Category: News Feeds

Earlier this week, a new report ranking the whitest law schools in America was released, where some law schools were called out for their “inappropriate,” “excess” whiteness during a time when diversity and inclusion should be given special consideration. At least two law school deans are taking their school’s place on this ranking quite seriously, and they reached out to students to let them know.

Deans Jessica Berg and Michael Scharf of Case Western Reserve University School of Law — ranked 144 out of 200 on list (the lower the score, the higher the whiteness) — emailed students to let voice their concerns. The Washington Free Beacon has the details:

“First, we should not be satisfied with the diversity of our student body, even on the measures used in this study,” Berg and Scharf said. “It does not mean we have an equitable number of students who identify as Black, Native American, Latinx, Asian American, Pacific Islander, or other under-represented groups.”

The percentage of minority students in the school’s first-year law classes, however, exceeded the percentage of nationwide minority applicants by 13 percent. Case Western has increased the percentage of first-year law students “who do not identify as white” by 11 percent since 2004, the deans said in the email.

Case Western happens to be a law school that’s already doing a great deal of work to diversify its incoming classes and incorporate racial justice initiatives into its learning environment, and the deans still don’t think they’re doing enough. In a world where racial equity still hasn’t been given its due in law school academia and admissions, that’s quite refreshing.

Deans Berg and Scharf released this statement: “We are committed to diversity and inclusion in all aspects of our law school community and know that we still have work to do in this area. This study draws attention to one measure, but its greater impact may be to help reinforce the need for additional conversations and initiatives.”

Will other law school deans take this ranking seriously and attempt to make changes to further diversify their incoming classes? We remain hopeful.

Law School Deans Chastise Student Body as Too White [Washington Free Beacon]

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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.

Well, that *was* quick. When I wrote about the controversial Zoom incident involving Georgetown University Law Center professors Sandra Sellers and David Batson, I hoped the law school would move quickly on the matter, but this is faster than even I’d imagined.

As a quick recap, Sellers was caught on camera saying of a Black student in a negotiations class she teaches with Batson that “a lot of my lower ones [students] are Blacks. Happens almost every semester. And it’s like, oh come on, you know? There are some really good ones, but there are also some that are just plain at the bottom and drives me crazy.” While Batson just seems to nod in agreement. It’s truly an astonishing display.

The law school’s Black Law Student Association called for the immediate termination of Sellers. Dean William Treanor just sent an email to the Georgetown Law community, letting them know that’s exactly what’s been done.

I informed Professor Sellers that I was terminating her relationship with Georgetown Law effective immediately. During our conversation, she told me that she had intended to resign. As a result of my decision, Professor Sellers is no longer affiliated with Georgetown Law. Professor Batson has been place on administrative leave pending the investigation by the Office of Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action, the results of which will inform our next steps. Until the completion of the investigation, Professor Batson will have no further involvement with the course in which the incident arose.

He went on to note:

We are taking significant steps to ensure that all students in this class are fairly graded without the input of Professor Sellers or Professor Batson.

Dean Treanor also said that this is not the end of the law school’s response. But no word, as of yet, whether BLSA’s other demands (a “public apology from Professor David Batson in his failure to adequately condemn Sellers’ statements; critically assessing and improving its current subjective grading system, including an audit of Professor Sellers’ past grading and student evaluations to account for her admitted biases; and committing to hiring more Black professors who will be better situated to fairly assess Black students in a non-biased manner.”) will be met.

Read Dean Treanor’s full email below.

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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).

Nothing is truly free. “Free shipping” just means the shipping costs have been factored into the price. “Free streaming service” just means you pay for it with your time watching commercials. Free toasters, free trips, free timeshares: You’re paying for all them somehow, because nothing is actually free.

The golden god of efficiency must be honored with scholarly sacrifice. Without new and more interesting ways of proving that the entire legal order is just a wordy supply and demand graph, Moloch will be displeased. And if that sometimes means writing an article about the contractual considerations of running a multinational sex slavery operation, so be it.

Cash rules everything around me, y’all.

Professor J. Mark Ramseyer of Harvard Law School has dutifully penned his offering to law and economics titled “Contracting for sex in the Pacific War” which already seems a little dicey, but let’s see what he’s on about:

The contracts themselves followed basic game theoretic principles of credible commitments…. Together, the women and brothels concluded indenture contracts that coupled a large advance with one or two year terms. Until the last months of the war, the women served their terms or paid off their debts early, and returned home.

It’s a testament to this article’s scope and vision that “indentured servitude good” is going to be the least troubling conclusion of the piece. And we don’t even have the bandwidth to get into his implicit assumption that an efficient prostitution industry would involve a non-worker owned brothel as an intermediary between a sex worker and a client, skimming money from the woman’s work to line the pockets of pimps. To dwell on that misses the point in this specific historical context, but it’s a problematic presumption just sitting there too.

What Ramseyer is talking about is Japan’s WWII practice of providing “comfort women” for its invading forces. His article operates from the premise that the women working as prostitutes to Japanese soldiers at the front throughout the war were willing contractors, as opposed to women kidnapped from conquered nations and pressed into sex slavery. The Korean Association of Harvard Law School responded with a statement digging into the history that Professor Ramseyer glossed over in order to reach his sweet contractual efficiency conclusion:

Professor Ramseyer’s deficient presentation of the historical record is demonstrated by his bibliography. Korean perspectives and scholarship, both rich sources of material on this topic, are almost completely absent in his work. Scholars studying history understand the possibility of post-hoc revisionism and bias. To counter such effects, they consult a wide-ranging set of materials from a variety of sources. Professor Ramseyer does not.

He also ignores expansive scholarship done by international organizations, such as the United Nations and Amnesty International, which has conclusively found that the “comfort women” were coerced, kidnapped, or forced by the Japanese government. After its independent inquiry, the Japanese government itself acknowledged as part of the Kono Statement that “the then Japanese military was, directly or indirectly, involved in the establishment and management of comfort stations.”

At this point, it’s worth noting that Ramseyer’s title is “Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law School.” Mitsubishi found itself on the unhappy end of a South Korean court ruling demanding that it provide compensation for the Koreans that it pressed into slavery during the war. It’s safe to say his chair’s benefactor has an interest in anyone willing to explain that they just efficiently negotiated wartime employment contracts based on balancing Mitsubishi’s desire to meet the nation’s high demand for munitions and the workers’ desire to not be executed by a colonial army.

Well, what is Ramseyer’s argument here anyway?

The comfort stations operated as the overseas military analogue to the private brothels in Japan and Korea. Whether in Japan or in Korea, brothels hired, and women looked for work. The work at stake in these transactions involved sexual services, but the economic logic to the arrangements that the two parties – brothel and prostitute – negotiated reflected the resources and alternative opportunities that both sides understood each other to hold….

OK.

Yes indeed, parents did sometimes sell their daughters and brothels did sometimes trap women or keep them virtually imprisoned.

Well, Mark, that seems like a big f**king problem for your article! That scholars estimate between 50,000–200,000 women were forced into the system mostly from occupied nations — which at the height of Japan’s expansion included everything from China through Southeast Asia to the Philippines, to New Guinea — undermines the explicit claim of the article that this was a phenomenon involving primarily Japanese and Korean women.

Ramseyer’s response to the “sure, sometimes women were trapped” argument is that “the economic logic… to the contractual arrangements reflects the fact that brothels could not – and did not – trap or imprison all or even most of the women.” The “relying way too much on elementary economics” logic is that because some women were paid in this manner, that must represent the bulk of the system because otherwise they’d just use the coerced women for free.

This is one of a number of economic conclusions he leaps to haphazardly. Could the notoriously racist culture of wartime Japan placed a premium on Japanese or Korean prostitutes over captured sex slaves that justified his evidence that some number of the former category were paid for their work despite the availability of exploited women? Of course. Is this addressed? Nope!

He’s confident that Japan just exported its domestic prostitution industry intact to its wartime rampage. And the local industry did not engage in any sort of coercion! Ramseyer knows this because pre-war data suggests that women had six-year indentured contracts but generally left the work early:

In practice, the prostitutes repaid their loans in about three years and quit. Surely, historians some- times insist, the brothels must have manipulated the charges for food and clothing to keep prostitutes mired in perpetual debt. At least on a large scale, however, they did not do this. Probably, the brothels – established institutions with a large capital investment – realized that cheating on their initial contract would raise their future recruitment costs. Not only did the brothels specifically promise a woman she could quit debt-free at the end of six years regardless of the revenue she generated, they generally kept their promise.

Not to introduce unsavory economics to this already deplorable hypothesis, but maybe it’s because, generally speaking, there’s higher demand for a 19-year-old prostitute than a 45-year-old prostitute? There’s a consistently replenishing supply of new sex workers — the brothel would have few incentives to keep someone longer than their term of servitude. They didn’t hold women longer for fear that it would “raise their future recruitment costs”? What?

Ugh, now I’m doing the economics thing. See how pernicious this is? And I’m calling it pernicious as an economics major.

Still, the article is reasonably sound when detailing pre-war prostitution. There’s hand-waving over the misogyny involved in selling daughters and the idea that brothels honored contracts because they were just generous, honest brokers, but if the article ended here it wouldn’t be so bad as an account of how the 1920s Japanese prostitution industry contracted.

Friends, it does not end here.

At this point, Ramseyer begins his cherry-picked account of women from Japan or Korea who worked in military-approved “comfort stations” throughout the war. Some women in this position joined voluntarily and fared well financially and Ramseyer is quick to cite their accounts. That thousands more women — from those countries and beyond — have detailed accounts of their kidnappings and coercion does not concern Ramseyer.

And that’s the real problem here. Analytically, this article could even have been written acknowledging the widely documented systematic oppression while noting that, for a small number of documented workers, the work was voluntary and those women were paid a premium because the brothels cynically added willing workers to the coerced because they were in higher demand. But this article isn’t really about those rare voluntary workers, it’s about painting a synecdoche of Japan’s overseas prostitution industry — these women were willing and well-paid, so therefore pay no attention to the war crimes behind the curtain. In other words, it’s one thing to honor the fact that women can voluntarily become sex workers, and another to indulge the “happy hooker” trope to erase hundreds of thousands of coerced, kidnapped, and exploited sex slaves.

Law and economics started out as a delightful offshoot of legal positivism designed to prove that gutting environmental regulations was a good idea. “Well, actually, who needs safety inspections for aspirin? See that long string of variables in this journal article? It’s science.” These days, law and economics is as at home defending class actions against corporate abuses as it was in justifying the destruction of environmental regulations, but whatever side of the aisle a scholar is on, it’s all about pigeon-holing their subjective conclusion into a vaguely mathematical account of “efficiency.”

In this way, we may truly be witnessing the apotheosis of law and economics: a full-throated revisionist war crime denialism recounted as a contract negotiation case study. If you can use the tools of the discipline to tackle that, then there’s really no limit to how empty this signifier has become.

Perhaps marrying law to a discipline that famously quips of itself, “the way to open a can on a deserted island is to assume we have a can opener” isn’t providing the unassailable support the authors think it will.

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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.

It’s the end of a long winter and you know what that means: it’s time for the ABA TECHSHOW! This year, the conference is virtual out of necessity. It won’t be quite the same, but I can tell you this: thus far, it has exceeded my expectations, as I explain below.

But first, let’s back up a bit to last year’s conference. For many of us in the legal technology space, it was one of the last times we were able to get together before the pandemic struck. Social distancing became the norm very quickly thereafter. As a result, the TECHSHOW planning board made the decision to hold the conference virtually some time ago, and while I’ve been excited to see what it would offer, I wasn’t holding out much hope. After all, by all accounts, there were no plans to hold an avatar-based conference, and as regular readers of my column know, I’m all about that type of online conference.

It turns out that ABA TECHSHOW 2021 is definitely structured more like a “traditional” virtual conference. You can learn all about the ins and outs of this year’s show here.

As a result, when I logged on for the first time, I wasn’t particularly excited about its potential since, in my experience, this type of virtual conference tends to be very flat and somewhat boring. That being said, this year’s conference has surprised me. For starters, there’s just something about the ABA TECHSHOW that draws me to it each year, and somehow that comes through even in a virtual setting. I’m not sure if it’s the gathering of so many legaltech enthusiasts, the forward-thinking educational content, or the collection of so many cutting-edge legal technology products in one exhibit hall. Whatever it is, the aspects of the conference that make it unique managed to shine through despite the virtual setting.

For starters, the virtual format is probably the best one I’ve seen so far. It’s easy to navigate and the user interface is colorful and uncluttered. The sessions themselves are about as good as virtual CLEs can be, and the programming this year covers a vast array of legal technology topics, ranging from cybersecurity and collaboration to law practice management, marketing, and artificial intelligence.

Similarly, the Start Up Alley competition held at the beginning of the conference felt just as lively as ever, and the best part about it was that seat access wasn’t an issue this year! If you didn’t attend and are interested in finding out who won, Bob Ambrogi provides that answer in this post.

Next, let’s talk about networking. The networking aspect of the conference is muted compared to year’s past, but that’s to be expected when a conference is held online. Despite the  limitations inherent in networking virtually, one aspect of the platform’s networking functionality that was a pleasant surprise was the ability to hold video networking sessions, which is a decidedly more interesting way to interact than through chat messaging. That being said, I do wish there had been one or two atypical networking sessions scheduled with the sole goal being to provide conference attendees with a bit of fun: perhaps a wine tasting, cooking demonstration, or a trivia session.

Finally, there’s the virtual Exhibit Hall. If you’re in the market for a particular legal technology product, an online exhibit hall has its benefits. For starters, you don’t have to worry about sore feet — instead, you can just click on a link and check out the software. The virtual booths have videos and other information available along with “live” company representatives who are available to answer any questions you might have or even provide a demo of the product. In some ways, virtual exhibit halls can be a more streamlined way to research legal software.

Last, but not least, although I haven’t worn my “press hat” while attending an ABA TECHSHOW for many years now (since MyCase, the company I work for, exhibits at the conference), I did end up attending a virtual demo of a product after being asked to do so. During that meeting I learned all about ALN LegalNet’s newly released product ALN Cloud.

In addition to offering their customers the affordability, convenience, and security benefits that go hand-in-hand with most cloud-based software, their new cloud-based platform makes it easy for ALN LegalNet’s customers to easily access and view their workflows while simultaneously mitigating risk with real-time court rules and feature updates. Customers can also take advantage of the new mobile apps which provide “enhanced functionality for docketing professionals on the go by integrating calendars, court rules and case monitoring alerts.”

Of course, there are lots of other great software programs available for your perusal on the virtual Exhibit Hall floor, so make sure to check them out. And if you’re attending the conference, take a minute to send a virtual “hello” my way. I’d still love to hear from you even though we can’t connect in-person this year — and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that next year we can raise a glass together in Chicago!

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Nicole Black is a Rochester, New York attorney and Director of Business and Community Relations at MyCase, web-based law practice management software. She’s been blogging since 2005, has written a weekly column for the Daily Record since 2007, is the author of Cloud Computing for Lawyers, co-authors Social Media for Lawyers: the Next Frontier, and co-authors Criminal Law in New York. She’s easily distracted by the potential of bright and shiny tech gadgets, along with good food and wine. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikiblack and she can be reached at niki.black@mycase.com.

Every year, Lawline puts together a list of our Top Women Faculty from the previous year in order to spotlight their accomplishments for Women’s History Month. 2020 was a tough year for instructors, who needed to adapt rapidly to filming over Zoom (along with everything else), and the attorneys on this list rose to the challenge spectacularly. Our top women faculty are at the top of the game in their practices – which range from employment law to civil rights, and everything in between – and also masters of pedagogy, making an impact on attorneys across the country. They are on the front lines of developments in cybersecurity, constitutional law, diversity and inclusion, and more, providing practical, actionable advice that attorneys can implement immediately to improve their practice. The women on this list taught some of the most-watched, highest rated programs Lawline produced in 2020 – and we are incredibly proud that we provided the platform for them to shine.

Without further ado, it is our pleasure to introduce our Top Women Faculty of 2020:

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Amanda M. Fisher back to our pages. Click here if you’d like to donate to MothersEsquire.

We were exhausted before the pandemic isolated us — before we were hiding in home offices, bedrooms, bathrooms, or closets for a few minutes of quiet — before we were juggling caretaking on top of working and fear, without being able to compartmentalize. Now, nearly a year in, a collective exhaustion has settled over everyone. Women have suffered more than men during this pandemic, but women of color have borne the brunt of the pandemic’s collateral effects. We are more than tired, more than betrayed — we are having an identity crisis.

Every individual’s identity consists of various roles — little bits forming the whole of who we are. Identity Theory relies on a self-categorization process and centers on an individual’s various roles. Although these roles are often self-selected, they also reflect societal expectations. The result is that our identity is partly how we view ourselves and partly how we think society views us based on outward expectations.

Think about how you would respond to the question, “Who are you?” I would respond that I am a mother, a lawyer, a professor, a spouse, a student — the list could go on for quite some time. My response would be curated based on who was asking the question. What does this person need to know about me, and in what order should I list my roles based on my goals for this conversation? This ordering of roles is related to identity salience.

At its most basic form, identity salience refers to how important one role or identity is to an individual within a specific context. As context changes, salience changes. For example, when teaching law students, my role as professor is most salient, with my role as lawyer a close second. Spending time with my son, my role as mother is most salient. I think of this as my own personal deck of cards that make up my identity. Each card has one role. I can choose which card to play based on the situation I am in. When my context changes (e.g., work versus home), I can change cards as needed.

Role shuffling is not necessarily difficult when external forces change our contexts. The office, the classroom, at home — these are places where society largely dictates who we are within those bounds and which role will be most salient.

But what happens when our contexts converge? When every role happens in the same place because we are working from home, our kids are learning from home, and we do not have the ability to create contextual space between our roles?

For many women, the pandemic consolidated everything at once. The kids are home (Mom), the work emails are flooding in (Lawyer), the students are panicking about midterms (Professor), and the spouses are asking about what groceries we need (Spouse). This means we are no longer able to shuffle through our identity deck of cards to remove and replace roles as needed. Instead, we are carrying the entire deck of cards, face up, all of the time, and we barely know who we are anymore. We are in survival mode, and we have been for nearly a year.

So, what now?

We need to find ways to create contextual space between our roles. We need to be able to focus, separately, on our obligations if we have any hope of preserving our sense of self as the pandemic wears on. We cannot continue to carry our roles and identities stacked on top of one another. The deck is too heavy. We need space to shuffle them, to set them down from time to time, and we need structures that allow us to do that. We need change, and we need it immediately.

1. Personal Support Systems: Not everyone has the privilege of a personal support system (spouse, family, friends), but for those who do, we need to call on them. When we do call on them, we need those systems to respond, to come to our aid. It is hard enough to ask, so let’s all be supportive and encouraging in ways that seem extraordinary. Send a meal over to a neighbor or friend who is juggling more than usual. Offer to help with childcare if you can safely do so with the people who are in your pandemic bubble. Encourage one another to prioritize rest.
2. Employers: If employers are aware of this identity crisis, they can help employees create space between roles. Flexibility, for example, might be possible in this virtual environment even if it was not an option before the world shifted. Employers might consider allowing varied work hours rather than traditional schedules. Another consideration might be allowing employees to choose a part-time package, temporarily or permanently, based on the employees’ needs. Finally, employees need to know that employers do not expect them to work around the clock and that sustaining boundaries is encouraged. After all, working mothers make better employees.

The pandemic has set women’s progress in the workforce back by decades. It will take significant effort and prioritization, by individuals and institutions, to get back to where we were in 2019. Working mothers are in crisis, and if we crumble, society’s scaffolding will fall.

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Amanda M. Fisher is an Associate Attorney at Richardson | Ober | DeNichilo LLP and a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of California, Irvine in Criminology, Law & Society. She is researching gendered stigma in the legal profession in the southern United States. If you are a Florida attorney, you can participate in Amanda’s research here. Amanda is also a Visiting Assistant Professor at WMU-Cooley Law School in Tampa, Florida. You can follow her on Twitter or reach her via email at fishera@cooley.edu.

The growing legalization of cannabis has attracted many celebrities to this flourishing and lucrative market. Yet, two of these personalities have shown their commitment to the cannabis industry extends beyond money. Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter and Dwayne Carter Jr., better known as “Lil Wayne,” recently launched social justice programs that are setting the stage for responsible entrepreneurship.

Jay-Z’s Bold Campaign Against National Drug Policy

In 2019, Jay-Z entered the world of cannabis by partnering with California cannabis company Caliva to develop MONOGRAM, a premium-priced luxury marijuana line that features $40 to $70 hand-rolled joints.

But Jay-Z is more than a billionaire entrepreneur who develops brands and business strategy, he also leads MONOGRAM’s social justice program, which recently launched a bold nationwide awareness campaign that challenges cannabis laws and denounces their disproportionate and devastating impact on communities of color.

The campaign consists, in part, of billboards and digital series featuring provoking factual headlines set against the backdrop of the portraits of eight individuals who have been negatively affected by the War on Drugs/Marijuana. The campaign also aims to show how archaic these regulations are by comparing them to immoral and depraved actions, such as cannibalism, which remain legal in certain states. Examples of MONOGRAM’s bold campaign messages include:

• “Weed is a federal crime. Even in the states where sex with farm animals isn’t.”
• “The legal term for bribing a politician is often called lobbying. The legal term for possession of weed is often called felony.”
• “You can marry your first cousin in more states than you can buy recreational weed.”
• “The war on drugs worked. If systemic racism was the goal.”

Beyond high-impact static visuals, MONOGRAM also announced it would introduce visual testimonials from its eight featured individuals, sharing their personal journey through excessive punishment for cannabis offenses and discussing ways in which these unfair practices have irreversibly damaged their lives.

Through this social justice campaign, MONOGRAM aims to magnify the hypocrisy of existing cannabis legislation, which for nearly 45 years have unduly targeted and punished communities of colors. Since the 1970s, the enforcement of marijuana possession laws has been carried out with staggering racial bias. According to a 2020 report published by the ACLU, nearly half of all drug arrests made in 2010 were for marijuana possession. Although marijuana use was roughly the same among Blacks and whites, Blacks were 3.64 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.

In addition to bringing the relationship between marijuana prohibition and racial injustice into national spotlight, MONOGRAM is also working on reversing course in this disastrous and racist War on Drugs/Marijuana. The company has funded a $10 million social equity ventures program that will provide Black and other minority entrepreneurs equal opportunity for participation in the legal cannabis industry.

Lil Wayne ‘Shares the Love’ and Money with Cannabis Reform Nonprofit

Like Jay-Z, Lil Wayne launched his cannabis company, GKUA Ultra Premium, in 2019, which offers a line of high-potency marijuana products but also contributes to social justice reforms.

In February, GKUA partnered with Last Prisoner Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to cannabis criminal justice reforms, to bring about awareness to the thousands of people incarcerated for nonviolent cannabis offenses through the “Share the Love” social campaign.

To support Last Prison Project’s initiatives, GKUA pledged to donate $1 to the organization for every Instagram user who shared a photo of themselves or of loved ones enjoying cannabis on the social media platform between February 12 and February 14.

Whether one approves of MONOGRAM and GKUA’s bold and thought-provoking campaigns, no one can deny that these companies are setting the stage for responsible entrepreneurship. They are bravely taking the lead in correcting and redressing the wrongs against Black and other minority groups by investing resources in these marginalized communities and providing them with an opportunity to reclaim their place in an industry built on their backs. Now one can only hope that these remarkable initiatives will inspire other cannabis entrepreneurs (including white entrepreneurs) to join and participate in these social justice and cannabis reform efforts.

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Nathalie practices out of Harris Bricken’s Portland office and focuses on the regulatory framework of hemp-derived CBD (“hemp CBD”) products. She is an authority on FDA enforcement, Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act and other laws and regulations surrounding hemp and hemp CBD products. She also advises domestic and international clients on the sale, distribution, marketing, labeling, importation and exportation of these products. Nathalie frequently speaks on these issues and has made national media appearances, including on NPR’s Marketplace. For two consecutive years, Nathalie has been selected as a “Rising Star” by Super Lawyers Magazine, an honor bestowed on only 2.5% of eligible Oregon attorneys.  Nathalie is also a regular contributor to her firm’s Canna Law Blog.

The nationally-recognized practice group of our client is looking to add a mid-level corporate associate to their Boston office.

The ideal candidate will have 3-6 years of sophisticated corporate/transactional experience from a top law firm.

Additional corporate/regulatory experience within the cannabis industry is highly preferred. Contact us at jobs@kinneyrecruiting.com to be considered or apply here!

Didn’t find what you were looking for? See more job postings from Kinney Recruiting here.

Decades, it seems, can pass between readings of the standard boilerplate inserted into every debt agreement. After all, this language has been honed by the finest transactional lawyers in the world; once they’re perfect, why change them, or even look at them when copying and pasting from the last one to the next one? It’s perfect, airtight, until it is not, because, as it turns out, some hedge fund managers are cleverer than decades’ worth of diligent contract attorneys, and some clients are far, far stupider than those same attorneys could have possibly imagined.