Category: News Feeds

(Steve Castor, who serves as a counsel for Republicans on the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, made headlines and became a viral Twitter sensation after he carried his files in a reusable grocery bag instead of a briefcase. The Fresh Market later announced itself as “the official briefcase maker of Steve Castor.”)

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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.

We have some unfortunate news to report out of Indiana, where a beloved law professor was found dead.

David Welter, 59, was a longtime professor at Valparaiso University Law School, and had recently celebrated his 25th year of teaching there. His cause of his death is unknown at this time, but police do not suspect foul play. The Chicago Tribune has some additional details:

Valparaiso police were called around 7:40 a.m. Monday to the 1300 block of Bullseye Lake Road on Valparaiso’s north side for a report of a man down, and police and medical personnel determined he was deceased, according to a release from that agency.

An autopsy is scheduled for Wednesday, according to the coroner’s office.

Valparaiso Law released the following statement after learning of Welter’s death: “We would like to express our deepest condolences to Professor Welter’s wife, Alissa Kohlhoff, his three daughters and to his family, friends, colleagues, students staff and others who mourn the loss of this special person.”

We here at Above the Law would like to extend our condolences to Professor David Welter’s family, friends, and colleagues during this difficult time.

Valpo law professor ID’d as man found dead in Valparaiso [NWI Times]
Police: Porter County Election Board president found dead in Valparaiso, but no foul play suspected [Chicago Tribune]

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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.

This year, the Legal Department Operations survey asked respondents to rate their maturity in various areas of operation, including Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) technology.

Among those respondents who used CLM tech (just over 80 percent said they did), half put their maturity at either a 1 or 2 on a scale of 1-5. Conversely, less than 1 percent of respondents who use CLM technology consider themselves power-users, rating themselves 5 out of 5 for maturity.

In other words, while many legal departments have adopted CLM, many are just beginning to leverage the technology in their practices. Some departments are in their infancy, using CLM technology solely as an electronic repository post-execution.  More mature departments will use CLM for pre-execution activities, like template management, clause libraries, and automated approval workflows.

Another indicator of CLM maturity is found within the survey in response to questions about the collection and utilization of metrics.  Asked which contract management metrics departments track with their CLM, the most common response is “contract volume by customer, partner, program type, and geography.”

This is important data to gather as a starting point for a company. But it is very basic information and telling of the unrealized potential of CLM in today’s legal departments.

In truth, this is totally to be expected with new technology, especially when that technology handles something as sweeping and complex as managing contracts across highly matrixed, global enterprises.

Contracts are language-based and unstructured, meaning they do not lend themselves to straightforward data analysis the way, say, external legal spend does. On account of this challenge, early CLM systems were little more than a repository to store and share contracts across the enterprise.

However, today’s contract management software, leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and cloud computing, can do much, much more.

Best-in-class CLM technology can extract contract data and metadata at scale to give enterprises deeper and wider views of their contract landscape. This means business can be done faster, risk can be reduced, and operations can be optimized.

But it doesn’t happen overnight. To fulfill their goals regarding CLM maturity and use of CLM data, legal department operation professionals should take a “crawl, walk, run” approach to enterprise contract management.

Such a progression might look something like this:

Crawl: A common early step for legal departments adopting CLM is to measure contract volume to get a comprehensive baseline for what your contract landscape looks like. How many contracts are touched by your legal department? The survey suggests that many legal departments are already at this stage, but if you are part of the 20 percent not yet using CLM technology, this is a good early project to start on.

Walk: With contracts digitized and quantified, legal departments can start to measure things like contract turnaround time and delays in approval and contract value. With this data, LDOs can identify bottlenecks, revise workflows and measure improvements over time. For instance, armed with this type of information, high-value contracts can get automatically routed for review to the pertinent attorney or subject matter expert; executives gain instant insights into the company’s most important contractual relationships; and risk can be more quickly surfaced and addressed.

Run: Finally, legal departments can begin to mine contract clauses for a global understanding of how contracts are deviating from standard terms and how the company is doing at fulfilling obligations and extracting maximum value from their contracts. At this point companies can leverage the technology to reduce litigation and improve outcomes — thereby becoming a true, strategic partner in the business.

Contracts form the foundation of commerce, governing every dollar in and out of the enterprise. Legal department operations professionals can accelerate, protect, and optimize their businesses with mature, robust contract lifecycle management technology.

What’s something you’d never expect to see plastered across the entryway of a law school? If you guessed it would be something as obtuse as this, then you win.

These flyers, which contain a phrase that’s been promoted by white supremacist groups, were found at the Oklahoma City University School of Law — one of the most diverse law schools in the country — the day after Halloween. More flyers like this were found scattered across the law school campus:

In response, Dean Jim Roth sent the following message to all law students:

This morning, our administrative team was alerted to the presence of flyers around the law school campus. I want to thank every student, staff, and faculty member who took the time to remove them and bring them to our attention. We are currently in the process of investigating this matter and hope to have this resolved quickly.

In the meantime, I want to address the message that was posted. As you may have noticed, OCU Law has been intentional and relentless in celebrating the voices, achievements, and culture of our diverse community. We enjoyed celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, LGBTQ+ History Month, Dia de los Muertos, and are excited to kick off Native American Heritage Month. And we will continue to celebrate our diverse community throughout the year.

Despite what the intentions of that message may have been, the message reminds me of one fact that I know our community embraces — it’s okay to be EVERYBODY. Exclusion and hate will not be tolerated here. You are accepted at OCU Law no matter how you pray, what you look like, or who you love. And you always will be.

Kudos to Dean Roth for handling a disgusting situation in the most gracious way. This is how you lead and embrace diversity and inclusion in times of division.

But who would have committed such an insensitive act? As it turns out, a law student was allegedly behind it. The Oklahoman has more information:

OCU Police Director Bill Citty said the male student was already on suspension from the law school, 800 N Harvey, and was not allowed to be on school property. The student violated the terms of his suspension when he posted the flyers on the door and exterior of the law school building the night of Oct. 31, Citty said. …

Citty wouldn’t confirm whether investigators determined the student to be a member of any white supremacist groups.

While Citty said the student isn’t considered a threat, a thorough investigation was needed nonetheless. “The reason you look into those types of things is you want to make sure the individual is not a threat to other students,” he said in an interview with the Oklahoman. “You have to look into those issues in this date and time. People worry, students worry, staff worry, parents worry. You have to make sure.”

As law students, we hope you hold onto your ideals and that you continue to believe that the legal profession is a noble one, in spite of events like this. Please treat each other with respect and value your classmates for who they are — you’ll be happier.

Suspended student expelled after posting “IT’S OKAY TO BE WHITE” flyers at OCU [Oklahoman]

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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.

We have finals this week and next week and I’m not prepared at all right now. I’m trying to work on getting caught back up…. I have a lot of debt and can’t wait to send a check out to my loan provider.

— Tyler Gordon, a third-year student at West Virginia University College of Law, in comments given after after winning $100,000 in the Dr. Pepper Tuition Giveaway during the Big 10 championship game in Indianapolis Saturday night. Gordon thinks he was chosen for the contest because his application included his future career plans. “I want to serve West Virginia and fight the opioid epidemic that we currently face,” he said. “I want to do that by working in the U.S. Attorney’s Office and hopefully becoming a U.S. Attorney someday.”

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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.

Every quarter we report on law firm financials and every quarter we see some kind of milquetoast improvement — revenues up, expenses up just a shade less, demand down, confidence… meh. One factor in every one of those reports is the collection and realization rate, the figure that explains the gap between billing the time and getting the check from the client. For years, we’ve chalked up low realization to a combination of attorney laziness and the disconnect between lawyers as practitioners and lawyers as businesspeople. But perhaps the real culprit in keeping firms waiting on their money is the out of control in-house legal department.

The Association of Legal Administrators and Bellefield Systems released a report last week on the nature of outside counsel guidelines and examining how firms deal with getting all their bills in. It’s not a surprise that in-house counsel are trying to keep bills low — that’s a given. Nor is it a surprise that legal departments internalize more work than ever to manage spend. But what receives less attention in the world of billing is the Byzantine guidelines clients concoct to delay paying the bills they owe.

And these delays can be significant:

Invoice rejection is universally experienced and varies by degree. Most firms experience 5-10% of e-bills getting rejected or reduced (43.24%). Almost a quarter of firms experience 11- 20% of e-bills getting rejected or reduced (21.62%). Over one third of firms (35.81%) experience 21% or greater of e-bills getting rejected or reduced.

15% of firms do not appeal rejections either because of lack of staffing power or writing off as a cost of doing business.

The report tells us that 88.83 percent of firms receive outside counsel guidelines from clients but 25 percent of firms have no process to synchronize their work with these guidelines and around 63 percent only have an ad hoc process for doing so. That’s unfortunate because there is zero effort to harmonize guidelines and every client creates their own inane rules for billing compliance. These rules can be as arbitrary as “don’t use X word in your descriptions even if we all know you’re doing X” with the result being an outright rejection of a monthly bill.

In addition to lack of staffing to handle client guidelines, the majority of firms feel that OCG are simply too complex as their top compliance challenge (66.04%), and nearly half report that they are simply too long with too much info, and they didn’t read them (43.4%).

On the one hand it’s amusing to see corporate attorneys hoisted by the petard of their own onerous quasi-adhesion contract language that no one really reads, but that’s no justification. The clients might say that they have enterprise-specific, nuanced needs that they want counsel to address. Oh, come on! You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re a random company in need of attorneys willing to tell you what they did and for how long. Get over yourselves.

Note that I said clients might say that. In this case, “might” is doing a lot of work because clients seem pretty comfortable just admitting they’re trying to force a write-off.

In 2019, clients are now pulling back on outside counsel spend and the overwhelming majority (81%) report utilizing Outside Counsel Guidelines as one of the most effective tools for controlling costs.

Firms lack the staffing to stay on top of all of this and attorneys lack the time to learn how to comply with every client under the sun. While that may save some money today, it’s not an effective long-term strategy because eventually firms will staff up and just pass the cost on to clients — congratulations on just making everything more expensive!

In the meantime, one thing firms can do to avoid getting hung out to dry by outside counsel guidelines is consider Bellefield’s own product. Their iTimeKeep system is set up to provide compliance guidance at the point of time entry. Basically, if you’re writing a description that violates the guidelines programmed into the system it’ll let you know right then and there. Frankly, clients should probably be demanding firms get this system before a bunch of admins get hired.

That might be a pretty smart guideline to add.

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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.

As we come to the end of our 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence, the Platform for Youth and Community Development (PYCD) joins the  world in commemorating the International Human Rights Day.

The theme of the 2019 International Human Rights Day, Youth Standing Up for Human Rights resonates well with our 2019 – 2023 strategic thrust which calls for a well-trained, mentored and nurtured young people with life skills in Manicaland Province. The 2019 – 2023 strategic thrust is buttressed by our programming and implementation that places young people at the centre of community development initiatives as we strongly believe that they are the drivers and agents of transformation and social change.

We call upon policy makers and community stakeholders to provide a conducive environment in which young people can enjoy their inalienable human rights. From our programming, we have realised that young people play an integral part in advancing social justice, democracy and peace in local communities.  Despite the young people’s passion for human rights, their contribution has been undermined by our political leadership who view young people as political cannon fodder and spectator partners for the full realisation of a human rights culture in Zimbabwe.

The upholding of human rights in Zimbabwe has become a challenge, with human rights abuses increasing at an alarming rate. This has exposed young people to serious challenges which limit their freedoms of assembly and expression. Having realised that they are growing up in a context marked by serious human rights violations, pervasive poverty and weak social controls, the young people have been exposed to a vampire world yet with little coping mechanisms to advance the principles of human rights in local communities.

PYCD is closely working with young people to socialise them to value human rights based approaches as a solution that brings about social cohesion, good health, political tolerance and economic growth.

Post published in: Featured

Determining the right outside counsel to hire for a given litigated matter is a critical decision that can have a major impact on both the outcome of your case and your legal spend. Today, the annual litigation spend for corporate legal departments and insurance claim groups is roughly $75 billion a year (that’s more than the size of the professional and college sports industries combined, for those keeping track at home).

With significant amounts of money and important case outcomes on the line, the decision of which counsel will be your best partner in any particular matter is a critical one. You want to know that you’re spending the right amount of money to get the best possible outcome. In the past, these decisions were made almost entirely on prior experience and inside knowledge of firms, players, geography, and relationships — in short, on gut feelings rather than data.

Not any more. With the LegalVIEW Predictive Insights Module, the new tool from from ELM Solutions, a business of Wolters Kluwer, corporate legal departments and insurance claims litigation groups can replace those gut feelings with data-driven decision-making. LegalVIEW Predictive Insights provides data on budgets, cycle times, and so much more, so you can make the right, informed decision every time.

The Path to Predictive Insights

In the age of big data, choosing counsel by gut feelings is no longer an option. Even assuming human intuition is correct (which we all know often isn’t the case), this approach has serious limitations and challenges for people who are new to the business and lack the requisite experience and expertise. Even seasoned attorneys or claims professionals need help, especially in new lines of business or unfamiliar jurisdictions. 

ELM Solutions set out to create a data-driven means of selecting the best possible outside counsel, starting with client insights and market research to determine how companies were making these decisions in the real world. Along with individual client data, ELM Solutions has the LegalVIEW database — over $130 billion worth of legal spend data — the largest and only thing like it in the industry. The LegalVIEW database is exactly the kind of clean, large volume of data that allows artificial intelligence (AI) to successfully produce useful analysis, and that’s exactly what ELM Solutions has done.

ELM Solutions combined its deep experience with AI solutions and the focus of Wolters Kluwer’s next-gen tech group on innovation, AI, and machine learning to create models and examine their existing data sets. The result was the LegalVIEW Predictive Insights Module, a sophisticated tool for choosing counsel that works within the user’s existing workflows and provides crucial answers about counsel options at the exact point of decision-making.

Insights In Action

LegalVIEW Predictive Insights is the next generation of legal management tools, focusing on budgeting, cycle time, and law firm selection in the normal stream of work when decisions need to be made. The tool provides more than just a list of potential law firms, but rather proactively ranks a list of firms that would be best for a particular client to partner with for a particular case, including information on budget ranges of what the case should cost and maximum/minimum cycle times for how long it should take to resolve the case.

Simply open a matter, and the module will automatically extract all the relevant data, including complexity, practice area, line of business, type of matter, and geographic location, and submit it to the AI engine. The AI engine then runs that information against the client’s universe of potential law firms, applying it against a segmented law firm schema. Within the top segments, weighted criteria are applied to generate the ranked list. That list, along with budget information, is sent back to the platform where they wait for the user to access them. The curated set of recommendations considers 23 different metrics to rank the law firms. 

The budget benchmark tells you how much matters of your type and complexity in the matter’s geography cost on average. You also get a maximum/minimum budget range prediction for each firm, based on real historical costs of similar matters at that firm. Another crucial metric is the likely cycle time in days, allowing you to judge how long it typically takes a given law firm to resolve a matter like yours compared to other firms on the list.

The number of available metrics, which you can choose dynamically based on your priorities, is impressive. Among others, LegalVIEW Predictive Insights provides information on the firm’s capacity, peer ratings, how accurate the firm is with invoicing, how well they’ve adhered to budgets in the past, how much money you’ve spent with them in the past year, and what discounts they provide. The idea is to empower users to make decisions that best align with their values, goals, and preferred metrics.

Once you’ve decided on a firm, you can assign it with a simple click and wait for the law firm to submit a budget. When you have that budget in hand, you can gain even more insights.

LegalVIEW Predictive Insights shows you the original budget prediction as compared to both the firm’s actual predicted budget and the overall budget benchmark. Click into the budget and you’ll see a breakdown across individual phases of a matter, such as case assessment, pleadings and motions, discovery, and trial prep.

This allows you to have informed discussions with a firm about their budget and ask critical questions about why certain budget aspects might be higher or lower than the predictions. After all, human expertise and nuance will always play into the actual budget of any given matter as driving factors on top of the empirical data.

As time passes, you can see how the invoices match up against the predictions and how the progress compares to the cycle predictions. In essence, LegalVIEW Predictive Insights is more than just a great way to pick the right counsel, it’s a roadmap to completion for your matter after that counsel is selected. And once a matter is closed, the matter details are fed back into the module, which uses machine learning to improve itself to provide better forecasting.

Data Matters

With data on your side, you’re no longer left to making blind decisions on which counsel to hire. The decision is still always yours to make (nothing says you have to pick the #1 ranked firm), but this tool empowers you to make the best possible decision based on data-driven predictions and all the background data that went into creating the weighted rankings. Simply put, the LegalVIEW Predictive Insights Module empowers humans with a data set far larger than they’ve ever had access to before, right at the point when crucial decisions need to be made.

Think of LegalVIEW Predictive Insights as your secret weapon for distilling all the tribal knowledge that’s been amassed by claims and legal departments over decades of hard work. What used to be nearly impossible to quantify is now available on one simple screen. With Predictive Insights on your side, you can feel confident that you’re making the right counsel decision every time.

Many small firm lawyers still struggle to find a low-cost alternative to costly subscriptions when it comes to conducting legal research.

Download Unlocking the Mysteries of Google Scholar to learn how to conduct legal research with ease using the platform’s case law and articles, create targeted keyword/phrase searches to improve your research, speed up your searches with advanced filters and a hidden search feature, and more.

Well, this negotiation is going to be interesting for some intrepid young lawyer.

From the bowels of Craigslist comes an… interesting ad. According to the copy, there’s a young woman — or in the parlance of the ad, a 22-year-old “damsel” — in need of a divorce. Now, that’s a pretty standard reason to seek a lawyer, though Craigslist is not the preferred way to engage counsel. But things kinda go off the rails when it becomes clear the poster cannot afford legal services. Rather than look for attorneys willing to work for free, she seems to want to avail herself of the barter system.

What precisely she’s willing to trade is left up to your imagination, but it certainly looks like she’s seeking a pro boner attorney.

I shudder to think of the legal ethics of any attorney who might take this woman up on what she very obviously seems to be offering.

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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).