Category: News Feeds

“What’s good?” – Socrates, right?

Hello to you, too. My name is Chris Williams. I’ll be serving as Above the Law’s new Social Media Manager and Assistant Editor. What follows are a few things about me that are likely to color my writing. I claim New Jersey, unapologetically. I spend most of my time in Camden. I recently attended a festival called Mini Beard and tried to read Aristotle’s Rhetoric in my tent. I was too distracted by my surroundings to continue on, but the attempt was made.

I graduated from Rutgers – Newark with a degree in Philosophy and a degree in African and African American studies. That experience taught me that theory must be grounded in practice. Oddly enough, I went to law school with no intention of ever being a practicing lawyer. I decided that I wanted to teach Jurisprudence, which is philosophy of law, and I figured learning what lawyers learn made the most sense to do. That did have the effect of me seeing my classes less as a place for me to outline and more of a place to teach others. For context, I was the student that would draw attention to discrepancies in 2^nd Amendment jurisprudence whenever possible. I intend on continuing that practice at Above the Law. This is an introduction as much as it is a paper trail, so I invite you to call my attention to this intro if at any point I don’t make the most of a teachable moment. Accessibility is something big to me. Is Above the Law addressing the needs of recent grads? Black folks? People who have problems seeing? If not, and if it is possible to change that, how can we make things right? I like memes, I post them, and I need them to be accessible so that as many people as possible can see how brilliant and modest my original content is.

When I’m not making memes or penning articles, I am a Youth Instructor at The Center for Environmental Transformation where I teach kids how to grow food and resolve conflicts. I seem to have a never-ending pile of laundry. I ride my bike enough to consider myself a cyclist, but actual cyclists have a problem discerning between myself and the average couch. I firmly believe Alan Lightman wrote one of the best books ever written and baked macaroni and cheese is my love language.

Questions, comments, concerns? Send me those and more at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com.

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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. Before that, he wrote columns for an online magazine named The Muse Collaborative under the pen name Knehmo. He endured the great state of Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com.

The Biglaw merger teased back in April between Holland & Knight and Thompson & Knight has been agreed upon by both firms. The tie-up is scheduled for August 1st. The new firm even has a name all picked out — Holland & Knight.

Welp, there go hopes that the new mega firm will go by the catchy Knight & Knight. Or even Knight Law. It was always a long shot that each of the second named partners would somehow emerge on the top of the masthead by a quirk of the merger partner, but those who imagine new and fun branding opportunities can still dream.

The joint statement from the firms on the merger:

Holland & Knight and Thompson & Knight have agreed to combine on or about August 1, 2021. The combined firm will operate under the Holland & Knight name. It will have approximately 1,600 lawyers and other professionals in 30 offices around the globe. The announcement follows favorable votes by the Holland & Knight Directors Committee and Thompson & Knight partnership, and the execution of a definitive merger agreement by both firms. Further information concerning the combined firm will be released upon completion of the merger.

And another upside to the merger: rising 2Ls will no longer embarrassingly confuse the two & Knight firms.

Nicely done.

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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).

When it comes to associate pay, the bigger the firm the better the salaries doesn’t always hold true. Time and time again throughout this summer’s salary wars, we’ve seen boutique firms deliver salaries that have matched — and even exceeded — the new $205K Biglaw salary scale.

To that end, we’ve got news from Reid Collins & Tsai, an Austin-based litigation boutique that is blowing the Davis Polk scale out of the water when it comes to both salaries and bonuses. According to a compensation memo from the firm, attorneys in all class years are guaranteed salaries that either meet or beat what the market has to offer, before their huge bonuses.

We’ve been told that Reid Collins pays out bonuses frequently, and to date in 2021, the firm has paid out more than $80,000 per lawyer, with another bonus on the way. Associates who have really hit it out of the park with unique achievements have received sizable individual bonus awards.

An insider at Reid Collins had this to say: “These partners make it their mission to find great talent, treat them well, and make sure they are rewarded for all their blood, sweat, and tears in this tough, tough, business.”

Congratulations to everyone at the firm!

(Flip to the next page to see the memo from Reid Collins & Tsai.)

We depend on your tips to stay on top of this stuff. 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’ll 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.

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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.

Just because a firm is new, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be giving out raises! Just take Glenn Agre. The boutique law firm, focused on bankruptcy and restructuring, white-collar litigation and investigations, and general commercial litigation, only started in February of this year. That’s when Andrew Glenn, Lyn Agre, Jed Bergman, Olga Fuentes Skinner, Marissa Miller, and a few others, left Kasowitz Benson to start their own firm. And, by all accounts, things are going pretty well.

That’s why associates in the firm’s two offices — New York and San Francisco — are getting raises! Effective July 1, the following salary scale will apply at Glenn Agre:

Congrats to associates on their raises!

You can read the full memo on the next page.

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of this stuff. So when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Raises”). 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’ll 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.

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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).

Imagine being a priest for decades, moving up to becoming bishop, then suddenly being defrocked. You lose your status, your identity, and a large part of your power. It’s got to smart.

Now picture Rudy Giuliani — the former head attorney of the Southern District of New York, mayor of the country’s largest city, hero of 9/11 — screwing up so thoroughly that the highest ethics board in the state, the Attorney Grievance Committee (AGC), moved the court to have him immediately suspended from practicing law.

That’s exactly what happened last week in a per curiam decision by the Appellate Division of the First Department, in which the court said, “The seriousness of [Giuliani’s] uncontroverted misconduct cannot be overstated.”  For an attorney, it doesn’t get much worse than that, short of criminal charges.

The court found that Giuliani committed such egregious violations of the rules of professional conduct that his immediate suspension was necessary to avoid “continuing misconduct.” Eventually, a full disciplinary hearing will be held where both sides will present further evidence. Until then, Giuliani can no longer be known as an attorney, or call himself such in any format, media, or manner. He’s been defrocked.

Interim suspension is a serious remedy, the court noted. “Available only in situations where it is immediately necessary to protect the public.”

Why does the public need protecting from the former mayor? Because, as the opinion goes on to say, Giuliani has a “large megaphone,” thereby magnifying the harm he’s caused and will likely still cause.

The gist of the charges against him concerns his misrepresentations about the 2020 election. In many different venues — newscasts, podcasts, social media, rallies, and hearings — Giuliani promoted the falsehood that the election was fraudulent, stolen from his friend and benefactor, former president Donald Trump.

He hit on this theme in so many ways and in so many forums that the court found overwhelming evidence that there was no way Giuliani didn’t know the statements he made were false at the time he made them. (Giuliani’s putative defense.)

Here are some examples cited by the court:

• Dead people voted, including Joe Frazier.

“He is still voting here,” Giuliani said on November 7, 2020, regarding the former heavyweight boxer. Meanwhile, records submitted by the AGC unequivocally showed that Pennsylvania formally canceled Frazier’s eligibility to vote on February 8, 2012, three months after he died.

• 6,000 dead people voted in Georgia.

After reviewing public records, the Secretary of State concluded that potentially two votes may have been cast in the name of dead voters.

• Hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens voted in Arizona.

Giuliani drew this conclusion from thin air, extrapolating from the number of illegal aliens believed to live in Arizona. As the court put it, “Undeterred by lack of any empirical evidence,” Giuliani stated in his podcast, “Chat with the Mayor,” that “with 5 million illegal aliens in Arizona, it is beyond credulity that a few hundred thousand didn’t vote.”

• 2,500 Georgia felons voted illegally.

Again, simply untrue. The Georgia Secretary of State identified 74 potential felony voters.

• Votes were hidden under a table in Georgia.

Giuliani based this claim on snippets from a full videotaping of the counting of votes in that state. What the full video (available to the public) shows is that boxes were put under the table at the end of the day, then retrieved when workers were told to go back and continue counting.

Giuliani admitted he didn’t have the “best sources” to justify the numbers he relied on to make these far-reaching claims of voter fraud. However, he made them just the same. The court found that, in part, his claims inspired the violence against the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

“This country is being torn apart by continued attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 election […]. The hallmark of our democracy is predicated on free and fair elections. False statements intended to foment a loss of confidence in our elections and resulting loss of confidence in government generally damage the proper functioning of a free society. When those false statements are made by an attorney, it also erodes the public’s confidence in the integrity of attorneys admitted to our bar and damages the profession’s role as a crucial source of reliable information. It tarnishes the reputation of the entire legal profession and its mandate to act as a trusted and essential part of the machinery of justice.”

Being a lawyer is supposed to mean something. Ethics rules compel us to be honest to our clients, to the courts, and to the public. That’s whether we’re in court, out of court, appearing in the media, or at a party. Giuliani’s reliance on his First Amendment freedom of speech is misplaced, the court said.  Attorney’s speech is subject to greater regulation than speech by others, it added. “Unlike lay persons, an attorney is a professional trained in the art of persuasion.”

Our words carry greater weight and therefore greater potential for harm. Put that training in the wrong hands — a guy with a giant ego, a worldwide platform, unlimited access to the media, and a direct connection to a man with an even larger ego, power base, and following –- and it makes sense that Giuliani’s right to practice law should be stripped. Permanently.

He gives us all a bad name.

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Toni Messina has tried over 100 cases and has been practicing criminal law and immigration since 1990. You can follow her on Twitter: @tonitamess.

Everyone knows the first reason why business travel will not immediately boom as the pandemic ends: It turns out that we didn’t need all those in-person business meetings after all!

Lawyers can look into prospects’ eyes and glean the essence of their souls by Zoom as well as the lawyers can at in-person meetings. (That may actually mean “not at all” in both situations, but that’s beside the point.) So long as in-person and Zoom meetings are more or less equal, there’s no reason to waste time and money on an unnecessary flight.

People have also realized a related reason why Zoom meetings are efficient:  You can invite more people, from more locations, to attend. For law firms, that means that the head of the Chicago office, and the head of the securities litigation practice, and the head of litigation might all attend a one-hour Zoom meeting, even though all those people would never have flown to St. Louis for the same event.

Zoom meetings are perfectly good and much cheaper. Why should we go back to the way things were before?

But there’s a second, less obvious, reason why business travel will remain restricted as the world emerges from the pandemic: Quarterly reporting of financial results.

Many companies compare this year’s second quarter to last year’s second quarter, and the analysts look for improvement in year-over-year results.

During the pandemic, companies spent essentially nothing on business travel and entertainment. The comparison between this year’s Q2 and last year’s Q2 is going to look abysmal if the costs for travel and business entertainment jump from $0 in 2020 to $100 million in 2021. If companies want to look good during quarterly financial reporting, companies will have to minimize business travel to maintain favorable year-over-year results.

This doesn’t mean that business travel won’t ramp up over time. On the contrary: It means that travel will only ramp up over time. Travel will increase incrementally over several quarters, so there’s no noticeable blip in earnings.

That’s actually pretty funny. We’ll limit travel only in part because travel is tiring, time-consuming, expensive, and generally achieves little. All of those things are actual experiences that we live in the real world.

We’ll also restrict travel in part to ensure that year-over-year comparisons of financial results continue to look strong. That has little to do with what we experience in the real world, but a lot to do with how the world acts.

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Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.

Biglaw firms continue to race to raise salaries in the epic quest to secure some of the lateral talent that’s floating around in this incredibly hot legal job market, but unfortunately, not every firm is raising associates up to the Davis Polk scale and not every firm uses a lockstep salary scale. Arent Fox is one of those firms.

With $333,600,000 gross revenue in 2020, Arent Fox placed 107th in the most recent Am Law 100 ranking. During the height of the pandemic, almost everyone at the firm took some pretty big salary hits, ranging from 25% for associates and staff all the way up to 60% distributon cuts for partners. But now, associates’ fortunes are changing when it comes to what they make.

From what we understand, the firm recently announced “market adjustments” to salaries for second- through ninth-year associates, and sources tell us that the “vague email” made it seem like any increases would be individualized. Even though the firm isn’t matching Davis Polk’s shiny new salary scale, our Arent Fox insiders tell us that the last time the firm raised salaries, folks received about $15,000 more in their wages. Here’s what one tipster from the firm had to say:

I get that Arent Fox didn’t match, but after a lot of negativity following the salary cuts during COVID, I really appreciated the gesture from the partnership. And the gesture wasn’t hollow either. I’m generally satisfied with the raise I received — it was still five figures. I don’t want to reveal what my increase was, but I’m at least closer to Cravath scale for my year.

But sorry, first-years — according to the firm, you’ll be kept at $190,000 “for now.” That’s an interesting way to enter on-campus recruiting season in just a few weeks. Let’s see how that works out for the firm.

In other news, Arent Fox is introducing a big adjustment to its productivity bonuses, which will now range from $15,000 to $75,000 for those who bill at least 1950 hours this year. Sources seem pretty pumped about this.

Congratulations to everyone at the firm!

(Flip to the next page to see the memo from Arent Fox.)

We depend on your tips to stay on top of this stuff. 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’ll 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.

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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.

Lawyers love a redemption arc.

Fundamentally, it proves the system works. People serve their time and then are free to go. When they excel after their brush with the law, we applaud and cheer. The First Step Act was a long overdue initiative to accelerate to help people who probably should’ve never been imprisoned in the first place.

But sometimes lawyers might get a little ahead of themselves trying restore people to pedestals they needn’t occupy.

Jeffrey Toobin is back on TV after what by all accounts amounted to sexual harassment. The effort to bring him back into society’s good graces began almost immediately after his story went public. As I put it then, “A second chance is just a phrase the uber-privileged use to justify living with no consequences for any of their actions.” I countered that people can have a second act, but the world doesn’t owe them a fast track to getting back on top. The media world was clearly not listening to me.

Meanwhile, a former convict turned advocate for sex offense policy reform at Mitchell-Hamline finds himself under a troubling cloud on social media. In a series of tweets including a number of screenshots of conversations, @papertigerx calls out her ex as manipulative and abusive. Without getting into her most serious allegations, it’s clear that she feels she’s been used and exploited as a proverbial prop in this guy’s story.

Or, as the case may be, a literal prop to the extent he’s allegedly using pictures of her on his new website marketing himself as a “writer. speaker. advocate.” It turns out this guy, literally Guy Hamilton-Smith, has shown up in Above the Law before in an old post written by our erstwhile conservative columnist blasting the state bar for having a hangup about admitting a lawyer with a child porn conviction.

He’s gone on from that to appear in and even write for a number of legal publications. Scott Greenfield even wrote a post about Paper Tiger herself in 2019, though that post was really about Hamilton-Smith with his then-wife functioning as a sympathy prop — a vehicle for his tale of woe. In retrospect, the post is pretty problematic. Actually, without hindsight it reads kind of skeevy.

There’s a guy I used to work with, that I frankly never had any issues with, who got himself arrested for propositioning someone he thought was a child. Today he’s a justice system reform advocate, interacting with multiple legal scholars and other journalists on social media and podcasts. He’s doing good work and by all indications he’s got himself squared away. That said, I’ve never been able to bring myself to personally amplify his voice. It just strikes me that I don’t have to join in that project.

And maybe that’s the lesson here. Sometimes people get in legal trouble and get past it. Other times they get in there because they have deeper issues. When it comes to some crimes, like getting mixed up in child porn, issues of control and misogyny might well come along for the ride and create further problems down the road. That’s the sort of thing you don’t necessarily invite when championing a newly released non-violet drug offender. Just be careful with which redemption trains you hop on. Cabin your praise, if you feel compelled to grant it, to the specific work at hand and don’t let yourself become a tool in whitewashing someone’s image when there’s a risk they might use that goodwill to do other bad if not criminal stuff.

In other words it’s one thing to appreciate the arc, it’s another to go out of your way to try and force it to happen.

Earlier: New York Times Spews A Lot Of Hot Garbage About Jeffrey Toobin

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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.

Bill Barr is headed to rehab.

No, not for drugs or alcohol — this is Reputation Rehab, and the first step is admitting you have a problem. The second step is finding a journalist who’ll let you tell your story without calling you on your bullshit, and thanks to ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan D. Karl, the former attorney general is well on his way.

In a teaser for his upcoming book, Karl writes in The Atlantic that Barr “has been widely seen as a Trump lackey who politicized the Justice Department. But when the big moment came after the election, he defied the president who expected him to do his bidding.”

Which is an interesting way of saying that the Barr huddled up with Senator Mitch McConnell, and the two of them decided that they’d have a better chance of maintaining Republican control of the senate if Trump stopped screaming nonsense about rigged elections and started telling Georgians to get out and vote for Senators Loeffler and Perdue.

When Barr told the AP on December 1, 2020 that “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” it was it was in no wise an attempt to de-politicize the DOJ, as he’d like to spin it now. He was trying to manage his mercurial boss to benefit the Red Team.

To McConnell, the road to maintaining control of the Senate was simple: Republicans needed to make the argument that with Biden soon to be in the White House, it was crucial that they have a majority in the Senate to check his power. But McConnell also believed that if he openly declared Biden the winner, Trump would be enraged and likely act to sabotage the Republican Senate campaigns in Georgia. Barr related his conversations with McConnell to me. McConnell confirms the account.

“Look, we need the president in Georgia,” McConnell told Barr, “and so we cannot be frontally attacking him right now. But you’re in a better position to inject some reality into this situation. You are really the only one who can do it.”

Hey, remember when Loretta Lynch had a ten-minute kibbitz with Bill Clinton on the tarmac, and it was the scandal of the century? But now Bill Barr is trotting out this wildly inappropriate conversation with the most powerful Republican in congress about wielding the executive branch to benefit the GOP in the January 5 Georgia run-offs, and Barr is supposed to be the good guy here?

AYFKMRN? Bill Barr, who spent months flogging lies about fraudulent ballots, breaking with Justice Department policy to allow pre-election investigations of bogus vote fraud claims, going so far as to hang Pennsylvania election officials out to dry over a clerical error that was immediately detected, wants to be the hero in this story?

“My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,” Barr told Karl. “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”

Which is fun story to tell a reporter six months later when you’re trying to launder your reputation, but conveniently omits Barr’s own role in promoting the lie that mail-in ballots were especially prone to fraudulent manipulation and the use of DOJ resources to investigate charges that the attorney general knew were “all bullshit.”

Meanwhile, Mister Unitary Executive Theory who spent the past three years defying congressional oversight and arguing in court that presidential communications were shrouded in a magical cloak of executive privilege has come to the belated realization that blabbing about your conversations with the president is fine, actually if you really, really want to take control of your own narrative.

“Did you say that?”

“Yes,” Barr responded.

“How the fuck could you do this to me? Why did you say it?”

“Because it’s true.”

The president, livid, responded by referring to himself in the third person: “You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump.”

Such heroics! Although perhaps slightly undercut by his subsequent boast that “This would have taken a crackerjack team with a really coherent and disciplined strategy. Instead, you have a clown show. No self-respecting lawyer is going anywhere near it. It’s just a joke. That’s why you are where you are.”

If only Trump had hired competent lawyers, he might have been able to steal the election! But instead he hired Sidney Powell, whom Barr worked with hand in glove to blow up the Michael Flynn prosecution. And Rudy Giuliani, for whom Barr set up a special intake system at the DOJ to launder what turned out (to the surprise of exactly no one) to be a Russian influence operation to damage Joe Biden’s electoral prospects.

Well, he may have used the DOJ to help these two clowns before, but by December of 2020, Bill Barr had seen the light. So right after that meeting, he handed in his principled resignation and refused to be associated with the assault on democracy being waged by a maniac in the White House. Right?

HA HA.

No, Barr promised White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that he would stay “as long as I’m needed,” although he assures Karl that he immediately regretted it. And his regret was so powerful that he didn’t leave until three weeks later, using a letter so larded with praise that it would make Kim Jong Il blush as a bribe to avoid being trashed by Trump in a tweet. Such a brave patriot!

This man thinks you are stupid. He thinks if he comes out against Trump’s excesses now and blames the former president’s bad advisors for leading him astray, he can somehow weather the eleventy-seven insider accounts that are about to flood the bookshelves and salvage his reputation as a good and noble conservative.

Don’t be stupid!

Inside William Barr’s Breakup With Trump [Atlantic]

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Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Remember Paul Davis? Sure you do, he’s the Hobbit-loving, Capitol-insurrectionist attorney who lost his in-house job when he posted to social media about his participation in January 6th and filed election lawsuits (not that he calls them that) against … pretty much every politician and also Mark Zuckerberg, because, reasons, that were full of batshit legal theories and he does NOT like it when people make fun of him.

Anyway, after the now-former general counsel got fired from that job, you’ll recall he filed a lawsuit seeking to undo the entirety of the 2020 election because of violations of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) which, in turn, he says begat civil rights violations. Yes, in follow-on filings he cited every nerd’s first love J.R.R. Tolkien for the notion that the United States could be ruled by a steward and we all laughed (with good reason) at that. But eventually he was fired by some of those plaintiffs over a disagreement over legal strategy, and he filed a second lawsuit, that on the internet is called In Re Gondor II but is really Bravo v. Pelosi, reiterating the causes of action from his first lawsuit.

But alas, Gondor II is no more!

In a recently filed notice of dismissal, Davis says the lawsuit can’t go on, since well, he doesn’t have the resources to pursue the case. Oh, and the “evidence” he was going to use has mysteriously been destroyed.

Moreover, one of their own staff has now represented that he has destroyed evidence Plaintiffs intended to use to establish personal jurisdiction over various non-resident Defendants.

But “fans” of his legal stylings need not despair — he promises a new lawsuit aimed at only the Texas defendants. And Mark Zuckerberg. But what we really want to know is…. will there be hobbit references in his next lawsuit…?

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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).