Author: TSA Press

It’s another spring day, and Davis Polk is admiring its crown as the new Biglaw compensation leader as peer firms line up to match the incredibly generous special bonus bucks the firm decided to hand out to its associates and counsel.

Which firm is the latest to fall in line and offer up bountiful bonuses in recognition of its attorneys’ hard work?

That would be Paul Weiss. Chairman Brad Karp sent a memo yesterday evening detailing all of the hard work associates and counsel had put in during 2020 and beyond, including work for their communities in the firm’s coronavirus relief center and for its racial justice, social justice, and voter-protection initiatives. “Thanks to your efforts,” Karp wrote, “we helped make the world more safe, more equitable and more just – and we still have lots more work to do.”

This is what the bonus scale looks like at Paul Weiss (full memo on the next page):

Class Year	June Bonus	September Bonus	Total Bonus
2020	$4,500	$7,500	$12,000
2019	$6,000	$10,000	$16,000
2018	$12,000	$20,000	$32,000
2017	$16,500	$27,500	$44,000
2016	$19,500	$32,500	$52,000
2015	$22,000	$37,000	$59,200
2014 and senior, including counsel	$24,000	$40,000	$64,000

Special bonuses at Paul Weiss will be paid out on June 30 and September 30, and will not have any impact on the firm’s regular year-end bonuses in December. The firm is especially “proud of and grateful for [its attorneys’] extraordinary talents, dedication, and generosity” during these tumultuous times. Congratulations to all!

(Flip to the next page to see the full memo from Paul Weiss.)

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of important bonus updates, so when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Matches”). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we also use for salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish. Thanks for all of your help!

---

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.

GameStop is a meme. A rallying cry. A cudgel against the powerful. Soon to be a major motion picture based on real events. A veritable religion.

Leo Tolstoy may have said spring is the time of plans and projects, but in Biglaw — at least in 2021 — it’s also the time of bonuses.

Yes, another Biglaw firm has announced a second round of special bonuses (last fall marked the first round) to thank associates for their hard work during the tumultuous season of COVID-19 — which has turned out to be pretty profitable for the top of the legal sector. Yesterday, Cleary Gottlieb announced they too would match the spring special bonus scale set last week by Davis Polk.

Below is the schedule Cleary will use to hand out bonuses:

You can read the full memo on the next page.

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of important bonus updates, so when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Matches”). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we also use for salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish. Thanks for all of your help!

---

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).

* A lawyer who is raising money for the Oath Keepers apparently likes to cite to Lord of the Rings in legal briefs. Bet he hopes judges don’t say “you shall not pass” in response to motions to dismiss filed against him… [Daily Beast]

* A Pennsylvania lawyer faces up to decades in prison for identity theft and stealing from clients. [Daily Voice]

* California may soon have its first Filipino Attorney General. [NBC News]

* The family of a black New York teen, who was falsely accused of stealing a cell phone, has filed a lawsuit. [CBS News]

* Check out this article on why Supreme Court proceedings should not be televised. Since oral arguments may have been held from a bathroom during the pandemic, this is a strong position… [Washington Post]

---

Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day!

Damian Williams looks primed to become the next U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the first Black person to hold that job. A former Garland clerk at the D.C. Circuit who went on to clerk for the late Justice John Paul Stevens, what Biglaw firm did Williams work at before joining the S.D.N.Y. in 2012?

Hint: The Yale Law School grad will also be the first elevated to the USAO position from inside the office in over 50 years.

See the answer on the next page.

You might think that the hordes of Redditors and Robinhoods would be done with Gabe Plotkin. They had cost him hundreds of millions of dollars and his investors billions of dollars. They forced him into a humiliating retreat on his GameStop short. They left him no recourse but to go cap-in-hand to Ken Griffin and his old boss—who he’d also lost a pretty penny—to keep his Melvin Capital Management afloat.

Some savvy political operative in the 1800s first rebranded the practice of funding government programs whose costs are spread widely to taxpayers, but whose service or economic benefits are concentrated in a particular geographic area, as “pork” (or occasionally, less-appealingly, as “pork-barrel spending”), and the term’s been with us ever since. Oh sure, its popularity ebbs and flows over time. I vaguely remember hearing jowled, red-faced men in ill-fitting suits screaming about pork on the 19” tube television set (with built-in VCR) that I had in my college dorm room. We haven’t heard much about congressional pork in quite some time though.

It looks like that’s about to change. In the early 2000s, congressional Republicans were livid about pork, leading to a complete ban on earmarks in 2011, with the Tea Party rising as a new force in American politics. An “earmark” is a legislative provision that spells out certain congressional spending priorities, spending priorities which will apply to very limited numbers of people, and while “earmark” is not technically the exact same thing as “pork,” the terms are more or less synonymous for our purposes (and we all have to recognize that “pork” is simply a more pleasing word than is “earmark”). The Tea Party had a few fair points, often embodied in the eventually abandoned “bridge to nowhere,” a $400 million pork project meant to connect an 8,000-person town in southwestern Alaska, one that was already served by a reasonably good ferry system, to the 50-person island that housed the nearest airport (this project was slipped into the federal transportation budget by the top House Republican on the Transportation Committee and the top Senate Republican on the Appropriations Committee, so one could argue that the posterchild for pork spending was more of an internal problem within the Republican Party than anything else).

At any rate, congressional pork (in the form of earmarks) has been gone since 2011, but now it might be making a comeback. A majority of House Republicans voted last week to revive earmarks, as long as certain new oversight requirements were met, including drafting a written justification for any particular project, verifying that the lawmaker proposing a project has nothing to gain financially from it, and appointing a federal watchdog to audit a portion of earmarks periodically. Democrats have also previously announced similar earmark reforms as part of their plan to bring back the practice.

Some Republicans remain highly skeptical, reverting to their role as pretend deficit hawks and forgetting that their beloved President Trump presided over the third-biggest increase in the size of the annual federal deficit relative to the size of the economy in all of American history (rounding out the top three deficit-spending presidents are George W. Bush, another modern Republican, and Abraham Lincoln, who, you know, had a Civil War to win). Yet, other Republicans are far more practical. And why not?

As the party out of majority power, Republicans aren’t going to be getting any of their major legislative priorities through. So, what they have to run on right now is playacting at hating Democrats the most of all, and stupid cultural issues like Mr. Potato Head and the fake cancelation of Dr. Seuss. I don’t think anyone thinks that is healthy for our democratic republic, or, if they are really honest about it, even for the Republican Party.

But what if we went back to the days when a Republican lawmaker could go home and say, “Look, I just couldn’t get there with banning abortion and mandating guns at church, but I did get this new bridge for our district that we really needed and couldn’t afford on our own”? That used to sort of work! And, “bridge to nowhere” notwithstanding, smaller communities often do legitimately need outside federal spending to fund local work on highspeed internet, airports, major highways, and other critical infrastructure (which is definitely some light socialism, but I won’t tell them if you won’t).

Bringing back congressional pork is not going to solve all of our political problems. But it might at least get the conversation started again. Right now, Republican lawmakers have no incentive to talk to Democrats, and Democrats have no reason to listen — neither stands to gain anything. Republicans are not going to sign onto a watered-down piece of progressive legislation, because “I made this bill that you hate something you might hate just slightly less,” is a very hard argument to make to voters. “I signed onto this bill because it was going to pass anyway and in doing so I got this large, local, tangible benefit that really helped you voters standing before me,” on the other hand? Now that’s something we can talk about.

---

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

After Willkie Farr announced another round of seasonal bonuses, Davis Polk went over the top and announced another two rounds of bonuses. The good times keep rolling in Biglaw. Joe and Kathryn also discuss the impending release of the US News and World Report Law School rankings — could there be a big change this year? And a disturbing study from a few years ago started making the rounds showing the gross sentencing disparity caused by unexpected college football losses.

Of all the famous or disastrous surrogacy cases I’ve written about over the last half-decade, literally none of them have been from South Dakota. That hasn’t stopped the state legislature, however, from being worried about surrogacy issues. South Dakota’s legislature has seen more than its fair share of anti-surrogacy bills over the past few years. While the rest of the country was going the other direction — including New York, which recently passed a new surrogacy-supportive law — last year, South Dakota’s legislature nearly criminalized the family-building option when it considered House Bill 1096, completely banning commercial surrogacy in the Mount Rushmore state. Thankfully, after passing the House General Assembly, that bill died in the State Senate.

Using The “A” Word. (Abortion.)

This year, anti-surrogacy advocates tried a different approach. On March 10, 2021, South Dakota’s legislature passed Senate Bill 183, called “An Act to declare certain contract provisions regarding abortion as unenforceable and to provide a penalty therefor.” The bill, which is currently on Gov. Kristi Noem’s desk, is expected to be signed into law imminently.

The bill invalidates any contract provision if it “in any way: ‘(1) Coerces, compels, or attempts to compel a pregnant woman to undergo an abortion; (2) Results in a breach of any term of the contract if a pregnant woman refuses to undergo an abortion; or (3) Results in the pregnant woman assuming any cost, obligation, or responsibility for refusing to undergo an abortion.’” Further, the bill deems it a crime for any person to “require” such a provision in a contract.

Is That A Bad Thing?

Of course, no one wants anyone coerced into having an abortion! I think we can all agree on that. But that’s not really the issue. I spoke with South Dakota assisted reproductive technology attorney Emilee Gehling about the likely new law-to-be. Gehling explained that the new law misunderstands the risks posed by surrogacy relationships and is likely to have negative consequences for South Dakota families.

Under current law in South Dakota, and in most states, intended parents and surrogates have in-depth conversations as to how everyone would want to handle the situation if the worst were to happen. For example, if the surrogate’s life were at stake as a result of a complication in the pregnancy, and there had to be a choice between the surrogate and the fetus, the parties would likely agree that the surrogate should save her own life. However, under the new law, a provision that contemplates the surrogate terminating her pregnancy might be ambiguous enough to trigger the reach of the statute. That’s problematic, and will chill legal conduct that could be thought to potentially lead to the criminal prosecution of the parties. Gehling is concerned that the bill creates fear and uncertainty for hopeful parents-to-be who have already been through so much, while the bill is unlikely to do anything to reduce abortion or abortion-coercion (if any) in the state.

Does It Change Anything?

Aside from complicating whether parties can freely memorialize their agreements, does the law change anything? Not really. As is, without any specific anti-abortion coercion law, surrogacy attorneys across the country advise their clients that there can be no specific performance of any surrogacy agreement clause relating to termination of a pregnancy. As Constitutional jurisprudence stands, a pregnant woman has the right to decide to continue a pregnancy or not to continue a pregnancy. This right is, of course, subject to limitations and regulations, as may vary by state, but none of those regulations relates to whether the pregnancy is a surrogacy pregnancy or not. Regardless of whatever a contract might say, it’s likely that any court deciding the issue would hold that a right to abortion remains the right of the pregnant person.

Of course, the law does preclude a potential breach of contract claim if a surrogate acted in a way other than agreed upon in the contract (including in relation to an abortion). So that’s something new. But to date, I have never actually seen a case, in South Dakota or elsewhere, of a surrogate being sued for breaching a surrogacy contract as it related to the termination or continuation of a surrogacy pregnancy.

Hope For The Future

While Gehling believes Senate Bill 183 misses the mark, she believes healthy surrogacy arrangements may still continue in the state. She is a member of a nonprofit organization called Families from South Dakota Surrogacy, Inc. which hopes to work with legislators next session to introduce a new bill to the state supportive of surrogacy arrangements and protecting all parties to the arrangement, including the child.

---

Ellen Trachman is the Managing Attorney of Trachman Law Center, LLC, a Denver-based law firm specializing in assisted reproductive technology law, and co-host of the podcast I Want To Put A Baby In You. You can reach her at babies@abovethelaw.com.