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

According to data collected by ALM for their 2020 Am Law 200 ranking, which firm saw the biggest fall in the rankings?

Hint: Not including LeClairRyan, which went from 179 to defunct over the last year, this Biglaw firm had the steepest decline, going from 86th in the 2019 ranking to falling out of the top 100 firms in this year’s list.

See the answer on the next page.

Is it ethical to oversee government deals with companies you own stock in? How about going on television to tout the amazing work being done by a business in which you own hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of shares? Asking for Mike Pence’s Chief of Staff Marc Short, who apparently owns up to $1.64 million worth of individual stocks in companies which play a critical role in the nation’s pandemic response.

Companies like Honeywell, which Short talked up on March 20 for its production of N95 respirator masks. NPR reports that Short owns between $50,000 and $100,000 of Honeywell stock.

Or 3M, in which he owns shares valued at up to $150,000. Short discussed the company on a March 18 appearance with Fox News’s Lou Dobbs. In the same interview, Short, who owns between $2,000 and $30,000 of shares in Gilead, the maker of Remdisivir, talked up exciting new developments in therapeutics.

He also holds between $15,000 and $50,000 in Abbott Labs, producer of the COVID test touted as a gamechanger by the president, although it was later found to have a 48 percent false negative rate.

In fact, Short owns stock in quite a few companies that are working with the Trump Administration to coordinate the pandemic response (such as it is), including  Procter & Gamble, Medtronic, Bristol Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson, CVS, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Walmart, and Roche.

Can you guess who’s running the White House’s coronavirus task force?

Surprise, it’s Marc Short!

“Marc Short has followed all applicable ethics laws, and even sought to divest from potential financial conflicts,” Pence spokesman Devin O’Malley insisted to NPR. Which is at least partly true.

Short did seek a Certificate of Divestiture from the Office of Government Ethics which would have allowed him to defer capital gains tax on the sale of assets sold to comply with conflict of interest laws. The Certificate doesn’t waive the conflict — it simply makes it less expensive for government employees to sell it and get into compliance. In fact, application for such a Certificate is tacit admission that such a conflict exists, and applicants must agree to sell the conflicted assets regardless of whether a Certificate is granted.

“Seeking a Certificate of Divestiture is not seeking approval. It’s seeking a tax break,” former Office of Government Ethics head Walter Shaub told NPR. “The non-issuance of a certificate of divestiture does not prevent you from divesting. It prevents you from getting a tax break.”

In fact, Short found his application was denied. (Unlike Jared Kushner, who was able to get a Certificate to defer gains on upwards of $50 million worth of his brother’s real estate tech company. In two tranches, three years apart. Lucky fella!)

“OGE would not grant a certificate of divestiture covering individual equities because, after such a divestment, the stocks held in irrevocable generation-skipping trusts — established for the benefit of his children over which Mr. Short has no independent control — would remain,” O’Malley explained. Which seems … rather carefully worded. Lack of “independent control” could well cover a scenario in which Short and his lawyer are co-trustees over the conflicted assets held for the benefit of his children.

But the particulars don’t really matter, because the law is clear that Short cannot “participate[] personally and substantially as a Government officer or employee, through decision, approval, disapproval, recommendation, the rendering of advice, investigation, or otherwise, in a judicial or other proceeding, application, request for a ruling or other determination, contract, claim, controversy, charge, accusation, arrest, or other particular matter in which, to his knowledge, he, his spouse, minor child, general partner, organization in which he is serving as officer, director, trustee, general partner or employee, or any person or organization with whom he is negotiating or has any arrangement concerning prospective employment, has a financial interest.” (Emphasis added.)

The fact that Short couldn’t get advantageous tax treatment to divest from his conflicts, or that he “worked with legal counsel to implement appropriate recusals,” according to O’Malley is entirely irrelevant. If he didn’t want to sell the stocks to get clear of the conflict, he didn’t have to take the job.

Naturally, Mr. Short will be eager to cooperate with congressional oversight efforts, and Attorney General Barr will immediately open an inquiry into this apparent conflict of interest and possible violation of federal law by a high-ranking administration official.

HAHAHAHAHAHA.

Pence Chief Of Staff Owns Stocks That Could Conflict With Coronavirus Response [NPR]

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

I have to confess that I have been surprised by the ease with which many large law firms transitioned to working from home. In various contexts over the past few months, I have spoken with law firm leaders who described transitions that were fairly seamless and that were pulled off within a relatively short time frame.

But what hasn’t surprised me is the common thread among these firms, which is that they all had in place a strong, technology-driven operational base. It is only common sense that firms that had already invested in leveraging technology would be most prepared for a crisis that made us almost totally dependent on technology.

The latest example of this comes from a case study published today by the workflow technology company BigHand about the global law firm DLA Piper.

Last month, I wrote about another BigHand case study involving the law firm Baker Donelson. In that case, the firm had been in just the early stages of what was planned to be a gradual rollout of BigHand Now, the company’s legal workflow application.

But when the coronavirus crisis hit, and it became clear to the firm that its attorneys and staff would have to work from home, it accelerated the roll-out in order to help minimize disruption to staff workflows.

In this new case study involving DLA Piper, the firm had already implemented the BigHand Now technology in 2018 to all 28 of its U.S. offices. But the firm credits the technology with helping to ease the way for it to completely transition to working from home within 36 hours.

Even though the firm’s administrative and support staff were using the technology to manage the flow of work assignments, not all attorneys were. That meant that when the time came to require everyone to work from home, the firm needed to get the attorneys up to speed.

“When COVID-19 started to become more widespread, we realized the best option to protect the health and safety of our workforce was to move to 100% remote work,” Norma Spearman, chief legal support officer at DLA Piper, says in the case study.

“As part of that transition, we tapped into each of our assistants and had them reach out to each attorney to ensure they had BigHand Now downloaded on to their computers, and walk them through how easy it is to use the tool, before they left the office.”

What BigHand Now does is facilitate management of tasks within a firm. Attorneys can use it to assign work to administrative support staff. For support staff, it serves as a single repository of all pending work and provides the ability to manage and prioritize assignments from within a single interface.

For Sonji Le Blanc, senior manager for legal support services at DLA Piper, it avoids the problem of work getting lost in the email, as well as the problem of managing staff capacities among a dispersed workforce.

“The beauty of BigHand is that anyone with the relevant skills can pick up and complete work in a timely fashion,” Le Blanc says. “However, people are now also communicating and talking to each other in ways they never did before, asking each other how a certain task was done, and asking for help. The distance has made them closer in terms of reaching out to each other.”

You can read the complete case study here.

A lawyer is in hot water after allegedly brandishing a gun over a local store’s social distancing rules.

According to station WCAX, Vermont lawyer Carrie Legus is accused of getting angry over a homemade sign at Butch’s Harvest’ore in Walden, Vermont, that promoted social distancing and safety. After allegedly shaking the sign, a store worker says Legus pulled out a gun:

“The lady walked up and was pulling at the sign and shaking at the sign,” [store owner Hazel] Greaves said.

Greaves was not there when it happened but she said her employee was alone and asked Legus to stop. What Legus allegedly did next shocked Greaves and her employee.

“So then she pulled out her gun and pointed it at her,” Greaves said.

Legus then left the scene and was later taken into custody by police.

Legus was arrested for reckless endangerment and pleaded not guilty. However, that’s not the end of the consequences for Legus’s alleged behavior. The state supreme court has ordered her license be suspended, on an interim basis. Legus has not yet responded to the court’s petition seeking her immediate suspension.

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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).

I kind of felt like I couldn’t sit at home and do nothing when I was fully capable of going and helping out. It’s definitely been draining. Time management has been my best friend.

— Cailly Simspon, a recent graduate of Rutgers Law School in Newark, commenting on what made her decide to go back to nursing during the pandemic while she completed her law degree. Simpson left the nursing field in 2017 to go to law school, but since April, she’s worked four 12-hour night shifts each week at NYU Langone hospital on top of her school work. She hopes to work as a medical malpractice defense attorney.

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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.

The Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP law firm has been sued by Big3 Basketball, LLC for allegedly pretending to act on behalf of the Big3 when it was really serving the interests of the State of Qatar, its royal family and its numerous state-owned enterprises.

In a Complaint filed on May 28 in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York, the Big3 professional basketball league that was created by musician/actor Ice Cube and entertainment executive Jeffrey Kratinetz characterizes Quinn Emanuel’s act as “an egregious betrayal” by serving a much more lucrative client whose interests were directly adverse to Big 3. In fact, Big3 says it has credible information and belief that Qatar and its royal family pay Quinn Emanuel tens of millions of dollars in legal fees on an annual basis, which includes work tied to the upcoming FIFA World Cup scheduled to take place in Doha, Qatar in 2022.

The backstory to the new litigation seems to begin in 2017 when Qatari agents are alleged to have tried to seize control of the Big3 after promising to provide many millions of dollars to the Big3 by way of investments and sponsorships. The Big3 ended up filing a lawsuit in 2018 and claimed that the investors only paid roughly half of the promised funds. The lawsuit included further causes of action for defamation, libel, and interference with contractual relationships.

Another lawsuit was filed, this time by former NBA player Roger Mason Jr., who served as commissioner of the Big3 prior to being fired, against his former employer. The case, which was transferred to arbitration, included claims that Kratinetz made “horrible racist comments.” The Big3 previously held and maintains that it rightfully fired Mason Jr. for being “corrupted by the Qatari agents” who were attempting to seize control of the league. The new lawsuit against Quinn Emanuel also alleges that Mason Jr. helped the Qatari agents with their efforts to create a three-on-three basketball league in competition with the Big3.

Apparently, Quinn Emanuel’s existing attorney-client relationship with Big3’s outside counsel in the Mason Jr. case is what created the issue in the newly filed case against the global firm. The Big3 says that the relationship between its outside counsel, Mark Geragos of Geragos & Geragos, and Quinn Emanuel allowed Quinn Emanuel to infiltrate the Big3’s legal team in order to redirect it from focusing on the Qatari government’s connection to Mason Jr. Additionally, the Big3 claims that Quinn Emanuel gave the Qataris intelligence about what the Big3 already knew about those connections.

The connection was allegedly created when attorney Robert Raskopf of Quinn Emanuel reached out to Geragos and offered to assist in representing the Big3. The Big3 now says that Quinn Emanuel should have known about its “unwaivable conflict of interest” based on its extensive relationship with Qatar when it offered to assist with the case against Mason Jr. The Big3 thus believes that Quinn Emanuel got involved in the Mason Jr. case based on false pretenses and that its main motivation was to steer the focus of the Mason Jr. case away from its Qatari clients as well as gather intelligence about the Big3 for Qatar.

“In effect, Quinn would become a spy for Qatar, a nation known for supporting terrorism and aligned with Iran,” states the Complaint.

Further in the Complaint it is stated that, “The conflict between Big3’s defense and Qatari interests was inescapable and unwaivable. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more egregious conflict of interest. Yet, Quinn persisted in representing Big3.”

Interestingly, the engagement of Quinn Emanuel was effectuated by another lawyer at Geragos’s law firm. The Complaint says that attorney Ben Meiselas of Geragos & Geragos signed the engagement letter, purportedly on Big3’s behalf, identifying himself as “attorney,” yet he lacked authority to engage Quinn Emanuel on behalf of the basketball league.

Also stated in the Complaint is that Quinn Emanuel represented the Big3 for less than five months, but ran up a bill of over $1.3 million, including a bill of roughly $778,000 for one month and that much of that time spent was attached to Quinn Emanuel’s losing attempt to obtain a temporary restraining order against Mason Jr.’s effort to sell an ownership interest in the league to a third party. It appears that the Big3 is bitter about the fees as well as that Quinn Emanuel refused to include details of Mason Jr.’s alleged corruption by Qatar in the filing.

“The amount charged should shock the conscience of any reputable attorney, but Quinn has no conscience when it comes to billing,” states the Complaint.

Quinn Emanuel ultimately withdrew from representing the Big3. The league says that it was then able to secure an admission that Mason Jr. was “unwittingly used” by the Qataris. It blames Quinn Emanuel’s conflict for not garnering that admission during the term of its representation.

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