Category: News Feeds

Telemedicine efforts have been cropping up across the world with the goal of bringing specialty care to more underserved regions.

One such example comes from Yaya Mbaoua, CEO of The Mbaoua Group, which has been an integral part of a pilot program to bring telemedicine to Zimbabwe. He will be speaking about his experiences at HIMSS20 in his session “Transforming Africa’s Health Crisis with Telemedicine.”

In Zimbabwe over 65% of the population lives in rural areas. This means that healthcare facilities can be far away, and specialty care even further. Coupling this with the shortage of physicians (currently there are 1.6 doctors per every 10,000 citizens) creates challenges in getting people to the right care.

“Telemedicine program entail getting rural clinics access to specialists. Obviously in those clinics they usually don’t have any resident physician,” Mbaoua said. “The best care you typically have is a traveling nurse who would stop there and provide care. So, I think the premise of the program is to enable patients in those remote villages to be able to be seen by specialists in more advanced facilities.”

The pilot program meant bringing stakeholders from nongovernmental organizations, government agencies and healthcare systems together.

“The challenge was getting all of these government and humanitarian organizations together and establishing clear responsibilities,” Mbaoua said. “So that is number one. The second challenge is really getting a pilot project off the ground, which really … means finding a province in the country that is representive of the health system in Zimbabwe and selecting the participants, the providers, patients and staff involved.”

Getting the infrastructure set up to facilitate such an effort was key, as was education of both rural clinics and specialist physicians alike.

“We came into situations where we were confronted with generational gaps,” he said. “The older generation lacked the confidence in using technology altogether, and it really required hand-holding and spending time with them to get more comfortable and confident in using the systems.”

According to Mbaoua, the Zimbabwe pilot was successful and is expected to lead to an expansion of the effort down the line.

“Telemedicine has a future in Africa. There is really no way around it. I’ve been here for four years now and [when I began] there was a lot of skepticism about telemedicine. But there is growing interest in telemedicine across the continent. There is an understanding now of the value proposition and for good reasons,” he said.

Yaya Mbaoua will be talking about his experience implementing telemedicine programs at the session “Transforming Africa’s Health Crisis with Telemedicine” on Thursday March 12, from 11:30a.m. to 12:30p.m. in room W300. 

Post published in: Featured

What would you do if your long-suffering team finally made it to the Super Bowl? We’re talking about a football team whose one and only Super Bowl title was earned in 1970. We’re talking about a team that hasn’t made it to the Super Bowl in 50 years. We’re talking about the Kansas City Chiefs. What do you do? You file a motion to continue like this one.

Back in October 2019, Denise Kirby, a lawyer in Kansas City, Missouri, told a judge she’d be unable to appear for a trial on February 3, 2020, because she’d be in Miami to watch the Chiefs in the Super Bowl. At the time, the concept seemed a bit far-fetched, even laughable, but Kirby was all in for her team. The trial was scheduled for February 3 nonetheless — come on, the Chiefs never go to the Super Bowl.

Kirby must be clairvoyant, because as luck would have it, the Chiefs are going to the Super Bowl this year. Here’s the continuance motion she recently submitted:

We’ve learned the motion was granted, showing that she can convert in the clutch like Mahomes on third and long. In fact, judges in courthouses across the state are getting in on the continuance action thanks to the Chiefs:

We had the chance to chat with Denise and found out that even though she’s secured a place to stay in Miami, she’s still searching for a ticket to the game. Please help this superfan out with her legal Hail Mary. Go Chiefs!

In a quirky motion to continue a case, KC attorney expresses support for Chiefs [Kansas City Star]

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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.

Managing email is among the most frustrating problems lawyers face. ZERØ, launched in 2018, is a mobile app that uses artificial intelligence to target lawyers’ email woes, automatically capturing billable time spent on email, automatically filing emails to the proper folders in a firm’s document management system, and guarding against inadvertently sending sensitive emails to the wrong recipient.

Today, ZERØ is releasing a new “lite” version of its product, targeted at smaller and mid-sized firms. ZERØ Lite provides virtually the same functionality as the flagship product, except that it lacks the flagship product’s ability to integrate with and file emails into the DMS systems NetDocuments and iManage.

Otherwise, ZERØ Lite is much like the product from which it is derived. It uses AI to help lawyers organize their emails into appropriate Outlook folders, capture time spent interacting with client-related emails from mobile devices, and automatically detect potential wrong recipients before an email goes out.

“Once we started with our flagship product, we started getting a lot of requests from mid-market firms and even larger firms that do not have the DMS platforms we support, but nonetheless wanted the benefits of our product for email mobility,” ZERØ CEO Alex Babin told me in an interview earlier this week.

“Now, attorneys and legal professionals do not have to have a DMS to get the value that ZERØ provides,” he said.

Specifically, ZERØ Lite performs three key functions:

• Email management. ZERØ Lite predictively files emails into corresponding Outlook folders, without the lawyer having to manually drag-and-drop them into the appropriate folders. The app can also prioritize emails by importance or sender.
• Mobile time capture. ZERØ Lite automatically captures the time lawyers spend interacting with client-related emails on a mobile device, creating draft time-entry narratives tied to emails and specific activities.
• Prevents data loss. ZERØ Lite prevents users from sending emails containing sensitive information to potential wrong recipients by warning them before the email goes out.

Babin says that both ZERØ and ZERØ Lite help law firms make more money by capturing time that might otherwise be lost emailing from mobile devices. It also helps firms be more compliant by helping users store emails in the right locations.

Although Babin did not specify the price of the new product, he said it will be lower than for the full product, in part because it does not require set-up of the connection to the firm’s DMS. If a firm purchases the Lite product and later decides to upgrade to the full product, the transition would be smooth, Babin said.

The company has already signed up three firms to use ZERØ Lite, two of which are Canadian firm Cox & Palmer in its Halifax office and Missouri firm Lewis Rice. (Babin declined to identify the third.) For its flagship product, the company recently signed the law firm Holland & Knight as a customer.

Longer term, Babin’s goal is to make ZERØ the standard for mobile email management in the legal profession, not just for time capture and compliance, but as a general email application.

While Apple’s native iPhone email app is currently the most widely used, it is a consumer app not designed for the needs of professionals such as lawyers, he noted.

Babin wants to see ZERØ become the standard mobile email app for legal professionals, with all the attributes professionals would want, including security, compliance and productivity.

In fact, pointing to ZERØ’s integrations with timekeeping tools such as Intapp Time and Aderant iTimekeep, Babin believes the product will become more a platform than a standalone app.

“We’re making it a hub of productivity management,” he said.

Malcolm Gladwell built a career out of making facially unconventional yet ultimately fairly obvious connections and allowing the lowest common denominator of American society dub him a genius for it. Oh, Sesame Street is successful because its content is memorable? Give this guy a unique haircut — more “stickiness” — and declare him a public intellectual with all the guest spots with Bill Simmons that title entails.

The problem is Gladwell’s “expertise,” such as it is, rests on compiling research from actual experts and then spitting it back packaged as some kind of novel revelation. It does not, for example, extend to his observations about the criminal justice system. Speaking at Penn State yesterday — you already see where this is going — Gladwell opined:

And this is the Tipping Point where we all need to come together and admit that blithely recategorizing straightforward stuff doesn’t make someone smart.

There was, in fact, nothing unbalanced or egregious about the prosecutors in the Sandusky case. And that’s saying something, because prosecutors are unbalanced and egregious all the time but they were pretty by the book in this case. Gladwell’s entirely amateur legal reasoning comes from his new book Talking To Strangers where he relitigates the Sandusky case based on a psychologist saying that people generally trust each other and therefore Joe Paterno and Penn State administrators should deserve public sympathy that Sandusky duped them when they trusted his denials.

I’m sure they were inclined to trust the guy they knew… but that wasn’t their job. These weren’t random folks on the street, they were university officials paid handsomely — in Paterno’s case very handsomely — to protect the school. That’s where they owed their duty and that’s why they faced repercussions.

There may be problems with the criminal law, but we’ve gotten this system by and large through decades, if not centuries, of evolution. The burdens placed on the Penn State administration reflect the wisdom of generations of legal professionals. It’s not something to throw out because someone slapped together a dime store attempt at a Brandeis brief based on one psychologist. If anything, the right lesson to take from that psychologist’s work is “people tend to trust folks and that can be dangerous so the law should situate some people with the responsibility to exercise critical judgment.”

Sometimes cutting against conventional wisdom is the sign of a bold thinker. Sometimes it’s the sign of an ill-informed poser collecting speaking fees and book deals. Figuring out where to draw that line is pretty important.

Earlier: Harvard Law School Is Full Of Druggies: A Conversation Between Malcolm Gladwell & Lance Armstrong

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Listen, you’re a busy lawyer. You don’t have time to keep up with the vastness of the internet. Plus, in case you haven’t noticed, there is an impeachment trial going on. That spectacle, presided over by Chief Justice Roberts, is sucking any spare time you might have. But that doesn’t mean some hilarious ish isn’t going down on the interwebs.

Take, for example, the Twitter feed of George Conway. Conway is notable in Biglaw as a litigator at Wachtell who had some conservative-leaning political aspirations. But, as we all know by now, he is also married to counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway. And he doesn’t like his wife’s boss. Like, not at all. Like he’s started a fund, The Lincoln Project, to make sure Trump gets defeated in 2020 and his wife is out of a job.

As interesting as that is to watch from afar, Conway has doubled down on the Trump attacks. Just the other day, he went on a Twitter screed slamming the president for some of the most egregious mistakes he’s made while in office. It’s a shade-filled walk down memory lane; actually, it bypasses shade and gets to full-on dunking on the president. Anyway, it would be an entertaining thread regardless of who put it together, but once you know Conway’s personal connection to the president, well *chef’s kiss*.

Enjoy!

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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).

* Michael Bolton’s lawyer disputes allegations from the National Security Council that Bolton’s new book contains confidential information. [Hill]

* The criminal trial of Michael Avenatti has begun, and the allegations are pretty juicy. [New York Post]

* A Syracuse man has decided to sack his court-appointed attorney and boycott his own trial. Seems like this self-represented defendant may have a fool for a client… [Syracuse.com]

* A lawyer saved a hawk who flew into a building in Brooklyn occupied by the U.S. Attorney’s office. This lawyer kind of gives new meaning to the term “legal eagle.” [New York Daily News]

* Hillary Clinton has so far been able to successfully duck process servers trying to serve her with papers related to the defamation lawsuit filed by Tulsi Gabbard. [New York Post]

* Facebook has agreed to a $550 Million settlement of a facial recognition class action lawsuit. How do we get in on that money?? [USA Today]

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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.

At issue in Lochner was New York’s Bakeshop Act of 1895 and its provision barring bakeries from keeping employees working obscene hours around hot stoves. How many hours a week were bakers allowed to keep their employees working under the act?

Hint: Lochner was fined $25 for holding an employee longer and $50 for a second offense before appealing his conviction.

See the answer on the next page.

If you’re lucky enough to have a $100 bill in your wallet, take it out and look at all those beautiful anticounterfeiting security features designed to keep your money safe. It’s got that trippy blue security ribbon with textured images of bells and 100s, an image of a bell in an inkwell that changes color in the light, and of course the watermark that is now iconic to U.S. currency. Ben Franklin’s subtle half-smirk is well placed, almost like he knows a little something you don’t.

Now take a peek at a twenty. Whereas the $100 bill is the most counterfeited U.S. denomination overseas, here at home, the $20 bill is more frequently counterfeited than its companion notes. Still an impressive feat of printing and design, the $20 bill has all the security features that have become more or less ubiquitous on U.S. currency, including the twist of a shifting color palette which fades from green to peach and back again. It doesn’t feature a picture of Harriet Tubman thanks to Steve Mnuchin, but hey, still a pretty good-looking banknote from a design perspective.

Finally, pull out a one. Soggy, torn, green ink smeared across it in tones that seem to differ wildly from one bill to the next, it looks like something you blew your nose into. Would anyone bother to make a fake version of something that looks so despondent in the first place?

Yes, it turns out they would. International Falls, Minnesota, perhaps best known for its unofficial motto, “Oh God it’s so cold I can’t feel my face,” and as the birthplace of my redheaded friend Andy, now has a new claim to fame: the end of the line for an international counterfeit currency smuggling operation.

Last week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized 45 cartons of counterfeit U.S. currency with a face value of $900,000 — in fake one-dollar bills — at the U.S.-Canada border at the International Falls Port of Entry. If you’re wondering what a shipment of nearly a million bucks in fake ones looks like, well, it looks like a bunch of cardboard boxes stacked up on pallets that stand well-above waist level. That is a lot of singles.

The bogus money was found in a commercial rail shipment, which authorities say originated in China. It really makes one wonder what the plan was going to be if and when the shipment reached its destination. How do you launder almost a million bucks in fake singles? Do you just pass them out as tips to baristas for the next 57 years? Maybe you bring a small army of complicit hotdog vendors into the fold? I’m pretty sure you’re not going to just get a hand truck and wheel 45 boxes stuffed with ones into a bank. And why 45 boxes, anyway? If you do the math, that’s 20,000 singles per box. Did someone get sticky fingers between here and China and run off with the other five boxes? Or did the printer decided he or she could get away with shipping $900,000 in pretend $1 banknotes, but trying to ship an even million was just too risky?

Perhaps you’re wondering, like I was, whether this crime could even be worth the printing costs. Well, if the presumably Chinese counterfeiters behind this daring low-rent forgery ring are at least as efficient as the U.S. government, it could indeed be worth their time. It only costs the government 5.5 cents to print each one-dollar greenback. This is about half of what it costs the Department of the Treasury to print the larger bills up to the $100 denomination, and about a third of what it costs to print a $100 bill, because $1 bills haven’t been redesigned in decades and lack the slightly more expensive security features of the larger bills.

Apparently the fourth season of the hit series “Fargo” is already set to air in 2020, but if the showrunners need some ideas for season number five, they need look no further. Midwestern crime stories don’t get much more absurd and charmingly quirky than $900,000 in counterfeit one-dollar bills in a train car in International Falls.

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Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

In less than a year, I turn sixty. Not quite senior, but certainly approaching the cusp. I have reflected on words my father spoke often to my brothers and me growing up in Pittsburgh.

“Today is the youngest you will ever be, live like it.”

This was a mindset that escaped me when I began recovery at forty-six. I sat in the 12-step room and listened to men and women who had been twenty and thirty years sober. They had begun their recoveries years and decades before me. It honestly depressed me. I wasn’t sure if I even had that many years in front of me with all the damage I had done to my body. It caused intense depression and loneliness.

I lamented the loss of a way of life and uncertainty about a projected future free of the bonds of booze and blow. I was terrified of looking at myself in the mirror, stripped naked, having to love the person I saw without an expensive but ill-fitting suit of cocaine and booze.

Beginning recovery at any age is difficult. It often involves some sort of loss. Loss of family. The loss of self-respect and the breaking down of self to ground zero before the slow rebuild begins. Sometimes the loss of freedom. When it happens at a later stage in life, there is a lot more room to engage in looking back at all that destruction. I certainly did that quite a bit in those early days of recovery. I obsessed over the years I had “wasted,” convinced that I might as well have lit a match to them. I felt the shame, regret, and contemplation of the uncertainty and fear of “middle-age sober.”

Starting out, it ripped me apart that I had two successful brothers whom I compared myself against and never came out feeling good. I engaged in the most self-destructive kind of reflection on the past. I call it “revisionist recovery.” Going over every moment in my past and wondering how things would be different if I had only not taken that drink or done that snort. Would I have been a better law student? A better husband? A better brother? A better son? A better lawyer?

I eventually realized that this was not going to help my recovery because it boiled my life down to moments in time rather than viewing it as a fluid chain of events that make me the person I am today. Do I have regrets? Sure. I will always regret the collateral damage, but that is what making living amends and doing my best to change the world with acts of kindness is all about for me. I can’t change the past, but I can control how I respond to it and do my best to stay in the present, trying to do the next right thing every day.

I had the epiphany that, for my recovery to truly move forward, I could no longer obsess about “wasted years.” How things could have been different or what I could have done in my life if I had gotten sober earlier. I embrace who I am today. Today is the youngest I will ever be, and I will live like it one day at a time in my recovery. That’s what I hope.

Next year I will turn sixty.

When the time comes, I will embrace the cusp of senior sober, hopefully looking forward with verve and purpose. Senior sober will be a wonderful place to be.

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Brian Cuban (@bcuban) is The Addicted Lawyer. Brian is the author of the Amazon best-selling book, The Addicted Lawyer: Tales Of The Bar, Booze, Blow & Redemption (affiliate link). A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, he somehow made it through as an alcoholic then added cocaine to his résumé as a practicing attorney. He went into recovery April 8, 2007. He left the practice of law and now writes and speaks on recovery topics, not only for the legal profession, but on recovery in general. He can be reached at brian@addictedlawyer.com.