Category: News Feeds

The trend of Biglaw firms pulling back from the height of their COVID-19 economic concerns continues. More and more, we’re seeing firms that decided to cut salaries when faced with the economic uncertainty of the pandemic change course, and re-institute at lease some of the cuts.

Back in April, Loeb & Loeb announced some salary cuts, as a way to avoid layoffs. Partners took the hardest hit, with draws slashed by 20 percent. Income partners, senior counsel, of counsel, associates, and senior staff had their salary cut by 15 percent and paralegals and other staff saw 10 percent cuts. But that’s changing.

Yesterday, firm chair Kenneth Florin announced via memo that “the impact of this pandemic on our business has not been as damaging as we had feared.” But that the firm is “very much aware that this pandemic is far from over and its overall impact not yet clear.” So, as a result, as reported by Bloomberg Law, Loeb & Loeb will see a partial reversal of their salary cuts.

Effective September 1st, the cuts will be reduced by 60 percent for income partners, senior counsel, of counsel, associates, paralegals and staff. The reductions to the monthly capital partner draws will remain in place. Florin also said the firm plans to award their annual year-end bonuses.

Let’s hope it’s only a matter of time before full salaries are restored.

If your firm or organization is slashing salaries or restoring previous cuts, 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.

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 GOP crime spree continues with yet another night of illegally coopting the powers of the presidency as part of the Republican National Convention.

Here’s Donald Trump issuing a pardon! Here’s the First Lady giving her speech from the Rose Garden! Here’s Donald Trump swearing in new American citizens! Here’s the Secretary of State taping a convention speech while on a junket to Jerusalem after explicitly warning his staff that politicking while abroad on official missions was against the law.

The Hatch Act makes it illegal for a federal employee to “use his official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.” While the president and vice president are exempt, federal employees who help them set up speeches at the White House or, say, Fort McHenry, are not.

As the Office of Special Counsel wrote in a letter to congress this month, “White House employees are covered by the Hatch Act, so there may be Hatch Act implications for those employees, depending on their level of involvement with the event and their position in the White House,” adding later that “all White House employees, including White House Commissioned Officers, are subject to the prohibition against using their official authority or influence to affect an election. Accordingly, Hatch Act concerns could arise if White House employees who are supervisors were to task subordinate staff with work in support of the political event.”

This would seem to specifically preclude the naturalization ceremony at which Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf gushed, “Mr. President, I want to again commend you for your dedication to the rule of law and for restoring integrity to our immigration system.” But the administration assures us that no, this is totally kosher because they taped it in advance.

“The White House publicized the content of the event on a public website this afternoon and the campaign decided to use the publicly available content for campaign purposes,” a White House official emailed Talking Points Memo. “There was no violation of law.”

But White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows took a different approach, insisting that actually everyone violates the Hatch Act. It’s like speeding — NBD, LOL.

“What it’s really designed to do is to make sure people like myself and others do not use their political position to try to convince other employees other federal employees that they need to vote one way, need to register one way or need to campaign in one way. We take it on well beyond the original intent of the Hatch Act,” he told Politico.

“Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares. They expect that Donald Trump is going to promote Republican values and they would expect that Barack Obama, when he was in office, that he would do the same for Democrats,” Meadows insisted.

Actually, no.

The Obama administration largely refrained from criticizing Trump and Mitt Romney, and it certainly didn’t use the White House to host campaign speeches. In 2012 after Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius veered off of prepared remarks in an official speech for a couple of sentences endorsing Obama’s re-election, she apologized profusely and reimbursed the Treasury for the entire cost of the trip. HUD Secretary Joaquin Castro was also found to have violated the Hatch Act in 2016 when he answered a direct question by Katie Couric, saying, “taking off my HUD hat for a second and just speaking individually … Clinton is the most experienced, thoughtful, and prepared candidate for president that we have this year.”

Compared to the naked political campaigning taking place at the White House podium every day, these two isolated incidents seem almost quaint. But at the time Republicans screamed bloody murder, with the National Review calling for Sebelius’s head and likening her to “a bank robber [who] is not exonerated merely because he returns the money to the bank.”

In contrast, this White House has scoffed at the law, with Kellyanne Conway laughing off a memo finding that she’d violated the law multiple times, saying “Blah, blah, blah. If you’re trying to silence me through the Hatch Act, it’s not going to work. Let me know when the jail sentence starts.”

Which would be shameless enough if it weren’t coming from a member of the bar! But if you’ve so thoroughly coopted the justice system that you know you’ll never be prosecuted — and you don’t care at all about the rule of law — why not break the rules wholesale?

As UC Berkley Berkley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky notes in the LA Times this morning, the administration has quietly crippled the agency responsible for enforcing the Hatch Act, as the Merit Systems Protection Board currently has zero members. And if Bill Barr was going to twist himself into a pretzel to say that it was perfectly fine for Michael Flynn to lie to the FBI, he’s certainly not going to go after Trump’s staff for violating the Hatch Act.

So the wheels are well and truly off the national car. The question is, does anyone in America care?

Meadows dismisses Hatch Act concerns at RNC: ‘Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares’ [Politico]

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

Tiffany Trump, a newly minted Georgetown Law graduate, appeared at the Republican National Convention last night. Back in May, when we said we couldn’t wait to see what Tiffany would do next, we certainly didn’t think it would be attacking the media, but here we are.

Before she dipped her well-heeled feet into the propaganda wading pool, Tiffany discussed what it was like to get her degree during these unprecedented COVID times:

Like so many students across the world, I graduated from law school during the pandemic. Our generation is unified in facing the future in uncertain times. And many of us are considering what kind of country we want to live in. As a recent graduate, I can relate to so many of you who might be looking for a job.

She can relate to people looking for a job? Did Tiffany Trump graduate from Georgetown Law without one? That seems pretty hard to believe, but hey, anything is possible during a pandemic. She’s the only Trump child who hasn’t taken a job at the White House or become a talking head for the campaign, so perhaps there’s hope yet for her future employment prospects.

Best of luck in your job search, Tiffany.

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.

Well, the shoe we’ve been waiting to drop for two years has finally hit the ground. Way back in 2018, Above the Law told you about the internal investigation that Yale Law School was conducting on celebrity law professor Jed Rubenfeld based on allegations of harassment and inappropriate behavior. It seems YLS has, at long last, come to a conclusion on the allegations.

As reported by New York Magazine, faculty received word earlier this week that Professor Jed Rubenfeld “will leave his position as a member of the YLS faculty for a two-year period, effective immediately,” and that upon his return, Rubenfeld cannot teach “small group or required courses. He will be restricted in social gatherings with students.”

The investigation reportedly found a disturbing pattern:

Three people familiar with the investigation that led to Rubenfeld’s suspension said it stemmed from the university finding a pattern of sexual harassment of several students. The allegations, which spanned decades, included verbal harassment, unwanted touching, and attempted kissing, both in the classroom and at parties at Rubenfeld’s home.

As with any behavior that has allegedly spanned decades, there’ve been reports that Rubenfeld’s behavior towards women was an “open secret” within the Yale Law community. The allegations of “boundary crossing” have been repeated to us via anonymous emails, texts, and DMs from alumni that are known to us but do not want to go on the record.

Rubenfeld made extensive comments to New York Magazine about his suspension:

In a phone conversation Tuesday, Rubenfeld told me, “I absolutely, unequivocally, 100 percent deny that I ever sexually harassed anyone, whether verbally or otherwise. Yes, I’ve said stupid things that I regret over the course of my 30 years as professor, and no professor who’s taught as long as I have that I know doesn’t have things that they regret that they said.”

He added, “Ironically, I have written about the unreliability of the campus Title IX procedures. I never expected to go through one of them myself.”
In 2014, for example, Rubenfeld wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that said that the university that puts in place affirmative-consent standards “encourages people to think of themselves as sexual assault victims when there was no assault” and that it is “illogical” to claim “intercourse with someone ‘under the influence’ of alcohol is always rape.”

Rubenfeld said Tuesday, “I think subsequent to me having written some controversial articles about sexual assault, that I became a target of people making false allegations against me.” Who was making these false allegations, exactly? “I don’t know,” Rubenfeld said, “because of confidentiality. Identities were not revealed to me.”

Except, as NY Mag notes, that part about not knowing the identities of his accusers isn’t true. Yale policy explicitly requires complainants identities be revealed. And one of the complainants told NY Mag exactly that:

“License to write about sexual harassment is not license to sexually harass,” [an accuser told New York Magazine]. “I reported because I was sexually harassed. Now he’s being dishonest about even this aspect of the Title IX process. For example, as Yale’s policy requires, I identified myself to him. I had to, and I did so at considerable risk given his influence in the legal community.”

Rubenfeld is married to fellow YLS professor and Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, author, Amy Chua. Chua, an influential member of the YLS clerkship committee, and Rubenefeld reportedly told a number of women Yale Law students that Judge Brett Kavanaugh prefers clerks with “a certain look.” And Chua reportedly said it’s “no accident” that Kavanaugh’s clerks “look like models.” Chua has denied those allegations.

YLS Dean Heather Gerken said in a message to the law school community:

 “While we cannot comment on the existence of investigations or complaints, the Law School and the University thoroughly investigate all complaints regarding violations of University rules and the University adjudicates them whenever it is appropriate to do so.” She added, “As Dean, I take this responsibility extraordinarily seriously.”

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).

In 2002, Brian Potts, then a law student at Vermont Law School, wrote to Perkins Coie, an Am Law 100 law firm, inquiring about a job. The firm responded by mail politely informing him that no positions were available.

Almost 20 years later, he is now a partner at Perkins Coie’s Madison, Wisconsin, office.

But he kept that rejection letter. Last month, he posted a copy of it on LinkedIn with the classic words, “Law Students: If at first you don’t succeed, try try again.”

His post went viral. It has been viewed more than 3.5 million times and received over 48,000 positive responses. Many people have reached out to him requesting advice, and as a result, he is currently booked out for at least a month speaking with law students and recent graduates.

I reached out to Brian to learn more about his story. Here are his answers to my questions.

So what did you do after getting the rejection letter?

During my second year, I applied to every AmLaw 100 firm (and many AmLaw 200 firms) and got form rejection letters from all of them (including the one from Perkins). I kept them to motivate myself. I also applied to about 15 or 20 firms in the Kentucky area (where I’m from), and the only summer associate job I was offered was at the firm where my step-grandfather was a partner in Lexington, Kentucky.

I did very well during my summer associate gig, and they made me an offer. I then reapplied to dozens of top firms with an offer in hand and ended up getting an interview with only one firm but not an offer (it was not an AmLaw firm, but a great environmental boutique in D.C.).  So, I went to Kentucky after law school to begin my career.

A year in, I decided to go to Berkeley to get an LL.M — mostly as a way to get Berkeley’s name on my resume. During my year at Berkeley, I published an article in the Harvard Environmental Law Review (which was a huge deal — at least to me). I also got all As.

Even with Berkeley and the publication on my resume, when I reapplied to all of the top AmLaw firms in Chicago and Madison, I again got form rejection letters from all of them except from Baker MacKenzie in Chicago. I ended up interviewing at Baker but didn’t get an offer. I did, however, land an associate offer from a well-respected midlevel firm in Madison, which is where my wife is from. So, we moved to Madison.

When did you start getting attention from a major law firm?

A year later, a recruiter working for Foley & Lardner called me about an associate position in their Madison office. Although I was happy where I was, it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. They were looking for a midlevel environmental associate with three to five years of experience. I was then a third-year so I perfectly fit the bill. And I “clicked” with the partners at Foley who I interviewed with.

So how did you like it at Foley?

I liked it. I ended up doing incredibly well at Foley; I made partner in the shortest time period possible at age 32.

How did you make partner in such a short period of time?

Hard work and luck. I met my hours requirements every year; and I treated the partners like I would treat my clients. Basically, I did whatever needed to be done to make the partners’ lives easier. And because the partners trusted me, I started to get a lot of client interaction. Eventually clients started to notice and appreciate my work. But there’s no doubt that I was also a bit lucky on the business development front. I made friends in town who trusted me, and some of them ended up in jobs where they could refer business to me.

When you transferred to an AmLaw 100 firm, were there any differences in the office culture and expectations from you?

Honestly, the biggest difference was in the dollar value of the matters I got to work on. The hours requirements and day-to-day expectations were pretty similar.

Describe your transition to Perkins Coie. 

I lateraled to Perkins three and a half years ago because of a client conflict. It was nerve racking. But all of my major clients came with me. Things are going extremely well in my practice now. Our group in Madison has grown from three to six attorneys (and we have a new associate joining this fall). I was also recently made co-chair of the firm’s Energy Industry Group.

During your career, what do you think helped you to get noticed?

I’ve tried to distinguish myself since law school by writing legal articles and op-eds. I also now teach a class on Renewable Energy Development & Project Finance at my alma mater, Vermont Law School. And I’ve founded two startup companies, including inventing the LegalBoard, the first and only keyboard for lawyers (which Above The Law has covered extensively).

There are many law students and young lawyers who want to emulate your accomplishment. What steps should they take now and later to maximize their chances of being hired?  

Spend an inordinate amount of time working on your writing (whether you are an excellent writer or not) and studying your area of the law. Work hard. And don’t panic if you haven’t landed your dream job yet. It may be hard to imagine now — but you will be your most marketable three to five years after starting to practice law. So, bide your time.

Also, email me. I recently asked for mentoring help on LinkedIn (since I’ve been inundated with requests for advice). More than 70 accomplished lawyers have already contacted me with offers to help. Together we are starting the LinkedIn Legal Mentor Network. Law students and recent grads can just email me, and I’ll refer them to a few contacts who have aligning interests from the network.

I want to thank Brian Potts for his time and for his offering to help young lawyers at a very difficult time. If you have a unique success story you want to share, please reach out to me.

Steven Chung is a tax attorney in Los Angeles, California. He helps people with basic tax planning and resolve tax disputes. He is also sympathetic to people with large student loans. He can be reached via email at sachimalbe@excite.com. Or you can connect with him on Twitter (@stevenchung) and connect with him on LinkedIn.

This website has discussed in many prior articles how law schools do little to prepare students for careers as practicing attorneys. Indeed, most of us know how law schools usually just teach skills such as analyzing cases and making arguments rather than the black letter principles that will be helpful in practice. Many law schools tell students that they will learn how to be a practicing attorney during their first job after law school, but if students are paying a boatload of money to earn a JD, it seems only fair that they learn some of that knowledge in school. One reason why law schools do not teach students how to be practicing attorneys is because many law professors have little experience in the practice of law or practiced as attorneys years ago. However, if law professors were required to have more practical experience, perhaps they could more effectively train students to become practicing lawyers when they graduate from law school.

When I was a law student, very few of my full-time professors had significant practical experience. Most had clerked for a federal judge, done a few years in Biglaw, and then went straight into academia. This lack of practical experience impacted many classes. My full-time law professors had very few practical tips to provide in their lectures, likely because they did not know how to handle legal matters in the real world. Whenever someone would ask a question of full-time law professors that related to a practical legal issue, the professors would usually hedge their statements or relate that students will learn answers to such questions in practice. That made my law school experience less meaningful, since I kept learning the same case-method skills in class over three years rather than collecting the practical knowledge that would be helpful in practice.

Some law professors may claim it is not their job to provide practical advice to students. Indeed, many law professors may point to their scholarship, including articles, presentations, seminars, and the like as their primary academic output. However, law students are not paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to earn a law degree in order to enjoy the benefits of a professor’s scholarship. Rather, the students are usually attending law school as a steppingstone to enter the legal profession. This would be made much easier if law professors could provide practical advice to students so that law school graduates are better able to face the challenges faced by the practice of law.

In addition, legal scholarship does not have much of an impact on the legal profession. It is very rare to see a scholarly article cited by most state or federal judges outside of some appellate opinions, so scholarship does not ordinarily have an impact on the judiciary in run-of-the-mill matters. Many journals (and there are hundreds of law journals across the country) are not periodically read by individuals within the legal profession. In many respects, the main outcome of legal scholarship is to promote the careers of law professors, and to give scholars credentials that they can use to earn tenure, secure different positions, and advance in their careers. Naturally, a handful of academics and journals do have a significant impact on the legal profession, but the vast majority of scholarship is not impactful and should not be considered the most valuable output of law professors.

I previously wrote an article about how adjunct professors can enrich the law school experience, since many adjunct professors are practicing attorneys who can provide practical advice in their lectures. Indeed, I had the benefit of learning from some great adjunct professors as a law student, who would literally travel to the law school from their law offices and impart practical advice in their lectures. I am not saying that full-time law professors should be entirely replaced with adjunct professors. Adjunct professors are often extremely difficult to hunt down for recommendations, questions, and feedback, which makes sense given the small sum of money they typically earn to teach, and their other obligations. In addition, adjunct professors are less likely to be involved with campus activities, which can be an enriching part of being a law student.

However, there is no reason why law schools should not require law professor candidates to have more practical experience, or at least give more preference to individuals who have such experience. Law professors do not even need to have substantial practical experience to learn much of the hands-on background they should have in a given area of law. Depending on the subject, law professors could likely benefit from as little as five to seven years of practical experience, and this could greatly enhance the instruction they provide to students.

Let me just say emphatically that I have a lot of respect for law professors, and some of my own law professors had a profound impact on me. In addition, law professors have been very supportive of my blogging over the years, and I have had some enriching correspondences with law professors over time. I hope that law professors and others will communicate with me about this article and let me know about any perspectives I may have missed. In addition, some law schools have solid clinical programs that can provide invaluable practical training to students. Nevertheless, if law schools want to better prepare their students to enter the practice of law, they should hire law professors that have more practical experience.

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.

The crux of the problem for the Pennsylvania Board of Bar Examiners in fending off the emergency diploma privilege petition filed by Temple Law Emeritus Professor Louis M. Natali Jr. and Law Students for Equitable Responses to COVID-19 — arguing that the planned online exam violates a provision of the Pennsylvania constitution requiring a heightened standard for licensure tests — can be summed up in a single sentence in the response filed by the examiners yesterday:

This argument is premised almost entirely upon the supposed shortcomings of the remote procedure that will be used for the October exam and not on the efficacy of generally using an examination as a tool for measuring competency.

The problem for the examiners is that this is entirely true, but this is the strength of the petition, not its weakness.

The original petition laid out the NCBE’s repeated claims that an online bar exam amounts to no competency exam at all. Whether or not that’s true, it leaves the Pennsylvania bar examiners in a pickle as they have exactly zilch defense of their mission beyond the word of the NCBE and the NCBE is already throwing them under the bus. Trying to shift this back to the general exam is just a Jedi mind trick, but unfortunately for them the online exam is the precise droid we’re looking for.

In perhaps the saddest point of the response, the examiners claim that if the petitioners are correct that the exam fails to meet the heightened standard required by the state constitution, “the remedy would be a detailed study” — an implicit admission that the examiners really have nothing backing their cause but the arguably self-serving studies put out by the NCBE. Too bad the remedy for constitutional violations is not “go ahead until we can hear from a committee.”

With a heightened standard for allowing an exam to interfere with a citizen’s chosen profession, the burden is upon the bar examiners to prove that the online exam meets the — pun intended — high bar that the court has previously found that the in-person bar exam cleared.

Gamely, the bar examiners try to gloss over this problem by indicating that they will, you know, mostly give the same exam they planned to give in-person. It’s a response that’s all well and good except when you remember that the people who make the test that Pennsylvania claims is so great have gone on record that online exams aren’t any good creating a problem that the bar examiners just can’t get around.

Full credit to the attorneys behind this response, as they recognize — even as they elide — this problem and mention as an aside that they’ve engaged their own private psychometrician to tell them “Pennsylvania’s system is more reliable than the ‘half exam’ used in other jurisdictions,” a conclusion that is noticeably not the same as “equal to the existing bar exam” which is the burden upon the bar examiners. Beyond that, the response outlines a spirited defense of ExamSoft’s Michigan debacle and a litany of accommodations that Pennsylvania has instituted to mitigate common problems with online exams and the bar examiners deserve credit for doing a much better job of this than most states.

Alas, “E for effort” isn’t the applicable standard.

And so the examiners lean on the standard bar exam bromides that offer no substantive insight but have proven shockingly successful in quelling the intellectual rigor of jurists across the country.

This is no small issue; on the July 2019 test, for example, the passage rate for first time test takers was 80.60 per cent.

At this point no one should need reminding that despite branding itself as a “minimum competency” test, passing the bar exam is not like passing the driving test. Passing scores on bar exams are set by a number of factors up to and including the existing bar’s protectionist interest in limiting admission of new competition, but it’s not actually controversial to say that an overriding factor is setting the score for the purpose of failing between 15-25 percent of examinees. It’s self-justifying: the bar exam is important because we fail 20 percent of examinees and we fail 20 percent of examinees to prove how important the bar exam is.

In an actual competency test, it would be possible for 100 percent of takers to pass the test, that this is impossible of a bar exam is a damning indictment of its “minimum competency” claims.

Most states have declined to follow this path. As the Supreme Court of Ohio recently stated in rejecting a petition seeking a diploma privilege:

The court agrees with our colleagues in other jurisdictions who have recently denied similar petitions. It is the court’s obligation to protect the public and the integrity of the profession through oversight of the profession and its practitioners. The purpose of the bar examination is to ensure minimum competence of those admitted to the practice of law. With the aforementioned orders, the court has taken steps to minimize the concerns raised by the petition while continuing to carry out its responsibility to promote the integrity of the legal profession.

A more empty set of words would be difficult to find. “The court’s obligation to protect the public and the integrity of the profession through oversight of the profession and its practitioners,” isn’t the question, the question is why does this exam — especially this exam in a plague-ridden online format — fulfill that obligation?

Is there evidence that bar exam passage prevents integrity problems among the local bar? Nope. Is the bar exam a minimum competency test? No, we already addressed that above. Is there evidence that a one-time examination constitutes meaningful oversight of a career? We’ve actually got some research on how that could be handled better by a number of alternative procedures. Is the court willing to formally state that it believes accredited law schools are professionally worthless? Because if not, what’s the point of this test and if so, shouldn’t raising those standards be the primary concern of the court rather than trying to square-peg-round-hole a half-measure test upon a bunch of people?

Citing the West Wing approvingly requires mainlining grains of salt and forgetting 20 years of political reality, but here’s my question to all these courts: “What are the next 10 words of your answer?” Because if anyone is willing to get past “we need it for public protection and maintaining professional integrity,” it would help a lot.

(Response attached on the next page…)

Earlier: New Petition Uses NCBE’s Own Logic To Support Diploma Privilege Bid

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.

* Halle Berry wishes to act as her own lawyer in her divorce against Olivier Martinez. Hope it doesn’t turn out badly like Catwoman… [Fox News]

* The top lawyer at ICE will become the new leader of the agency. [CNN]

* The Attorney General of Alaska has resigned after allegedly inappropriate text messages he sent to a younger female state employee surfaced. [NBC News]

* A new lawsuit alleges that the NFL’s concussion settlement discriminates against black players. [Wall Street Journal]

* The family of a woman found alive at a funeral home after being declared dead has hired a lawyer to investigate possible negligence. Maybe she was just a heavy sleeper? [Guardian]

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.