Category: News Feeds

* President Trump has demanded that Supreme Court Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor recuse themselves from cases that involve him. [New York Times]

* A federal appeals court will decide whether to overturn a $4 verdict in a wrongful death case. That’s four dollars, not four million. [USA Today]

* Vanessa Bryant has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the helicopter company involved in the deaths of her husband and child. [Washington Post]

* Justice Thomas has cited himself in a decision he wrote arguing that a precedent also authored by him should be overturned. Kind of difficult to wrap your head around. [Fox News]

* The lawyer who helped Elon Musk fend off a defamation lawsuit is helping to protect Tesla from investors. [Bloomberg]

* An entire murder prosecution is in jeopardy because a court reporter may have written “shot the dude” instead of “shut the door” when transcribing testimony. Sounds like an honest mistake. [Syracuse.com]

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

What percentage of your firm’s billable hours would you say get captured, invoiced, and paid on every month? 

The painful truth is that, for most firms, there is a significant gap between hours worked and revenue collected for that work.

Thankfully, healthy billing practices can combat that gap, helping your firm capture and collect on more of your billable time. In this short article, you’ll learn the 3 essential steps your firm can take to close the gap between hours billed and revenue collected.

Step 1: Make Time Tracking Instinctual

Anyone who works in an office environment faces bothersome, but necessary, daily tasks that stand in the way of getting real work done. For lawyers, there is no more bothersome a task than daily time tracking.  

If you track time on paper, in a spreadsheet, or using a software that’s more than 15 years old, you probably sit down at the end of the day and try to reconstruct your billable time from memory. But what if instead, your time tracking was done for you while accomplishing your daily tasks?

Modern time-tracking software tools discussed in this article are designed to help law firms solve this problem. Many softwares offer time saving features like tracking your time as you work (called contemporaneous time tracking) or the ability to turn tasks and calendar events into time entries. 

Tools like this make your firm’s time tracking instinctual, rather than bothersome, while helping to capture billable hours that may have gone uncaptured otherwise.

Step 2: Simplify Invoice Creation and Distribution

Say it’s the 23rd. Is your firm feeling the end-of-month dread? 

Complicated invoice creation and distribution can hinder a firm’s normal workflow until the bills are sent out, but it doesn’t have to be that way. 

One of the easiest ways to simplify invoice creation is to adopt new legal technology. Software programs that create and send out invoices can, and have, saved law firms hours per month and helped assuage end-of-month dread. 

Take a look at some of the helpful legal billing software discussed in this article. Up to date technologies like these offer features like batch billing, so you can generate all your end of month invoices at the same time. Some offer the ability to send invoices to clients online, saving you from stuffing envelopes or drafting emails.

With these simplifications, end-of-month dread will be banished for good. 

Step 3: Expand Collection Options

Lastly, it’s imperative that law firms take advantage of 21st century payment options in order to ensure that clients are able to pay their legal bills quickly and easily. After all, in 2020 legal consumers expect to have multiple payment methods available to them, and the more methods your firm offers, the more likely legal bills will be paid promptly and in full. 

In this article, you’ll learn about the payment processing tools available to law firms that make it easier than ever for legal clients to pay their bills. 

Using these software programs, law firms are providing their clients with a number of different ways to immediately pay their bills, including credit card and ACH payments.

Improve Your Law Firm’s Financial Performance

Healthy legal billing is just one part of running a successful, profitable law firm. If you’re looking to take your firm’s financial performance beyond billing practices, take a look at How to Run your Law Firm Like a Business. 

This free ebook details the steps you can take to identify blind spots in your firm’s financial performance while using data and technology to make better business decisions.

The flooded area is a confluence point of four rivers namely Simbwambwa, Siakanda, Namapande and Manyenyengwa. As a result the road connecting Binga and Siabuwa has been damaged and is currently closed. Chininga Bridge connecting Nsungwale and Siabuwa and linking with Karoi, Gokwe, and Kariba needs urgent rehabilitation IOM managed to support the DCP with a comprehensive registration of all affected individuals, along with officers from the PA, Red Cross, Save the Children, Action Aid.  Through 16 focus groups discussions and HHs assessments, accurate and timely collection and dissemination of data was provided regarding the internal displacement in the affected area.

16 Villages were assessed (Maneta 1-2-3-4-5-6-8-10-11, Chinomba 2, 3 y 4, Simuchembu 9, Chinga 1, Siyakubulabula) Due to the heavy backlash a total of 215 HHs were affected (967 individuals). Out of the affected, 42% were adults (409) and 58% (588) were children. In addition, 53% (512) were females and 47% (455) male. Among the most vulnerable groups, 165 individuals were consider, 5% Disabled, 21% Widow, Single parents, 19% Orphans, 25% Children under 5, 6% Elderly and 22% Chronically ill. 33 were totally destroyed (15%), 34 partially destroyed (16%) and 148 HH (69%) had crops, fields and items affected. All the houses with damaged infrastructure are on the water way and in need of relocation, their field crops were also washed away. Main crops were: Maize, Sorghum, Millet, Beans, Cotton, Pumpkins, Groundnuts and Okra. Approximately 98% of the interviewed households do not have toilets and they are practicing open defecation.

Highlights: 215 HH affected, 33 totally destroyed, 34 partially destroyed, 16 villages assessed and 33 diarrhea cases Read more

The airline eventually has plans to fly these aircraft to destinations in China and the U.K. but this will have to wait until the leased aircraft are returned.

The Boeing 777s are set to join Zimbabwe’s flag carrier..eventually. Photo: Boeing Dreamscape via Wikimedia Commons

The airline’s administrator, Reggie Saruchera of Grant Thornton, broke the news this weekend. Saruchera added that nine companies have already expressed interest in leasing the two Boeing 777-200ERs. The aircraft both have a carrying capacity of 282 passengers. Details of the identity of the nine companies was not disclosed.

While the aircraft are leased out…

It looks like while the aircraft are being leased out, the airline will take the opportunity to train its flight crew as well as maintenance and ground-handling personnel on the new arrivals. However, whether or not they can do this effectively in the absence of the actual aircraft is a big question.

According to Pindula News, Saruchera said the following:

The national airline will be leasing out the two Boeing 777-200ER aircraft in the immediate, pending re-introduction of international flights to China and London after developing a robust domestic and regional route network…During the lease period, the airline will embark on training of flight crew, maintenance and ground handling personnel.

Saruchera also says that the national airline will use the revenue gained from the 777 leases to buy an additional narrow-bodied aircraft.

Restructuring of Zimbabwe’s airline

Air Zimbabwe was placed under “reconstruction” in October 2018. This was done in order to allow it to clear its debts, which are understood to be more than US$35m owed to foreign creditors.

According to Bulawayo 24 News, settling of the legacy debt would allow the administrator to settle outstanding issues with creditors and remove the airline from reconstruction. With economic turmoil going on inside the country, the airline has also suffered the embarrassment of having its aircraft impounded outside the country due to outstanding debts. In fact, a Boeing 767 belonging to the airline was impounded last October by the Airports Company of South Africa.

The airline’s Boeing 767 was impounded last year in South Africa due to outstanding debts. Photo: Getty Images

Conclusion

While it is all well and good for a country to have an airline of its own – it is debatable whether or not it is a necessity. With the country suffering enormously from hyperinflation and a weak economy, it may be best for the government to put its commercial aviation aspirations on hold and spend money elsewhere.

Do you think Zimbabwe’s government should further invest in getting its national airline back to good health? Or should it focus on other issues instead? Let us know in the comments.

Simple Flying has sent Air Zimbabwe an inquiry email regarding details of the lease. At the time of publishing, we have yet to receive a response. This article will be updated if news comes in.

Post published in: Business

As global temperatures continue to rise and the world seeks solutions to stem the tide, the deputy UN chief visited Hwange National Park, which, at 14,651square kilometres, is almost half the size of Belgium.

“We have seen what climate change is doing to our environment and livelihoods”, she said. “We saw how the park is hounded by climate change; the way in which Hwange is hot, the water, and even animal migration and people”.

With unreliable weather patterns resulting in less rainfall, Hillary Madhiri of the national parks and wildlife office said that more than 400 bird and 150 mammal species – 45,000 of them elephants – are suffering.

Key issues include conflict between humans and wildlife, lack of water, loss of habitat, limited resources, population management and community partnerships to preserve the park.

“It’s quiet complex,” the deputy UN chief observed.

Mr. Madhiri maintained that of all the problems “climate change is our biggest challenge”.

He said that in spite of the park’s use of green technologies and sinking over 100 boreholes to save the animals from literally dying of thirst in the dry season, more still needs to be done.

Ms. Mohammed commended the park’s efforts to buffer nature against climate change.

Prelude to meeting

The Deputy Secretary-General is in Zimbabwe to attend the 6th Africa Regional Forum on sustainable development, which begins on Monday and runs in Victoria Falls until Thursday.

Ms. Mohammed said she would participate in the discussion on the Regional Coordination Mechanism between the UN and the African Union.

The focus will be on the elements needed to accelerate action on the ground for nations to achieve the goals of Agenda 2063 – Africa’s master plan to transform the continent into a global powerhouse – and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – the blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet.

“What a better place than Zimbabwe to show the kind of leadership that we would like to see in transforming Africa through the Agendas 2063 and2030,” the UN deputy chief said.

According to bar passage data release by the American Bar Association, which law schools failed to achieved an ultimate bar pass rate of 75 percent for their 2017 class (two years after graduation)?

Hint: Nine law schools (excluding Puerto Rican schools) failed to hit the ABA standard that 75 percent of graduates pass the bar within two years of graduation.

See the answer on the next page.

In spite of having just sold a house for almost $80 million, former hedge fund manager Phil Falcone is apparently hard up for money. This is to an extent understandable, as piano-playing pigs don’t just feed themselves, and also the $70 million in settlements Falcone has reached in the last couple of years stemming from his inability to correctly pay his taxes, to say nothing of other potentially pricey litigation. So Falcone sold a couple of paintings to raise some cash, since he no longer has a hedge fund to borrow money from with which to cover said taxes.

In an uncanny coincidence of timing, two new services have come along in the past month to deliver free legal and litigation news derived in large part from court dockets.

Legal Radar, slated for release tomorrow, comes from legal and business news company ALM, the publisher of Law.com, The American Lawyer, Corporate Counsel, and other legal publications. The other, Law Street Media, was launched Jan. 15 and comes from the legal research and publishing company Fastcase.

Legal Radar and Law Street Media are free legal news services, and both are heavily focused on delivering litigation-related news derived from court dockets.

Both will use artificial intelligence and analytics to help automate and customize news delivery.

(And when it comes to full disclosure, I’ve got a bucketful for this story: I am on Law Street Media’s advisory board. Law Street Media will be using some content from LexBlog.com, where I am editor-in-chief. And I am a long-ago former employee of ALM.)

Legal Radar

Slated to launch on Feb. 25, Legal Radar will deliver news drawn from PACER — the federal courts’ electronic docket system — as well as news from the Law.com network. It will include updates on new lawsuits and filings in federal courts, federal litigation trends, breaking news, and other legal news reported by ALM journalists.

As I report in more detail at my LawSites blog, ALM says the service will be ideal for business litigators as well as for attorneys who want to keep up with industry and practice-area trends, get alerts for news involving clients or other firms, and cut through information overload.

The service will include news extracted from PACER as well as the full-text source documents. A story about a new litigation filing, for example, will include a link to the full complaint.

Legal Radar’s summaries of PACER news will be generated algorithmically, rather than by human editors. Although editors will not review each summary, they will quality-check the summaries’ overall accuracy.

A key feature will be customization, allowing each user to create a custom news feed, Vanessa Blum, ALM director of newsroom innovation, told me during a demonstration of the product. New users will be guided through a series of choices to select the news the user wants to track. Options include:

• Industries, including aerospace, AI and automation, biotech, cannabis, education, entertainment, fintech, government, health care, renewable energy, and technology.
• Practice areas, including antitrust, consumer protection, employment, intellectual property, product liability, securities, and trade secrets.
• Companies, from the U.S. and globally, spanning the Fortune 500, major global companies, and emerging fast-growth startups.
• Law firms, including the Am Law 200, NLJ 500, elite plaintiffs’ firms, the largest global law firms, and alternative legal services providers.
• Regional news covering all 50 states as well as some global regions.

The service is designed to be optimized for use on mobile devices, but can also be used on computer desktops. It will include the option to receive push notifications, either in the app or browser, for updates involving specific companies or law firms.

The service will be offered for free in both the desktop and mobile versions. For some articles, clicking through to the full text may take the user to ALM publications that require a paid subscription.

Law Street Media

Similar to Legal Radar, Law Street Media is a legal news service whose goal is to enable readers to track legal news by industries, companies, law firms, and litigation.

To do this, it leverages both case law from the Fastcase legal research platform, and docket information and analytics from Docket Alarm, the docket search platform owned by Fastcase.

So far, Law Street Media covers just one industry, high tech. But it plans eventually to cover 10 core industries, with food and agriculture slated for June. After that will come health and medical in October 2020, followed by hospitality, logistics, and travel in December 2020. Slated for 2021 are manufacturing and retail, entertainment and communications, energy and environment, legal, and then finance, insurance, and banking.

Users can read the news at the Law Street Media website or subscribe to a daily update.

Whereas Legal Radar’s articles are both journalist-written and algorithmically generated, Law Street relies on a small staff of in-house writers, led by Editor-in-Chief David Nayer, a lawyer who formerly worked as a reference attorney at Fastcase.

Nayer describes his mission as delivering news that leads to business for the site’s readers. “News leading to business could be as simple as tracking emerging litigation, but today, with docket alerts and analytics, it extends to tracking a growing company’s litigation docket, or the law firms that represent those companies,” he said.

Many of Law Street’s articles link to the underlying source documents, including judicial opinions, statutes, regulations, docket sheets, and pleadings, all of which can be viewed for free.

A feature Nayer expects to add soon is the Docket Alarm Alerts Center. This will allow users, when reading a story, to easily create docket alerts for the parties or firms mentioned in the story. By clicking on the name of a party in Law Street, the user will launch a search in Docket Alarm, from which the user can set up an alert. Use of this feature will require a Docket Alarm subscription.

Targeted for June is the launch of a premium subscription level for Law Street Media. This will offer pre-alerts of litigation news, before articles are written; analytics articles about judges, firms, and companies; and access to a new Emerging Litigation Journal.

It will also include access to what Law Street is calling “pop-ups” — which it describes as hyper-focused alerts devoted to emerging areas of litigation, such as litigation around vaping, drones, or data privacy.

The Law Street that launched last month was a phoenix arising from the ashes of an earlier incarnation, founded by journalist John Jenkins in 2013 as a news site for Millennials. After the site went dormant, Fastcase acquired it in 2018 with the goal of retooling and relaunching it. As Fastcase CEO Ed Walters told me at the time, he viewed expanding into legal news as consistent with Fastcase’s mission to become as robust a legal research platform as LexisNexis or Westlaw.

“We’re knocking the legs out from under the chair of things people get LexisNexis for,” he said. “Legal news is definitely one of them.”

At a time when trusted options for legal news grow increasingly rare, both of these new services should be welcome additions for legal professionals. While particularly suited to litigators, they should be useful to any legal professional who wants to track news of practice areas, industries, firms and companies.

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Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

Vered Yakovee, former vice president and associate general counsel of the NBA team the Miami Heat, has filed a federal lawsuit alleging violations of the Family and Medical Leave Act. The complaint, available in full below, seeks lost wages, employment benefits and other compensation, damages, and return of her job.

As reported in Law.com, Yakovee, who began working at the Heat in 2015, alleges that when she told her boss, the team’s General Counsel Raquel Libman, that she’d been selected to adopt a newborn baby and would be taking parental leave, she was immediately met with hostility, with Libman allegedly saying, “Now I definitely won’t get to take a vacation.”

Yakovee did take the leave she was entitled to — 12 week unpaid leave — and when she did return to work, the situation allegedly only deteriorated further:

Libman “berated Ms. Yakovee and complained about her FMLA leave not only privately but also publicly in group meetings and on group email correspondence,” the complaint states. The suit said Libman canceled their weekly one-on-one meetings that started when Yakovee was hired.

The complaint also alleges that Human Resources was brought into the situation when Libman “self-reported.” However, it goes on to allege that process was unsatisfactory and only served to create documentation:

She later asked the president of business operations to assign an independent investigator to the matter because the HR vice president and Libman are “close friends,” according to the complaint. But her request was denied on the same day that the director of human resources sent Yakovee an email criticizing her for failing to provide “enough advance notice” for her parental leave.

Yakovee asserts in her complaint that the email was part of an effort “led by Ms. Libman and supported” by the Heat to “litter the file” and provide Libman and the team “grounds to continue to harass and retaliate” against her.

Only a few months after Yakovee returned from leave, she alleges she was terminated. The complaint says it was the day after Yakovee took her first sick day at the company, which she used to take her sick child to the doctor.

Read the full complaint below.

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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).