Cops Embarrass Themselves With Arrest Warrant For Odell Beckham Jr.

(Photo by Bobby Ellis/Getty Images)

If you’re the sort of awful person that hates Odell Beckham Jr. for taking a boat trip, then we’ve got a story for you!

The Browns wideout was in New Orleans as his alma mater won the college national championship and as part of the locker room festivities he slapped a guy on the ass. For an adult with a fully formed sense of self this would fit right into the celebratory atmosphere. At worst, one might offer a “hey man, not cool” and move on. But the New Orleans police are not moving on because OBJ’s butt pat landed on a cop so they want the receiver arrested.

OBJ with another one-handed grab.

Why have America’s police — the people who are supposed to have the mental and physical toughness to protect society — becoming the sonwflakiest snowflakes of all? They got a Starbucks manager fired for daring to make a joke which was ridiculous enough before another cop got caught lying about a copycat coffee cup. You have guns! Suck it up!

But in case you thought it was a black eye for New Orleans law enforcement that they even sought this battery warrant it’s so much worse:

Of course they tried to make this a gay thing. But, as everyone knows the law doesn’t sustain such a charge as long as the defendant yells, “no homo” at any point. It’s a little known provision of the Napoleonic Code they use down there.

Where were the prosecutors on this? Because the prosecutors are the professionals who are supposed to temper the “coulda from the shouldna” when it comes to wasting public money prosecuting technical violations that would make the city a laughing stock if ever brought.


HeadshotJoe 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.

Boring Man Going To Prison While The Cool Kids Swill Champagne Safe From Extradition

Harvard Law School Students Protest Paul Weiss Recruiting Event

Years ago, students chatting during the precious breaks in on-campus interviewing cattle calls would ponder who among them would really be interviewing with Chadbourne & Parke. The now-deceased firm — sucked up into the Norton Rose Fulbright megalith — was on everyone’s radar as one of the firms representing big tobacco against allegations that the company had willfully deceived the public about health risks for decades. Everyone may deserve an attorney, but not everyone deserves you as an attorney, and for law students at elite schools back then, future lawyers that every law firm would love to have, this was an opportunity to exert some social pressure on a firm tying its bottom line to a public health crisis of the client’s own making.

A couple of decades down the road, law students are taking a page from the past and upping the ante. Last night, law students at HLS staged a protest at a Paul Weiss recruiting event demanding the firm drop Exxon as a client, arguing that Paul Weiss attorneys have facilitated Exxon’s efforts to undermine climate change action. From the group’s press release:

As law students and firm partners mingled at the upscale reception with glasses of wine and hors d’oeuvres, a representative from Paul, Weiss began to address the room. Within seconds, a group of students unfurled a banner reading “#DropExxon” and began chanting over the firm’s speaker. “We, students of Harvard Law School, will not work for you as long as you work for ExxonMobil. Our future is on fire, and you are fanning the flames. If you want to recruit us, then drop Exxon and join us in fighting for a livable future.”

After continuing to fill the reception with chants and songs for 15 minutes, the law students left the room to rally with fellow students and community members who had come together outside the reception to show their support for the action.

The protest in the room ended after 15 minutes as the students moved outside to join more students, including the activists involved in the Yale-Harvard football protest. The organizers are in touch with students at other elite law schools and suspect that this is only the beginning of the high visibility protests against the firm’s fossil fuel work.

“This is a do-or-die moment in human history,” said Aaron Regunberg, a first-year student at Harvard Law School and former Rhode Island state representative. “We have just a few years left to rein in corporate polluters and address the climate crisis. This firm’s enabling of corporations like Exxon to continue blocking climate action and evading accountability for their malfeasance is, simply put, not compatible with a livable future.”

Paul Weiss is certainly not the only firm representing entities like Exxon with a long history pushing regressive positions in environmental litigation, but the reputation Paul Weiss carries in the legal industry is one reason why the protest focused on that firm first. Paul Weiss is known for its liberal lean and high profile pro bono efforts, making the firm one of the most likely to respond to direct action from top-tier law students. While some firms would respond to a protest like this by releasing the hounds and then spend the rest of the night building a styrofoam bonfire to own the libs, Paul Weiss values its role as a bridge between its corporate clients and a conscience. It’s part of their DNA!

This is exactly why the firm got more public flack over its lack of a diverse partner class while other firms with worse track records fly under the radar — part of accepting the mantle as a socially conscious firm is accepting criticism when tensions arise. When it comes to diversity in the partnership, Paul Weiss responded this year.

Will the firm respond to this protest the same way?


HeadshotJoe 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.

AI Transcription Company Verbit Closes $31M Series B Round | LawSites

Verbit, the Tel Aviv-based, AI-powered transcription platform, today said it has closed a $31 million Series B funding round led by Stripes, a leading New York-based growth equity firm.

Following an $11 million seed round in March 2018 and a $23 million Series A round in January 2019, this brings the total investment in the company to $65 million.

Several existing investors participated in this latest round, including Viola Ventures, Vertex Ventures, HV Ventures, Oryzn Capital and ClalTech.

In an interview yesterday, Tom Livne, CEO and founder, told me that the company will use this latest investment to further accelerate its growth, including expanding into new industry verticals, adding coverage of new languages, and continuing to develop its speech recognition technology.

That will include significant expansion in the United States. Last year, the company opened an office in New York City, and it plans to triple its U.S. headcount by the end of the year. In fact, Livne, who spends about half his time there already, said there is a high probability he will soon move to New York as his home base.

“We are very excited and thankful for the belief in us from our existing investors and our new investors,” Livne said. “The opportunity is so big and we are well positioned to lead this transformation.”

Founded in December 2016, the company has 100 employees and a network of 15,000 freelancers.

It’s product transforms spoken content into text. It uses AI-driven software for the initial transcription and then an on-demand network of 15,000 human translators to improve accuracy. In this way, Verbit delivers transcriptions that are better than 99% accurate, it says.

Although it is exploring other verticals, it currently focuses on two – academic transcriptions and legal transcriptions.

In the legal vertical, there is a $4 billion market for transcription services, Livne said. Verbit’s customers are court reporting agencies.

Verbit is unique in this market, he said, because it offers templates to ensure compliance with the transcription guidelines of each U.S. jurisdiction. The company is also making it highly customizable.

“We are thrilled to partner with Tom and the rest of the Verbit team on their mission to build the leading AI-powered transcription and captioning platform,” said Stripes’ partner Saagar Kulkarni, who will join Verbit’s board of directors. “We are big believers in the power of AI to fundamentally change business models and provide critical services better, faster, and more affordably.”

As for Livne, he believes the need for transcription is growing and he expects to see his company reach revenue of $100 million within four years.

“When I established Verbit three years ago, I didn’t anticipate we would become one of the market-leading companies in our industry so quickly,” he said. “This latest financing round is an important milestone in Verbit’s journey and strengthens the incredible momentum we had in 2019.”

Want To Lead A Law School? You Better Be Pumped During The Interview

It was amazing at the way dean candidates would shoot themselves in the foot during the interview process. The main problem was ambivalence. People want to be inspired.

—Melanie Leslie, dean of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, explaining one of the biggest reasons for failed law school dean candidates. She goes on to note, that with steadying law school enrollment jobs are increasingly competitive, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t throw your hat in the ring. The secret is no one really knows how to be dean until they’re doing the job, but, “Don’t take yourself out of the running because you’re smart enough to know you don’t know how to run anything,” Leslie said.

Findings from the 12th Annual Law Department Operations Survey

Legal teams are strongly committed to changing how law works and, where there is disagreement among legal operations professionals, it is usually about the degree of change,” notes Heidi Rudolph, managing director of Morae Global, in the 12th Annual Blickstein Group Law Department Operations Survey: Continuing to Mature While Bracing for Uncertainty.

Join us on January 22 at 1pm ET for a free webinar exploring the findings from the longest-running and most influential annual research concerning legal operations.  The 2019 LDO Survey reveals a profession–and an entire legal industry– experiencing increasing operational success while confronting a variety of challenges for law department transformation.

Our expert panelists will explore how law departments are currently leveraging legal operations, including insights on:

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Technology Effectiveness
  • Legal Project Management
  • and much more!

(This is part two of a two-part series exploring the findings of the 12th Annual Law Department Operation Survey. Part 1 can be found here.)

 

Goldman Spending Heavily On Regulatory Fines, Becoming A Different Bank Entirely

New Year, New Look For This Biglaw Firm

Who doesn’t love a shiny new makeover? The Biglaw firm formerly known as Wiley Rein has decided to go bold in the new decade, shortening their name (at least in marketing materials) to Wiley and using the .law exchange (a move they believe to be a first for an Am Law 200 firm).

Wiley.law is also shaking up their look. Gone from their homepage is the staid green and white palette in favor of a bold red and purple look:

As managing partner Peter Shields told Law.com, the new look was designed to turn heads:

“We decided as a partnership that the timing was right,” managing partner Peter Shields said in an interview. “We have a focus on some new practices and thought it was time for our brand to reflect that.”

….

The colors, according to Shields, were recommended by Dharma Pachner, chief creative officer at consulting firm Contrast and Co. “He said the overall look and vibrancy reflected what he heard from the stakeholders. We never looked back,” said Shields.

And the firm’s powers that be believe the new look matches up well with the legal services they provide their clients:

“Since our founding, clients have turned to Wiley to solve their most pressing issues and anticipate the challenges that lie ahead,” Shields said in a statement. “Our new brand represents who we are today—a firm with a focused mindset, interdisciplinary depth, a celebration of diversity, and a culture of collegiality.”

Best of luck with the new look.


headshotKathryn 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).

Justice Boomer Gets Laughs As He Guts Federal Employee Discrimination Statute

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Pity the poor Boomers! With a paltry 57 percent of the country’s wealth to their name, those sprightly 55- to 73-year-olds just can’t catch a break. Yesterday Chief Justice John Roberts invoked their grievous plight during oral argument in Babb v. Wilkie, an age discrimination case filed against the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Let’s say in the course of the, you know, weeks’ long process, you know, one comment about age, you know, the hiring person is younger, says, you know, “OK Boomer,” you know, once to the applicant.

The transcript records laughter in the courtroom. Or, as SCOTUS blog put it, “A dozen or so high school students in the second and third rows of the public gallery perk up and nudge each other over this au courant phrase.” (The joke writes itself.)

But as hilarious as it is when, you know, the Justices try to meme from the bench, the fact remains that the conservatives are aggressively trying to strip employment discrimination protections from federal workers.

Here, plaintiff Noris Babb is a is VA pharmacist who sued because she was denied advancement opportunities that were given to younger colleagues. In the private sector, under Gross v. FBL Financial Services, an employee must establish but-for causation to recover.

Babb argues that the wording of the Age Discrimination Employment Act’s provisions covering federal workers is slightly different, and thus the employee can recover for generalized policies which favor younger employees, without establishing a but-for linkage. Or, as her attorney Roman Martinez put it:

The government, in this case, apparently believes it’s perfectly lawful for , federal agencies to apply younger-is-better or whiter-is-better hiring policies to individuals who can’t prove that they would have been hired but for those policies.

Which is apparently fine by Justice Gorsuch, whose main concern is that allowing a more permissive federal standard will force public sector employers to get rid of generalized preferences that don’t rise to the level of but-for discrimination. And then where will we be!

The Solicitor General suggests that if we were to adopt your view, we’d have to do the same thing with respect to private discrimination under, what is it, the 623. Which, of course, we can’t do because of Gross, and point specifically to the language saying, you know, you can’t discriminate in hiring or otherwise, right, discriminate with respect to terms and conditions of employment. And if we were to adopt your broad reading here of “discriminate,” why wouldn’t we do the same thing there?

So we actually care about precedent when the issue is curtailing the rights of federal workers to combat age discrimination. Got it. Let’s see if that holds up in seven weeks when Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch get the opportunity to shut down the last abortion provider in Louisiana in June Medical Services, LLC v. Gee.

OK, … ah, you know.


Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Trump Judge Tries To Put Reasonable Spin On ‘I Don’t Like Trans People,’ Fails

When a pro se federal prisoner’s name change motion reached the Fifth Circuit, the appellant made the additional request that the court employ feminine pronouns. At this point, the court could — without much trouble — just use feminine pronouns. Instead, Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, a hack attorney who now sits on the Fifth Circuit because he was on the Hobby Lobby case, devoted nearly six pages to explain why adding an “s” to any pronouns in the opinion wasn’t just his bigoted trolling but rather an impossible burden threatening to grind the judicial system to a halt!

First, no authority supports the proposition that we may require litigants, judges, court personnel, or anyone else to refer to gender-dysphoric litigants with pronouns matching their subjective gender identity. Federal courts sometimes choose to refer to gender-dysphoric parties by their preferred pronouns.

To Judge Duncan’s partial credit, at this point he includes a footnote explaining that “sometimes” translates to EVERY OTHER CIRCUIT EXCEPT THE ELEVENTH (the footnote also misses the 10th, but the dissent adds them). Judge Duncan even recognizes that his own FIFTH CIRCUIT has respected litigant pronouns in the past. Undeterred by the overwhelming persuasive precedent, Judge Duncan continues wasting government ink on trying to put an academic spin on just being an asshole.

Varner’s motion in this case is particularly unfounded. While conceding that “biological[ly]” he is male, Varner argues female pronouns are nonetheless required to prevent “discriminat[ion]” based on his female “gender identity.” But Varner identifies no federal statute or rule requiring courts or other parties to judicial proceedings to use pronouns according to a litigant’s gender identity. Congress knows precisely how to legislate with respect to gender identity discrimination, because it has done so in specific statutes. See Wittmer v. Phillips 66 Co., 915 F.3d 328, 338 (5th Cir. 2019) (Ho, J., concurring) (citing Hively v. Ivy Tech Comm. Coll. of Indiana, 853 F.3d 339, 363–64 (7th Cir. 2017) (Sykes, J., dissenting)) (observing that “both Congress and various state legislatures have expressly prohibited . . . gender identity discrimination by using the term[ ] . . . ‘gender identity’ discrimination”)

Except the prisoner isn’t trying to assert a cause of action here — all she wants is the court to use the proper pronouns. As 84-year-old Judge Dennis notes in dissent, basic English skills make it clear that this is just a request that “this court, in this proceeding” (emphasis in original) employ feminine pronouns.

Judge Duncan continues:

Second, if a court were to compel the use of particular pronouns at the invitation of litigants, it could raise delicate questions about judicial impartiality

Oh?

What Judge Duncan is trying to suggest is that in the event of a case over gender identity, using someone’s preferred pronouns would convey the appearance of prejudgment. Except by that logic that’s also true of not using someone’s preferred pronouns. The fairest way to resolve this would be to respect personal preferences as a courtesy but recognize that whatever statute lies at the heart of a case may not grant the relief the litigant wants. But taking that logical step would undermine Duncan’s earlier inane argument about legislating gender discrimination so he’s just going to glide past it with all the intellectual laziness he can muster.

Third, ordering use of a litigant’s preferred pronouns may well turn out to be more complex than at first it might appear. It oversimplifies matters to say that gender dysphoric people merely prefer pronouns opposite from their birth sex—“her” instead of “his,” or “his” instead of “her.” In reality, a dysphoric person’s “[e]xperienced gender may include alternative gender identities beyond binary stereotypes.” DSM-5, at 453; see also, e.g., Dylan Vade, Expanding Gender and Expanding the Law: Toward a Social and Legal Conceptualization of Gender that Is More Inclusive of Transgender People, 11 Mich. J. Gender & L. 253, 261 (2005) (positing that gender is not binary but rather a three-dimensional “galaxy”). Given that, one university has created this widely-circulated pronoun usage guide for gender-dysphoric persons:

Shorter: “We’ve all gone to law school, but the possibility of keeping nine things in our heads is far too daunting.” In Duncan’s defense, being a conservative jurist usually doesn’t require anything more complex than taking contemporary Republican talking points and saying, “my guess is James Monroe would’ve wanted it this way.” It’s not like judges would even be guessing at the proper pronouns by consulting a list like this because the litigant would tell them straight up what to use. They would only have to cut and paste.

There’s not really a difference between this and saying, “there are a lot of names out there… how can judges keep track of someone who spells ‘Gennifer’ with a ‘G’? So this court will only use ‘Jennifer’ in all documents lest the American judicial system collapse into anarchy.” Just use what the fucking litigant asks. It’s not hard.

In fact, a test of how not hard it is, realize that over half of this opinion is wasted on trying to justify Duncan’s inability to use the “s” key.

Deploying such neologisms could hinder communication among the parties and the court. And presumably the court’s order, if disobeyed, would be enforceable through its contempt power.

That’s… not how any of this works.

John Mulaney has a joke about someone telling him that the word “midget” was “as bad as the n-word” and him explaining, “If you’re comparing the badness of two words, and you won’t even say one of them? That’s the worse word.” A good judicial corollary might be that if you need 6 pages to justify not using one letter… that’s the worse position.

(Full opinion on the next page….)


HeadshotJoe 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.