Category: News Feeds

As baby boomers continue to push past 65, firms are faced with the dilemma succinctly posed by Paul McCartney, “Will they still need [them], will they still feed [them], when [they’re] 64?” 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.

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.

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, my colleagues at Lateral Link are happy to share their 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. Andrew Wood graduated from UCLA, and has worked for Lateral Link for six years, as a data analyst and product director, generating market intelligence for the company, among other things. He is in avid mountaineer in his spare time.

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.

Baloney. That’s not true. If you’re screwing him—let’s be frank now, because I should not be wasting judicial resources on this kind of malarkey. If you have been screwing him for these years, there’s no question that you know where she works. That’s how affairs work.

— Middlesex (NJ) County Assignment Judge Alberto Rivas, in comments made from the bench while overseeing a dispute between a husband, wife, and the husband’s girlfriend when the girlfriend stated she didn’t know where the wife was employed. In this case, the girlfriend sought the return of pictures depicting her in various stages of undress that were allegedly in the wife’s possession. Rivas also told the girlfriend, “I will give you a piece of advice … The only person you should be sending naked pictures to are (sic) Hugh Hefner. He will pay you $100,000 for the use of them.”

Rivas later apologized after an ethics complaint was brought against him, saying, “I regret the comments I made during the proceeding. I felt the court was being manipulated, but I let my feelings about the case influence my language, tone and demeanor, all of which were inappropriate.”

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.

Last Friday, I went on All-In with Chris Hayes to discuss billionaire Stephen Ross decision’s to hold a fundraiser for racist President Donald Trump. On air, I said, “I have no problem shining the light back on the donors who fund this kind of racialized hate. I mean, I go further. I want pitchforks and torches outside this man’s house in the Hamptons. I’ve been to the Hamptons, it’s very nice. There’s no reason it has to be. There’s no reason he should be able to have a nice little party. There’s no reason why people shouldn’t be able to be outside of his house and making their voices peacefully understood.”

I stand by that, but I borked the structure a little. In my head, I wanted to go: “shine a light” –> “peacefully understood” –> “torches” –> “f**k the Hamptons.” The “torches” were supposed to parallel the “light” and the Hamptons bit was supposed to be the punchline. Same thoughts, same words, different order. These people who support Trump are racist assholes and I wanted to make the point that disagreeing with them peacefully doesn’t require disagreeing with them “nicely.” But structurally, the way it read in my mind versus the way it came out on air is the difference between getting screamed at by white people versus getting screamed at by white people with guns. The way I phrased it allowed the alt-right to take the first part and ignore the second part, with predictable results.

Of course, I’m not in the business of actually caring about these people, so on Sunday on Joy Reid, I said this:

You don’t communicate it to them — you beat them. Beat them. They are not a majority of this country. The majority of white people in this country are not a majority of the country. And all the people who are not fooled by this need to come together, go to the polls, go to the protests, do whatever you have to do. You do not negotiate with these people — you destroy them.

Yep, that’s just accurate. Words, sentiment, and structure all check out there. That came out exactly right.

Again, that drew predictable responses, including this fabulous devolution of headlines which brilliantly shows what white wing media is all about in this country:

• Fox went with: “MSNBC guest tells people not to ‘negotiate’ with Trump supporters: ‘You destroy them’” — which, okay, fine. Fox gonna Fox.
• Washington Examiner went with: “‘You destroy them’: MSNBC guest offers advice on dealing with white Trump supporters” — which, I mean, leaves out some context but whatever.
• Some rando site went with: “MSNBC Yakker: Destroy White People” — OH COME ON!

With headlines like that, my inbox exploded. People see the trolls and idiots on Twitter and Facebook. But those people are still somewhat aware that their comments are public. They are restrained, if you can believe it. The people who email me, well, they tend to think that their BS gets to remain private.

I’m not about to doxx anybody. Most of their email addresses are fake anyway, and even if they aren’t, a man’s gotta have a code. But I want you to see some of these people. They kind of explain WHY I do not believe Trump voters can be negotiated with. And also, you know, here are some LEADS in case I turn up dead. [WARNING: these emails contain strong language which I’m not going to bleep out.]

[Marge]

ACCORDING TO THESE —— YOU ARE A RADICAL TROUBLE-MAKING NIGGER.
SELF-RIGHTEOUS HYPOCRITICAL ASS-HOLE AND INGRATE.
YOU HATE WHITEY— MAKES YOU A RACIST PIECE OF SHIT.
NO SUCH THING AS A PEACEFUL PROTEST WHEN CARRYING TORCHES AND PITCHFORKS.
YOU THINK ALL TRUMP SUPPORTING WHITE PEOPLE SHOULD BE DESTROYED.
WHAT ABOUT TRUMP SUPPORTING NEGROES?
HARD TO BELIEVE YOU ATTENDED HARVARD.
BUT, THEN AGAIN.. SO DID BARRY & MOOCHY OBAMMY.
THEY WERE MADE TO TURN IN THEIR LICENSES TO PRACTICE LAW.. BECAUSE THEY WERE (ARE) CORRUPT AS HELL.
IF IT WERE NOT FOR AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, THEY NOR YOURSELF WOULD HAVE EVER ATTENDED HARVARD.
*YOU PEOPLE* MAKE A MOCKERY OF EVERYTHING YOU TOUCH.
WHITE PEOPLE BUILT THIS NATION AND YOU NIGS DESTROY IT.
ITS A FACT—- ANYTHING YOU CANNOT TEAR UP OR STEAL, YOU BACK UP AND SHIT ON.
I’M NOT REFERRING TO ALL BLACK PEOPLE—- JUST THE NIGGERS.
ALL NIGGERS ARE BLACK— NOT ALL BLACK FOLKS ARE NIGGERS.
YOU’RE A NIGGER.

She goes on like this for another page, like she’s going through her notes from the HMS Beagle, trying to explain the difference between a Galapagos n***** and good black people.

[Jerry]

Fox showed your nigger ass today and being you want to call ALL WHITES Racist we may as well start really being one . When your Nigger Daddy Obummer was in office we let him do his job ,but 4 some nigger afro punk that u are u think the World is racist id we vote Trump . All u did was make me and my family friends and 1,000,000 millions of other deplorables make sure we get out and vote . 68 million racists didn’t vote Trump in ,69 million did ! In 2020 your fat ass nigger afro punk faggitt face with the girls name will find out just how racist we can be .

Ahh, the classic, “I’m not racist but you made me racist you dumb n*****” routine. I’ve got about 10 versions of this story this week. But I like this one because it also gets the math wrong.

[Mike]

You ASSHOLES are so fucking stupid how about all illegal things Clinton and nigger boy Obama did TRUMP is making America great again FUCK YOU CUNTS

At some point Mike realized he didn’t say anything specific to me, so he emailed again:

Eli — He is one stupid nigger

I mean, I usually get all my insults out in one email, so who is the dumbass now?

[UCONN]

I hate kikes and niggers and i will do everything i can at all times to vote ha ha for them being killed. Pig and nigga can both be wiped dead off the planet, nigger

Sometimes people can’t decide if I’m black or Jewish, but this man made sure to cover all his bases. What’s troubling is that this guy emailed me with a Uconn.edu address. I checked it, and it’s fake, so I can’t do anything. But, code aside, when there are people like this on campus I feel I have a duty to report it to the proper campus authorities.

I’ll end with “Patty”…

Mr. Mystal has stated that Trump supporters should be destroyed? Are you kidding me? Send to me your telephone number. Right now!

A solid 30 percent of my hate mail includes people who demand that I share my phone number or home address with them, so that they can continue to yell at me. Which is WILD, when you think about it. Like, who are these people who think I’m going to say, “You know, I should really call them up and engage them in conversation?” Who the hell do they think they’re emailing, Joe Biden? The bald HUBRIS of mediocre whiteness never ceases to amaze me.

In any event, I want people to take away two themes from this:

1. When you support white wing media and Republican elected officials, THESE are the people whose side you’ve chosen to be on. For years, for decades, Republicans have acted like their their so-called “limited government” policies could be detached from the bigotry and misogyny of their supporters. Trump has put the lie to that theory. If Trump or Fox or the Republican Party had any shred of decency, a quick look at the people who are “on their side” would make them RE-EVALUATE their entire political platform, as well as their life choices. Instead, Republicans continue to act like you can support “tax cuts” and “conservative justices,” but not “WHITE PEOPLE BUILT THIS NATION AND YOU NIGS DESTROY IT.” It doesn’t work that way. It’s never worked that way. The people who continue to support Republicans are no longer merely ignorant about the true “base” of their party, they’re willfully malicious.

2. Fox writing a story about me and then these nut jobs popping up in my inbox is not a bug, but an actual feature of their coverage. The goal of their coverage is to inspire the crazies, who will then make me uncomfortable, in hopes that me and people who believe what I believe will shut up or self-censor.

And it works, better than you might think! I haven’t written a lot this week. It’s a little hard to focus when you open your work inbox and you have to spend a morning going through “true threat analysis.” It sends you down a hole and, even when you come out clean on the other side, the journey still takes hours that could have been spent doing something productive. And I’m more used to this than most (thanks, former ATL commenters). Most of this stuff bounces right up off me, but Fox knows and Breitbart knows that not all of it will. That’s the point. It’s a “chilling effect,” not a liquid nitrogen freeze ray.

So you can see why I’m somewhat resistant to the notion that these people, these Trump supporting assholes, are the ones who need to be “won back,” in order to defeat Trump. You can see why my willingness to “negotiate” with these people is nil. You can see why I believe in fighting fire with fire instead of some kind of triangulated appeasement strategy. F**k these people. F**k ’em right in their f**king ear.

I’m going to keep saying that. I’m going to keep kicking hornet’s nests. Not because I’m immune to stings, but because these hornets need to get the hell off my lawn.

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

This follows violent clashes between police and Movement for Democratic Change supporters in Harare on Friday.

Police fired teargas and violently removed the large group gathered in the capital.

The march was called off after the courts denied the MDC’s application to overturn a ban on the demonstration.

“It’s panic and more panic from the part of the regime that’s evident. They’re just afraid of the situation running out of control,” said Mandaza.

“You can see negative implications of such actions as when it happened in August last year and January this year. The regime finds itself unable to restrain itself in the face of growing opposition,” he said.

Friday’s demonstrations would have been the first in a series of MDC-planned rallies.

The party’s accusing the government of corruption and economic mismanagement.

One political analyst believes the Zimbabwe government is panicking. #Zimbabwe #TheLead Courtesy #DStv403 pic.twitter.com/JcDguUagSj

— eNCA (@eNCA) August 16, 2019

By 1500 hours on 16 August 2019,  Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR) had attended to 128 arrests. Some of the arrests were executed in a dragnet manner. A total of 12 people have been treated by medical doctors following assaults and torture at the hands of the police.  This number is expected to increase as more reports are received.

It is clear from eye-witness accounts and video footage that the protestors gathered at Africa Unity Square were peaceful, posed no threat to people or property. In fact, our monitors on the ground witnessed the crowd sitting on the ground when the police suddenly and menacingly advanced towards the protestors mainly targeting women.  One woman was reportedly left unconscious following the attack.  Several groups of people were rounded up at Corner Second Street and Samora  Machel and at Parliament Building in the Harare Central Business District. Thereat, they were thoroughly beaten while already under arrest and not attempting to escape. Other reports were received from Chitungwiza and Norton. The total number of victims is still to be ascertained.

The brutal attacks on protestors is in clear violation of the Public Order and Security Act (POSA) which provides for a clear procedure of dispersing illegal gatherings. We expect law enforcement agents to follow provisions of the laws that they are supposed to enforce. The Constitution states that the police, as part of the security sector, must not violate fundamental rights or freedoms of any person. The police also have a constitutional obligation  to uphold provisions of the Constitution, which includes fundamental freedoms and human rights. In particular, section 53 that guarantees freedom from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. We are concerned that the government continues to brutalise innocent citizens with impunity.

We call upon the relevant government departments of Zimbabwe to:

• investigate these cases of torture, cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment and make perpetrators accountable;
• Respect the pre-trial rights of all persons arrested in a series of dragnet arrests around the city to be respected as provided in section 50 of the Constitution.

As we continue to monitor the situation, we urge the international community to condemn the ongoing violations and call on the SADC leaders currently meeting in Tanzania to remind the government of Zimbabwe to respect the fundamental rights of the people to peaceful assembly and association, freedom from torture and the freedom to demonstrate and petition.

Post published in: Featured

Scores of people gathered in the capital’s Africa Unity Square to demonstrate against the country’s worsening economy in defiance of the ban, which was upheld by a court on Friday.

Supporters of Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) sang songs condemning police brutality as officers fired teargas to disperse them.

Police also cornered a group of protesters and beat them with batons, with one women carried into a Red Cross ambulance.

“This is worse than during colonial times,” said a man who declined to be identified.

“We aren’t armed but the police just beat us while we were sitting on the street,” he told AFP.

Dozens of police and three water cannons were involved in running street battles with protesters in the square, which overlooks the country’s parliament and is where thousands gathered in November 2017 calling for Robert Mugabe to step down during a military-led coup.

Friday’s protests went ahead after opposition plans for large-scale marches were banned by police late on Thursday.

An MDC attempt to challenge the ban in court was then rejected.

“The court has said the demonstration should be off,” MDC spokesman Nkululeko Sibanda told AFP.

The party’s vice president Tendai Biti told reporters outside the high court that “we differ respectfully with the ruling”.

“The fascist regime has denied the right for Zimbabweans to demonstrate,” said Biti.

“There is no difference between Mnangagwa and Mugabe. We jumped from the frying pan into the fire after the November coup,” Biti told reporters outside the court.

Five million face ‘starvation

Emmerson Mnangagwa took over as president from long-time autocrat Mugabe and went on to win the disputed July 2018 elections, vowing to revive Zimbabwe’s economy.

But Zimbabweans say things have gone from bad to worse, with people facing shortages of basic goods and skyrocketing prices.

Around five million people – almost a third of the country’s 16 million population – are in need of aid and at least half of them are on the cusp of “starvation”, the World Food Programme (WFP) said this month.

Armed police had put up barricades across around the city early on Friday in a bid to deter protesters, turning back cars on streets leading to the MDC’s party headquarters.

Long queues of traffic formed as the police searched cars and commuter buses for weapons. Riot police also searched pedestrians.

At least six opposition and rights activists were abducted and tortured by unidentified assailants in the days leading up to the protest, according to the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, a coalition of 21 human rights groups.

Friday’s protests are the first since rallies in January against Mnangagwa’s decision to hike fuel prices that ended in deadly clashes with troops.

At least 17 people were killed and scores wounded after the army used force, including live ammunition, to end the demonstrations.

Post published in: Featured

In the aftermath of the last spate of deadly mass shootings, there was a little flutter among conservatives that maybe this is one of those times where they may need to throw the tiniest of common sense bones to the Democrats. With an assault weapons ban garnering 67 percent approval in Fox News polls, conservatives started to coalesce around the idea of “red flag” laws that would stymie certain at-risk individuals from purchasing an arsenal. The National Review talked about how it was the “right” idea and congressional sources started leaking that the policy would have bipartisan support. It is, literally, the least they could do after their thoughts and prayers failed to pan out.

Folks who’ve been down this road before could see it was coming. It was all a ruse to keep people occupied until Trump could leak that he wants to buy Greenland — probably because he doesn’t understand maps and actually thinks it’s bigger than Africa — and get everyone distracted from the largely avoidable crises that seem to strike every couple of weeks now. The media cycle approved grieving period behind us, right-wing objections to these laws are popping up everywhere declaring it unconstitutional to put any regulations upon gun ownership — even if that restriction is telling a psychopath with a published manifesto that they may not be right for an AR-15.

For anyone still clinging to the idea that “strict construction” or “textualism” are consistent judicial philosophies and not mealy-mouthed fig leaves for “the contemporary policy goals of the Republican Party” the violent erasure of “well-regulated” from the very text of the Second Amendment is the opening and closing argument against that fairy tale. The Originalists fare no better with the Federalist Papers making clear that the original public meaning of the right to bear arms was founded in states’ rights — the ability of states to maintain part-time, organized fighting forces supplied by citizens. With a straight face conservative judges have written that the original meaning of the Second Amendment could only be divined by ignoring every contemporaneous source and using clippings from almost a century after the fact. Meanwhile, none other than George Washington led an army while sitting as the president to go open a can of whoop-ass on people who thought they could stockpile weapons outside of the state militia system (they gave up instantly). Federalist 29 explicitly argues that these militias would be called together by the states to train “once or twice in the course of a year.” Hardly descriptions of an original public meaning that would embrace the status quo.

The problem with red flag laws and gun regulations generally is that they suffer from an effort to be entirely reasonable with an entirely unreasonable corporate lobby. Any piecemeal reform will get crushed under the decades of disingenuous gobbledygook that the Federalist Society’s judges have strung together. The only hope for breaking the logjam is a state to kick the wobbly chair holding up the current framework of gun legislation.

Some state should make it mandatory to join the National Guard — or an auxiliary to the Guard that would place it outside of federal activation if one believes that’s a sticking point — to possess a firearm.

It’s a well-regulated militia. The state setting red flag regulations or restrictions on what kind of guns are appropriate for the militia’s tasks would be entirely reasonable within the context of maintaining a functional militia. The armed forces can kick people out for committing crimes or having a mental illness that renders them a danger to the mission — so could this militia.

Those who want to own guns but who aren’t able to perform the martial tasks of a fighting force can be given administrative work. National Guard forces around the country need more people to deal with natural disasters and with an influx of bodies could see its mission expanded to other charitable causes. Whenever infrastructure becomes a project instead of a talking point, this new militia

It’s wild that this isn’t a more popular challenge to the current firearm regulation regime. It’s textual and originalist and gun supporters who object could, rightly, be called cowards for refusing to serve. Yet it’s only cropped up as a suggestion sporadically.

To any Democratic Party lawmaker sitting in a unified state government, draft this bill immediately. If Republicans can waste state resources on heartbeat bans just to go through the motions of ultimately futile constitutional litigation, why shouldn’t Democrats embrace litigation where they have the benefit of having the better of the textual argument? Especially with the NRA in potentially dire financial straits.

If John Roberts is correct that the greatest threat to his philosophical mission is the public perceiving the judiciary as merely partisan, force him to make more boldly partisan decisions. Letting him shield the Court by tossing reformist policies on technicalities and tenuous distinguishing logic is a losing game — make him say up is down and that text doesn’t mean text.

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.

LeClairRyan may have announced they’re closing their doors come August 30th, but that won’t guarantee an end to their legal troubles, especially not when new lawsuits keep popping up. The latest legal trouble is a suit filed August 9th by Capital Credits Group, which operates as the Enterprise Zone Company, alleging the firm failed to pay $97,886 in fees.

LeClairRyan had allegedly entered into a consulting agreement with Enterprise Zone Company whereby they’d pay the tax consultants for additional tax credits identified, as reported by Big Law Business:

According to the complaint, LeClairRyan entered into a tax consulting agreement with The Enterprise Zone Company in 2013, authorizing the consultant to identify and obtain tax benefits not claimed with the IRS and the State of California Franchise Tax Board.

LeClairRyan would pay the company 20% of the total amount of tax credits identified and provide it with copies of their ‘Enterprise Zone Deduction and Credit Summary’ for all of the years when tax credits were finalized, the complaint said.

According to the complaint, $416,026 in tax credits were identified for the Los Angeles office and an additional $73,407 for the San Francisco office, for a total of $97,886 in fees. Plaintiff alleges only a small fraction of the total owed has been paid thus far.

The firm has not yet made a comment about the lawsuit.

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).