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Hot Damn! Vulgar language at the Supreme Court.
Of Course They Are: Department of Justice is prioritizing denaturalization.
Coronavirus’s Impact On Biglaw: Despite the relatively low mortality rate, the new pandemic is changing how Biglaw does business.
Second Circuit Judge Insists He’s An Art Fan: Despite what his decision said.
Talking about money in church seems a somewhat profane and inappropriate thing to do—a bit at variance with the whole point of the venture. But I did not grow up in a prosperity gospel tradition. This may, in the end and along with many, many other things, damn me to an eternity of conscious torment in fire, but it has stood me in good stead in at least one sense, as I am unlikely to fall victim to this sort of thing.
According to the SEC’s complaint, from 2013 to 2019, Van Zyl used his position of trust as a senior Elder at a suburban Atlanta church, and held himself out to fellow church members as having a background in finance and private equity, to form investment advisory relationships with dozens of congregants. Van Zyl allegedly invested $23.5 million of his clients’ funds into his own failing start-up companies and his related investment fund, and also used clients’ funds for high-frequency forex trading, without disclosing to investors how he was using their funds or the associated investment risks. As alleged, Van Zyl also failed to fully disclose his compensation, telling clients only that he could take certain “advisory” and “consulting” fees. While his clients lost most of their investment funds as a result of his trading activities, Van Zyl collected nearly $3 million in undisclosed fees, commissions, and other compensation.
SEC Charges Georgia Businessman with Affinity Fraud Focused on Christian Investors [SEC]
In what Casetext cofounder and CEO Jake Heller calls a breakthrough that will have a profound impact on the practice of law, the legal research company is today launching Compose, a first-of-its-kind product that helps you create the first draft of a litigation brief in a fraction of the time it would normally take.
In a preview demonstration given under embargo during the recent Legalweek conference in New York, Heller showed how he could use Compose to create a first draft of a brief in five minutes.
The product, the company says, “is poised to disrupt the $437 billion legal services industry and fundamentally change our understanding of what types of professional work are uniquely human.”
Heller and cofounder Pablo Arredondo, who is Casetext’s chief product officer, say this is the first brief automation product in the legal market and only the second litigation automation product, after LegalMation, which automates the creation of responsible pleadings in litigation.
Casetext is a company that is known for developing innovative legal research products. Its brief analysis product, CARA, launched in 2016, was recognized by the American Association of Law Libraries as product of the year and has spawned a spate of similar products.
Compose is not for writing appellate briefs. It is designed for writing litigation briefs in support of standard procedural motions, such as a motion to exclude expert testimony or a motion to compel discovery. It can be used only for the specific types of motions the product covers, which Casetext will be building out over time.
To use Compose, a lawyer begins by entering basic information about the brief, such as the nature of the brief, the jurisdiction, and the lawyer’s position for or against the motion.
A lawyer starts by selecting the type of brief to compose.
Compose then presents the lawyer with a treatise-like outline of what Casetext says are all the available arguments for that motion, as well as the legal standards or rules applicable to each argument.
The lawyer selects the jurisdiction and position to be taken in the brief.
The lawyer simply peruses the available arguments and standards and then clicks on a standard 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.
Compose presents a treatise-like list of arguments from which the lawyer selects.
“Picking arguments to add to your brief is like choosing pastries at a French patisserie,” Heller said during the Legalweek demonstration.
Select the legal standards to add to your brief.
The legal standards that Compose suggests are tailored to the jurisdiction and state identified by the lawyer, Heller said. Arguments can be nested hierarchically.
If offering that selection of pastries was all Compose did, it would be notable of itself. But a second feature of Compose takes it further, not only suggesting pastries, but feeding you the full menu.
Called Parallel Search, it uses advanced natural language processing to follow you as you draft your arguments in the brief and 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.
“This fills in a blind spot in current search,” Heller told me. “It allows you to return cases that have a violently different articulation of the current concept.”
Parallel Search finds relevant cases as you compose your arguments.
At the Legalweek demonstration, Heller gave an example by typing the argument, “Plaintiff’s testimony was deceitful.” Parallel Search returned a case in which the judge concluded that testimony was “frankly incredible.” The algorithm understood that deceitful and incredible were parallel concepts.
As another example, Heller typed the argument, “Target is liable for not cleaning up the banana peel that Ms. Jones slipped on, injuring her hip.” Parallel Search returned a reference to a case that said, “Davis alleges that Kroger’s employees were responsible for negligently leaving a soapy substance on the ground that caused her to fall.”
Compose’s motion automations will be offered as collections. The first three collections to be marketed will be Federal Discovery, Federal Motion to Dismiss, and Federal Core Civil Procedure. As of today’s launch, there are six motion automations available:
Over time, Casetext will release new motion automations and collections.
Casetext will sell Compose as a separate product from its legal research service. Six larger law firms have already signed on as customers: Ogletree Deakins, Sheppard Mullin, Bowman and Brooke, and three others that Casetext declined to name.
For solo and small-firm attorneys, they will be able to purchase Compose on an a-la-carte, per-brief basis. The first use will cost $99. After that, each brief will cost $1,499.
For larger firms, they will purchase Compose on a subscription basis. Subscriptions will be offered based on bundles or themes, such as federal discovery or federal civil procedure.
Heller envisions that firms will purchase some subscriptions on a firm-wide basis and others on a practice-specific basis.
Casetext will also sell Compose to clients, such as insurance companies and inhouse legal departments, on both a single-use basis and in packages allowing a certain number of briefs.
Heller said that compose will allow lawyers to write better drafts of briefs in as much as one-tenth the time it would typically take. Given that litigators spend more than half their time working on motions, that could be a significant savings.
But lest anyone label this a robot lawyer, let us be clear: You still need to craft the brief. Compose gives you a shortcut to assembling the skeletal framework of legal principles that support you, but it remains your job to add substance to that framework and weave it all together into a compelling argument.
But even there, Compose’s Parallel Search feature will help, delivering up cases that are conceptually similar to the facts of yours and providing the fodder you need to support your positions (or highlighting the cases that work against you).
“Compose commoditizes the parts that lawyers never liked working on and clients never liked paying for,” Heller said. “At the end of the day, what’s left is the lawyer’s imagination, creativity, intelligence and persuasiveness in the brief-drafting process. That’s what we’re excited about.”
I have not used Compose directly. I have seen it demonstrated twice. Based on what I have seen, I have to agree with Heller that this appears to be a breakthrough technology for legal professionals. Just as Casetext’s competitors scrambled to emulate CARA, I suspect they will now scramble to come up with a Compose product of their own.
5 Pointz (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)
The Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff may have lamented that parents just don’t understand, but at least one Second Circuit judge thinks that it’s lawyers who just don’t understand.
Judge Barrington D. Parker Jr. wrote for the majority in a case that revolved around graffiti and the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990. The Second Circuit upheld the district court decision awarding a $6.75 million judgment in favor of a graffiti artist whose work was whitewashed over as part of a real estate developer’s attempt to bring (more) high rise apartments to Queens. The court found that the developer “willfully” violated the VARA by whitewashing the 5 Pointz complex in Long Island City, Queens, which had been used since the 1990s as a display space for the works of graffiti artists.
The decision turned around whether or not the art had taken on “recognized stature,” and Judge Parker commented on the fluid nature of that standard, and made an… interesting comparison:
“Since recognized stature is necessarily a fluid concept, we can conceive of circumstances under which, for example, a ‘poor’ work by a highly regarded artist—e.g., anything by Monet—nonetheless merits protection from destruction under VARA,” Parker wrote in the 32-page decision.
A lot of people took that line to be a healthy dose of shade at Claude Monet, the French impressionist master. But Parker insists that wasn’t what he meant at all.
Speaking with New York Law Journal, Parker said the intention was only to demonstrate that even lesser-quality works by greats like Monet would still get “recognized stature.” But rather than try to fight on behalf of his real meaning in the court of public opinion, Parker decided the more prudent course of action was just to remove the reference:
Parker, who professed a great appreciation for the arts, clarified that Monet is an “absolutely great artist,” and said it was best to delete the reference, which was incorrectly seen as a criticism of Monet.
“I love Monet, and I’m very heartbroken that I was misunderstood,” he said. “It was easier to just change it.”
The amended opinion has indeed removed the Monet reference.
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).
Litigators, are you looking to sharpen your skills and learn more about your practice? Look no further than Lawline’s catalog of over 300 litigation CLE. To help narrow down your options, we’ve compiled a list of the five most popular courses that litigators are watching right now.
Want more options? Check out our catalog of 300+ litigation courses. Happy viewing!
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It feels safe to say that Wells Fargo is a pretty miserable place to work these days. The hateful or pitying looks from customers, regulators, family, friends, potential CEOs, Warren Buffett, Jamie Dimon and other outsiders. Sharing an office with 25,000 other people reduced to eating only Popeyes. The bonuses, or lack thereof. The waiting around to see if you’re among the next crop of sacrificial lambs offered up in response to the next fuck-up by someone else. An HR department that sees its role as collecting, rather than addressing, complaints.
Well, some enterprising employees are doing something about the latter. And as with previous innovations by enterprising Wells employees, it’s bad news for the bank.
On March 25, an advocacy group called The Committee for Better Banks will participate in a House Financial Services Committee hearing titled “Holding Wells Fargo Accountable: Examining the Impact of the Bank’s Toxic Culture on Its Employees.” Two bank workers plan to testify….
“They’re able to work with Congress and representatives and kind of gives us a voice where they’ll actually do something about it,” Jackson told Reuters.
The group has been trying in vain to get management’s attention for years…. The group has not gotten an audience with any of the CEOs, but they have had success with Federal Reserve governors, Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and an Iowa lawmaker who used Wells Fargo employees as the face of her campaign to prevent offshoring.
Charlie Scharf thinks this is all a little unfair, as he’s only been in the world’s worst job for about 10 minutes. Still, he did suggest the group go meet with the head of HR, which under the circumstances is at least a little insulting. But fear not, aggrieved employees: He’s doing everything he can to turn Wells into JPMorgan as quickly as he can, as the former Dimon protégé adds a little Dimon flesh and blood to the effort (and by doing so presumably increasing the grievance felt by the Charlotte, San Francisco and Des Moines cliques and Charlie Munger about the growing New York cabal driving the stagecoach). Anyway, if you haven’t noticed, he’s got bigger fish to fry.
Conor Tolkin, Dimon’s son-in-law, reports directly to Wells Fargo Chief Executive Officer Charlie Scharf in a transformation and planning role, according to company spokeswoman Arati Randolph. He joined the firm late last year to conduct planning and administrative support for Scharf, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Tolkin previously worked under Scharf at Bank of New York Mellon Corp., according to his LinkedIn profile…. Since taking over at Wells Fargo in October, Scharf has hired at least five men with experience at JPMorgan.
Prosecutors agreed not to pursue criminal charges against the bank if Wells cooperates with other investigations and complies with relevant laws for three years.
However, the deal did not address issues with Wells’ mortgage and auto-lending businesses, where customers were enrolled in unwanted products that charged fees. Nor does it preclude potential charges against individuals who were in charge at the time of sales abuses….
The resolution was seen as positive, but the Fed’s consent order remains the “bigger overhang on shares,” Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analyst Brian Kleinhanzl said in a note.
Wells Fargo workers seek Washington’s help with internal gripes [Reuters]
At Wells Fargo, One-Time Dimon Protege Hires Dimon’s Son-in-Law [Bloomerg]
For Wells Fargo and former executives, $3 billion-deal with U.S. may not be the end [Reuters]
How New York became Wells Fargo’s new center of power [American Banker]
Rudy Giuliani (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
I just keep getting disappointed. I got about five friends left.
— Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who currently serves as President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, in comments made after he thought he hung up the phone with a reporter from the New York Daily News. After aligning himself with the president, Giuliani has reportedly become “political poison” among his former circle of friends.
Without realizing he forgot to hang up the phone, Giuliani was carrying on a conversation where he spoke negatively about former New York governor George Pataki, who claims in his upcoming book that Giuliani asked him to call off New York City’s 2001 mayoral election so he could remain in office to handle the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. “He’s trying to sell a book,” Giuliani said, unaware that the Daily News reporter was still on the line. “Even if we would have had that conversation, it would have been privileged between a mayor and a governor … He’s an honorable guy. I can’t believe he would do that. [He’s trying to make me] sound like a power-hungry politician.”
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.
A healthcare worker tests a woman’s temperature at a hospital in Turin, Italy. Northern Italy’s Lombardy region has seen a large outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
As of Tuesday, more than 80,000 people around the world have become infected with the novel coronavirus, originally designated 2019-nCoV and now called SARS-CoV-2, according to the World Health Organization. The overwhelming majority of those cases – and the estimated 2,700 deaths – are in China, particularly around Wuhan, China, where the virus was first detected. However, large outbreaks in South Korea, Italy and Iran have fueled fears of a potential global pandemic, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said an outbreak in the U.S. is inevitable.
Government health authorities and drugmakers have quickly mobilized to develop drugs to treat patients with COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, and vaccines to prevent infection. While it will likely be some time before the Food and Drug Administration approves one, several clinical trials are underway. The following are some of the companies that either have product candidates in the clinic or have announced partnerships to develop them with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Moderna
Headquarters: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Market cap: $10.3 billion
Product: Vaccine (mRNA-1273)
Stage: Phase I trial to begin soon
The company said on Monday that it had released the first batch of its investigational vaccine, mRNA-1273, for use in a Phase I trial among healthy volunteers. A page for the trial was posted on ClinicalTrials.gov the next day, with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – part of the National Institutes of Health – acting as sponsor. The trial page gives an estimated start date of March 6, though NIAID Director Anthony Fauci told The Wall Street Journal Monday that it could start in April. One site, run by Kaiser Permanente, is listed.
Gilead Sciences
Headquarters: Foster City, California
Market cap: $94 billion
Product: Drug (remdesivir)
Stage: Phase II trial initiated
Based on mouse studies showing that an investigational Gilead drug, remdesivir, has broad-spectrum activity against coronaviruses – particularly the SARS and MERS viruses – followed by a report of a COVID-19 patient’s symptoms resolving after taking it, there are now multiple clinical trials testing the drug in patients infected with SARS-CoV-2. The most recent one is a Phase II study that just opened at the University of Nebraska, sponsored by the NIAID, and other studies had previously been initiated in China.
Johnson & Johnson
Headquarters: New Brunswick, New Jersey
Market cap: $379.2 billion
Product: Drug
Stage: Discovery/preclinical
J&J’s Janssen subsidiary is one of several companies that have partnered with HHS’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), to develop vaccines and drugs for the COVID-19 virus. HHS said in a Feb. 18 announcement that BARDA and Janssen would work together to identify drugs that can be used to reduce the severity of COVID-19 illness and treat infections. HHS said the company would also identify compounds with activity against the virus. Prior to that, J&J Chief Scientific Officer Paul Stoffels said in a Jan. 27 interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the company was “pretty confident” it could develop a vaccine and had begun working on one two weeks prior. Janssen will work with the Rega Institute for Medical Research in Leuven, Belgium, to screen compounds.
Sanofi
Headquarters: Paris
Market cap: 113.6 billion euros ($123.7 billion)
Product: Vaccine
Stage: Discovery/preclinical
Also on Feb. 18, HHS said it had partnered with French drugmaker Sanofi to develop a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. Under the partnership, BARDA is providing its expertise and allocating money to fund the vaccine’s development, while Sanofi is using its recombinant DNA-based and egg-free vaccine development system to produce a vaccine candidate. Sanofi and BARDA have had a partnership to develop vaccines since 2004.
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals
Headquarters: Tarrytown, New York
Market cap: $50.5 billion
Product: Drug
Stage: Discovery/preclinical
Like Sanofi, Regeneron is another company that had an existing relationship with BARDA, dating back to 2014. HHS said Feb. 4 that the two would use part of Regeneron’s VelociSuite monoclonal antibody discovery system to rapidly look for mAbs against the COVID-19 virus. The technology platform was previously used to develop monoclonal antibodies against the Ebola virus, used in a recent outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the MERS coronavirus. The system, HHS said, helped shorten processes like antibody discovery and selection and manufacturing for preclinical and clinical studies.
Photo: Stefano Guidi, Getty Images
(Image via Getty)
Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Lindsay Kennedy back to our pages.
I live in South Korea with my young daughters and husband. I work remotely as a federal tax attorney, a job I started only one month ago and already adore. I am experiencing the euphoric sense of truly finding my calling in the legal world. Yet, here I sit dealing with the struggles of switching from SAHM to remote, part-time working mom and getting to navigate this new thing called the Coronavirus.
I have lived in Korea for eight months, so I am not an expert by any means. I have had the pleasure of learning about the Korean culture and falling in love with it. The Koreans absolutely adore children. Every face lights up when a kid walks into a room — including and especially store workers, which tend to give kids a different look in the United States. The Korean people have always, from the moment I arrived in Korea, highly prioritized germ prevention. It comes as no surprise to me that a virus with a new name would be treated with such a high degree of concern.
I treated this new thing like any attorney smack dab in the middle of it –- I researched it. I learned the coronavirus spreads like the flu, has symptoms like the flu, kills the same demographic of people as the flu (those with already compromised immune systems), and lasts about the same amount of time in the body as the flu. Since no one in my family has a compromised immune system, I don’t find the possibility of contracting the virus to be all that scary.
I made sure before I started working, I had proper care for my kids lined up -– back-ups plus back-ups to my back-ups and a team of support from friends. This virus has eliminated each option one by one.
The Korean school my 3-year-old attends was the first to close until further notice. The American school was next to close, informing parents at 7:30 the night before it closed for the rest of the week. Then, the back-up childcare facility let me know at 8:38 the night before it closed until further notice. Friends that have been great assets in trading childcare have chosen to completely isolate themselves. They are scared and are choosing isolation as a means to find control. I am only on day two of having my kids at home and so far, I am lucky that they are being good about playing together and allowing me to work. I am also very lucky to have such a supportive boss.
Everywhere we have gone in the past three weeks, every single person is wearing a mask. Masks are never uncommon in Korea, but they have not been this overt. Hand sanitizers are everywhere. Every elevator has a bottle hanging in it, every store counter, everywhere.
My kids and I have allergies that are flaring up. We ran out of medicine just as the temperatures went from 50 degrees to a chilly rain. Since our allergy symptoms (runny nose, sneezing, coughing watery eyes) are similar to the common cold, flu, and coronavirus, I am scared of being seen.
I am not scared of contracting coronavirus; I am scared of sneezing in public. I do not want to be quarantined for 14 days. The easy solution was for my husband to get our refills. But I do not like feeling terrified that at any moment I could be detained, even temporarily for mandatory coronavirus testing.
The military is doing an amazing job at keeping families informed using social media in the perfect manner. In order to drive onto the military installation, we are now asked a series of questions and our temperatures are checked. Some of the gates to get on post have been closed. Getting on post used to take me three minutes, today after two hours, we were still not on post and gave up.
The airports and train stations all have thermal scans set up. A team stands on the side checking temperatures. I see very few people riding the public buses that are normally full.
There is a general panic in the air. I see the desperate pleas on Facebook by military spouses wanting to leave Korea. For the past few weeks, the Korean school has been sending me daily messages urging and begging families to not take children out of the house. The military has requested individuals not to leave their homes for social reasons, only if completely necessary. Of course, upon hearing this, the lawyer in me immediately started overanalyzing the definition of “social” versus “necessary.”
I used to live in Watertown, N.Y., home of massive snowfalls measured only in feet. When there was a massive overnight snow, we endured a sort of lockdown, as most families experience from time to time. But this is different.
There is a strong sense of panic in the air. Most businesses are closed. I get shameful looks when expressing a desire to take my family sightseeing in Korea. Things continue to change hour by hour. And, most challenging, there is not an end in sight.
Lindsay Kennedy recently took a position with Eaker Perez Law, doing exclusively U.S. federal tax law. She is also the Executive Director of MothersEsquire. Lindsay’s favorite thing, besides her family, is working to support changes in the legal profession to allow for more non-traditional options so both parents are afforded the opportunity to enjoy their family. She’s a proud mom of two beautiful girls and married to a loving and supportive husband. You can reach her at lindsay@eakerperezlaw.com