams & Connolly

Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath*

Morrison & Foerster*

Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr*

Fenwick & West*

Much Shelist

Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati*

Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner*

Munger, Tolles & Olson*

Winston & Strawn*

Fish & Richardson

Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg

Womble Bond Dickinson*

Foley & Mansfield

Nixon Peabody*

Fredrikson & Byron*

Norton Rose Fulbright*

Congrats to the firms on the list — and we look forward to it being even longer next year.

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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).

PDFs have long been a staple of legal practice, but one that has caused more than its fair share of unnecessary headaches. The thought of dealing with PDFs causes many lawyers an immediate sense of dread. But what if I told you that PDFs are actually easy to edit, but you’ve just been using the wrong software?

Put your basic PDF reader aside and meet the folks at Foxit. Foxit has upgraded PDF technology and transformed it to meet the needs of today’s lawyers. With Foxit PhantomPDF, working on PDFs feels like using the word processing programs you’ve come to know by heart.

PDF viewing, editing, creating, commenting, collaborating, converting, OCRing, Bates stamping — they’re all not only possible, but easy with Foxit PhantomPDF. With the right tool in your arsenal, you’ll never see PDFs as a roadblock again.

The PhantomPDF Basics

The overall user interface of Foxit PhantomPDF is similar to what you’re seeing in Office or other Microsoft products, with a file menu for creating or importing documents, the main functions organized in tabs along the top, and a navigation panel on the left side of your document.

You can also add stamps that are customizable to include any text you want, such as names, dates, times, and more. The stamps are actually small PDFs in their own right, which are applied on top of your main document, and you can use templates to create and save stamps for future use.

All of these reading and commenting features are available with the free version of Foxit’s PDF Reader. PhantomPDF, though, comes with so much more, and it’s worth the investment.

The Bells and Whistles

With Foxit PhantomPDF, you get far more functionality than you probably thought was possible with PDFs. It truly does feel like you’re working in a word processing program.

For starters, there’s a wide variety of ways to convert almost any file into a PDF. You can create your PDF from one or multiple files at the same time, scan it in, copy it from your Windows clipboard, import it from your computer, or directly convert a webpage. You can even combine all these sources and convert it all to one PDF with a single click. Conversion in the other direction is just as easy — when you’re done, you can take your PDF files and export them into any of 15 different file types, including most Office types, many image types, plain text, and html.

Foxit has put a lot of time and effort into its PDF editing features, and it shows. Any PDF can include text, which you can freely edit in all the ways you’re used to (changing font, adding bold or underline, changing font size, etc.). Even better, when you delete an item, the program understands what you did and your entire document re-flows — it even recognizes paragraph and outline numbering and renumbers your items if you delete one of them in the middle.

Objects and images are just as easy to edit. You can move them, rotate them, edit their properties, and more. All the details of your PDF can be edited and formatted, which is a far cry from the days when converting a document to PDF meant your formatting was guaranteed to be off. This is especially useful when formatting really matters, like when you’re complying with filing rules for margins and spacing.

Also critical for lawyers are two key functionalities — OCRing and Bates numbering. PhantomPDF’s OCR functionality lets you to run OCR in both searchable text mode and editable text mode in over 20 languages, and allows you to clarify any text that OCR couldn’t read. Bates numbering is also incredibly easy. You just select any number of documents, add them to a list, select where the number should go and designate your prefix and number format, and PhantomPDF will assign the numbers, continuing through all the documents in your list.

Of course, no program would be complete for use in the legal world without the ability to redact. You can redact your documents right within PhantomPDF by drawing over the area to be redacted and then applying the redaction (a two-step process so nothing is redacted accidentally and lost forever). You can add custom text to the redaction box, indicating reasons for redaction, statutory sections, or replacement text like “Person A.” If the redaction is recurring, you can use the search and redact function, which will locate every instance of the designated text and do a batch redaction with your replacement text.

When it comes time to finalize your document, PhantomPDF allows you to freely reorder, insert, extract, duplicate, and rotate pages. It’s easy to apply custom watermarks, backgrounds, headers, and footers, all with settings you can save if you want to apply the same marks each time. You can tag documents, add bookmarks, and even make PhantomPDF generate a table of contents or table of authorities from the text you’ve entered.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what you can do with PhantomPDF. The list of useful features and functionalities is endless – you can set alternative text for images, apply read-aloud and other accessibility tools, take snapshots of documents, add password protection, add digital certificate protection, require digital signatures, and so much more. Phantom PDF fully integrates with a wide range of other best-in-class software, including DocuSign, iManage, Dropbox, NetDocuments, OneDrive, Google Docs, and more, without having to open a separate program or browser.

With PhantomPDF, you can also use the portfolio tool to create curated packages of many different documents. Unlike combining documents into a single PDF, this functionality enables you to access and display each document separately while maintaining the collection as one discrete file. There are countless useful applications for this tool within the practice of law, including creating collections of evidence, amassing legal authorities, preparing omnibus motions, or creating complete case files – essentially any situation where you need documents to exist separately but be kept together. It’s also particularly handy for collections of documents that you want to present from your tablet in the courtroom, be they exhibits or case law.

In short, PhantomPDF does everything you never knew a PDF could do, and then some.

PDFs for the Modern Era

Technology has changed the practice of law, and Foxit has brought those advances to once-dreaded PDF with PhantomPDF. With friendly and flexible terms, perpetual licensing, and available upgrade assurance, you can find the pricing and package that works with your budget. If you’re still not convinced, you can even do a free trial.

It’s the 21st century — PDF’s can help eliminate the word processing headaches of the past. Foxit PhantomPDF is the only PDF tool you’ll ever need again.

On September 7, Robert Reich, who was Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton and held various high-level government positions before and since, tweeted the following:

Tesla forced all workers to take a 10 percent pay cut from mid-April until July. In the same period, Tesla stock skyrocketed and CEO Elon Musk’s net worth quadrupled from $25 billion to over $100 billion.

Musk is a modern-day robber baron.

A couple days later, Elon Musk tweeted this pithy retort:

All Tesla workers also get stock, so their compensation increased proportionately. You are a modern day moron.

In the time we’re living in, considering the garbled word salad our president vomits onto Twitter on a daily basis, that qualifies as rapier wit.

So why do Robert Reich and Elon Musk apparently have beef? Near as I can tell, there is no pre-existing reason really — it seems Reich just randomly decided to call out Musk on Twitter because Musk is a popular public figure and putting his name in things gets lots of strong reactions. People put Elon Musk’s name in headlines for articles that have little to do with him all the time (yeah, I’m guilty of that too).

But does Reich have a point? Well, Musk is indeed a billionaire. There is a certain swathe of voters who find “billionaire” synonymous with “robber baron.” But the real situation is a bit more nuanced than that.

Musk did not dispute the COVID-related pay cut, but accurately pointed out that Tesla employees are able to share in the gains of Tesla stock, which is not a benefit that publicly listed companies universally provide. Furthermore, the compensation Tesla provides to its production employees is not grossly unfair. The available data’s a bit old, but as of 2018, the median Tesla employee made $56,163 annually, which was 81 percent more than the median American. That lagged the median employee compensation for automotive competitors like Ford and General Motors, but it exceeded the median employee compensation for some automakers, like Fiat Chrysler, and it was more than the median compensation at some other well-to-do (and more consistently profitable) tech companies, like Apple.

Tesla’s CEO famously refuses to accept a salary from the company, although he does have one of the handsomest performance-based stock option plans in corporate history (which, of course, only pays out for him if the company does very well, which it has in the past several years). Robert Reich followed up his original tweet with some commentary about Musk discouraging unionization at Tesla’s auto plants — but what CEO welcomes in a union chief with a big bear hug? I think a tweet suggesting Tesla’s employees already have it pretty good and so would be wasting money on union dues is a far cry from the gangs of armed mercenaries the real robber barons of the Gilded Age tasked with literally smashing union resistance.

While Musk is obviously a very rich, very powerful man, he just seems like an odd target for Reich’s ire. What about the Walton family, who pay the average full-time hourly worker at Walmart just $14.26 an hour? How about the Sackler family, who amassed a fortune poisoning thousands of Americans with highly addictive opioids and then sucked $10.8 billion out of their company Purdue Pharma to try to shield it from the coming wave of meritorious lawsuits? Or maybe take a look at the DeVos fortune, which came from a multilevel marketing scheme in the first place and then was used by one DeVos sibling to start a shady mercenary army and by another to become Secretary of Education so she could undermine public schools.

Musk is far from perfect. But at least he spends his money in a lot of good ways. Musk has signed The Giving Pledge (along with such other business titans and philanthropic luminaries as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates), which is a promise to contribute a majority of his fortune to charitable causes over his lifetime. And unlike a multitude of other billionaires you could name off the top of your head, Musk’s money doesn’t come from doing something horrible (actually, producing vehicles that don’t pollute the air is a plus, in my book), and it doesn’t come at the expense of his workers, who are doing relatively well.

So, I don’t think Reich is really a modern day moron, but maybe he did overshoot a little on this one. Elon Musk is a flawed genius, and a rich man, but a robber baron? I think not.

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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.