Category: News Feeds

Bar exam plans are in shambles. The July administration is obviously off and the plan to offer a test in the Fall has run up against the concrete logistical concern that there simply isn’t enough space to cover every applicant and that’s before trying to deal with a wave of young lawyers who will need extended leave or to be laid off to take a future exam while shouldering student loan payments.

The only good solution to this is a form of diploma privilege licensure — something Utah has already figured out. But entrenched interests worry, probably rightfully, that if a diploma privilege system ends up working on a temporary basis, everyone is going to look around and realize the bar exam wears no clothes. That’s why we’re seeing these laughably bad defenses of the bar exam coming from the NCBE, an entity that doesn’t just want to maintain the bar exam, but maintain it in its exact form leaving them with a monopoly over the testing regime across the country.

Massachusetts isn’t ready to junk the bar exam, but recognizes that it’s not going to happen any time soon and that a makeup exam is a logistical nightmare. That’s why the state is talking about an online bar exam to allow applicants to go through the test without forcing the state to ration seats for a series of in-person exams. It’s the sort of reasonable accommodation one would expect states to undertake and consequently it’s one that the NCBE won’t get behind. Apparently fed up with this hemming and hawing, Massachusetts is signaling that they’re willing to write their own bar exam to make this happen.

From Law.com:

Massachusetts will create and deliver its own online bar exam if it’s unsafe to administer the traditional test in late September—the rescheduled date for the July exam.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and the Massachusetts Board of Bar Examiners unveiled those plans Thursday, making it the first jurisdiction to commit to an online test as a fallback amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

This plan to create its own exam comes as the NCBE continues to claim that it finds “significant issues” with administering its exam online, despite the fact that every law school has already figured out how to use the webcam panopticon to keep everyone honest. Massachusetts is done waiting for a solution and assured the law schools that there will at least be a Massachusetts admission only version of the exam to take online.

But at the point that the exam has no portability, why not opt for the diploma privilege plus option?

The Massachusetts Supreme Court ultimately decided against an emergency diploma privilege or an extended supervised practice program because the state’s first-time pass rate has hovered around 81% for the past three years, Gants wrote. That would likely mean that roughly one out of every five new lawyers might start practicing under supervision, then lose their privilege to practice if they must later take the bar, he wrote.

“Not only would this raise justifiable concerns about their competence to practice law when they were doing so, but it also would create the problem of nascent law practices having suddenly to close shop, potentially leaving clients in the lurch,” reads Gants’ letter.

This is dizzyingly circular. Of course it creates the risk of graduates losing the ability to practice after a future test… if you force them to take a future test. The point of a diploma privilege program is not requiring that future test. And nascent law practices don’t close up if their unsupervised practices aren’t allowed for a suitable period of time. There are serious concerns with regulating attorney supervision, but they aren’t insurmountable. The more important takeaway here is that confronted with the possibility that 19 percent of law school graduates aren’t subject-matter proficient (which isn’t accurate as some of that 19 percent will have failed for unrelated reasons), the state’s concern isn’t “figuring out how to ensure schools only graduate capable students” but “making sure students take a one-shot test after they’ve committed 3 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to a long-term immersion in the subject evaluated as proficient from multiple different angles.”

In any event, at least one state is committed to minting new lawyers this year and isn’t going to let anyone else tell them that they can’t.

Unprecedented: Massachusetts to Offer Its Own Online Bar Exam—If Necessary—Amid COVID-19 [Law.com]

Earlier: First State Opts For Emergency Diploma Privilege Plus Admission
Law School Student Governments Petitioning For Diploma-Privileged Admission
NCBE Trashes Diploma Privilege, Sprinkles In Some Racist And Sexist Conclusions
The Nation’s Top Defender Of The Bar Exam Knows Exactly How To Value Diploma Privilege Systems
NY Bar Exam Encounters New Hurdle — Not Enough Space To Test Everyone
Why Attorney Supervision Could Undermine The ‘Diploma Privilege Plus’ Movement

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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.

Looks like the Supreme Court is limbering up to duck hard on the Trump tax cases. Justice Roberts just needs to find some reason, any reason at all, to spare himself the embarrassment of having to decide whether Trump’s bankers and accountants have to hand over his financial records to Congress. Because, blech, who wants to wind up getting shit-tweeted by the president, right?

The law is pretty clear that Congress is entitled to enforce its subpoenas as long as it can point to legitimate legislative or oversight purpose. But getting crosswise with the president is very unpleasant, so maybe Solicitor General Francisco wants to throw his old Fed Soc pals a lifeline? Hey, what if congressional subpoenas are magically transformed into a political question if they relate to the president’s company? No one raised this issue in the District Court, or when Trump appealed to the D.C. Circuit. But desperate times call for desperate measures, right?

Which is why this morning’s orders list includes an instruction that, “The parties and the Solicitor General are directed to file supplemental letter briefs addressing whether the political question doctrine or related justiciability principles bear on the Court’s adjudication of these cases.” These will be due on May 8, a full four days before the cases are scheduled for virtual oral argument on the 12th.

Trump himself has never claimed that the congressional subpoenas issued to his bankers and accountants after Democrats took back the House in 2018 present a non-justiciable political question. In fact, he spent the past two years arguing that the courts must instead ride to his rescue and perform a psychological assessment of congress’s “true motives,” rejecting the House’s oversight as purely political and thus non-enforceable. Which is ridiculous, of course. But so is arguing that a lawsuit by a private citizen to stop a private company complying with a legislative request for documents presents a political question verboten to the courts, and yet here we all are.

Trump’s reasoning has been roundly rejected by District Judges and the D.C. Circuit Court, which ruled that Deutsche Bank, which loaned the president and his company billions of dollars over the past two decades, and Trump’s accountants at Mazars must comply with a congressional subpoena for the president’s financial records.

If the Supreme Court does decide to grab on to the political question doctrine and punt, precedent be damned, it puts the ball entirely in Deutsche and Mazars’ court. The companies themselves will have sole discretion over whether to comply, and they’ve already indicated that they intend to cooperate. Which is exactly the same outcome as if the Court had just done its damn job, applied the law neutrally, and affirmed the legality of congressional oversight.

And all this dodge will cost is the Court’s credibility as a non-partisan actor and Congress’s ability to enforce its own subpoena power. What a deal!

Cases and controversies: Congress, the subpoena power and a “legislative purpose” [SCOTUSblog]

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Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

We are all experiencing the immediate impact of the Coronavirus crisis on our professional lives and careers. But how will this crisis impact the legal profession over the longer term? Will we eventually return to the legal world that once was?

I think not. Rather, I believe that many of the adaptations we’ve made here in the moment are already setting in motion changes that will permanently reconfigure the legal landscape. Further, as horrific and painful as this crisis has been for so many, I believe that many of the changes that will emerge out of it will be for the betterment of the legal system and those it is intended to serve.

Here are seven ways I believe the legal system will fundamentally and permanently change as the result of this crisis.

1. Lawyers will no longer see technology as something to be feared.

Two years ago in this column, I published a two-part article on what I called “the innovation gap,” or why the justice system has failed to keep pace with technology. In Part 1, I outlined six barriers to broader adoption of innovative technologies in law. In Part 2, I offered 10 suggestions for how we “reboot” the legal system.

What I saw then as the No. 1 obstacle to innovation was lawyers’ fear of technology, even as I acknowledged that it sounded simplistic to say. But it was true, and it remained true. Many lawyers persisted in their ignorance and fear of technology, viewing it as a threat to their clients and themselves.

Almost overnight, that has changed. I thought UK legal technology journalist Joanna Goodman put it best when she wrote recently in The Law Society Gazette that the COVID-19 crisis has “reframed legal services,” and in the course of that, “technology has become a lifeline.”

In a matter of a month, any lawyers who still harbored fears of technology have of necessity come to see it as a lifeline to the survival of their practices and their continuing ability to serve their clients. Going forward, that will fundamentally reshape the legal profession’s use and adoption of technology.

2. Lawyers will no longer see innovation as a threat to the ‘guild.’

In that same two-part article from two years ago, another obstacle to innovation I saw was that the legal profession is a protectionist guild that sees innovation as a threat. Like a game of whack-a-mole, wherever experiments in alternative forms of legal services delivery popped up, the organized bar would be at the ready to pound them down.

Even before this crisis hit, the organized bar was softening its hardball stance against new models and methods of delivering legal services. Regulatory reform initiatives in several states were the most visible examples. Even the American Bar Association, once seen as a bastion of protectionism, has in recent years become an advocate for innovation, as recently as February calling for states to consider regulatory reforms and legal services innovations.

But the pandemic has dramatized, in ways no studies or committees ever could, the fundamental shortcomings of the legal system as it was. A rigidly structured guild system of courts and services delivery, designed by lawyers for lawyers as their exclusive domain, is not up to meeting the challenges of a world that demands agility and flexibility in services delivery. This had already been becoming clearer to many, but there can now be no going back.

3. Regulatory reform will accelerate.

Last Friday, the Utah Supreme Court put out for public comment a proposed set of the most-sweeping regulatory reforms in a generation. While the process that led to these proposals was underway well before the crisis, the court explicitly acknowledged in announcing them, “The current COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of finding new, affordable, and high-quality innovations as quickly as possible.”

In fact, even as it put the proposed rules out for a 90-day comment period, it offered expedited review and approval of proposals aimed at offering low- or no-cost legal help to individuals and businesses impacted by the crisis.

We are only at the beginning of what will be a major crisis in serving the legal needs of low- and moderate-income individuals and small businesses. Not only will this crisis fuel a surge in cases, but it is also like to eviscerate one of the major sources of funding for legal help for the poor, IOLTA, which depends heavily on the health of the real estate market and the economy in general.

As Utah is already doing, other states will have no choice but to follow. The traditionally strict rules on who can deliver legal services and by what means will of necessity be eased to meet demand of crisis proportions. Although born out of crisis, those reforms will ultimately, over the long term, help close the justice gap in this country.

4. Courts will accelerate innovation and online services.

Another of the obstacles I wrote about in that piece two years ago was that the courts are stuck in a vicious circle that blocks change. For years, in part because of the access-to-justice crisis and the growing numbers of self-represented litigants, courts have been overwhelmed by demand and underfunded to deal with it. Consumed with the struggle to keep up with this demand, they were unable to formulate the innovations that would help them meet it.

For the courts, it was a problem that Richard Susskind described in his recent book, Online Courts and the Future of Justice, as having to change the tire on a moving car — it can’t be done.

But now, not only has the car come to a full stop, but we are also realizing that it needs a whole new chassis and a rebuilt engine. In its current condition, there is no way to get this car back on the road.

Quite possibly the most significant change in the legal system to come out of the Coronavirus crisis will be a fundamental rethinking and restructuring of the courts. Susskind’s book brilliantly poses the core question: “Is a court a service or a place?”

As we find ourselves in a moment when that place can no longer function, the need for the service does not abate. As courts adapt for the short term, they will inevitably change for the long term.

5. More legal services will be delivered remotely and online.

Many in the legal profession are learning for the first time what it means to deliver legal services remotely. Many others have been doing it to one extent or another for years. Others still are scrambling to come up with the capability.

Turns out, Zoom (or whatever is your videoconferencing app of choice) is a perfectly good way to meet with clients and colleagues. More to the point, in many cases, it is a superior way to meet.

Why should a business owner need to trek downtown to meet with a lawyer? Why should a low-income parent need to arrange childcare and spend bus money to get legal advice? To what extent has face-to-face lawyering been an obstacle for a rural farmer or someone homebound by a physical condition?

The fact of the matter is that legal professionals can serve more clients by meeting with them remotely, and do it at greater convenience and lower cost. Now that we all understand this, remote meetings will become more the norm and less the exception.

6. Law firms will reduce their physical footprints.

For lawyers who firms were already more technologically adept, transitioning to working from home was no biggie. In fact, in recent years, many firms –- especially larger firms — were already encouraging flexible, remote working arrangements for their partners and staffs.

The driver of this trend was not just convenience, but economics. The more a firm could reduce its physical footprint, the more it could save on real estate, maintenance, and overhead costs.

Now, firms and other organizations are seeing that they can go remote on a scale they never anticipated and still function quite well –- in some cases with barely a glitch.

Susskind’s question about courts –- whether they are a service or a place -– applies as well to law firms. To what extent is a firm’s physical plant essential to the services it provides? No doubt, an office provides camaraderie, collaboration, and convenience. And not everyone has a home suitable to working remotely. But there can be no doubt that physical downsizing will be a lasting impact of this crisis.

7. Legal education will be revamped.

By coincidence of schedule, I happened to be at Brigham Young University Law School on March 12, the day its leaders made the decision to shut down physical classrooms, send students home, and teach the remainder of the semester online. I ended up recording a podcast interview with the school’s head of infrastructure and technology about how the school came to and would implement that decision.

Even then, little did anyone anticipate the degree to which the crisis would upend legal education. Just six weeks later, everything that seemed written in stone about our system for training new lawyers is up in the air — even as to the bar exam process that has been the gateway to becoming a lawyer. Utah has proposed letting law students skip the bar exam, and Massachusetts says it may offer the exam online.

As Jordan Furlong put it, “The lawyer formation process is breaking down in front of us.” And he accurately, I believe, predicts that out of this crisis “will emerge a driving need … to really rethink what we’re trying to achieve: to develop competent, confidant lawyers to service clients and society.”

I am anything but an expert in legal education. But I have no doubt that, as a result of what we are going through now, legal education — like law practice and the courts — will never again look the same.

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Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

Before they go crazy with the COVID-19 austerity measures we’ve seen a lot of across Biglaw — the salary cuts, furloughs, and layoffs, oh my! — Shearman & Sterling has decided to ask the class for volunteers. That’s right, according to Roll on Friday, they’re offering associates the opportunity to do an extended vacation.

Shearman has launched a “voluntary leave program” that allows attorneys at the firm to take a minimum of three months and a maximum of six months sabbatical at 30 percent of their current salary. Plus, if attorneys decide to do pro bono work during their time off, their salary may be “topped up to 40%.”

But will anyone take the offer? That remains to be seen. But given the competitive environment at the firm, one insider quipped, “It would be exceptionally surprising if anyone volunteers for this at all.”

So, what is your firm doing to deal with the economic upheaval around COVID-19? If your firm or organization is slashing salaries, closing its doors, or reducing the ranks of its lawyers or staff, whether through open layoffs, stealth layoffs, or voluntary buyouts, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Our vast network of tipsters is part of what makes Above the Law thrive. You can email us or text us (646-820-8477).

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

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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).

Lawyers and legal professionals the world over are worried about their health and their job security thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, so it’s time for a little levity with a new set of law school rankings.

From the Princeton Review law school rankings to the U.S. News law school rankings to the Above the Law law school rankings, there are many law school rankings to gaze upon (with some of them more reliable than others) — but have you seen a ranking of the best law schools in the world? Here’s your chance.

Before we get to the World Law School Rankings, let’s discuss the methodology used by the Quacquarelli Symonds team at Top Universities (you can explore more in-depth explanations here if you’re interested):

Each of the subject rankings is compiled using four sources. The first two of these are QS’s global surveys of academics and employers, which are used to assess institutions’ international reputation in each subject. The second two indicators assess research impact, based on research citations per paper and h-index in the relevant subject. These are sourced from Elsevier’s Scopus database, the world’s most comprehensive research citations database.

These four components are combined to produce the results for each of the subject rankings, with weightings adapted for each discipline.

We know you want to see if any American law schools cracked the list, so we won’t make you wait anymore. Here they are, the top 10 best law schools in the world:

1. Harvard University
2. University of Oxford
3. University of Cambridge
4. Yale University
5. Stanford University
6. London School of Economics and Political Science
7. UC Berkeley
8. Columbia University
9. New York University
10. University of Melbourne

USA! USA! USA! More than half of the world’s top 10 law schools are in America! Be sure to grab your ivy and roll around in it, because half of those American law schools are in the Ivy League. Congratulations go out to Harvard for once again coming out on top of both Yale and Stanford in this global law school ranking. Harvard is officially the most elite law school on the planet.

Farther down the list, but still within the top 25 law schools in the world, you’ll see Chicago (#11) and Georgetown (#18). Going deeper, but still within the top 50 law schools in the world, you’ll find UCLA (knocking on the T14’s door at #15 in U.S. News rankings), Michigan (#29), Penn (#31), Duke (#32), Cornell (#41), and Northwestern (#46). But… where’s UVA? Every other U.S. News T14 school has already been listed.

For the second year in a row, UVA is nowhere to be found in the world’s top 50 law schools. Sadly, Quacquarelli Symonds didn’t even bother to show UVA’s rank — all we know is that it fell somewhere between 51 and 100. Sure, it’s great to be ranked so highly on a world scale, but it must be really disappointing to be the only T14 school left out of the world’s top 50. Better luck next year!

What do you think about these worldly law school rankings? Feel free to congratulate or condemn your alma mater — but be careful, the world is watching.

QS World University Rankings by Subject 2020 – Law [Top Universities]

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

There’s a lot going against those trying to launch a hedge fund these days. There’s the piss-poor performance industry wide, even among the crisis-tested, that seems to be scaring investors away from the sector over and above their need for ready cash to hoard toilet paper and yeast. There’s the negative publicity some people insist on stirring up by suggesting that hedge funds partake of federal handouts. There’s the fact that large, existing hedge funds run by people investors have heard of are making clear they’d like whatever money is being put into the space. And then there are the practical difficulties of launching amidst a quarantine, like being unable to travel or have would-be clients travel to you and such. And do not forget the smaller but still crucial obstacles to fundraising via Zoom.

* Students at numerous universities have filed class-action lawsuits alleging their colleges have not properly refunded fees from COVID-19-related closures. Guess classes by Zoom are just not cutting it. [CNN]

* A New York lawyer alleges that conditions at a federal jail in Brooklyn are insufficient to prevent the spread of COVID-19. [New York Daily News]

* A lawsuit has been filed over a policy denying COVID-19 stimulus checks to American citizens who are married to immigrants. [Business Insider]

* An attorney for the physician accused of selling fake COVID-19 cures says his client was just following President Trump’s lead. [NBC News]

* Michael Flynn has attempted to undo his guilty plea on the grounds that his former lawyers gave him bad advice. Sounds like an awkward situation. [Politico]

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Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

Zimbabwe has had to extend its nationwide lockdown because of a rise in coronavirus cases.

But the restrictions have come at a cost, raising concerns that a food crisis affecting half the population will get worse.

Al Jazeera’s Haru Mutasa reports from Norton, Zimbabwe.

Unlike Zimbabwe, television here hasn’t run out of programmes. But better entertainment can be found in following the tweets of exiled former Information Minister Professor Jonathan Moyo.

Moyo’s latest contribution is to accuse the Chinese Chargé d’Affaire in Harare, Zhao Baogang, of meddling in the political affairs of Zimbabwe. Baogang had tweeted that Zimbabweans are only dying from coronavirus in the UK and not in China. (He didn’t mention that Africans had been chased away from China . . . ) Baogang further asserted that sanctions harmed Zimbabwe more that the virus.

Moyo said in response: ‘This revolutionary Chinese friend of the rogue regime is undiplomatically and proudly celebrating Zimbabwean deaths in the UK due to Covid19 in such an insensitive way that would get him sent back to his racist homeland in any other country with a proper and legitimate government!’ After Baogang deleted his tweet. Moyo returned to the attack: ‘The racist diplomat from racist China has deleted his offensive, outrageous and totally unacceptable tweet as if he does not know that the Internet, or rather Twitter, does not forget.’

Moyo said Boagang was abusing his status in Zimbabwe. ‘He’s blissfully unaware that Chinese mega-deals, most of which have been signed by either corrupt or drunken officials, are even more harmful as they rob future generations!’ (See: https://www.thezimbabwemail.com/zimbabwe/robert-mugabes-minister-clash-with-chinese-ambassador/).

Next on stage was Deputy Information Minister Energy Mutodi who blamed the virus on eating ‘dogs, cats, snakes, bats, monkeys, baboons and other wild life’ putting the rest of the world at risk. He suggested that Zimbabwe might be able to provide beef to China instead (see: https://news.pindula.co.zw/2020/04/24/dog-eating-chinese-exposing-world-to-covid-19-says-zimbabwe-deputy-information-minister-promises-to-increasebeef-exports-to-china/).

Mutodi also weighed into the fuss over the Zimbabweans who voluntarily returned home from the UK and objected to being quarantined in student hostels at Belvedere Teachers’ College in Harare, complaining of inadequate facilities with no running water. Mutodi rebuked them for ‘trying to demand VIP treatment’ and reminded them that quarantine was not a matter of choice.

On this occasion, the Vigil can sympathise with Mutodi. Zimbabweans are being deported in their hundreds from South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Namibia. The Bulawayo Provincial Affairs Minister Judith Ncube says that city is already overwhelmed (see: https://www.newsday.co.zw/2020/04/65-returning-zimbos-demand-hotel-quarantine/).

The government has responded by cutting quarantine from 14 to 8 days. But this has been criticised by the president of Zimbabwe Hospital Doctors’ Association, Tawanda Zvakada, who said it risked spreading the virus as people return to their home areas.

The Vigil is pleased that the UK has given Zimbabwe US $43.6 million to help it deal with the pandemic – the largest donation by any country. As we in the UK look out of our windows at the sunshine we can only hope that suggestions by the Trump administration that the sun reduces the strength of the virus will save us all from further suffering.

Other points

NOTICES:

• The Restoration of Human Rights in Zimbabwe (ROHR) is the Vigil’s partner organization based in Zimbabwe. ROHR grew out of the need for the Vigil to have an organization on the ground in Zimbabwe which reflected the Vigil’s mission statement in a practical way. ROHR in the UK actively fundraises through membership subscriptions, events, sales etc to support the activities of ROHR in Zimbabwe. Please note that the official website of ROHR Zimbabwe is http://www.rohrzimbabwe.org/. Any other website claiming to be the official website of ROHR in no way represents us.
• The Vigil’s book ‘Zimbabwe Emergency’ is based on our weekly diaries. It records how events in Zimbabwe have unfolded as seen by the diaspora in the UK. It chronicles the economic disintegration, violence, growing oppression and political manoeuvring – and the tragic human cost involved. It is available at the Vigil. All proceeds go to the Vigil and our sister organisation the Restoration of Human Rights in Zimbabwe’s work in Zimbabwe. The book is also available from Amazon.
• Facebook pages:
  Vigil: https://www.facebook.com/zimbabwevigil
  ROHR: https://www.facebook.com/Restoration-of-Human-Rights-ROHR-Zimbabwe-International-370825706588551/
  ZAF: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Zimbabwe-Action-Forum-ZAF/490257051027515

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