Category: News Feeds

An audit report into sales of state land in Harare, which was done by a commission of inquiry led by Supreme Court judge Tendai Uchena, recommended that former President Robert Mugabe’s wife Grace should be prosecuted along with many others.

The inquiry investigated the acquisition and sale of state land in the city and other urban areas since 2005.

Other prominent figures recommended for investigation include former local government minister Ignatius Chombo, secretary in the same ministry George Mlilo, former minister Nyasha Chikwinya, businessman and president of the Confederation of Southern African Football Associations Philip Chiyangwa and former legislator Shadreck Mashayamombe.

Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC) chairperson Loice Matanda-Moyo said Thursday that the commission had received a copy of the audit report and that investigations would start soon.

“We hope investigations will start on Monday after we have agreed on the cases that ZACC and the police will be investigating,” she said.

The former First Lady is accused of grabbing stands at a farm north of the city and transferring ownership into names of her relatives without payment.

She said all stands improperly acquired by Mugabe, Chombo and some local government officials at the farm must be recovered.

Post published in: Featured

According to data collected by Law School Transparency, which T14 law school gives the most discounts to students?

Hint: 87.5 percent of the students there receive some discount of their tuition, and the median discount is $27,000.

See the answer on the next page.

I’m grateful to the Chief Justice. He did a good job. His demeanor was great; he maintained his patience. I thought it was unfair of him to direct that at both sets of counsels. It felt like collective punishment for isolated guilt.

— Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), responding on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom to the mild reprimand Chief Justice Roberts gave both sides the other day during the impeachment trial when Roberts reminded everyone, after a terse exchange between Jerry Nadler and Trump’s attorneys, that “they are addressing the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

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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).

“This Court should swiftly reject the government’s brazen attempt to punish Mr. Flynn for refusing to compose rather than sing.” So begins the latest motion filed by Michael Flynn’s melodramatic lawyer Sidney Powell, “paraphrasing an expression that Alan Dershowitz has used for decades.”

“Since November 2017 (and before), Mr. Flynn told the government the truth about every question it asked him,” she insists, swerving hard to avoid the giant whoppers he fed FBI agents that January about his conversations with then-Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, while joking that the FBI probably knew exactly what he’d said because they were bugging Kislyak’s phone. Which … they were, so they knew he was lying. (Those parentheses are doing quite a lot of work here.)

Last week, Powell filed a motion to withdraw the former National Security Advisor’s 2-year-old guilty plea for making false statements to the FBI. She promises to brief the court real soon as to why her client is not guilty of conduct he’s now admitted to under oath on multiple occasions. But until then, she argues that he lacked the mens rea to commit the FARA violation he also admitted to in his plea but was never charged with, and, in the event the court does not accept the withdrawal of his guilty plea, deserves no jail time.

It’s … complicated. Hey, have you heard that Michael Flynn served in the military?

Powell argues that Flynn only realized in retrospect that he had falsely filled out the Foreign Agents Registration Act paperwork regarding his work for the Turkish government, and the real culprit is his prior counsel from Covington & Burling.

At the beginning of his cooperation, Mr. Flynn’s then-counsel and the government drafted a Statement of Offense. The government’s original draft contained language that would have Mr. Flynn claim that he “then and there knew” that the FARA filing made by Covington in March of 2017 was false. Mr. Flynn could not sign that assertion because it was not true. Instead, the parties agreed to remove that language.

Having belatedly realized his mistake, this highly decorated military man was thus unable to testify at the trial of his former partner Bijan Rafiekian. This severely damaged the government’s case against Rafiekian, which was built around Flynn’s testimony.

Unsurprisingly, this did not endear him to prosecutors, who have now withdrawn their recommendation that he receive no jail time. Also unsurprisingly, Powell would like the court to see Flynn’s reversal as honorable devotion to the truth, rather than welching on a deal and torpedoing the government’s case.

The reversal of its sentencing position is not only unjust, it is unlawful. If left unchecked, it will send a dangerous message to cooperators – give testimony consistent with the government’s theory of the case, regardless of veracity, or pay the price with your freedom.

Which is so unfair for a person who has served his country on the front lines!

On the one hand, Powell does have a point. At the December 18, 2018 sentencing hearing, prosecutors recommended a non-custodial sentence, saying that “the defendant had provided the vast majority of cooperation that could be considered.” The government declared his cooperation substantially complete a year ago, so it looks like retaliation to change their sentencing recommendation because he refused to cooperate more since then.

On the other hand, at that December 18 hearing an infuriated Judge Emmet Sullivan made it very clear that he was not content with Flynn’s cooperation, and told him to go cooperate a whole lot more if he wanted to stay out of the pokey. That was the hearing when Judge Sullivan asked prosecutors if they’d considered charging Flynn with treason.

Looking into the depths of his soul and discovering he didn’t really mean it when he attested to making “materially false statements and omissions” in his FARA paperwork is probably not what His Honor had in mind. Even for a man who spent decades in the military.

And it’s a safe bet that Powell’s yammering about prosecutor Brandon Van Grack trying to “force Mr. Flynn to lie for the government’s benefit” is not going to make Judge Sullivan less mad.

But perhaps he will be persuaded by five pages detailing Michael Flynn’s selfless devotion to the country through his decades of service. Were you aware that General Flynn was in the military? And that has to count for something, right?

US v. Flynn, Defendant’s Supplemental Sentencing Memo [Crim. No. 1:17-cr-00232-1 (D.D.C. Jan 22, 2020)]

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

As we’ve discussed, 2019 was a “meh” year for hedge funds. Returns look pretty OK in isolation, but when compared with, say, an S&P 500 index fund, they look a good deal less OK. (Unless you are one of the very rare souls investing with a woman or person of color, in which case things look somewhat more OK.) All around the world, there’s really not much to celebrate for those not named Bill Ackman or Chris Hohn (and even he’s not celebrating as much as he could be, given the continuing demands of the former missus and also the impending extinction of the human race).

Yesterday we told you about the allegations swirling around Greenberg Traurig partner Joel Katz. The founder of the firm’s entertainment practice was accused by the former president and CEO of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Academy, Deborah Dugan, of sexual harassment. According to the complaint, Katz made overtures to Dugan, repeatedly calling her “baby” and making comments on her appearance at a work dinner.

Dugan also says that when she reported the “boys’ club” mentality of the Academy to HR she was put on administrative leave. The Academy takes the position that Dugan didn’t complain about the alleged harassment until there were allegations that Dugan created a “toxic and intolerable” work environment.

Now that you’ve gotten that quick refresher on the allegations at play, it’s time for Katz’s statement on the matter. His comments go on the offensive, calling the claims in the complaint “false” that he “categorically and emphatically” denies. The full statement, made by Katz’s attorney Howard Weitzman of Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump & Aldisert, is as follows:

“Ms. Dugan’s allegations of harassment and her description of a dinner at the steakhouse in the Ritz Carlton, Laguna Niguel are false and Mr. Katz categorically and emphatically denies her version of that evening,” says Weitzman. “This dinner meeting was 2½ months before Ms. Dugan started her job. Mr. Katz believed they had a productive and professional meeting in a restaurant where a number of members of the Board of Trustees of the Academy, and others, were dining. Ms. Dugan’s claims are made, for the first time, 7 months after this dinner took place. Mr. Katz will cooperate in any and all investigations or lawsuits by telling the absolute and whole truth. Hopefully Ms. Dugan will do the same.”

Given the strong feelings that seem to be on both sides, it’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out.

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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).

There was a day when the annual holiday bonus meant an “annual holiday bonus.” Firms would announce associate bonuses well in advance of the holidays and pay them out with ample time to help everyone have a festive holiday season. These announcements would often come out right before the firm holiday party so everyone could walk up and thank the partners for sharing the wealth during the happiest season of all.

This year, after Milbank got the bonuses rolling way earlier than usual, the Biglaw community mostly sat on their hands. Many firms followed suit in the following weeks, but some big players just never made any announcement at all.

We’re still waiting on some of those delinquent firms, but Goodwin Procter has lived up to its consistency. While it’s not a holiday bonus, the firm traditionally announces bonuses at the end of January and it’s done so again.

Bonuses are available to those meeting the 1,950-hour threshold during the firm’s fiscal year ending September 30, 2019. The scale, which should be familiar to everyone by now, is as follows:

Class of 2018 – $15,000
Class of 2017 – $25,000
Class of 2016 – $50,000
Class of 2015 – $65,000
Class of 2014 – $80,000
Class of 2013 – $90,000
Class of 2012 – $100,000

Bonuses will be paid tomorrow.

The firm also announced the salaries for the coming year which also follows the market:

Class of 2019 – $190,000
Class of 2018 – $200,000
Class of 2017 – $220,000
Class of 2016 – $255,000
Class of 2015 – $280,000
Class of 2014 – $305,000
Class of 2013 – $325,000

The firm doesn’t go that extra year to $340K that some firms do, but that’s most likely because it starts to make off grid arrangements with those more senior.

Congratulations to Goodwin’s team! Meanwhile, we’re still waiting on some of you holdout firms.

(Full text of the memo on the next page…)

Please help us help you when it comes to bonus news at other firms. As soon as your firm’s bonus memo comes out, please email it to us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus”) or text us (646-820-8477). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish.

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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.

When I first read that the legal communications and marketing firm Baretz+Brunelle had launched a NewLaw practice to advise law firms “on ways to thrive in the modern marketplace,” my reaction was, “Well, isn’t that what every legal PR firm should be doing for its clients?”

But in a telephone conversation this morning with the two principals of the new practice, legal industry veterans Brad Blickstein and Beatrice Seravello, I came to the realization that this is something more than a PR consultancy. Rather, it is a soup-to-nuts advisory group that will help law firms at every step, from evaluating opportunities for improvement, to building and implementing new tools and processes, and then helping the firms take that message to the market.

“We are heading to a place where clients and the marketplace are going to demand real changes in the way legal services are delivered,” Blickstein said. “There’s all this talk about legal innovation, but a lot of it is not real, and it’s hard to differentiate.”

“Differentiation is the big point here,” Seravello agreed. “What does our legal service delivery look like and how can we improve it.”

The practice will offer four core services:

• Intelligence, in the form of research, insights and analysis to help firms better understand the state of the market and trends in legal services delivery.
• Consulting, in the form of working with firms to identify opportunities for improving and modernizing their processes and services delivery.
• Development, by helping firms develop and implement new technologies and processes for everything from legal services delivery to back-end operations.
• Marketing, in the form of helping firms that develop “newlaw” solutions take that messaging to the market through communications and marketing initiatives.

Blickstein and Seravello are both veterans of the legal industry. Blickstein was cofounder in 1991 of Corporate Legal Times, the first independent publication focused exclusively on law departments (which later became Inside Counsel). His Blickstein Group, which he will continue to operate, provides legal-industry research and advisory services, including an annual law department operations survey, the largest survey of Fortune 1000 legal operations, and the new Legal AI Efficacy Report, the first in-depth analysis of the various AI legal technology products.

Seravello has had leadership roles at several AmLaw 100 firms, most recently as deputy executive director of Arnold & Porter following its merger with Kaye Scholer, and formerly as chief strategy officer and chief operating officer at Kaye Scholer. Earlier, she was chief strategy officer at Blank Rome and firmwide practice group director at Dechert, leading its practice management.

The two said that the focus of the practice will be law firms, but that they expect also to work with legal departments and alternative legal services providers.

They expect to work with firms at any stage of their transition — those that are just coming to terms with the need for change, those that have already begun the process but need help tweaking and refining, and those that are farther along and need help promoting what they’ve done.

Blickstein said the new practice group evolved out of a conversation he had nearly a year ago with Baretz+Brunelle cofounder Spencer Baretz about offering communications and marketing services targeted at so-called newlaw initiatives.

“But as we dug in, we realized it would be disingenuous to help firms market their not-very-effective or not-very-innovative ‘innovations,’” Blickstein said. “We realized that we could help them build new delivery-service models, and that’s when we started talking with Bea.”

“It’s no secret that the changes in the industry have created a great deal of anxiety for law firms, making some question their future,” Blickstein said in a press release announcing this new initiative.

My own observation is that “anxiety” is exactly the right word — that many firms are anxiously struggling to understand what clients want, what changes the firm should make, how to “sell” and implement change within the firm, and then how to communicate that outside the firm.

Providing that guidance as an end-to-end consultancy makes eminent sense. Maybe they should actually describe it as hand-holding.

Georgetown Law’s big selling point is its ease in booking high-profile political figures to speak at the school because of its proximity to the halls of power. Allowing students to rub elbows with powerful officials is exactly why a prospective student might turn down an offer from a Michigan or a Berkeley to head to D.C. for the only school in the history of the T14 to… not be there.

But when the administration finds itself holding the bag after at least 38 people including 6 children — and many who work with immigrants at the border believe the officials are understating these figures — end up dead on their watch, students, faculty, and generally decent human beings find themselves less interested in policy puffery. When Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan showed up at Georgetown for the Migration Policy Institute’s annual event to offer platitudes about the the border crackdown he oversees, protestors interrupted the speech naming the children confirmed to have died under his organization’s watch.

This made the Secretary sad, so he left.

Dean William Treanor’s office sent around an email informing Georgetown Law students that he’s considering changing law school policies to allow for the punishment of students, faculty, or staff who participate in protests:

As you may be aware, after the protest that disrupted Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan’s remarks in Hart Auditorium in fall 2019, Dean Treanor re-constituted the Law Center’s Speech and Expression Committee. This year’s committee comprises the students, senior staff and faculty who served on the committee in its two prior years of operation, 2017-2018 and 2018-2019.

Dean Treanor has asked the committee to provide by spring 2020 recommendations on the following questions: (1) Should there be any constraints on which outside speakers may be invited to speak on the Law Center campus and which Law Center community members may invite them?; (2) How should the school respond to disruptive protests during an event?; (3) How should the school respond after a disrupted event has concluded, including possible disciplinary or other administrative action against students, staff or faculty disruptors?

Sadly, we must report “emphasis in the original.” While this is merely an invitation to discuss these issues in committee, one wonders why ominously raise these “questions” at all when the correct answers are no clearly: (1) No; (2) If they’re not a security threat, nothing; and, (3) See the answer to question 2. In response to this email, students have launched an online petition and are organizing to have a presence at a listening session convened by Dean Treanor and the law school’s Speech and Expression Committee tomorrow at 11:30 a.m.

The problem is that the proximity to power that Georgetown enjoys is also why the Beltway cancer is metastasizing there. The culture of Washington, bred over decades of townhouse cocktail parties demands that policy be discussed in detached civility with little — and preferably zero — access granted to those impacted.

Secretary Kevin McAleenan was about to dump a spin job on the room about America still being a nation of immigrants, but one where he takes very seriously his obligation to guarantee that people come here the “right way” whatever that means in a world where they routinely deport people with valid visas. And he’d get away with this whitewashing draped in all the credibility of a non-partisan event at an elite law school. It’s not a matter of hearing “both sides” — he’d enjoy an asymmetric power dynamic blowing off any serious question about how his decisions (and those of his administration predecessors) have materially increased the risk of killing children by holding them in judicially recognized unsanitary conditions. People with a willingness to speak on behalf of the targets of government policies are tired of watching the pantomime.

This is why the snowflake conservatives at Georgetown Law want to have a nice safe space for their civil rights violators to talk. They realize the hack they worked out claiming the rhetoric of free speech to authorize one-way information dumps on “docile bulls**t receptacles.” People are starting to complain. “Free speech” isn’t about letting someone take a podium without criticism. If people in the audience don’t like the protest, then they can shout it down and the marketplace of ideas goes on. The fact that these protests are most often met with apathy from anyone not involved is telling.

The better question is how does a school avoid protests like these in the first place. That’s accomplished by building trust with the students and faculty that the school isn’t handing out credibility chits for public relations talking points. It’s built by creating a culture that makes students feel comfortable that the gatekeepers of these opportunities will take responsibility themselves to tenaciously grill speakers on the issues people care about. That’s not a difficult hurdle to clear, but it’s going to take a concerted effort on the part of the administration and the courage to take the lumps when high profile speakers turn the school down because they’d rather not face scrutiny.

Telling the school that you’re looking for input on how to punish people is not a good start.

Pro-immigrant protesters force Kevin McAleenan to scrap speech [CBS]

Earlier: Law School Snowflakes Demand Safe Space Over Jeff Sessions Talk

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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.