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The king is dead, and we were wrong. He had not discovered the secret to eternal life; he was not the Bionic President. Robert Mugabe was an ordinary mortal like the rest of us, albeit one who shaped and twisted an entire nation in his image, and now he’s gone to join the others in the Great Presidential Palace in the Sky. The devil had better watch his back.

“I have died many times – that’s where I have beaten Christ. Christ died once and resurrected once.” – Robert Mugabe, on his 88th birthday.

Robert Mugabe presided over an independent Zimbabwe for close on four decades. Thirty-seven years to be exact, until he was unseated through military intervention in 2017. It wasn’t all bad. But it was mostly bad, and the history books that he loved to read will judge him harshly.

He was, from the very beginning, an enigma, a jumble of contradictions that somehow fuelled rather than felled him. He was the Anglophile who hated Britain; the freedom fighter who denied basic rights to his people; the pan-African visionary turned archetypal African dictator; the teacher who refused to learn from his mistakes. He was charming, and he was cruel. He was loved and then reviled.

But one thing never changed. L’ État, c’est Mugabe. Mugabe was Zimbabwe. Now he’s gone, and Zimbabwe has an opportunity to create a new identity.

ACT I: THE REVOLUTIONARY

“The people’s votes and the people’s guns are always inseparable twins.” – Robert Mugabe, in a 1976 speech.

Mugabe’s secret was that he was always the cleverest person in the room. His formidable intellect took him from a modest background into some of the best schools in the land – the best black schools, of course, because he was a second-class citizen in colonial Rhodesia – and then to the University of Fort Hare in South Africa, which was then a production line for extraordinary Africans. Nelson Mandela studied there, as did Oliver Tambo, Julius Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda.

At Fort Hare, Mugabe studied alongside Robert Sobukwe and Leopold Takawire, and their revolutionary zeal rubbed off on him. Afterwards, he taught for a few years – in northern Rhodesia, and then in Ghana, where he met his first wife – but the dye had already been cast. Mugabe was a freedom fighter, a fluent exponent of the language of pan-Africanism.

His struggle began on his return to Zimbabwe in 1960, where he immersed himself in the underground opposition, eventually taking a senior leadership in the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu). In 1964, he was arrested for “subversive speech”, and imprisoned for a decade without charge – a guest of Ian Smith’s brutal regime.

Smith was typically cruel, denying Mugabe permission to attend the burial of his three-year-old son in 1966. This detail is important: later, when their roles were reversed, Mugabe allowed Smith to serve as a member of the Zimbabwean parliament in a powerful gesture of forgiveness and reconciliation. Mugabe was not always a tyrant.

In prison, he studied. Through distance learning, he earned first an undergraduate and then a Master’s degree in law from the University of London, respectively his fifth and sixth university degrees. He had already done another three through correspondence after Fort Hare, and there would be another Masters in his future. This would make him, by quite some distance, the best-educated president on the continent, and possibly the world.

But he was cunning too, exhibiting a ruthless, Machiavellian streak from which none were safe. From prison, he manipulated party processes until he was elected Zanu secretary-general in 1974, side-lining better-known and arguably more accomplished rivals.

After his release later that year, he fled into exile, clutching a portable typewriter as he crossed the border into Mozambique. Even then, he knew that words were his most potent weapon. While the bush war raged around him, Mugabe waged his own personal war against potential rivals both within the party and broader resistance movement. The infighting was vicious, violent and at times deadly, but Mugabe was good at it. By the time Smith was forced to the negotiating table, Mugabe had the party under control and was perfectly positioned to succeed him.

ACT II: THE STATESMAN

“Cricket civilises people and creates good gentlemen. I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe; I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen.” – Robert Mugabe, undated.

Ironically, modern Zimbabwe was born in London, in stately Lancaster House. It was there that the United Kingdom brokered talks between Ian Smith’s Rhodesia and the resistance to white rule; there that the road map to a second independence was created. Elections followed soon after in February 1980, with Zanu – which by now had merged with the Patriotic Front, to create Zanu-PF – winning by a landslide.

For Mugabe, these were halcyon days. For a man with such a thirst for knowledge, what greater privilege could there be than to use that knowledge to create a nation? He set to work creating perhaps the finest education system in Africa and turned Zimbabwe into a breadbasket for the region. Things were looking up, and he was celebrated by his peers and feted by the international community. Mugabe was a bona fide African hero, and he relished the attention.

But all was not as rosy as it seemed in the new republic. Mugabe’s authoritarian streak did not disappear now that he was in power. Quite the opposite, in fact. Joshua Nkomo, another liberation legend, was the highest-profile victim of the prime minister’s growing megalomania. Intimidated and fearing for his life, Nkomo fled into exile in 1983.

Much worse was to come. In Shona, there is a word for the early rains that come before spring, the rains that wash away the useless chaff and give the crops space to grow. That word is gukurahundi. In a message lost on no one in Zimbabwe, it was also the code name of Mugabe’s military operation to pre-empt resistance from the Ndebele community. The Shona were the healthy seeds, to be nurtured, while the Ndebele needed to be washed away.

To do the washing, Mugabe deployed his North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade. Over the course of five years between 1983 and 1987, they purged “dissidents” in Matabeleland and surrounds. Sometimes these were former war veterans, sometimes members of Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu). Sometimes they were civilians, chosen for no obvious reason except that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and belonged to the wrong ethnic group. No one knows exactly how many people died because no records were kept. The state did not bother to count its victims. Conservative estimates put the death toll at 8,000 people. The Ndebele themselves say it was closer to 30,000.

Not that anyone outside of Zimbabwe seemed to care. While the Ndebele were dying, Robert Mugabe was forging his reputation as an international statesman. It was only later when his regime started killing white farmers, that he began to be treated like a pariah by the international community.

ACT III: THE DICTATOR

“This Hitler has only one objective: justice for his people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people and their rights over their resources. If that is Hitler, then let me be Hitler tenfold.” – Robert Mugabe, in a 2003 speech.

Mugabe’s transition from freedom fighter to despised despot was slow, and uneven. To each their own moment of revelation, when the scales fell from their eyes and they realised that Zimbabwe’s president had begun to resemble his Rhodesian predecessor.

Perhaps it was gukurahundi. Perhaps it was earlier, when Mugabe murdered and betrayed his comrades in his desperate bid to get ahead. Perhaps it was when he sent Zimbabwean foot soldiers to fight and die in the Democratic Republic of Congo, while he and his generals grew fat off smuggled minerals. Perhaps it was when he authorised the seizure of white-owned farms, and encouraged his thugs to take the land by force. Perhaps it was when he printed money to buy loyalty, tanking the economy in the process. Perhaps it was when he stole the 2002 election, or when he beat and bullied the opposition out of an outright victory in the 2007 poll.

Perhaps it was all of these things. Or perhaps it was none of them. For even now, with everything we know about what Mugabe did, he could draw a crowd. He could stand up at the African Union, aged 92, and rail against imperialism and homosexuality, and receive a standing ovation. When he was on form, he was charming, and eloquent, and he knew how to work an audience. A consummate, charismatic politician. There’s no question that his support was dwindling. But equally, there’s no question that his support remains more substantial than his opponents would like to believe. Some of the grief on display in Zimbabwe will be real.

The celebrations will be too, however. For too long, Mugabe ruled Zimbabwe as his personal fiefdom, abusing the state and its resources to keep himself in State House, no matter what the cost.

Of course, it wasn’t the money that motivated him – his second wife, Grace, was the big spender – but the power.

And so these last few years must have been torture. As the vultures circled, and his age became more apparent, his authority dwindled into nothing. He wasn’t calling the shots, not in the state or the party, and his orders were no longer obeyed without question. Kept in position while rival factions sought to further their own agenda, by the time he was ousted he had been reduced to a stumbling figurehead. This sudden, precipitous demotion, from all-powerful to near puppet, was a shock to the system, and surely hastened his demise.

The king is dead. Yes, there will be mourning. Some will miss him. But most will mourn the devastating, perhaps irreversible damage he’s done to the country that he promised to cherish and serve so many years ago.

Robert Mugabe’s death is no tragedy; but his life, ultimately, was. DM

Robert Mugabe: The life and times of the former Zimbabwe leader (Supplied by MSN) 

Robert Mugabe’s role in Zimbabwe’s fight for economic emancipation has not been disputed by many, but at the same time, the country’s ultimate economic ruin left him with a conflicted legacy. While he has been widely hailed as a liberation icon, blame for the country’s catastrophic downfall has also been laid at his feet.

Mugabe was meant to be Zimbabwe’s economic liberator. But something went horribly wrong.

In 2017, when Emmerson Mngwangwa succeeded Mugabe, Zimbabweans were again promised economic renewal after years of deterioration. This did not occur. Today, the country is at a tipping point, the outcome of decades of erosion. Its year-on-year inflation will only be published in February, it was announced in August.  The country’s inflation was recorded at 176% in June – the highest in a decade. Economists, however, have pegged annual inflation as closer to 558%, some three times the official rate.

In August, Zimbabweans heard they would be paying 173% more for electricity as the country sought ways to alleviate crippling power shortages.

Zimbabwe’s woes have also impacted South Africa to some extent. State-owned entity SAA was unable to access over R1bn amid a shortage of foreign currency, which was needed to transfer the proceeds of local ticket sales to airlines outside the country. South Africa has also agreed to supply 400MW per week to Zimbabwe in electricity, amid reports of Zimbabwe – which has been facing its worst power cuts in ten years – struggling to pay its debt to Eskom.

These types of hardships are all too familiar to Zimbabweans.

An unwavering drive towards economic emancipation at all costs saw Mugabe implement a range of populist policies with catastrophic results. Ultimately, this led to vast numbers of the country’s citizens being forced to flee.

At the top of his populist policies was the controversial and violent fast-track land reform programme. As glaring as it was that there was need to redistribute land from a few white minorities – roughly 5 000 farmers – to the black majority, the way Mugabe went about it left Zimbabwe with a perennial begging bowl amid food shortages.

Additionally, as an audit was conducted following Mugabe’s ouster, it emerged that several top Zanu-PF officials had benefited from the programme, with Mugabe himself reportedly owning over 20 farms, in contravention of the one farm per family policy.

The policy systematically destroyed 400 000 jobs in Zimbabwe, according to economist John Robertson.

Robertson is on record saying the cancellation of property rights and security of tenure imposed severe limitations on farmers and had a significant negative impact on Gross Domestic Product.

Robertson suggested, the crippling process started with agricultural production declining sharply enough to cause precipitous falls in export revenues and food security, as well as manufacturing volumes.

“The move to declare all farmland to be the property of the state crippled the whole country and is the source of Zimbabwe’s problems which range from unmanageable foreign and domestic debts, cash and liquidity shortages, very high unemployment rates, dependence on food imports, a serious trade imbalance, deteriorating health and education services, disabled air and rail transport services, an inability to borrow and very little success in attracting foreign investors,” according to Robertson.

Mugabe was to come back again with another policy which, like a hurricane, helped destroy the once-prosperous economy.

In 2008, his government enacted the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act, which Mugabe said was meant to empower historically disadvantaged indigenous Zimbabweans.

The law gave Zimbabweans the right to take over and control foreign-owned companies. Specifically, over 51% of all the businesses in the country were to be transferred into the hands of indigenous Zimbabweans, defined as “any person who before 18 April 1980 was disadvantaged by unfair discrimination on the grounds of his or her race, and any descendant of such person”.

The impact was devastating as foreign capital left or shunned setting base in the country. It complicated the local business environment for the few investors that showed faith in the Zimbabwean economy, while denting the country’s prospects of attracting fresh FDI inflows.

Soon after the introduction of the law, FDI actual inflows plummeted to US$69m in 2008, as investors reacted negatively to the policy. Since then, FDI actual inflows have averaged US$340m from 2009 to 2019 against a SADC regional average of US$1,2bn.

The hyperinflation era, from approximately 2004 – 2009, was characterised by severe shortages of foreign exchange, made worse by a marked difference between official and black market rates.

As one Zimbabwean, Respect Gwenzi aptly put it on Twitter, “A generation is poorer. He [Mugabe] decimated agriculture, industry and commerce, butchered critics and shunned the global world. [The] economy is at the brink of collapse, he left it in tatters and latter couped by his Cdes. Our present pain is of his making.”

Mugabe’s complex legacy leaves Zimbabweans with a burning question. As the country faces the same promises of economic liberation from his successors, will they find a way to do better?

Post published in: Featured

Despite the fact that the calendar has just flipped to September, for many law students, the Fall Recruiting Cycle — we really need to find a more seasonally appropriate term for this and I am open to suggestions — is coming to an end.  For those fortunate students, the extensive interview process has resulted in an offer for summer employment, and likely, a subsequent position after graduation.  A smaller cadre of students finds themselves in the even more enviable circumstance of having multiple options from which to choose one, or more positions.  Last year, I went through the nature of the offer stage and while that piece was long on logistics — those two paragraphs on how the NALP Guidelines address multiple offers now read as if they were written in an alternate dimension, which they may well have been— but short on advice.  So how should students sort through multiple offers?

While late capitalism might be the best term to describe the current American era, the latter part of that phrase is still applicable in the present day.  As such, in most industries, when multiple employers are trying to woo the same candidate, they will simply try to offer more money than their competitors.  But as mentioned previously in this space, the legal industry is far from a textbook example of the intersection between economics and employment.  As even casual Above the Law readers know, with law firms wary of seeming cheap to their own attorneys, law students, and possibly even clients, base Biglaw salaries are typically at a particular market rate to which all firms in a geographic area adhere.  Such uniformity often trickles down to the bonuses as well.  This is not to say that exceptions do not exist and that some firms will go above market, but typically speaking, salary is not going to be the deciding factor for most law students because there is no gradation amongst the firms — this similarly melts away when comparing Biglaw to more mid-size or boutique firms.

If money will not help you make a decision, consider geography.  Where do you want to spend the next several years of your life, if not longer?  Do you want to stay in the same city as your law school?  Return to your childhood hometown?  Live somewhere completely new?  Be honest with yourself during this process.  If you know that you do not like the cold weather, factor that into your analysis of whether you should accept and offer in Chicago versus Miami.

This is not to say that geographic location should be the only consideration, but it should be part of your evaluative process.

Also, think about what sort of law you want to practice.  The vast majority of firms that make up Biglaw are all-purpose firms, providing a young lawyer with an array of practice areas from which to choose — though there can be some exceptions with certain firms having more of a boutique practice, but with Biglaw revenues.  However, there are some obstacles that can arise, preventing one from being able to practice the type of law they prefer.  First, just because a firm has a particular practice area does not mean they will have a need for new attorneys in that area when you graduate from law school.  There are instances in which there is not enough work in a particular practice area to support the attorneys currently in that group, let alone to bring in a new crop of attorneys.  Furthermore, certain practice areas are more prominent in some offices than others.  If your goal is to be an appellate litigator, the Washington, DC office is likely going to have more opportunities than the firm’s Boston office.  Intellectual Property work is more prevalent in Northern California than in Milwaukee.  Not only should you consider where you want to work, but also think about how that will impact the type of practice you can build.

Working at a law firm, regardless of the size, can be an overwhelming experience.  While law school can provide you with the intellectual foundation needed to complete your work, it cannot teach you the intricacies of each firm and the dynamics at play within.  That is where mentoring programs can be greatly beneficial.  Typically, new attorneys are provided with senior mentors (typically partners) who can make sure enough work is coming the first year’s way as well as more junior mentors who help navigate the firm.  However, not all firm mentorship programs are the same.  First, make sure that the firms you are considering actually have a formal mentorship program.  While smaller firms might have more of an ad hoc program, you want to make sure there are at least some people at the firm who will support you.  Assuming all the firms under consideration have a mentoring program, get to know some of the details.  How are mentors assigned?  How many?  Are they drawn from your practice area or elsewhere?  Can you get different mentors if issues arise, e.g., a personality clash?  What sort of budget is afforded for mentoring activities?

Finally, consider what you might want to do after the firm.  Even if you head into a summer program with the expectation that you will get a post-graduation offer, accept it, and spend the next thirty years at the firm, such a scenario is not always realistic.  Firms that have summer associate classes in the triple digits are not going to make 100 partners in ten years’ time.  Almost everyone in your summer associate and/or first-year associate class are going to leave the firm at some point before they would come up for partnership.  For those who leave the law entirely or go into academia — not to mention those of us who are academia adjacent — there might not be much of a connection between the new opportunity and their firm job.  However, for a great many more fleeing Biglaw, the landing point may well be a former client.  In-house opportunities rarely go to law school graduates as corporations would much rather let law firms train young lawyers and then pluck them once their skill set has developed.  But said plucking typically takes place from outside counsel.  Think about what sort of entity you might want to work for later in your career and see if any of your firm options happen to represent them.  It is much easier to land in-house at Pfizer if you spent the previous several years impressing them with your work product. 

Similarly, oftentimes certain government offices will have a significant number of former Biglaw attorneys from a particular firm who are always looking to add to their refugee ranks.  Do your diligence and see if a particular U.S. Attorney’s or Federal Public Defenders office you might be interested in down the line has a number of attorneys who used to work at one of the firms you are considering.  If so, that potential interview years down the road can be far friendlier than anticipated.

Having multiple law firm offers is an objectively fantastic situation, but one that can quickly paralyze even the savviest law student by overwhelming them with choices.^[1] However, if you think about the various aspects of the firm and your career, you can come up with a wholly satisfying choice.

[1] Consider what would happen if you wanted to buy some cereal and went to two stores, the first having one brand and another having fifty, which store are you leaving first with a box of cereal?

Nicholas Alexiou is the Director of LL.M. and Alumni Advising as well as the Associate Director of Career Services at Vanderbilt University Law School. He will, hopefully, respond to your emails at abovethelawcso@gmail.com.

At the Straight Pride Parade in Boston last week, the world came face-to-face with the power of hundreds of fragile male egos and the world laughed hysterically. But it turns out the most pathetic man in Boston wasn’t marching that day. Instead, Boston Municipal Court Judge Richard Sinnott was waiting at the finish line to take up the mantle of saddest man-child in town.

As one might expect of an explicitly fascist trolling event like the Straight Pride Parade, especially when held in Boston — a town that despite harboring more than its fair share of the lowest common denominator of inbred racists is generally pretty cosmopolitan — the affair brought out a number of protestors. The Boston Police — see above about the lowest common denominator — met these folks with riot gear and pepper spray as one does. While there probably was some jackhole in the crowds actually causing trouble, most of the protestors the cops harassed and locked up were just ordinary folks exercising their free speech rights — something District Attorney Rachel Rollins recognized when she ordered the charges dropped for over 30 of the protestors.

That’s when Judge Sinnott decided he would arraign the protestors anyway even though the government wasn’t prosecuting them.

This is, of course, entirely illegal. But Judge Sinnott’s tantrum didn’t end there! When Susan Church, the defense attorney representing a number of the protestors pointed out that, you know, there are centuries of precedent for this whole “rule of law” thing, Judge Sinnott’s personal sense of inadequacy had her handcuffed and hauled away for contempt of court. The Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers called for an immediate investigation of this incident.

DA Rollins filed an emergency petition focused on one of the defendants who was not only arraigned without a prosecutor’s blessing, but had bail set at multiples of the maximum fine for the alleged offenses just to make a scene. This sets up what’s going to be one of the most epic appellate benchslappings in quite some time.

Imagine the glee of some appellate clerk getting ready to tee up this opinion — dripping with references to all the Star Chamber and Revolutionary War iconography that Massachusetts has traded upon for the last 250 years. How many times will they work in a Magna Carta reference?

The credibility of the Massachusetts state courts is on the line.

Boston’s DA wants to dismiss charges against some ‘Straight Pride Parade’ protesters. But a judge won’t let her [CNN]

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.

Boston is a growing and dynamic legal market. Lateral hiring — among new offices and the more established Boston offices — is stronger than ever. If you have a background in tech or the life sciences or if you’re a talented corporate lawyer with any background, you will likely find opportunities in Boston you will not find elsewhere: opportunities that combine sophisticated and cutting-edge work, market or above-market pay, a collegial culture, and clear pathways for advancement.

New players on the Boston scene

In recent years, numerous international firms have opened new offices in Boston, including Kirkland, Sidley, Wilson Sonsini, Morrison & Foerster, Orrick, and White & Case. All of these firms are hoping to carve out a significant share of the market with respect to Boston’s core industries: tech, biotech, health care, and other life sciences-related businesses.

Sophisticated work, top clients

High-profile clients offer challenging and cutting-edge work. Clients of the Boston offices include Pfizer, Raytheon, Staples, Biogen, Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Timberland, Gillette, Dunkin Donuts, General Electric, State Street Bank, New Balance, Liberty Mutual, Bain Capital, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Keurig Green Mountain, HubSpot, and of course the best sports team in the world, the Boston Red Sox.

Top practices

The new Boston offices and the established Boston firms are all looking to expand their corporate practices. Most in demand are private equity lawyers — PE M&A, PE finance, and fund formation. Emerging companies and venture capital work is also booming, as well as technology transactions. For intellectual property lawyers with a hard sciences background, there are numerous opportunities. Real estate lawyers have been consistently in demand in recent years. Even capital markets, a traditionally NY-based practice, is gaining ground in Boston.

Salaries and cost of living

Most of the top Boston offices pay New York market salaries, i.e., first-years start at $190,000. Some of these firms have bonus schemes that will put you above market pay when you bill over the hours target. Pair that with a 5.05 percent state income tax and no city tax (compared to a combined state and city tax rate above 10 percent for most New York associates). Furthermore, every dollar goes further in Boston. NALP statistics from 2018 show that $116,820 will buy you in Boston what $180,000 will buy you in New York City.

Pathways to Partnership

Making partner at a major law firm is always difficult and never guaranteed. However, joining a new office or an established office at the start of a growth phase can often give you a leg up when it comes time for advancement decisions. No matter how impressive your legal skills, firms won’t promote unless there’s a business case. Where practices and client bases are growing as they are now in Boston, that business case is more certain.

Hiring Trends

Needing ties to Boston to find a job in Boston or to succeed in that job is a thing of the past. Of course firms will want some assurance that you won’t just leave after your first winter in Beantown. But they also recognize that bringing in associates with training from other major markets, especially New York, only adds to a firm’s ability to handle the most sophisticated work. They encourage the idea that Boston is no longer just a market for associates “moving home”; Boston has become a destination for lawyers looking to advance their careers.

Despite high standards for hiring, Boston firms are often more flexible than New York firms when it comes to more superficial factors. For example, they will often consider associates outside the traditionally coveted 3-5 years’ experience range, and they will be more willing to relocate associates even without the local bar.

***

This is an exciting time to work in Boston. Whether you join a new firm to the Boston market or an established Boston firm, you’ll have the chance to be part of building the firm’s practice at a time of real growth and innovation.

It’s important to work with a recruiter who is knowledgeable about the specific market. Lateral Link is unique in that each recruiter specializes in one or just a few markets where we have practiced ourselves and/or where we are on the ground to build relationships with the firms’ key players. I work closely with a wide range of Boston firms. I can help you navigate the lateral hiring trends and can help answer questions such as:

• How important is it that I have the Massachusetts before starting my search?
• When in my career and when in the calendar year is the ideal time to move to or within Boston?
• Would a particular lateral move bring me closer to my ultimate career goals?
• Which Boston firms will be most interested in a candidate with a profile and skill set such as mine?
• Which Boston firms will allow me to broaden/focus my practice?

Please reach out to me at agordon@laterallink.com to learn more about the best Boston opportunities for your specific skills and experience.

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on lateral associate and partner moves from Lateral Link’s team of expert contributors. Abby Gordon is a Senior Director with Lateral Link’s New York office. Abby works with attorney candidates on law firm and in-house searches, primarily in Boston, New York and Europe. Prior to joining Lateral Link, Abby spent seven years as a corporate associate with Cleary Gottlieb, focusing on capital markets transactions for Latin American clients in New York and for the last five years for European clients in Paris. A native of Boston, Abby holds a J.D., cum laude, from Georgetown University Law Center and a B.A. in government and romance languages, magna cum laude, from Dartmouth College. Abby also worked with the International Rescue Committee as a Fulbright Scholar in Madrid, Spain. She is a member of the New York, Massachusetts and Maine Bars and is fluent in French and Spanish (and dabbles in Portuguese and Italian). You can view additional articles by Abby here.

Lateral Link is one of the top-rated international legal recruiting firms. With over 14 offices world-wide, Lateral Link specializes in placing attorneys at the most prestigious law firms and companies in the world. Managed by former practicing attorneys from top law schools, Lateral Link has a tradition of hiring lawyers to execute the lateral leaps of practicing attorneys. Click ::here:: to find out more about us.

Katie Sears works as a criminal defense attorney in Iowa but in her spare time she flies to Nevada to work in a brothel. While attorneys going into prostitution have made news before, the narrative is usually an unfortunate tale of women who went into sex work because they needed the money. Thankfully, Sears is available to offer the counter-narrative that gets overshadowed by troubling tales of coercion and human trafficking — a lot of sex workers actually just like their jobs:

“I like sex,” Sears said. “Sex is fun and I can get paid for it.”

Sears, who took on prostitution three years ago, hopes that opening up about her other job can help change people’s attitudes about it:

“You can say, ‘No sex without a condom.’ You can say, ‘No sex until we’re married.’ But you can’t say, ‘No sex until you pay me’? And that feels like it really undermines what consent means,” Sears said.

While Sears said she’s shy, she feels empowered being a sex worker.

“I think the more we talk about it, the better our chances are of getting decriminalization that we’re pursuing,” Sears said. “We’re not going to have legislation change if we’re passive about it.”

Sears, who works with her husband at the firm of Clark & Sears, carries her side hustle into her advocacy, taking on prostitution cases pro bono to help sex workers in trouble, suing brothels that allegedly fail to pay their workers, and advocating for decriminalization to help combat sex trafficking practices that flourish while the industry is kept in the shadows.

And, yes, we did say that she works with her husband whom she met in law school. As for her other job, “I don’t really care that much,” John Sears said.

The question is: which job has the higher billing rate?

Des Moines attorney unveils her life as a prostitute [KCCI]

Earlier: Law Student Turned Prostitute In Legal Battle Over ‘Sex Contract’ With Lawyer
Down Goes Bajaj: Reema Pleads Guilty To Prostitution

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.

A federal court has dismissed a defamation lawsuit brought against the Splinter website by a former Trump staffer. Jason Miller, a Trump campaign spokesman, sued after Splinter published an article that included allegations made by another Trump staffer Miller had an affair with. The allegations being sued over weren’t your normal allegations. These allegations were made in court by A.J. Delgado, Miller’s affair partner who later had Miller’s child.

Whether or not the allegations made by Delgado were true is irrelevant. Miller may have been correct his reputation had been damaged by the publication of these court documents (but $100 million-worth?), but the fact remains they were court documents. Filing a defamation lawsuit over reporting on court documents is per se stupid.

The thing about allegations made in court is that, while they can be defamatory, they cannot be sued over. Miller understood at least this much, it appears, because he didn’t sue the staffer he had an affair with. He instead sued Splinter, which published an article containing the court document with the allegations in it. Miller may have thought he had found a softer target. But he was wrong, as the federal court points out.

Reporting on court documents is protected under New York law. Splinter invoked this law to defend its reporting. The court agrees the law applies. Because it does, it has no reason to examine any other of Miller’s claims. From the decision [PDF]:

Under New York’s fair report privilege, codified in section 74 of its Civil Rights Law, “A civil action cannot be maintained against any person, firm, or corporation, for the publication of a fair and true report of any judicial proceeding . . . .” N.Y. Civ. Rights Law § 74 (alteration and emphasis added). The purpose of the statutory privilege is to protect reports of judicial proceedings “made in the public interest.”

Because Splinter was honest about how it obtained this document and, crucially, included the document itself in its post so readers could draw their own conclusions about the contained allegations, the court finds it fulfilled the requirements of the state law on court document reporting.

With the summary judgment standard in mind, review of the record shows the Article: (a) states the allegations come from an “explosive new court filing” in the “ongoing custody battle” between Plaintiff and Delgado (Article 2); (b) describes the “acrimony” between Plaintiff and Delgado (id. 4); (c) describes how Delgado obtained the information (see id.); (d) quotes the victim’s alleged reaction to the journalist, exactly as it is quoted in the Supplement (see id. (quoting Jane Doe stating: “Yes, that happened to me — how did you know? Who told you?” (internal quotation marks omitted)), see also Supplement 9 (same)); and significantly (e) embeds a full copy of the Supplement, so readers can review the Supplement without leaving the webpage (see Defs.’ SOF ¶ 91). Considering these undisputed facts, the Article is a substantially accurate report on the Supplement under New York law.

Always post documents. It’s amazing how many reporters treat court records as privileged information, limiting readers to the journalist’s interpretation of a ruling or filing. More generally, suing over reporting on court documents is a bad idea. If you can’t sue people for what they say about you in court, it would seem to follow that suing for reporting on what people said about you in court is a non-starter.

Court Tosses $100 Million Defamation Suit Brought By Former Trump Spokesman Over Reporting On Court Documents

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Listen… typos happen. I get that. After all, I churn content daily for a blog, so I am well aware that that these small mistakes often happen in the rush to publish. Sometimes your brain just moves faster than you can type, or you mishit a key, or a sentence gets badly mangled in the self-editing process. All of which is to say, I really do sympathize and acknowledge that mistakes shouldn’t be a big deal.

But…

But when a publication is THE authority on legal citations that the law school perfectionist/overachievers known as gunners worship, well, then we’re going to take notice. After all it isn’t the first (or likely last) time Above the Law has documented a slew of errors in these pages. There’s just something so satisfying about seeing a a mistake in the tome that causes so much angst in law students. So we just had to post about it when an eagle-eyed tipster sent us a picture of a clear error in the Bluebook.

Now, is it a giant mistake? No, of course not. But it still elicits a smirk when I see it.

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).