Category: News Feeds

At some point, perhaps in a few weeks or so, it will be easier to track the Biglaw firms that aren’t cutting salaries than those that are. But right now reports of salary cuts are coming in quickly, and each one has an impact on the overall landscape of Biglaw.

The latest firm to cut salaries is Snell & Wilmer, a firm with $262,000,000 in 2018 gross revenue making it 120th in the Am Law 200. Tipsters report Snell Wilmer is cutting associate salaries by 10 percent. Some staff, those who can’t work remotely, are also being furloughed, and the firm will keep paying their portion of benefits and give them legal advice to navigate CARES Act benefits.

Matthew P. Feeney, chair of the firm, provided this comment:

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Snell & Wilmer has been committed to doing everything possible to ensure the health and safety of our staff, attorneys, clients, and communities, while continuing to provide the highest quality legal services in a timely and efficient manner. Consistent with that commitment and in furtherance of the long-term success of the entire Snell & Wilmer family, we announce the difficult decision to implement pay reductions at the firm and furloughs for certain employees who are unable to work remotely due to the nature of their positions or whose work has significantly declined because of the current crisis.

In May, partners’ monthly draws and the base salaries of non-partner attorneys will be reduced by 10 percent. Administrative professionals will see reductions from 1 percent to 10 percent depending on their annual salaries.

The furloughed individuals are valued members of the Snell & Wilmer team and we expect to bring them back following the furlough. The firm will cover both the employer and employee portion of health, life, and long-term disability insurance premiums for all furloughed employees. Snell & Wilmer attorneys are assisting furloughed employees in obtaining unemployment and CARES Act benefits. These employees have also been invited to participate in our weekly staff town hall meetings.

These decisions were difficult, but we believe they will best serve our clients and our team. Going into this pandemic, Snell & Wilmer has never been stronger. We know this extremely challenging time will pass.

Best of luck to those dealing with austerity measures.

If your firm or organization is slashing salaries, closing its doors, or reducing the ranks of its lawyers or staff, whether through open layoffs, stealth layoffs, or voluntary buyouts, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Our vast network of tipsters is part of what makes Above the Law thrive. You can email us or text us (646-820-8477).

If you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Layoff Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the layoff alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each layoff, salary cut, or furlough announcement that we publish.

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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).

The COVID-19 epidemic has been particularly hard on the elderly. Not only does it kill them in distressingly large numbers, but in order to keep it from doing so, we have to do even more of something which we’re already pretty good at doing as a society generally: Ignoring them to molder away in lonely isolation with minimal if any human contact. As such, we’re told to check in on our older friends, family and neighbors. Give them a call. Wave to them from the street. Buy them so groceries or pick up their meds or whatever else we can do at a safe distance.

Great news, America! We may be confined to our homes during a deadly pandemic, but at least we won’t have to suffer through yet another Roger Stone hearing. Describing his motion as “a tower of indignation, but at the end of the day, there is little of substance holding it up,” Judge Amy Berman Jackson denied Stone’s petition for a new trial based on juror misconduct. Turns out, you can’t claim evidence is “newly discovered” just because your lawyers and jury consultants couldn’t be bothered to do a Google search during the trial. Who knew?

In November, a jury convicted the self-described dirty trickster of obstruction, false statements to congress, and witness tampering. After a sustained attack on the prosecution by Donald Trump and his merry band of howler monkeys, the jury foreperson identified herself in a social media post defending the Justice Department’s handling of the trial. At which point, the defense team had the novel idea to do a Google search of her name and social media presence.

The juror had straightforwardly admitted in the jury questionnaire that her social media might contain posts commenting on the Russia investigation. And yet, it failed to occur to anyone on the defense team to investigate this further before the trial. Nor did it occur to them to ask her any further questions about potential bias during voir dire.

As Judge Jackson noted:

At the time of the trial, though, the defense made a strategic choice not to look for social media information. None of the seven lawyers or the two jury consultants on the defense team performed the rudimentary Googling that located this set of Facebook and Twitter posts: not 7 during the two months they were in possession of the entire set of jury questionnaires with the jurors’ names on them; not during the four to five days before trial when they knew the exact order in which the members of the jury panel would be questioned and seated as jurors; not during the two days of jury selection; and not overnight after the twelve jurors and two alternates had been picked and instructed to return the next morning to be sworn.

And what did Stone and his illustrious counsel discover once they figured out the password for the WiFi? They found that the juror doesn’t like the president. And that she is a Democrat. And that she got her photo taken with Democratic strategist Donna Brazile once in 2008. All of which is perfectly consistent with her admission that she’d run for Congress as a Democrat and served in local political groups when she lived in Tennessee.

But to Roger Stone, it was “newly discovered information” which proved that the foreperson’s “answers were equivocal, misleading, deceptive, evasive, and fallacious.”

Deriding his “parade of adjectives,” Judge Jackson noted that dislike of the president does not equal bias against Roger Stone, as “linking them together in a sentence does not make them one and the same.” Because who would think that a low-rent, hanger-on ratf*cker had any power in Washington, anyway, right?

At bottom, the motion appears to be based on the defendant’s assumption that the juror must have known who he was, what his relationship with Donald Trump has been over time, and what role he played in the campaign, and that since he was so central to the election, one could not possibly view him independently from the President. See Mot. Hr’g Tr. at 45–46. But there is no basis to conclude that Roger Stone was a household name in either Washington, D.C. or in the foreperson’s home state, particularly given his short and informal association with the campaign.

Noting that the juror only made her social media private after the president sicced his wingnut minions on her, Judge Jackson observed that “the problem is not that the material could not be discovered; it was not discovered. And it was not discovered because no one was looking for it.” None of the five lawyers, the paid jury consultant, nor the Defendant himself — who knows a few things about social media, from his own assiduous trolling — could be bothered to type this woman’s name into their phones. FFS, the courthouse itself has WiFi!

Whodathunk that a legal team which stumbled into the case by botching the pro hac vice motion would make such a boneheaded mistake? What a shocking turn of events!

US v. Stone [Memorandum Opinion , USA v. STONE, No. 1:19-cr-00018-1 (D.D.C. Apr 16, 2020)]

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

Law students have a tough job during the pandemic in trying to balance the rigors of academic learning with the harsh realities of COVID-19 life. And Netflix, so they definitely have to balance some good old-fashioned binge watching in there.

And like everyone else in law school, Kim Kardashian has to balance these (and running a multimillion-dollar business) pulls on her time. Okay, technically Kim isn’t in law school, what with not having a bachelor’s degree and all. But she is studying via apprenticeship to be a lawyer, and she even has plans to take the bar exam in 2022.

Faithful Above the Law readers will be familiar with Kim’s social media documentation of the the process. She shared a criminal law issue spotter that cast Justin Bieber as a criminal mastermind, complained about the fact that law student life sucks, explained that she neglected her Keeping Up With the Kardashians livetweeting duties to keep up with torts homework, bailed on summer holiday festivities as she continued with her contracts homework, and dealt with personalized questions all about her. She even has a favorite law professor — University of Washington contracts professor Steve Calandrillo — who she’s shouted out on Insta.

Going by her latest post, Kim is enjoying both studying AND Tiger King… which… makes her more relatable than anything on the last three seasons of KUWTK. Anyway, here’s the question she shared from JD Advising:

In case you didn’t catch that, here’s the question for you to puzzle out:

A woman visited a tiger rescue zoo with her family. While she was there, she tripped over a tiger’s tail and injured her arm.

Who should the woman sue and what is her best theory of liability?

(A) The owner of the zoo, for negligence.
(B) The owner of the zoo, for strict liability.
(C) The owner of the zoo, since a tiger zoo is considered an abnormally dangerous activity.
(D) Carole Baskin.

Think you know the answer? Check out the full answer and explanation here.

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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).

Yet more decisions between bad and worse are upon us. The class of 2020 is due to start arriving in less than six months. There’s not going to be enough work for them; they should be deferred.

There’s no abnormal reputational risk in announcing deferrals now. It would be well received by current associates who’ll recognize it avoids increasing the competition for what work is available.

It’s tempting for firms to delay announcing decisions about the arrival of the class of 2020 as we await greater clarity. However, we are already past the time in 2009 by which most firms had announced. There’s also an important benefit to incoming associates from moving soon: delay weakens their prospects of securing prestigious paid public interest work and entry into elite LL.M. programs.

— Hugh A. Simons, formerly a senior partner and executive committee member at The Boston Consulting Group and chief operating officer and policy committee member at Ropes & Gray, arguing that, given historical perspectives from the Great Recession, the associate class of 2020 should be deferred.

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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.

Honestly, Georgia is a complete mess.

Since that’s probably not specific enough, I’m talking about the public law schools in Georgia, institutions that have held out against the overwhelming weight of the legal academy and insist on continuing to issue letter grades for this shambles of a semester while everyone else is adopting at least some form of Pass/Fail grading.

While most holdout schools can lay the blame squarely on the administration, the Georgia schools answer to a higher power, the collection of political appointees making up the University System of Georgia. Early reports out of the law schools saw the schools laying the blame on the USG — a plausible boogey-entity (“Boogey-Board?”) since the state’s governor was busy pretending that coronavirus didn’t exist at the time. Curiously, one early tipster said that the University of Georgia Law powers-that-be were discouraging students from complaining to the USG, which we thought was odd but we wrote it off as an administration hoping to maintain a good relationship with people they depend on.

Now we have multiple reports that students who have continued to try to reach the USG to prevail upon them to alter the decision finally got ahold of a Vice Chancellor who informed them that “our deans had the option to petition for a p/f option all along and that no dean has elected to do so.”

Wait, what? Could this be why UGA didn’t want anyone asking the USG what was up? That’s some shady buck passing if that’s what happened.

That said, I don’t know who to believe. It’s not like UGA is alone on this — is Georgia State also playing the blame game? Or perhaps the USG is the one passing the buck, having signaled to the schools not to bother petitioning and now laying the blame on the administrations? Whatever happened, everyone is quick to point the finger somewhere else.

All that’s clear is that UGA Law is a complete mess right now and it’s all traceable to how this is being handled. The administration is reportedly refusing to have town halls to provide any sort of transparency and the SBA is going on Facebook groups telling people to “stop complaining and start studying for finals,” which is exactly the mentality you want in a zealous advocate. But it does jive with the initial article we wrote on this subject, suggesting that there’s an effort to suppress speaking out about this — within the institution, to the press, and to the USG. I’d bombard the school with media inquiries to try and get a statement, but frankly it would be kind of insulting for Above the Law to get an answer from the administration when they aren’t having meetings directly with the students. Have a town hall and we can all talk about what happened.

Seriously, the last time I saw leadership this bad out of Georgia the Patriots came back from 28-3.

Oh! And UGA has also decided to allow this semester’s grades to impact class rankings, adding insult to the injury of bull-headedly sticking with letter grades.

Maybe that’s USG’s fault too?

Earlier: Political Appointees Still Keeping Law Schools From Going Pass/Fail
When A Law School Says ‘Don’t Contact The Media,’ You Should ABSOLUTELY Contact The Media

Let’s spin the Biglaw wheel and see which firm is enacting COVID-19 austerity measures. The latest firm making the tough cuts is Foley Hoag. The firm made $208,144,000 in 2018 gross revenue, making it 142 on the Am Law 200.

Over email (available on the next page), firm leaders laid out the specific cuts to all of the stakeholders. Their plan involves a 15 percent pay cut for associates and business professionals making $190,000+, a 7.5 percent cut for staff making $150,000-190,000, and a 20-30 percent cut for non-equity partners. According to the email, equity partners have already taken compensation cuts of an undisclosed amount and will continue to do so.

Foley Hoag Co-Managing Partners, Jeffrey D. Collins and Kenneth S. Leonetti, had this statement about the cuts:

The COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented and has caused far-reaching repercussions across the business community. As the economy slows, our goal is to ensure Foley Hoag is well-positioned to weather a downturn. Therefore, the firm is making temporary adjustments by reducing salaries for all attorneys and certain business services personnel.

If your firm or organization is slashing salaries, closing its doors, or reducing the ranks of its lawyers or staff, whether through open layoffs, stealth layoffs, or voluntary buyouts, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Our vast network of tipsters is part of what makes Above the Law thrive. You can email us or text us (646-820-8477).

If you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Layoff Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the layoff alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each layoff, salary cut, or furlough announcement that we publish.

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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).

Greetings, it’s David Lat here. As many of you know, and as I mentioned here last week, I recently engaged in a weeks-long battle with the novel coronavirus. I was hospitalized for 17 days, including about a week in critical condition in the ICU, when I was hooked up to a ventilator. But I’m happy to report that I made it through — thanks in no small part to the support of the Above the Law community — and I’m now recovering comfortably at home (or actually my parents’ home in suburban New Jersey, which is a bit more spacious than my Manhattan apartment).

I am (slowly) getting back into the saddle as both a legal recruiter and a legal journalist, currently working through a large backlog of communications. Apologies if I owe you a message. If I do, please feel free to try me again; I’m now more on top of my correspondence than I was while in the hospital.

During the few weeks that I have been away, Biglaw has been transformed. Law firms have implemented many different measures to deal with the economic fallout of COVID-19, including delaying or reducing partnership draws, reducing salaries of associates and staff, furloughing associates and staff, or postponing non-essential spending.

Making predictions is a dangerous business. Who would have guessed, two months ago, that we would be where we are today? But with your indulgence, I will offer a few… observations about the current state of Biglaw. (To the extent that these are predictions, please take them with a veritable shaker of salt.)

1. Law firms are responding very intelligently to the current crisis.

As I said in recent interviews with Law.com and Bloomberg, I believe that law firms are doing a good job in responding to the downturn — especially compared to how they handled the Great Recession.

I had a front seat to how Biglaw responded to the Great Recession, given Above the Law’s close coverage of events in Biglaw during that time. Back then, firms basically had one tool — layoffs — and they used it indiscriminately.

This time around, law firms are being more creative — and more fair. They are using a variety of measures to economize, and some of these measures, such as delaying or reducing partnership draws, hit partners as well as associates and staff. In other words, law firms are spreading the pain, instead of inflicting it upon the people least able to bear it.

2. We are only at the beginning of this retrenchment.

If you look at the list of law firms that have adopted cost-cutting measures, you’ll be struck by how many firms are not on the list. Compare this to the Great Recession, where it seemed that practically every firm, including some of the most prestigious and profitable, did something (e.g., layoffs, delaying start dates, etc.).

But the list of firms cutting costs in the current crisis grows every day and every week. So it’s not particularly bold of me to predict that it will continue to grow, especially as the economic downturn continues. The lockdown or stay-at-home orders in many jurisdictions will likely remain in place for quite some time, which means that the economic damage these cause will continue for some time too. As clients suffer, their law firms will suffer along with them.

3. Associate hiring has slowed down, but partner hiring will continue.

Many law firms have put associate hiring on hold — which is not surprising, considering that work is slowing down in many practice areas. And of course firms that are laying off or furloughing associates, or thinking about layoffs or furloughs, generally aren’t going to be eager consumers of lateral talent.

But as in the last recession, partner hiring continues. This makes sense: as the pie shrinks, the way firms can maintain or grow revenue is by getting a bigger share of the smaller pie. And the way to do that is to hire lateral partners with big books of business.

So here at Lateral Link, we still have many partner candidates interviewing with firms (using tools like Zoom and Skype). Closing deals can be tricky right now — firms generally want a face-to-face meeting before bringing aboard a new partner, and those can be hard to set up right now — but activity is taking place.

But who knows if this will continue? The bottom line right now: the only certain thing is uncertainty. We are experiencing an unprecedented social and economic disruption, whose consequences will not be fully understood for quite some time.

To help lawyers and legal employers navigate this challenging environment, Lateral Link is launching our COVID-19 Bridge Program. The Bridge Program will connect lawyers who are seeking work with employers who are seeking temporary assistance — and, as an inducement to encourage employers to work with us, we are offering our attorneys at no cost for two weeks (newly-placed attorneys only).

If you are an attorney interested in participating, please register with us, and we will email you with additional details. If you are an employer interested in hiring top temporary talent, please contact my colleagues Jaclyn Genchi and Carolyn Brenner. If you are an employer interested in hiring document review attorneys, please contact my colleague Craig Brown.

The Bridge Program also includes, for employers, outplacement services for their furloughed or laid-off lawyers — and the first 20 hours of counseling are free. If you are an employer interested in retaining us to provide outplacement services for your lawyers, please contact my colleague Amy Savage.

These are difficult and trying times. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me or to any of my colleagues at Lateral Link for help. We will get through this — together.

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts from Lateral Link’s team of expert contributors. David Lat is a managing director in the New York office, where he focuses on placing top associates, partners and partner groups into preeminent law firms around the country.

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Lateral Link is one of the top-rated international legal recruiting firms. With over 14 offices world-wide, Lateral Link specializes in placing attorneys at the most prestigious law firms and companies in the world. Managed by former practicing attorneys from top law schools, Lateral Link has a tradition of hiring lawyers to execute the lateral leaps of practicing attorneys. Click ::here:: to find out more about us.

Were you having trouble getting your Note finished while you broke your personal Mario Kart record while studying for “Cloud Formations and the Law”? Well, while you did that, Pitbull decided to get a work of legal scholarship published. In a T14 journal, no less. And so Mr. Worldwide adds another jewel to his “EGOTLRA,” adding “Law Review Article” to his Grammy.

The article, “EEEEEEEYOOOOOO!: Reflections on Protecting Pitbull’s Famous Grito,” appears in the latest NYU Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law and offers the perspectives of Pitbull and his attorneys — Partner and Entertainment, Media & Technology Industry Group chair Leslie Zigel and Senior Counsel Justin McNaughton of Greenspoon Marder and entertainment attorney Ryan Kairalla — discussing the work they undertook in filing to get Pitbull’s instantly recognizable yell registered as a sound mark. To put this in context, there are about 2.6 million active trademarks right now and only 36 of those marks are wordless sounds — sounds like NBC’s chime or the MGM lion roar. That’s… not a lot.

NYUJIPEL Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Vincent said the idea for the article was first floated by Kairalla, an NYU Law alum, who approached the journal with the idea of a practitioner-based essay about the application and how its success could prove important music industry as a whole. Vincent said the journal “saw this as a cool opportunity to not only have practitioners talking about what they’ve done, but also to provide some practice advice.”

The article discusses the cultural history of the grito — an individually distinctive signature yell with deep Mexican cultural roots — and charts Pitbull’s consistent use of his personal grito throughout his career, evidence that contributed to the USPTO’s decision to grant Pitbull two marks for the yell (one for live performances and one for recordings).

You can check out the whole article on the next page and in the below video, you can watch three of the authors (the ones who aren’t internationally known musicians) speak with NYUJIPEL Staff Editor Zach Bass:

EEEEEEEYOOOOOO!: Reflections on Protecting Pitbull’s Famous Grito [New York University Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law]

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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.

Ed. note: This is the first installment in a series of posts from Dads at the Bar, an online community created as a “brother” group to our friends at MothersEsquire, for lawyer dads who want to work for a more equitable world and profession for themselves as fathers, who want to be allies for their coworkers who are mothers, and to build a better world for their daughters and sons. Welcome Dan Canon to our pages.

Two doors down from me, in a part of town where houses are packed tightly together, resides a rooster. The rooster is loud. He does not care when or if the sun is up. He does not seem to care about the municipal ordinance that runs contrary to his existence. He is a howling basilisk who terrorizes the neighborhood with his shrill cries at all hours of the day and night. I hate him.

Everyone here in Indiana is too polite to say so, but it is possible that my three daughters, like our demon neighbor chicken, have attained local-nuisance status. They often shriek at each other. The shrieking happens inside, but only when we can’t convince them to be outside. For what seems no more than three or four blessed hours a night, they sleep. Otherwise? Shrieking.

Concurrent with an increase in telephonic hearings, these noises, along with barking dogs, engine hum, clinking glasses, whining screen doors, and the occasional flushing toilet, became a part of my law practice. Sometimes the noises were mine; sometimes not. For the most part, other practitioners and judges have been too kind to mention any background clamor, if they noticed it at all.

Still, we are embarrassed when we are the custodians of racket. So we do our best to stifle it; we fumble with the mute button, we scurry off to the basement, and we yell uncharitable things at children and pets. We must take these measures because we are Very Serious Professionals. What if our colleagues were to find out that we were real people, too?

Now it seems we lawyers, along with everyone else, are migrating to a place we may never return from; a work environment in which we stay home and our electronic avatars perform all the talking that can’t be eliminated. Even the Supreme Court has burst forth from its ancient, antitechnology tomb to hold arguments via teleconference. At the same time, children have been turned out of schools en masse. All of a sudden, all of our work happens from the discomfort of our homes, and our homes may sound like a drunken food fight in Hell.

Under these circumstances, we would serve each other well by learning to accept background noise as is. To be sure, calamity in the home can pull your attention away from a conference call (especially if you’re trying your damnedest to silence it). Consider, though, that most of us are ardent multitaskers, the kind who make performance art out of getting 20 things done at once. In the morning, you drop off your dry cleaning with your coffee in your lap while checking email at red lights and flipping through discovery in your passenger seat. At night, you drive your kid to soccer with a sandwich in one hand, returning voicemails and anxiously peering at tomorrow’s calendar. But get on a Zoom chat and you can’t handle a little shrieking? A little barking? A little crowing? We litigators are used to all that noise (and not just from opposing counsel).

As much as the incessant screeching of the poultry item down the street haunts my dreams, I think I can learn to work around him. At least I shouldn’t have to be ashamed of him; he is part of what my life sounds like, whether I like it or not. And if I can accept that feathered terrorist, I certainly don’t intend to apologize for my own kids.

My ultimate proposition goes further still, and may seem radical to Very Serious Professionals: The background noise is good for us. You may recall that up until a month ago, day-to-day lawyering was inexorably social. We’d put on nice clothes, show up to court every Monday, wait for our cases to be called, and chew the fat with other practitioners in the gallery, in the hallways, on the street, or wherever. This, in my estimation, was one of the most vital aspects of the profession – one which we were losing even before we were chased indoors by invisible killers lying in wait on every tangible thing in every public place.

By gathering in the courthouse, we had the chance to size each other up. We exercised our mirror neurons. We were forced to recognize our colleagues not as unfeeling robots, hell-bent on destroying their opponents at any cost, but as the earnest, confused creatures we truly are. The courthouse is where we confronted our commonalities. The courthouse is where sympathy was earned. The courthouse is where cases were settled. And now the courthouse is gone.

Background noise is the consolation prize: the belching gulps of the coffee maker; the skitter of Labrador paws on a tile floor; the too-loud laughter of children. Such little blessings allow us to see beyond the avatars we litigate against, to peer into the house of a real person, and to feel the warmth of an inherently communal profession, if only for a few seconds at a time. Crises have a way of making us forget who we are. In embracing the background noise, we can remember.

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Dan Canon is a civil rights lawyer and a Professor of Law at the University of Louisville, Louis D. Brandeis School of Law. Most notably, he served as lead counsel for the Kentucky plaintiffs in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, which established marriage equality in all 50 states. He writes on civil and criminal justice issues for a variety of regional and national publications. PLEADING OUT, his book on plea bargaining reform, is scheduled to be published in early 2021. His short documentary series on activists in the Midwest can be viewed at www.midwesticism.org. He lives a noisy-but-great life in Indiana with his wife and three daughters.