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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]

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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 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.

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.

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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.

Politics

Professor Michael McFaul has you covered.

By Elie Mystal

at 11:44 AM

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It’s that time of year again where we look back, take stock of the year in law, count the bonuses rolling in and order another round. With that in mind, we’re throwing a holiday party here in New York, and you’re invited!

So, if you want to grab some drinks and food on ATL, RSVP here! This year we’ll have our party on December 10th at Houndstooth Pub on 8th Avenue at 37th Street.

Want to brag about your bonus? Share a war story? Take a break from studying for finals? Catch up with your favorite (it’s me, I know it is) ATL editor? All are welcome!

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

The Trump FCC has made it abundantly clear it isn’t particularly keen on state, city, or local rights, especially when they interfere with AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast’s ability to make a buck. The problem: when the FCC neutered its ability to police the telecom sector at lobbyist request as part of the net neutrality repeal, it may have ironically obliterated its authority to tell states or cities what they can do.

The agency fiercely opposes your town and city’s right to build its own broadband networks, even if nobody else will and locals have voted for it. The Pai FCC has also tried (illegally and unsuccessfully so far) to ban states from trying to protect consumers from predatory telecom monopolies in the wake of federal apathy. And a number of other FCC policy changes have attempted to hamstring your town or city’s ability to stand up to wireless carriers over things like environmental reviews for cell tower placement, or the money they can collect for hosting telecom equipment in public rights of way.

This week, the FCC was sued by a broad coalition of cities which say they’ve had enough. Dozens of states have joined forces to sue the FCC over an August ruling cities say not only limit how much money cities can collect for things like environmental impact reviews on cell tower placement, but hamstrings their ability to stand up to giants like AT&T and Verizon on pretty much any issue of substance. The FCC claimed the changes were necessary to accelerate our positioning in the “race to 5G,” though cities say the changes are little more than a giant gift to the nation’s biggest telecom conglomerates:

“At least 46 cities are asking federal appeals courts to undo an FCC order they argue will force them to raise taxes or cut spending on local media services, including channels that schools, governments, and the general public can use for programming.

The lawsuits reflect a larger clash of interests among localities, media companies, and the FCC brought on by the agency’s tactic of promoting broadband deployment nationwide—especially in rural areas with spotty or no internet access—by easing rules for business.”

The case began with Eugene, Oregon (pdf), though 46 cities, along with eight counties and the state of Hawaii, have since filed seven petitions in three different circuit courts in the hopes of overturning the rules. They say the FCC’s ability to constrain the money they can collect from telecom giants will hurt localities, and is part of an overall effort to weaken any municipal opposition to AT&T and Verizon:

“…cities will have to reduce their public media budgets, stop offering services, or cut into other programs to make up the difference, Christopher Ali, associate professor in the University of Virginia’s media studies department, said.

The order also stifles municipal decision-making authority over franchise terms, Ali said. “It allows cable companies to call the shots a lot more than they used to,” he said. The franchise order is part of “much larger agenda to diminish the power of municipalities,” Ali said. “We’re seeing this battle between municipalities and big media, and big media is winning.”

While the FCC says that freeing industry incumbents from oversight and accountability will spur greater broadband deployment, the net neutrality debate has shown that limited competition and regulatory capture ensures that doesn’t actually happen. Also like the net neutrality debate, the FCC may have painted itself into a corner. The courts haven’t looked kindly upon the FCC’s decision to neuter its own oversight authority over broadband, then turn around and tell cities or states what they can or can’t do, an issue that’s likely to rear its head here as well.

46 Cities Sue The FCC For Trampling Their Rights

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So WeWork has cost Masa Son $4 billion (and counting), female employees their maternity leave and dignity, and has deprived us of our own Thornton McEnery. Now, it’s also costing 2,400 people their jobs.

That’s a lot, but given how things are going, it could be worse: The company is losing more than $1 billion a quarter while paying Adam Neumann nearly $2 billion to, uh, consult, or whatever, and just generally not be around anymore. And after it lays off another 1,000 people and pushes a further 1,000 off its books onto someone else’s, WeWork will remarkably still be employing more than 8,000 people. For the time being. At the moment.

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An EU memo prepared for its diplomats ahead of talks in Harare on Thursday said the arrests and abductions of several political activists had “reinforced the impression that the democratic space is being curtained again”.

The memo, seen by Reuters, also said the EU was worried by Harare’s slow pace of political reforms, including the alignment of laws to the constitution that was adopted in 2013.

The EU withdrew budget support to Zimbabwe in 2002 when it imposed sanctions on the late Robert Mugabe’s government over charges of political violence, human rights abuses, vote rigging and violent seizures of white-owned farms.

The talks this week are seen as an important step towards the EU resuming direct financial aid for the economy, which is in the grip of its worst crisis in a decade and worsened by a severe drought.

Timo Olkkonen, the EU’s ambassador in Harare, told acting foreign affairs minister July Moyo and his team at the start of the talks that reforms and inclusive political dialogue would also help with Zimbabwe’s economic recovery.

“These reforms can pave the way for a further strengthened relationship between Zimbabwe and EU based on shared values, the respect of human rights and the sustainable development goals agenda,” Olkkonen said, flanked by several EU diplomats.

Moyo said the talks would deal with all “hard issues” and were supported by President Emmerson Mnangagwa – who last month described EU and U.S. sanctions on Zimbabwe as a “cancer” sapping the economy.

With the economy afflicted by dollar shortages, fuel queues, power-cuts, and soaring prices, Mnangagwa has said restoring ties with the West and multilateral lenders like International Monetary Fund is one of his major priorities.

But, like Mugabe, he blames sanctions for the country’s economic ills and says they are designed to remove the ruling ZANU-PF party from power. Critics also say that since Mnangagwa came to power, he has cracked down on opposition parties.

This week, Zimbabwean police used batons, tear gas and water cannon to beat up and disperse supporters of the main opposition party trying to listen to a speech by their leader.

In its memo, the EU noted Zimbabwe had made progress by deciding not to enforce its empowerment law, which would have required all foreign investors to cede at least 51% of their shares in local operations to Zimbabweans.

The memo also said the interim compensation of white farmers whose land was seized by the government was a positive gesture towards re-opening export markets in the European Union.

In a budget statement last week, Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube set aside $24 million to compensate white farmers, 768 of whom had consented to the interim compensation scheme.

Post published in: Featured

More than half of Zimbabwe’s population requires food aid following an El Nino-induced drought that also reduced water levels in the biggest hydro dam, leading to rolling power cuts.

Acting information minister Simangaliso Ndlovu said in a post-cabinet press statement that the government would now allow anyone to import maize, maize meal and flour. Import duty on the products had also been removed so they can be brought into the country cheaply. Ndlovu said the measures were temporary.

Millers will no longer be able to buy grain at subsidized prices from the state grain agency, Ndlovu also said, in a move that takes immediate effect.

Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube had said in a budget speech last week the subsidies would end in January, raising concerns that impoverished citizens would face another round of price increases.

“The government will also be unveiling a mechanism for targeted subsidies for basic foodstuffs. This is intended as an additional cushion for vulnerable households and the generality of Zimbabweans,” Ndlovu said.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa has this year moved to remove subsidies on fuel and electricity and introduce a new currency, reforms that have unleashed inflation.

Mnangagwa says the reforms are painful in the short term but will eventually put Zimbabwe on a sound economic footing.

The government has said Zimbabwe needs more than 800,000 tonnes of maize to plug its grain deficit.

Post published in: Featured