Category: News Feeds

Last month, former Biglaw partner Kym Cushing was suspended from the practice of law by the Supreme Court of Nevada for nine months. The court’s suspension comes after serious concerns about Cushing’s addiction issues and honesty.

According to the court’s opinion, Cushing, who worked at Wilson Elser Moskowitz Edelman & Dicker from 2005 to 2018, wrote three checks to himself from the firm’s operating account. When confronted about the checks, Cushing first told the firm they were to reimburse expert witness outlays, naming a friend (and pro bono client) as the expert. However, Cushing later told the firm the checks were to cover gambling losses. As a result, the firm asked him to resign.

After being forced out at Wilson Elser, he rebounded with a position at Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith. However, during the lateral move, Cushing failed to disclose why he left his old firm. This was rectified by Wilson Elser, who reportedly shared with Lewis Brisbois the circumstances surrounding Cushing’s departure. Cushing no longer works at Lewis Brisbois.

Cushing later rescinded his gambling losses explanation for his behavior, saying in a demand letter to the law firm seeking $5 million in compensation for alleged age and disability discrimination and retaliation that he claimed a gambling problem to save his job. He now claims he actually wrote the checks in a “drunken stupor.” Additionally, he claimed he turned to alcohol to deal with the stress of the “go-to attorney” for difficult cases.

In 2018, Cushing’s behavior was first brought to the Supreme Court of Nevada. Then Cushing agreed to treatment with the Nevada Lawyers Assistance Program to avoid suspension. Unfortunately, Cushing did not follow through with the program and lied about his reasons for doing so.

All of which brings us to the instant case. As reported by Bloomberg Law, the court felt this history was enough to warrant the nine-month suspension:

“Substantial evidence” supports the disciplinary panel’s findings that Cushing’s mental state was “intentional and that his misconduct harmed the public and the legal profession and potentially harmed his pro bono client,” the court said in determining the sanction. It conceded, however, that there were mitigating factors including his emotional problems and lack of prior discipline.

Cushing, who says he is “extremely disappointed” with the decision, can apply for reinstatement, provided he completes the Nevada Lawyers Assistance Program, an anger management program, and an additional 10 hours of CLE credits, five hours of which must be on the subject of substance abuse.

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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).

If you were wondering whether someone could go Wilbur Ross one better and just start outright rooting for Chinese people to die, wonder no more.

“We should take our supplies and go back home. Let the chinese virus rampage through the ranks of the GT and the rest of the communist party,” the founder and chief investment officer of Dallas-based Hayman Capital Management wrote.

In fairness to Kyle Bass, he was obviously speaking out of anger: He was really, really hoping that President Trump’s trade deal with China would fall apart, not because he’s a particular fan of the president, but because he’s convinced that any deal with the Chinese is a lifeline keeping their economy afloat, and also one that they will inevitably flout. Plus, you could argue that the editor of the Chinese Communist Party’s Global Times started it by complaining about the U.S. government’s “belated” aid for the coronavirus outbreak in western China that has killed more than 800 people and countless vacation plans.

I would like to show my granddaughters that the equal citizenship stature of men and women is a fundamental human right. The union will be more perfect when that simple statement — that men and women are persons of equal citizenship stature — is part of our fundamental instrument of government. So even if the argument is it’s largely symbolic, it is a very important symbol.

— Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in comments given about the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) during a recent appearance at Georgetown Law. Ginsburg said that rather than try to get the 1970s version of the proposed amendment made part of the Constitution, she’d like to “see a new beginning” and “start over.” She continued, “There’s too much controversy about late comers. Plus, a number of states have withdrawn their ratification. So if you count a latecomer on the plus side, how can you disregard states that said we’ve changed our minds?”

(Thirty-eight states were needed to ratify the ERA, which was originally sent to states in 1972 with a seven-year deadline for ratification. That deadline was later extended to 1982, but not enough states followed through in time. Nevada (2017), Illinois (2018), and Virginia (2020) recently ratified the ERA, with Virginia becoming the last state needed for ratification. The Justice Department refused to accept the state’s approval, stating it came decades too late (not to mention the fact that five other states have moved to rescind their ratifications), and litigation has commenced.)

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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.

When traveling, I cannot escape the study of trusts and estates and how its tenets pervade every culture’s art and economics. For example, in Paris, I had to visit Dante and Virgil, a painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, that depicts the drama surrounding the creation of a counterfeit last will and testament. In Italy, I reveled at the Synagogue of Florence whose magnificent building was funded by an estate as noted under a last will and testament, a copy of which is on display. More locally a jaunt to Miami provided its own study of the famed Fontainebleau Hotel and its family litigation.

Traveling to Switzerland is sensory overload in multiple ways. Its natural beauty and  picture-perfect scenery are indisputable. As a trusts and estates attorney, I find the location enticing because of its banking history and continuing debates as to whether trusts, recognized in Switzerland as a valid legal form since the Hague Trusts Convention, should also be included within the Swiss domestic legal framework.

On my recent trip to Switzerland, another  matter, concerning to all individuals, not just trusts and estates attorneys,  arose as I learned on a train from Luzerne to Interlaken that Holocaust survivor, Greta Beer, had passed away at the age of 98. Beer, a Jew born in Czerowitz, Romania, was known for her continued search and fight for her father’s Swiss bank accounts which, in turn, led to Switzerland’s payment of more than $1 billion to Holocaust victims and families.

Beer’s father, Siegfried Deligdisch, was a wealthy textile manufacturer. He deposited monies in Swiss bank accounts because of the banking secrecy laws in order to protect the funds from the Nazis. He died in 1940 without revealing the name of the Swiss banking institution or any associated numbers. Greta Beer spent World War II, first hiding in the Carpathians with her mother, then fleeing to Hungary and, finally, in a facility for dispatched individuals in Vienna, where she married her husband, Simon Beer.  She came to the United States via Italy in 1951 as a stateless refugee. In the 1970s she returned with her mother to Switzerland, to try to find the monies her father has deposited decades before. She was faced, however, with rejection by the Swiss banking system which refused to assist her in her search or pay her any of the monies.

In the 1990s, an independent commission was launched to investigate Swiss banking practice during this time. Among many items, the  commission identified 50,000 bank accounts held by Holocaust victims, when the Swiss had claimed fewer than 1,000 were in existence. At this time, the Swiss government also asked for an investigation into Swiss actions during World War II.

In 1996, Beer testified before Congress about her experiences in trying to collect her father’s moneys and the  Swiss banks’ actions in response. As a result of her involvement, a $1.25 billion settlement was reached as a result of a class-action suit brought against the Swiss banks.

Although Beer was never able to identify her father’s accounts, in 2002 when distributions from the suit commenced, the first check of $100,000 went to Beer in recognition of her services and efforts to recover the monies for the Holocaust victims.

Surely Greta Beer has left a legacy larger than numbers. Her efforts to assist all Holocaust survivors, following the war, will be remembered as that which she helped to recover will be reinvested for many years to come. This is the kind of legacy that trusts and estates attorneys wish for all of their clients.

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Cori A. Robinson is a solo practitioner having founded Cori A. Robinson PLLC, a New York and New Jersey law firm, in 2017. For more than a decade Cori has focused her law practice on trusts and estates and elder law including estate and Medicaid planning, probate and administration, estate litigation, and guardianships. She can be reached at cori@robinsonestatelaw.com. 

Two years ago, a working group at Airbus called ContractInnovators began investigating how they could design better contracts. As a use case, they set about redesigning a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA).

The goal of the group was not to create a legal document that could extract more concessions from business partners or better protect Airbus in case of litigation.

Rather, the goal was to create a contract people could understand, enabling faster onboarding for vendors.

It’s often taken for granted that contracts are impossible for a layperson to decipher. Research from the International Association for Contract & Commercial Management (IACCM) shows that 88 percent of contract users find contracts “difficult or impossible to understand.” That’s what lawyers are for, right?

The Airbus group, led by Ines Curtius, Head of Contract Governance, Space Systems, refused to accept this status quo. With the world of business digitizing and accelerating, Curtius and her cohort recognized that contracting had to keep up.

“We needed to be faster and more agile,” Ines said during a recent webinar, hosted by IACCM and Icertis.

Ines’s team started from the ground up on what a contract could look like.

What they came up with was an NDA that used far fewer words and employed visual representations to convey the meaning of the document. The information on the business process was captured in a single page, and its “readability,” as measured by the Flesch Readability Score, rose from 22 to 51.

Ines still recalls the reaction she got when she first showed the new NDA to an Airbus supplier: a smile.

“Have you ever encountered your contractual partner smiling going through your contractual draft?” Ines asks. “This is showing that they trust you. It is a trust-based business you are building up.”

Visual Contracting: Changing Perspectives on Contracts

In using visual representations within a legal document, Airbus is an early adopter of what will be a growing trend in the years to come: visual contracting.

Broadly speaking, visual contracting is the use of design thinking and technology in combination with diagrams, illustrations, flow charts, hierarchies and other data-visualization tools to express contractual terms, relationships and concepts.

In one of the best-known examples of visual contracting, Royal Dutch Shell included illustrations in a standard contract to express when risk and title of oil are transferred during a delivery. Rather than a sea of dense legalese describing the point of transfer, four simple illustrations explain it.

Who needs a lawyer for that?

Visual Contracting Is More Than Just Cool Pictures

The innovation and artistry around visual contracting are fascinating. But what’s really exciting about the movement is the philosophical shift that it represents.

When a company invests in visual contracting, it’s because they want their contracts to be more than just enforcement tools that are defensible in a court of law. Instead, they want their contracts to convey value between parties. It adds expression and communication to the contracting process.

Visual contracting isn’t just confined to illustration. Visual contracting can be scaled across an entire body of contracts to understand contractual terms and relationships, better leveraging design thinking and technology under the digital transformation program of organizations.

For example, a company can use flow charts to understand how a supplier relationship impacts their ability to deliver a project to a customer. Or perhaps populate a map of where business is being done based on contract metadata.  There are future applications of deep learning technology like artificial intelligence as well, to extract contract information with respect to metadata and text out of such graphical illustrated visual contracts.

This is a mindset shift whose time has come. Contracts contain a vast wealth of data about a company’s risks and opportunities. Visual contracting allows these risks and opportunities to be understood intuitively by business users. Doing so unlocks incredible value from what had long been a store of hardly decipherable legal text.

The Nuts and Bolts of Visual Contracting

So how does a company go about implementing visual contracting?

Some tools can help you get started. IACCM has created a wonderful library of contract designs that can inspire teams to think about how they can visually represent their contracts. For example, check out their “Swim Lanes” design.

Creating these contracts may also require the help of a designer to bring visual concepts to life.

If your company is interested in scaling visual contracting across a body of contracts, you will need the help of technology.

Enterprise contract management software pools a company’s contracts and contract data into a single repository, where they can be managed and analyzed holistically. From here, visual representations of contract relationships and processes can be built.

Icertis’s VisualizeAI application, built on top of the Icertis Contract Management (ICM) platform, enables users to quickly find and load a large volume of contract data, navigate relationships and easily discover patterns.

For example, let’s say a supply chain manager wanted to see all the contracts associated with a certain supplier. With VisualizeAI, she can spin up a flow chart that shows all of the company’s contractual relationships with the supplier for intuitive insights into that piece of the supply chain. 

She can then take it a step further and display contracts that are dependent on that supplier delivering the goods. Suddenly the contracts are becoming a looking glass into the company’s entire value chain!

Just as with Airbus’s illustrated NDA, VizualizeAI allows companies to transform their contracts into stores of data that convey data.

When contracts and contract information are easy to understand, commerce accelerates, risk is reduced and commercial relationships become more valuable.

This is the power of visualization.

To learn more, view this on-demand webinar: Cut Through the Noise With Visual Contracting.

The Citi Private Bank Law Firm Group just put out a summary of their 2019 year-end report and it’s no surprise to those of us following the quarterly reports throughout the year.

Revenue was up!

That’s probably where the firms would like you to stop reading the report. But you don’t even have to look deeply into the report to hear the ominous chords they play whenever someone on Chopped says, “I think I’ll just make this into a bread pudding.”

Billing rate growth was the main driver of revenue growth, given modest demand growth, a longer collection cycle and a modest decline in accrual realization

Revenue is up because clients are still willing to pay more. I guess it’s more fair to say “pay more eventually” given the collection issues. Folks, I’ve been writing this article for years now and it feels like the elasticity of client demand is reaching that point where Stretch Armstrong actually breaks. Clients are already dragging out collections and imposing increasingly stupid rules to duck their bills, and you’ve got to wonder just how long this goes until the steep discounts they’re already demanding undermine the system.

The report also notes that equity partnership levels are holding steady while headcount is rising. These new lawyers have resulted in everyone working a little bit less which in a Dickensian sense is a sign that the firms have grown unnecessarily but in a human sense means people are vaguely remembering the names of their children. Leverage is leverage, but associates aren’t cheap — that’s the biggest bump in expense.

With reports already streaming in of firms docking attorneys back whole class years on pay, firms may already be gaming the system to get more for less. But this too becomes unsustainable at a certain point. If there’s a hiccup in the economy — and law firm leaders are pretty sure there’s about to be — things could get wild. Mergers, new tiers of associate pay, dissolutions… it’s all on the table.

Don’t worry, profits per equity partner were up on the year.

Earlier: In-House Counsel Make Increasingly Arcane Billing Demands And It’s Costing Firms Money
Stealth Layoffs And Shortchanging Associates
Law Firm Leaders Think It’s About Time To Completely Freak Out

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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 an easy mistake to make. Who could blame the Justice Department for failing to guess that a group called Hookers for Jesus might use taxpayer dollars in ways that violate the First Amendment and fail to adhere to accepted treatment standards? Although, to be fair, referring to human trafficking victims as “Hookers” might have tipped them off. Plus, there’s the whole FOR JESUS part.

Reuters reports that the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees local 2830, the DOJ employees union, filed a whistleblower complaint with the Department’s Inspector General about possible corruption in the allocation of $77 million of anti-human trafficking grants.

According to a September 12 memo seen by Reuters, Chicanos Por La Causa, which opposes Trump’s immigration policies, and Catholic Charities in Palm Beach, whose leader has been active in Democratic politics, were originally on the Office of Justice Programs (OJP) list of Tier 1 grantees. But later that month, both were bumped in favor of less-qualified, Tier 2 grantees more closely linked to the GOP.

For instance, The Lincoln Tubman Foundation of South Carolina was founded less than two years ago by Brooke Burris, the daughter of a prominent Republican donor. It’s currently run out of a private home and has almost no record of helping victims of human trafficking. What it does have, though, is the support of South Carolina’s Tim Scott, a prominent backer of Donald Trump. In September, Sen. Scott wrote a letter to OJP demanding a “prompt review” of the Foundation’s application, and just days later the organization received $549,345 of funding. Amazing!

And then there’s Hookers for Jesus, which received $530,190.  At least through 2018, the organization mandated attendance at religious services for residents of its safe house and banned “secular magazines with articles, pictures, etc. that portray worldly views/advice on living, sex, clothing, makeup tips.” Because taking the Cosmo survey causes human trafficking?

The state of Nevada funded the organization in 2017, but subsequently declined to renew the grant after discovering that the Hookers for Jesus program manual required church attendance, called homosexuality immoral, and described recreational drug use as “witchcraft.”

One Nevada grant reviewer in 2018 questioned whether Hookers for Jesus treated victims like “prisoners,” while another observed the program seemed too controlling and expressed concern it forced victims to attend Bible study, the grant review documents show.

“We felt their policies were not victim-focused or evidence based,” said Kelsey McCann-Navarro, whose office in Nevada’s Division of Child and Family Services decided not to renew the funding.

OJP head Katharine Sullivan, who approved the grantee substitutions, concedes that mandatory church attendance is perhaps a bad thing, saying, “This might be something that may be appropriate for our civil rights department to look at.” (It might!) But she denies any responsibility for determining whether grantees use taxpayer dollars effectively or even legally, because “Those are not facts or things that we would know ahead of time.”

Ms. Sullivan insists that the Tier 1 grantees were bumped simply to “distribute funding across as many states as possible,” adding later, “Our funding decisions are based on a merit-based review system.” Which seems rather at odds with bumping Tier 1 grant applicants in favor of Tier 2 candidates. But perhaps we are confused from a lifetime of witchcraft and demonic makeup tips.

Exclusive: Justice Department anti-human trafficking grants prompt whistleblower complaint [Reuters]

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

In Arizona last week, a federal court was responsible for what is now an increasingly rare occurrence: it issued an opinion in a case involving religious liberty that both liberal- and conservative-minded legal voices praised. Using the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), the court in Arizona reversed the convictions of four defendants who were leaving food and water in one of the harshest environments in the world so as to save the lives of those who cross our border illegally. For reasons that I suspect are rather obvious, progressive voices have celebrated this decision and another similar case involving a single defendant named Scott Warren. However, to understand conservative support we have to get into some necessary background regarding the RFRA statute.

To understand RFRA one must begin with the Supreme Court Case of Employment Division v. Smith 494 U.S. 872 (1990). In Smith, the Court upheld the denial of state unemployment benefits because both citizens were fired for ingesting the illegal drug peyote during one of their Native American religious rituals. The social/legal backlash to this decision was profound, with liberal-minded legal voices continuing to criticize the decision a decade later. As a direct consequence to the Smith opinion, a liberal-led coalition in Congress passed RFRA as a means to strengthen religious liberty protection by establishing the following standard: “Government may substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person — (1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and (2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.” Perhaps because RFRA began as a political response to a perceived erroneous legal precedent, application of the statute in practice rather quickly devolved into a partisan tool.

Examination of the historical application of the RFRA statute reveals a legal trend that anyone who studies religious liberty cases already knew. Which is, that for the past several decades the single greatest factor for determining whether the federal judiciary will recognize a defendants RFRA claim (or religious liberty claim in general), is if you are a conservative Christian. If you are not a conservative Christian, and even if the case presents a facial preference for Christianity to the exclusion of literally every other religion, you are often SOL when it comes to most of the federal judiciary.

The Arizona case therefore represents a single, but important, refutation of this historical application. The conservative evangelical voices who have praised the Arizona decision offer an additional hope that the bias application of the past can begin to be reversed. But the Arizona case also presents a dreadfully important question that, until answered, prevents unity from ever being achieved behind this laudable expansion of civil liberty: Would a nonbeliever’s conviction for committing the same act be upheld under RFRA’s standard?

I literally hate to say this, because one is always assumed to be arrogant but if the only factor involved here was the law, this would not be difficult to answer. In McCreary County v. ACLU 545 U.S. 844 (2005) the Supreme Court not only recognized that the First Amendment’s religious clauses “protect adherents of all religions, as well as those who believe in no religion at all,” more importantly when it comes to answering the RFRA question, the McCreary opinion made clear the Court views granting a preference for “religion over irreligion” as a violation of the Free Exercise Clause. These principles discussed in the McCreary decision were merely echoing what James Madison declared over two centuries ago when establishing free conscience liberty which is that government “subjecting some to peculiar burdens” violates the same principles of equality as government “granting to others peculiar exemptions.” Here with RFRA, we have Congress passing a law that grants the religious exclusive exemption from criminal law while continuing to burden nonbelievers (who, despite what many religious people might think also maintain deeply personal codes of ethics). With these facts it becomes difficult to argue, again from a legal perspective, that an RFRA which excludes nonbeliever convictions is not a pretty clear violation of equality under the law.

Now, here is the part where I also tell you that maintaining a preference for religion, Christianity in particular, is precisely what many are after. In fact, if litigated today, I believe extending RFRA to nonbelievers would be denied in some U.S. federal circuits.

Why? Well, it is important to keep in mind that we are operating in an environment where our current Attorney General will declare to our nation’s law students that unless you are Christian or a Jew, you are not morally fit to be a citizen of the United States. In fact, William Barr and his predecessor Jefferson Beauregard Sessions regularly describe nonbelievers as a direct threat, to religion and our country, that must be destroyed. It is also important to note that evangelical Christians universally celebrate these descriptions or have since refused to speak up against them. In such an environment, is it any sort of surprise that we are witnessing multiple federal circuits designate nonbelievers to second-class status, even going so far as to prevent them from addressing their own legislatures?

Unification behind our civil liberties requires equality under the law. Providing exemptions to criminal conviction based entirely on whether you practice religion or not is about as clear-cut a legal case of religious inequality as you’ll get. The arguably real, but certainly terrifying question, I suppose, is if the law even matters here anymore.

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Tyler Broker’s work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review, the Albany Law Review, and is forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review. Feel free to email him or follow him on Twitter to discuss his column.

Working at Above the Law, you hear about a lot of questionable behavior from people with J.D.s. But rarely do I have as vocal a reaction as I did when I read what Allegheny County, Pennsylvania Common Pleas Judge Mark Tranquilli allegedly called a juror. Maybe it was the shock of hearing the quiet (racist) part out loud, or some lingering old-fashioned notion that judges are supposed to have decorum, but the truth is, the story has me shook.

According to written complaints filed by both Assistant District Attorney Ted Dutkowski and defense lawyer Joe Otte, who were both reportedly deeply disturbed by the incident, Tranquilli repeatedly called a juror “Aunt Jemima” in his chambers — since apparently his exposure to black people has never gone deeper than instant rice and syrup. The comments, made after the acquittal of a defendant on drug charges, pinned the “blame” for the verdict on the ADA for allowing a black woman on the jury. As CBS Pittsburgh reports:

In chambers, Tranquilli questioned the assistant DA about why he had not moved to strike or block a black woman juror during jury selection weeks before.

“You weren’t out of strikes when you decided to put Aunt Jemima on the jury,” Tranquilli is alleged to say.

The document alleges Tranquilli said of the woman who had her hair in a headdress, “As soon as she sat down, she crossed her arms and looked like this.”

Dutokwski said the judge then crossed his arms and scowled, then continued: “You know darn well that when she goes home to her baby daddy, he’s probably slinging heroin too.”

As a result of these allegations of racism, Tranquilli was reassigned to administrative tasks. At least there, exposure to his alleged racism will be limited.

While that is clearly a step in the right direction, the Pittsburgh chapter of the NAACP wants more severe consequences:

“We urge the Judicial Conduct Board to conduct a full, transparent, and through investigation into Tranquilli, and impose appropriate sanctions, including, but not limited to his suspension and removal from the bench,” reads a statement from Pittsburgh’s NAACP. “Furthermore, we call for the Pennsylvania Attorney General to review Tranquilli’s record as an assistant district attorney for potential racially motivated misconduct.”

The statement went on to note that faith in the administration of justice is eroded when mouthpieces for racist beliefs sit in judgment of others:

“Justice has never been meted out equally for African Americans in this country, yet there is a long standing prohibition on excluding jurors based on race,” reads Pittsburgh’s NAACP statement. “Tranquilli openly yearned for a time before that prohibition was in effect, where the color of a juror’s skin was grounds for exclusion. There can be no fair administration of justice, when judges who are to be held to the highest of ethical standards display racist views.”

Tranquilli was elected to the bench in 2013 on a “tough on crime” platform.

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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).

Imagine that your small law school is part of an undergraduate university that’s steeped in tradition, having been in business for more than 100 years. Things seem to be chugging along smoothly. At about $29,250 a year, your tuition is stunningly low, and your bar exam pass rates are equally stunning. You’re one of just a handful of law schools to have a perfect ultimate bar pass rate. Your students are happy as can be, but you suddenly receive news that could shatter their dreams of becoming lawyers. The undergraduate university has decided to cease operations, effective at the end of the current semester.

What on earth do you do?

This is exactly what’s going on at Concordia University School of Law, where about 150 students were recently notified that their law school may be shuttering due to their undergraduate university’s financial issues and a “challenging and changing educational landscape.” But not so fast, because Interim Dean Latonia Haney Keith says she’s hard at work to find a parent school that will allow Concordia Law to stay open. The Idaho Press has more information:

“This process is underway, and we are currently engaged in active conversations with multiple institutions interested in an affiliation with the law school. We will have more details in coming weeks about Concordia Law moving forward.”

…

“We want a parent institution that knows what we’re doing,” Haney Keith said.

Haney Keith said the time frame for partnering with a new institution is before the next academic year.

“We want it before the fall semester,” she said.

Haney Keith says she’s in talks with “multiple” institutions, but didn’t disclose which ones. She’s incredibly optimistic about the situation, and says “the only thing that will change is the ownership of the institution and potentially, a name change.”

If things don’t go as planned, Corcordia — which received full accreditation from the American Bar Association just last year — will begin a teach-out as one of the latest law schools to close its doors since 2017. Best of luck to Concordia as the little law school that could tries to forge a path forward. We think you can!

Portland’s Concordia University closing, leaving future uncertain for Boise law school [KTVB 7]
Concordia University-Portland to close; Boise-based law school looking for new parent institution [Idaho Press]

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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.