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According to the Princeton Review’s 2020 law school rankings, which law school has the most diverse faculty?
Hint: The ranking is based upon institutional demographic data as well as on law student ratings of their perception of diversity among the law faculty.
See the answer on the next page.
As Dealbreaker bid a fond farewell to Thornton McEnery this week, it was sad for me personally to know that I’m no longer working with someone who’s been a friend since elementary school and who’d reached out when I became a writing free agent three years ago to see if I’d like to do some sportswriting for the business site where he was the editor. But that sadness is softened in being able to work with Jon Shazar, whom I’ve known since college – a time during which we tried to crowdfund a bid to buy the Montreal Expos.
Fast forward almost 18 years from what sparked some college newspaper kids’ efforts to save a major league team, and come to Tuesday, when Bernie Sanders spoke out in opposition to plans to shutter 42 minor league franchises, tweeting, “Closing down Minor League teams, like the Vermont Lake Monsters, would be a disaster for baseball fans, workers, and communities across the country. We must protect these teams from corporate greed.”
Meanwhile, at the major league level, ill winds are blowing on the labor front, with NBC Sports reporting that commissioner Rob Manfred has said, “maybe Marvin Miller’s financial system doesn’t work anymore.” A lockout for the 2022 season never has looked more likely.
It’s quite an idea for Baseball to optimize its business by getting rid of baseball wherever it possibly can. We’ll see how that plays out on their balance sheets, but it also raises an important existential question: how much is baseball a business, and how much is it a public trust?
The prices of Major League Baseball teams have risen enough in nearly two decades that a crowdfunding effort to save one from extinction would be silly – not that it wasn’t back in 2002. But in a world that now has Kickstarter and various other methods of pooling resources, it would not be out of the realm of the imagination for ordinary people to get together enough money to purchase minor league teams.
At least, if the issue was those teams being in dire straits from an ownership perspective, that might be possible. What’s happening is that these teams are being targeted for deletion against their will. Dave Heller, the CEO of Main Street Baseball, which owns three of the teams on the cut list, told SB Nation, “Minor League Baseball is never going to agree to have 42 teams contracted in the most arbitrary and capricious way. They can’t proceed without our acquiescence.”
Sanders and his colleagues in Congress, for their part, are not subtly reminding baseball’s poohbahs that their antitrust exemption can be revoked. If the sport, as a business, is failing to serve the public interest, putting people out of work, and wasting billions of dollars’ worth of public infrastructure investment in ballparks and more, the result of Baseball’s plans may be only to strengthen the case for control of the levers of power in the game to be handed over to the communities where the game is played and extremely viable, if not for outright nationalization.
Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia appeared at a Federalist Society event, probably because he heard they had free pizza, and told attendees that Biglaw is suffering from a “self-censorship” problem because as we all know, if there’s one group of people who are shy with sharing their opinions, it’s the lawyers.
The former Gibson Dunn partner posited a universe where conservative attorneys abound but are almost undetectable as if they’re f**king dark matter or something. While cold, hard numbers exist proving that this is a lie, Scalia soldiered on bemoaning a Biglaw culture that just doesn’t let this mythical silent majority spread its wings and he knows who to blame!
Capitalism.
Wha?
“One factor preventing that in these and other cases is self-censorship. Our elite law firms are hesitant to get involved in cases that might generate criticism from the left of center or that might conflict with views that other lawyers in the firm hold personally,” he continued. “Secondly, firms fear repercussions from certain well-heeled corporate clients if they take positions disfavored by progressives. And sadly there’s reason for that concern.”
I’m old enough to remember when Republicans believed the free market solved everything. Now it’s apparently a travesty that big corporations care about their customers enough to actually embrace causes popular with the majority of the country. Not that big business should dictate morality — they can and do take horrific stances all the time — but it’s truly wild to hear someone allegedly “pro-business” complaining that businesses serving the market is bad.
“Today a corporation accused of environmental crimes objects to a lawyer at its outside law firm filing a brief in support of the unborn,” Scalia said. “Tomorrow, why can’t someone schooled in today’s ‘cancel culture’ use the same logic to attack the firm for defending that company’s environmental depredations.”
Again, “cancel culture” is just a trendy conservative slur for “the free market.” Tomorrow, another corporation could use the same logic to attack a firm for representing another company committing environmental crimes. Disney’s brand may not want to be tied to poisoning Bambi’s neighborhood. Sure, legally the accused is entitled to a defense, but professionally the firm is well within its rights to assess whether or not it’s in its best interest to lose other clients over that fight. Conservatives act like that’s some sort of treachery as opposed to how business works. Indeed, it’s exactly how conservatives long tried to influence the world — they just eventually realized they lack the market power to destroy Oprah for voting for Obama.
Welcome to the same ongoing pity party as those FedSoc professors who bellyache about how law schools should offer affirmative action for the minority of scholars who think voting rights are overrated as opposed to, say, actual minorities. Or the Harvard dweebs demanding more right-wing clinics. That they’d blame just about anyone but themselves for their own unpopularity isn’t a shock. But going after “well-heeled corporate clients” as antagonists marks a bold extension of the Steve Bannon populism playbook.
From Antonin Scalia defending corporate free speech rights to Eugene Scalia complaining about corporations using their speech to support DACA. It’s been a wild few years.
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.
The book contains a wide variety of recipes from all over the globe. It seems that lawyers have a sweet tooth with a number of particularly delicious cake recipes submitted. There’s something for everyone from quick weeknight meals to recipes taking a couple of days.
— Ishan Kolhatkar, a law lecturer and educational technologist at BPP University, commenting on The Billable Hour Cookbook 2019, a 250-page book that contains “[o]ver 100 recipes from more than 70 people” across legal Twitter. Celebrity chef Nigella Lawson has already ordered herself a copy. You can preorder one for yourself here. Proceeds from the book will be donated to charity.
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.
Mark S. Scott, a former partner at Locke Lord, was convicted in federal court yesterday on conspiracy to commit bank fraud and conspiracy to launder money charges. The case against the lawyer stems from a cryptocurrency, OneCoin, that prosecutors say raised money in a pyramid scheme.
Scott left Biglaw to work at OneCoin, and prosecutors say he had a key role in the plot to launder $400 million from the cryptocurrency. During trial, Scott’s lawyers tried to portray him as being conned by OneCoin co-founder Ruja Ignatova. But jurors apparently rejected that argument, and after a three-week trial, returned a verdict in a day.
Law.com has details of the scheme:
Federal prosecutors said Scott was introduced to Ignatova in September 2015 and eventually helped her launder hundreds of millions of dollars from OneCoin, which raised about $4 billion through a pyramid scheme. While OneCoin purported to be a digital token whose transactions were recorded on a blockchain, unlike real cryptocurrencies, there was no decentralized, public blockchain to ensure the system’s integrity.
Prosecutors say Scott used his proceeds from OneCoin — estimated at $50 million — to buy a yacht, several homes, and luxury cars. U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said Scott used his skills as a lawyer to perpetrate his crime:
“Mark S. Scott, an equity partner at a prominent international law firm, used his specialized knowledge as an experienced corporate lawyer to set up fake investment funds, which he used to launder hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud proceeds. He lined his pockets with over $50 million of the money stolen from victims of the OneCoin scheme. Scott, who boasted of earning ‘50 by 50’ now faces 50 years in prison for his crimes.”
One of Scott’s lawyers, Arlo Devlin-Brown, a Covington & Burling partner, said Scott is “disappointed in the jury’s verdict and plans to appeal.”
Scott is scheduled to be sentenced on February 21st. The conspiracy to commit money laundering charge has a sentence of up to 20 years, and the conspiracy to commit bank fraud conviction has a maximum possible sentence of 30 years in prison.
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).
(Image via Getty)
Partners are invaluable contributors to law firms. Their experience and business generation are the pillars that support the behemoth of Biglaw, but concerns about mandatory retirement center around two key questions: How do we safeguard ourselves against the inevitable decline of acuity, and how do we ensure that junior partners don’t pile up on the ladder to business succession if partners postpone retirement?
For the former, a plethora of research has shown that cognitive decline is slowed by mental stimulation, which law provides in spades. Pegging the retirement age to a national standard assumes uniform decline which may not be the case. That being said, the higher incidences of alcohol abuse and inadequate sleep among attorneys likely diminishes some of these gains.
For the latter, later retirements mean a logjam at the top of the business succession chain. Though the baby boomer generation opened up the ranks for a lot more partner positions, Biglaw could face a lost generation of partners who are being crowded out of clients by the late-retiring baby boomers.
Firms risk potentially alienating their junior attorneys by catering to the tried and proven. The long-term impact of such policies could be disastrous, which is why many firms are turning to succession plans to keep all parties happy.
Roughly half of Am Law 200 firms have some mandatory retirement policy. Not all stipulate retirement at 65 — most range roughly from 63-68, with different protocols as to how to deal with retiring attorneys. Some firms will transition partners into counsel positions where they can practice while transferring their clients and work to younger partners with longer runways, and others broach the topic of the impending retirement a year or two in advance to ease the partner’s transition out of the law firm.
Not all policies are made equal. Some firms advertise a mandatory retirement age but are willing to skirt it for rainmakers or make other “special exceptions.” That being said, many firms openly embrace lateral partners beyond the mandatory retirement age.
The drop-off in practicing attorneys from age 65 to age 70 is precipitous, especially compared to the U.S. overall population. One slightly confounding variable is the fact that 91.4 percent of partners over the age of 65 are male, who represent a lower percentage of the 65+ population.
Nonetheless, more and more workers are expecting to retire later, and the problem could only worsen with subsequent generations.
Over the last 20 years, the expected retirement age has risen by six years for non-retirees. Looking at the breakdown, by expected retirement age, the difference becomes even more stark.
From 1995 to 2018, the percentage of workers expecting to retire past the age of 65 has increased almost four-fold. Even in lucrative careers like law, partners are pushing back against hard and soft mandatory retirement policies, putting firms in an uncomfortable position.
Major Am Law 200 firms vary in their commitment to enforce mandatory retirement ages. Some firms take a strict approach to mandatory retirement, like Bradley Arant and Knobbe Martens, who have almost no attorneys over 65 years of age. On the other hand, Holland & Knight, Greenberg Traurig, Duane Morris, and K&L Gates tend to eschew the mandatory retirement requirement.
Promoting partners and associates to create a path to leadership positions, or rewarding them with lucrative client relationships, are efficient ways to seamlessly transfer responsibility to younger lawyers. At the same time, moving client relationships to younger partners also puts the firm at risk. Unless the firm feels the partner is loyal, or at least loyal enough, the firm may not want to transition the relationships too early in a partner’s career.
While the distribution of aging lawyers is trending upwards, firms may have to rethink their insistence on mandatory retirement and succession planning. Relying on a firm mandatory retirement deadline hurts both the lawyer and the firm, especially if there is no succession plan in place. Firms are wiser to ease the severity of the rule and instead impose a soft transition period on a case-by-case basis during which the lawyer could operate in a mentoring capacity to facilitate a smoother transfer of responsibility and relationships.
Moreover, firms have adopted leaner staffing models since the 2009 collapse. After average leverage dropped by 25 percent in one year, it has been slow to rise. Our forecast models estimate that leverage will slightly decrease. This mediates some concerns as there are fewer associates caught in the logjam to partner, but ultimately firms would be better served creating succession plans that allowed for seamless transition of business matters so that they do not lose capable partners.
Executing a proper plan easily solves the dilemmas brought about by mandatory retirement. While identifying an aging leadership problem is helpful, creating and executing an actual plan is a necessity. If your firm needs to benchmark their leadership, or wishes to learn practices to cope with mandatory retirement, I or my colleagues at Lateral Link are happy to share our suggestions and help you craft a game plan based on their real experience with and knowledge of the Am Law 200 law firm market.
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.
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.
There are law schools that are relative bargains. There are law schools that are functionally debt factories. Figuring out which is which before you waste tens of thousands of dollars chasing a profession that’s never going to pay you back should be every prospective law student’s first priority.
The Department of Education took a break from grinding a boot into the neck of public school teachers to release a report on law school graduate indebtedness. Over at Forbes, Wesley Whistle has a thorough, professional analysis of what students can learn from the figures, but we’ll be more blunt: don’t go to Florida Coastal.
The final remaining stone in the for-profit Infilaw gauntlet — with Charlotte closed and Arizona Summit closing — is obviously a bad deal, but these numbers put in stark relief exactly how much of a bum deal it is. The median debt for Florida Coastal grads is $198,655, an eye-popping amount before you notice that the median salary for graduates is $35,300 a year. A student debt to gross income ratio of around 5.6 to 1 is… not great.
Contrast this with Columbia, which leaves grads with a median $165,314 debt, but at least gives grads a median salary of $180,300 and the dream of being debt free in their 30s. That Florida Coastal can land students in more debt than Columbia is a travesty.
Some law schools have incredibly high median debts, though the salaries of those schools can have extreme variances. The three law schools with the high debt loads—all over $195,000—have median salaries below $40,000.
The good news, I suppose, is that of the five worst offenders in this regard, only at most three will be around to continue inflicting this trauma on students next year. Florida Coastal and Southwestern are both still kicking, but Whittier and Charlotte have closed, and Thomas Jefferson School of Law just lost its accreditation, which ups the chances that it may close next.
If you’re considering law school, please, please, please don’t go to one of these joints. Everyone likes to pretend that they’re the outlier who will beat the odds at the school, but betting on yourself requires a dash of realism.
On the other hand, if they’re almost $200K deep for a $35K payday gambling might not be their strong suit.
Is Your Law School Worth It? [Forbes]
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.
Ever since the American Bar Association began cracking down on law schools that seemed to be playing it fast and loose with accreditation standards, it was only a matter of time before the organization dealt out the ultimate punishment to a deserving law school — and now, that time has come for yet another poorly performing school. Back in late May, the ABA informed the Thomas Jefferson School of Law that it intended to strip the school of its accreditation. The school appealed the decision and has been impatiently waiting to discover its ultimate fate.
We now have news that an appellate panel affirmed the ABA’s decision to revoke Thomas Jefferson’s accreditation. This will now officially be the second time that the ABA has revoked accreditation from a fully accredited law school. From the decision:
There is no further appeal or review of the Council’s decision within the accreditation process. …
The Panel’s decision reinstates the Council’s prior decision to withdraw approval. That removal is effective on December 17, 2019, the day following the end of the fall semester’s final exam period.
Thomas Jefferson School of Law’s numerous weaknesses and failures have been documented in these pages for years. From its dubious admissions practices to its repeated bar-exam embarrassments to its depressing (and allegedly deceptive) employment statistics, this institution has been maligned in the press for good reason. These days, the school is lucky if more than 25 percent of its graduates are able to pass the exam (which tracks with its unemployment and underemployment rates).
Thomas Jefferson released a statement on the matter, noting:
The law school is disappointed by the appeals panel’s decision, and is focused on ensuring that its current students will graduate pursuant to an ABA-approved teach-out plan. … The ABA Council has approved recent teach-outs allowing law schools to remain ABA-accredited in order to grant degrees to current students. While the approval process is pending, the law school will proceed with plans for the Spring 2020 semester as scheduled.
Normally, Thomas Jefferson would be unable to enroll additional students because of the ABA’s decision to withdraw its approval of the school, but if you recall, last fall, afraid it would lose ABA accreditation, TJSL applied for and was later granted California accreditation. Going forward, the school must create a teach-out plan to ensure that students will be able to complete their degrees and take the bar exam.
While this is the death knell for Thomas Jefferson School of Law as an ABA-accredited institution, the school will survive to educate students who hope to take the California bar exam and remain in the state to practice law. Ironically, the law school’s bar pass rates are just about as poor the overall bar pass rates for California-accreditated law schools — about 26 percent for the July 2019 administration of the exam.
Perhaps this was meant to be, but it’s incredibly unfortunate for all of the students and graduates who laid down hundreds of thousands of debt-financed dollars to obtain a degree from the school. For now, this chapter of TJSL’s existence is over.
(Flip to the next page to see the ABA’s accreditation decision.)
NOTICE TO AFFIRM THE COUNCIL DECISION TO WITHDRAW APPROVAL THOMAS JEFFERSON SCHOOL OF LAW [ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar]
It’s Official: Thomas Jefferson Law School Will Lose Its National Accreditation [Voice of San Diego]
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 took almost exactly two years of radical open-mindedness (Principle 1.3), identifying and diagnosing problems (2.2 and 2.4), paying attention to people’s track records (8.4), not getting hung up on how things “should” be (1.4a) and synthesizing the situation at hand (5.2) for logic, reason and common sense (5.5) to finally overtake Ray Dalio’s initially somewhat optimistic view (itself almost certainly the result of the aforementioned radical open-mindedness) of the Trump era and lead him to write a book about World War III, which he still thought was probably not imminent but also: He wrote a book about World War III. Since embracing our extremely depressing reality (1.4), however, the drumbeat of increasingly dire Dalio takes has grown louder and more frequent.
Being a quantitatively-minded sort of guy, Dalio has always tried to put a number on how bad he thinks things are getting. But he’s never put quite so compelling a number on it as this:
Bridgewater paid roughly $1.5 billion for the options contracts… tied to around $100 billion worth of the indexes, said people familiar with the matter. How much the firm stands to potentially make would depend on many factors, including the magnitude of any market decline and the timing of when the firm cashes in its bet….
The massive size of the wager has prompted chatter among traders and caused the price of some options to rise.
Bridgewater insists that it’s not betting on “any potential political developments in the U.S.,” but one can’t help but it isn’t exactly oversqueezing a dot (5.2e) to note that the options expire in March and, well…
March 2020 is significant in the Democratic primary because a majority of the party’s delegates, which are needed to capture a presidential nomination, will have been awarded by the end of the month.
Which suggests that Dalio has either diagnosed an Elizabeth Warren presidency as a bigger threat than a continuing Donald Trump presidency, or that others have inaccurately diagnosed it as such but, in a self-fulfilling way, have accurately diagnosed that it means the markets will tank when it becomes clear that the senior senator from Massachusetts will be triumphantly taking the stage in Milwaukee next July, assuming the good vote-counters of California have given us an inkling of that by midnight on March 31.
Over the course of my legal career I have been at large firms, small firms, and with the government. There is one constant I have noticed throughout my career — that your colleagues change jobs as much as you do. A fact of life is that key colleagues are going to leave their positions at your place of employment. I find that this is a tough process to manage. First, most of the time, you are losing not only a colleague, but a friend. And second, you are losing a good source of knowledge that has been built up over the course of the departing colleague’s time working with you. Thus, the transition process when a colleague leaves is very important. I decided it would be helpful to list how I handle this predicament to ensure that there is a smooth transition for you, your employer, and any clients involved.
The most important aspect of the transition is to have a smooth and effective transfer of knowledge from the departing attorney to yourself or the new attorney taking over the case. I recommend having as many meetings as possible and talking over the case with the departing attorney as many times as possible. If you and the departing attorney prepare for the meetings, this can be an extremely effective way to transition knowledge from one attorney to another. I also believe having the departing attorney’s key work product at these meetings will help. Whether it is a brief or a memo, going over the documents with the departing attorney will help you better understand the case. This will also help you understand the departing attorney’s thinking and reasoning on why certain decisions were made.
Another good idea is having the departing attorney prepare a departure memorandum on each case that the attorney is currently working on. This does not have to be extensive, but it should note the basic story of the case, who the players are, what has been accomplished procedurally, and where the case is heading. A good departure memorandum will save a lot of time for the next attorney who will be picking up the matter.
The next step in transitioning an attorney’s cases to yourself or another attorney is to have a seamless physical transition of all files and work product. In this digital age, this is much easier than it was years ago when key documents were always in hard copy. But to that end, you must ensure that you have access to that attorney’s computer files and documents. It’s also important to have access to the departing attorney’s company email and voicemail. All these things should be saved in the normal course of business, but just be sure nothing is deleted, or access is lost when the attorney leaves. Make sure you have all passwords saved before the departure date so that the moment the departing attorney has left, you can respond to emails and voicemails right away.
One more vital step in this process is to inform all the clients and professionals that the departing attorney was working with. You never want the client to be the last one to know that their primary contact on their case has left and no one bothered to tell the client. Always remember, the client comes first. Make sure you have a plan on how to tell the client about the attorney’s departure and how you are going to address any concerns the client may have regarding the departure.
With regard to professionals such as experts, you want to inform them about the departure or any change in staffing as soon as possible too. You do not want to risk the social capital that the departing attorney has built with any experts or witnesses. Another good idea is to have the departing attorney go over what he or she has spoken to the expert or witness about. If there have been extensive communications between the attorney and the professional, then the departing attorney should prepare some sort of memorandum that summarizes what has been discussed and where the case is currently.
It’s always difficult seeing a colleague depart. But if you try to follow some of these recommendations, then hopefully the transition can be easier and smoother.
Peter S. Garnett is an attorney at Balestriere Fariello who represents clients in trials, arbitrations, and appeals. He focuses his practice on complex commercial litigation and contract disputes from pre-filing investigations to trial and appeals. You can reach Peter at peter.s.garnett@balestrierefariello.com.