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Having gone through several episodes of violence, Zimbabwe must have a conversation on how its reparations programme must look like in order to bring healing to victims and survivors.

Realising the importance of this matter, the National Transitional Justice Working Group (NTJWG) is hosting a Policy Dialogue Session on 20 January 2020 in Harare at the Holiday Inn at 5:30pm.

Special Guest at the Dialogue Session will be Ms. Paula Gaviria, a Colombian Expert on Reparations who served as the Director of Colombia’s Reparations Programme in the Office of President Juan Manuel Santos in 2012.  During her tenure, the Colombian reparations programme documented over 6 million victims of the Colombian conflicts and provided reparations to hundreds of thousands of victims in what Harvard University called the most comprehensive and ambitious reparations programme in history.

Ms. Paula Gaviria will bring her expertise to Zimbabwe and share with stakeholders some of the strategies she employed during her tenure in the Government of Colombia.

She will be joined by Dr. Frances Lovemore, the Executive Director of the Counselling Services Unit (CSU) whose organisation has provided medical and psycho-social support to thousands of victims and survivors in Zimbabwe.  Dr. Lovemore is the NTJWG’s Thematic Leader on Reparations and Rehabilitation.

NTJWG is privileged to be hosting this special dialogue of experts and stakeholders on this important matter for our country.

It is with great pleasure that we are extending this invitation you to join the conversation on Monday 20 January 2020 from 5:30pm at the Holiday Inn, Harare.  Please use the link here to register, or email [email protected] .

Post published in: Featured

What sitcom character’s career evolved from law student to judge over the course of 9 seasons?

Hint: The fictional character’s career path also included the very realistic turn of stifling his public interest aspirations for a corporate gig.

See the answer on the next page.

Ian was no different from you—a brilliant, driven, professional struggling internally to meet the demands of work he loved and feeling unable to seek help because of intense fear around the stigma of mild mental health issues and diabetes. His story is also not too different from that of countless men (mostly) and women in the law who have also taken their own lives. He was coping reasonably well until suddenly he wasn’t, and it was too late. This “he just snapped” phenomenon is all too common, and I promise that you are not immune to it.

—Dr. Marny Morrison Turvill, widow of legal marketer Ian Turvill who died by suicide two years ago, writing for Law.com about her husband’s mental health issues that led to his death. She says that the culture at Biglaw firms can prevent folks who need help from seeking it. Turvill also says a change in paradigms in the understanding of mental health is necessary to truly address the problem.

If you or someone you know is depressed and in need help, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-8255) or a lawyer assistance program in your state

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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).

Alphabet Chief Legal Officer David Drummond will leave the company at the end of the month and will not receive a severance package. No need to cry for Drummond though since he routinely found himself on the annual list of the highest paid in-house attorneys in the land.

Technically, Drummond is retiring to make way for the company’s new leadership, but with Alphabet quick to point out that Drummond won’t be receiving an exit package and that there’s still on ongoing investigation, it looks like Google compiled its annual Year In Search and someone kept noticing their own legal department making all the wrong headlines.

As we recapped the situation back in September on the occasion of Drummond’s wedding: “the GC just married an employee this weekend, but not the employee who says he neglected their baby after he had an affair with her while married to yet another person.” Why doesn’t Google have a streaming service, because that’s top-notch drama right there! The former employee with the baby, Jennifer Blakely, had an affair with Drummond in 2007. That kid is going to be going to high school soon — that’s how long Google’s had a heads up about how the legal department works. And Blakely claims that Drummond had numerous other affairs with employees before deciding to marry… an employee.

Even if everything happens above board, turning the office into a dating pool reflects a broken professional culture at best, and as worst can lead to downplaying sexual misconduct throughout the company — which is theoretically something the legal department is tasked with policing. If a legal department adopts the worldview that asymmetrical power relationships aren’t a barrier to sexual relationships, then it’s that much easier to dismiss harassment — when hitting on employees is acceptable harassment becomes “a misunderstanding.”

A culture like this is exactly how Android’s Andy Rubin ends up with millions after credible allegations of misconduct:

Drummond was most recently one of several executives at the center of an internal investigation regarding Google’s handling of sexual harassment and misconduct, including the $90 million exit package given to disgraced Android co-founder Andy Rubin following Rubin’s own credible allegations of sexual misconduct.

The investigation that followed the worldwide uproar over the company trying to sweep Rubin’s story under the rug with a $90 million payout may not be the reason Drummond’s leaving, but it’s a pretty good reason why he had to go. Even if the investigation ultimately clears Drummond, the employee response to the Rubin package indicates a lack of confidence in the leadership of the department and that requires a change for the company to move forward.

But in case you were still worried, Drummond sold around $200 million in stock over the past several months, so he’s fine no matter what the investigation decides.

Alphabet’s top lawyer is leaving with no exit package following misconduct scandals [The Verge]

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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.

“What’s the difference between the judge and another lawyer,” my first-year law professor once asked a group of students.

“The black robe.”

Indulge me for a moment. Please suspend your judgment and rank the words below in the order of perceived importance.

Partner, senior counsel, legal process outsourcing (LPO) attorney, general counsel, legal vendor, bar association president, legal recruiter, associate general counsel, of counsel, solo, legal tech investor, paralegal, legal marketer, law school professor, associate, contract attorney …

Do the first thing that comes to mind. Just write it down or mentally arrange these words.

Quick. Don’t overthink it! Yes, it’s uncomfortable, I know. Just do it!

Surely this is list is not comprehensive. Plenty of other legal designations and titles are out there if you think of a few that are missing. But for the purposes of this exercise, this list is plenty.

I have done this ranking game with more legal professionals than I can count, in numerous locations under numerous circumstances. In fact, I travel with a set of index cards on which these and other legal titles are written in big letters just in case.

Sometimes, I do it over a meal or beverage with another legal professional. Other times, it’s just me, the index cards, and a very puzzled stranger or friend who happens to be a member of the legal profession.

I have done it in groups and in one-on-one conversations. I have done it in person and through a video conference chat.

I am here to report that remarkably, the outcomes are basically the same, every time.

There are some differences in the margins. Occasionally an “it depends” response leads to a philosophical discussion about hierarchy and importance. But by and large, the results are very similar every time.

These consistent results are disturbing. They suggest the existence of a rigid legal caste system. They make the swim lanes and very high barriers to entry in the legal profession that so many of us have suspected exist hard to deny.

I believe that this rigid social stratification in law has huge impacts on collaboration, innovation, and, ultimately, progress in law. After all, the cross-pollination of ideas is almost always at the core of collaboration, innovation, and progress. And it’s made impossible by a rigid social structure.

This makes me wonder: what if we stop buying into this invisible hierarchy of importance among legal professionals? What if we approach every interaction with an open mind? What if the difference between a lawyer and a judge is just the black robe that one is wearing?

At what point is maintaining the system as it exists too costly for the profession and individual practitioners? What do you think?

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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. Olga founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to participate on corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. Olga also co-founded SunLaw, an organization dedicated to preparing women in-house attorneys to become general counsels and legal leaders, and WISE to help female law firm partners become rainmakers. She authored Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board Seat and Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security. You can email Olga at olga@olgamack.com or follow her on Twitter @olgavmack. 

Marc Kasowitz had an altogether disastrous 2017, but things have been fairly quiet ever since he stepped back from Russiagate and handed the role of “ostensible lawyer spewing wild nonsense” job over to Rudy Giuliani.

But last week, Kasowitz got sued by not one but TWICE. The two lawsuits, one in Texas and one in California, may be entirely independent but they have a lot in common. In both suits, a diverse former partner alleges that the firm stiffed him on pay before firing him. Both even allege that the firm was paying them on the same deficient scale.

The first suit was brought by Kyung Lee, who joined the firm’s Houston restructuring practice in 2018. According to the complaint, the firm agreed to a $550K in annual comp for Lee’s first year on the job and then proceeded to pay him $20K/month — on target for $240K/year. When Lee asked for the remaining $310K, he claims that was told on October 15, 2019 that the firm would take a $51K offset and would pay him “$125,000 today” which doesn’t add up. He says that Kasowitz responded soon afterward by making “false allegations.” On October 16, he received the $125K and on October 17 he complained that he felt as though punitive actions were being taken against him. On October 18, he was fired. Lee noted that this was done without a proper vote of the firm’s Executive Committee.

In the second suit, San Francisco white collar partner David Fermino, a gay African-American attorney, alleges a number of discriminatory incidents from his time at the firm. Not to downplay the seriousness of those allegations, let’s focus on the compensation issues because that’s where the two suits come together. Fermino, who joined Kasowitz in 2017, alleges that the firm promised him an annual salary of $400K. You’ll never believe what Fermino alleges happened next:

Between Plaintiff’s start date and December 2017, Kasowitz paid Plaintiff a salary of $20,000 per month, or $240,000 on an annualized basis, substantially less than his agreed upon compensation.

I guess $20K/month is a magic number! Fermino says the firm made a partial payment of the deficiency in January 2018 before reducing monthly compensation to $10K in April and later to $9K. Fermino then claims that Kasowitz made “false and defamatory statements” about him to others in the legal community before terminating him unilaterally… without the proper vote of the firm’s Executive Committee.

For its part, the firm informed Texas Lawyer that “Kyung Lee’s allegations are false, and his claims are unfounded.” The firm has yet to make a specific statement on Fermino’s claims.

Two partners, two different offices, two different specialties. And yet some disturbingly familiar allegations: diverse partners, paid an associate’s salary despite earlier agreements, subject to false claims when they raise complaints, and then unilateral termination without proper EC process.

These are two cases to keep an eye on.

(Check out the full complaints on the next two pages…)

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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.

Dumb, smart, poor, rich-but-not-obscenely-rich, Democrat, or even Republican, among we Americans, there is consistent, overwhelming majority support for a wealth tax. The tsunami of polls on this subject is itself a bit overwhelming.

Most recently, a Reuters/Ipsos poll of 4,441 American adults found that 64 percent either somewhat or strongly agreed with the statement that “the very rich should contribute an extra share of their total wealth each year to support public programs.” This general result largely held across demographic categories. There was a difference in support based on political affiliation: 77 percent of Democrats supported the idea of a wealth tax, but among Republicans there was still majority support, with 53 percent of GOP respondents supportive of a wealth tax on the very rich.

Last November, a New York Times/Survey Monkey poll found similar levels of support for a specific wealth tax proposal. Of the 2,672 people surveyed, 63 percent supported Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax that would place an annual 2 percent tax on the wealth of those with assets worth more than $50 million, and a 3 percent annual tax on the wealth of billionaires. Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax proposal got the support of 77 percent of Democrats, a very consistent figure compared to general Democratic support for a wealth tax, and the added level of specificity got a few more Republicans on board as well, with 57 percent of GOP respondents expressing favorable views of this policy.

A bevy of additional polls in 2019 from a variety of different polling outlets found varying levels of support for a wealth tax, but all of them found overall majority support for the policy proposal.

That’s quite astonishing, really. It’s rare to get levels of support that high on specific policies in American politics. In antebellum America, there wasn’t even that level of bipartisan majority support for the policy idea that “slavery is bad.”

What’s even more astonishing is such a high level of support for a policy we don’t even have yet and have no clear path to implementing anytime in the near future. Why kind of politician can’t or won’t take action on a policy that clear majorities of both parties want?

Well, the kind who likes money, apparently, and realizes that there are no longer any consequences in our system of government to just ignoring the will of the majority as long as you serve moneyed interests. The one demographic category among which the idea of a wealth tax falls flat is a very small one: the obscenely rich.

In an interview released in January, sports merchandising billionaire Michael Rubin blasted the idea of a wealth tax and said, “What would happen is people won’t start businesses here anymore.” Oh, the same argument that everyone has used against every tax ever that hasn’t resulted in America being anything but the best place in the world for startups? Yeah, OK, go ahead, move to Uganda and start a company from scratch there and make a billion dollars from it, we’ll wait.

Other prominent billionaires to recently slam the idea of a wealth tax include hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman, former CEO and promulgator of the $6 coffee Howard Schultz, and megabillionaire Bill Gates. Even Michael Bloomberg, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination seemingly based on the sole qualification of being a billionaire, said that a wealth tax would drive rich people to hide their incomes or withdraw money from the economy. As opposed to the other kinds of taxes that already exist that don’t do that at all -– we lawyers have surely never seen anybody try to hide income based on something like an income tax, for instance.

A lot of billionaires also call a wealth tax unconstitutional. Did everyone just collectively forget that we had to pass a constitutional amendment to put a national income tax on ourselves? That was the Sixteenth, look it up. If we can amend the Constitution to put a tax on everyone, I’m pretty sure we can figure out a way to enact a tax on the tiny sliver of people with more than $50 million dollars, especially when that idea is already enjoying the support of close to two-thirds of the electorate.

Why do we keep letting these grotesquely wealthy people dictate national policy to the rest of us? According to U.S. News, there were 607 billionaires in the United States in 2019. There are about 329,175,736 nonbillionaire Americans. In 2020, the teeming masses should turn the tables and make the billionaires swallow our ideas for a change. Frankly, billionaires should thank whatever gods they keep that two or three percent is all we want.

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Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

In a story summarizing biopharma executives’ forecasts for 2020 last weekend, one said that while it may take a political solution to address the issue of high out-of-pocket costs for patients, it would be up to drugmakers themselves to bring down list prices. A new startup, founded by a well-known health policy expert and a biotech industry exeutive, plans to do that.

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based EQRx announced its launch Monday with a $200 million Series A financing whose participants include GV, ARCH Venture Partners, a16z, Casdin Capital, Section 32, Nextech and Arboretum Ventures, in addition to other investors.

The company aims to provide what it calls a market-based solution for the rising cost of drugs by changing the process of creating medicines from discovery all the way through to patient delivery in order to make the process cheaper. It will then offer its drugs at costs lower than those of drugs on the market. Per a spokesperson, its initial focus will be on small molecule drugs in cancers, immuno-inflammatory and rare genetic diseases, with the goal of eventually producing biologics as well.

“The process of developing and bringing new drugs to market should and can be organized toward the goal of their being affordable, both for patients and society,” said Dr. Peter Bach, director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and a co-founder of EQRx, in a statement. Bach will act as an adviser to the company. “Today, even people with insurance are delaying filling prescriptions or going without due to the high cost sharing that’s part and parcel of high drug prices.”

Fellow co-founder Sandra Horning – former executive vice president, chief medical officer and global head of product development at Genentech/Roche – will also serve as an adviser to EQRx.

List prices from drug manufacturers, which in recent years have soared to eye-popping levels in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, are distinct from the out-of-pocket costs that patients typically pay, but they contribute to those costs nonetheless. That has led to a number of proposals from both major political parties that include everything from requiring more transparency in negotiations between manufacturers and pharmacy benefit managers to allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, which it currently is prohibited by statute from doing.

However, Tim Mayleben, CEO of drugmaker Esperion Therapeutics, previously said that while the solution to out-of-pocket costs would probably have to be political, given that it stems more from cost-sharing policies imposed by payers and PBMs, it would likely be up to drugmakers to lower list prices.

“Over the last several decades, society has benefited from unprecedented technological advances and a deeper understanding of disease biology, revolutionizing the way many diseases are treated today,” EQRx CEO Alexis Borisy said in a statement. “That said, the pricing of new therapeutic approaches is pushing beyond the limits of common sense, preventing people and society from equally benefiting from innovation. The time is now for a market-based solution to rising drug costs.”

Photo: gerenme, Getty Images

Happy New Year! Believe it or not, we have entered a new decade — if the past is any bellwether of the present (or future), that means that technology advances will continue to accelerate. Think about it — just in the past decade, we have witnessed a vast expansion in mobile computing platforms, vast improvements in computer memory (i.e., smaller physical footprints and lower costs), as well as rapidly increasing communication speeds. Cloud computing has evolved to the point where most software is now provided as a service instead of installed directly on a computer. Need to take your software mobile? There is probably an app that can do that on your mobile device. The problem is that technology continues to outpace the laws that can affect it, and there is little doubt this next decade will be an exception.

The slow pace of the law is not surprising — the very nature of the common law system in the United States is premised upon the rendering of decisions over time, and deference to precedent (referred to as stare decisis). Needless to say, that is not a structure that is designed to move nimbly, but rather, quite deliberately. Unfortunately, technology waits for no one, and by extension, no laws. In an effort to play “catch up,” the ability to enact legislation at both the state and federal level as technology advances does exist; however, these mechanisms are far from perfect, and in the case of state legislation, a potential patchwork of legislation that can vary depending upon jurisdiction (such as data breach notification laws) looms large.

Looking at 2020 (and beyond) through this backdrop, it’s not hard to find a number of areas of interest that are worth looking at more closely.  This is not to say that these are the only areas of concern, but in the context of law and technology (with a healthy dose of intellectual property), there are three specific areas that I believe will prove to be hot topics for the coming year (and beyond):

1. Cybersecurity & AI. If the past decade is any indication, the rise of online security threats to both computer networks and endpoint computers has been remarkable. Starting with the Yahoo security breach in 2013 (exposing over 3 billion accounts and leading the list as the largest data security breach to date), the 10 largest data security breaches of all time occurred in the past 7 years. In fact, Cybersecurity Ventures (a leading cybersecurity research group and publisher of Cybersecurity Magazine) predicts cybercrime damages will amount to $6 trillion annually by 2021, or “exponentially more than the damage inflicted from natural disasters in a year, and more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined.”  Why? You guessed it — technology. Cybersecurity Ventures has research that estimates around 111 billion lines of new software code are being developed every single year — such vast amounts of code means a vast likelihood of vulnerabilities that can be exploited. This number will not be decreasing anytime soon. As a result, the capability of humans to uncover exploits or otherwise detect and intervene in data security incidents is being rapidly outpaced by the pace of software development. The need for real-time detection and intervention of advanced persistent threats is pushing the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to help close the gap. That said, detection and intervention by a constantly learning platform is one thing, but what about threats that are being initiated by AI? Needless to say, existing laws (such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or “CFAA”) are woefully inadequate in dealing with the development of AI in this area. Think about it — the CFAA was enacted in 1986, a time when the personal computer was still finding its footing in the marketplace, computer viruses were mostly confined to university research labs, and the internet as we know it today was still a part of the Department of Defense. Although CFAA has been amended many times between 1989 and 2008, it remains far behind the technology development curve. For that reason, I think we will be seeing more data security in the context of AI/ML, and a reaction by the law to address the ever-expanding online data security dilemma.
2. Data Privacy, State Laws, and the Advent of Federal Legislation (Maybe). A corollary to the data security dilemma is the privacy of data accessible online. The General Data Protection Regulation enacted in the EU in 2016 and effective in May 2018 has been instrumental in advancing a more consumer-centric approach to the privacy of personal data. In fact, I would argue that it has been instrumental in “resetting” the approach to privacy in the U.S. — just this month, the California Consumer Privacy Act became effective in California, representing a fundamental shift in the handling of personal information by following many of the tenets embraced by the EU in the GDPR. Sounds good to privacy advocates, but the problem here is readily apparent. It is a California law, not a federal one. This is leading to some interesting discussions with clients regarding compliance — assuming a legal entity that is domiciled outside of California but otherwise meets the threshold requirements for compliance and collects data from California residents will likely need to comply because the CCPA focuses on the residency of the consumer. Given the size of California’s economy, there is almost a de facto application to out-of-state companies transacting business with California residents. Other states (such as Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York and Mexico, to name a few) are also following suit with the introduction of “copycat” bills. Given this likely patchwork of state legislation, there is a better chance than ever that Congress may take up a bill (or two) designed to harmonize these state laws. That may seem like a tall order under the present political climate, but stranger things have happened.
3. AI & IP Creation/Ownership. The growth of AI is creating some novel issues in the world of intellectual property, not the least of which is self-created works and inventions. If an AI creates an original work, who is the author? You may be aware of the case involving Naruto (a macaque) and the authorship of a selfie he took with a camera provided by photographer David J. Slater (FYI – Slater won), but there is no guarantee the courts would apply the same logic for AI. I haven’t even touched upon novel concepts created by AI that may be patent eligible, but you get the point.

I don’t know about you, but I am looking forward to how these topics will develop in the coming year (and beyond). I can’t predict how they will play out, but I can guarantee that they will play out (if not in 2020, then in the coming decade) and that I look forward to writing about them. Now that’s a good resolution for 2020 and beyond.

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Tom Kulik is an Intellectual Property & Information Technology Partner at the Dallas-based law firm of Scheef & Stone, LLP. In private practice for over 20 years, Tom is a sought-after technology lawyer who uses his industry experience as a former computer systems engineer to creatively counsel and help his clients navigate the complexities of law and technology in their business. News outlets reach out to Tom for his insight, and he has been quoted by national media organizations. Get in touch with Tom on Twitter (@LegalIntangibls) or Facebook (www.facebook.com/technologylawyer), or contact him directly at tom.kulik@solidcounsel.com.

I mean… really, in the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a big deal. It’s a typo that doesn’t impact the substance of any legal argument. And you know what they meant to write. But *but* it is also a decent laugh.

In a FISA court filing by the FBI, the signature block misspells the name of its general counsel. Instead of Dana Boente, they write Dane. Classic facepalm moment. But what gives it the extra pop, is that the filing was about errors in past filings… which is just glorious.

As Washington Post reporter Devlin Barrett points out:

Not a bad quick laugh to start out your Monday morning.

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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).