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No one ever said suing a Biglaw firm was going to be pretty. That’s a lesson the six named plaintiffs taking on Jones Day found out pretty quickly. The latest development has the Biglaw firm seeking sanction against the plaintiffs and their lawyers.

For those who need the primer on the case, the purported class-action gender discrimination case alleges a “fraternity culture” at the firm and unequal pay behind the firm’s notorious “black box” compensation system. There are currently six named plaintiffs in the case (there had been seven, but one anonymous plaintiff dropped out rather than reveal her name). The plaintiffs are spread throughout the country — Nilab Rahyar Tolton, Andrea Mazingo, Meredith Williams, and Jaclyn Stahl worked in California offices of the firm, while Saira Draper was an associate in Atlanta, and Katrina Henderson was in the firm’s New York office — and a core allegation is that the same black box compensation systems kept their pay below that of men working at the firm.

But the firm takes issue with the way the plaintiffs have, thus far, attempted to show the unequal pay. In filings they’ve pointed to Jones Day’s statement about paying market salaries, which they define as being in line with the Cravath scale, and the theory is that female associates who make below that mark are being unfairly compensated, as discussed in the deposition of plaintiff Meredith Williams:

“So just sort of combining Jones Day’s representation that top performing candidates are making market, neither myself nor any of the women I know are making market, I have to assume that Jones Day’s representation was truthful and someone is making market, and I would understand that that would be the male associates,” Williams testified.

But, as reported by Law.com, Jones Days takes issue with this theory, calling it “deeply flawed logic” and “pure speculation,” and alleging plaintiffs are aware of facts that contradict that theory:

“Their principal theory of the case—that the proof of discrimination is the fact that plaintiffs did not earn “Cravath scale”—was sophistry on its own terms,” the Jones Day attorneys said. ”And, to make matters worse, plaintiffs knew facts that contradicted their theory and knew no facts that supported it.”

The firm also says the plaintiffs’ theory does not take into account productivity and performance reviews, and how plaintiffs’ performance, not their gender, allegedly impacted their compensation.

In their request for sanctions, Jones Day also takes aim at what they deem a lack of research about the claims and, allegedly, not speaking with similarly situated men at the firm:

“No policy could have precluded plaintiffs’ counsel from contacting the alleged comparators, for example, to determine whether there was a good-faith basis for claiming that they were paid more than plaintiffs for equal work,” the Jones Day attorneys said. “Instead, counsel ‘fire[d] shots into the proverbial dark,’ making a host of baseless allegations which plaintiffs then touted in the media in a (largely unsuccessful) effort to drum up new plaintiffs.”

And though the plaintiffs’ lawyers at Sanford Heisler Sharp have not yet released a formal statement on the motion, attached to the sanctions motion is correspondence that reveals the plaintiffs’ position on the matter. They point to the “wealth of circumstantial evidence” about life at the firm including “gendered comments, gendered criticism, discriminatory allocation of work, discriminatory performance evaluations, and, as a result, severely limited advancement opportunities for women.” They also say Jones Day’s lack of compensation data to back up their point is damning:

“You are in possession of all of the relevant evidence and have known of Plaintiffs’ allegations for more than a year. We expect that you have long since analyzed the firm’s pay data and evaluated the degree to which men and women are paid comparably. We are confident that if you had a basis to deny plaintiffs’ allegations of firmwide pay discrimination you would do so, and that if you had evidence to disprove those allegations, you would produce it.”

We’ll be waiting — with popcorn — for the next development in the highly contested litigation.

Earlier coverage: Jones Day Hit With Explosive Gender Discrimination Case
Jones Day Facing Second Class-Action Lawsuit Over ‘Fraternity Culture’ Of The Firm
Partner Whose Behavior Features Prominently In Jones Day Gender Discrimination Lawsuit Is Out At The Firm
Jones Day Wants Gender Discrimination Plaintiffs To Reveal Themselves To The Public
Plaintiffs Throw Shade At Jones Day In Gender Discrimination Lawsuit
Gender Discrimination Lawsuit Against Jones Day Gets Yet Another Plaintiff
Gender Discrimination Lawsuit Against Jones Day Dropped — Well, One Of Them At Least
Jones Day Gender Discrimination Case Spreads To New York
Amended Gender Discrimination Case Brings The Real Scoop On Jones Day Compensation
Jones Day To Gender Discrimination Plaintiffs: You Don’t Deserve To Be Paid On The Cravath Scale
Plaintiff Backs Out Of Gender Discrimination Lawsuit Against Jones Day Rather Than Reveal Her Name
Plaintiffs In Jones Day Gender Discrimination Case Want It To Be A Class Action

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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).

After a lifetime working his way up the rungs at HSBC, John Flint managed to muck things up so royally that he was escorted out after just 18 months in the top job. Still, five months later the stench in the boardroom is so great that a number of other longtime veterans infected by it now have to go, as well.

The British bank confirmed that Samir Assaf, its longtime global banking and markets chief executive, will leave his job in March and become chairman of corporate and institutional banking…. Other changes include the departure of a 14-year veteran, Marc Moses, who is leaving the bank’s board and his job as chief risk officer next month, to be replaced by Pam Kaur, head of wholesale market and credit risk. The bank said Chief Operating Office Andy Maguire will give up his role as of January, having helped HSBC find his replacement, former Hewlett Packard executive John Hinshaw.

There is overwhelming evidence that President Trump betrayed his oath of office by seeking to use presidential power to pressure a foreign government to help him distort an American election, for his personal and political benefit, at the direct expense of national security interests as determined by Congress. His conduct is precisely the type of threat to our democracy that the founders feared when they included the remedy of impeachment in the Constitution.

We take no position on whether the President committed a crime. But conduct need not be criminal to be impeachable. The standard here is constitutional; it does not depend on what Congress has chosen to criminalize.

If the House of Representatives impeached the President for the conduct described here and the Senate voted to remove him, they would be acting well within their constitutional powers. Whether President Trump’s conduct is classified as bribery, as a high crime or misdemeanor, or as both, it is clearly impeachable under our Constitution.

— an excerpt from an open letter to Congress signed by hundreds of law professors from schools across the country, sponsored by the government watchdog Protect Democracy, which reaches the conclusion that there is “overwhelming evidence that President Trump betrayed his oath of office” and that his conduct was “clearly impeachable.”

At this time, 768 law professors from schools like Columbia; Yale; Stanford; Harvard; Duke; Emory; Georgetown; Berkeley; University of Florida; University of Pennsylvania; Albany; University of Texas; Rutgers; and the University of Georgia have signed the letter.

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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.

Corporate law departments (CLDs) are taking a cue from their colleagues in other departments and have become more rigorous in their business processes to gain better control of their legal spend. This shift started with e-billing, which remains the most effective legal operations technology according to respondents to this year’s survey. However, CLDs are now seeking tools that supplement e-billing and help them meet their spend targets. For example, this survey shows that 20 percent of companies are already using artificial intelligence (AI) for their billing and spend management. Total Spend Management from Wolters Kluwer’s ELM Solutions is an innovative approach that adds to the tools CLDs have for running efficiently. The following are a few areas where this kind of advanced technology can help improve legal spend management.

Invoice Intake

Many invoices, especially from smaller outside counsel firms, arrive as paper or non-LEDES-compliant electronic files, such as PDF or image files. These invoices can’t be adjusted or appealed with automated e-billing tools. In addition, the data in them can’t be analyzed or reported on. Manually keying this information into the e-billing platform is an option, but is inefficient and prone to human error. This is an area where AI technology can execute a time-intensive task, allowing staff members to stay focused on work that yields greater value. AI can automatically capture and convert non-LEDES invoices without manual data entry, saving hours.

Invoice Review

Traditionally, the painstaking job of reviewing law firm invoices has fallen to the in-house attorneys assigned to a matter or central invoice review teams. Due to limited time, competing priorities, and the drudgery of scrutinizing every line item, invoices often are not reviewed as carefully as they should be. This leads to spend leakage and low compliance with billing guidelines. AI technology can analyze huge numbers of invoices quickly and flag line items that need careful attention so that human reviewers can focus these, instead of wading through every line. Here, technology does the grunt work, and people are able to spend their time efficiently.

Outside Counsel Selection

It’s common for legal teams to make outside counsel selections based on who they traditionally use or personal relationships and good impressions. But this leaves CLDs open to selecting the wrong partner, instead of the one most likely to deliver the results they want. Predictive AI offers a more reliable alternative. An AI algorithm can analyze information from past cases and performance and make a recommendation as to which firm would likely be the best fit, with no need to make a guess or rely on a gut feeling.

Many CLDs have already begun to adopt portions of the Total Spend. Many CLDs have already started to adopt portions of the Total Spend Management Approach, identifying processes and technologies that can be improved upon to better control legal spend., identifying processes and technologies that can be improved upon to better control legal spend. The key to success is being aware of the technology that is available and prioritizing the opportunities for improvement.

While less catchy than “I’ve got a plan,” Elizabeth Warren’s campaign has put considerable effort into making transparency an additional pillar of her run. She’s put out a decade’s worth of tax returns and spends a good deal of time subtly and indirectly reminding folks that Joe Biden spent decades as the “Senior Senator from Visa” and Mayor Pete just refuses to talk about whole years of his life like he’s a Tom Hardy character returning to claim an inheritance. And mostly what Warren’s gotten for all her efforts is a bunch of undeserved flack.

The lesson is, to quote Homer Simpson, never try.

The latest public dragging she’s getting stems from her decision to release around 30 years of records relaying her legal work as a bankruptcy expert. Ironically, it’s a move she was prompted to take because of attacks from Buttigieg who started aggressively deflecting from his own opacity by calling out his rivals — a tactic that might be unsavory but empirically works on the mainstream media as evidenced by the mere existence of the current administration. So when Warren released her records, she got coverage like this from the Washington Post:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren earned nearly $2 million consulting for corporations and financial firms, records show

An alternative title not prepared to cater to the legally illiterate would be “Nationally Recognized Bankruptcy Specialist Earned Around $60K/Year As A Lawyer.” Social media is encouragingly pushing back at the mainstream narrative by pointing out that this story only seems to prove that Warren was underpaid for three decades of legal work proving that there are still a lot of people in the country who have a vague clue about the law. Unfortunately, the Twittersphere isn’t backed by a publishing empire.

Here we are yet again with the press trying to gin up outrage by trying to play up how much money attorneys make for their work. Yet this is a uniquely stupid episode in this ongoing trend because as journalistically irresponsible as it is to get breathless over a Biglaw partner billing a few hundred bucks an hour, it’s even dumber to try to tag someone as a hypocritical plutocrat for making $1.9 million over 30 years when there are partners making $1.9 million every six months that wouldn’t even get a society page blurb.

The most charitable reading of this coverage is that even if the amounts are disingenuously hyped, it’s significant that an attorney so fixated on standing up to corporate greed would take work from corporations:

For instance, the documents released Sunday show that Warren made about $80,000 from work she did for creditors in the energy company Enron’s bankruptcy and $20,000 as a consultant for Dow Chemical, a company that was trying to limit the liability it faced from silicone breast implants that were made by a connected firm.

Enron’s creditors may have been corporations themselves, but representing them is actually in line with Warren’s central thesis that unregulated corporate greed screws people over. The breast implant work dealt with Dow buying out another company and, almost assuredly, had to do with who was on the hook for damages, as opposed to whether or not someone was on the hook. That’s pretty standard legal work. We’ve addressed before the limits of blaming attorneys for their clients. There’s not really a contradiction between arguing for Bankruptcy Code reform and counseling folks on how the current Code works.

No, what this coverage is all about is a cheap bid to turn one candidate’s transparency against them by playing to prejudices about the value of lawyers through misleading headlines.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren earned nearly $2 million consulting for corporations and financial firms, records show [Washington Post]

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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.

It’s that time of year again where we look back, take stock of the year in law, count the bonuses rolling in and order another round. With that in mind, we’re throwing a holiday party here in New York, and you’re invited!

So, if you want to grab some drinks and food on ATL, RSVP here! This year we’ll have our party on December 10th at Houndstooth Pub on 8th Avenue at 37th Street.

Want to brag about your bonus? Share a war story? Take a break from studying for finals? Catch up with your favorite (it’s me, I know it is) ATL editor? All are welcome!

Here are the details:

When: Tuesday, December 10th
Where: 520 8th Avenue, New York, NY 10018
Time: 6pm – whenever we stop drinking

Remember to RSVP soon to guarantee your spot and we’ll see you in December.

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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 are risk-averse.” It’s a generality that I’ve heard repeated constantly throughout my career. But as the rare lawyer (yep, that’s me!) attracted to risk — an allegedly rare breed — I’m often puzzled. Law demands creative thinking and innovative solutions — how can you have either of these things without taking risks?

When I hear this generalization, I wonder: Am I not enough of a lawyer? Am I thrill-seeking techie who dresses up in lawyer’s clothing and pretends to be one every day? Or, is your generalization is just that: An inaccurate generalization? In the end, I always conclude the latter. After all, it’s usually easier to conclude that “it’s you, not me” in most situations.

Jokes aside, predicting a personality trait of a group member is a challenging and at best a crude undertaking. Even if your assessment of the group is correct on average, it may or may not be for any one member. And sometimes the standard deviation is so large and there are so many outliers that even talking about averages is meaningless.

Most importantly, just like any group of human beings, individual lawyers don’t fit neatly into a box. Within a group, there are scattered gems of varieties — different personalities, experiences, and talents. Why not enjoy the full spectrum of legal experiences? Why not enjoy the richness of each interaction and get to know each person for who they are, not for who they’re not or for who you expect them to be?

While “lawyers are risk-averse” is and has always been an easy cliché, my experiences in law have also included meeting very interesting people who happen to practice law. After all, as a tech lawyer, I know as well as anyone that the law is a dynamic, constantly evolving body of knowledge — there must be someone embracing change, newness, and risks behind it.

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Olga V. Mack is the CEO of Parley Pro, a next-generation contract management company that has pioneered online negotiation technology. Olga embraces legal innovation and had dedicated her career to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive than before by embracing technology. Olga is also an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor, and entrepreneur. Olga founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to participate on corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. Olga also co-founded SunLaw, an organization dedicated to preparing women in-house attorneys to become general counsels and legal leaders, and WISE to help female law firm partners become rainmakers. She authored Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board Seat and Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security. You can email Olga at olga@olgamack.com or follow her on Twitter @olgavmack. 

On the latest episode of The Jabot podcast I speak with Dana Rosenfeld, incoming Managing Partner at Kelley Drye & Warren. We talk about her path to the top of the firm’s leadership, the surprising thing about the managing partner role, her advice for attorneys in the lateral market, and her priorities for her tenure in the firm’s leadership.

The Jabot podcast is an offshoot of the Above the Law brand focused on the challenges women, people of color, LGBTQIA, and other diverse populations face in the legal industry. Our name comes from none other than the Notorious Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the jabot (decorative collar) she wears when delivering dissents from the bench. It’s a reminder that even when we aren’t winning, we’re still a powerful force to be reckoned with.

Happy listening!

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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).

We don’t get out of bed for a Deutsche Bank fine of less than $100 million, because really who has the time, and also because anything less is very literally only a drop in the bucket of the $20 billion-plus the other DB has had to part ways with for being naughty over the last few years. There are, of course, exceptions, such as the rare occasion when the bank has done something smart, like settling bribery allegations for $13 million that really should have cost it a lot more than $13 million. Or today’s news that the Deutsches are paying €15 million (more) to settle some (additional) money-laundering allegations. This settlement is notable for two reasons: The first is that the two employees who looked like they might have to go to jail over the whole thing are not, and the second is that the bank would presumably have paid a lot more than €15 million to keep all of those police cars from very publicly surrounding its headquarters.

Think the bonus scale that was set by Milbank is the most an associate can hope for this year (without onerous billing requirements that could trigger additional cash payouts)? Think again. Wilkinson Walsh + Eskovitz has once again topped that scale — across the board.

Apparently the plus sign in the firm’s name stands for bigger bonuses.

Below is the firm’s bonus scale, which is 1.5 times the going market rate. This is the fourth time WW+E has beaten the market on bonuses since it opened four years ago.

Class of 2019: $22,500 (pro-rated)
Class of 2018: $22,500
Class of 2017: $37,500
Class of 2016: $75,000
Class of 2015: $97,500
Class of 2014: $120,000
Class of 2013: $135,000
Class of 2012 and senior: $150,000

Wilkinson Walsh attorneys will once again be having very happy holidays. It just goes to show that working at a boutique doesn’t require trading off Biglaw compensation.

(Flip to the next page to see the full memo from Wilkinson Walsh.)

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of important bonus updates, so when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Matches”). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we also use for salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish. Thanks for all of your help!

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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.