Category: News Feeds

Another day, another firm that’s hopped on board the salary restoration train. We’ve been documenting all of the Biglaw firms that were perhaps a bit too cautious when it came to the economic impact of the coronavirus crisis here. Today, we have news on yet another Am Law firm that’s partially rolled back its salary cuts.

This morning, Kelley, Drye & Warren — a firm that placed 135th in the latest Am Law 200 rankings, with $232,400,000 in gross revenue in 2019 — announced that the salary reductions it made earlier this year will now be halved. Here’s a statement we received from James Carr, the firm’s chairman:

As you know, the Firm implemented a number of cost cutting measures this Spring to minimize the economic impact of the coronavirus crisis and to protect the financial health of the Firm. Thanks to these actions and your dedication to our clients, we are now in a position to restore some of the salary reductions implemented in May. The 10% pay cut for associates, special counsel and staff earning more than $100,000 will be reduced to 5%. The partner reductions will remain in place for now.

If you recall, those cuts for partners were up to a 20 percent reduction on their draws. So while partners at Kelley Drye continue to feel the pain, it’s nice that associates, counsel, and staff will have some of theirs lessened.

Let’s hope more firms are able to roll back COVID-19 austerity measures — and soon.

If your firm or organization is slashing salaries, 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.

Well, it looks like we can expect the Biglaw trend of layoffs to get worse before it gets better.

The coronavirus has wrought a lot of changes in Biglaw — we’ve seen firms announce their office is closing until 2021, we have partners and associates are sharing offices, bunches of firms slashed salaries, and we’ve even seen partners forced out of firms. But the very, very top of the Biglaw pile remained mostly quiet during this tumultuous time. Now, that’s changed.

Tipsters at the firm reported to Above the Law that none other than Skadden Arps has been cutting back on professional staff, apparently taking the unprecedented upheaval to make some staffing changes. A spokesperson for the firm confirmed the layoffs to Above the Law, “We can confirm that we have laid off just under 4% of professional staff across our U.S. offices.”

Best of luck to those who find themselves out of work.

Now that an ultra prestigious firm has decided layoffs are the way to go (and one that instituted no previous COVID-19 austerity measures to boot), will we see even more firms willing to take a carving knife to their ranks? Only time will tell.

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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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).

On August 26, 2020, the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) issued a press release indicating that it had adopted amendments to the definition of “accredited investor.” The amendments, among other things, added to the list of individuals who qualify as accredited investors, holders in good standing of a Series 7, Series 65, or Series 82 license. The amendments also updated the definition of accredited investor to include, with respect to investments in private funds, natural persons who are “knowledgeable employees” as defined in Rule 3c(5)(a)(4) of the Investment Company Act of 1940. This change could prove significant for private funds with under $5 million is assets under management which wish to allow certain employees to participate in the private fund’s offering.

The SEC’s release can be found here: https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-191.

The Final Rule adopting such amendments can be found here: https://www.sec.gov/rules/final/2020/33-10824.pdf.

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This article is for general information only. The information presented should not be construed to be formal legal advice nor the formation of a lawyer/client relationship.

Related

Offering proper accommodations for the bar is always a difficult but necessary task for examiners in the best of times. But in the midst of a global pandemic, some states seem to just be giving up.

Multiple people have now flagged messages informing diabetic applicants that the upcoming online exam is already tough enough without them having to trifle with your pesky diabetes. This one from the Pennsylvania Board of Law Examiners:

“We are reaching out to ask if you feel you will still need to have these diabetic supplies, food, and a drink with you while testing, since the exam is now remote.”

Do people not understand diabetes? Wilford Brimley dies and suddenly everyone forgets about DIABEETUS.

Barring some hitherto undisclosed ExamSoft impact on pancreatic function, the fact that the test is now remote is unlikely, in fact, to have much impact at all on the applicant’s need to stay alive. They’re also asking people to turn off their glucose monitor alarms! What the hell?

I think everyone gets that the AI-driven video proctoring thing was going to flag someone giving themselves a shot in the middle of the exam. It sucks, but there’s not really an alternative given how these tests work. The message from the bar examiners should be, “You’re going to get flagged automatically for glucose monitor alarms, but rest assured we’re aware of your condition and the software’s flagging of your test will be reviewed and you won’t face any negative repercussions based on your medical needs.” See how easy and reassuring that was?

Meanwhile in New York, bar examiners have lined up a brutal choice for applicants:

Come in person or tough luck is how that reads. Adding more breaks is better than telling applicants that they should try not being diabetic for a day but it’s not necessarily realistic. And the later caveats in the message make it all but a non-starter.

This is fundamentally broken. If you ascribe to the worldview that the profession cannot survive the risk that an applicant has a bottle of insulin with them that MIGHT have the rule against perpetuities scrawled onto the label, then your priorities are dangerously out of whack.

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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.

If you, dear reader, happen to have noticed some strange goings-on at a company you cover for a bank or money manager or whatever, we have wonderful, lucrative news for you.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday issued a joint $2.5 million award to two external analysts who flagged financial reporting abuses by Orthofix Medical Inc, the agency and the lawyers for the analysts said in separate statements…. “These analysts could have ignored their hunches and remained silent—like so many others on Wall Street,” said Thomas.

* Carole Baskin is asking a judge to dismiss a lawsuit about the disappearance of her ex-husband since it’s allegedly a “fishing expedition.” They should have used a tiger metaphor… [Tampa Bay Times]

* A New York lawyer has been suspended from practice for not paying taxes and and shielding settlement money from tax authorities. [New York Law Journal]

* The Supreme Court might have a major role in the upcoming presidential election. [Hill]

* A lawyer in the Bronx is in hot water for allegedly calling COVID-19 “Chinese cooties.” [New York Daily News]

* GEICO has tapped a longtime in-house lawyer to be its new general counsel. Guess he stayed there for more than 15 minutes… [Corporate Counsel]

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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.

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

According to American Lawyer’s Midlevel Associate Survey, which breaks the rankings out by specific offices, the Washington, D.C., office of which Biglaw firm is ranked best in midlevel associate satisfaction in the nation’s capital?

Hint: The firm got a 4.95 out of 5 in overall satisfaction for their D.C. outpost, which is one of 23 offices the firm has worldwide.

See the answer on the next page.

Shortly after midnight on March 13, 2020, Louisville Metro Police Department officers executed no-knock raid on the home of 26-year-old EMT Breonna Taylor. They suspected that Taylor was allowing her ex-partner Jamarcus Glover to use the apartment to store money and drugs, although no drugs or money were recovered from the scene.

Why the police needed a battering ram to execute a midnight raid on a woman they expected to be alone and unarmed in her own home was never made clear. But when they broke down her door, Taylor was asleep next to her boyfriend Kenneth Walker. Walker fired his gun, hitting an officer, after which the police rained down a hail of bullets, striking Taylor eight times and killing her.

The four-page incident report filed at the time was almost entirely blank, which the police attributed to technical errors. It described Taylor’s injuries as “none” and claimed no forced entry had occurred.

In the six months since Taylor was killed, her name has become a rallying cry for racial justice protestors nationwide. But instead of acceding to public demands to arrest the police who shot Breonna Taylor, Louisville prosecutors have instead worked to dirty up that name as post facto justification for her murder.

Walker was initially charged with attempted murder of a police officer, although the charges were later dropped with the possibility of being reinstated when the Justice Department concludes its own investigation. And now Jamarcus Glover has revealed that prosecutors offered him a sweethart plea deal if he would implicate Taylor as part of an “organized crime syndicate” dedicated to trafficking large amounts of drugs “into the Louisville community.” Taylor is named as a “co-defendant,” despite never being charged before the police shot her in her own home.

If Glover, a convicted felon with a history of drug trafficking, had taken the deal he might have gotten off with simple probation. But he didn’t, and subsequent drafts of the deal stipulated that he used her apartment to store “proceeds from the trafficking operation,” but didn’t describe her as a “defendant.”

“Our office has not and does not posthumously indict any person who is deceased,” Commonwealth Attorney Tom Wine told NBC, without explaining how and unindicted party came to be described as a “defendant.”

Wine characterized the first deal as a “draft” which relied on jail phone calls, in which “Mr. Glover implicated Ms. Taylor in his criminal activity.”

“When I was advised of the discussions, out of respect for Ms. Taylor, I directed that Ms. Breonna Taylor’s name be removed. The final plea sheet provided to Mr. Glover’s counsel is attached and clearly does not include Ms. Taylor as a co-defendant,” he told WRDB.

Out of respect.

Taylor’s family has filed a wrongful death suit, and Walker has sued for a declaratory judgment barring future prosecution under Kentucky’s “stand your ground” law. Meanwhile, prosecutors work to coerce Glover into retroactively remaking Taylor as a criminal who deserved what she got.

And the protests rage on.

Drug suspect offered July plea deal if he would admit Breonna Taylor part of ‘organized crime syndicate’ [WRDB]
Breonna Taylor’s ex was offered a plea deal to say she was part of an ‘organized crime syndicate’ [NBC]
The Authorities Are Still Gunning for Breonna Taylor [The Nation]

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

Whatever’s happened to Kodak shares over the past month-plus, one’s things very clear: None of them had anything to do with fundamentals. First it was rumor. Then it was Peter Navarro. All along, it was powered by day traders who know the name “Kodak,” saw it was going up and gave into their crippling FOMO. Indeed, Kodak’s fundamentals remain exactly the same or worse today than they were before some self-serving and eventually untrue whispers about something that would “change the course of history for Rochester and the American people” began to emanate from Kodak’s press office.