Category: News Feeds

According to ALM’s 2020 Go-To Law School data, from how many different law schools did Kirkland & Ellis hire their 2019 new associate class?

Hint: K&E had the largest new associate class last year, at a whopping 245.

See the answer on the next page.

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

The morning after Hurricane Sandy hit Brooklyn, I turned on my faucet, drained my bathtub, and wandered around my neighborhood. Typically, Dumbo is bopping with tourists posing in front of our bridge for a famous photograph. But this morning, instead of selfie stick holding millennials, small fish scattered the sidewalks. My street was impacted, but it could have been much worse.

As I checked my office email, I breathed a similar sigh of relief. Our emergency plans had done what emergency plans needed to do. Generally, our people, servers, and things were safe. We were a fortunate mix of prepared and lucky. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for other places, companies, and people. Because sometimes no amount of planning can plan around a catastrophe.

Like bracing for a hurricane, as concerns over COVID-19 spread, in-house attorneys for startups are digesting information, assessing risks, making plans, and answering questions. Frequently, on top of the typical workload, the legal department is tasked with leading and coordinating with stakeholders concerning complex and risky situations. The team must provide tangible advice that goes beyond purchasing soap and hand sanitizer.

The pressure on the lawyers to make quick and thoughtful decisions in an unclear and changing world would be unbearable without formal and informal networks. In the past few weeks, generous and thoughtful in-house lawyers in my networks have shared, for example, response-plan templates, reliable websites and statistics, and work-from-home policies and resources. As well, there have been several lively debates on the topic of force majeure clauses.

As the New York City subways turn empty, it is comforting to have an inbox full of accurate, up-to-date information to keep the baby unicorns as safe as possible. We are a community. We have a duty to help each other. Remember to wash your hands and hooves. Be safe out there, little fish.

Sarah was the General Counsel/first Lawyer at Etsy and Vroom. She’s a co-founder of The Fourth Floor, a creator and producer of Legal Madness, an NYU Law School Engelberg Center fellow, a board member, an investor, and a speaker. You can also find Sarah hammering silver, eating candy, and chasing her child. sarahfeingold.com.

We have some incredibly sad news from Bellevue, Washington, where an executive legal assistant at Davis Wright Tremaine, has died from unknown causes. According to a statement from Jeff Gray, the firm’s managing partner, Lisa Carney was 60 years old and had been with the firm for more than 16 years. Carney reportedly left the office on Tuesday because she had flu-like symptoms, worked from home on Wednesday, and was found dead in her home on Thursday morning.

Perhaps believing that this was too close to the epicenter of the coronavirus breakout in the area, DWT has rolled out a plan to protect its employees. Here’s an excerpt from Gray’s statement on Carney’s unexpected passing (available in full on the next page):

Since we do not yet know the cause of her death, in the interest of the health and well-being of all our employees, we are closing our Bellevue and Seattle offices until further notice and have asked everyone in those offices to work remotely. In addition, we have asked those in the Bellevue office to self-quarantine according to the CDC’s guidelines during that time.

While carefully navigating the death of an employee that could be related to coronavirus, the firm is also dealing with another office that was possibly exposed:

Yesterday, we were also told of a confirmed case of an individual, not from our firm but in the building where our Portland office is located, who has tested positive for COVID-19. Therefore, we have also decided to close our Portland office and have asked everyone in that office to work remotely today while it is deep cleaned.

Because of all of these unfortunate things happening at once, DWT has decided to offer all its employees work-from-home capabilities:

We are instructing our employees in all our other offices to work remotely if possible, starting Monday, March 16. We are continuing to carefully monitor this situation across the firm and are prepared to implement additional measures to ensure safety.

We here at Above the Law would like to extend our sincere condolence to Lisa Carney’s friends, family, and colleagues, and thank Davis Wright Tremaine for its delicate handling of the situation so that all employees are protected from harm.

(Flip to the next page to read the Davis Wright Tremaine statement in full.)

What is your firm doing to protect lawyers and staff from coronavirus? Please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “Coronavirus Response”). Stay safe.

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 afternoon at 3pm, President Trump is expected to announce a state of emergency under the Stafford Act. Finally.

“We have things that I can do, we have very strong emergency powers under the Stafford Act,” Trump bragged to reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. “I have it memorized, practically, as to the powers in that act. And if I need to do something, I’ll do it. I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about.”

The Stafford Act is 192 pages, but … fine, whatever.

As The Los Angeles Times pointed out this morning, when and if Trump declares an emergency, FEMA will have access to $40 billion of disaster relief to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. It will also become much easier for individual states to use Medicaid waivers to expand services and eligibility for thousands of people who will soon find themselves simultaneously sick and out of work as the gig economy grinds to a halt.

“Getting an emergency declaration would really help us get services to people who need it,” said Cooper. Medi-Cal currently covers about 13 million low-income Californians.

Among other things, Cooper said the state wants to shorten lengthy verification procedures to quickly enroll people. Public health experts fear that gaps in insurance coverage make controlling coronavirus more difficult because patients who don’t have insurance won’t seek medical attention and testing they fear they can’t afford.

California and other states also want to ensure that mobile clinics and other temporary facilities set up to handle a crush of patients can bill Medicaid, which also would require a waiver.

If Trump hadn’t spent the past month swearing that the virus would disappear in warmer weather “like a miracle,”  refusing to let states administer their own coronavirus tests, and locking cruise passengers on a floating petri dish to keep the number of confirmed cases down at “15,” he could have declared an emergency weeks ago.

And if he had, states would have had flexibility to enroll newly unemployed residents quickly to ensure they could afford to get tested and treated. But expanding access to health care for poor people is really not the Trump administration’s bag. From imposing work requirements on Medicaid recipients to shifting to block grants that would allow states to kick millions of people off the rolls, if it takes coverage away from poor people, they are on it.

“Medicaid could be the nation’s biggest public health responder, but it’s such an object of ire in this administration,” Sara Rosenbaum, a Medicaid expert at George Washington University, told the LA Times. “Their ideology is clouding their response to a crisis.”

And yet, he waited just one day after hammering out a budget with Democrats agreeing to $1.4 billion for his southern border wall to declare a national emergency to justify filching $3.8 billion from military construction funds to build that wall the Mexicans were going to pay for.

It’s all about priorities. And the health of poor Americans is … not one of them.

Trump administration blocks states from using Medicaid to respond to coronavirus crisis [LA Times]

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

The rapid spread of the coronavirus pandemic across the globe has impacted virtually every facet of life. The times we live in are now uncertain, and nothing is normal anymore. The stock market has tanked, sports seasons have been canceled outright, the lights have gone out on Broadway, school districts have closed, entire countries have been put on lockdown, states of emergency have been declared, and people are waging wars over toilet paper in supermarket aisles.

In order to contain the community spread of COVID-19, many law schools have shuttered for semesters at a time, moving to online learning platforms to spare their students from potentially contracting the virus. Some Biglaw firms have decided to do the same, offering their employees opportunities to work from home in an effort to protect the health and wellness of their most valuable assets.

Just as we’ve done in the past when it comes to raises and bonuses, we are compiling a table of all the firms that have announced coronavirus policies that will benefit their employees, who those policies apply to (lawyers and staff or only lawyers), and the markets where those policies are in effect. Today, we unveil that table for your viewing pleasure. We will be updating this table on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times, as news on these policies is announced. If you see any information here that is incorrect or needs clarification, let us know.

Help us help you. Let us know what your firm is doing to take care of all of its employees during this unprecedented moment in time.

As a little reminder, we love covering the Biglaw news, but we need your help. As soon as your firm’s coronavirus policy memo comes out, please email it to us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Coronavirus Response”). We always keep our sources on stories anonymous. There’s no need to send the memo using your firm email account; your personal email account is fine. Please be sure to include the memo as proof; we like to post complete memos as a service to our readers. You can take a photo of the memo and attach as a picture if you are worried about metadata in a PDF or Word file.

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.

Former Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Eli Karl Cherkasky is learning the hard way you can’t choke a woman out in a bar and it have no impact on your legal career. The former prosecutor found out earlier this week his law license would be suspended for a period of two months as a result of the 2015 assault.

The penalty for Cherkasky’s behavior imposed by the New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division, First Judicial Department was more severe than what was recommended by the sanctions hearing referee. The referee had only recommended a private sanction, as reported by Bloomberg Law:

A sanctions hearing referee had recommended a private sanction. While the referee said he thought Cherkasky hadn’t issued a sincere apology to the woman, he added that he believed that Cherkasky wouldn’t have assaulted her if he hadn’t been drunk. The referee also found that he had “turned his life around by stopping drinking and taking upon the burden of raising a family,” the court said.

But in lowering the boom on Cherkasky, the appeals court noted the “seriousness of respondent’s assault,” and that he’d been convicted of “criminal obstruction of breathing or blood circulation and assault in the third degree and harassment in the second degree.”  And the description of the incident sounds pretty intense:

He had been “drinking heavily for many hours” when he got into a verbal altercation with a woman that ended up getting physical, it said.

According to Cherkasky, the woman hit him in the eye with her arm and then threw a beer at him.

The parties’ joint stipulation of facts said that Cherkasky then knocked the woman “against a railing, tackled her to the floor, kneeled on top of her, grabbed her neck and struck her in the face.”

The court also recognized that Cherkasky has no prior history of disciplinary proceedings and that the incident, though severe in nature, was “aberrational in nature.” However, even “when taking into account the mitigating circumstances, a period of suspension for such an assault is warranted in order to maintain the honor and integrity of the profession and deter others from committing similar misconduct.”

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).

Recently added to the ever-growing list of “things that are the lawyer’s fault”: the coronavirus. At least as reported by CNN regarding the spread within New York. What relevance his profession has to the public health crisis is beyond me.

In the modern news cycle, it can be hard sometimes to tell where facts end, and where fiction or false alarms begin. But the evolving story of the coronavirus is a compelling one that seems to be gaining momentum by the second. On Friday evening last week, our firm spoke about the Western District of Washington’s cancellation of jury trials and wondered if similar measures would affect any of the firm’s upcoming trials. By this week’s end, we had our answer by way of an adjournment.

Stories from Chinese expats of days and even weeks spent indoors seemed, to me, far away a week ago. Today — with news of the NBA suspending its season, MLB cancelling spring training, and the NCAA canceling March Madness altogether — there seems to be a real possibility that our work norms will change in response to the pandemic in the coming weeks and months. With this acknowledgement in mind, now would be as good a time as any to remember what we can do personally, and professionally, to weather the storm.

What We Can Do Personally

I do not hold myself out to be an expert in public health. As such, I’m not in a position to be giving advice about how we should respond to a pandemic. Professor Kenji Shibuya, Director of the Institute for Population Health at King’s College in London, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of expert whose advice we should be feverishly seeking and following as decrees from a higher being. Shibuya, along with Yoshiro Hayashi, entrusted designer Takashi Tokuma to communicate straightforward, accurate guidelines to prevent the further spread of the virus.

Such measures are outlined in a disarming bilingual infographic and include: sleep well, wash your hands, don’t touch your face, exercise, eat well, cover your nose and mouth, use your nondominant hand, and stay home when you’re sick. So basically, the appropriate response to avoid the further spread of the coronavirus is to live your best life. Notably missing from these measures is avoid large public gatherings, but perhaps that goes without being said?

What We Can Do Professionally

Our firm employs a chief of staff who has stayed on top of coronavirus developments over the past few weeks, and so we had some warning a week or two ago that our modus operandi could be disrupted in the near future. Anticipating the worst, every employee has verified that they are able to remotely log in to their workspaces, so that in the event of a mandatory lockdown, our work will not simply grind to a halt.

Connectivity is a double-edged sword to the modern professional. On the one hand, it can create the expectation of constant contact and make it hard to “unplug” from work. On the other hand, in times of crisis, it’s a huge convenience to be able to remotely work and access all the necessary information from anywhere at any time.

Uncertain times are ahead for us all. We simply do not know to what extent the coronavirus will affect public health, as well as the economy. We will have to do a certain amount of “wait and see.” That said, whatever measures you decide to take, be sure to communicate them to your clients.

Timothy M. Lupinek is an attorney at Balestriere Fariello who represents companies and individuals in state, appellate, and administrative courts of Maryland. He focuses his practice on complex commercial litigation with thousands of hours of civil, criminal, and regulatory trial experience. You can reach Timothy at timothy.m.lupinek @balestrierefariello.com.