Category: News Feeds

Every so often, a new social media platform debuts and changes the landscape. Years ago, it was Instagram. For the past couple of years, it’s been TikTok. Now, it’s Clubhouse.

The new audio app is taking the social media marketing industry by storm, but why is it proving to be so popular? Is it even wise to add another social platform to your marketing strategy?

In this post, I’ll be exploring the rise of Clubhouse and determining whether the popularity of this new platform is merely a matter of hype or if it has the potential to stick around.

What Is Clubhouse?

Clubhouse is an audio-based social media platform where users communicate using voice chat. The platform functions using rooms that can accommodate thousands of people. People all around the world tune in to listen to the room hosts speaking live, discussing topics, and engaging with one another. Clubhouse provides a new and unique way to connect via social accounts.

The newest social on the block isn’t doing too badly, acquiring a $4 billion valuation at the end of its Series C round of financing in April 2021. These figures suggest this audio platform is a force to be reckoned with. So, do these high numbers suggest you should all be jumping on the Clubhouse bandwagon in the pursuit of social media success?

How Do You Choose Your Platform, Optimize Your Time, And Connect With An Audience?

How does adding another social platform to your marketing strategy sound? Exciting? Tiresome? Pointless? Maybe a mixture of all three? The fact of the matter is, you can’t be everywhere all at once. With a big enough social team, you might be able to, but the majority of us need to decide what platform(s) works for us and focus on growing those.

Instead of spreading yourself too thin, which results in below-average content and communication on all platforms, narrowing your focus lets you hone in and provide your best work.

Still, Clubhouse does show a lot of growth potential. For one, it’s the platform everyone is talking about, so it’s getting a lot of traction at the moment. Secondly, being relatively new means that it has less competition.

Clubhouse could be the platform for you, but are you willing to sacrifice the time you’re already dedicating to something else? Are you willing to risk spreading yourself too thin? That’s for you to decide.

Clubhouse: Hype Or Hope?

The figures show that there are many users, and the people keep coming. For now, Clubhouse is looking pretty hopeful.

Do you think the world is ready to leave behind a world of eye-grabbing, aesthetic visuals to just listen to voices? I’m not so sure.

I’d love to know, does Clubhouse have a place in your marketing strategy? How will you optimize this unique way of connecting with an audience?

Clearly, Clubhouse has a lot of potential but only time will tell if lawyers will embrace this medium.

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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.

There’s an oft-forgotten corner of this world where pretentiousness meets disposable income. This is the realm of the vanity license plate.

Either luckily or tragically, the legal industry is no stranger to the vanity plate and that’s why we run this occasional feature.

Today’s entry comes to us from the Peach State, where an eagle-eyed tipster caught this confusing entry.

This seems like a bad strategy because you’re just begging to get pulled over because you’ve already done half the work for the cops — there’s no denying that you have mens rea.

What’s the message here? Is this a defense attorney bragging about their field? Because it looks like somebody celebrating criminal intent, which isn’t usually what you’re after in a defense attorney. “AQUIT” or “1NNC3NT” or “RDOU8T” would seem like better options for promoting your commitment to the criminal defense tribe.

Is this a crim law professor honoring a favorite lecture? That would explain the Mazda, I suppose.

Perhaps most troubling of all is the numeral “3,” suggesting that some other Georgian already locked down the actual “MENSREA” plate. So many questions.

As always, thanks to our tipster network for sending pics like these in. Remember to send us any law-related license plates you may see by email.

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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.

What’s the best way to ensure that associates at your firm have a wonderful weekend? By announcing big-time — we’re talking huge — salary raises on Friday night. How exciting!

At litigation powerhouse Williams & Connolly, salaries are typically difficult to cover due to the firm’s black-box feel. While salaries are known to be slightly above market, associates at the firm usually remain relatively quiet as far as their compensation is concerned — that is, until now.

According to memo sent on Friday, the firm is now paying lockstep salaries across all class years, and those salaries are way, way above market. Check it out:

For the Class of 2021, that’s $17,500 more than the DPW scale, and for the Classes of 2013 and earlier, that’s $35,000 more than the DPW scale. That’s quite the payday for associates at the firm.

These new mega-salaries will go into effect on September 1. Congratulations!

(Flip to the next page to see the memo from Williams & Connolly.)

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.

Lawyering for the cannabis industry used to mean practicing criminal defense, but these days, the field is wide open. The industry is broad, offering so much opportunity and change that lawyers in nearly every area of practice have something to contribute.

To be the most valuable advisors in this fast-growing sector, lawyers serving the industry should stay on top of trends, advises Shabnam Malek, partner at Brand & Branch, LLP and a co-founder of the International Cannabis Bar Association, who chairs the Practising Law Institute’s (PLI) Cannabis Law: Business Fundamentals program.

Of course, lawyers must keep up with cannabis and hemp-related state (and federal) laws and regulatory schemes that affect all aspects of business. For instance, Malek says, “Transactional lawyers need to understand the rules, regulations, and licenses pertaining to ownership structures, how and whether a license can be ‘sold’ or transferred, and what the emerging trends are on raising funds to support growing businesses.”

In addition, lawyers working in advertising and intellectual property must understand how advertising laws and regulations differ state by state and that packaging and labeling laws are also unique to each state. Malek explains: “These differences can affect brand development and use of brand elements, especially when advising clients operating in more than one state. And let’s not forget that the federal agencies are still watching this industry – rules pertaining to false advertising and health claims can still be enforced if your clients aren’t in compliance.”

No matter their practice area, all lawyers must keep an eye on the shifting rules of professional conduct as states may make changes at any time to how, when, and whether a lawyer can represent a cannabis company, take equity in a client company, or serve as in house counsel. “This is merely the tip of the iceberg,” Malek says.

“The skyrocketing interest in and demand for cannabis law-related programming is indisputable,” says Laxmi Rees, Director and Program Attorney, California Center at Practising Law Institute. “For this reason, in addition to our full-day program covering regulatory, financing, intellectual property, litigation, substance abuse and ethics issues related to cannabis law, PLI also offers further related program content, as well as a comprehensive treatise that is updated regularly. All of this would have been unthinkable even a few years ago.”

While it’s hard to predict what lies ahead, this practice area is only moving forward. Additional states are coming online with adult use programs, while medical marijuana programs continue to exist – and, in some states, these are the first step in the legalization movement. And with a new Administration, the industry is keeping an eye out for impending change in federal law and policy.

Malek concludes: “The most important part of all of this is ensuring that legalization models match the needs of this emerging industry, that past wrongs are righted, and that regulations are reasonable and promote consumer safety, patient safety, and social justice goals. Who better than the lawyers of today to help usher in the new world of cannabis legalization tomorrow?”

To learn more, register for PLI’s on-demand program Cannabis Law: Business Fundamentals. The 2021 edition of the PLI Press treatise Legal Guide to the Business of Marijuana: Cannabis, Hemp and CBD Regulation is newly updated with the latest on regulation of CBD products, the Final Rule for the Establishment of a Domestic Hemp Production Program, and the laws of the latest states to adopt some form of cannabis legalization.

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Practising Law Institute is a nonprofit learning organization dedicated to keeping attorneys and other professionals at the forefront of knowledge and expertise. PLI is chartered by the Regents of the University of the State of New York and was founded in 1933 by Harold P. Seligson. The organization provides the highest quality, accredited, continuing legal and professional education programs in a variety of formats which are delivered by more than 4,000 volunteer faculty including prominent lawyers, judges, investment bankers, accountants, corporate counsel, and U.S. and international government regulators. PLI publishes a comprehensive library of Treatises, Course Handbooks, Answer Books and Journals also available through the PLI PLUS online platform. The essence of PLI’s mission is its commitment to the pro bono community. View PLI’s upcoming live webcasts here.

When Xavier Helgesen got the email on Feb. 3, 2020, that UpCounsel was shutting down, he was shocked. A client of the lawyer marketplace for his own businesses, he believed it had saved him thousands in legal fees. So he and business partner Sieva Kozinsky, who together had just founded a small private equity firm, Enduring Ventures, decided to act. To keep UpCounsel from closing down, they bought it.

Sixteen months later, the business is not only alive and well, but reporting double-digit revenue growth, consistent profitability, and accelerating demand for legal services through its lawyer marketplace. And now, it is launching a crowdfunding campaign with the mission of further accelerating its growth and of “bringing legal to the people.”

UpCounsel privately launched its crowdfunding campaign on WeFunder earlier this month (which you can access here) and will open it to the public on Wednesday, July 28. The company seeks to raise from $50,000 to $5 million, which is the upper limit allowed for such a campaign by federal securities law.

“We’re Bringing Legal to the People,” says the campaign’s WeFunder page. “The UpCounsel solution is simple: an online marketplace connecting businesses with a network of experienced independent attorneys — for 1/3rd the price. We remove the headaches and hassles for everyone, bringing you Legal You Can Love.”

“It basically gives us a chance to let our stakeholders buy into our success,” KJ Erickson, UpCounsel’s chief executive officer, told me. “And the more people we have that are shareholders in our mission and in our vision, the faster that we can grow it.”

It also offers a way to raise capital that circumvents many of the downsides of traditional venture capital, she said.

Erickson and Chief Revenue Officer Paul Drobot recently sat down with me in an exclusive interview to tell the story of the company’s phoenix-like rise from the ashes of near shutdown to now launching this campaign.

I tell the story in greater detail in a post at my LawSites blog, and we also recorded an interview for my LawNext podcast that posts today.

Erickson and Drobot lead a new management team that Enduring Ventures put in place after it acquired UpCounsel. Erickson is an experienced entrepreneur who was named by “Rolling Stone” in 2017 as one of 25 people shaping the future — a list that included the likes of Elon Musk and Kamala Harris. Drobot previously led sales at legal tech companies Atrium and Logikcull.

“We needed to take a business that was essentially closed, quickly formulate a plan, and then take that plan to market,” Drobot told me. “And the complexities of that plan is it needed to address all of the challenges in the previous model and also allow us to help this business to truly realize its potential.”

Before the acquisition, UpCounsel’s revenue came from charging clients a 30% commission on the fees they paid lawyers hired through the site. The problem with that was that revenue fluctuated unpredictably based on variations in site traffic and lawyer engagements.

Seeking more-predictable revenue flow, the new management team flipped some of that cost to the attorneys, instituting a monthly subscription fee for attorneys to be part of the service and to be able to bid on jobs posted on the site — something UpCounsel calls “legal-as-a-service” and which more closely aligned UpCounsel with a typical SaaS model.

At the same time, it significantly reduced the commission it charged clients to 8%, thereby reducing the cost to clients of legal services they purchase through the site.

Revamping its business model bore fruit, UpCounsel said, enabling the company to create a recurring stream of predictable revenue. “Our new business model has transformed UpCounsel’s future with a hyperfocus on recurring revenue,” UpCounsel says on its crowdfunding site.

Further, Erickson said that the company has doubled its revenue, seen its traffic explode, and has more jobs being posted than it can fill. UpCounsel says it was profitable (based on EBITDA) in its first 12 months of operation after taking over the company and that it is operating at a revenue run rate of $2.6 million.

Now, UpCounsel is planning to launch several new products — and eventually to launch its own branded law firm.

One such product, slated to launch within the next two months, is Direct Connect, by which attorneys will pay to allow clients to contact and book them directly.

As Drobot described it, Direct Connect sounds like an easy button, which attorneys can place on their profile page, social media sites, articles they publish, and elsewhere. Potential clients will be able to click to connect to the attorney’s UpCounsel portal and describe their legal need, and the attorney can then reach out directly to the client to connect.

Further down the road, UpCounsel says that it plans to launch its own branded law firm, citing new lawyer regulations that will allow it to do this.

“By standing up our own branded law firm, we will be able to dramatically increase the rate of fulfillment of current inbound demand at very high margins without impacting current subscribers, leading to a 4-6x jump in revenues,” the crowdfunding page says.

While Erickson and Drobot declined, for competitive reasons, to provide specific details, Drobot said that they have done a lot of investigating and have developed several potential options for how to create “the digital law firm of the future.”

“That can take a lot of different forms, but at the end of the day, the North Star for us is how do we best serve those millions of entrepreneurs and individuals and small business owners that want fast, affordable, transparent access to great legal,” Drobot said.

With UpCounsel’s crowdfunding campaign now underway, Erickson said she is committed to two core missions for the company.

One is to bring legal to the people. “We believe it shouldn’t be only the wealthy who can afford to protect themselves in a contract dispute or start a business that depends on a patent,” she said.

The other is to make legal “something you can love.” Erickson said she has heard testimonial after testimonial from clients about how much they loved the experience of hiring an attorney through UpCounsel and how it enabled them to get their businesses off the ground when they would not otherwise have been able to afford legal help.

“We basically cut all the overhead and the fat out of the old, bloated big law firm model and we make it easy and fast and reliable to hire partner-level attorneys at literally a third the cost of going through big law.”

(To read a more detailed report on UpCounsel’s development over the past 16 months and its crowdfunding campaign, visit LawSites blog.)

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Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

Which cases must you report on?

When you talk to a muckety-muck, what cases will muckety be most interested in hearing updates on?

The first category is obvious: Big-ticket cases.

If the plaintiffs are suing us for a billion or two, then the folks in the C-suite care. Report on those cases regularly.

But things other than money matter.

If the case poses possible risk to the corporation’s reputation, then the folks in the C-suite care. Report on those cases regularly.

If the case involves a government regulator, the folks in the C-suite probably care. Add those cases to the list.

But that’s all obvious.

What other categories of cases does muckety care about?

Cases in which muckety is personally involved.

Perhaps the CEO’s deposition was for some reason taken in a relatively small-stakes case. The stakes are no longer material, but the CEO will likely remain interested in hearing about developments as they occur.

Suppose somebody in the C-suite was named personally as a defendant in a case, was blocked at an international border because of some false report to the police, or otherwise has a personal interest in the case. Instantly, those cases move up the ladder. Report regularly (to the involved person) even though the stakes are relatively low.

What’s the next category of cases about which muckety cares? Cases in which muckety has a personal relationship with counsel.

Suppose you’re looking for counsel in Panama. You don’t have regular counsel there. The CFO was college roommates with a very impressive person who’s now a lawyer in Panama. You check out the recommendation, and you end up hiring the recommended lawyer.

The stakes were never necessarily material. There’s no personal involvement in the case. But the case becomes a matter of interest because the CFO has a personal relationship with counsel. The C-suite generally won’t care about this case; the CEO, though curious about the case in which she was personally involved, doesn’t care about this other case; but the CFO, who has a personal relationship with counsel, cares. Give regular reports about this case to the CFO.

None of this is difficult stuff; it’s all self-evident when you think about it.

But many in-house lawyers take years — or forever — to start thinking about these things.

Think about whether your audience will care about the case.  Vary your reporting depending on the level of personal interest.

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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.

Another day, another firm that’s moving to the $205,000 starting salary scale that was set by new market compensation leader Davis Polk last month. Before associates get too excited, we must caution you that like several other firms that have made this move, this is not a match of the full salary scale. Let’s get into the details.

Schiff Hardin — a firm that brought in $173,956,000 gross revenue in 2020, placing it at No. 163 in the most recent Am Law 100 ranking — made its salary announcement this past Friday. As of September 1, the firm will be moving to a $205K scale for the classes of 2020 and 2021 only. For third-years and up, Schiff Hardin will switch to a lockstep system “based on achieving certain performance thresholds.” The firm is also working on changes to income partner and counsel compensation. Associates seemed pleased about the news, but called the memo “cryptic,” saying, “It may be a two-year lockstep and then black box? No idea.”

Joseph J. Krasovec, Schiff Hardin’s managing partner, said the firm was changing its compensation scheme for the following reasons: “We recognize the value our many talented associates bring to our clients and the firm and we are committed to recruiting the best and brightest lawyers to Schiff Hardin.”

Come September, please help us open this black box. Until then, congratulations.

(Flip to the next page to see the memo from Schiff Hardin.)

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.

With the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s  eviction moratorium set to expire in days, millions of households are still behind on rent.

As of the first week of July, about 1.4 million people out of 7 million surveyed said it was very likely that they would face eviction in the next two months, according to the CDC’s latest Household Pulse survey. Another 7.4 million people of 51 million said they were currently behind on rent.

“In the coming days and weeks, it’s a little hard to know exactly what to expect. There’s been lots of language at times about an eviction wave or bubble or cliff, and I’m not exactly sure what we’ll see,” said Dan Threet, a research analyst with the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), in a phone interview. “Even when low income renters are hard pressed by income loss, they’ve made lots of sacrifices to stay housed. Whether immediate or protracted, there’s cause for great concern for low-income renters.”

While emergency federal relief funding has been allocated to support people who are behind on rent and utilities, getting it into people’s hands has been a slow process. Of the $46 billion Congress appropriated for emergency rental aid, only about $3 billion has actually been doled out by states, according to the Washington Post. 

Several states were ill equipped to process rental assistance so quickly. Another compounding factor: Many people didn’t even realize they were eligible for assistance in the first place.

Housing affordability remains a problem
Insurers and other healthcare organizations are also seeing the domino effect of housing insecurity on people’s health. Before the pandemic, many people were already struggling to secure housing, or had significant utility debt, said Amy Riegel, director of housing for CareSource, an Ohio-based insurer that operates large Medicaid managed care plans.

The problem isn’t limited to high-priced cities. A recent report by NLIHC found that the minimum wage isn’t enough to rent a two-bedroom apartment in all but two U.S. states.

“The moratorium was helpful in that it prevented what I can imagine would have been a tsunami, a huge impact of homelessness and eviction,” Riegel said in a phone interview.

But it still doesn’t erase people’s rental debt, utility debt, or previous evictions from their record. Sometimes, emergency rental assistance goes to paying down utility debt, which lets people turn the lights back on, but still doesn’t solve the problem that the cost of housing outpaces most minimum wage workers’ income.

“It helped to stop the impact of what could have happened, but it didn’t solve the problem,” she said. “We have to really come to terms with the housing instability that exists in our country.”

Even as many businesses reopen, not everyone is able to go back to work yet, Rieger said. Childcare is still difficult to find, as centers either haven’t reopened or have a limited number of seats, while kids are out of school for the summer. On top of that, some people who had Covid-19 are still struggling with complications related to the illness.

“There’s a desire to reenter the workforce,” she said. “They would love to have employment opportunities again but the supports just aren’t there for them to do that.”

Taylor Justice, co-founder and president of healthcare technology company Unite Us, said that these different factors — employment, childcare, housing and transportation — are all linked. The company makes software to coordinate social service providers with a person’s healthcare, to make it easier to intervene when they need support.

“Giving them a list and sending them on their way isn’t good enough,” he said in a Zoom interview.

Out of the 42 states where Unite Us operates, housing has always been a “top 2” need, Justice added.

“Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck,” he said. “(Housing insecurity) affects more people than you think.”

To address both housing and other wraparound costs, Unite Us worked with United Way in Kentucky to provide rental and mortgage assistance, coupled with flexible cash assistance to help pay for transportation services, diapers, childcare and other critical needs.

Going into the next month, it’s difficult to know what will happen. There’s still a concern that people scraping by to make rent might be making other sacrifices to keep their homes.

“Many renters who we know have lost wages are making sacrifices of other basic needs to remain current,” NLIHC’s Threet said. “If done by unsustainable means, it could be a problem in the future.”

* Does trying to form a study group feel like a DJ Khaled song on repeat? You aren’t alone. [Insider]

* App paying folks in NYC and LA to record crimes and fires. Who needs a duty of care in the gig economy? [Business Insider]

* OnlySouls? Facebook will let religious groups offer premium content. [Business Insider]

* I believe the young attorneys are our future. And they’re working toward a better one. Oh, and shout out to Morgan Humphrey! RU Law stand up! [Law 360]

* What’s in a face, really? Judge rules compelling a defendant to place their face in front of a computer to unlock it does not count as a 5th Amendment violation. [ABA Journal]

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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.