Category: News Feeds

In 2014, I wrote about how Haben Girma, a deafblind lawyer, used technology to practice law and advocate for the rights of the disabled. Back then, Haben, a Harvard Law graduate, had already been named a White House “Champion of Change” and was serving as a Skadden Fellowship Attorney at Disability Rights Advocates (DRA).

Since then, as I learned from her just-published memoir, Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, she’s had continued success with her efforts to advocate for the disabled, all the while accomplishing in the span of just a few years what many of us can only hope to tackle in a lifetime.

For starters, she was part of the DRA legal team that prevailed in its efforts to force Scribd, the eBook company that provides online access to millions of digital titles, to comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act. The United States District Court for the District of Vermont concluded that “because Scribd’s website and apps are not programmed to be accessible through [screen reader] software, Scribd is denying blind persons access to all of the services, privileges, advantages, and accommodations that Scribd offers and is excluding them from accessing information critical to their education, employment, and community integration.”

In her memoir, you also learn that since that victory, she’s: 1) spoken at the White House and met President Obama during the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the ADA, 2) received the Helen Keller Achievement Award, 3) made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and 4) been honored by President Bill Clinton, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Chancellor Angela Merkel.

And those experiences just scratch the surface of what you’ll find in this book. Haben’s memoir is a thoughtful and entertaining tale that offers an enlightening glimpse into so many aspects of her world. Her journey takes you from her early years as the child of Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants in California to the halls of Harvard Law School and beyond.

Given my tech-focused perspective, I found the descriptions of the technology that she used throughout her schooling to be fascinating. But as Haben points out again and again throughout the book, while technology plays an important part in making the world more accessible to the disabled, what matters even more are cultural attitudes about disabilities and the disabled.

This concept was driven home in Chapter 18, wherein Haben shared her uphill struggle for accessibility to the menu at her college’s dining hall. All she sought was advance knowledge of what was being served ahead of time so that she could successfully navigate the dining hall and choose foods that comported to her vegetarian diet. Her simple request was that the menu be forwarded to her in an email each morning; software on her computer would handle the rest and convert the emails into digital braille for her.

She was inexplicably met with resistance and non-compliance, and, after what can only be described as a series of Herculean efforts on her part — and the threat of litigation — she finally received the accommodations that she needed and was entitled to. It was this experience that inspired her to attend law school and devote her life to fighting for the rights of the disabled.

In continuation of that goal, Haben shifted her focus in 2016 and launched a business providing disability rights consulting, writing, and public speaking. As part of those efforts, she offers advice on ways to increase access for people with disabilities.

At the end of her memoir she includes a short guide designed to aid in that goal. Here are two excerpts that I hope will help lawyers and law firms be more inclusive to those who are disabled:

Harmful Messages to Avoid

• Nondisabled people should feel grateful they don’t have disabilities. This perpetuates hierarchies of us versus them, continuing the marginalization of people with disabilities.
• Successful people with disabilities overcame their disabilities. When the media portrays the problem as the disability, society is not encouraged to change. The biggest barriers exist not in the person, but in the physical, social, and digital environment. People with disabilities and their communities succeed when the community decides to dismantle digital, attitudinal, and physical barriers.
• Flat, one-dimensional portrayals of people with disabilities. Stories that reduce a person to just their disability encourage potential employers, teachers, and other community members to similarly reduce the person to just a disability.
• Victimizing Language. Avoid victimizing language when describing medical conditions and other aspects of the disability experience. E.g., “She is blind” is neutral, but, “She suffers from blindness” encourages pity.
• Jumping through hoops to avoid saying “disability” and related words.

WHAT CAN ORGANIZATIONS DO TO BECOME MORE ACCESSIBLE?

• Conduct a survey to identify physical, social, and digital barriers. Work to remove these barriers.
• Plan for accessibility from the start. Designing a new service or product with access in mind is easier than trying to jury-rig accessibility after the product or service has been created.
• Increase hiring of people with disabilities—one of the largest untapped talent pools.
• Hold regular disability rights training sessions to help create a more inclusive culture.
• Promote positive disability stories in the media.

And, last but not least, if for some inexplicable reason you’re not yet sold on this book, then let me tell you about Chapter 20. In it, Haben details her somewhat rocky, but ultimately successful path toward a wonderful relationship with her first guide dog, Maxine. Heartbreakingly, Maxine died of cancer in 2018, and Haben went on to train a new lifelong companion and now shares her days with her guide dog, Mylo.

I’ll leave you with Haben’s touching description of her unique bond with her guide dogs: “Love takes time. Love forms through the expression of genuine appreciation, the creation of clear boundaries, the practice of forgiveness, and mutual respect. Over time, these experiences weave together, forming a strong bond between two beings. Time and experience have fostered a trust that draws us together, building a shared understanding that continues to grow.”

Wise words for any relationship whether it’s between a deafblind person and her guide dog, or two people.

I guarantee you’ll find many more tidbits of wisdom and insight where that came, so what are you waiting for?  Grab a copy of her book right now.

---

Nicole Black is a Rochester, New York attorney and the Legal Technology Evangelist at MyCase, web-based law practice management software. She’s been blogging since 2005, has written a weekly column for the Daily Record since 2007, is the author of Cloud Computing for Lawyers, co-authors Social Media for Lawyers: the Next Frontier, and co-authors Criminal Law in New York. She’s easily distracted by the potential of bright and shiny tech gadgets, along with good food and wine. You can follow her on Twitter @nikiblack and she can be reached at niki.black@mycase.com.

Bonn, Germany, 8 August 2019. We have known for over 25 years that poor land use and management are major drivers of climate change, but have never mustered the political will to act. With the release of the IPCC special report on climate change and land, which makes the consequences of inaction crystal clear, we have no excuse for further delay.

We cannot head off the worst ravages of climate change without action on land degradation. The knowledge and technologies to manage our lands sustainably already exist. All we need is the will to use them to draw down carbon from the atmosphere, protect vital ecosystems and meet the challenge of feeding a growing global population. We must harness the enormous positive potential of our lands and make them part of the climate solution.

With the help of our scientists, I will ensure the issues in this report that are within the scope of the Convention are presented to ministers for strong and decisive action when they meet at the world’s largest intergovernmental forum where decisions on land use and management are made, the 14th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNCCD, taking place in New Delhi, India, in three weeks’ time.

The IPCC report is one of four major assessments released over the last two years that show the wide-ranging impacts of land degradation. It is not just the climate that suffers when land quality declines. Land degradation jeopardizes our ability to feed the word, threatens the survival of over a million species, destroys ecosystems and drives resource-related conflicts that demand costly international interventions.
These problems are no longer local problems. The report underlines that the increasingly global flows of consumption and production means that what we eat in one country can impact land in another. In the wake of land degradation and drought, communities are breaking down due to the swift and devastating loss of life and livelihoods.

Faced with these life-changing consequences, the UNCCD has developed a robust policy framework that can enable countries to avoid further land degradation and recover land that has become virtually unusable.
Change is happening, but not fast enough. In the last four years, 122 of the 169 countries affected by desertification, land degradation or drought have embarked on setting national targets to halt future degradation and rehabilitate degrading land to ensure the amount of healthy and productive land available in 2015 does not decline by 2030 and beyond.

Last year, these countries submitted baseline date to verify this achievement. And in just three years, close to 70 countries have set up national drought management plans to reduce community and ecosystem vulnerability to droughts, which the IPCC says will become stronger, more frequent and more widespread.
This shows that commitment to reversing land degradation is growing, even though much work remains. More than two billion hectares of land are degraded. Initiatives to restore land on a national or landscape level are not only vital in reversing the process. They are critical for helping the global community mitigate and adapt to climate change in the short term, using soil and vegetations through methods that do not harm the Earth.

When the ministers meet in September, I expect the IPCC report to have a strong influence not only on the policy decisions they will debate, but the will to take them home for appropriate action. Science can help politicians develop informed policies that will support ordinary people to prepare, act and create more positive pathways to the future.

Rep. Christopher Collins got a bit of good news this week as prosecutors from the Southern District of New York dropped some of the insider trading charges against him in a Superseding Indictment. But, if you read the fine print, it’s only a very little bit of good news.

The New York Congressman is still facing five securities fraud charges from June 22, 2017, when he raced out of the Congressional Picnic at the White House to dial his son from the lawn seven times in five minutes. When Cameron Collins finally picked up, his father frantically ordered him to dump stock in their favorite Australian biotech company Innate Immunotherapeutics based on non-public information. And Cameron Collins is still charged with six counts of blabbing to everyone he could get hold of, including his wife and father-in-law Stephen Zarsky, that the drug they’d hyped as a cure for multiple sclerosis and possibly HIV had just failed the clinical trial, so they needed to get the hell out before the news broke.

The Congressman himself had invested $6 million, none of which he could sell because his shares were held in Australia, where trading had already been halted. But Cameron Collins and his merry band of tippees saved themselves upwards of $760,00 in losses as the stock plunged 92 percent between June 26 and June 27.

The good news for the Collins crew, including Zarsky who is also charged, is that the government decided it wasn’t worth the time to fight about the Speech or Debate Clause, so they dropped reference to the Office of Congressional Ethics 2017 finding that there was “substantial reason to believe that Representative Collins shared material nonpublic information in the purchase of Innate stock, in violation of House rules, standards of conduct, and federal law.”

(During that investigation, Collins encouraged witnesses, including former Rep. Tom Price whom he’d convinced to invest in Innate, not to cooperate because the OCE lacked subpoena authority. He also insisted that the hadn’t destroyed evidence, he just likes to Marie Kondo his inbox on the regular — “I delete my emails every day. In fact, generally three times a day. I delete all our texts, three times a day. I just always — I have a very uncluttered life and something like this would be absolutely no reason for me to hang onto it.”)

And because Collins could have delayed the trial by appealing the admissibility of the very carefully worded statement by his chief of staff denying the charges based on a (perhaps spurious) argument about the Speech or Debate Clause, the government went ahead and convened a brand new grand jury and reindicted him and his family without it.

As U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said in a letter to Judge Vernon S. Broderick:

It should be emphasized that in making these modifications to the Original Indictment, the Government does not intend to restrict in any way the evidence that it may rely upon at trial. Subject to the Court’s rulings on admissibility, the Government reserves the right to offer any and all evidence that it deems relevant to the charges in the S1 Indictment, including evidence to which Congressman Collins (or any other defendant) has objected on Speech or Debate grounds or otherwise.

And if Congressman Collins wants to appeal the admissibility of that evidence post-trial, he can go ahead and knock himself out.

The government also narrowed the scope of charges relating to Stephen Zarsky, who called three more people on June 23 and told them to dump their Innate stock STAT, since Chris and Cameron Collins couldn’t be held entirely responsible for their in-law’s big, fat mouth.

So, it’s a win for Collins. But not much of one.

Superseding Indictment [USA v. Collins, et al., No. 1:18-cr-00567-1 (S.D.N.Y. Aug 6, 2019)]
Berman Letter [USA v. Collins, et al., No. 1:18-cr-00567-1 (S.D.N.Y. Aug 6, 2019)]
Feds Narrow Insider Trading Case Against Chris Collins to Sidestep Legal Hurdles [Buffalo News]

---

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

The dream that was LeClairRyan is over. Of course, for those of us following along with the once Biglaw firm, this was expected; after all, last week we reported LeClairRyan had begun the process of dissolution of the firm. Which was after a 2+-year-long span of trouble, including partners deserting the firm en masse (notably including name partner Gary LeClair); being prevented by their lender from returning departing partners’ capital contributions; giving staff WARN Act notices of mass layoffs; and being sued for back rent and for gender discrimination. But through it all, the firm, somewhat stubbornly, has refused to comment — until now.

Yesterday, the firm released a statement saying its members have “voted to commence an orderly wind-down of the firm’s business.” And going on to note:

“The firm, through its dissolution committee, is working in cooperation with its lender to ensure the continuity of client service until such time as the firm ceases to actively practice law and turns its attention to post-practice activities.”

As reported by Law.com, in a statement on the closing of the firm, CEO Erik Gustafson focused on a smooth transition for the firm’s clients:

“On behalf of my colleagues, we are deeply saddened to make this announcement today,” now-former CEO C. Erik Gustafson said in a statement. “Through our transition, we will continue to focus first and foremost on the success of our clients, as we have always done. I am thankful to all of the clients who have chosen to work with our team over the last 30 years, and I am grateful for the exceptional lawyers and professionals who continue to work with dedication and determination towards winding down the firm in an orderly fashion.”

So, what happens now? Well, associates have reportedly been told their last day at the firm will be August 30th. Headhunters have been contacted to assist with finding new firms for any groups of attorneys that somehow missed the writing on the wall and are still at the firm. It is currently unclear whether the firm will wind up in bankruptcy court, or if they’ll manage to navigate the dissolution of the firm without that process.

What’s happening at LeClairRyan may, in fact, be a harbinger for other Am Law 200 firms. At least according to Bill Brandt, chairman of Development Specialists and a law firm restructuring expert:

However it proceeds, LeClairRyan’s situation highlights the perilous positions of some firms in the Am Law 200, especially in the Second Hundred.

Brandt said firms in LeClairRyan’s size bracket—in roughly the 200-partner range—are in a tough position. “Those midrange Am Law firms” don’t have the geographic and practice base to pull in lot of clients, but they can’t manage themselves like a boutique, he said. “They are very vulnerable right now.”

We’ll definitely keep our eyes and ears open to see what ripple effect LeClairRyan closing may have on the larger legal industry.

---

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).

* Jones Day partner Don McGahn sued for failing to comply with House subpoena. [National Law Journal]

* Short seller argues that Burford is out of money in move that pits highly sophisticated calculated gamblers against highly sophisticated calculated gamblers. [American Lawyer]

* A reminder that the Supreme Court is going to hear a case that could allow employers to fire women for not acting feminine enough. [Vice]

* ICE deported a guy to Iraq who had never lived there, didn’t speak Arabic, and who subsequently died unable to secure insulin. [Slate]

* Biglaw is making the diversity officer role more senior and more powerful. [American Lawyer]

* MGM complaining that federal government gives tribes “monopoly” over casinos. That’s… that’s not how this works. [Courthouse News Service]

* National Review is arguing for “red flag laws” in an editorial that it will deny ever publishing once the GOP quietly kills this issue. [National Review]

The UN announced Zimbabwe is facing a food crisis, with more than five million people – about a third of the population – in need of food aid. UK aid agency CAFOD is already responding to this food crisis.

Verity Johnson, CAFOD’s Country Representative for Zimbabwe, said:

“Zimbabwe is in the midst of a devastating food crisis. More than five million people in the country will face severe hunger this year.

“Years of economic turmoil and climate change, as well as the recent Cyclone Idai, are pushing families to the brink of starvation. Last year’s harvests failed, largely due to extreme weather, ranging from droughts that lasted for months on end, to flooding which wiped out whole villages.

“The cost of food has also risen sharply and there are severe bread shortages across the country. Where it can be found, a loaf of bread in Zimbabwe now costs up to nine times more than it did a year ago. Parents are struggling to feed their children and give anything they can get hold of straight to them. With the prolonged drought, dams have failed to fill, and wells and rivers are drying up, leaving communities with no option but to walk tens of kilometres to reach water.

“We are at crisis point. The Church in Zimbabwe has also recently called for the desperate cries of Zimbabwean families to be heard.

“CAFOD has been working in Zimbabwe for almost fifty years, and our local aid experts across the country are witnessing first-hand the misery that climate change is already bringing to families.

“Over the last couple of weeks, we have stepped up our efforts reaching out to the most remote parts of the country through our Church network. We are delivering grains and emergency food aid to help people on the brink of starvation, as well as helping them to access safe, clean water through new pipelines and wells.

“We are also supporting communities to adapt and mitigate the effects of climate change, so that they are better prepared as the environment around them on which they rely for their food becomes increasingly volatile.”

Post published in: Agriculture