Category: News Feeds

The government of Zimbabwe is set to urgently start the construction of Manyame and Warren Control Pump stations in two months’ time in a quest to elevate water shortages in Harare and its surrounding towns.

This is after the government allocated US $9.3m following a report that row water from Lake Chivero is not good for human consumption and it is expensive to treat. The report further stated that pumping water from Lake Manyame would reduce the usage of aluminium sulphate by 26.8%, consequently reducing the cost of water treatment as aluminium sulphate is the main chemical in the water treatment process.

July Moyo, the Minister of Local Government and Public Works said that the installation of appropriate water meters will be undertaken concurrently with the cited works to keep up with the scheduled timeframe.

Lasting solution to water problems in Harare

With 100 million liters a day, Harare is only producing 20% of its daily demand water averaging 450 million liters a day, because it does not have an adequate supply of chemicals to treat the water.

Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services Minister Monica Mutsvangwa said that to provide long-lasting solutions to water problems in Harare, the government ought to allocate enough foreign currency to Chemplex Corporation to import water treatment chemicals.

She also called for the provision of loan guarantees for various water and sanitation projects to be undertaken by local authorities using various project procurement methods that suit their specific requirements. Furthermore, she needs hefty fines to be imposed on polluters of water sources.

The government is also set to assist in the rehabilitation of Morton Jaffray Water Works and the pumping of water from Lake Manyme, which has the capacity to pump 600 megalitres.

Post published in: Featured

What legal movie thriller features this derisive line about law school: “I discovered the law again. You actually made me think about it. I managed to get through three years of law school without doing that”?

Hint: The movie was based on a 1991 novel of the same name.

See the answer on the next page.

Findings from the 12th Annual Law Department Operations Survey – Webinar

Findings from the 12th Annual Law Department Operations Survey – Webinar

BLICKSTEIN GROUP & ABOVE THE LAW

When talking heads complain about “political correctness” and how “it’s impossible not to offend these people,” they’re kind of missing the whole point. Doing right by folks is not a quest for perfection, but a willingness to embrace shortcomings and to take action to get it right. In other words, don’t get defensive, get proactive.

Last year, Paul Weiss announced a new partnership class that might well have raised no eyebrows except that it came with a picture worth several thousand words and those words weren’t particularly positive. The partnership welcoming portrait showed a gaggle of white men followed (alphabetically, but that didn’t help the optics) by a lone white woman. Paul Weiss employees flooded our inbox with the image and, as we explained at the time, the fact that the image didn’t set off any red flags before released summed up the problem with Biglaw writ large: it’s not the lack of diversity as much as the inability to notice the lack of diversity as out of the ordinary.

When called out for this, many firms would double down or try to just weather the bad press and carry on. Paul Weiss took the opposite course.

The firm quickly held a town hall to hear from the concerned attorneys and explain plans to address diversity concerns. Over the course of the year, the firm took the initiative to add diversity through the lateral market, landing former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Supreme Court litigator Kannon Shanmugam. The rest of the lateral class for the year: Jeannie Rhee, Sarah Stasny, Jean McLoughlin, Andrew Finch, and Laura Turano brought more diversity to the ranks and the incoming class, announced today, adds even more women. From a memo released this afternoon:

Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP is pleased to announce that seven attorneys have been elected to the partnership, effective January 1, 2020: Jonathan H. Ashtor, Rachael G. Coffey, Alexia D. Korberg, Caith Kushner, Kyle T. Seifried, Brette Tannenbaum and Austin Witt. All are resident in the New York office.

When Paul Weiss got publicly called out over this last year, we noted that there was some sense of karmic injustice to it. After all, other peer firms had atrocious diversity records but were flying under the radar simply because they didn’t put their classes in a picture.

On the other hand, maybe karma did right by the industry here. There aren’t many firms that could have stumbled like this and then turned around to provide a blueprint to the whole profession of how to make amends.

Diversity isn’t something that gets “solved.” That’s sometimes difficult for results-minded professionals to accept, but diversity is always a process of striving to get better. Paul Weiss spent 2019 showing that it took 2018 seriously and understands that there’s always more to be done. It knows it’s not perfect, because perfection is an empty concept invoked to engender complacency. But the firm’s going to adhere to a strategy of promoting diversity in its partnership whenever and wherever it can.

And that’s what it means to be proactive.

Earlier: Paul Weiss Press Release Captures Everything Broken About Biglaw In One Image
If A Biglaw Firm Falls In The Woods And No One Issues A Press Release About Its Lack Of Diversity…

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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.

Gary Senior is the former London Managing Partner at Baker McKenzie, and he’s embroiled in a sexual misconduct scandal. He’s already admitted he acted inappropriately with a junior associate in 2012, but the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal is conducting hearings over the alleged sexual harassment investigation.

The prosecution in the case says that in the incident in question, Senior was “seeking to initiate intimate activity” with a junior associate which he was in a position of “authority and responsibility over.” They went on to note Senior “knowingly caused [the junior associate] to be alone with him and told her he was attracted to her” and “attempted to embrace and kiss” her and that Senior “persisted in said conduct despite [the junior associate] indicating that such conduct was not appropriate.”

During testimony this week in the tribunal, Senior was questioned and said that if he wasn’t drinking during on the 2012 night in question, the incident would “probably never have happened.” He also said he “operated in the drinking culture that you find in all big law firms,” and that there are “many examples of partners willing to drink late into the night with all kinds of employees.” He went on, “I have done more of that than I should have done as managing partner and realize that’s an error on my part,” he said, “and the night [of the alleged incident] was an example of that.” And as reported by Law.com, the firm attempted to restrict Senior’s alcohol consumption going forward, though exactly how they did that was unclear.

Baker McKenzie as well as the former head of human resources, Martin Blackburn, and former litigation partner Tom Cassels are alleged to have allowed Senior to exert influence over the firm’s internal investigation. The hearings are ongoing.

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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).

Insider trading certainly seems illegal. People continue to be indicted for it. Congressmen continue to plead guilty to it. Other people remain in jail convicted of it, or, having left jail, just convicted of it. Still others continue to be sued by the SEC for it. So, yea, in spite of the hopes briefly kindled by a 2014 ruling severely limiting its scope and by the soon-to-be-dead Antonin Scalia’s dreams of rendering it not, insider-trading is definitely still illegal.

But, like, how illegal? Or, more to the point, what aspects of insider-trading are illegal? What, essentially, is insider-trading? This definitional issue is a good deal less clear than the, “is any kind of insider-trading illegal” issue. To paraphrase another court ruling, judges just seem to know it when they see it. This has predictably led to some rather disparate interpretations, uneven enforcement, one particular person not really sure if he insider-traded in spite of having pleaded guilty to it, and enough hand-wringing to lead some people to throw their hands in the air and say, “Fuck it! Just let people do whatever they want.”

The closer we get to Friday night, the more likely it is that Biglaw firms will announce bonus news that’s sure to delight.

Yet another firm has announced bonuses that reward associates for billing well above and beyond what was expected of them, except in this case, many associates were surprised by the fact that less was required of them than usual to achieve a market bonus — meaning that some may be receiving some unexpected additional cash.

The firm in question is Katten Muchin, and associates seem pretty thrilled:

Katten announced bonuses today! The big news this year is that the firm is paying market bonuses at 2000 hours. Previously, the threshold for market was 2100, with a smaller bonus at 2000. On top of that, the announcement this year is much earlier (previously mid-to-late January), as is the payment (previously mid February).

Here’s the scale for Katten’s over-the-top bonuses for high billers:

Note that there’s not even a pro-rated bonus included for the class of 2019. Ouch.

(Flip to the next page to see the full memo from Katten.)

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of important bonus updates, so when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Matches”). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we also use for salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish. Thanks for all of your help!

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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.

[Legally Blonde] is more than another romantic comedy. It’s a nod to feminism, not judging women by appearances and, of course, women in law.

The ultimate verdict on the movie should be that you don’t need a man to succeed, you can still be feminine and strong if that’s your style, and you can always brush someone’s condescending doubt about your worth with a “What, like it’s hard?”

— Haley Moss, an associate at Zumpano Patricios, in a piece she wrote on the ways Legally Blonde influenced a generation of women lawyers. Moss, a 2018 graduate of the University of Miami School of Law, is the first openly autistic female attorney in the State of Florida.

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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.

It’s been 15 years since I stood on the steps of Langdell Hall as a newly minted Harvard Law School graduate. Along with 500 of my classmates, I naturally assumed we would launch our careers, rise through the ranks, and then make partner — all at the same firm where we started. Little did I realize that the path to success is not a linear one, but rather a series of well-intentioned moves in a complex landscape where legal expertise is only one facet.

Here are my suggestions for recent graduates as they navigate the next decade of their legal careers:

1. Build Your Network. Though I am no longer a practicing attorney, the network of friends and peers I built in my short stint in Biglaw pays dividends even outside the practice of law. For attorneys, the payoff is even greater; attorneys live and die by their reputation and maintaining a group of advocates, mentors, and friends will both embed your reputation in the legal community — for better or worse, so be careful — and open new opportunities to you from lateral movement, referrals, career advice, or even just moral support.
2. Keeping On Climbing. Perhaps the most apt metaphor I’ve heard to describe a Biglaw career is that it is akin to climbing a mountain. It is a constant uphill battle that becomes steeper the higher up you climb. While attempting to climb the ranks in Biglaw, you will get outpaced by your coworkers if you fail to recognize that steady endurance and constant commitment are the keys to success. Our clients measure attorneys based on their future expected performance, which is often demonstrated by tangible benchmarks from their past, such as originations and hours. Try to maintain an even pace that allows you to hit both the quantity and quality requisites for working in Biglaw.
3. Death of a Salesman. Young lawyers often think of sales and marketing as ignoble and would rather devote their time strictly to the practice of the law. While an endearing sentiment, the reality is that any partner worth his or her salt has developed sales prowess. In my dealings with rainmakers, the one thing they all possess is the ability to communicate with clarity and act with authenticity. It takes a track record of expertise to get in front of a client, but once you’re there, you have to close the deal and pass up when you cannot deliver. Look for partners with a demonstrated record of procuring large clients, and see if they are willing to mentor you — then ride their coat tails.
4. Play Chess, Not Checkers. Navigating your legal career requires finesse and foresight. From elementary school to law school, your path has likely been fairly linear. The game of law is not so much — it requires a deft touch to get you where you want to go. You may have to sacrifice short-term happiness for long-term gains. For instance, though you may be enamored with your overly leveraged firm, you have few opportunities for servicing meaningful work and practicing your client development skills. Come your eighth year, the firm is not going to make you partner just because you love the firm so much. We have had clients that lateral away from their dream firm to gain the requisite experience at another firm to later come return to that firm as a partner. Think three moves ahead, not just one.
5. Always Explore Your Options. The days of the lifer are pretty much over. Staying with one firm for eight years in hopes of becoming a partner won’t boost your chances as much as you might hope. In making your career plan, remember that there are always opportunities for more substantial work, higher pay, and better mentorship. It never hurts to be aware of your career options and check in on the marketplace from time to time. Worst-case scenario, you stay at your firm if the current opportunities are not quite the right fit.

As you embark on your law careers, remember there is no singular piece of advice that will fit every attorney. Much of your career will be reacting to new information with little notice. We counsel our candidates based on each individual’s current situation and goals, and we invite you to explore your options with us.

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts from Lateral Link’s team of expert contributors. Michael Allen is the CEO of Lateral Link. He is based in the Los Angeles office and focuses exclusively on Partner and General Counsel placements for top firms and companies. Prior to founding Lateral Link in 2006, he worked as an attorney at both Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and Irell & Manella LLP. Michael graduated summa cum laude from the University of California, San Diego before earning his JD, cum laude, from Harvard Law School.

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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.

The effort to rehabilitate the reputation of alleged serial sexual harasser, former Ninth Circuit judge Alex Kozinski continues a pace. In 2017, Kozinski retired amid a sexual harassment scandal that rocked the legal world. While the jurist was somewhat famous in legal circles for his bawdy sense of humor, the extent of the alleged harassment — asking women clerks to view pornography with him in his chambers, making inappropriate sexual comments, and verbal abuse heaped on females working in his chambers — was more hidden. However, the Washington Post’s exposé on the judge sparked an avalanche of over a dozen women coming forward to share their experiences with the judge. But his retirement stunted any real investigation into the allegations.

Last year, the first step in the rehabbing his reputation began when he appeared as a co-author on an appellate brief on behalf of the heirs of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Zindel, in their case claiming the Oscar Award-winning movie “The Shape of Water” stole copyrighted parts of Zindel’s “Let Me Hear You Whisper.” Now it’s reported that he’ll be returning to the Ninth Circuit in an oral argument in that case.

Kozinski’s attempt to ingratiate himself back into the legal community — without any investigation — is what Kozinski accusers warned us would happen:

“Where formal processes fail or are subverted, the legal community should insist on informal reckonings before any rehabilitation, rather than turn a collective blind eye to allegations of harassment,” wrote Leah Litman, a professor now at the University of Michigan Law School, Emily Murphy, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, and Katherine Ku, a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

And some see this attempt as a deliberate flip of the bird:

“The issue right now that faces our sort of  #metoo world is the issue of normalization after certain allegations have been made and after certain consequences have occurred,” said UC Hastings professor Rory Little, who is currently a visiting professor at Yale Law School this semester.

“My overall reaction is one of some sadness that [Kozinski] somehow feels it necessary to thrust himself back in the public eye,” Little said. “It seems like poking a stick in the eye of the community.

“You can just imagine this his return is going to upset some people,” Little said.

But there isn’t any formal process designed to hold Kozinski accountable. Once he retired, the investigation ended and, as a industry, there is not much that can currently be done. However, Fix the Court executive director Gabe Roth thinks it shows the need for congressional action:

“That a serial harasser is allowed to make a comeback without making amends is shameful. It’s also the exact reason we’ve called for an amendment to the judicial misconduct statute that would ensure judges can’t simply retire to make their misconduct cases disappear.

“Keeping complaints alive post-retirement would send a strong signal to current and former members of the judiciary that there are long-term consequences for their actions and that any attempt to return to public life may be marred by a thorough misconduct investigation — and not merely a banal dismissal of charges, as happened with Kozinski.

“Continuing the misconduct process would also signal to other legal bodies, like state bar associations, that they’d be welcome to act, as well.”

But until that happens there’s little recourse but good, old-fashioned shaming.

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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).