Category Added in a WPeMatico Campaign
Oh, And There Are Anecdotes About How Sucky The Online Bar Was Too: Like puking in the trash.
Biglaw Staff News: Voluntary buyouts and COVID bonuses.
Austerity Measures Are Done: At Dorsey.
What Is The President Saying Now? He isn’t a reliable narrator, but this is getting to be ridiculous.
(image via Getty)
Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day!
According to Vault’s 2021 practice area ranking, which Biglaw firm is #1 in private equity?
Hint: This behemoth of a firm was founded in Chicago in 1909.
See the answer on the next page.
Olga V. Mack is the CEO of Parley Pro, a next-generation contract management company that has pioneered online negotiation technology. Olga embraces legal innovation and had dedicated her career to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive than before by embracing technology. Olga is also an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor, and entrepreneur. She founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to participate on corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. She authored Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board Seat and Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security. You can follow Olga on Twitter @olgavmack.
Five weeks in, Lawyer Forward’s 90-Day Known Expert series is not slowing down. This week’s episodes include “Is Your Problem Juicy Enough?”, “Identifying the Villain,” and “Declare the Big Idea.”
Make sure you take advantage of the show’s Q&A feature. You can ask Mike questions about the latest episode and he’ll answer at the end of the next episode. Just submit your question in the form at the bottom of this post.
“Last night felt like Christmas Eve,” according to one voter who showed up just as his polling place first opened.
“It’s crazy,” is how a political scientist put it.
Early-voting data reported this week — and quotes like the ones above from The Washington Post and Associated Press — reveal that the combination of voter enthusiasm and the coronavirus pandemic is adding some unprecedented metrics to the 2020 election.
Over 17 million Americans have already voted in the 2020 race, representing “a record-setting avalanche” that is “leading election experts to predict that a record 150 million votes may be cast,” the Associated Press reported on Friday:
The total represents 12% of all the votes cast in the 2016 presidential election, even as eight states are not yet reporting their totals and voters still have more than two weeks to cast ballots. ”
In a feature on Wednesday detailing its early-voting data, The Wall Street Journal noted that more than 2 million voters had cast ballots at polling places and 12.5 million early votes were mail ballots. The publication added that rules surrounding mail voting are already the subject of numerous legal battles, including one before the U.S. Supreme Court.
As for November:
Election officials already talk about ‘Election Week’ rather than ‘Election Day’ and urge voters to see a lengthy count in close contests as normal.”
In its report on Wednesday, however, The Washington Post did note the potential for some clarity on election night — just 18 days away:
If the presidential race boils down to Pennsylvania … there is little chance a result will be available on Nov. 3, since tabulation of mail ballots may not begin until that morning, and ballots may arrive as late as Nov. 6. Election officers in Philadelphia were still counting mail ballots two weeks after the state’s June primary.
Yet some potentially pivotal results are expected shortly after polls close, according to a Post analysis of early vote totals and state rules governing mail balloting. Thanks to surges in early and absentee voting, looser rules for processing and counting mail ballots, and active preparation by election officials, voters in critical states such as Florida and North Carolina can expect to see advanced results on election night, if everything goes to plan.”
Avalanche of Early Votes Transforming 2020 Election [The Associated Press]
Across the Country, Democratic Enthusiasm Is Propelling an Enormous Wave of Early Voting [The Washington Post]
Mail Balloting Is Fueling Historic Early Voting in the 2020 Election [The Wall Street Journal]
Jeremy Barker is the director of content marketing for Breaking Media. Please feel free to email him with questions or comments and to connect on LinkedIn.
(Image via Shutterstock)
Many older lawyers lament how our profession has turned into a business. Or at least most do — some of my more experienced colleagues think the profession was too limited and not enough of a business in the past. The cliche in business is that the customer is always right. If the customer says the chicken is overdone, he’s right and you, chef, are wrong. If the customer says the television does not work the way it should, she is right, and you, the electronic salesperson, are wrong.
It’s not like that with us lawyers. We’re supposed to be experts. Customers — clients — come to us all the time and can be woefully wrong. Indeed, sometimes the reason a client hires a firm like ours is because they got into some dispute or some mess and, yes, when looking back, we can agree they did something wrong. Telling a client that they were right when, in fact, they did something wrong, can be exactly the wrong thing to do. We’re not here to stroke our clients’ egos or make them feel good about themselves (at least, trial lawyers like my collegues and I are not). We’re here to counsel and fight for them and hopefully do justice. And sometimes that means identifying exactly how the client was wrong so that we can try to make things right.
However, while we are not salespeople, nor present simply to flatter a client’s ego, that does not mean that we are not in a service industry. While some litigators do forget this, we are, in fact, service professionals. Our cases can be cool and fun and all that. But there are clients behind every single cool case. And we must be supremely loyal to those clients. Loyalty does not mean telling the client she is right, just like good parenting does not mean telling our children they can get whatever they want (as much as clients paying us money want to be told that they are right, and goodness knows teenagers are certain in only the way the inexperienced can be that they are completely right about everything). Loyalty to a client, akin to good parenting, means setting aside the self to discern what we truly believe to be in the client’s best interests, counseling the client to see what is in her best interests, and then seeking those goals.
The lawyer-parent analogy of course breaks down here, in that while parents may be obligated to do exactly what their children state they do not want, we as lawyers cannot so do. We need client consent for our actions. But my view is that we need to obtain consent for what we believe to be in the client’s best interest. It may be hard, and maybe later on we even realize we are wrong. But I find we almost always get it right, and then loyalty means fighting like hell for the client.
We are different than salespeople in that it may well be our job to tell the client she is wrong. Unlike salespeople, we are not supposed to be loyal to the pitch, but to the client. Aside from maintaining our integrity, loyalty to the client is the supreme virtue of a trial lawyer.
John Balestriere is an entrepreneurial trial lawyer who founded his firm after working as a prosecutor and litigator at a small firm. He is a partner at trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at john.g.balestriere@balestrierefariello.com.
I knew I had to take the exam. Otherwise I’d have to wait until next July because I have to take the Georgia bar in February. Deferring was not an option. I set up a trash can next to me and I would just puke in between questions. It was one of the toughest things I’ve gone through in my life.
— Johnny Carver, a recent graduate of the University of Miami School of Law, commenting on his experience taking the remote Florida bar exam. The day before the test, Carver was so sick that he had to go to the emergency room, where he tested negative for COVID-19 and the flu. This test experience is almost as bad as that of the fellow who had to sit in his own urine while taking the exam or the woman who had to take the exam while she was in labor.
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.
“We sent in the U.S. Marshals, it took fifteen minutes, it was over. Fifteen minutes it was over. We got him. They knew who he was. They didn’t want to arrest him and in fifteen minutes that ended.”
That was President Trump at a rally in North Carolina yesterday describing the shooting of suspect Michael Reinoehl.
Lawyers on Twitter recoiled in horror at Trump’s apparent admission of an extrajudicial execution of the Antifa supporter sought in the shooting of far-right Patriot Prayer activist Aaron Danielson during protest in Portland, Oregon on August 29.
Although, as The Intercept points out, it’s entirely possible that the “they” who “knew who he was” and “didn’t want to arrest him” are local law enforcement officials in Portland who had taken too long with the legal niceties of compiling an indictment based on actual evidence for the president’s tastes.
On the other hand, Trump did tell Fox’s Jeanine Pirro on September 12 that Reinoehl was shot as “retribution,” so he has been treating this as an execution for a month now.
Two and a half days went by, and I put out, ‘When are you going to go get him?’ And the US marshals went in to get in, and in a short period of time, they ended in a gunfight. This guy was a violent criminal, and the US marshals killed him. And I’ll tell you something — that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this.
Unfortunately, the current president is not a reliable narrator. He could very well be trying to take credit for a gangland-style shooting, but that doesn’t mean it actually happened. Frankly speaking — and how else can we speak after four years of this nonsense — the president talks a lot of shit.
In fact, Reinoehl was shot by local officials deputized by the U.S. Marshal Service. There have been conflicting accounts of the killing, but multiple witnesses told The New York Times that the agents made no real attempt to arrest the suspect, firing off 37 rounds from four guns without announcing themselves as police officers, barely missing bystanders and killing Reinoehl within seconds.
While there were initial reports that Reinoehl threatened officers, it later emerged that his gun was in his pocket when he was shot. Officers claimed he was reaching for it, but they failed to record the encounter on their body cameras, so we’ll probably never know.
Naturally Attorney General Barr, who has consistently maintained that the presence of a weapon on the scene justifies any level of police violence, has blessed this as a clean shooting.
And maybe it is. But if so, it didn’t go down like the president tells it. Because either the police went there for “retribution,” or they went to make a legitimate arrest of a suspect. And the president can maniacally tweet “LAW AND ORDER” ten times a week, but extrajudicial death squad executions amount to anything but.
Trump Boasts About Federal Task Force Killing Antifascist Wanted for Murder in Portland [Intercept]
‘Straight to Gunshots’: How a U.S. Task Force Killed an Antifa Activist [NYT]
Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
The official image of 2020 bar examiners.
The Florida Bar Exam went this week and was, by most accounts, more successful than the debacle the week before. It’s not really surprising that technology would improve with every run — it’s quite literally why we all asked for a series of stress tests and got laughed at — but it’s nice to see that this one worked a little better. There remains no excuse to run a test that puts anyone in a bind, but we’ll extend the modicum of credit that’s due here.
Because the tests the week before were truly disastrous and no amount of spin can cover that up.
Sam Skolnik over at Bloomberg Law has the numbers from a survey conducted by New York State lawmakers Brad Hoylman and Jo Anne Simon.
More than 40% of law school graduates who took the recent online bar exam in New York said they encountered tech problems during the test, according to a new survey from a pair of state lawmakers who want to let lawyers in training ditch the exam.
The test takers said the tech trouble stemmed from internet issues, test software problems or both. Three in four of the nearly 500 people surveyed also found the experience to be “negative,” including 37% who called it”extremely negative.”
But remember, you’ve got to translate a 75 percent disapproval rating into bar examiner speak. For Judith Gundersen of the NCBE that’s, “Overall, the remote exam was a success.”
This is why lawmakers like Simon and Hoylman are so important. Even after this debacle has concluded — for now — they’re continuing to fight the fight to get this class an emergency diploma privilege program to eliminate the rank unfairness we’ve put these applicants through. If you’re in NY, pressure your representatives to join the diploma privilege legislation they’re proposing. If you’re in other states, get your lawmakers to propose comparable legislation. This is thoroughly broken and the bar examiners are shrugging it off as “overall … a success.”
N.Y. Bar Exam Takers Report ‘Negative’ Online Experience [Bloomberg Law]
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.
Photo by Scott Olson/Getty
I guess Senator Ted Cruz was getting jealous of Senator Josh Hawley for monopolizing the “I’m a constitutional lawyer who doesn’t understand the 1st Amendment when it comes to internet content moderation” space, and has jumped in as well. He has announced that he’s going to issue a subpoena to get Jack Dorsey to come justify what he falsely claims is “election interference.”
Let’s be clear here. Like Senator Hawley yesterday, Senator Cruz is full of shit. And, like Hawley, Cruz is a constitutional lawyer who knows this is bullshit. Like Hawley, Cruz has now sent silly, laughable letters to Twitter and Facebook.
And, of course, it really was not that long ago when I remember this very same Ted Cruz screaming about the evils of the “government takeover of the internet.” To him, the idea of net neutrality was “Obamacare for the internet” and he decried:
Washington politicians want the money, and they want more and more control over our speech.
That… describes Ted Cruz trying to punish a company for its editorial decisions. That same article has some other choice quotes that can now be thrown back at him:
[W]e must promote growth in the technological sector, a consistent bright spot for the U.S. economy. But we won’t realize more of that dynamic growth unless we keep the Internet free from the kind of unnecessary regulation that is strangling our health-care, energy and banking industries.
And yet, here he is threatening regulations to strangle growth of the technology sector.
In 2012, those who care about Internet freedom were shocked as bills such as the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP acts, which would regulate speech on the Internet under the guise of protecting property rights, started gaining popularity in Washington. Thankfully, online activists were quick to mobilize to protect their free-speech rights. But we must remain vigilant. Intellectual property must be defended, but any threat to quell speech on the Internet must be treated seriously and subsequently defeated.
The same activists who were “shocked” by SOPA and PIPA are the ones pointing out that Ted Cruz’s attacks on Section 230 are an even bigger threat to quell speech on the internet and need to be treated seriously and defeated. It’s just that Ted Cruz is the one now championing these efforts at censorship.
And for anyone trying to defend Ted Cruz right now, here’s a basic question: how would you respond if a Democratic Senator stood up and said he or she was going to subpoena the CEOs of Fox News or Breitbart to discuss their “bias” in covering the election? People would be throwing an absolute and total shitfit about how unconstitutional that is. And yet, here we have a Republican Senator threatening a company for its own editorial decisions. Ted Cruz’s grandstanding on this issue is, itself, a violation of the 1st Amendment. It is an attempt to punish a private company for its own 1st Amendment protected editorial discretion. And no one should let a grandstanding Cruz get away with this nonsense.
More Law-Related Stories From Techdirt:
We Interrupt This Hellscape With A Bit Of Good News On The Copyright Front
Take-Two Opposes Trademark For An Entertainment Company Running An Axe-Throwing Facility
Blatant Hypocrite Ajit Pai Decides To Move Forward With Bogus, Unconstitutional Rulemaking On Section 230