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Which Biglaw firm was ranked #1 in Vault’s 2020 practice area rankings in the area of media, entertainment, and sports?

Hint: The firm represents almost every major sports league in the country. Some would say that its name is synonymous with “sports law.”

See the answer on the next page.

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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.

Last week, we talked a little about the importance of information governance and how critical it is to get stakeholders to the table. We asked why fully 40 percent of companies do not have a formal information governance policy and why half of organizations do not have a dedicated individual assigned to lead information governance.

This week, we look at that leadership function, the executive support that is needed to get an information governance initiative off the ground, and some specifics for implementing an IG program.

Data managers are repeatedly asking questions like who is creating data, where is it stored, and how are people accessing it? Additionally, they want to know who owns or controls the data, if it is needed and for how long, and how do they maintain and secure the data.

Talk to any CIO or IT director and they will tell you that their challenges lie in one or more of these questions.

But with everything else they have on their plates, it should surprise no one that many IT leaders have neither the money nor the time to formally implement an information governance program. And this says nothing about all the other potential obstacles they face.

An information governance program sounds like a big deal, after all. Some might argue that it’s okay to back-burner such plans in favor of more pressing needs. Done right, however, and IG plan can solve many of the issues facing IT leaders today.

First, get the right stakeholders involved. It starts, frankly, with legal operations. As the principle risk managers for the organization, lawyers and legal ops professionals should be leaning in heavily to press executive leadership for funding and resources. But that’s just the beginning.

Every business unit leader needs to be involved in the IG conversation. Because one of the first questions (i.e., who is creating data?) reaches across the enterprise, each leader must be engaged. Data silos that previously existed need to be broken down and centralized.

And there needs to be a formally appointed leader who is empowered to direct and manage the IG program moving forward. Some organizations have CIGO or CISO roles, others have less attractive titles. It really does not matter what the role is called, just that it exists.

The IG leader not only needs authority, they also need to be a strategic thinker. Realistic IG solutions involve coordinating a lot of moving parts, including people, processes, and software tools. The goal is to make the process as seamless as possible; it’s difficult to do in a bureaucratic and siloed setting.

Second, it is necessary to take an organization-wide inventory. From every business unit, it is necessary to answer each of the initial questions data managers repeatedly ask. What tools are they using? Where is data stored? How are they using the data?

Next, consider using data classification tools. Data classification is a relatively new term to some, but large organizations have been classifying data for many years. In order to properly manage data, it is essential to understand precisely what data is under management.

Fourth, determine the organization’s legal obligations to retain information. This is typically a broad undertaking, but a retention schedule should apply to all information under management. And, perhaps most critically, if data is not needed it should be subject to disposition.

Every organization is different, but once the stakeholders are engaged, and scope of the data and the need to retain it are understood, the next step is to begin focusing one at time on the other substantive issues, like security (device and user access, data loss protection, intrusion prevention), regulatory and compliance (privacy, corporate governance, GDPR and reporting), and legal requirements (legal holds, data preservation and collection, eDiscovery).

Information is the soft tissue that holds an organization together. Many executives don’t see it that way. Things like eDiscovery have almost invariably been called a nuisance by top management. That is, until a litigation event hits or there’s a failure to preserve data. The point is that through a strategically thought-out process, that is implemented functionally and with all the proper stakeholders involved, organizations can easily reap the benefits of information governance and everything that comes with it.

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Mike Quartararo is the managing director of eDPM Advisory Services, a consulting firm providing e-discovery, project management and legal technology advisory and training services to the legal industry. He is also the author of the 2016 book Project Management in Electronic Discovery. Mike has many years of experience delivering e-discovery, project management, and legal technology solutions to law firms and Fortune 500 corporations across the globe and is widely considered an expert on project management, e-discovery and legal matter management. You can reach him via email at mquartararo@edpmadvisory.com. Follow him on Twitter @edpmadvisory.

On the streets of Harare, locals say they’re worried about a decision to make Zimbabwe’s interim currency its sole legal tender.

The government has introduced an interim currency, the RTGS dollar, in a bid to end a decade of dollarization. On June 24 it renamed the new currency the Zimbabwe dollar and declared it Zimbabwe’s sole legal tender.

For many Zimbabweans, the name Zimbabwe dollar brings unpleasant memories of 2008, when the local currency was wrecked by hyperinflation of 500 billion percent, which wiped out pensions and savings and forced authorities to adopt the U.S. dollar and other foreign currencies the following year.

Godfrey Mupanga, a member of the group Zimbabwe Lawyers For Human Rights, petitioned the court to reverse the decision to ban other currencies.

In his court application seen by Reuters, Mupanga said the decision by the national treasury and central bank was “grossly unreasonable” and should be declared unconstitutional.

The court did not immediately set a date for a hearing.

In banning foreign currencies, Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube used regulations under emergency presidential powers, which lapse in six months unless parliament passes a substantive law.

Ncube told a parliamentary committee on Monday that dollarisation was throttling an economy grappling with shortages of U.S. dollars, fuel and bread, and 15-hour daily power cuts.

Many businesses had resorted to selling goods in U.S. dollars to protect them against near triple-digit inflation as the RTGS dollar was fast losing value before the government’s surprise intervention.

The Batoka project involves construction of a dam, powerhouses, roads, transmission infrastructure and houses in both Zambia and Zimbabwe, the Zambezi River Authority (ZRA) said in a statement.

Feasibility studies are almost complete and a developer for the project is expected to be engaged by the end of this year, it said.

“Once engaged, the developer is expected to commence works in the last quarter of 2020,” the statement said.

In February, ZRA short-listed U.S, European and Chinese companies to build the Batoka Gorge hydro power plant, Zambia’s ministry of finance said in statement.

Those short-listed are a consortium of General Electric and Power Construction Corporation of China, Salini Impregilo of Italy and a joint venture of Chinese firms Three Gorges Corporation, China International and Water Electric Corporation and China Gezhouba Group Company Ltd.

The project will use a Build-Operate-Transfer financing model and place no fiscal strain on either government as no sovereign guarantees will be required.

Post published in: Business

When it comes to diversity and inclusion in the legal profession, there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that there’s still so much work to be done. The good news is that the profession is now focused on that work — and leaders of the bar are willing to take it on.

Last Wednesday, I had the pleasure of attending the Diversity and Inclusion Celebration Dinner of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, where the organization bestowed its Diversity and Inclusion Champion Award upon two such leaders: Juan Arteaga, a partner at Crowell & Moring, and Lisa Linsky, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery (and, full disclosure, a longtime friend of mine). It was a beautiful and inspiring event — and it also served as a fundraiser for the City Bar Fund, the nonprofit arm of the organization that supports the legal profession in advancing social justice (including, but not limited to, diversity efforts).

After welcoming remarks by Deborah Martin Owens, Executive Director of Diversity and Inclusion at the City Bar, and Roger Juan Maldonado, President of the City Bar, the organization paid tribute to Justice Rosalyn Richter of the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court, First Department. Two members of the Committee to Enhance Diversity in the Profession, Kathy Hirata Chin of Crowell & Moring and Matthew Morningstar of Morgan Stanley, praised Justice Richter, outgoing co-chair of the Committee, for her tireless efforts to advance diversity in the profession. They noted that the past year has been a difficult one for Justice Richter — in September, she lost her wife, LGBTQ activist Janet Weinberg — but Justice Richter continued to work hard for the causes she cares about, including LGBTQ rights, diversifying the judiciary, and educating young people about law and the legal system.

Amid a standing ovation, Justice Richter took the stage. When she reached the podium, she joked about how long it took to make it up there in her walker — and thanked the City Bar for having a ramp leading up to the stage, without her even having to ask for it.

“I have the privilege of being an appellate judge, and so I now have the privilege of asking for things I was too scared to ask for as a young lawyer,” Justice Richter said. “We as a legal community need to stop having inaccessible events.”

Following presentations about the City Bar’s various pipeline programs devoted to advancing diversity, the 2019 Diversity and Inclusion Champion Award was presented to — and enthusiastically accepted by — Juan Arteaga and Lisa Linsky. Both delivered heartfelt and eloquent remarks focused on different aspects of diversity and inclusion.

Arteaga focused on immigration. He has done extensive pro bono work in the field, representing immigrants, including battered women and their children, in immigration and deportation proceedings. He told the story of one such case.

In 2017, he was asked to help a family of undocumented immigrants from Colombia who are now living in the United States. The oldest son applied for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, while the family pursued asylum claims.

The son received notification that he needed to be fingerprinted as part of the DACA application process — and he was terrified, afraid that the fingerprinting could result in him being taken into custody and deported. After much discussion and deliberation with his family, the son decided to go in for the fingerprinting. Arteaga accompanied him on that day.

On the day of the appointment, the son hugged his father in a parking lot a few blocks away from the fingerprinting site (because his father was not joining his son for that appointment, and understandably so). The son was shaking with fear as he hugged his father and told him how much he loved him. Neither father nor son was certain that the son wouldn’t be taken into custody for eventual deportation when he went in for the fingerprinting.

In the end, the son, accompanied by Juan Arteaga, had his fingerprints taken without incident. But the more Arteaga reflected on the episode, the more sad and angry he became. Immigrants shouldn’t have to live in such fear — and they shouldn’t have to endure the deplorable conditions and treatment at the border that have dominated the headlines as of late.

When it comes to immigration, Arteaga said, “We need to advocate for the values and principles that brought us here this evening. Our resolution of the immigration debate will determine the kind of nation we become.”

In her acceptance speech, Lisa Linsky focused on LGBTQ rights — appropriately enough, given that the dinner took place just a few days before the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and the WorldPride celebration in New York. She talked about her work at McDermott as the first partner-in-charge of Firmwide Diversity and partner-in-charge of LGBT Diversity and Inclusion — which she viewed as of a piece with the work she did in the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office, as a prosecutor focused on sex crimes and child abuse. The common thread: advocating for people whose voices were not being heard.

Linsky did point out the progress made on LGBTQ equality in recent years. She noted that the dinner was taking place on a momentous date: June 26, the anniversary of both United States v. Windsor (2013), in which the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), in which the Court ruled in favor of nationwide marriage equality.

But she also urged everyone not to become complacent. Just as electing an African-American president didn’t mark the end of racism, the advent of marriage equality didn’t mark the end of discrimination against the LGBTQ community. Instead, Linsky said, “We must continuing naming — and resisting — the ways in which people continue to be excluded and oppressed.”

The evening concluded with remarks from Letitia “Tish” James, the 67th Attorney General of the State of New York, as well as the first African-American and first woman to be elected to the position. She began by invoking the now-infamous AP photograph of two migrants, a father and his young daughter, who drowned in the Rio Grande while trying to enter the United States.

“Caging individuals and separating families is not an immigration policy,” she said. “It is man’s inhumanity to man.”

James then turned to the Census case, Department of Commerce v. New York — which her office litigated, and which the Supreme Court was going to rule on the next day.

“Let’s hope the justices get it right,” she said. “Let’s hope they recognize the proposition that in this country, everyone should be counted.”

Diversity and Inclusion Celebration Dinner [New York City Bar Association]

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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.

I know many men who put on wedding rings for jury trials and include comments in their examinations about their family and kids. I was shocked the first time I saw it, but it’s a common phenomenon. Juries like family men, and married men over single men, apparently.

— an unnamed female partner at the New York office of an Am Law firm, commenting on her colleagues who try to use the “daddy card” to gain an advantage in court.

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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.

What if I told you that a substance, alcohol, is the direct cause of more human death and destruction than all other illicit substances combined and yet, remains readily available for legal purchase, including at drive-thru locations? What if I also told you that once upon a time the United States government, mostly for noble reasons, tried to ban alcohol, but that the promised cure of prohibition ended up being worse than the disease? This information alone should undermine every current argument justifying national prohibition policies of substances demonstrably less harmful to society than alcohol, right? Wrong.

Unfortunately, many in the United States refuse to learn the lessons of history and nevertheless insist that government authoritarian action in the form of a heavy handed and overtly discriminatory criminal system is the only solution to combatting drug use. However, although prohibition has largely remained a partisan issue (with conservatives generally supporting it, and liberals denouncing it), a growing chorus of right-wing figures such as Newt Gingrich are openly acknowledging the glaring faults of drug prohibition. As Newt correctly points out: “More than half of all people in federal prisons for drug offenses have no violent history, and more than one-quarter have no prior criminal history.” In other words, we have a system that locks up a lot of people, not because they have violated another, but simply “because we’re just mad at them” for selling products in high demand among the citizenry.

Moreover, conservative stalwarts such as Charles C.W. Cooke have taken note of the many terrible consequences of prohibition:

What are we to make of the fact that spending on prisons is second only to Medicaid as the fastest growing area of state budgets. What are we to make of the violence that has been done to privacy rights and the Fourth Amendment? What are we to make of the undermining of the important principles of federalism and of enumerated powers? Are we to assume that these are just minor downsides to a worthwhile program? Or are we perhaps to recognize that there is so much on the other side of the ledger already that we are getting almost nothing for our buck?

Most encouragingly, organizations made up of individuals who have worked in law enforcement are being created to inform the public that “drugs — even hard drugs — do much less harm to Americans than does the drug war.”

If so much consensus can be found acknowledging the problems with prohibition however, the question arises: Why do we as a society continue with such a failed/problematic policy? The answer, of course, includes many details. However, it is simply undeniable that, from the very beginning, the main force driving prohibition was/is racism. When studying the history of prohibition, author Johann Hari discovered that it came about in the middle of a race panic here in the United States:

After the Civil War, Reconstruction failed, and what you had were African Americans and Chinese Americans who—rightly—were pissed off. At various points they showed their anger—in fact, given how extreme their oppression was, it’s surprising they didn’t show a lot more anger. Many white Americans explained this growing rebelliousness at the start of the 20th century by saying that African Americans and Chinese Americans were forgetting their place, using drugs, and attacking white people. If this sounds bizarre, that’s because it was.

The official statements are extraordinary. A typical one said, “The cocaine nigger sure is hard to kill.” Sheriffs across certain parts of the United States increased the caliber of their bullets because they believed African American men were taking cocaine and ravaging and attacking white people. The main way I tell about that in the book is through the story of how the founder of the war on drugs, Harry Anslinger, played a crucial role in stalking and killing Billie Holiday, the great jazz singer, which blew my mind when I first learned it.

Using prohibition as a means to legally attack and harass minorities has proceeded into the modern era. As John Ehrlichman, the former domestic-policy advisor to former president Nixon would later admit:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Of course, not everyone who supports prohibition today is a racist. However, it has always been impossible to deny that the policy of prohibition results in a uniquely racist impact. For example, the war on drugs is being waged almost exclusively in communities of color despite the fact that studies consistently show that people of all races use and sell drugs at remarkably similar rates.

Adding to the tragedy and horror of prohibition is that the continued fear mongering and lying about drugs and drug users by prohibitionists is preventing the implementation of other, better policies. Policies outside of prohibition have a proven record of accomplishment in driving down rates of drug use and societal harms associated with drugs. This is perhaps the most important point to make, which is that the alternatives to prohibition have been tried, spanning decades of time, and the results unambiguously demonstrate the superiority of these alternatives.

If you want to reduce heroin addiction for example, there is no greater model to follow than that of Portugal and Switzerland. Almost two decades ago, these countries took the exact opposite approach to prohibition here in the United States and instead focused on reconnecting heroin addicts with society and turning their lives around. The results were that unlike here, rates of broader addiction, overdoses, and property crimes all dropped dramatically. Put simply, there is no legitimate or moral claim for maintaining prohibition today that can be backed by evidence, while centuries of evidence can show that prohibition is not only a racist, costly failure, but a direct cause of more harm than drug use could ever create.

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Tyler Broker’s work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review, the Albany Law Review, and is forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review. Feel free to email him or follow him on Twitter to discuss his column.

The Affordable Care Act and its associated health insurance exchanges have been a major target for Trump Administration policies meant to undermine the 2010 law.

Moves like the cutting funding for consumer education on open enrollment, reducing cost sharing subsidies, zeroing out the individual mandate penalty and the emergence on non-ACA compliant short-term health plans have led to some fretting about whether the exchanges and the overall law can survive.

Last year, represented a record high in insurer profitability on the exchanges and 2019 average premiums fell slightly as a result. Still – for now at least – it appears that insurers offering plans on the individual exchanges continue to be profitable.

A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of the individual insurance market found that in the first three months of 2019, medical-loss ratios for insurers landed at 73 percent.

While that number could rise through the rest of the year, the percentage is lower than the first few years of the ACA and signal an upward trajectory for participating insurers.

KFF also analysed average gross margins on a per member per month basis, essentially how much premiums outstrip claim costs for each enrollee.

The $134.30 individual gross margins for the first three months of 2019 are higher than any other year of the ACA’s existence other than 2018.

When it comes to which insurers are standing out, the KFF found that Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliates have had consistently higher gross margins than competitors. For the first quarter of 2019, the gap in average gross margins per member per month was $56 between Blue and non-Blue plans.

Average monthly premiums fell from $490 to $488 between 2018 and the first part of 2019, while claims have risen from $336 to $354.

That increase in claims suggests that the repeal of the individual mandate penalty did not lead to the mass exodus of healthy members from the insurance exchange that some observers feared.

“Taken together, these data suggest that the individual market risk pool is relatively stable, though sicker on average than the pre-ACA market, which is to be expected since people with pre-existing conditions have guaranteed access to coverage under the ACA,” the report states.

“(E)arlier concerns that the market would collapse or insurer exits would lead to counties with no coverage available at all have proven unfounded.”

To be sure, structural problems exist within the ACA exchanges, especially in rural areas where there is limited competition among insurance providers, but KFF’s data illustrates that the program remain stable for the time being.

However, the overall status of the ACA remains in flux after U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor ruled that the sweeping law was unconstitutional last December. The statute remains in place during the appeals process, which is headed next to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Picture: tomertu, Getty Images

A night on the town for a few judges turned sloppy and then violent and now one of the judges who was shot in the altercation is facing charges.

Unraveling this story is a little difficult but from what is known is that Judge Andrew Adams and Judge Brad Jacobs, both of Southern Indiana’s Clark County, were in Indianapolis for a judicial conference and decided to take in the big city. From the IndyStar:

After hopping around several Downtown restaurants and bars late April 30 and into the morning hours of May 1, the judges tried to enter the Red Garter Gentleman’s Club, police said, but it was closed. They went to the nearby White Castle instead.

I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they were playing some “color-themed establishment bingo” and not anything untoward. At some point, it’s not entirely clear when, Judge Sabrina Bell joined the group and all three were chilling in the White Castle parking lot when everything got ugly. Two guys in an SUV pulled up and got into a fight with Judges Adams and Jacobs:

During the struggle, one man raised to his knees, pulled a gun from his waistband and shot Adams in the stomach. Nearby, Jacobs and another man were wrestling. The other man held onto Jacobs, police said, when the shooter walked up to Jacobs and shot him in the chest. After Jacobs fell to the ground, one man held him down while the shooter held the gun against Jacobs’ chest and shot again.

Then the two men drove away, leaving the judges behind.

The police and prosecutors are keeping details frustratingly tight around this case so there’s no disclosed motive for the fight, but what we do know is that the shooter and his accomplice have been charged… but so has Judge Adams. The judge is facing “seven counts of low-level felony and misdemeanor charges, including two counts of Level 6 felony battery.” Judge Jacobs faces no charges.

The whole thing is an even bigger mess because prosecutors empaneled two grand juries and put up firewalls between individual prosecutors so everyone was able to be offered immunity in inquiries where they were victims without impacting the grand jury considering charges against each as perpetrators. All three charged men are free right now — for some f**king reason — and are expected to turn themselves in this week.

Conferences, man. I’m starting to get nervous about my next big legal tech show. I hear the EPCOT Center can get really rough.

Indiana judge is indicted for his alleged role in his own shooting at White Castle [IndyStar]

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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.