Category: News Feeds

 

One wishes one could say “rest in peace”. One can only say, “may there be more peace for Zimbabwe’s people, now that Robert Gabriel Mugabe has retired permanently”. Zimbabwe’s former president has died, aged 95.

His failures are legion. They might start with the 1980s Gukurahundi massacres in Matabeleland and the Midlands, with perhaps 20 000 people killed. Next, too much welfare spending in the 1980s. Then crudely implemented structural adjustment programmes in the 1990s, laying the ground for angry war veterans and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), a strong labour union and civil society based opposition party.

In 1997 Mugabe handed out unbudgeted pensions to the war-vets and promised to really start the “fast track land reform” that got going in 2000, when the MDC threatened to defeat Zanu (PF) at the polls. That abrogation of property rights started the slide in the Zimbabwean dollar’s value.

From 1998 to 2003 Zimbabwe’s participation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s second war cost US$1 million a day, creating a military cabal used to getting money fast. Speedy money printing presses led to unfathomable hyperinflation and the end of Zimbabwe’s sovereign currency, still the albatross around the country’s neck.

In 2008, the MDC’s electoral victory was reversed with a presidential run-off when at least 170 opposition supporters were murdered. Hundreds more were beaten and chased from their homes. Even Mugabe’s regional support base could not stand for that, so he was forced to accept a transitional inclusive government with the MDC.

Over the next decade, Mugabe was unable to stop his party’s increasing faction fighting. His years of playing one group off against the other to favour himself finally wore too thin. When in early November 2017, at his wife Grace’s instigation, he fired his long-time lapdog Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa, the generals with whom he’d colluded for decades turned on him. A coup petit ensued and returned Mnangagwa from exile, soon to be elevated to the presidency and heavily indebted to his comrades.

Where did Mugabe gain his proclivity for factionalism? And how did he learn to speak the language all wanted to hear – only to make them realise they had been deluded in the end?

The beginning

Mugabe and many other Zimbabwean nationalists were jailed in 1964. Ian Smith was preparing for the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, and the first nationalist party had split into Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union and Ndabaningi Sithole’s Zanu. Mugabe had been Nkomo’s Publicity Secretary.

As far back as 1962, Mugabe was registering on the global scales: Salisbury’s resident British diplomat thought Mugabe was “a sinister figure” heading up a youthful “Zimbabwean Liberation Army … the more extreme wing of Zapu”.

But almost as soon as Mugabe was imprisoned, a man in her majesty’s employ travelled down from his advisory post in newly free Zambia to visit the prisoner. Dennis Grennan returned to Lusaka having promised to look after Mugabe’s wife Sarah, known as “Sally”. Grennan and people like Julius Nyerere’s British friend and assistant Joan Wicken played an important role in Mugabe’s rise.

The Zimbabwean nationalists emerged from Salisbury’s prisons late in 1974, as Portugal’s coup led to Angola and Mozambique emerging from colonialism into the Soviet orbit. The fifties generation of Zimbabwean nationalists were to participate in the Zambian and South African inspired détente exercise. This inspired much competition for Zanu’s leadership: Mugabe arrived in Lusaka after ousting Ndabaningi Sithole, Zanu’s first leader.

Samora Machel, freshly in Mozambique’s top office, wondered if Mugabe’s quick rise was due to a “coup in prison”. Herbert Chitepo’s March 1975 assassination  (which got many of Zanu’s leaders arrested and its army kicked out of Zambia) was only one marker of the many fissures in the fractious party that by 1980 would rule Zimbabwe.

In late 1975 the vashandi group emerged within the Zimbabwean People’s Army. Based in Mozambique’s guerrilla camps, they tried to forge unity between Zimbabwe’s two main nationalist armies and push a left-wing agenda. They were profoundly unsure of Mugabe’s suitability for leadership.

When Mugabe found his way to Mozambique also in late 1975, Machel put him under house arrest in Quelimane, far from the guerrilla camps. In January Grennan helped him to London to visit a hospitalised Sally. He made contacts around Europe and with a few London-based Maoists.

Soon after Mugabe’s return the young American congressman Stephen Solarz and the Deputy Head of the American embassy in Maputo, Johnnie Carson, wended their way to Quelimane. Mugabe wowed them.

Solarz and Carson reported back that Mugabe was “an impressive, articulate and extremely confident individual” with a “philosophical approach to problems and … well reasoned arguments”. He claimed to control the “people’s army”. Yet by January 1977, he persuaded Samora Machel to imprison the young advocates of unity with Zapu. His many reasons included their initial refusal to support him at a late 1976 conference in Geneva organised by the British, helped immeasurably by Henry Kissinger, the American Secretary of State.

At a hastily called congress in March 1977 to consecrate his ascension, Mugabe uttered his leitmotif: those appearing to attempt a change to the party’s leadership by “maliciously planting contradictions within our ranks” would be struck by the “the Zanu axe”.

This was Mugabe’s strategy, embedded at an early stage: tell foreign emissaries what they wanted to hear, use young radicals (or older allies) until their usefulness subsided, and then get rid of them. All the while he would balance the other forces contending for power in the party amid a general climate of fear, distrust, and paranoia.

Dealing with dissent

It is not certain if Margaret Thatcher knew about this side of Mugabe when they met less than a month after his April 1980 inauguration. He seemed most worried about how Joshua Nkomo’s Zapu – which he had dumped from the erstwhile “Patriotic Front”, and the violence against which had put Zimbabwe’s election in some doubt – was making life difficult for the new rulers. He warned that he might have “to act against them soon”.

In as much as Zapu was linked with the South African ANC and Thatcher and her colleagues tended to think the ANC was controlled by the South African Communist Party, Zapu intelligence chief Dumiso Dabengwa’s perspective might be more than conspiracy theory. Perhaps Thatcher’s wink and nudge was a green light for the anti-Soviet contingent to eliminate a regional threat. Gukurahundi followed. It was certainly the biggest blot on Mugabe’s career and created the biggest scar over Zimbabwe. The scar is still there, given the lack of any effort at reconcialitation, truth, or justice.

Four years later the ruling party’s first real congress since 1963 reviewed its history. Mugabe tore the Zipa/Vashandi group that had annoyed him eight years before to shreds. “Treacherous … counter-revolutionary … arms caching … dubbed us all zvigananda or bourgeois”. Thus it “became imperative for us to firmly act against them in defending the Party and the Revolution… We had all the trouble-makers detained”.

The great helmsman recounted the youthful dissenters’ arrest and repeated the axe phraseology.

But few saw these sides of Mugabe’s character soon enough; those who did were summarily shut up.

The end

After he’d been ousted, Mugabe could only look on in seeming despair over the ruination he had created. Sanctimonious as ever he wondered how his successor, current President Emmerson Mnangagwa, had become such an ogre. At his 95th birthday, February 21 2019, a few weeks after Mnangagwa’s troops had killed 17 demonstrators, raped as many women, and beaten hundreds more in the wake of his beleaguered finance minister’s methods to create “prosperity from austerity”, Mugabe mused to his absent successor:

We condemn the violence on civilians by soldiers … You can’t do without seeing dead bodies? What kind of a person are you? You feed on death?

He only had to look into his own history to see what kind of people he helped create.

Professor David Moore is based at the University of Johannesburg. This article first appeared on  The Conversation

ZIMBABWE – The family of former president Robert Mugabe says there’s no feud between the government and the family over where he will be buried.

Family spokesperson, Leo Mugabe, says they have been meetings with the government and everything is going according to plan.

“To say there is a feud is not correct, it’s not true. We’ve been meeting with government and everything has been very smooth. There’s understanding, there’s clarity on responsibilities and therefore there’s no feud whatsoever,” said Leo Mugabe.

He says the family and the chiefs in Zvimba will decide where the former president will be laid to rest.

“The chiefs in Zvimba still regard him as a chief and in terms of tradition they are the ones that determine where is he going to be buried, how is he going to be buried, the procedures that must be followed in his burial. This is a cultural thing and nobody can push the chiefs to divulge where they are going to bury [Mugabe],” he said.

Mugabe died in a Singapore hospital on Friday, aged 95.

His funeral is expected to take place on Sunday, 15 September.

There have been a number of books written on Robert Mugabe in his many leadership roles.  As a leader of a guerrilla movement/army, as a prime minister, as a president and even from a western perspective as a complicated/sophisticated dapper dictator.  And make no mistake, many more will be written about him.  As an ousted or disgraced long ruling repressive leader and also as a belatedly glorified Pan Africanist.

And it is the assumptions of future published perspectives on Mugabe’s long rule that are of interest. What I am however concerned with is the lived realities of Mugabe’s legacy.  And by legacy here I am not inferring something to be celebrated but more something to be understood.

In the aftermath of the coup that toppled him, Mugabe has largely been holed up in his Borrowdale mansion and giving the impression of a bitter self-righteousness.  He emerged publicly at least twice.  The first time to endorse the mainstream opposition presidential candidate in a long drawn statement and questions and answer session with the press. The second time to vote for the latter in Highfields, Harare.

I am sure he has had other interviews and publicized conversations with visiting leaders from African countries.  Or his wife as his spokesperson has occasionally put out the same.  Together with his still many apologists and runners either in remnants of the G40 faction he spawned or on social media and in the mainstream opposition.

Beyond the immediacy of his ouster from power, we are however reeling from the effects of his leadership of the state.  And there is little that is positive that can be objectively discerned from it or assumed to be as a result of his own individual leadership effort.

Having ridden on the noble but painful cause and struggle that was the liberation struggle, Mugabe managed in his at least 37 years in power, to undermine the values and principles that the liberation struggle was motivated by.

While conveniently embracing socialism as his then ruling party’s ideological foundation, he was to actively undermine it in practice.  Foregoing the democratic values of socialism, he went on to attempt a violent clampdown on his then main opposition rivals in the form of Joshua Nkomo’s Pf Zapu under the pretext of preventing a civil war in the southern parts of the country.  An attempt that has come to be infamously called ‘Gukurahundi’.

After co-opting the same opposition, Mugabe was to try to establish a ‘one party state’ which was eventually rejected via the activism of his former colleagues in the struggle but also due to the fact that it was no longer popular in Southern Africa after Nyerere had abandoned the same in Tanzania.

What was to prove colossal in his intentions at retaining power with global western power endorsement, was his economic about turn to embrace neoliberalism/ capitalism as advised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

Where he had previously had some sort of obligation to collective and people centered economics he abandoned this to begin his worship at the altar of free market economics.  Contrary to the values of the liberation struggle.  And this was the beginning of the unraveling of our national consciousness as had been established by the liberation struggle.  It quite literally became about Mugabe and his hold on power while serving the interests of global capital.

It was labour that was to try and rein in Mugabe’s neoliberalism by first of all recalling the values of the liberation struggle and using the same to challenge an elitist political economy.   The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) and its allies in the students and womens’ movements as well as human rights focused civil society organisations went on to establish what was then referred to as a working people’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Mugabe in populist turn decided to by embark on what we officially know to be the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP. All in a vainglorious and individualist attempt at retaining the loyalty of war veterans and the peasantry.  While at the same time echoing long abandoned principles and values that had motivated the liberation struggle.

It worked, albeit briefly.  Mugabe’s neoliberal economy could not sustain the FTLRP and it expectedly reeled under not only sanctions but also the fact that its populism was never going to make it revolutionary.

That it happened and has been said by Mnangagwa’s government to be irreversible does not make it any less violent or populist in serving Mugabe’s intention at retaining power.

Even by the time he was forced by SADC to form an inclusive government with the opposition, Mugabe’s particular version of individualism in politics would not allow him to even consider his own succession.  In his own party nor for posterity.

And where we fast forward to his ouster from power, his particular streak of individual political stubbornness eventually led him to be hoist by his own petard. He quite literally fell on his own sword. Even if he didn’t see it coming.

It is a combination of Mugabe’s inability to see into the future or beyond himself and his deliberate abandonment of liberation struggle socialist democratic values as accompanied by neoliberal/free market economics that led Zimbabwe to its current parlous state.

The end effect of this on our own society has been catastrophic.  Not only just in relation to our one time critical national consciousness as informed by the liberation struggle but also to our own individual perceptions of what should be a progressive society.

Mugabe’s long rule has the unenviable legacy of having created a highly individualized, materialistic and populist society.  One that perceives progress by the day and rarely considers collective posterity.  And with a default admiration of neoliberalism and ideological austerity.  Mugabe, via his ruling party Zanu Pf have taken us into the trap of ‘millennial capitalism’ where a combination of free market economics, superstition (religion), gambling and individualism have stymied the collective national consciousness.

There are many ways to regain a critical collective national consciousness.  The first step to doing so is to identify what caused its demise.  Historically and in the contemporary, that begins at identifying Mugabe’s real legacy and role in getting us to where we are as a country. Where we are saddled with a nasty/violent, materialist and populist individualism.

This article was first published in April 2019 on http://takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com/  

Post published in: Featured

The body of Zimbabwe’s former president Robert Mugabe was flown home from Singapore on Wednesday morning, five days after he died in a hospital in the wealthy city-state. Police motorbikes escorted the white Mercedes hearse carrying Mugabe’s body from Singapore Casket, a funeral parlour where he had been kept since his death.

A plane carrying the former leader and the visiting delegation departed shortly afterwards, his nephew Adam Molai told AFP.

“It just left now,” he said by phone from the plane as it took off, with the noise of the aircraft audible in the background.

The delegation from Zimbabwe arrived on Tuesday and attended a private Catholic mass for Mugabe at the funeral parlour, which was officiated by a Zimbabwean priest.

Mugabe’s body was expected to arrive in Zimbabwe on Wednesday at 3pm (13:00 GMT), a family member told Reuters. From there, it will be taken to his home village in Kutama, west of the capital Harare, where he has been mourned as a hero and where there will be an overnight wake.

Mugabe died on Friday. He was 95.

Saturday funeral

The former guerrilla leader had dominated Zimbabwean politics for almost four decades from independence in 1980 until he was removed by his own army in a November 2017 coup.Revered by many as a liberator who freed his people from white minority rule, Mugabe was vilified by others for ruthlessly crushing his opponents and wrecking one of Africa’s most promising economies.On Thursday and Friday, Mugabe’s body will lie in state at Rufaro Stadium in the capital so the public can pay their respects.

The 35 000-seater stadium is where Mugabe took his oath of office when Ian Smith, the Prime Minister under the colonial Rhodesian regime, handed over power.

There Mugabe hoisted the new Zimbabwe flag and lit the independence flame on April 18, 1980 – bringing hope for a new era after a long guerrilla war.

The official funeral will be held on Saturday at the 60 000-seat National Sports Stadium in Harare and foreign leaders are expected to attend.

He will be buried on Sunday but the location remains unclear.

Mugabe’s family is resisting the government’s plan to bury him at the National Heroes Acre monument in the Harare and wants him to be interred in his home village, relatives have told Reuters.

Post published in: Featured

Mugabe, a guerrilla leader who swept to power after Zimbabwe’s independence from Britain and went on to rule for 37 years until he was ousted in 2017, died on Friday, aged 95.

His health deteriorated after he was toppled by the military and former loyalists in November 2017, ending an increasingly tyrannical rule that sent the economy into ruin.

Relatives and Zimbabwean government officials have travelled to Singapore, where Mugabe died after receiving treatment for several months, to collect his body. They will fly out later Wednesday.

A white hearse carrying Mugabe’s body left the funeral parlour, accompanied by police motorbikes, and drove past a group of journalists.

The visiting group, who include Vice President Kembo Mohadi, arrived on Tuesday and attended a private Catholic mass for Mugabe at the parlour, officiated by a Zimbabwean priest.

Zimbabweans have been divided over how to mourn a former leader once hailed as a liberation hero but who later brutally repressed his opponents.

On arrival in Zimbabwe, Mugabe’s body will be taken straight to his village in Kutama, in Zvimba district west of the capital Harare, for an overnight wake.

On Thursday and Friday the body will lie in state at Rufaro Stadium in Mbare township in Harare – where Mugabe took his oath of office — for the public to pay their final respects.

The official funeral will be held on Saturday at the giant 60,000-seat National Sports Stadium in Harare and foreign leaders are expected to attend.

His body will be buried on Sunday but the location remains unclear.

Mugabe’s family and President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government are apparently at odds over whether it would be at his homestead northwest of Harare or at a shrine for liberation heroes in the capital.

Crippling daily power outages of up to 18 hours and erratic supply of clean water are just some of the most obvious signs. Meanwhile, an inflation rate of over 500% has put the prices of basic goods beyond the reach of most people.

Hopes that the end of President Robert Mugabe’s ruinous rule in November 2017 would help put the country on a new path of peace and prosperity have long dissipated. Efforts by his successor President Emmerson Mnangagwa to attract foreign investors, who are critical in reviving Zimbabwe’s ailing economy, have also largely failed.

The situation has not been helped by the rejection of the 2018 presidential election results by the main opposition party. The Movement for Democratic Change Alliance (MDC-A) claims the governing Zanu-PF stole the elections even though the results were endorsed as free and fair by the African Union and Southern African Development Community (SADC). Only the European Union observers were somewhat circumspect in their assessment.

The opposition alliance has been calling for Mnangagwa’s government to relinquish power, and a national transitional authority appointed to run the country for at least two years, or until the 2023 general elections.

How individuals who will sit on the national transitional authority will be chosen and by whom, is not clear. But the party and some academics believe such a transitional authority would normalise Zimbabwe’s highly polarised political situation and help it revive its relations with the West.

The opposition may have a point on re-engagement with the West. This is key to helping end the investment drought that started in earnest between 2000 and 2003 under sanctions imposed by Western countries for human rights violations linked to Zanu-PF’s violent land reform seizures and election rigging.

But the transitional authority idea is doomed to fail because of lack of buy-in by Zanu-PF. So, it’s time to consider a more viable alternative path to peace for Zimbabwe.

Clamping down

For now, the government has dismissed talk of a transitional authority as unconstitutional. Instead, in May it launched its own platform, called the Political Actors Dialogue. The forum comprises 17 small political parties that participated in the 2018 elections.

The main opposition party is boycotting the process on grounds that Mnangagwa is an illegitimate president. Recently, it attempted to embark on public protests in the hope of bringing the government to its knees. The protests fell flat after being blocked by the courts and the police.

It boggles the mind why the MDC-A, led by Nelson Chamisa, insists on marches when previous attempts were crushed with brute force. These led to deaths in August 2018 and January 2019.

The Zanu-PF regime has always clamped down heavily on perceived threats to its rule since 1980. Why then does the MDC-A continue to endanger people’s lives through this deadly route as a way of resolving Zimbabwe’s socio-economic and political crises?

I firmly believe that the opposition needs to change tack and focus on entering into dialogue with the government.

Dialogue and unity government

Zimbabwe’s ongoing crisis requires the two leading political protagonists – Mnangagwa and Chamisa – to enter into serious dialogue. Both leaders need to soften their hard-line stances towards each other and put the people of Zimbabwe first.

There’s a precedent for this. Ten years ago, then South African President Thabo Mbeki managed to bring then President Mugabe and Movement for Democratic Change opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai to the negotiation table.

The talks culminated in the formation of the government of national unity that ran Zimbabwe from February 2009 to July 2013, with Mugabe as the President and Tsvangirai as the Prime Minister. The unity government was fairly successful and managed to stabilise the economy.

Two decades of suffering have shown that it is not the threat of protests or sanctions from the West that can move Zanu-PF to change, but neighbouring countries under the aegis of SADC. South Africa is pivotal in this regard as the region’s strongest economic and military power.

It’s time to experiment with a second government of national unity for Zimbabwe. But for this to happen, SADC and South Africa must have the appetite to intervene in Zimbabwe. This is currently lacking.

Dialogue in Zimbabwe’s history

Historically, dialogue has moved Zimbabwe forward as a nation during its darkest hours.

• A year before independence in 1980, battle-hardened guerrilla commanders agreed to talk to the then Rhodesian Prime Minister, Ian Smith, to end Zimbabwe’s liberation war even though they were convinced that they were winning.
• In 1987 Joshua Nkomo, who was the leader of the main opposition party, the Zimbabwean African People’s Union, agreed to talk to his political nemesis, then Prime Minister Mugabe. Yet before this, he had been hounded out of the country by Mugabe in the mid-80s, and thousands of his supporters killed.
• More recently in 2009, Morgan Tsvangirai agreed to enter into a unity government with Mugabe, despite winning the first round of the 2008 elections. The unity government briefly resuscitated and stabilised Zimbabwe’s fragile economy. Hyperinflation was tamed, basic commodities became available again and people regained purchasing power.

The way forward

Given the MDC-A’s positive contribution during its brief stint in the 2009-2013 unity government, the party should be expending its energies on dialogue. The main opposition party can enter into a second government of national unity, but continue building and strengthening its own support.

In the same vein, Zanu-PF also needs to realise that without the involvement of the MDC-A, its attempts to revive the economy and end the strife in the country, on its own terms, are destined to fail.

Tapiwa Chagonda, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Johannesburg

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Post published in: Business

Is it finally here? After years of continuances and delays, and more than five long years after Dan Markel’s killing, could (some of) his murderers finally face justice?

The trial of two alleged murderers of Markel, the Florida State University law professor who was shot and killed in July 2014, will start on September 23. Last Wednesday, lawyers for the two defendants, Sigfredo Garcia and Katherine Magbanua, told the court that they are ready to go to trial.

There’s still some pretrial wrangling going on, including arguments over witnesses. But barring something unforeseen, a final pretrial conference will take place on September 19, and jury selection will begin on September 23. The trial is expected to run between three and six weeks.

(I offer the “barring something unforeseen” caveat because, as followers of these proceedings well know, something always seems to come up on the brink of trial. I’ll believe trial has started once the jury is seated and lawyers are delivering opening statements. But this is the closest we’ve ever gotten to trial; 750 jury summonses have already been issued.)

Speaking of wrangling over testimony… when I last wrote about the case, back in June, I urged Judge James Hankinson to reconsider his decision to deny the defense a deposition of Wendi Adelson, Dan Markel’s ex-wife. As it turns out, Judge Hankinson did just that, and Wendi was duly deposed.

And speaking of Wendi Adelson… Jason Solomon, a friend of Dan Markel, has started an online petition that’s essentially an open letter to Wendi, urging her to allow Dan’s parents, Ruth and Phil Markel, to see their two grandchildren. As of this writing, the petition has 657 signatures; you can review and sign it here.

The case for allowing the Markels to see their grandchildren, whom they have not seen for more than three years, is exceedingly strong. If the petition isn’t enough for you, read Solomon’s thoughtful and compelling Medium essay on the subject.

To be sure, Solomon’s piece has a provocative title — What Should Happen When Your Mom and Brother Murder Your Ex? — but in terms of its content, it’s quite fair-minded. It acknowledges the arguments against allowing the Markels to see their grandkids (which it then refutes, in my view persuasively). And unlike many of the armchair sleuths who follow the case, Solomon expresses the view that Wendi was not involved in the planning of her ex-husband’s murder.

In other news about Wendi Adelson, it appears that she’s no longer the executive director of the IMPAC Fund, a position she assumed in the summer of 2017. If you go to the website of the immigration-focused nonprofit, you’ll see that Kathy Bird Carvajal is now its executive director.

What’s Wendi Adelson up to now? We don’t know. Her LinkedIn profile still lists her as ED of the IMPAC Fund. Whether her departure from the organization has anything to do with the Markel case is also unclear.

My guess is no. Mike Fernandez, the billionaire founder of the Fund, has already spoken out in defense of Wendi, who disclosed the circumstances surrounding her husband’s death to the Fund prior to her appointment.

And as one source of mine who knows Wendi socially told me, Fernandez is just one of several high-profile, civic-minded individuals who have embraced Wendi since her return to South Florida. It’s quite possible that Wendi, through these connections, has found another job.

But here’s one thing I think it’s safe to say: don’t expect to see Wendi Adelson anywhere near that courtroom on September 23.^[1]

P.S. For those of you who are new to this story and looking to catch up (and there’s a lot to catch up on), I refer you to two well-done, long-form treatments about the case that came out over the summer: Steve Miller’s piece for the Miami New Times, and the Tallahassee Democrat piece by Karl Etters, who has been covering the case since its inception.

P.P.S. For those of you who listened to Over My Dead Body, the podcast that focused on the Markel case for its first season, it just launched its second season, focused on a different case. And the first season will be coming to television — even though the story of the Markel case is far from over.

[1] It’s possible that Wendi might appear later in the trial to testify. As you’ll recall, the reason the defense sought to depose her is because she was listed as a possible witness by the prosecution, purportedly to supply background information and explain some of the relationships in the case. But I wouldn’t expert her to appear at the trial of her own accord — even though the proceedings are of obvious interest to her.

What Should Happen When Your Mom and Brother Murder Your Ex? [Medium]
Let Dan Markel’s Parents See their Grandkids [iPetitions]
Friend starts petition for Dan Markel’s parents to visit his children [WTXL]
Trial nears for Dan Markel murder case [WTXL]
Markel case still on track for trial later this month [WCTV]
Friend starts petition for Dan Markel’s parents to visit his children [WTXL]
A Professor’s Murder in Tallahassee Was a Contract Hit, Prosecutors Say [Miami New Times]

---

David Lat, the founding editor of Above the Law, is a writer, speaker, and legal recruiter at Lateral Link, where he is a managing director in the New York office. David’s book, Supreme Ambitions: A Novel (2014), was described by the New York Times as “the most buzzed-about novel of the year” among legal elites. David previously worked as a federal prosecutor, a litigation associate at Wachtell Lipton, and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@laterallink.com.

The legal industry continues to grapple with the idea that clients are in control. How do law firms protect and grow profits as clients put more pressure on them to do more with less and at an ever-decreasing cost? What’s more, many clients struggle to articulate precisely how they expect firms to meet these expectations.

What may seem like an impossible problem is actually a manifestation of the larger cultural shift to customer-centric commerce. The rise of the on-demand economy has created an expectation that all businesses, including lawyers and law firms, deliver new experiences that meet unexpressed or underserved expectations. For example, very few travelers were asking to stay in strangers homes 10 years ago, but today, this mode of lodging is widely accepted. Among some, it’s even preferred.

This white paper provides:

• An overview of the current market including statistical trends;
• Strategies for creating a plan to uncover and document client needs; and
• A guide with critical probing questions to ask clients.