Category: News Feeds

We have to remember the racism that John Boalt expressed. But that doesn’t mean we honor him by putting his name on the building.

— Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of Berkeley Law, in comments given about the decision to remove the name of its former namesake, “Boalt Hall,” from the elite law school. Per Berkeley Law lecturer Charles Reichmann, Boalt’s “most significant legacy” was his “advocacy for Chinese exclusion.” Boalt’s name was removed today from the law school.

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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.

This is some truly upsetting horse hockey.

In 2016, a woman appeared in the courtroom of New Jersey Superior Court Judge John Russo Jr. seeking a restraining order against a man she says sexually assaulted her. Russo took this as an invitation to interrogate the woman about what she could have done to prevent the alleged attack. Talk about some victim blaming BS. The details of the exchange are distressing:

According to a transcript of the exchange, when the woman described her encounter with the man, Russo asked her, “Do you know how to stop somebody from having intercourse with you?”

When the woman answered affirmatively and said one method would be to run away, Russo continued, “Close your legs? Call the police? Did you do any of those things?”

What’s even worse, is after the proceeding (where Russo denied the protective order), he continued to joke about it with courtroom staff.

Now a three-judge panel has recommended Russo be removed from office for “severe misconduct” following multiple incidents, including the “close your legs” comment. Some of the other improper conduct the panel found, as reported by the Asbury Park Press:

The panel also found beyond a reasonable doubt that Russo used his position as a judge to attempt to influence the scheduling of a guardianship hearing in Burlington County involving his son, that he failed to recuse himself in a spousal support matter involving a couple he went to high school with, and that he had improper communications with only one of two parties to a paternity matter.

This isn’t the first look into Russo’s conduct. In 2018, the state supreme court’s Advisory Committee on Judicial Conduct held hearings on the same incidents as the panel. Though the Committee found improper behavior, same as the panel, they were split on the punishment, with the majority recommending a three-month suspension, and the minority holding out for a six-month suspension. Despite those recommendations, the state supreme court instituted removal proceedings and Russo was suspended, without pay, pending the outcome of the proceedings. Russo objected to this harsher penalty, which is something the three-judge panel addressed when making their recommendation:

Russo contended no judge has ever been removed from the bench when the Advisory Committee on Judicial Conduct recommended a lesser sanction. The three-judge panel responded that Russo’s testimony “lacked candor, fabricated after-the-fact explanations for events, and displayed a lack of integrity that is unworthy of judicial office.”

The state supreme court has scheduled hearings on the disciplinary recommendation for March 30 and 31.

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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).

It was inevitable we’d wind up here. After months of protesting that there was no quid pro quo! and no firsthand witnesses! and no problem asking a foreign government to investigate corruption!, we have reached our final destination. Republicans are now openly insisting that the president has every right to ask a foreign government to intervene on his behalf, as long as he earnestly believes it’s in America’s best interest that he win reelection.

It was not inevitable, however, that Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz throw his personal legacy on the pyre in service of this inane argument. But he did it anyway, for one last moment in the spotlight.

In response to Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s question — “As a matter of law, does it matter if there was a quid pro quo? Is it true that quid pro quos are often used in foreign policy?” — Dershowitz launched into a rabid defense of unchecked presidential power.

If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment. I quoted President Lincoln, when President Lincoln told General Sherman to let the troops go to Indiana so that they can vote for the Republican party — let’s assume the president was running at that point, and it was in his electoral interest to have these soldiers put at risk the lives of many many other soldiers who would be left without their company, would that be an unlawful quid pro quo? No! Because the president (A) believed it was in the national interest, but (B) he believed that his own election was essential to victory in the Civil War.

Because preserving the Union in wartime is exactly the same as pressuring a dependent foreign nation to gin up a fake scandal about an electoral opponent and announce it publicly.

This morning, the esteemed professor is angrily ranting at the media for “[t]aking advantage of the fact most of their viewers didn’t actually hear the senate Q and A,” saying, “They characterized my argument as if I had said that if a president believes that his reelection was in the national interest, he can do anything. I said nothing like that, as anyone who actually heard what I said can attest.”

Who ya gonna believe, Dersh or your own lyin’ eyes?

Arguing that naked solicitation of bribery or violation of law is the only case in which an impeachment doesn’t require senators to “psychoanalyze a president,” Dershowitz insisted that any effort to determine motives is “dangerous.” Which is a pretty strange position for a guy who spent 45 years explaining the concept of mens rea at the most prestigious university in the country. He went on:

But a complex middle case is: ‘I want to be elected. I think I’m a great president. I think I’m the greatest president there ever was. And if I’m not elected, the national interest will suffer greatly. That cannot be an impeachable offense.

And then he was mercifully gonged off by the Chief Justice before he could expound further on the unitary executive’s exclusive right to determine what’s best for America. But the internet never forgets!

Many commentators today are quoting a passage from Dershowitz’s 2018 book, “The Case Against Impeaching Trump.”

Assume Putin decides to “retake” Alaska, the way he “retook” Crimea. Assume further that a president allows him to do it, because he believed that Russia has a legitimate claim to “its” original territory. That would be terrible, but would it be impeachable? Not under the text of the Constitution.

Incidentally, when the book came out, Dershowitz indignantly insisted that he was not defending Donald Trump’s conduct, he was defending civil liberties, and anyone who said otherwise was a damn, dirty liar.

You are implying in a kind of Mccarthyite way that I am somehow defending Trump and that I am making his case. Shame on you. I am making a civil liberties case. I am not part of the Trump defense team and don’t you dare accuse me of doing that. I am not making a case for anybody.

My how times do change!

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 to our pages.

Yesterday, after getting my kids on the buses for kindergarten and preschool, I went to a Korean tea house for my once-a-month self-care outdoor yoga class. Afterwards, I sent out 23 MothersEsquire emails. Then, I spent a couple hours proofreading a motion for summary judgement for Florida and researching a Kentucky tax law issue. Then my kids came home. … I am a stay-at-home mom and a lawyer. And I am so much more.

I live in Korea with my active-duty military husband and kids. When switching from being a lawyer to a stay-at-home mom, my life drastically changed. There were a lot of changes that I expected –- diaper changes, feedings, and baby snuggles, but there are many unexpected changes to my life.

I suddenly felt super weird spending money on anything but absolute essentials. The loss of a second income made me feel like I had to be extra frugal and didn’t dare think of getting something for myself. In hindsight, I was being a bit ridiculous, and it would have been fine to buy that $30 dress that looked great on me (and had pockets!).

While I am a social person, at work I was always the person thinking, “get out of my office so I can be productive.” When I experienced entire days only talking to a small being, I found myself accosting my poor husband the moment he walked in the door, crushing him with story after story about inane things and parenting articles I read.

Checking email became a waste of time and eventually I stopped, so when I did receive a personal email, it would take a week or two before I noticed. My to-do list became useless. Laundry. Check. Wait, it’s been 5 minutes so there’s more. Run Errands. Check. Wait, now we need velcro for my husband’s uniform. The household part of life never ends for everyone, but when that became the main part of my life, the lack of accomplishment became maddening.

I’ve always had a lot of self-confidence –- too much, perhaps. When I switched to a non-legal job with significantly less pay due to living in Germany, it didn’t faze me. But then, motherhood. It’s all I was. And I wasn’t even very good at it, or so I felt. I couldn’t even get my baby to sleep!

With all those changes, the absolute hardest part of becoming a SAHM, was enduring being treated like I was dumb. “And what do you do?” The question I began dreading most because it followed with the same, awful look of disappointment in me as a human being. Then, they would catch themselves and put on a fake smile and say in a high-pitched voice, “oh, how fun.” No, it is not fun. It is a lot of exhausting work. There are moments that are precious, moments that are joyous beyond description, moments filled with laughter, but hours filled with screams and tantrums and whining.

I was surprised how many working moms would avoid me. Here I was interested in hearing about their life and job, and I could provide help in transporting kids or insight on a project (where I would work for free or cheap if you just treated me like an equal!). But time after time it was made clear that we were not to be allies.

In hindsight, I can admit I overdid the SAHM thing. All parents want the best for their kids, but as a lawyer, I was going to research every little thing related to parenting to guarantee success. All those things they do at daycare with a full staff, I did solo. I had charts galore and a well thought out curriculum involving critical thinking development and art and science and reading and limited screen time and … too dang much.

I was a Stay-at-Home-Mom for five exhausting years with some occasional legal work and am now transitioning into being a part-time lawyer (until my husband is out of the Army, then I will be a real full-time all-in lawyer!). I am proud I did it. But I will never do it again. It was harder than anything I’ve ever done.

Shout out to all the stay-at-home parents and thank you for working so hard! Working parents, please recognize that life on that side of the fence is not easier, the grass is not greener, but we can work together to help each other.

Earlier: Mothers At Law: Achieving Meaningful Success In The Legal Profession

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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

Telemedicine efforts have been cropping up across the world with the goal of bringing specialty care to more underserved regions.

One such example comes from Yaya Mbaoua, CEO of The Mbaoua Group, which has been an integral part of a pilot program to bring telemedicine to Zimbabwe. He will be speaking about his experiences at HIMSS20 in his session “Transforming Africa’s Health Crisis with Telemedicine.”

In Zimbabwe over 65% of the population lives in rural areas. This means that healthcare facilities can be far away, and specialty care even further. Coupling this with the shortage of physicians (currently there are 1.6 doctors per every 10,000 citizens) creates challenges in getting people to the right care.

“Telemedicine program entail getting rural clinics access to specialists. Obviously in those clinics they usually don’t have any resident physician,” Mbaoua said. “The best care you typically have is a traveling nurse who would stop there and provide care. So, I think the premise of the program is to enable patients in those remote villages to be able to be seen by specialists in more advanced facilities.”

The pilot program meant bringing stakeholders from nongovernmental organizations, government agencies and healthcare systems together.

“The challenge was getting all of these government and humanitarian organizations together and establishing clear responsibilities,” Mbaoua said. “So that is number one. The second challenge is really getting a pilot project off the ground, which really … means finding a province in the country that is representive of the health system in Zimbabwe and selecting the participants, the providers, patients and staff involved.”

Getting the infrastructure set up to facilitate such an effort was key, as was education of both rural clinics and specialist physicians alike.

“We came into situations where we were confronted with generational gaps,” he said. “The older generation lacked the confidence in using technology altogether, and it really required hand-holding and spending time with them to get more comfortable and confident in using the systems.”

According to Mbaoua, the Zimbabwe pilot was successful and is expected to lead to an expansion of the effort down the line.

“Telemedicine has a future in Africa. There is really no way around it. I’ve been here for four years now and [when I began] there was a lot of skepticism about telemedicine. But there is growing interest in telemedicine across the continent. There is an understanding now of the value proposition and for good reasons,” he said.

Yaya Mbaoua will be talking about his experience implementing telemedicine programs at the session “Transforming Africa’s Health Crisis with Telemedicine” on Thursday March 12, from 11:30a.m. to 12:30p.m. in room W300. 

Post published in: Featured

What would you do if your long-suffering team finally made it to the Super Bowl? We’re talking about a football team whose one and only Super Bowl title was earned in 1970. We’re talking about a team that hasn’t made it to the Super Bowl in 50 years. We’re talking about the Kansas City Chiefs. What do you do? You file a motion to continue like this one.

Back in October 2019, Denise Kirby, a lawyer in Kansas City, Missouri, told a judge she’d be unable to appear for a trial on February 3, 2020, because she’d be in Miami to watch the Chiefs in the Super Bowl. At the time, the concept seemed a bit far-fetched, even laughable, but Kirby was all in for her team. The trial was scheduled for February 3 nonetheless — come on, the Chiefs never go to the Super Bowl.

Kirby must be clairvoyant, because as luck would have it, the Chiefs are going to the Super Bowl this year. Here’s the continuance motion she recently submitted:

We’ve learned the motion was granted, showing that she can convert in the clutch like Mahomes on third and long. In fact, judges in courthouses across the state are getting in on the continuance action thanks to the Chiefs:

We had the chance to chat with Denise and found out that even though she’s secured a place to stay in Miami, she’s still searching for a ticket to the game. Please help this superfan out with her legal Hail Mary. Go Chiefs!

In a quirky motion to continue a case, KC attorney expresses support for Chiefs [Kansas City Star]

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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.

Managing email is among the most frustrating problems lawyers face. ZERØ, launched in 2018, is a mobile app that uses artificial intelligence to target lawyers’ email woes, automatically capturing billable time spent on email, automatically filing emails to the proper folders in a firm’s document management system, and guarding against inadvertently sending sensitive emails to the wrong recipient.

Today, ZERØ is releasing a new “lite” version of its product, targeted at smaller and mid-sized firms. ZERØ Lite provides virtually the same functionality as the flagship product, except that it lacks the flagship product’s ability to integrate with and file emails into the DMS systems NetDocuments and iManage.

Otherwise, ZERØ Lite is much like the product from which it is derived. It uses AI to help lawyers organize their emails into appropriate Outlook folders, capture time spent interacting with client-related emails from mobile devices, and automatically detect potential wrong recipients before an email goes out.

“Once we started with our flagship product, we started getting a lot of requests from mid-market firms and even larger firms that do not have the DMS platforms we support, but nonetheless wanted the benefits of our product for email mobility,” ZERØ CEO Alex Babin told me in an interview earlier this week.

“Now, attorneys and legal professionals do not have to have a DMS to get the value that ZERØ provides,” he said.

Specifically, ZERØ Lite performs three key functions:

• Email management. ZERØ Lite predictively files emails into corresponding Outlook folders, without the lawyer having to manually drag-and-drop them into the appropriate folders. The app can also prioritize emails by importance or sender.
• Mobile time capture. ZERØ Lite automatically captures the time lawyers spend interacting with client-related emails on a mobile device, creating draft time-entry narratives tied to emails and specific activities.
• Prevents data loss. ZERØ Lite prevents users from sending emails containing sensitive information to potential wrong recipients by warning them before the email goes out.

Babin says that both ZERØ and ZERØ Lite help law firms make more money by capturing time that might otherwise be lost emailing from mobile devices. It also helps firms be more compliant by helping users store emails in the right locations.

Although Babin did not specify the price of the new product, he said it will be lower than for the full product, in part because it does not require set-up of the connection to the firm’s DMS. If a firm purchases the Lite product and later decides to upgrade to the full product, the transition would be smooth, Babin said.

The company has already signed up three firms to use ZERØ Lite, two of which are Canadian firm Cox & Palmer in its Halifax office and Missouri firm Lewis Rice. (Babin declined to identify the third.) For its flagship product, the company recently signed the law firm Holland & Knight as a customer.

Longer term, Babin’s goal is to make ZERØ the standard for mobile email management in the legal profession, not just for time capture and compliance, but as a general email application.

While Apple’s native iPhone email app is currently the most widely used, it is a consumer app not designed for the needs of professionals such as lawyers, he noted.

Babin wants to see ZERØ become the standard mobile email app for legal professionals, with all the attributes professionals would want, including security, compliance and productivity.

In fact, pointing to ZERØ’s integrations with timekeeping tools such as Intapp Time and Aderant iTimekeep, Babin believes the product will become more a platform than a standalone app.

“We’re making it a hub of productivity management,” he said.

Malcolm Gladwell built a career out of making facially unconventional yet ultimately fairly obvious connections and allowing the lowest common denominator of American society dub him a genius for it. Oh, Sesame Street is successful because its content is memorable? Give this guy a unique haircut — more “stickiness” — and declare him a public intellectual with all the guest spots with Bill Simmons that title entails.

The problem is Gladwell’s “expertise,” such as it is, rests on compiling research from actual experts and then spitting it back packaged as some kind of novel revelation. It does not, for example, extend to his observations about the criminal justice system. Speaking at Penn State yesterday — you already see where this is going — Gladwell opined:

And this is the Tipping Point where we all need to come together and admit that blithely recategorizing straightforward stuff doesn’t make someone smart.

There was, in fact, nothing unbalanced or egregious about the prosecutors in the Sandusky case. And that’s saying something, because prosecutors are unbalanced and egregious all the time but they were pretty by the book in this case. Gladwell’s entirely amateur legal reasoning comes from his new book Talking To Strangers where he relitigates the Sandusky case based on a psychologist saying that people generally trust each other and therefore Joe Paterno and Penn State administrators should deserve public sympathy that Sandusky duped them when they trusted his denials.

I’m sure they were inclined to trust the guy they knew… but that wasn’t their job. These weren’t random folks on the street, they were university officials paid handsomely — in Paterno’s case very handsomely — to protect the school. That’s where they owed their duty and that’s why they faced repercussions.

There may be problems with the criminal law, but we’ve gotten this system by and large through decades, if not centuries, of evolution. The burdens placed on the Penn State administration reflect the wisdom of generations of legal professionals. It’s not something to throw out because someone slapped together a dime store attempt at a Brandeis brief based on one psychologist. If anything, the right lesson to take from that psychologist’s work is “people tend to trust folks and that can be dangerous so the law should situate some people with the responsibility to exercise critical judgment.”

Sometimes cutting against conventional wisdom is the sign of a bold thinker. Sometimes it’s the sign of an ill-informed poser collecting speaking fees and book deals. Figuring out where to draw that line is pretty important.

Earlier: Harvard Law School Is Full Of Druggies: A Conversation Between Malcolm Gladwell & Lance Armstrong

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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.

Listen, you’re a busy lawyer. You don’t have time to keep up with the vastness of the internet. Plus, in case you haven’t noticed, there is an impeachment trial going on. That spectacle, presided over by Chief Justice Roberts, is sucking any spare time you might have. But that doesn’t mean some hilarious ish isn’t going down on the interwebs.

Take, for example, the Twitter feed of George Conway. Conway is notable in Biglaw as a litigator at Wachtell who had some conservative-leaning political aspirations. But, as we all know by now, he is also married to counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway. And he doesn’t like his wife’s boss. Like, not at all. Like he’s started a fund, The Lincoln Project, to make sure Trump gets defeated in 2020 and his wife is out of a job.

As interesting as that is to watch from afar, Conway has doubled down on the Trump attacks. Just the other day, he went on a Twitter screed slamming the president for some of the most egregious mistakes he’s made while in office. It’s a shade-filled walk down memory lane; actually, it bypasses shade and gets to full-on dunking on the president. Anyway, it would be an entertaining thread regardless of who put it together, but once you know Conway’s personal connection to the president, well *chef’s kiss*.

Enjoy!

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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).

* Michael Bolton’s lawyer disputes allegations from the National Security Council that Bolton’s new book contains confidential information. [Hill]

* The criminal trial of Michael Avenatti has begun, and the allegations are pretty juicy. [New York Post]

* A Syracuse man has decided to sack his court-appointed attorney and boycott his own trial. Seems like this self-represented defendant may have a fool for a client… [Syracuse.com]

* A lawyer saved a hawk who flew into a building in Brooklyn occupied by the U.S. Attorney’s office. This lawyer kind of gives new meaning to the term “legal eagle.” [New York Daily News]

* Hillary Clinton has so far been able to successfully duck process servers trying to serve her with papers related to the defamation lawsuit filed by Tulsi Gabbard. [New York Post]

* Facebook has agreed to a $550 Million settlement of a facial recognition class action lawsuit. How do we get in on that money?? [USA Today]

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Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.