Category: News Feeds

For most of Mubwandarika’s 35-year teaching career, the salary was good – enough to cover all the basic expenses, and more.

“I didn’t even look at the price tag when buying,” he says.

But as Zimbabwe’s economy sputters and the government adapts its currency model to try and revive it, Mubwandarika says he now struggles to meet his family’s basic needs.

In response to a Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe policy enacted in October 2018, banks converted all money in customer accounts to RTGS units. Until then, U.S. dollars were the most commonly used form of currency. RTGS is a common term in international banking that stands for real-time gross settlement. But in Zimbabwe, it’s now the name of a pseudo-currency that effectively functions as a new Zimbabwean dollar.

An RTGS unit, locally known as a dollar, trades at roughly 5.07 to 7.1 to the U.S. dollar. But when the government denominated electronic banking transactions into RTGS, the numbers stayed the same, even though the value did not. One RTGS dollar was deemed equivalent to one U.S. dollar. Yet, salaries haven’t increased, and ordinary Zimbabweans are left to make do with incomes that are a fraction of what they earned before the abrupt October 2018 change.

And the RTGS dollars only exist electronically. As physical currency, they can be withdrawn in the form of bond notes, which have yet another rate of exchange with the U.S. dollar.

Global Press Journal reporters covered the story and noted the change’s immediate and devastating impact. Many Zimbabweans were confused by the change, and some panicked when they realized that their bank balances had been seriously devalued.

Now, months later, no one can ignore the fact that a huge portion of the money they might have saved is gone, and that any payment made electronically is worth a fraction of what it should be.

Global Press Journal reporters sought an interview with the governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe but did not receive a response.

Mubwandarika says he takes home just 200 RTGS dollars. The value of RTGS currency changes constantly, but in mid-May, that was valued at $40. Before October, Mubwandarika took home $200 in U.S. dollars.

His rent alone is 150 RTGS dollars (about $18), he says.

“I have been borrowing to survive and I cannot borrow anymore,” he says. “The situation is really bad for most civil servants and the bulk of people living in Zimbabwe.”

Raymond Majongwe, the secretary general for the Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe, says the government has abandoned civil servants by not ensuring they are paid at a level that matches the U.S. dollars agreed upon in their contracts.

“The government is not taking care of its employees,” he says.

Inflation has pushed prices of basic goods way up, far beyond what they cost even before the government’s switch to RTGS currency.

By spring of this year, the basket filled with basic goods meant to indicate the monthly needs of an average family cost 781 RTGS dollars (about $95), Rosemary Siyachitema, executive director of the Consumer Council of Zimbabwe, told GPJ.

Many families can’t afford the basics, she says. Even retailers are forced to exchange RTGS dollars for foreign currency on the black market to stock their shelves.

Prices have gone up gradually in recent years, Siyachitema says, but there was a serious spike in 2017 during a spate of extreme inflation, then again in October with the shift to RTGS dollars. Even with those price hikes, she says, salaries haven’t increased.

Savings accounts have taken a serious hit. Denford Mutashu, president of the Confederation of Zimbabwe Retailers, said in a written statement to Global Press Journal that pensions were all but wiped out with the shift to RTGS dollars. Now, with little disposable income and paltry savings at best, he wrote, many Zimbabweans can’t afford to meet their own day-to-day needs.

Mubwandarika, the schoolteacher, says the situation for ordinary Zimbabweans is desperate. That’s made worse, he says, in light of Zimbabwe’s potential.

“Our county is rich in resources,” he says. “If those could be channelled towards making our lives better, that would be helpful.”

Post published in: Business

The New York Law Journal, an ALM property, has been publishing daily coverage of important news about the legal profession in the Empire State for more than 130 years. The paper has been tweeting its coverage since July 2011, but all of that came to a grinding halt sometime yesterday when Twitter decided it was time to give the NYLJ the boot.

Jay Kirsh, president of Media for ALM, was pretty confused about the situation:

(@associatesmind is better known as Keith Lee, one of our former columnists.)

If you try to access the @NYLawJournal’s account on Twitter, this is what you’ll see:

Twitter: where neo-Nazis are welcome, but law journals are persona non grata.

At this point, the New York Law Journal has been suspended from Twitter for more than 24 hours without any justification. In the era of so-called fake news, with real legal news being constantly churned out from one of the most active jurisdictions in the country, it’s critical that the New York Law Journal’s account be reinstated.

Do the right thing, Twitter, and do it now. This is absurd.

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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.

During Mugabe’s four-decade rule until 2017, he would routinely blame European “colonialists” for Zimbabwe’s problems, and snarled at EU and U.S. sanctions for rights and vote abuses.

The EU has only kept sanctions on Mugabe, his wife and the state arms manufacturer, but is yet to resume direct funding to the new government of President Emmerson Mnangagwa, preferring to channel money through local charities and U.N. agencies.

With the economy afflicted by dollar shortages, fuel queues, power-cuts, and soaring prices, Mnangagwa has said restoring ties with the West and multilateral lenders like International Monetary Fund is one of his major priorities.

At the start of the open-ended talks between diplomats and officials in Harare, EU Zimbabwe delegation head Timo Olkkonen said they would discuss issues including economic development, trade, investment, rights, rule of law and good governance.

The government has already signed up to an IMF monitoring programme where it has committed to political and economic reforms in a bid to set a track record of fiscal discipline that could earn it debt forgiveness and future financing.

At a separate event in a Harare hotel, Mnangagwa signed a new bill creating a tripartite negotiating forum intended to bring labour, business and government together to shape policy.

The 76-year-old leader is under pressure to deliver on pre-election promises and wants to avert a repeat of violent protests over a steep fuel price hike in January.

Later on Wednesday, the government is expected to start wage negotiations with public sector unions, who say a pay rise of up to 29% they received in April had already been eroded by inflation, now at a 10-year high of 75.86 %.

Mnangagwa has promised to break with his predecessor and says his “open for business” mantra will woo foreign investors. But critics say under his rule the economy shows no signs of improving while security forces have continued to crush dissent.

Post published in: Business

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Before Jeopardy phenom James Holzhauer’s defeat on Monday, people were already chattering about the end of his epic run because many had already watched it happen. Somewhere along the line, someone leaked clips of the episode and tipped off the world and now Jeopardy might pursue legal action.

Maybe they can make back some of the money they owe Holzhauer.

The working theory is that someone with a local affiliate — the folks who get copies of the episodes before airtime — put the word out there. As one might expect, that’s a breach of the show’s agreement with the stations and a duty the show takes pretty seriously:

[Seth] Berenzweig compared the event to someone pirating the final five minutes of HBO’s Game of Thrones finale and releasing it early on social media.

Yes, what if Americans were able to be thoroughly disappointed a few hours early? I mean, Bran knew how it was going to end and he looking frigging miserable the whole time.

But one potential stumbling block for Jeopardy’s lawsuit is that it’s hard to tell exactly what harm the show suffered:

“This apparent breach was egregious, given the heightened viewership with the record-setting performance of the contestant, who was on the cusp of breaking the show’s all-time record,” Berenzweig said. “The harm from this is significant, because many viewers may have decided to not watch the show after hearing the spoiler alert, which would decrease ratings for advertisers.”

Despite the spoiler, the “Jeopardy!” episode that aired Monday night was the top-rated installment of the show since May 2005, according to Nielsen. But could viewership have been even higher?

Objectively, there’s an argument that Monday’s episode was the greatest game of Jeopardy ever played. The players combined to offer only one wrong answer — or question as the case may be — the entire game. It was bonkers and America flocked to the episode in droves whether or not they knew the outcome because figuring out how James managed to finally tumble was worth the half-hour investment.

There’s doubtless a defined penalty in the contract, but the really big bucks would seem to be off the table given the show’s ratings. A producer from the show said they’re looking to take “very, very, very appropriate” action. That’s a bit vague to decipher, but we’ll take a shot:

What is a lawsuit? Alex.

‘Jeopardy!’ star James Holzhauer’s leaker could face legal trouble [Fox Business]

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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.

A major trend in the legal industry has been the growth of alternative legal service providers and, in particular, legal process outsourcing companies. A 2019 report by Thomson Reuters documented the accelerated growth of ALSPs in recent years, noting that two years ago, the sector was still nascent and poorly defined, but that now ALSPs make up a market that is “better defined, quickly growing, and broadly adopted.”

News today from Microsoft Corporation and the legal process outsourcing company Integreon underscores the extent to which major corporations are working with LPOs.

The two companies have revealed that, over the course of a 10-year partnership, Integreon has grown its Microsoft operation from a single U.S.-based specialist team in 2009 to now providing managed legal services across five delivery centers on three continents and in 14 languages worldwide.

Microsoft first contracted with Integreon in 2009 to support its Global Contracting Office (GCO) with a team based in Fargo, N.D., providing contract lifecycle management (CLM) services. There, Integreon implemented a team for drafting, negotiating, and managing certain categories of Microsoft’s high-volume, low-risk procurement contracts. That relationship has continued ever since, with Integreon operating as an extension of Microsoft’s GCO, while expanding both the in-scope categories of contracts and range of services provided.

A year later, in 2010, Integreon took over Microsoft’s internal help-desk services, while gradually expanding both its geographic coverage and languages supported. During 2013 and 2014, Microsoft worked with Integreon to select and install a new CLM system, after which Integreon took on the role of providing ongoing administration and intake support for the new platform. Microsoft also engaged Integreon to provide contract review, data abstraction and migration of about 22,000 agreements to the new system.

In 2014, Integreon opened offices in Mumbai to support Microsoft contract administration services, and then in 2017, opened offices in Manila to support Microsoft in the APAC region.

In 2018, Integreon scaled up to take on an increased volume of Microsoft’s contract reviews to ensure compliance with the GDPR data protection regulation.  Most recently, Integreon has worked to support and maximize Microsoft’s own tools, such as its automated contract helpdesk LexiBot, and to leverage new technologies such as, robotic process automation and artificial intelligence tools such as Kira.

As of today, according to the two companies, Integreon:

• Employs nearly 80 dedicated Microsoft associates who review up to 24,000 contracts annually.
• Manages up to 90,000 contract entities in Microsoft’s CLM platform annually and completes up to 14,000 contract help desk resolutions per year.
• Operates five delivery centers for Microsoft in Fargo, N.D., Charlotte, N.C., Bristol in the U.K., Mumbai, and Manila.
• Provides support in 14 languages including English, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

In announcing this news today, Bob Rowe, CEO of Integreon, said that he is proud of the decade of results Integreon has achieved on behalf of Microsoft.

“Microsoft and Integreon have built a strong partnership based on trust, quality and performance, and we are committed to securing that relationship and evolving it in a positive direction,” he said.

Jason Barnwell, Microsoft’s assistant general counsel-legal business, operations, and strategy, talked about his company’s work with Integreon on a recent episode of his Business of Law podcast.

“Our global contracting office supports the procurement and contracting legal team within our corporate legal group,” he said. “This service allows our legal department to serve Microsoft’s need for procurement contracting velocity, volume, and compliance. Integreon is a critical partner for this work.”

Not content with passing medieval laws regulating women’s bodies, the Alabama legislature has just voted to mandate indefinite chemical castration for men convicted of sex offenses against a child under 13 as a condition of release from prison. And they’ll have to pay for it themselves. This is really not the equality we were hoping for.

We don’t know who needs to hear this, but of course we’re not diminishing the seriousness of pedophilia. At the same time, we can’t allow bill’s sponsor, State Rep. Steve Hurst, to use inflammatory rhetoric to obscure the glaring problems with this statute. Hurst told Birmingham CBS affiliate WIAT-TV:

I had people call me in the past when I introduced it and said don’t you think this is inhumane? I asked them what’s more inhumane than when you take a little infant child, and you sexually molest that infant child when the child cannot defend themselves or get away, and they have to go through all the things they have to go through. If you want to talk about inhumane–that’s inhumane.

He also told the station that he hopes fear of possible castration will make potential sex offenders think twice before committing crimes, which is not entirely consistent with the stated goal of protecting minors from dangerous predators with an incurable psychological compulsion who have paid their debt to society but literally cannot help themselves.

In fact, the statute is a hot mess of bad drafting, which is why its sponsors are leaning hard on the horrifying images of infant sexual abuse to distract from the fact that it treats a flasher the same as a serial rapist — both are subject to mandatory, indefinite chemical castration, with no regard for their likelihood of recidivism. (See Alabama Code Section 15-20A-5 for the list of offenses which can trigger Hurst’s mandatory castration law.)

Secondly, the law requires all sex offenders to undergo medroxyprogesterone acetate treatment, AKA Depo Provera injections. For men, this results in impotence and lack of sexual desire. For women, it does … nothing, except possibly make them chubby and infertile. Nevertheless, the law requires a woman (or a quadriplegic, or a 95-year-old on hospice care) to begin treatment at least a month before scheduled release and continue until a judge gives her the okay to stop. If a parolee of either gender terminates treatment without permission of the court, then he or she must immediately submit for re-incarceration, or be guilty of a Class C felony. 

What grounds might a judge consider for allowing an offender to discontinue chemical injections? The law is silent on that, saying only that the offender “shall continue receiving treatment until the court determines the treatment is no longer necessary.” So, in the sole discretion of a judge who has to get elected in Alabama, a smoker with a history of blood clots — both of which make chemical castration more dangerous — can be required to continue hormone treatment indefinitely.

But don’t worry, because a medical professional the court will inform the offender of the risks and get a receipt for his or her informed consent. And that is not even a joke.

The ACLU maintains that chemical castration violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, although several states do have laws requiring it for certain classes of repeat sex offenders. These laws are rarely applied, though, with only a handful of parolees each year undergoing chemical castration.

Judges and probation officers generally ignore these mandatory castration laws because they are STUPID. Just like mandatory minimums, and three-strikes laws, and every other statute that exists solely as a vehicle for lawmakers to tell their constituents how very much they hate bad guys.

Right Rep. Hurst?

I’d prefer it be surgical, because the way I look at it, if they’re going to mark these children for life, they need to be marked for life. My preference would be, if someone does a small infant child like that, they need to die. God’s going to deal with them one day.

Very cogent commentary by the good representative to the local Fox affiliate — the man does get around. Were you wondering if Hurst supported Roy Moore’s senate campaign last year? Of course he did!

The bill goes to Governor Kay Ivey’s desk now, where she can either sign it or get slammed for siding with child rapists. Sweet home Alabama!

AL HB379 [ALISON]
Alabama considers chemical castration for child molesters [CBS42]
Chemical castration bill awaiting Ala. governor’s signature [WAFB]

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

Some legal advice will withstand the test of time.

Don’t steal, don’t murder, don’t accept a foreign nation’s help when running for President of the United States, to name just a few.

Those bits of legal advice were just as true a hundred years ago as they are today, and as they will be in another hundred years. Like a good Twinkie, that advice will never expire.

But outside of the blatantly obvious examples from criminal law, sometimes legal advice can have a shelf life. In the world of contract law, your advice may last as long as some unopened pasta sauce, which according to the jar in my pantry is about three years.

Other advice related to an active negotiation may only have the lifespan of package of unopened bologna, which the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says I can keep in my refrigerator for a couple of weeks. Why the CDC declined the opportunity to advise you to never eat bologna is a debate for another time.

And the last category might have a shelf life of mere hours, say legal advice given in a rapidly changing environment or in the midst of an unforeseen crisis. Like your lunch from Taco Bell, that advice may get the job done, but you will probably pay dearly for it later, and in no circumstances should you reheat it in the morning.

Regardless of the shelf life of your advice, it is always a good idea to take a regular inventory of whatever advice you have lingering our there to ensure it is still good for your client and won’t cause them any harm, like that weird thing in the back of your refrigerator’s fruit door that has begun to grow hair.

Recently I had the chance to visit one of our hospitals as a patient rather than in my role as in-house counsel. As I sat at the registration desk, I scanned the numerous signs and placards adorning the desk until I set my gaze on a rather familiar one, as it was one I drafted… over four years ago.

Four years ago our hospital was implementing a new payment system which changed the forms of payments we would accept. Although it was a routine change, since it discussed payment with patients in a hospital, legal was asked to draft the language so as not to fall into any EMTALA pitfalls.

The creation of the sign was a worthwhile effort and the involvement of legal was necessary at the time. But its shelf life had long since expired.

Now all the remained was yet another sign cluttering the registration desk which could add to patient confusion and result in questions a registration team member likely forgot the answers to about three years ago.

Needless to say, after I returned to my role as in-house counsel, I promptly made some calls to ensure the signs were removed and I set about taking an inventory of any other expired advice that may be lingering.

Although we may be remiss to admit it, our legal advice rarely ages like fine wine. Save your client from sniffing that carton of milk that’s well past its prime and remember to regularly review your advice’s expiration date.

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Stephen R. Williams is in-house counsel with a multi-facility hospital network in the Midwest. His column focuses on a little talked about area of the in-house life, management. You can reach Stephen at stephenwilliamsjd@gmail.com.

* A rundown of the legal problems with Florida’s decision to criminally charge the school cop at Parkland for not being a better guy with a gun. [CBS News]

* White House aims to take legal services and exercise away from migrant children for cruelty’s sake. [NY Times]

* Opioid manufacturer settles case for pocket change. [Courthouse News Service]

* While its former athletic director is reportedly under investigation, USC got a bit of happy news when one of its former basketball coaches avoided prison time. Fight on. [Law360]

* Cellino and Barnes battle royale gets a bit more juicy. [Buffalo News]

* Tom Brady is trying to trademark another Hall of Famer’s nickname. [BU Today]

* A day in the life of a human rights attorney. [Lifehacker]