Category: News Feeds

Sometimes the wisest legal strategy is a PR nightmare. Sometimes the best public relations move can violate the law. And sometimes a lousy legal strategy will lead to widespread public condemnation, but the Trump administration steers full speed ahead into the iceberg anyway because they’ve been inhaling the putrid exhalations of the wingnutosphere so long they can hardly tell which way is up.

This is one of those times.

After Homeland Security shock troops got caught throwing racial justice protestors in Portland, Oregon into the back of unmarked vehicles and driving them to an undisclosed location for questioning, Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf, best known as the architect of the child separation policy, took to the airways to defend his agency.

“Earlier this week, I called not only the mayor but the governor,” Wolf told a sympathetic Sean Hannity on Friday. “I offered DHS support to help them locally address the situation that’s going on in Portland. And their only response was, ‘Please pack up and go home.’ And that’s just not gonna happen on my watch.”

Which is big talk for a lobbyist with zero law enforcement experience and no legal background who happened to be the last guy standing after everyone else got fired and couldn’t even get confirmed to his position.

The “situation” Wolf refers to is 50 days of protests and scuffles with police, with minor property damage to federal buildings in downtown Portland. But with Trump threatening to “take over” Democratic cities to control everything from protestors to crime generally, the DHS swung into action to implement the president’s dystopian plan.

The legal justification for the crackdown appears to be a pasted together amalgam of 40 U.S.C. § 1315, which empowers federal agents to protect federal property, and a June 26 Executive Order about protecting sacred Confederate monuments. The order was largely ignored at the time, since it was larded with nutbaggery about imagined Marxists who “have sought to impose that ideology on Americans through violence and mob intimidation” and warnings about wild-eyed extremists clamoring for “many existing religious depictions of Jesus and the Holy Family [to] be purged from our places of worship.”

As constitutional lawyer Steve Vladeck points out, 40 U.S.C. § 1315 only empowers federal agents to arrest citizens for federal crimes which those agents have witnessed or have probable cause to believe have been committed. This would not extend to unleashing squads of heavily armed men to round up random protestors for detention and interrogation, as they are purported to have done with 29-year-old Mark Pettibone last week.

“It was basically a process of facing many walls and corners as they patted me down and took my picture and rummaged through my belongings,” Pettibone told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “One of them said, ‘This is a whole lot of nothing.’”

After being Mirandized and declining to answer questions without a lawyer present, Pettibone was released without charge or documentation. DHS later acknowledged that it had detained Pettibone, with Acting Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli telling NPR that agents “believed they had identified someone who had assaulted officers or a position – a federal building there, the courthouse. Upon questioning, they determined they were – they did not have the right person, and that person was released. So – but all that questioning took place out of reach of a mob that had been gathering in one point, so that’s how that concluded.”

So a bunch of storm troopers jump out of a van and chase down a few stragglers walking home from a protest, they catch some skinny white dude dressed in black — just like everyone else! — and decide that they need to question him about some unspecified federal crime, remove him from the scene because of a “mob,” and then get to detain him without charge? Sounds legit.

On Saturday, Oregon Governor Kate Brown sued D.H.S., C.B.P., the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Federal Protective Service, seeking to enjoin them from warrantless detention of citizens exercising their First Amendment right to protest and walk down the street unmolested in the United States of America.

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler decried the federal government’s escalation, which is making a tense situation far worse.

“My residents don’t know who a federal officer is, or a local police officer or a county deputy or a state patroller. They don’t know and they don’t care. It’s all the same to them,” he told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “On Friday night, after the federal police starting gassing people about 300 people came to my house and wanted to know why I allowed our police officers to gas people, which of course I didn’t and they didn’t. But it’s a distinction without a difference in the eyes of the public, and I believe the president and his people know that.”

And then came the moms.

On Saturday, a few dozen mothers showed up at the federal courthouse to to shield protestors from federal agents.

Last night, there were hundreds.

Would DHS really pepper spray hundreds of middle aged mothers? They would!

They also managed to beat the crap out of a navy veteran asking them to uphold their oath to the constitution in a video that wound up going viral.

And apparently, they plan to do a whole lot more of it. The Chicago Tribune reports that DHS will be sending 150 troops to Chicago this week to see if they can make a bad situation there even worse.

Spoiler Alert: They can, and they will.

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Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

This isn’t a new issue. Above the Law wrote about bar examinees not being allowed to take their own menstrual products into test centers back in 2013. But, unfortunately, in 2020 it is still an issue and goddamn it, it still makes us mad.

Amid all the cancellation and postponements of the July 2020 bar exam, let’s not forget that a shocking number — 23! — of states intend to go forward with an in-person bar exam next week pandemic be damned. And of course the whole, they’re-trying-to-kill-us thing is a big deal but there’s another controversy about the gender-based microaggressions (frankly, I don’t think they’re micro, but, that’s me) in a number of states’ bar exam rules. Take a look at the Twitter hashtag #bloodybarpocalypse tracking the well-placed outrage over states that won’t let folks take their own menstruation products into the bar exam:

After that social media storm rained down on the Arizona bar, they changed course and will now allow this (admittedly minor) concession:

But don’t worry, there are still a bunch of other states that have these draconian anti-cheating (and anti-woman) measures, with no regard if it’s “her time of the attorney licensing process.”

Are you outraged yet? Well, you should be. And there’s a petition you should sign: Let Examinees Bring Menstrual Products into Bar Exams (sign by 6 p.m. eastern tonight for the greatest impact on this year’s bar exam).

But, wait! There’s more!

Women are also shit out of luck if they have the unmitigated gall to be nursing while taking the bar exam. In Oklahoma one applicant with a four month old child was told that she should do whatever she needs to regarding pumping in an open room with 300 other test takers.

While another was told she would have to pump and store her milk while being monitored and within the pre-scheduled 15 minute breaks in some, as of yet undisclosed, location.

The profession frequently bellyaches over the lack of meaningful diversity, but without tackling these sorts of structural issues that clearly demonstrate a lack of consideration for folks that menstruate and breastfeed, well, nothing’s really going to change.

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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).

Earlier today, we reported on the violent shooting death of the son of Judge Esther Salas as well as the critical gunshot injuries her husband, criminal defense attorney Mark Anderl, sustained during the same attack. At the time, the suspect’s identity was unknown and he remained at large.

Authorities have now named a suspect — and he’s a former Cravath associate.

Roy Den Hollander, a men’s rights attorney who worked at the prestigious firm for several years in the late eighties before going out on his own, is being investigated for his alleged role in the shooting. Hollander had a case before Salas in 2015.

Hours after the shooting, Hollander was found in his car with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in upstate New York. A FedEx package addressed to Salas was reportedly found in his car. The Daily Beast has some additional details on Hollander:

Hollander described himself on his website as an anti-feminist. “Now is the time for all good men to fight for their rights before they have no rights left,” it said. …

For years, Hollander has been filing suits alleging that women get unconstitutional special treatment and pushing to outlaw Ladies’ Nights at bars and women’s studies programs at universities.

The case in Salas’ courtroom was filed in 2015 on behalf of the mother of a 17-year-old New Jersey girl who argued that the Selective Service System barring females from registering for the draft while making is mandatory for males was illegal.

We will continue to follow this tragic case and provide updates should more information — like a possible motive — be revealed.

Men’s Rights Lawyer Eyed in Shooting of NJ Judge’s Family [Daily Beast]
Authorities Investigate Link Between Lawyer’s Apparent Suicide, Fatal Shooting at NJ Judge’s Home [National Law Journal]

Earlier: Shooting At Federal Judge’s Home Leaves One Dead, One Critically Injured

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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.

While we support the adoption of an online examination as an option, the excessive delay in making a final determination on such an exam places an undue burden on our graduates who have been studying intensively for licensure for the past two months in the midst of extreme public health concerns and hardship.

The State of New York currently has no clear plan to facilitate the admission to the bar of thousands of our recent graduates. These graduates now are in a state of limbo, with a profound level of uncertainty and anxiety that surrounds their futures and economic stability as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic.

— excerpts from a letter signed by all 15 law school deans in New York, sent to the New York Court of Appeals, Governor Andrew Cuomo, and several other elected officials, addressing the need for the state to adopt diploma privilege for 2020 law school graduates “in the swiftest way possible” due to the ongoing pandemic and the recent cancellation of the bar exam. “Immediate action is essential,” they write.

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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.

John Yoo began the Trump administration with “grave concerns” over Trump’s view of limitless executive power. But Yoo still embraces the expansionist vision of executive authority he became famous for when he argued that the Framers intended for the Executive Branch to stick people dick first through meatgrinders without Congressional or Judicial oversight. It’s just that these days, he frames his theories as “worries,” offering a wink and nod to anyone who might interpret his work as a green light.

Now Yoo has written a wild screed in National Review interpreting the Supreme Court’s recent DACA opinion — an opinion that liberals hailed as a victory — as an open invitation for any White House that might want to take questionably illegal actions to go right ahead.

And Trump has made sure that recent photographs show the issue on his Oval Office desk.

Yoo feels the 5-4 opinion (the case also yielded a more tragic 8-1 lineup on the Equal Protection issue) functionally invalidates the purpose of the Constitution:

Such a rule upends the text, structure, and history of the Constitution, which generally prevents the occupants of a branch of government (who are temporary, after all) from binding their successors. The Constitution, for example, contains no system for undoing a statute. When Congress wants to repeal a law, it must pass a new law through the same process of bicameralism (House and Senate approval) and presentment (presidential signature). The Supreme Court effectively repeals past opinions simply by overruling the earlier case, though the Constitution does not expressly provide for such reversals. Brown v. Board of Education famously overruled Plessy v. Ferguson’s rule of separate-but-equal. When a president wants to repeal an executive order, all he need do is issue a new executive order. When agencies want to reverse a regulation, they must resort to the same sluggish method of notice-and-comment rulemaking.

Except… no. The bicameral system was designed for the purpose of slowing the ability of the legislature to respond to the “passions” of the electorate. The judiciary, at least before Justice Alito started his march to Janus had to show wide deference to precedent. This paragraph is comically at odds with the American legal tradition.

Yoo argues that this has to be the rule because the Framers “wanted each president to be fully accountable to the electorate for his actions without any diffusion of responsibility,” apparently forgetting the existence of the Electoral College and that 90 percent of the modern bureaucratic executive branch would have thoroughly confused a bunch of agrarian plantation owners.

It is important to understand that this principle applies even more strongly in the case of illegal presidential action. The Constitution vests in the president the responsibility to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully Executed.” The highest form of the law of the land is the Constitution. Under this duty, the president cannot enforce an executive order that violates the Constitution — here, the vesting of the power over immigration in Congress. Upon taking office, for example, President Thomas Jefferson immediately ended all prosecutions under the 1798 Sedition Act, which had made criticism of the government a crime, and pardoned those convicted under it.

Missing in this analogy is anyone’s reliance interest on the Sedition Act. The DACA majority didn’t bind presidents to every act of a predecessor, just that an action that creates reliance interests can’t be overturned without taking that into consideration. The opinion laid out a remarkably low bar. Indeed, as we pointed out, the real action was the 8-1 opinion where Justice Sotomayor stood alone arguing that maybe targeting Latinx kids was more about an Equal Protection violation than the finer points of administrative law. Yoo’s article doesn’t even begin to address the limits, say, the Fourteenth Amendment might place on executive power.

This all reads very much like Yoo is a hand-wringing classical conservative worried that the Supreme Court has legalized wild abuses of power. And yet he put it in National Review, a dead drop for anyone trying to reach the inner sanctum of Mar-a-Lago, where the White House counsel can mull its subtext. Yoo told the White House, under cover of consternation, that the Supreme Court has affirmed executive authority to take illegal action in immigration — and beyond. As dire warnings go, it’s all about as credible as Tom Sawyer warning the other kids about the perils of whitewashing fences.

“Now Donny, here’s that new BB gun you wanted, please don’t play with it!” Gosh, I wonder what the Trump White House might do with this information?

“We’re working out the legal complexities right now, but I’m going to be signing a very major immigration bill as an executive order, which Supreme Court now, because of the DACA decision, has given me the power to do that,” Trump said.

If John Yoo wanted to pen an article bemoaning the idea of a lawless White House and appealing to an innate sense of constitutionalism to rein in abuses now blessed by the Supreme Court, he’s about to be bitterly disappointed.

But I’m pretty sure he’s actually about to get exactly what he really wanted out of this article.

Earlier: DACA Opinion Confirms Supreme Court’s Cowardly Refusal To Acknowledge Donald Trump
John Yoo Crushes The Testicles Of Logic

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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.

Just as the number of people hospitalized for Covid-19 approaches new highs in some parts of the country, hospital data in Kansas and Missouri is suddenly incomplete or missing.

The Missouri Hospital Association reports that it no longer has access to the data it uses to guide state coronavirus mitigation efforts, and Kansas officials say their hospital data may be delayed.

The Trump administration this week directed hospitals to change how they report data to the federal government and how that data will be made available.

In an email, Missouri Hospital Association spokesperson Dave Dillon called the move “a major disruption.”

“All evidence suggests that Missouri’s numbers are headed in the wrong direction,” Dillon said. “And, for now, we will have very limited situational awareness. That’s all very bad news.”

The absence of the data will make it harder for health and public officials, as well as the general public, to understand how the virus is spreading.

“It’s hugely problematic,” said Dr. Karen Maddox, a public health researcher at Washington University in St. Louis. “The only way that we know where things are going up and where things are going down and where we need to be putting resources and where we need to be planning is because of those data.”

The White House instructed hospitals to report data to the Department of Health and Human Services through a new system created by a Pennsylvania-based company, TeleTracking, instead of to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The directive came as a surprise to hospitals, according to Kansas Hospital Association spokesperson Cindy Samuelson.

“From our perspective, these changes are big,” Samuelson said. “We only found out Tuesday, and we had to update the data by Wednesday night — so, less than 48 hours.”

The Missouri Hospital Association currently does not have access to the new HHS system, according to Dillon. He said the new system is also significantly different from the CDC system.

“The new datasets for reporting are not identical and in several cases are ill-defined,” Dillon said. “That has complicated hospitals’ efforts.”

In the wake of the announcement, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services posted a notice on its website this week that the daily and weekly updates on hospitals, including the numbers of people hospitalized and the availability of standard hospital beds, ICU beds and ventilators, would be temporarily halted.

“Missouri Hospital Association (MHA) and the State of Missouri will be unable to access critical hospitalization data during the transition. While we are working to collect interim data, situational awareness will be limited,” the notice on the department’s website says.

Dillon said the hospital association hopes to have “within a few days or weeks” hospital and coronavirus data that had been available through the CDC.

“However, in the short term, we’ll be very much in the dark,” Dillon said.

The hospital association will create an alternative reporting system for hospitals, according to Dillon, and plans to continue producing weekly reports, despite the uncertainty about data.

The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services did not respond to inquiries regarding the data.

Kansas health officials are still able to access hospital and coronavirus data through the CDC and TeleTracking, according to Kansas Department of Health and Environment spokesperson Kristi Zears.

However, Kansas Hospital Association spokesperson Samuelson said the Kansas hospital data may be delayed if it is incomplete.

“If we’re not able to get a bulk of our members converted and uploading, I’m not sure we want to show it because then it will look like things have gotten a lot better,” Samuelson said.

The most recent data shows that as of July 12, 875 Missourians were hospitalized with Covid-19, among the highest reported numbers since an early May peak of 984. Kansas’ most recent data shows 1,393 people have been hospitalized with the disease.

The Trump administration said the reporting change was needed due to reporting delays and other problems with the CDC.

But the move has been widely criticized for being disruptive, especially as Covid-19 infection numbers reach new highs and hospitals in some areas of the country are reaching capacity.

“By now, we should have a foolproof, streamlined reporting system for Covid,” Maddox said. “And this change — midstream — is not going to do anything to help our ability to fight the disease.”

This story is part of a reporting partnership that includes KCUR, NPR and Kaiser Health News. 

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Christy McLaughlin is running for the GOP nomination to replace the retiring Francis Rooney. She’s also an Ave Maria grad and apparently filed a 114-page complaint (gavel bang TaxProf) against FIU for allegedly expelling her for supporting Donald Trump.

McLaughlin filed for the crowded primary field back in March as a 24-year-old — she would reach the constitutional age requirement by the time she would hypothetically take office — campaigning on the Handsmaid’s Tale platform of banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest.

McLaughlin claims that the law school run at the time by Alex Acosta — a Trump administration official — had it in for her politically. She also names Acosta in the suit, alleging that he turned a blind eye to her political harassment and to professors having “inappropriate sexual relations with Plaintiff’s classmates” which certainly tracks his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case.

McLaughlin accuses a professor who gave her a C+ of calling her “immoral” for supporting Trump, a professor who gave her a D for blocking her lawyer from attending her readmission hearing, a professor who gave her a B- of “promoting socialism,” and a C- and C from vaguely anti-Trump professors. The most striking anecdote is about a professor who gave her a D of “political indoctrination”:

In October 2017, during regular class time, Prof. Baker performed a skit demeaning Trump supporters. Prof. Baker entered the classroom wearing a “MAGA” hat. Prof. Baker spoke in a manner that mocked mentally challenged persons with a southern twang. Prof. Baker stated that he was the average Trump voter. Prof. Baker stated “My heroes are Napoleon Bonaparte, Forrest Gump and Donald J. Trump.” Prof. Baker carried on for several minutes making jokes and mocking Trump supporters as mentally challenged fascists.

The only thing unfair in that account is that Trump supporters would never have a dirty Frenchman as hero.

She claims in all of these cases the professors went in and messed with her grades in violation of blind grading policies and this led to her being tagged with academic expulsion based on deficient grades. This seems like a hell of a lot of effort to go to just to keep one conservative from entering the world with an FIU degree. The bulk of the complaint challenges the procedures employed in her dismissal as inadequate.

This should make for an interesting Answer.

In the meantime, today is primary day in Florida! Ave Maria has a 36 percent employment score for 2019 grads. So we’ll give McLaughlin a 1 in 3 chance of prevailing.

Congressional candidate claims law school expelled her for supporting President Trump [NBC 2]

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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.

It’s mid-July and we still have no idea what the fall semester will look like. Betsy DeVos is talking all crazy and educators at every level are trying to figure out exactly how they’re supposed to teach when COVID-19 is far from under control here in America.

Despite the uncertainty swirling around, law schools will, in some form, be around in the fall. And as schools try to figure out what that will look like, one top law school wants to make it very clear they’re not about to give out refunds just because COVID is screwing up their normal plans.

An Above the Law tipster sent in the following disclaimer from Duke University School of Law. It states in no uncertain terms, that while yes, the University and Law School are doing everything to keep students safe and keep the semester going, no, you can not expect any tuition discount as a result.

Not an entirely surprising stance given that Harvard Law is currently defending itself against a lawsuit arguing its tuition for an online semester is overpriced. Let’s just hope they (and every other law school out there) use the tuition they collect to make online learning as productive as possible, because COVID doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere any time soon.

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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).

The Svengali of Westport, Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio, teaches that we must hold people accountable and not let them off the hook. That we should not feel bad about mistakes but love them, getting over “blame” and “credit” and getting on with “accurate” and “inaccurate,” while at the same time recognizing that the responsible party is the person who bears the consequences of what is done. That’s unfortunate, because no lesser a personage than some guy at the Securities and Exchange Commission says that Bridgewater’s 20.6% drop this year is totally not its fault.

“No worries! How can I help you?” I say with intentional enthusiasm, trying to hide my real thoughts and their sarcastic tone: You have no idea how much I wanted to drop everything on my Sunday morning to take care of your fake emergency!

Every lawyer, and definitely every in-house lawyer, has had this experience at least once!

Educating your clients about the definition of “emergency” is a solid investment. Personally, I like starting with Black’s Law Dictionary. An emergency has at least one of the following: “involves injury, loss of life, damage to the property, or catastrophic interference with the normal activities.” I can work from there to tailor our own definition to our own circumstances.

Then comes the hard part — stay strong. Do not carve out exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions. Resist the urge! If you give in, I promise you’ll end up moonlighting as a workplace firefighter on your nights and weekends! And believe me, once you create an “emergency” slippery slope, you’ll see fires all over the place.

But we will never be able to avoid fake emergencies altogether, as, at the end of the day, it is ultimately a judgment call. Besides, defining a real one is a lifelong skill to work on. It’s equally important to work on how to respond to a fake emergency. Sort of like “fake crisis management” skills.

To perfect my own fake emergency response skills, I crowdsourced “How do you respond, if at all, to that fake emergency call on Sunday morning?” Here is what I learned from the masters.

There’s Always Monday Morning

One thing is certain, and that’s that Monday always follows Sunday. Jamie Szal, Maine state and local tax attorney at Brann & Isaacson, said, “I respond by acknowledging the email, and indicate I will address their questions first thing Monday morning.”

She has a point. It makes a lot of sense to ask yourself whether the “emergency” can wait until Monday to be properly addressed during normal business hours. And whoever is raising the “emergency” will appreciate having their concern acknowledged before then.

Flexibility And Knowing Your Clients Is Key

Flexibility and knowing your clients will determine how you draw boundaries. (Just don’t forget to draw boundaries!) Claire E. Parsons, partner and owner at Adams, Stepner, Woltermann & Dusing, said, “Since my clients are government officials, it usually is an emergency if they contact me on a Sunday. However, they usually email or text first to check availability and give me a heads up. I think that’s a good way to go about it. But, if I can suggest a solution that doesn’t require a lot of activity on the weekend, I definitely do that.”

She explained, “Part of the satisfaction I get with my job is that my work enables officials to do important work for the community. That is especially true for emergency situations. It’s not always the most convenient but it is meaningful, and my job allows enough flexibility during the workweek that I can bend sometimes after hours.”

Preemptively Defining Emergency Is Key

Clarity about what constitutes an emergency is paramount. Marc Kaufman, partner at Rimon Law, said, “Sunday morning is my mental recovery so I can clear my head to perform best for my clients in the coming week. Would really have to be an emergency for me to respond on Sunday afternoon!”

He continued, “There are some ’emergencies’ that arise. For example, the client may realize that the last day due date has come up for a filing at the USPTO. However, if we are managing the case, we would have been sending the client reminders of this in advance. Another example is a due diligence issue that arises in the context of M&A. Sometimes issues arise at the last minute that need to be addressed before closing. Both of these instances are rare.”

Some people have more strict definitions. As Lisa Borgeson, senior director at NetApp, said, “You could always try the definition I used with my kids — ‘unless you’re bleeding from an artery, don’t bother me right now with X, Y, Z.’”

Likewise, Jenny Lynn (Cox) Sheridan, founder of JL Sheridan Law, explained, “Reminds me of what I told my teenage daughters was an emergency and they could call me at work: 1) flood or fire; 2) someone trying to break into a house; or 3) someone in house bleeding or unconscious. Fortunately, never had a true emergency.”

Triaging competing crises (that is, that compete with each other and your time and life generally) is one of the most difficult parts of practicing law, especially in-house. It’s also highly subjective, even though it doesn’t always feel that way. There are a million reasons that your clients identify something as an emergency that you might see as a Monday morning to-do item.

The important thing is to be on the same page. Set guidelines from the start, and don’t be afraid to communicate. After all, the only person who gets to define what an emergency is — and what takes up your precious time — is you.

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Olga V. Mack is the CEO of Parley Pro, a next-generation contract management company that has pioneered online negotiation technology. Olga embraces legal innovation and had dedicated her career to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive than before by embracing technology. Olga is also an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor, and entrepreneur. She founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to participate on corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. She authored Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board Seat and Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security. You can follow Olga on Twitter @olgavmack.