Category: News Feeds

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Molly Daniel-Springs to our pages.

If you had told my first-year law school self that I would be writing an article about how to maintain/improve your mental health while parenting two toddlers and running a solo practice, I would have been all, not in this life. Almost 10 years later, here we are. I hope these tips help you on your journey.

Change your mindset. What is it with the insane expectations on working moms? A few days ago, I read a post on Facebook by Sarah Friedberg (the post went viral- look it up) that dropped so many truth bombs I found myself nodding and mmmhm-ing all over the place. Then I had my husband read it because he must know women are so superior. The gist of her post is that society expects us to be the perfect mothers, ideal workers, and doting wives. We are supposed to run the household, organize the social calendar, plan the vacations, handle the doctors’ appointments, participate in school functions [insert my feeling of total dread on this one], meal prep, make sure the animals don’t die of neglect, plan the birthday parties, make sure the kids are in swim lessons, do craft projects with them, buy their clothes and wash them, make sure they’re using their manners, be Santa and the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy, and keep the house clean and tidy, just to name a few. Oh, and maintain a career. And be a good human. Um… wut?

And the reality for many of us is that we have bought into this outrageous standard and take pride in “accomplishing” all of this — at the expense of our own well-being. That requires re-training. After trying to live up to these expectations for a couple of years, in early 2018, I decided to choose another path and strive for being a just okay mom, worker, and wife. I kid, I kid. But, really, I try to set realistic expectations for myself. In the same token, I try not to allow myself to feel guilty for doing so. Mom guilt is no joke and people have no problem laying it on thick.

Promote partnership. My husband and I both work. For most in the same position, the majority of the child care and “household” responsibilities still fall on us moms. One way I have found to combat this is to make to-do lists. They’re not for my husband; they’re for both of us. Here are a few things that were on my recent list: return software (J), lay pine straw, fix wheel barrel tire, pressure wash (J). My husband (Joseph) knows that everything with a (J) beside it is for him to do. Yes, I totally fixed that wheel barrel tire, like a boss. I put things on the list that, two years ago, I would have undoubtedly handled (think: schedule dentist, call plumber). Because not all of the household tasks, like returning an item, need to be my responsibility. I am in a partnership with my spouse, and these tasks should fall on us equally.

Sometimes, the best way for your partner to realize how much you actually do is to take a vacation sans kids and spouse (and work). I feel like my husband is well above-average in sharing the housework and the child care responsibilities (shout out to you, stud), but he still benefited from seeing all the things that did not get done while I was gone on a girls’ trip for a long weekend last year. If you’re wondering to yourself because I know all of you are, but really though, how did he survive? I’ll tell you. He doesn’t have as hard of a time as I used to in calling for help. It’s engrained in many of us that we can handle it because we are expected to handle it. Dads don’t have that problem. Neither should you.

Enlist help. Whether it’s a nanny, help from family, or putting your kids in daycare, having help with the kids is, for me, the number one stress reducer. We also have trusted family members who live nearby and help tremendously. And recently, I found a “mommy’s helper” who comes twice a month and assists in working down the list of household things that need to get done. It takes a village. Embrace yours.

Girls’ night. As a solo practitioner, networking is key (and as I write this article, I am reminded that I need to take networking off the backburner). As a mom, girls’ night is hashtag critical. Once a month, on average, we plan a dinner out. They’re my therapy and my tribe.

You time. My former boss and current mentor used to stress the importance of taking “you” time. Never has that advice been as valuable as it is now. When I need to step away for a moment because opposing counsel filed a frivolous motion or one of my toddlers lost her mind because I “didn’t put her potty seat on right,” I do just that. Go for a facial, run an errand, walk around the antique mall, scroll through Facebook marketplace. Don’t judge me.

In closing and as a last tip, give yourself and others grace. We’re not going to win every case or get it right every time, and we’re going to make mistakes in parenting. We’re all just trying to figure this out while maintaining enough wherewithal to show up for court without bodily fluids on our blazers.

Earlier: Mothers At Law: Achieving Meaningful Success In The Legal Profession

Molly Daniel-Springs is the owner of Springs Law Firm, a personal injury and social security disability firm in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is married with two toddlers and enjoys gardening, talking politics, and using sarcasm whenever possible.

On February 21, 1967, during a test procedure for Apollo 1, a fire occurred in the crew cabin. Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee were killed in the accident. The crew could not be rescued, because the hatch door could not be opened from the outside by rescuers.

Despite America’s “space race” against the Soviet Union, the manned space program was halted from 20 months to investigate and address the causes of the accident.

In the public sector, when your technology kills people, you take it off the line and fix the problem before you put people in harm’s way.

The private sector is a little different.

This February, according to a lawsuit, Omar Awan was driving a Model S Tesla when he lost control and careened off the road. A fire ignited in the car. A crowd gathered and a police officer came while he was burning. But, according to the family, they couldn’t help because they could not open the car’s “auto-present” doors.

Backed by a strong earnings report, Tesla stocks are soaring today, up near $300/share.

From the Washington Post:

Awan’s death is one in a string of recent incidents that have been blamed on Tesla’s innovative technology. A lawsuit stemming from a May 2018 crash that killed two teens also blamed a battery fire for at least one of the deaths. ([Awan’s family attorney Stuart Grossman] represents the car’s third passenger, who survived the accident after being thrown from the vehicle.)

In April, surveillance footage from a Shanghai parking garage showed smoke billowing from a Model S moments before the car burst into flames. The widely shared video prompted Tesla to open an internal investigation.

Several other suits have attributed deaths to Tesla’s “Autopilot” system, an automatic driver-assistance feature.

“There are a number of these cases,” Grossman said. “What the hell is going on?”

After the Awan crash, Tesla did not halt production for 20 months. Instead:

Shortly after the February crash, a Tesla spokeswoman told the Florida Sun-Sentinel that “We are deeply saddened by this accident” but that “Tesla vehicles are engineered to be the safest cars in the world and Tesla drivers have driven more than 10 billion miles to date.”

Tort law is here for this. Tort law is the only thing that is here for this. You can make your jokes about tort lawyers or seemingly frivolous lawsuits — Lord knows I have. But at the end of the day, a private company like Tesla is never going to run its business with the kind of restraint as an agency like NASA, no matter how much the owner talks about going to space.

Unless the tort lawyers make them.

A man died in a burning Tesla because its futuristic doors wouldn’t open, lawsuit alleges [Washington Post]

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.

I have written a number of times here about the innovative LawX lab at BYU Law, in which students use design thinking to tackle issues in access to justice. The lab has already produced two notable applications: SoloSuit, an award-winning online tool to help self-represented people who have been sued for debt, and Hello Landlord, an online tenant-landlord communication tool designed to reduce evictions.

Now, the LawX lab is taking on the project of using design thinking to simplify the asylum process. But this time, the lab is joining forces on the project with the technology law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati and SixFifty, the technology subsidiary it launched earlier this year.

“We established LawX to teach students design thinking in tackling pressing access-to-justice issues, and we are honored to work on this project with Wilson Sonsini and SixFifty,” said Gordon Smith, dean of BYU Law. “Asylum fits nicely with the work BYU Law is already doing on immigration.”

BYU Law students enrolled in the LawX winter 2020 semester will use a design-thinking approach to build on the lessons learned from the two previous LawX projects. SixFifty will provide technical support for the project.

As in the past, the lab will be taught by Kimball D. Parker, who is the director of LawX and also the president of SixFifty. This year, he will be joined in teaching the lab by Marie Kulbeth, COO and general counsel at SixFifty, who is now also co-director of the lab. Kulbeth formerly worked at BYU Law as assistant dean of communications and marketing and is a graduate of the school.

The law school has already been regularly involved in asylum issues. Several times a year, faculty and students volunteer at the South Texas Family Detention Center in Dilley, Texas – the largest detention center in the country – to assist with credible-fear interviews for women seeking asylum. Kulbeth is among those who have volunteered there.

In addition, working in partnership with Deseret Industries, BYU Law offers direct representation on immigration law and other matters to individuals in the Utah Valley through its Community Legal Clinic.

“With such a daunting project as asylum, we are thrilled to collaborate with Wilson Sonsini, one of the best law firms in the world, to design this year’s solution,” said Parker. “We are confident that together we can do something very meaningful for a class of very vulnerable people.”

RELATED: LawNext Episode 32: Kimball Parker, Head of Wilson Sonsini’s New Tech Subsidiary SixFifty.

Bar exam results are out. You didn’t make it. Panic and grief sets in. Over the coming days and weeks, you will read about how many famous people like Hillary Clinton and John F. Kennedy, Jr., failed the bar exam, but this will not make you feel any better.

The only thing that will change your feelings will be to begin working on a plan of attack for the next time you take the exam. What was your strategy last time? What should you do differently this go around? Where will you find the answers?

We at Marino Bar Review have worked with thousands of students who have failed the bar exam. Some of them were very high profile people. We guided them to success on the bar exam by helping them follow these three simple steps:

1) Keep in mind that the bar exam does not test subject areas. People spend entire careers trying to master legal subject areas like Evidence or Constitutional Law. It is a fool’s errand to believe you could do so over the course of a couple of months. Instead, the bar exam tests rules. You do not need to know the entirety of Torts law; you just need to know the main 25 or so rules tested.

The last time you studied you spent weeks or even months skimming the surface of the law. But the exam isn’t nearly as big as it seems, and by focusing on what you study, you will have sufficient knowledge of the rules that are most frequently tested to pass the bar exam.

2) Don’t neglect any section of the bar exam. On the UBE, the essay section and the MBE section are each worth an equal number of points. While multiple choice is a large part of the bar exam, half of the exam is written and subjectively scored. Not all answers are equal and simply putting the correct answer on the page may not score you maximum points if you don’t know how to properly word it. Furthermore, it’s not as simple as the IRAC method you were taught in law school and led to believe was the best way to write by your previous bar review course. In fact, with the proper approach, you can score points even if you don’t know the rule being tested.

3) Don’t be afraid to get help. You need to know what went wrong on your last bar exam and your score report can give you a good amount of information about this. Everyone thinks that they just needed to study a little more or focus on the MBE, but the reality is that each exam taker’s scores and problems are unique. Just because your uncle, who took the bar exam many years ago, is convinced that you probably failed because you’re not good at answering multiple choice questions, does not mean this is actually the reason you were not successful. You can submit your score report to us here or email it to us at info@marinolegal.com and we will be happy to give you a completely free score evaluation and guidance on what went wrong and what you can do to improve your score for the next exam. We really know what we’re talking about!

Remember, the bar exam is not a referendum on your intelligence, nor is it an impossible hurdle. It is a hazing ritual that all future lawyers must go through. However, you need to approach studying for the exam the correct way or you will struggle to pass.

As always, if you have any questions about the bar exam or need help knowing where to start (or restart) your studying, please do not hesitate to reach out to us.

We wish you good luck!

I don’t think there are words to actually describe the joy and relief I feel to know that I am his and he is mine and we will actually enjoy a long life together. We’re ready for the “in health.”

— Lauren O’Malley, a 2017 graduate of Georgetown Law, commenting on her wedding this past weekend to Jake Woodward, one of her law school classmates. During their third year of law school, O’Malley was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. After she had her tumor removed, she was declared cancer free and able to graduate on time. The couple got engaged in October 2017, and about one year later, Woodward was diagnosed with a thymoma tumor in his chest. The tumor was removed and while he was also declared cancer free, he was left so weak he’s been hospitalized several times since. “One silver lining of this is we know we can count on each other. We know we’re not going to run away,” Woodward said. “We’re all in on this.”

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.

Trick or treat?! Halloween is next Thursday, but let’s face it, most people in the legal community — especially the law students — are planning a weekend full of debauchery in their favorite witty (or incredibly naughty) costumes.

For the tenth year in a row, we here at Above the Law are soliciting legally themed costumes for our annual Halloween contest. We’re continually impressed with how creative lawyers and law students can be when they take their noses out of their books.

Have you got what it takes to top the winners of years past? We hope so!

Here are the winning looks from the past few years of the contest: Nefarious RBG (2015), the Donald J. Trump College of Law (2016), The Bluebook (2017), and Brett Kavanaugh’s calendar and his beer (2018).

Please email us your pictures and then we’ll vote on the winner of our annual competition. We’re all looking forward to judging you!

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.

Today, corporations are under unprecedented scrutiny.  Companies are being investigated not only by federal, state, and foreign government agencies, but also by private plaintiffs in a wide variety of litigations that place corporate conduct under a microscope.  In today’s increasingly intricate international legal and regulatory environment, investigations are more crucial — and complicated — than ever. We here at Above the Law partnered with our friends at H5 to take a deeper dive into the investigations space in order to better understand this intricate landscape. We took an in-depth look at the principal actors and their perception of trends, differences among categories of investigations — such as due diligence, cybersecurity, employee/workplace, and regulatory matters — and how those might vary within industries and across companies of different sizes.

In order to gain a better understanding of the investigations space, we fielded a survey targeting those in all roles and at all stages of investigatory process. We heard from those involved with the management and strategy of investigations, those whose responsibility it is to select and manage vendors and resources, and those who respond to investigations — and asked them to share their experiences on everything from how technological tools are leveraged to how they see the field changing in coming years. 

Download the report to read about the insights they shared and the future they see coming!

A disturbing aspect of an  elder law and trusts and estates practice is the discovery of elder abuse. According to the National Institute on Aging, hundreds of thousands of adults over the age of 60 are abused, neglected, or financially exploited each year. Elder abuse includes physical, emotional, and sexual abuse in addition to neglect and abandonment.  The perpetrators are often relatives or friends who have influence over the individual who may be vulnerable due to illness, disability, or age. Sometimes the abuse occurs at the hands of caregivers, whether in the home or in a facility.

New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has introduced bipartisan legislation to help protect the elderly and infirmed by improving health care worker hiring practices in long-term care and medical facilities. Too often the elderly and infirmed are harmed as a result of the individuals working in the very facilities that are charged with helping rehabilitate them.

The Promote Responsible Oversight and Targeted Employee Background Check Transparency for Seniors Act, also known as “PROTECTS,” is an act that would expand access to the National Practitioner Data Bank for Medicare and Medicaid providers to conduct background checks on employees. Specifically, PROTECTS would include Medicaid/Medicare-certified skilled nursing facilities, home health agencies, hospice programs, and pharmacies.

The Act has been endorsed by the American Health Care Association and the National Association for Home Care & Hospice. The aforesaid Data Bank would reveal malpractice for potential employees and assist facility administrators in their hiring and consequently affect the standards of care.

As an attorney who regularly practices with the elderly population, I visit a lot of nursing homes. As a guardianship practitioner, I interact regularly with many professionals servicing the elderly such as nursing home administrators and geriatric care managers. Personally, I have spent many days and nights at hospitals and rehabilitation and nursing facilities for my own parents. As is the case with one’s health care, it is imperative that you learn to advocate for your needs. The problem is that those in facilities are often too sick or too intimidated to speak up for themselves. For those lucky enough to have involved friends and family, the risk of being abused or mistreated is lessened by the mere fact that they have someone present to speak for them. Additionally, would-be predators are likely aware of the patients who receive visitors and who have involved family members.

Elder abuse, however, does not just occur in facilities. It also occurs in the home. Relatives and close friends often gain access to bank books and financial accounts and take advantage of a vulnerable person’s assets. Financial scams abound wherein the elderly are lured into investing in businesses that do not exist or do not provide that which they promise. Unfair annuities and reverse mortgages are pitched at lunch events targeted toward senior citizens, eager to connect with someone or something. Savings are often divested and the reporting of these actions is low.

Sometimes the abuse is at the hands of home health aides who insist on or help themselves to gifts as a result of their “care” of the patient. In many cases, the abuse extends beyond the patient’s life, when last wills and testaments are revealed naming health care aides or others as beneficiaries, much to the surprise of family members.

New York’s PROTECTS Act is a good step towards increasing protections for the elderly and long-term care patients. Other states have made similar endeavors. From a macro perspective, it is imperative that we keep the elderly a part of our greater communities. They fall prey to abuse when they are isolated. There are many seniors who do not interact with anyone outside of their residence. Similarly, there are many who do not receive any visitors when residing in a facility. Keeping seniors a part of our society, along with proactive legislation to protect against predators who abuse in a myriad of ways, is just a start to reducing the rate of elder abuse in our country.

Cori A. Robinson is a solo practitioner having founded Cori A. Robinson PLLC, a New York and New Jersey law firm, in 2017. For more than a decade Cori has focused her law practice on trusts and estates and elder law including estate and Medicaid planning, probate and administration, estate litigation, and guardianships. She can be reached at cori@robinsonestatelaw.com. 

She did it, you guys.

UPenn Law’s Amy Wax has successfully demonstrated yet again that trading in academic credentials for easily debunked innuendo can pay off if you’re willing to put your faith in the lowest common denominator and the feckless cowardice of university officials.

As a truly spooky Halloween event, Berkeley Law’s Public Law and Policy Program (co-sponsored by the Federalist Society and the Pacific Research Institute) will have UPenn professor Amy Wax give a spiel at an event that’s NOW titled “A Conversation with Amy Wax and Mickey Kaus,” marking a rare opportunity for superficial hot-take artist Kaus to be the reasonable one in the room.

But that’s not what the event was always called. No, this ostensibly academic endeavor was at one point billed as “Nationalism, Identity, and Immigration: Considerations for the Academy and the Nation.” Wax now gets to slap the name of another prestigious academic institution onto her bio — an honor befitting a woman who recently graduated from just making stuff up to misconstruing Wikipedia pages.

More distastefully — if possible — this event is being run as a fundraiser with a $60/head admission charge. This means people are actually expected to spend good money to listen to Wax discuss immigration policy when they could easily just ask Cooter to spit out a missive through his meth-depleted teeth.

With Wax and Kaus on the same stage, I can save everyone some time and preview the festivities:

Wax: America is better off without people who aren’t from Northern European stock. That’s not a racist statement, I’m just saying those people are dirty and dumb.
Kaus: As a proud liberal… I totally agree with all of that and it’s a shame that the Dumbocrats don’t understand that. Which is something I can say because I’m totally a liberal.
*Repeat ad nauseam*

This isn’t much of a surprise from a group that’s previously hosted Heather Mac Donald, author of The Diversity Delusion, a book that unabashedly argues that the academy is better off when it’s populated by exclusively by white men. Berkeley’s just sitting by as its name serves as an aegis for gussied-up, whitewashed white supremacy. It’s long past time to reserve the term “white supremacy” for violent overt racists. Any ideology positing that white people or culture are supreme — and remember Amy Wax doesn’t “shrink from the word, ‘superior’” — is quite literally white supremacy and deserves to not fly under the radar just because it’s gussied itself up for the cameras. Wax is getting cited by Stormfront. At a certain point, what your work justifies matters.

And no doubt the response of the school’s defenders will again be that the academy thrives on different and controversial viewpoints and that they respect the views of these affiliated groups even if they don’t agree. Which is a fine answer in theory, but also one that Wax and her cronies have thoroughly hacked for their own gain. The academy is about allowing controversial professors to post their empirical research and expose themselves to the slings and arrows of their colleagues’ research to build upon human knowledge. It’s not about letting people pop off about MS-13 conspiracy theories. Drawing that line is uncomfortable for academics. They want to say, “Who are we to say when something isn’t academic freedom?”

It’s a cop-out that everyone knows is coming and it’s a cop-out that Amy Wax has built her career upon.

Earlier: Law School Professor Amy Wax Cites Wikipedia And We Need To Stop Pretending Tenure Was Made For This
Amy Wax’s Racist Remarks Force Penn Law School To Let Her Take A Paid Vacation
T14 Law Professor Goes To White Nationalism Conference And Says White Nationalist Things And Somehow Still Has A Job
Academia Means Never Having To Say, ‘I Got Fired’
T14 Law Professor Goes To White Nationalism Conference And Says White Nationalist Things And Somehow Still Has A Job
Professor Amy Wax And The Bell Curve
Law Professors Say White ’50s Culture Is Superior, Other Racist Stuff
Penn Law School Prof Amy Wax Stumbles Into A Truth… Before Delving Back Into Vile Conspiracy Theories
Amy Wax Relieved Of Her 1L Teaching Duties After Bald-Faced Lying About Black Students
Professor Declares Black Students ‘Rarely’ Graduate In The Top Half Of Law School Class
Dog Whistling ‘Bourgeois Values’ Op-Ed Gets Thorough Takedown From Other Law Professors
Law Students Seek To Ban Professor From Teaching 1Ls
Law School Professor Says Dr. Ford ‘Should Have Held Her Tongue’ In Latest Embarrassment To Her School

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.