THE CHARLOTTE SCHOOL OF LAW AND A WHISTLEBLOWER

Posted on September 21, 2017 by thebellyofthebeast

The latest developments at the Charlotte School of Law are the culmination of regulatory capture. The last significant ABA task force addressing the crisis in legal education kicked the can down the road, as did all of its predecessors. That came as no surprise because the head of the task force was Dennis W. Archer. He also chaired the national policy board of InfiLaw, a consortium of Charlotte and two other marginal for-profit law schools owned by venture capitalists.

The Persistent Problem

Without the ability to exploit vulnerable prospective law students willing to incur six-figure law school debt in return for limited prospects of meaningful JD-required jobs, the InfiLaw schools—Charlotte, Arizona Summit, and Florida Coastal School of Law—probably would have gone out of business long ago. It’s a safe bet that InfiLaw’s owners would not send their kids to any of them.

Only recently did the ABA take steps to revoke Charlotte’s accreditation. The school lost access to student loan money, and now its doors are closed. In March 2017, the ABA put Arizona Summit on probation for reasons that included a 25 percent bar exam passage rate for its July 2016 graduates taking the test for the first time. Florida Coastal’s 2016 graduates are faring so poorly in the job market that its end may be in sight: only 36 percent of graduates obtained full-time long-term JD-required jobs. Meanwhile, Florida Coastal grads have the distinction of obtaining degrees from a school that is among the leaders in law school debt: almost $160,000. Arizona Summit’s grads are right up there with them.

For years, InfiLaw has been a poster child for a persistent problem, but it’s not the only offender. Ten years after the Great Recession decimated the demand for new law school graduates, the ABA has ignored a perverse incentive system arising from a dysfunctional market. Specifically, marginal law schools lack accountability for their graduates’ poor job prospects. Those schools live on student loans—which is to say that they would die without them. But once students make their tuition payments, their schools have no skin in the game.

Even Archer’s task force report acknowledged that 25 percent of law schools derive at least 88 percent of their revenues from tuition. The overriding goal becomes maximizing revenues by filling classroom seats with tuition-paying bodies. At most marginal schools, that has meant lowering admission standards–an action that later reflects itself in declining bar passage rates for graduates. The result: unemployed law school graduates are burdened with enormous non-dischargeable debt for degrees of dubious value.

What Will It Take?

Perhaps a Charlotte whistleblower will bring change to a profession that has shown a consistent unwillingness to police itself. The allegations from former Charlotte School of Law Professor Barbara Bernier, who filed suit in June 2016 under the False Claims Act, prompted a federal investigation. She alleges that the school defrauded taxpayers of more than $285 million over a five-year period. According to the suit, Charlotte used dubious tactics to shore up the school’s performance numbers, protect its accreditation, and keep federal student loan dollars flowing.

Bernier claims that admissions officers had quotas of students they had to accept to keep their jobs. She alleges that over a six-year period beginning in 2010, 1,355 substandard students were enrolled, resulting in improper government payments to the school totaling $285 million. She asserts that the school discouraged some students from taking the bar exam because it thought they were likely to fail. Even so, the school’s pass rate has dropped steadily and its February 2017 results were the worst in the state: 25 percent. For those repeating the exam, the February 2017 news was worse: 18 percent passed.

How could this happen? A better question is, why wouldn’t it? Bernier’s allegations are consistent with revenue-maximizing behavior that the current law school business model incentivizes without regard to graduates’ outcomes.

“At Charlotte, there was constant talk of investors — referring to the school’s owners,” the Charlotte School of Law whistleblower professor told The New York Times, “and the focus was on the number of students. They were bringing them in and setting them up and then failing them out.”

InfiLaw has until Oct. 20 to file a formal answer to the complaint. Perhaps someday its owners and those who run other marginal law schools across the country will answer to their students who leave such institutions with big debt and limited JD-required job prospects. Every year, the ranks of those alumni grow.

TRUMP AND BETSY DEVOS DELIVER A ONE-TWO PUNCH

Posted on June 22, 2017 by thebellyofthebeast

Since 2007, the federal student loan forgiveness (PSLF) program has been an escape hatch for law graduates (and others) saddled with overwhelming educational debt. The idea was that the graduate would take a public service job at low pay and reduced monthly loan requirements. After ten years of service, any remaining loan debt was forgiven. The well-known backstory is that student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy. They can follow a person to the grave.

There were and still are problems with PSLF, such as the resulting tax on the imputed income from the forgiven loan. And 10 years is a long time to toil in low wage positions. But the country and many recent graduates have been the better for it.

New Problems

Serious administrative issues surfaced when the ABA sued the Department of Education for retroactive denials to lawyers who thought they were employed in qualifying PSLF programs. After original approval, the suit alleged, the department then reneged and said, in effect, “No soup for you.”

According to one report, “The ABA, which views the program as an essential part of its recruiting and retention efforts, was only informed that it was no longer an eligible employer for PSLF purposes earlier this year – nine years into a 10 year program. The association has lost employees who were in the program and has been told by possible hires that the loss of qualification was an important factor in not joining the ABA.”

Problems Solved, Trump-Style

For young lawyers hoping that public service loan forgiveness was the answer to a lifetime of student debt burdens, Trump has some bad news. Rather than remedy the problems with a program that can provide enormous help to many recent grads and the organizations for which they work, he wants to eliminate it altogether. It’s analogous to his approach to the Affordable Care Act. Fixing something is more difficult than eliminating it altogether. So Trump proposes to eliminate it.

Amid the attention surrounding Trump’s scandals involving Russia, obstruction of justice, and business conflicts of interest, many important stories got lost. What’s happening in the U.S Department of Education is one of them. On May 17, The Washington Post reported, “Funding for college work-study programs would be cut in half, public-service loan forgiveness would end and hundreds of millions of dollars that public schools could use for mental health, advanced coursework and other services would vanish under a Trump administration plan to cut $10.6 billion from federal education initiatives.”

Why? Because Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ lifelong mission has been to promote private and religious schools. According the Post story, she seeks to put $400 million into expanding “charter schools and vouchers for private and religious schools, and another $1 billion to push public schools to adopt choice-friendly policies.”

Who’s Affected?

By the end of 2016, 550,00 people had been approved for the federal loan forgiveness program. The first beneficiaries of the program will receive their rewards this year. If Trump and DeVos have their way, they will become the vanguard of a dying breed. Trump and DeVos are not just throwing out the baby with the bathwater; they’re ripping out the tub and all of the plumbing, too.

TREATING SYMPTOMS; IGNORING THE DISEASE

Posted on June 1, 2017 by thebellyofthebeast

On May 22, 2017, The Wall Street Journal ran an article about the legal profession’s enduring problem: psychological distress. For decades, attorneys have led most occupations in the incidence of serious psychological afflictions — depression, substance abuse, even suicide. Now some law firms are “tackling a taboo,” namely, the mental health problems of their lawyers.

Some observers theorize that a special “lawyer personality” is the culprit. In other words, we have only ourselves to blame, so no one should feel sorry for us. Then again, no one ever feels sorry for lawyers anyway. But attorney psychological distress has become a sufficient problem that, as the Journal reports, some big law firms are now “offering on-site psychologists, training staff to spot problems, and incorporating mental health support alongside other wellness initiatives.”

Stated differently, law firms are following the unfortunate path that has become a dominant approach in the medical profession: treating symptoms rather than the disease. Perhaps that’s because law firm leaders know that curing it would cut into their personal annual incomes.

The Facts

Other workers have serious psychological challenges, too. But attorneys seem to suffer in disproportionately high numbers. The Journal article cites a 2016 study of US lawyers finding that 20.6 percent of those surveyed were heavy drinkers (compared to 15.4 percent for members of the American College of Surgeons). Likewise, 28 percent experienced symptoms of depression (compared with eight percent or less for the general population). According to a 2012 CDC study cited in the Journal, attorneys have the 11th-highest suicide rate.

Now add one more data point. According to an ABA survey in 2007, lawyers in big firms are the least satisfied with their jobs. Anyone familiar with the prevailing big firm environment knows that it has deteriorated dramatically since 1985.

The New World

What has changed? For starters, just getting a job at a big law firm is more difficult. Corporate clients have found cost-effective alternatives to young attorneys billing $300 an hour to review documents. At many firms, demand remains soft.

But the real psychological problems begin after a new associate enters the door. For most of them, promotion to equity partner has become a pipe dream. In 1985, 36 percent of all lawyers in The American Lawyer’s first survey of the nation’s fifty largest firms were equity partners. In 2016, the comparable number was under 22 percent. More than 40 percent of all AmLaw 100 partners are now non-equity partners. The leverage ratio of equity partners to all attorneys has doubled. Stated another way, it’s twice as difficult to become an equity partner today as it was in 1985. That’s what’s been happening at the financial pinnacle of the profession.

The Business Model

There is nothing inevitable about the underlying business model that produces these outcomes. It’s a choice. In 1985, average profits per partner for the Am Law 50 was $300,000 — or about $700,000 in 2017 dollars. Today’s it’s $1.7 million. And the gap within most equity partnerships reflects their eat-what-you-kill culture. Instead of 3-to-1 in 1985, the ratio of highest-to-lowest partner compensation within equity partnerships often exceeds 10-to-1. As the rich have become richer, annual equity partner earnings of many millions of dollars has become commonplace.

At what cost? The future. As law firm leaders rely upon short-term metrics — billings, billable hours, and leverage ratios — they’re pulling up the ladder on the next generation. Too many associates; too few equity slots. Let the contest begin!

But rather than revisit the wisdom of the model, some big firm leaders have made what the Journal characterizes as a daring move: bring in a psychologist. It’s better than nothing, but it’s a far cry from dealing with the core problem that starts with the billable hour, moves through metrics that managers use to maximize short-run partner profits, and ends in predictable psychological distress — even for the so-called winners. The Journal notes that a psychologist at one firm was offering this sad advice to its attorneys: Take a cellphone reprieve by turning off all electronic devices between 2:00 am and 6:00 am.

But even such input from mental health professionals seems anathema to some firm leaders. According to the Journal, Dentons’ chairman Joseph Andrew says that his fear of offering an on-site psychologist was that “competitors will say we have crazy lawyers.”

Former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates recently told the New Yorker about her father, an attorney who suffered from depression and committed suicide. “Tragically,” Yates said, “the fear of stigma then associated with depression prevented him from getting the treatment he needed.”

For some firm leaders, “then” is still “now.” And that’s truly crazy.

TRUMP AND THE MORGAN LEWIS MESS

Posted on April 12, 2017 by thebellyofthebeast

On January 11, 2017, Sheri Dillon and Fred Fielding sullied themselves and imperiled the reputation of their firm, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. They shilled for a plainly insufficient plan to deal with Donald Trump’s massive business conflicts of interest. In doing so, they traversed far beyond the principle that an attorney should advocate zealously on a client’s behalf. I predicted that Dillon, Fielding, and the firm would regret their roles in the charade. If they haven’t seen the light by now, they never will.

Lawyers Without Boundaries; Clients Without Shame

When it comes to dealing with Trump, ignorance of his tendencies affords his attorneys no excuse. Throughout his life, he has destroyed reputations whenever it helped him fulfill an agenda item of the moment. Once his allies outlive their usefulness — or whenever Trump needs a scapegoat — they become expendable. Remember the rumors about cabinet positions for Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, and Newt Gingrich? And how quickly Mike Flynn went from loyal patriot to dishonest traitor!

Trump’s January 11, 2017 press conference made for great theater as he claimed yet another victim. “President-elect Trump wants there to be no doubt in the minds of the American public that he is completely isolating himself from his business interests,” Dillon explained amid a mountain of paper. Some of the documents appeared to be blank and some of the folders lacked labels. Substantively, attorneys knew immediately that the Dillon/Fielding/Morgan Lewis plan was a joke. Every day, it becomes less humorous.

Trump Still Owns Everything

Dillon assured the public that Trump would put his business holdings in a revocable trust — meaningless window dressing. She didn’t mention he still owned and benefited from every Trump asset in his portfolio. And he wasn’t selling any of his most valuable ones involving the family business. Still, she explained, no one should worry because his sons, Eric and Don Jr., would run the company. Trump even joked that he’d return to management in eight years, hoping that they’d done a good job and saying that he’d fire them if they didn’t.

Har-dee-har-har-har.

Six weeks later, Eric Trump told Forbes that he would continue to update his father on the family business: “’Yeah, on the bottom line, profitability reports and stuff like that, but you know, that’s about it.’ How often will those reports be, every quarter? ‘Depending, yeah, depending.’ Could be more, could be less? ‘Yeah, probably quarterly.’ One thing is clear: ‘My father and I are very close. I talk to him a lot. We’re pretty inseparable.’”

It Gets Worse

On April 4, ProPublica reported — and Trump Organization attorney Alan Garten confirmed — that a February 10 version of the revocable trust agreement states: “The Trustees shall distribute net income or principal to Donald J. Trump at his request, as the Trustees deem necessary for his maintenance, support or uninsured medical expenses, or as the Trustees otherwise deem appropriate.”

The Trustees are Don Jr. and Allen Weisselberg, who started his career working for Donald Trump’s father Fred in the 1970s. In other words, Trump can watch his wealth grow and get at his money whenever he wants.

Fallout

At the time of the press conference, self-proclaimed law firm public relations experts urged that mere proximity to Trump would make Morgan Lewis a client magnet. At least one prominent client went the other way. The co-chair of the Wallace Global Fund expressed outrage over the firm’s willingness to aid and abet Trump’s undermining of democracy.

On March 28, H. Scott Wallace sent a blistering termination letter to Morgan Lewis chair Jami Wintz McKeon: “We believe that the legal advice given to [Trump] by your partner Sheri Dillon, in the January 11 press conference and background ‘white paper,’ is not just simplistic and ill-founded, but that it empowers and even encourages impeachable offenses and undetectable conflicts of interest by America’s highest official, and thus is an unprecedented invitation to corruption and an assault on our democracy.”

Wallace, a Villanova Law grad, walked McKeon through the patent defects in the Dillon/Fielding/Morgan Lewis conflicts plan. In great detail, he covered issues that I outlined in my three-part series on the plan’s inadequacies. And he added a few zingers:

“Ms. Dillon has legitimized a complete non-solution to Trump’s manifold conflicts of interest….”
“She adds a few window-dressing safeguards….”
“She absolutely denied the existence of any Emoluments Clause problems….”
“The result is an illusion of protection against the President using his office for personal gain. Trump’s entire life has been devoted to personal gain, not a moment to public service.”

Presidential corruption matters, and the Dillon/Fielding/Morgan Lewis plan facilitates it. As Wallace observed, “the ethical carnage is mounting”:

Just days after Trump reaffirmed the “one China” policy, it granted 38 new Trump trademarks.
Trump’s newly hired director of diplomatic sales at his DC hotel has enjoyed tremendous success in foreign bookings, including Azerbaijan, Bahrain, and Kuwait.
Trump’s bans on Muslin-majority nations excluded countries where Trump has business interests.
China’s government-owned bank is the single largest tenant in Trump Tower and the lease will come up for renewal during Trump’s presidency.
Since Trump’s election, initiation fees at Mar-a-Lago have doubled to $200,000.

Wallace could have added that Trump has yet to make good on Dillon’s promise to donate all Trump hotel profits from foreign governments to the U.S. Treasury. And his organization’s post-election success in registering Trump trademarks around the world has been phenomenal.

“It is painfully obvious that Trump is using his office for personal gain,” Wallace continued. “And Morgan Lewis is enabling and legitimizing this… Americans deserve a president of undivided loyalty. Your firm has denied them that.”

What’s Next? Nothing Good for Morgan Lewis

Here is my next prediction: more clients will fire Morgan Lewis. Corporate boards and CEOs will shun a firm willing to tolerate Dillon’s unprofessional performance on January 11. They’ll act on their belief that preserving critical norms of democracy should outweigh a firm’s desire to do almost anything for a client’s billable hour.

But the most discerning of general counsels will leave Morgan Lewis for an entirely different reason that has nothing to do with Trump, politics, the appropriate limits of a lawyer’s role as client advocate, or every attorney’s sworn duty to protect the U.S. Constitution. Substantively, the Trump conflicts plan is embarrassingly bad lawyering.

STUDENT LOANS AND BETSY DeVOS

Posted on March 28, 2017 by thebellyofthebeast

Into the teeth of the student loan crisis walked Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. She’s already making it worse.

The problem goes far beyond DeVos’ embarrassing ignorance on display at her confirmation hearing, Her main qualification for Trump’s cabinet appears to have been her status as a Republican billionaire-donor. She knows nothing about basic educational policy, the decades-old Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, fraud by for-profit colleges and graduate schools exploiting students, or any other subject about which an aspiring Secretary of Education should have at least some rudimentary knowledge.

Why DeVos?

None of DeVos’ shortcomings kept Trump Party senators from confirming her. With an expertise in lobbying, she pushed Michigan money away from public education and into charter schools that had little or no accountability for their dismal performance. And Michigan now leads all states in the number of charter schools operated for a profit.

For law students, DeVos’ actions in Michigan are more than just a troubling analogy. In an earlier post, I wrote about Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, which has a marginal law school. His newest assignment is leading Trump’s task force on deregulating higher education. Most law schools — especially those whose graduates have the toughest time finding meaningful JD-required jobs — love the idea of deregulating an already dysfunctional market that props them up.

Law School Winners

If marginal schools had to operate in a completely competitive market, many would have closed their doors long ago. As they lowered admission standards and admitted students who produced declining bar passage rates, federal student loan dollars have kept them afloat. Trump embraces deregulation as a panacea. But that’s because, as with so many things, he lacks an understanding of how the absence of regulation would make the currently dysfunctional market in legal education even worse.

Only federal student loans keep the worst law schools in business. Educational debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy, and federal guarantees add another layer of protection for schools that don’t deserve it. Meanwhile, schools themselves have no accountability for their students’ poor bar passage rates or dismal employment prospects.

The Obama administration had been making life more difficult for schools that exploit students and leave them deeply in debt from which many will never recover. Specifically, schools that grossly underperformed for their students faced the prospect of losing eligibility for the federal student loan program. Charlotte Law School felt that heat directly.

The Other Shoes Dropped

Less than a week after Falwell’s task force appointment, Vice President Mike Pence’s tie-breaking vote in the Senate confirmed Devos as Secretary of Education. Immediately, she chose advisers:

— Robert S. Eitel, an attorney, is on unpaid leave of absence from his job as a top lawyer for Bridgepoint Education, Inc., a for-profit college operator whose stock is up 40 percent since November 9. Bridgepoint faces multiple government investigations, including one that ended in a $30 million settlement with the federal Consumer Finance Protection Bureau over deceptive student lending.

— Until July 2016, Taylor Hansen was a lobbyist for the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, the largest trade group of for-profit colleges. In June 2016, his mission was to eliminate the government’s “gainful employment” rule, which can cost a school federal funding if too many of its recent graduates fail to repay their student loans. But then Hansen became a DeVos adviser and a member of the Education Department’s “beachhead” team — a group of temporary employees that doesn’t require Senate approval. On March 6, the Department announced a three-month delay in deadlines associated with the gainful employment rule.

On March 14, ProPublica reported on Hansen’s unseemly status. On March 20, Sen. Elizabeth Warren sent the ProPublica article with a letter to DeVos asking for an explanation. Hansen resigned the same day.

Bottom line: If you’re counting on help in dealing with the worsening student loan crisis, count the Trump administration out.

ANOTHER BIG LAW FIRM STUMBLES

Posted on December 19, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

King & Wood Mallesons was never really a law firm. For starters, it was a verein — a structure that allowed three distinct firms to create a branding opportunity — King & Wood in China, Mallesons in Australia, and SJ Berwin in the United Kingdom. As things turned out, when SJ Berwin came on board in 2013, the verein whole quickly became less than the sum of its parts.

As The American Lawyer’s Chris Johnson and Rose Walker put it in their recent article, a verein is “a holding structure that allows member firms to retain their existing form. The structure…enabled the three practices to combine quickly and keep their finances separate.”

But the structure also means that when one member of the verein hits hard times, the others can walk away. For KWM, “the Chinese and Australian partnerships have effectively been able to stand back and watch as the European practice burned.”

Not Just a Verein Problem

To be sure, the verein structure exacerbates SJ Berwin’s current difficulties. But before leaders of big non-verein firms become too self-satisfied, they might consider whether their own firms risk the same dangers now afflicting KWM.

As Johnson and Walker report, the firm’s compensation system produced bad behavior. KWM awarded client credit to the partner who physically signed the invoice. That effectively encouraged partners to refer work to rival firms, rather than other KWM partners.

Think about that last sentence for a minute.

“It was one of the things that killed the firm,” says one former London partner. “If I sent work to other [KWM] partners, it would be out of my numbers at the end of the year. It was better for me to send it to another firm, as I’d then still be the one invoicing the client, so I’d get the credit for everything.”

A Team of One, Not One Team

When it came to cross selling among offices and practice groups, management talked a good game. Indeed, the verein’s 2013 merger tag line was “The Power of Together.” But here, too, behavior followed internal financial incentives. The compensation committee focused on individual partner performance, not the “one team, one firm” sound bite on its “vision and values” website page.

“There was a complete disconnect between what management said we should do and what the remuneration committee would reward us for doing,” says a former partner.

Lessons Not Learned, Again

As KWM’s European arm disintegrates, most law firm leaders will probably draw the wrong conclusions about what went wrong. Emerging narratives include: SJ Berwin had been on shaky ground since the financial crisis hit in 2008; the firm lacked competent management; the principal idea behind the combination — creating a global platform — was sound; only a failure of execution produced the bad outcome.

For students of law firm failures, the list sounds familiar. It certainly echoes narratives that developed to explain the 2012 collapse of Dewey & LeBoeuf. But the plight of KWM — especially the SJ Berwin piece — is best understood as the natural consequence of a partnership that ceased to become a partnership. In that sense, it resembles Dewey & LeBoeuf, too.

The organizational structure through which attorneys practice law together matters. The verein form allows King & Wood and Mallesons to back away from Sj Berwin with limited fear of direct financial exposure. But as SJ Berwin careens toward disaster, fellow verein members will suffer, at a minimum, collateral damage to the KWM brand.

What’s the Future Worth?

The lesson for big law firm leaders seems obvious. Since the demise of Dewey, that lesson has also gone unheeded. A true partnership requires a compensation structure that rewards partner-like behavior — collegially, mentoring, expansion and transition of client relationships to fellow partners, and a consensus to pursue long-term strategies promoting institutional stability rather than maximizing short-term profit metrics.

Firms that encourage attorneys to build individual client silos from which partners eat what they kill risk devastating long-term costs. They’re starving firm of their very futures. Unfortunately, too many big law firm leaders share a common attitude: the long-term will be someone else’s problem.

In a line that stretches back to Finley Kumble and includes Dewey & LeBoeuf, Bingham McCutchen, and a host of others, the names change, but the story remains the same. So does a single word that serves both as those firms’ central operating theme and as their final epitaph: greed.

OPEN LETTER #3 TO PRESIDENT-ELECT TRUMP: A JOB FOR JEFF SESSIONS

Posted on November 21, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Dear President-elect Trump,

Sometimes your lack of impulse control works for you. For example, on Friday night, you lashed out at the Broadway hit, Hamilton. With the stroke of a few tweets, you dominated the weekend news cycle. The fun ended Sunday morning, when Vice-President-elect Mike Pence told CBS’s John Dickerson that Hamilton was “a great show.”

Pence “wasn’t offended” by a 90-second post-performance comment on behalf of the cast and producers. Your tweets had demanded an apology from them, but it turned out that you now owe one — for misstating the facts and challenging First Amendment principles.

You achieved a larger objective. Your twitter tantrum diverted popular attention from: your thumbs-up group photo after meeting with business partners developing a Trump-branded luxury apartment complex in India; white nationalists convening in Washington to celebrate your election; and your selection of National Security Adviser-designate Mike Flynn, who called Islam a “cancer” and a “political ideology hiding behind religion.” He’s also a board member of ACT for America, which the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “far and away the largest grassroots anti-Muslim group in America.”

Master Distracter

Your Hamilton tweets also moved the spotlight away from your attorney general-designate. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan’s Republican Senate put Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court and made William Rehnquist chief justice. But even at the height of the Reagan revolution, Alabama’s then-U.S. attorney Sessions became only the second nominee in 48 years to be rejected for a federal judgeship. Now he’ll be your attorney general.

In a normal world, Sessions’ earlier defeat would doom your nominee. But you’re normalizing the abnormal. When Steve Bannon is the baseline for comparison, even Jeff Sessions looks good. He shouldn’t.

Sessions on the Merits

The junior senator from Alabama is one of its most conservative members. He opposes: any path to legalizing undocumented immigrants, gay marriage, abortion, and the legalization of marijuana. He voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. His portfolio is a distressing compilation of what you seem to mean by “Make America Great Again.”

Sessions is far out of step with most Americans. (Hillary Clinton’s popular vote victory — 1.5 million ballots and growing — proves that you are, too.) But resigned to his confirmation, I propose a bipartisan assignment for him: restore the integrity of the FBI. It will require a public investigation into events culminating in your election.

Roll the Tape

In October, polls showed you losing so badly that you were likely to cost Republicans the Senate. Three months earlier, FBI Director James Comey had announced that no reasonable prosecutor would bring criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. But in an unprecedented press conference, he’d opined about her recklessness anyway. That kept your “Crooked Hillary” rally theme alive. Even so, as summer turned to fall, the email-gate story was losing its legs.

On October 25, your key surrogate, Rudy Giuliani appeared on Fox & Friends. When a host asked whether you had anything other than “some more inspiring rallies” planned for the remaining 14 days of the campaign, Giuliani chuckled.

“Yes,” he grinned.

“What?” a co-host asked.

“You’ll see,” Giuliani answered in a full-throated laugh. “We’ve got a couple of surprises left. I call them surprises in the way we’re going to campaign, to get our message out there. Maybe in a little bit of a different way. You’ll see, and I think it’ll be enormously effective.”

Giuliani then discussed how “all of these revelations about Hillary Clinton, finally, are beginning to have an impact.”

On Oct. 26, Giuliani appeared with Fox reporter Martha MacCallum. As the interview ended, he interrupted her to volunteer, “And I think he’s [Trump] got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days.”

MacCallum tried to conclude the interview, but Giuliani kept pushing: “I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.”

Finally, MacCallum took the bait.

“I heard you saying that this morning,” she said. “What do you mean?”

“You’ll see,” Giuliani laughed.

Friday, October 28

Only days after Giuliani’s teasers, Comey violated Justice Department guidelines with a letter informing Congress that the Bureau was reviewing additional evidence relating to the Clinton email investigation. Conservative radio talk show host Lars Larson interviewed Giuliani.

“There’s a kind of revolution going on inside the FBI about the original [July] conclusion being completely unjustified and almost a slap in the face of the FBI’s integrity,” Giuliani said. “I know that from former agents. I know that even from a few active agents who, obviously, don’t want to identify themselves.”

Later, Giuliani backpedaled.

“I don’t know anything about leaks from the FBI or the Justice Department,” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “I haven’t talked to anybody in the FBI or Justice Department.”

When Blitzer confronted Giuliani with the Lars Larson interview, Giuliani responded, “Well, the information I’ve been getting is from former FBI agents. If I did say that, that was wrong.”

In 48 hours, Giuliani had gone from “I know that even from a few active agents who, obviously don’t want to identify themselves” to “the information I’ve been getting is from former FBI agents.”

But Giuliani’s distinction didn’t help the Bureau. Whether the leaks came directly from active agents, or whether active agents leaked to retired agents who then went to Giuliani, they originated within the FBI. In addition to professional responsibilities of confidentiality under the ABA Standards on Prosecutorial Investigations, agents sign employment agreements that have sharp non-disclosure teeth. Certain FBI personnel working on the Clinton investigation also signed a “Case Briefing Acknowledgement,” agreeing that “due to the nature and sensitivity of this investigation, compliance with these restrictions may be subject to verification by polygraph examination.”

Lie detectors!

Wednesday, November 2

Less than a week before Election Day, another FBI leak produced a new bombshell. Bret Baier of Fox News cited “two separate sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI investigations” for what turned out to be a bogus report. He said that the Clinton investigations would likely to lead to an indictment. You milked that one. As rally crowds responded with “Lock her up” even more loudly than before, some members of your mob added, “Execute her!”

By Thursday, Baier admitted that he’d spoken “inartfully” about the false FBI report. By Friday, he was in full retreat: “That just wasn’t inartful, it was a mistake and for that I’m sorry.”

When MSNBC’s Brian Williams grilled your campaign manager Kellyanne Conway on whether you would stop using the earlier false report in your stump speech, she smiled and said, “Well, the damage is done to Hillary Clinton…”

Sunday, November 6

Then Comey sent another letter confirming that his earlier missive had been a false alarm. But by then, early voters had cast 40 million ballots — almost 30 million of which came after his October 30 letter. Meanwhile, you’d spent the week telling crowds that Clinton’s problems were “bigger than Watergate” and that criminal investigations into her dealings would continue for years into her presidency.

When confronted with Comey’s latest exoneration of Clinton, Kellyanne Conway kept her smile as she told MSNBC, “We have not made this a centerpiece of our messaging… This has not been front and center of our campaign.”

Sessions could put Rudy Giuliani under oath and ask him to name his FBI sources — active or retired. After all, if this had happened to you, hearings in the Republican Congress would already be underway. Now they’ll never happen. To “Make America Great Again,” start with the FBI, if you dare.

OPEN LETTER #2 TO PRESIDENT-ELECT TRUMP: YOUR ELECTORAL COLLEGE RANT

Posted on November 16, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Dear President-elect Trump,

Well, that was quick. Within 24 hours of my first open letter pledging to hold you accountable for missteps, you fired up another twitter storm. Your topic was the Electoral College. It’s easy to see why.

Hillary Clinton’s popular win by more than 1 million votes makes you only the fourth president in history to gain an Electoral College victory without support from at least a plurality of the people you will govern. In fact, tiny popular vote margins in three key states tipped the Electoral College balance in your favor: Michigan (12,000 out of almost 5 million votes cast), Wisconsin (27,000 out of 3 million), and Pennsylvania (68,000 out of 6 million).

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but did you see the tweet from John Dean, former White House counsel to President Nixon?

“What happens when we discover that the Russians rigged just enough votes in Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania for Trump?” he wrote.

Don’t Believe Everything Newt Tells You

Now you’re turning to the Electoral College for help. But four years ago, you despised it.

On November 6, 2012, you tweeted: “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.”

Back then, you thought President Obama would lose the popular vote, but win in the Electoral College. You called for “a march on Washington” to “stop this travesty.” In tweets that you have since deleted, you even urged a “revolution.”

Now you need the Electoral College to override the popular vote that you lost decisively. Throughout the media, critics are asking, “Is it time to eliminate the Electoral College?”

At 5:30 am on November 15, 2016, you provided your new answer, starting with this: “If the election were based on total popular vote I would have campaigned in N.Y. Florida and California and won even bigger and more easily.”

Including Florida on that list projects panic. You spent more time there than in almost any other state. As for New York, it defies credulity to suggest that fellow New Yorkers don’t know you by now.

With respect to California, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told CBS News’ John Dickerson that you would have picked up “at least 2 million votes,” if you’d campaigned there. No evidence supports that claim. Even so, it doesn’t answer the overriding point that yours is only the fourth election in American history where the popular and electoral vote diverged. (The others were George W. Bush in 2000, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876.)

But there’s a bigger trap in Speaker Gingrich’s argument that you have now echoed in a tweet. It reinforces the budding false narrative that you have a popular mandate. For the reasons explained in my first letter, you don’t.

Don’t Believe Everything You Read

Your second tweet at 5:30 am on November 15 was: “The Electoral College is actually genius in that it brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play. Campaigning is much different!”

Your tweet gives ammunition to those who focus on the speed with which you decry rules that appear to be working against you, only to embrace them when they turn in your favor. The Electoral College that you described as a “disaster for democracy” in 2012 is now “genius.” For your latest flip-flop, The Washington Post awarded you an “Upside-Down Pinocchio for an unacknowledged change in position.”

Perhaps the inspiration for your second tweet came from reading Dr. Larry Arnn’s Wall Street Journal op-ed that morning. He’s president of Hillside College and defends the Electoral College as “anything but outdated.” His conservative credentials include board membership on the Heritage Foundation and, in 1996, founding chairman of the California Civil Rights Initiative, which prohibited racial preferences in state hiring, contracting, and admissions. Stated simply, he’s one of your growing circle of new best friends.

Alexander Hamilton Is More Than A Hit Play

“Consider for a minute why the Electoral College was invented,” Dr. Arnn writes.

Characterizing your million-plus vote loss as a “whisker,” Dr. Arnn’s historical discussion ignores the most important source of contemporaneous insight into the origin and purpose of the Electoral College: Alexander Hamilton. Conservatives regularly cite The Federalist Papers in defending an originalist interpretation of the Constitution. (You’ve said that you want your Supreme Court nominee adhering to that approach.) In Federalist No. 68, Hamilton explained some of the concerns that led to creation of the Electoral College.

On one hand, Hamilton observed, the framers believed that the will of the people deserved respect. But they also worried that citizens were vulnerable to an unqualified demagogue — someone with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” lacking “a different kind of merit to establish him in the esteem and confidence…necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.” The Electoral College became the nation’s safety valve.

What If Every Vote Counted?

Dr. Arnn concludes that binding electors to support the candidate who wins the national popular vote would be a “disaster.” He worries about the 10 states and the District of Columbia — representing 165 electoral votes — that have already signed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. It binds each signatory state’s electors to vote for the national popular winner. If a handful of states accounting for another 105 electoral votes sign on and bring the total to at least 270, the Compact will become effective without a Constitutional amendment.

Among the remaining states that in various combinations could put the Compact into effect are Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Don’t be surprised if those who voted against you now turn their attention to state legislatures that could render the Electoral College irrelevant by 2020. At some point, the constitutionality of the Compact would probably be litigated, but serious scholars believe it would survive.

What Would Hamilton Do?

You can see the irony of your precarious situation. In an unprecedented bipartisan display, the most respected leaders of your own Republican party outlined publicly and repeatedly the dangers that you — their nominee — would pose to America and the world. But the story of the 2016 election is that the people could be trusted. Most voters did not buy your “low intrigue” from someone versed in the “little arts of popularity.” And they reached their decisions, even as FBI Director James Comey, unnamed Bureau leakers of false information, Russian hackers, and Wikileaks distorted the election in your favor. Those clouds will always hang over you.

Dr. Arrn glossed over the fact that on December 19, the Electoral College could still approve the nation’s collective decision and deprive you of the Presidency. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia impose some type of requirement that electors vote in accordance with their states’ individual voter totals. But the penalties for noncompliance typically are insignificant. And in the remaining 21 states — including Pennsylvania — electors are free to vote as they see fit.

Would Alexander Hamilton be among the more than 4 million signatories to a current petition urging electors to do what they believe best for the country, rather than blindly follow their individual states’ voting results? We’ll never know. But you’re making a mistake by inviting a focus on the original motivations for the Electoral College. They work against you now.

OPEN LETTER #1 TO PRESIDENT-ELECT TRUMP

Posted on November 14, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Dear Mr. President-elect,

Congratulations.

This is the first in a series of open letters that you’re not likely to read. The ultimate goal is simple: accountability. As you speak and act, these letters will try to set the factual record straight in our post-factual world that you now dominate. Your words and deeds will determine the scope and duration of this exercise.

The Responsibility of Attorneys and the Press

I didn’t vote for you, but this isn’t a partisan crusade. Lawyers across the political spectrum are concerned about what you might do as President. We listened with concern to your campaign rhetoric. Repeatedly, you professed disrespect for the rule of law. (Along the way, I wrote about your transgressions here, here, here, here, and here.)

Now we watch and wait for any sign of disquieting conduct matching the words that helped propel you into office. When you err, we will speak. You may say that such vigilance is un-American. It’s not. Holding elected officials accountable to the law and the truth is the essence of democracy.

You’ll start with functional control over two branches of government. Senate confirmation of your Supreme Court nominee will deliver the third. So it becomes the task of those outside your orbit to identify and spotlight your missteps. More than at any time in our nation’s history, attorneys and the press have a special responsibility to remain on high alert.

Open letters like this one will arrive whenever the circumstances require it. Two have already arisen: the false claim that you have a mandate and your early post-election tweets.

The Illusory Mandate

Contrary to the narrative that you and your supporters are pushing, Republicans do not have a mandate to pursue whatever the Trump agenda turns out to be. You benefitted from a disquieting confluence of events and circumstances. And even at that, you lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by the widest margin of any elected President in history.

Start with the FBI. As voters were casting more than 46 million early ballots, FBI Director James Comey’s profound misstep on October 28 compounded his July 5 press conference error in handling the Clinton email investigation. Stated simply, he pushed votes your way.

Four days later, the Bureau used a twitter account that had been dormant for more than a year to release documents relating to the Clinton Foundation. On November 2, Fox News’ Bret Baier aired a false report from FBI sources that there would likely be indictments involving the Clinton Foundation. Two days after that, Baier apologized for that “mistake” and retracted his story.

But as your campaign manager Kellyanne Conway acknowledged to MSNBC’s Brian Williams shortly after Baier’s retraction, “The damage has been done to Hillary Clinton.”

Responding to a post-election report that Clinton thought the FBI’s unprecedented actions had affected the election, Conway did a slick about-face on November 13: “I just can’t believe it’s always somebody else’s fault. Sometimes you just have to take a look in the mirror and reflect on what went wrong.”

The Russian Vote

Likewise, you alone benefitted from Russian hackers and Wikileaks. They put their thumbs on the Trump side of the election scale. The fact that the Russian parliament burst into applause when Vladimir Putin announced your victory should not please you. It should cause you and all American citizens grave concern.

Yet even with all of that help, as well as Republican-sponsored state voter suppression laws in North Carolina, Wisconsin and elsewhere, your opponent beat you by more than 2.5 million votes.

About That Republican Congress

Some voters split their tickets. They were heeding the call of leading Republicans in Congress and elsewhere who shunned you. Outraged at your behavior, concerned about your lack of knowledge and intellectual depth, and fearful of your erratic temperament, they made the case that a Republican Senate was essential to check President Hillary Clinton. Unwittingly, they have now empowered you beyond their wildest fears.

From the standpoint of popular support, you begin your first term from a position of unprecedented weakness. Ironically, you entered politics with a frivolous “birther” claim that questioned the legitimacy of your predecessor’s right to the Oval Office. Yet real shadows hover over yours.

Dubious Tweets

A second circumstance that already requires voices of accountability to speak involves your post-election tweets. Less than 48 hours after your subdued acceptance speech, you responded to nationwide street protests with a two-pronged attack against the dissenters and the media.

“Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”

No facts supported your claims. As always, your response to any hint of criticism was to find a scapegoat or a distraction. We’ll be watching for that tendency, too. When you fail to fulfill your most unrealistic campaign promises, the anger of those who voted for you will intensify. In Ohio, when the steel mills don’t fire up again in Youngstown and your border wall doesn’t solve the opioid epidemic in Columbus, will you follow your lifelong impulse to blame someone else?

Continuing Attacks on the Press

On Sunday morning, November 13, you renewed your pre-election attack on The New York Times:

“Wow, the @nytimes is losing thousands of subscribers because of their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the ‘Trump phenomena’.”

That wasn’t true, either. The Times reported a post-election surge in new subscriptions — four times the pre-election rate.

A few hours later, you went after the Times again: “The @nytimes states today that DJT believes “more countries should acquire nuclear weapons.” How dishonest are they. I never said this!”

But you did say it. When Mike Pence denied in his vice-presidential debate that you’d taken such a position, nonpartisan Politifact rated his statement as “Mostly false” and listed all of the instances that you’d said what the Times reported — the first of which was in March 2016 to reporters for The New York Times.

On April 3, 2016, you had this exchange with Fox News’ Chris Wallace:

Trump: “It’s not like, gee whiz, nobody has them. So, North Korea has nukes. Japan has a problem with that. I mean, they have a big problem with that. Maybe they would in fact be better off if they defend themselves from North Korea.”

Wallace: “With nukes?”

Trump: “Including with nukes, yes, including with nukes.”

Most people are too busy with life’s daily demands to scrutinize your torrent of sometimes conflicting words. But many of us will make the time necessary to stand guard against your demonstrated capacity to take advantage of the post-factual world in which we live. No President possesses a mandate to lie without getting caught.

INDIANA TECH: ANOTHER COSTLY LESSON IGNORED

Posted on November 10, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

I’ll have more to say about the election, but not today. Instead, let’s take a closer look at a story that got lost in the shuffle of presidential politics. It deserves more attention than it received.

Back in 2013, when Indiana Tech opened the state’s fifth law school, I wrote that the decision was the latest example of pervasive legal market dysfunction. As the number of applicants declined, marginal schools increasingly were admitting students who wouldn’t be able to pass the bar, much less get decent jobs requiring a JD. Schools such as Indiana Tech were continuing to inflate the growing lawyer bubble, which was also the title of my 2013 book. (Proving that some things never change, it came out in paperback earlier this year.)

The central contributor to that bubble remains in place. Specifically, the federal student loan program absolves marginal law schools of accountability for their graduates’ poor employment outcomes, while encouraging administrators to fill classrooms with tuition-paying bodies. The results are predictable: lower admission standards, lower bar passage rates, and burgeoning law student debt for degrees of dubious value from marginal schools.

Victims of a Doomed Experiment

Indiana Tech’s inaugural class of first-year students began their studies in August 2013. Two years later, the school failed in its first attempt to get ABA accreditation. Further proving the ABA’s failure to address the continuing crisis in legal education, it granted Indiana Tech provisional accreditation earlier this year. The school graduated its first twelve students in 2016; only one passed the bar exam. Another passed on appeal, and a third passed the bar in another state.

On October 31, 2016, the school’s 71 students received an unwelcome Halloween surprise. The board of trustees announced its unanimous vote to close forever on June 30, 2017.

Indiana Tech President Arthur Snyder’s statement said, “[F]or the foreseeable future, the law school will not be able to attract students in sufficient numbers for the school to remain viable.”

Here’s the thing. President Snyder’s observation was equally true in 2011 — when the school completed its feasibility study and announced the decision to move forward. But rather than confront obvious facts about the demand for legal education that were apparent to everyone else, President Snyder insisted in 2013:

“We have given this decision careful research and consideration, and we believe we can develop a school that will attract and retain talented individuals who will contribute to our region’s economic development.”

Thanks to President Snyder and Indiana Tech’s board of trustees, those individuals — students and faculty — now face a tough and uncertain road.

Seeking Answers

What could have motivated such an obviously bad decision to open a new law school in the teeth of a lawyer glut? The answer is pretty simple. Snyder is a business guy. He has an MBA in strategic management from Wilmington University and a doctorate in education (innovation and leadership) from Wilmington University. Before joining the academic world, he spent more than 20 years in the telecommunications industry, rising to the position of vice president for the Data Systems Division of AT&T.

For someone focused on a bottom line approach to running higher education, adding a law school probably seemed like a no-brainer. In a 2011 interview for the National Law Journal, Snyder explained his strategy. Noting that about half of Indiana residents who attended ABA-approved law schools were doing so out of state, he said, “There are potential students who desire a law school education who cannot get that education in this area….”

Capturing that segment of the market was a strange premise upon which to build the case for a new law school. Which Indiana students admitted to established out-of-state schools did he expect to jump to an unaccredited newcomer?

The Real Play For Dollars

Like most law schools that should have closed their doors long ago, Indiana Tech’s business strategy sought to exploit market dysfunction. If the school could attract a sufficient number of aspiring attorneys to Fort Wayne, student loan dollars for tuition would take care of everything else, including a spiffy new building:

“The Indiana Tech Law School contains eight state-of-the-art classrooms, a courtroom, several learning and relaxation spaces for students including lounges and an outdoors patio, a three-story library, and everything else our students need to make their time here a successful and rewarding experience.”

Would graduates obtain decent full-time long-term jobs requiring the Indiana Tech JD degrees costing them close to $100,000? That would never become President Snyder’s problem.

The Opposite of Leadership

After the ABA denied Indiana Tech provisional accreditation in 2015, the handwriting was on the wall. But Snyder doubled down on a bad bet. The school tried to bolster admissions with a loss leader: a one-year tuition scholarship to students who enrolled in the fall of 2015. Anyone who took that deal is now twisting in the wind.

Indiana Tech reportedly lost $20 million. But its failed business strategy, followed by gimmicks that could never save it, produced dozens of real-life human victims whose damage is immeasurable. Those people don’t count in calculating Indiana Tech’s profit-and-loss statement. Except as conduits for federal student loan dollars, it’s fair to ask if they ever counted at all.

In his 2011 interview about the then-planned new law school, President Snyder suggested that Indiana Tech law school could be the first to offer a joint JD and master in science degree in leadership. He thought it would be an especially good fit because the university already has several programs in leadership.

Sometimes the most important learning in life comes from careful observation of negative role models. Speaking of negative role models, as I said at the beginning, I’ll have more to say about the election results in the days and weeks to come.

JAMES COMEY AND THE FBI

Posted on November 2, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

I hadn’t planned to write another post until after the November 8 election. But on Tuesday, November 1, lightning struck twice.

First, the FBI used its twitter account to post documents relating to President Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich back in 2001. For those who are too young to remember, that presidential action 15 years ago was so controversial that it led prosecutors in the Bush administration to investigate potential criminal wrongdoing. They came up empty.

The second strike came Tuesday evening: the Chicago Cubs beat the Cleveland Indians and sent the World Series to Game 7.

This post concerns the first bolt from the blue.

Beyond Strange

Taken alone, the FBI’s release of the March Rich documents might have seemed relatively innocuous. But it came on the heels of FBI Director James Comey’s unprecedented letter to Congress on Friday, October 28. Contrary to Donald Trump’s subsequent false assertions, Comey was not “reopening” the Bureau’s closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, Rather, Comey said only that “the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.”

Then it turned out that the emails in question were on former congressman Anthony Weiner’s computer. Reportedly, the emails were to or from his now-estranged wife, Huma Abedin. Then it turned out that the FBI hadn’t even obtained a search warrant to look at any of those Huma Abedin emails that, to Comey, “appeared to be pertinent.” A judge issued the warrant two days after Comey’s explosive letter. Perhaps the FBI director is clairvoyant.

Backlash

The bipartisan outrage against Comey was fast and furious. More than 100 former prosecutors and high-ranking Justice Department officials in Republican and Democratic administrations signed an open letter chastising Comey for his breach of longstanding Justice Department guidelines relating both to the confidentiality of investigations generally and, most especially, to any actions that could affect an imminent election.

In fact, The New York Times reported on November 1 that precisely those well-established guidelines stopped the FBI from taking overt actions to pursue its investigation of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort. The issues involve Manafort’s connections to pro-Russia officials and business leaders in Ukraine. The Times also reported that the FBI likewise delayed activities relating to a Clinton Foundation investigation.

Meanwhile, Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics counsel for George W. Bush, filed a formal complaint that Comey’s letter to Congress had violated the Hatch Act. It outlaws misuse of a public office by, for example, seeking to influencing an election.

Who Is James Comey?

Even Comey’s detractors have expressed admiration for his character and integrity. Perhaps that’s justified. But lawyers and judges know that the appearance of impropriety can be problematic. In that respect and as relates to Comey, some facts alone may speak for themselves. So without additional comment, here are some facts about James Comey.

1985: Graduated with a J.D. from the the University of Chicago Law School and clerked for Judge John Walker of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

1987: After a brief stint as an associate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Comey was hired by then-U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Rudy Giuliani. He was an assistant U.S. Attorney until 1993.

1993-1996: Partner in private practice at McGuire Woods in Richmond, VA.

1996: Deputy special counsel for the Senate Committee investigating the Clintons and Whitewater. Eventually, the process led to appointment of a special prosecutor and President Clinton’s impeachment (for which the Senate acquitted him).

1996-2001: Managing assistant U.S. attorney for Richmond division.

2002-2003: U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, where his tasks included supervising the criminal investigation of former President Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich.

2003-2005: President George W. Bush’s appointee as deputy attorney general — the number two person at the Justice Department — reporting directly to John Ashcroft. He became known for his standoff over the no-warrant wiretapping program at Ashcroft’s hospital bedside. According to one report of that internecine Republican battle, “Comey rushed to the room of his bedridden boss to physically stop White House officials from trying to get an ailing Ashcroft to reauthorize the program.”

2005-2010: Vice president and general counsel for Lockheed Martin.

2010-2013: Executive at Bridgewater, reported to be the world’s largest hedge fund.

June 21, 2013: President Obama nominates Comey to head the FBI.

July 5, 2016: In a bizarre departure from an investigator’s role, Comey dons his prosecutor hat to announce his recommendation that Hillary Clinton not be indicted for her use of a private email server while Secretary of State. He then offers a similarly unprecedented description of her behavior as, among other things, “extremely careless.”

July 7, 2016: As Congressional Republicans began investigations into Comey’s recommendation, he testifies that he’d been a Republican for most of his adult life, but was no longer a registered member of the GOP.

July-September, 2016: Trump and his surrogates, including Rudy Giuliani, blast Comey for not recommending the indictment of Clinton. Calling the failure a “total outrage,” Giuliani said, “As associate attorney and as Jim Comey’s boss for two or three years, I was very disappointed in him. I think if you read it, it’s logically inconsistent. He contradicts himself at least three times.”

September 28, 2016: For four hours, Comey testifies before the House Oversight Committee, mostly about the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server and his recommendation not to indict her.

October 3, 2016: FBI agents seize Anthony Weiner’s laptop and learn quickly that they include some Huma Abedin emails.

October 28, 2016: Comey sends his letter to Congress about additional materials that “appear to be pertinent.” Two days later, the FBI obtains a search warrant to see what those emails actually say.

November 1, 2016: The FBI releases documents responsive to earlier Freedom of Information Act requests relating to President Clinton’s 2001 pardon of Marc Rich. When pressed, the official FBI comment was that its release of the Rich documents were posted “automatically and electronically to the FBI’s public reading room in accordance with the law and established procedures.” This happens, the statement said, on a “first-in, first-out” basis.

And the FBI twitter account that announced the release? Until October 30, it had been dormant for more than a year — since October 8, 2015.

To the FBI’s official comment that the timing of the release was a coincidence, CNN’s legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin commented, “My official response is, ‘Give me a break.'”

I would add this: Sometimes even paranoid persons have real enemies.

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S ATTORNEY GENERAL? — PART 2

Posted on November 1, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Part 1 of this series discussed the possibility that, if Donald Trump wins the election, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie could become his attorney general of the United States. After all, he was the first major Republican presidential candidate to endorse Trump. With Christie’s popularity in his home state dropping to historic lows (now below 30 percent) and term limits foreclosing a run for another term as governor, he had to do something to salvage his political ambitions.

Sure, he didn’t get the vice-presidential nomination that he reportedly craved. But shouldn’t he reap some reward for his remarkable public scenes with Trump? In one, Christie appeared to be physically ill — or a hostage. In another, Trump mocked him to get a cheap laugh.

About That Bridgegate Thing

The prospect of Christie becoming the nation’s top law enforcement officer isn’t funny. The Bridgegate trial has resurrected old questions that a Christie-appointed independent investigator was supposed to answer almost three years ago. It has also raised new ones.

Christie has steadfastly denied having any knowledge about the George Washington Bridge lane closures before or during the 2013 scandal that culminated in criminal charges against his top aides. Some of those aides have now sworn that Christie knew more than he has admitted.

In that respect, they have confirmed Donald Trump’s declaration during a December 2015 Republican primary rally: “He knew about it. He totally knew about it.”

The Four Other Key Players

In a federal courtroom on September 27, 2016, a senior official at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (and Christie’s high school classmate), David Wildstein, testified that Christie knew what was happening on the bridge during the days that traffic was backed up for hours. According to Wildstein, so did Bill Stepien (Christie’s then-gubernatorial re-election campaign manager) and Bill Baroni (the governor’s top appointee at the Port Authority, which runs the bridge).

Another courtroom bombshell exploded on October 21, 2016, when Bridget Anne Kelly — who had replaced Stepien as Christie’s deputy chief of staff — testified that on August 12, 2013, she’d told the governor about the contemplated lane closings a month before they occurred.

Someone is lying. Donald Trump cast his vote: the culprit is Christie, the person who now heads his presidential transition team.

The Investigation

I’ve written previously about the independent investigation that was supposed to put all of this to rest almost three years ago. In January 2014, Christie – a former federal prosecutor with eyes on a 2016 presidential bid – tried to contain the growing scandal by appointing a respected attorney to investigate. He chose Randy Mastro, another former prosecutor, who had served as Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s deputy from 1993 to 1998 before returning to the New York office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

Mastro’s team included Debra Wong Yang, who had served as U.S. attorney for the central district of California. At a June 2011 event, she introduced Christie as her “very good friend” whom she had “known for ten years” – going back to their time together as federal prosecutors. Yang said he was “the real deal” and “doing a remarkable job as governor.” When Christie took the stage, he recalled how their families vacationed together at the game ranch of a fellow U.S. attorney in Texas.

“We are good and dear friends,” Christie said.

Only two months after the 2014 Gibson Dunn investigation began, Mastro released his final report. It identified Wildstein and Kelly as the Bridgegate villains, both of whom — along with Baroni and Stepien — had refused to speak with investigators.

The Moment

The report discussed briefly a key moment: the conversation that Wildstein said he’d had with Christie and Bill Baroni at a 9/11 memorial service in New York City – two days into the four-day lane closures. According to his attorney, Wildstein told Christie about the lane closures and resulting traffic problems in Fort Lee. Christie said he couldn’t recall any such conversation. The report dismissed Wildstein’s account as not credible.

The investigation was expensive, but not for Christie. Through August 2015, Gibson Dunn billed New Jersey taxpayers $8 million for its work. According to the Times, in December 2015, Debra Wong Yang, “co-hosted a $2,700-per-person fund-raiser in Los Angeles for Christie’s Republican presidential campaign.”

Days of Reckoning

Fast-forward to September 23, 2016, when prosecutors called Wildstein to the witness stand. Using photos showing Christie, Baroni, and Wildstein speaking together at the 9/11 event, Wildstein testified to their conversation. He said that Baroni began by telling the governor in a sardonic tone that “there was a tremendous amount of traffic in Fort Lee” and that Christie would be “very pleased to know” that the Democratic mayor of the city was “very frustrated.” According to Wildstein, Christie laughed at the news. Upon learning that Fort Lee’s mayor was placing urgent phone calls about the situation, Christie said sarcastically, “I imagine he wouldn’t get his calls returned.”

Christie responded immediately to Wildstein’s courtroom testimony.

“All kinds of stuff is going on up in a courtroom in Newark,” he said on September 27, 2016. “I have not and will not say anything different than I’ve been saying since January 2014. No matter what is said up there, I had no knowledge prior to or during these lane realignments.”

Subsequently, Bill Baroni took the stand and offered his version of the 9/11 memorial service conversation with Christie. He said that the photo of the three men laughing might have captured their joking about Governor Andrew Cuomo arriving at the event on a motorcycle with singer Billy Joel.

But then Bridget Anne Kelly testified to having informed Christie about the planned lane closings a month before they occurred in 2013. And she added a kicker: She said that the governor stopped by her office after the 9/11 event, and they discussed the ongoing Fort Lee traffic complaints. She swore that Christie told her that the Port Authority and Wildstein were handling the situation.

The Lesson

The judge instructed the Bridgegate jury that Chistie was among those about whom the jury had heard but would render no decision. Its verdicts can’t resolve the question of whether Christie has been telling the truth about what he knew and when he knew it.

But that open issue is less important than how all of this relates to Donald Trump. He believes Christie is lying. Yet Christie still chairs the Trump presidential transition team. And he could become Trump’s leading candidate for attorney general.

One more twist in the tale: On January 9, 2014, Christie announced that Bill Stepien’s conduct relating to Bridgegate had caused him to “lose confidence in Bill’s judgment,” so he fired him as gubernatorial re-election campaign manager. On August 26, 2016, NBC News reported that the Trump campaign hired Stepien as its national field director.

“I hire only the best people,” Trump says.

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S ATTORNEY GENERAL? — PART 1

Posted on October 25, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Last week, I discussed Trump’s threats to sue his critics and the possibility that, when it came actually to filing a lawsuit, his lawyers’ overriding duties of professional responsibility became a restraining influence. Even so, the threats themselves — like those Trump reiterated on October 22 to sue any and all accusers who have or will come forward to confirm his boasts about being a sexual predator — have a chilling impact. If an accuser with a truthful story remains quiet, Trump wins without firing a shot or paying a filing fee.

Anyone who doubts the effect of even an idle Trump threat should consider the American Bar Association’s recent actions. The New York Times reports:

“Alarmed by Donald J. Trump’s record of filing lawsuits to punish and silence his critics, a committee of media lawyers at the American Bar Association commissioned a report on Mr. Trump’s litigation history. The report concluded that Mr. Trump was a ‘libel bully’ who had filed many meritless suits attacking his opponents and had never won in court. But the bar association refused to publish the report, citing ‘the risk of the A.B.A. being sued by Mr. Trump.'”

The Media Law Research Center posted the report.

If candidate Trump can achieve that type of chilling effect on the nation’s largest professional association of attorneys, imagine the impact of a President Trump who would select the country’s top law enforcement officer, namely, the attorney general of the United States.

Even Worse Threats

“You’d be in jail.”

Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton to deliver that warning during their second debate. Moments earlier, he’d provided the context.

“If I win,” he said, “I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there has never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it, and we’re going to have a special prosecutor.”

As Trump landed another blow against the rule of law, his supporters in the audience howled, “Lock her up” — a standard chant at Trump rallies.

The Gambit

The process for appointing a special counsel doesn’t give any president the power Trump says he’d wield. The last president to have any influence over a special prosecutor was Richard Nixon. Esteemed Harvard Law Professor Archibald Cox had the job, and it didn’t end well for Nixon or the country.

When Cox subpoenaed the president’s Oval Office tape recordings, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. Richardson refused, so Nixon fired Richardson. When his successor, Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, likewise refused to discharge Cox, Nixon fired him, too. After Solicitor General Robert Bork was sworn in to replace Ruckelshaus, he executed Nixon’s command.

Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Nixon to release the tapes. Nixon’s own voice proved his personal involvement in efforts to cover-up the 1972 burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters – the Watergate break-in. The incriminating evidence led the House of Representatives to issue articles of impeachment. When it became clear that fellow Republicans in the Senate would provide enough votes to convict him, Nixon became the first U.S. president to resign his office.

The “Saturday Night Massacre” that cost Richardson, Ruckelshaus, and Cox their jobs led Congress to enact the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 that removed the president from the independent prosecutor process. In 1999, the legislation lapsed under a sunset provision. Today, the Code of Federal Regulations – which has the force of law – governs. The decision to appoint a “special counsel” to conduct investigations or prosecutions of particular matters on behalf of the United States belongs to the attorney general, not the president.

The Executioner

Nixon’s appointees, Richardson and Ruckelshaus, lost their jobs because they refused to do Nixon’s bidding. Trump’s attorney general would have to embrace his illegal post-election assault on a political adversary. To fulfill his banana republic-like promise to imprison a political opponent, Trump would need someone who bowed unquestioningly to his wishes.

Who might use the power of high office for such retribution? There’s an obvious candidate: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. After all, at the Republican National Convention, he prosecuted the case against Hillary Clinton and invited the audience to roar, “Guilty.”

As for a willingness to use political power for payback, Trump has a favorable view of Christie, too.

“He knew about it,” Trump said during a Republican presidential primary rally in December 2015. “He totally knew about it.”

During a December 2013 news conference, Christie had staked out a different position: “I didn’t know anything about it.”

The “he” was Christie. The “it” was Bridgegate.

The Scandal

On September 9, 2013 – the first day of the school year in Fort Lee, New Jersey – commuters to New York City found themselves in a traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge. Without advance notice to local officials, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey reduced from three to one the number of lanes and tollbooths available to vehicles accessing the bridge from Fort Lee.

Even by New York standards, the resulting gridlock on the world’s busiest bridge was monumental. Some motorists were stranded for hours. Public health and safety became serious concerns. Was it just a coincidence that the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee had refused to endorse Christie for a second term as governor?

As the debacle developed, what did Governor Christie know and when did he know it? Senator Howard Baker had made a similar question famous during the Watergate hearings, and it still resonated.

The next installment in this series will take a deeper dive into the criminal trial that has inflicted significant collateral damage on Christie — the head of Donald Trump’s presidential transition team.

TRUMP’S THREATS

Posted on October 18, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Here’s the most important line from Melania Trump’s October 17 interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper:

“Sometimes I say I have two boys at home — I have my young son and I have my husband.”

One of them is running for President of the United States. He loves winning. And he loves to blame anyone else — everyone else — when he isn’t.

Two months ago, polls following Trump’s verbal war with a gold star family showed him losing the election badly. As I wrote at the time, his response was to complain that the election system was rigged. But as his poll numbers rebounded in September, Trump’s cries of “rigging” became more subdued.

After Trump’s disastrous first debate and the revelation of his own vile behavior toward women, his poll numbers plummeted again. And so, once again, Trump rails against a system that, he claims, must be rigged against him. Otherwise he’d be winning.

He pursued a similar strategy when it looked like might not have enough delegates to win the Republican nomination. (Remember when he said there would be riots if he didn’t get it?) When a process makes him the winner, he embraces it; when he fears failure, he denounces it.

This time, Trump has merged his baseless election-rigging rhetoric with his ongoing assault on freedom of the press. For Trump, scorched earth apparently includes destroying two essential pillars of American democracy: a free press and public confidence in the election process itself.

A recent Politco poll suggests that Trump’s message is getting through: 41 percent of voters think that the November election could be “stolen” from him.

The Relentless Assault On The Press

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has threatened to sue journalists and the media more than a dozen times. Here’s a small sample:

— On April 27, 2016, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Cay Johnston later tweeted, Trump personally called and threatened to sue him “if he doesn’t like what I report” in discussing Johnston’s book about Trump.

— On May 18, 2016, Trump told reporters for The Washington Post: “I will be bringing more libel suits…maybe against you folks.”

— On July 20, 2016, The New Yorker reported that Trump had threatened to sue his former ghostwriter Tony Schwartz for supposedly “defamatory statements” Schwartz had made to Jane Mayer about the book he “co-wrote” with Trump, The Art of the Deal.

— When The New York Times reported on women claiming that they had been victims of Trump’s sexual assaults, he threatened to sue.

Responsible Lawyers

Why hasn’t Trump followed through? After all, he’s not reluctant to litigate. In June, USA Today reported that Trump and his businesses have been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits.

And Trump has plenty of advisers with JDs — including Kellyanne Conway (George Washington University, ’92), who replaced Paul Manafort (Georgetown ’74) as campaign manager, senior adviser Boris Epshteyn (Georgetown ’07), and ubiquitous surrogate Kayleigh McEnany (Harvard ’16), among others. So what’s holding him back?

In mid-September, Trump tweeted, “My lawyers want to sue the failing @nytimes so badly for irresponsible intent. I said no (for now), but they are watching. Really disgusting.”

As Trump himself might say in response to that tweet, “I don’t think so.”

A more plausible reason is the restraining influence of Trump’s outside attorneys. Although Trump and his surrogates with law degrees can say whatever they want, litigators marching into a courtroom cannot. A trial attorney’s professional responsibilities transcend the whims of a client. Trump may think that he’s beyond the rules applying to everyone else. But his attorneys know they are bound by court requirements governing all lawyers’ conduct. And they risk serious sanctions for violating them.

A Lawyer’s Duty

One of Trump’s outside attorneys, Marc Kasowitz, signed the recent demand letters to the Times about Trump’s tax returns and sex scandals. Attorneys can send letters threatening lots of things. But when a controversy moves into a courtroom, it’s a whole new ball game.

Kasowitz is an accomplished and respected trial lawyer. Appropriately, he represents clients zealously – and Donald Trump is no exception. Even so, when it comes to lawsuits, even the best attorneys face two immutable constraints: the facts and the law. Most states have rules embodying the principles of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11. It provides that by signing a court filing, an attorney certifies that “after reasonable inquiry” that there is factual and legal support for the assertions it contains.

For Trump’s latest threats against the Times, those obstacles are so great that noted attorney Theodore Boutrous, Jr. called Kasowitz’s demand letter a “stunt.” Boutrous suggests that Trump’s real aim is to chill aggressive reporting into his activities.

Rules? What Rules?

The legal restrictions governing the attorneys who would file a Trump lawsuit also explain his February outburst:

“I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money… We’re going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.”

At one level, such bombast reveals Trump’s ignorance. Libel is a state-law tort constrained by First Amendment principles. A president’s views don’t figure in its application. At another level, Trump’s comments reveal a deeper danger.

Conservative law Professor Ilya Somin of the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University notes, “There are very few serious constitutional thinkers who believe public figures should be able to use libel as indiscriminately as Trump seems to think they should. He poses a serious threat to the press and the First Amendment.”

Baseless Conspiracy Theories

In his latest assault on the press, Trump asserts that the media is part of a larger conspiracy to rig the election. It extends, Trump claims, to rampant voter fraud that could rob him of victory. Vice presidential candidate Mike Pence tried to explain away Trump’s incendiary stance as referring only what he claims to be media bias.

But in his tweets, Trump himself set Pence and everyone else straight about his meaning:

“The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary – but also at many polling places – SAD.”

And: “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!”

The evidence refutes Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud. As I noted previously, Professor Justin Levitt at Loyola Law School – Los Angeles tracked all claims of alleged voter ID fraud and found a grand total of 31 credible allegations – out of more than one billion ballots cast. But facts have never mattered to a Republican presidential campaign that has become the worst reality TV show ever.

As Benjamin Franklin left Independence Hall following the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a woman approached him.

“Well, Doctor, what have we got,” she asked, “a republic or a monarchy?”

“A republic,” Franklin answered, “if you can keep it.”

On November 8, we’ll find out.

TRUMP’S TAX RETURNS: PART 2 — FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

Posted on October 11, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

At an October 10 rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump held up a document. Kurt Eichenwald describes what happened next:

“He told the assembled crowd that it was an email from Blumenthal, whom he called ‘sleazy Sidney.’ ‘This just came out a little while ago,’’ Trump said. ‘I have to tell you this.’ And then he read the words from my [Kurt Eichenwald’s October 21, 2015 Newsweek] article. “‘He’s now admitting they could have done something about Benghazi,’ Trump said, dropping the document to the floor. ‘This just came out a little while ago.'”

As Eichenwald explains, the words weren’t Blumenthal’s. Trump read from a distorted summary of Eichenwald’s 10,000-word Newsweek article attached to an email to John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman. It resulted from a Russian disinformation campaign tied to a recent Wikileaks release. A Russian-controlled news agency — Sputnik — reported the false story.

Eichenwald asks, “So how did Donald Trump end up advancing the same falsehood put out by Putin’s mouthpiece?”

“This is not funny,” Eichenwald continues. “This is terrifying. The Russians engage in a sloppy disinformation effort and, before the day is out, the Republican nominee for president is standing on a stage reciting the manufactured story as truth.”

Which Takes Us Back to Trump’s Income Tax Returns

Compared to Trump’s boast about being a sexual predator, his admission in the second debate that he paid no federal income taxes for years seems almost innocuous. So why does he still refuse to release his returns? Eichenwald’s latest revelation adds more evidence that the answer may be Russia. Like all things Trump, his words and deeds fit a pattern.

“He is not going into Ukraine, OK, just so you understand,” Trump declared in August. “He’s not going into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down. You can put it down. You can take it anywhere you want.”

“Well, he’s already there, isn’t he?” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos corrected him immediately, referring to Vladimir Putin’s illegal seizure of Crimea.

“OK,” Trump answered. “Well, he’s there in a certain way.”

Worse Than Ignorance?

A month after Trump’s declaration about Putin in Ukraine, he made what Trump’s campaign later called a mistake. Trump appeared on Russian state-sponsored television to criticize America. Meanwhile, he has praised Vladimir Putin continuously: “If he says great things about me, I’m going to say great things about him.”

Never mind that Putin is a cruel dictator who crushes dissent, makes a mockery of human rights, and orders the invasion of sovereign countries. Political opponents and critical journalists disappear or get assassinated. And there’s growing evidence that he’s trying to influence the election in Trump’s favor.

During the first presidential debate, Trump reacted defensively to Hillary Clinton’s concerns about Russians hacking into the Democratic National Committee’s computers. Rejecting the U.S. law enforcement consensus that Russian intelligence agents were behind that cyberattack, Trump said:

“She keeps saying ‘Russia, Russia, Russia,’ and maybe it was. It could be Russia, but it could be China, could also be lots of other people. It could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”

And at the second debate, he persisted: “[A]nytime anything wrong happens, they like to say the Russians are — she doesn’t know if it’s the Russians doing the hacking. But they always blame Russia.”

He knows better. Back in mid-August, Trump and his team received intelligence briefings that directly contradict his recent statements. And 48 hours before the second debate, the intelligence community and the Department of Homeland Security issued a joint statement that pointed directly to the Kremlin:

“The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations… We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

Why does Trump ignore undisputed evidence, defend Russia, and praise Putin? Here’s one possible answer: the personal financial self-interest of Trump and his top advisers.

Paul Manafort and Ukraine

When Georgetown Law School graduate Paul Manafort took over as campaign manager, the selection seemed to be the harbinger of an extreme makeover. Manafort would attempt for Trump what he’d accomplished for Ukrainian’s former president, Viktor Yanukovych, whom Manafort resurrected from disgrace to that nation’s highest office in only five years.

But Manafort’s ties to Ukraine’s pro-Putin former president led to accusations of secret cash payments to Manafort’s consulting firm. Then The Washington Post reported that the Trump campaign worked behind the scenes on a Republican convention platform plank that gutted the GOP’s longstanding support for Ukrainian resistance to the Russian-led intervention. Finally, the Associated Press reported that Manafort’s firm hired Washington, DC lobbyists to influence the American press and U.S. government officials on behalf of the pro-Putin Ukrainian Embassy. The cascading revelations of pro-Russian activity led to Manafort’s resignation.

Boris Epshteyn

After Manafort departed, another Georgetown Law graduate, Boris Epshteyn, became the most visible surrogate defending Trump’s continuing admiration for Russia’s top tyrant. Epshteyn was born in Russia and emigrated to the United States in 1993. Twenty years later, when New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg died in 2013, Epshteyn wrote,

“[I]t was the Lautenberg Amendment that allowed my family and me to emigrate to the United States of America in 1993. The Lautenberg Amendment, passed in 1990, loosened the restriction on refugee states and thereby allowed for tens of thousands of Jews like me from the former U.S.S.R. to come to America. The legislation was also applied to religious minorities from Iran, Vietnam and Burma, as well as other countries.”

Now that he is safely in the United States, Epshteyn supports a candidate who proposed a religious ban to keep others out. After receiving his JD in 2007, Epshteyn went to work at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCoy. According to his LinkedIn website page, a Russian theme has permeated his activities:

— June 2007 to present (overlapping with his time at Milbank from October 2007 to May 2009): Principal for Strategy International, providing “consulting and liaising services for domestic and international transactions with a focus on Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union.”

— June 2009 – July 2013: Managing director of business and legal affairs for West America Securities Corp. His duties were to “originate and locate funding for diverse domestic and international transactions, including private placements, public equity/debt offerings and mergers and acquisitions transactions.”

— July 2013 to present: Managing director of business and legal affairs for TGP Securities, Inc. In that position, he moderated an October 2013 panel discussion for a conference titled, “Invest in Moscow!”

In August 2016, Epshteyn became a senior adviser to the Trump-Pence campaign on “media, communications and foreign policy.” If Epshteyn is the important foreign policy adviser that he claims to be, it explains some of Trump’s bizarre denial about Putin.

Whose Party Line?

“First of all,” Epshteyn told a CNN interviewer on July 31 . “Russia did not seize Crimea. We can talk about the conflict that happened between Ukraine and the Crimea…But there was no seizure by Russia. That’s an incorrect statement, characterization, of what happened.”

That’s in line with Trump’s statement to George Stephanopoulos that Putin “is not going into Ukraine.” Observers dismissed Trump’s comment as a gaffe, but it’s the Kremlin’s position. And it’s blatantly false. The international community has condemned Putin’s invasion and annexation of Crimea. Period.

Like Trump, Epshteyn also points to Putin’s 82 percent approval rating as proof that Putin is a strong leader. But as Tom Brokaw observed on the September 11 edition of Meet the Press, “He’s not saying the other 18 percent are on their way to a gulag somewhere.”

All Roads Lead To Trump’s Tax Returns

Trump’s tax returns should confirm what he has now admitted publicly: that he hasn’t owed any federal income tax for years. But a far more sinister explanation for his unwillingness to release the returns is that they could complete a picture of Trump’s business connections to Russia that journalists are piecing together.

David Cay Johnston’s August investigation reveals that Russians are partners with Trump in many American projects: “Trump has tried at least five times to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, including efforts he made during his 2013 trip there. His name is on a 47-story building in Georgia, formerly part of the Soviet empire… Donald Trump Jr. said in 2008 that ‘in terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.'”

Kurt Eichenwald — the same reporter who revealed Russia’s disinformation effort relating to his 2015 article — published a September analysis in Newsweek: “Hoping to start its branding business in Russia, the Trump Organization registered the Trump name in 2008 as a trademark for projects in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Sochi… If the company sold its brand in Russia while Trump was in the White House, the world could be faced with the astonishing sight of hotels and office complexes going up in downtown Moscow with the name of the American president emblazoned in gold atop the buildings.”

Legal Eagles

Richard Painter and Norman Eisen are former chief ethics attorneys for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, respectively. Their op-ed for The Washington Post listed the numerous conflicts that would make a Trump presidency “ethically compromised.” Among the most serious are his family organization’s undisclosed financial ties to Russia, China, India, South Korea, and Turkey.

Labeling Trump’s actual or apparent conflicts “as obscure, profound, and dangerous,” they conclude: “The ethics lawyer who would have President Trump as his or her client would face a far more daunting task than either of us — or any of our colleagues in recent years — has ever confronted.”

“Conflict-of-Interest Laws, You’re Fired!”

How would President Trump resolve the massive conflicts that haven’t been disclosed fully to voters? However he chose. All of those elaborate ethics laws and rules applicable to cabinet members and other high-level government officials don’t apply to the president.

As Norman Eisen elsewhere observes, “Because the President of the United States is the single most consequential decision maker on the planet, Congress has decided his hands shouldn’t be tied on any issue because of conflicts of interest over any potential financial or personal gain.”

In September, Kurt Eichenwald concluded, “Never before has an American candidate for president had so many financial ties with American allies and enemies, and never before has a business posed such a threat to the United States. If Donald Trump wins this election and his company is not immediately shut down or forever severed from the Trump family, the foreign policy of the United States of America could well be for sale.”

The Russians have chosen their candidate for president of the United States. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

BIG LAW RESISTS THE ASSAULT ON DEMOCRACY

Posted on August 24, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Call them unsung heroes.

When attorneys in big law firms get things right, they deserve more attention than they receive. Recently, some of them have won important victories in the profession’s noblest pursuit: protecting our republic. And they’re not getting paid anything to do it.

Start with North Carolina. On July 29, a unanimous court of appeals threw out that state’s voter ID law. In an 83-page opinion, the court wrote that the law had targeted African Americans “with almost surgical precision.”

Behind that monumental win was an enormous investment of money and manpower — all of it pro bono. Daniel Donovan led a team of lawyers from Kirkland & Ellis LLP through two trials over a four-week period. More than fifty witnesses testified. After losing in the trial court — which issued a 479-page opinion denying relief — the plaintiffs appealed. On July 29, they won. Think of it as Kirkland & Ellis’s multi-million dollar contribution to democracy.

On, Wisconsin!

The same day that the court of appeals threw out North Carolina’s unconstitutional voter ID law, a federal judge in Madison invalidated Wisconsin’s effort to disenfranchise African Americans and Latinos. Big law firm partner Bobbie Wilson at Perkins Coie LLP was at the center of that effort. A nine-day trial and more than 45 witnesses (including six experts) culminated in Judge James B. Peterson’s 119-page ruling in favor of the plaintiffs.

On August 22, the seventh circuit court of appeals denied the request of Governor Scott Walker’s administration to stay Judge Peterson’s ruling.

North Dakota

Three days later, Richard de Bodo of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP won a challenge to North Dakota’s voter ID laws. The targets of that legislation were Native Americans.

Like similar statutes enacted throughout the country since 2010, voter ID laws in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and North Dakota were products of a Republican-controlled legislature and governorship. The real motivation behind such restrictions on a fundamental right is as ugly as it is obvious.

Fighting Against the Demographic Tide of History

In 2014, the Brennan Justice Center noted that North Carolina and Wisconsin were in select company: “Of the 11 states with the highest African-American turnout in 2008, 7 have new restrictions in place: Mississippi (73.1 percent), South Carolina (72.5), Wisconsin (70.5), Ohio (70.0), Georgia (68.1), North Carolina (68.1), and Virginia (68.1).”

Of the 12 states with the largest Hispanic population growth between 2000 and 2010, North Carolina was one of nine that made it harder to vote. The others were South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, Mississippi, South Dakota, Georgia, and Virginia.

Rigged Elections? Yes, But in Whose Favor?

Now that the Republican nominee for President of the United States is pushing a dangerous and destructive new theme, the battle to vote has now assumed a great significance.

“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged,” Donald Trump warned at a rally in Columbus, Ohio on August 1, right after the North Carolina federal appeals court ruled.

That evening he told an interviewer: “I’m telling you, November 8, we’d better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged. And I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away from us.”

Dedicated attorneys — especially those in big firms willing to donate enormous resources to the cause — have worked hard to protect the right of every eligible person to vote. If they hadn’t, then the North Carolina legislature might, indeed, have rigged the election in a key swing state that President Obama had won. But that’s not what Trump meant, was it?

No, he sees a different enemy.

“[P]eople are going to walk in, they are going to vote 10 times maybe. Who knows?” he said in an August 2 interview.

He now has a website page: “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election.” Such whining is actually much more than that. It’s a campaign tactic uniting two sinister and pervasive themes: racial division and attacks on the rule of law.

Facts Don’t Matter

Trump began stoking fear and division with a promise to build a wall to keep out Mexicans, whom he called rapists and drug dealers. He then coupled it with a “deportation force” to “round ’em up,” sending 11 million illegal immigrants “back where they came from.”

Then he professed ignorance about David Duke. (“I don’t know anything about David Duke… I know nothing about white supremacists.”) Before long, he unleashed hostility toward “Mexican” Judge Gonzalo Curiel. After scaring people, it was a short step for him to becoming their self-professed “law-and-order” savior.

Now he is wrapping his message in a long-discredited canard. Defenders of unconstitutional voter ID laws persist in fomenting “election fraud” paranoia, even though it lacks any factual basis. Professor Justin Levitt at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles tracked all claims of alleged voter ID fraud and found a grand total of 31 credible allegations – out of more than one billion ballots cast.

In the North Dakota case, Judge Daniel L. Hovland wrote, “There is a total lack of any evidence to show voter fraud has ever been a problem in North Dakota.”

Likewise, in the Wisconsin case, the judge ruled. “The Wisconsin experience demonstrates that a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities. To put it bluntly, Wisconsin’s strict version of voter ID law is a cure worse than the disease.”

And in the North Carolina case, a unanimous court of appeals concluded, “The record thus makes obvious that the ‘problem’ the majority in the General Assembly sought to remedy was emerging support for the minority party.”

Mob Mentality

The cry of phantom election fraud feeds Trump’s narratives, while taking them a perilous step farther: de-legitimizing an election that polls now show Trump is losing “hugely.” As his prospects sag, his vile rhetoric escalates.

Shortly after an August 10 poll showed Trump trailing in Pennsylvania by double digits, he went to that state and told an Altoona crowd, “Go down to certain areas and watch and study and make sure other people don’t come in and vote five times… The only way we can lose, in my opinion – I really mean this, Pennsylvania – is if cheating goes on… ”

Never mind that Pennsylvania hasn’t voted for a Republican Presidential nominee since 1988. Even an incumbent, George H.W. Bush, couldn’t carry it in 1992.

Trump then continued waving his red herring: “Without voter ID there’s no way you’re going to be able to check in properly.”

Scorched Earth

The real danger to democracy isn’t election rigging or cheating. It’s Donald J. Trump. De-legitimization – the ultimate ad hominem attack on a process to undermine its outcome – is a standard tactic from his deal-making playbook. When it appeared that he might not arrive at the Republican convention with enough delegates to secure the nomination, he warned about “riots,” if someone else won.

Never mind the rules; they’re for losers. Anyone fearing that Trump will win should fear more that he won’t.

Trump knows that facts don’t matter because – true or false – the branding sticks. For example, there was never any evidence to support Trump’s wild “birther” claims about President Obama in 2011. But five years later, 20 percent of Americans still believe — today — that he was born outside the United States.

Some people will always believe anything Trump says, even as he contradicts himself from one moment to the next. His infamous line was pretty accurate: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

Perhaps he is discovering that “any” was an overstatement. But his de-legitimization strategy worked against most Republican politicians, who folded like cheap suits rather than break from the man-baby who would be king. Now the stakes are higher. His targets are the rule of law, the essence of democracy, and the peaceful transfer of Presidential power that occurs every four years.

The Real Losers

The eventual victims of Trump’s scorched earth approach will be the American people. If, as with his false “birther” claims five years ago, 20 percent of voters – about half of his current supporters – believe that Trump’s defeat results from a “rigged” election that “cheaters” won, the collateral damage to the county will be profound.

Donald Trump lives in a simple binary world of winners and losers – and he’s all about winning at any cost. He measures success in dollars. His latest tactic makes democracy itself the loser. Try putting a price on that. And thank some big law firms and their attorneys who are willing to make the investment required to stand in his way.

THE ABA’S TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY

Posted on August 10, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

It’s a mere formality. Every five years, the Department of Education renews the ABA’s power to accredit law schools. The June 2016 session before a DOE advisory committee (NACIQI) was supposed to be just another step in the rubber-stamping process. The NACIQI staff had recommended approval. The committee’s three-day session contemplated action on a dozen other accrediting bodies, ranging from the American Psychological Association to the American Theological Schools. Sandwiched between acupuncture and health education, the agenda contemplated an hour for the ABA.

What could go wrong?

For starters, committee members grilled the ABA’s representatives for an entire afternoon.

Questions About Law Student Debt?

First up for the ABA was the chair of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Arizona Supreme Court Justice Rebecca White Berch. A committee member asked how the ABA assessed schools based on the interrelationship between student debt, bar passage rate, and graduate placement rates. Justice Berch said the ABA was looking “for a bar passing rate of 75 percent…. [W]as that part of your question?”

Actually, that was just a proposal set for an ABA Section hearing on August 6, but it wasn’t what the NACIQI had in mind.

NACIQI Member: “Sorry, no. I think my question also went to concern related to debt that students incurred while in law school and relationship of that to placement.”

ABA Managing Director Barry Currier tried to field that one:

“With respect to debt, we have been following a disclosure model for a number of years now and a lot of information is disclosed… [W]e collect information about student borrowing, but it is currently not part of the consumer information that schools are required to post with us… [T]here is no standard about how much debt is too much debt at this point in time.”

Let the squirming begin.

“So it may be,” Currier continued, “that as evidence mounts that students don’t shop very effectively and that as uncapped student loans are available, that we need to be more paternalistic, if you will, or more — we may need to make more information required and adopt standards around how much debt is too much debt.”

Placement Rates?

NACIQI: “What would be an appropriate placement rate for a law school?”

Currier: “Well our standards do not require any specific employment…[W]e don’t have a specific standard that a school must achieve in terms of placement.”

…

NACIQI: “But you are the ones who identified that legal education is very expensive… And if they can’t find a job it wrecks their lives.”

…

NACIQI: “[Y]ou can tell a lot from some of these low performing schools. And a school that sticks out to me is Whittier Law School in California… [T]he enrollment has dropped 51 percent since 2010, yet tuition has increased 31 percent since 2008.”

He wasn’t finished.

“Over 105 million dollars of Title IV funding has gone into this school. All the while, one in four graduates of this law school has obtained a full-time attorney job within nine months… Appalachian School of Law, University of LaVerne, Golden Gate, all have abysmal placement rates… [S]o I guess my question is specifically related to these low performing institutions: what are you guys doing?”

Then he answered his own question:

“[W]hen we look at these low performing schools, you guys are doing absolutely nothing.”

Can We Talk About Something Else?

Justice Berch’s attempt to change the subject was unavailing.

NACIQI: “We are talking about student debt, right, so — I guess you are not answering my question, and so I would like for us to stay on that… I just want to make sure we are talking about what is your responsibility and your response to these lower performing schools. I mean, have they been put on probation? That’s my first question.”

Justice Berch: You make a valid point. The answer is — has anyone yet been put on probation? No…”

…

NACIQI: “How many institutions have you denied accreditation to for low pass rates?

Justice Berch: For low pass rates alone, none.”

…

NACIQI: “Over the past five years how many institutions have you withdrawn your accreditation from?”

Currier: “Zero, zero.”

You Think The ABA Can’t Do The Job?

During the NACIQI’s discussion on the motion to recommend renewal of the ABA’s accreditation power, one member put the problem bluntly:

“I am troubled that the ABA just simply isn’t independent enough for this responsibility… I find it very difficult to think that they are going to be objective enough to continue to carry out this responsibility. And I reluctantly conclude that the ABA is not the appropriate accreditor for our law schools…[T]he crushing debt load on thousands and thousands of students is too serious for us… And I think the debt load is not going to get better if we say yes to this motion.”

Another member added: “I think that objectivity is important as you go through this process, so I would think an independent body that does not have the conflict of interest that the ABA has.”

It’s Worse Than They Thought

The NACIQI didn’t consider a recent illustration of the ABA’s independence problems. Former ABA President Dennis Archer is chairman of the national policy board of Infilaw — a consortium of three for-profit law schools. At those schools — Arizona Summit, Florida Coastal, and the Charlotte School of Law — students graduate with six-figure debt and dismal prospects for a meaningful job requiring bar passage. (Full-time long-term JD-required job placement rate ten months after 2015 graduation: Arizona Summit — 40 percent; Florida Coastal — 39 percent; Charlotte — 26 percent.)

On November 18, 2013, Archer and Infilaw’s chief executive officer co-signed a seven-page tour de force warning the DOE about the perils of applying the “Gainful Employment Rule” to “proprietary law schools and first professional degree schools in general.” The letter (on Infilaw stationery) argued, among other things, that the proposed rule was unnecessary because the ABA — as an accrediting body — ensures that InfiLaw “must offer an education that will help students achieve their goals.”

Six months later, Archer became chairman of the ABA’s Task Force on the Financing Legal Education. A year later — June 2015 — the Task Force acknowledged that 25 percent of law schools obtain at least 88 percent of their revenues from tuition. But it refused to recommend an obvious remedy: financial penalties for schools where students incur massive law school debt in exchange for dismal long-term JD-required job prospects.

The Task Force’s recommendations were embarrassingly inadequate, but the ABA House of Delegates accepted them.

One More Chance?

The ABA’s culture of self-interest and insularity has now created a bigger mess. Some NACIQI members favored the “nuclear” option: recommending denial of the ABA’s accrediting authority altogether. The committee opted to send a “clear message” through less draconian means.

The final recommendation was to give the ABA a 12-month period during which it would have no power to accredit new law schools. Thereafter, the ABA would report its progress in addressing the committee’s concerns, including the massive debt that students are incurring at law schools with poor JD-required placement rates.

As one member put it, “It is great to collect data, but they don’t have any standard on placement. What’s the point of collecting data if you can’t…use the data to help the students and protect the students…”

Another member summarized the committee’s view of the ABA: “This feels like an Agency that is out of step with a crisis in its profession, out of step with the changes in higher ed, and out of step with the plight of the students that are going through the law schools.”

The day of reckoning may not be at hand, but it’s getting closer.

THE NHL, BRAINS, AND LAWYERLY DENIAL

Posted on July 28, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Back in 1988, the Surgeon General of the United States issued a report about the addictive qualities of tobacco. In summary form, its “Major Conclusions” were:

“1. Cigarettes and other forms of tobacco are addicting.

2. Nicotine is the drug in tobacco that causes addiction.

3. The pharmacologic and behavioral processes that determine tobacco addiction are similar to those that determine addiction to drugs such as heroin and cocaine.” — The Health Consequences of Smoking: Nicotine Addiction: A Report of the Surgeon General.

All of that had been obvious to many smokers who’d tried unsuccessfully to quit — and to many others who had watched their efforts. But six years later, the presidents and CEOs of the seven major tobacco companies faced a continuing avalanche of tobacco-related lawsuits. Appearing jointly before a congressional committee on the health effects of tobacco, Congressman Ron Wyden posed a question that he asked each of them to go down the line and answer:

“Do you believe nicotine is not addictive?”

With only minor variations in word choice, one-by-one they replied, “I believe nicotine is not addictive.”

It became an iconic scene of corporate denial. Three years later, the companies did an abrupt about-face and settled the largest class action and government cases against them.

Not Quite Today’s “Tobacco Moment”

The tobacco episode came to mind as I read Senator Richard Blumenthal’s first two questions to Gary Bettman, commissioner of the National Hockey League. But there’s a critical difference: The tobacco executives stood together as one against the onslaught; Bettman and the NHL are all alone.

In a March 2016 congressional hearing, Representative Jan Schakowsky asked Jeff Miller, the NFL’s senior vice-president for health and safety, whether there was a link between football and degenerative brain disorders like chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

“The answer to that is certainly, yes,” Miller said.

It seemed reasonable to ask similar questions about hockey, and Blumenthal posed these two (among others) in a letter to Bettman:

Do you believe there is a link between CTE and hockey? If you do not, please explain how head trauma in hockey differs from head trauma in football.
Do you dispute that the documented CTE of former NHL players, like Derek Boogaard, is linked to injuries sustained while playing in the NHL?

Bettman reframed the first question and ignored the second one.

A Lawyerly Treatment

Bettman is a graduate of NYU Law School. The league’s litigation attorneys probably drafted his 24-page response to Blumenthal. But he signed what is essentially a legal brief outlining the NHL’s defenses to former players’ pending litigation against the NHL.

Bettman’s reframing of the first question is subtle: “The core of your letter goes to the question of why the NHL has not acknowledged a ‘link’ between playing hockey and developing CTE if an NFL executive may have done so with respect to football.”

Then he recites in great detail the scientific community’s failure to reach consensus on the causation between concussions in contact sports and CTE. Scientific consensus is the way experts approach research issues. But it has never been the standard by which ordinary, everyday people decide whether to engage in an activity. For example, it takes far less than a reasonable degree of medical and scientific certainty — the legal standard implicit in Bettman’s letter — for a parent to make a decision about what is best for a child.

For starters, a scientific study requires a sufficiently large sample size. For CTE, the sample is tiny and will be for a long time. Confirmation of CTE occurs only by examination of a deceased person’s brain. To date, only 200 brains with CTE have been analyzed. As athletes die, the sample size will increase, but it’s a slow process. Even in brains found to have CTE, isolating all variables to identify the specific contribution of contact sports is a daunting task that will take years, assuming it happens at all.

Here’s another way of reframing Bettman’s position on this issue: The NFL shouldn’t have acknowledged the link, either.

And Another Thing…

Bettman then suggests that the key difference between football and hockey is the frequency of hits to the head. That’s why for years boxers were the exclusive subjects of brain injury studies. Interestingly, footnote 37 of his letter defends fighting as an essential element of hockey:

“Outside the context of ‘staged fighting,’ we note also that players (not just Club General Managers) believe that some types of fighting — though penalized — play a useful and worthwhile role in protecting ‘skilled players’ from being targeted by more aggressive opponents because any such ‘targeting’ activity is capable of being appropriately ‘policed’ by a teammate… [S]pontaneous fights — which, of course, are also penalized — provide a ‘safety valve’ that enables players to confront opposing players in a less dangerous fashion than they might otherwise engage in through dangerous ‘stick work’ or cheap shots.”

But not to worry. Bettman notes that only two of the league’s video-analyzed concussions resulted from fights. And please, let’s not discuss NHL Deputy Director Bill Daly’s 2011 email: “Fighting raises the incidence of head injuries/concussions, which raises the incidence of depression onset, which raises the incidence of personal tragedies.”

And Another Thing…

Finally, Bettman says that the NHL has educated players on the dangers of concussions. But he says it’s premature to provide a formal warning about CTE. In fact, he suggests, it could even be dangerous to do so. Players might decide they have an irreversible brain disease when they have only depression or other treatable disorders that have similar symptoms.

He concludes with an example. Rather than respond to Blumenthal’s question about Derek Boogaard, Bettman turns to another former player, Todd Ewen. After Ewen committed suicide. his autopsy showed no CTE. Because his widow said that she and Todd “were sure Todd must have had CTE,” Bettman leaps to an absurd conclusion: “This, sadly, is the type of tragedy that can result when plaintiffs’ lawyers and their media consultants jump ahead of the medical community.”

The Real Troublemakers

For Bettman, the villain in “the current public dialogue about concussions in professional sports (as well as youth sports)” seems to be “media hype driven in part by plaintiffs’ counsel.”

In December 1994, another NYU Law School graduate, NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said: “On concussions, I think this is one of those pack journalism issues, frankly…The problem is a journalist issue.”

Twenty years later, what Bettman describes as the absence of medical consensus about the causal relationship between concussions and CTE didn’t stop the NFL from agreeing to a $1 billion class action settlement with 5,000 former players claiming brain injury. On the sliding scale of monetary awards to those victims, former players who died “with CTE” are in the second highest dollar recovery category — with a maximum of $4 million.

The NHL is only two decades behind.

ASSOCIATE PAY AND PARTNER MALFEASANCE

Posted on July 13, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Cravath, Swaine & Moore raised first-year associate salaries from $160,000 to $180,000 — the first increase since January 2007. As most law firms followed suit, some clients pushed back.

“While we respect the firms’ judgment about what best serves their long-term competitive interests,” wrote a big bank’s global general counsel, “we are aware of no market-driven basis for such an increase and do not expect to bear the costs of the firms’ decisions.”

Corporate clients truly worried about the long-run might want to spend less time obsessing over young associates’ starting salaries and more time focusing on the behavior of older attorneys at their outside firms. In the end, clients will bear the costs of short-term thinking that pervades the ranks of big firm leaders. Some already are.

Historical Perspective

Well-paid lawyers never generate sympathy. Nor should they. All attorneys in big firms earn far more than most American workers. But justice in big law firms is a relative concept.

Back in 2007 when associate salaries first “jumped” to $160,000, average profits per equity partner for the Am Law 100 were $1.3 million. After a slight dip to $1.26 million in 2008, average partner profits rose every year thereafter — even during the Great Recession. In 2015, they were $1.6 million — a 27 percent increase from seven years earlier.

In 2007, only 19 firms had average partner profits exceeding $2 million; in 2015 that group had grown to 29. But the average doesn’t convey the real story. Throughout big law, senior partners have concentrated power and wealth at the top. As a result, the internal compensation spread within most equity partnerships has exploded.

Twenty years ago, the highest-paid equity partner earned four or five times more than those at the bottom. Today, some Am Law 200 partners are making more than 20 times their lowest paid fellow equity partners in the same firm.

It Gets Worse

Meanwhile, through the recent prolonged period of stagnant demand for sophisticated legal services, firm leaders fueled the revolution of partners’ rising profits expectations by boosting hourly rates and doubling leverage ratios. That’s another way of saying that they’ve adhered stubbornly to the billable hours model while making it twice as difficult for young attorneys to become equity partners compared to 25 years ago.

The class of victims becomes the entire next generation of attorneys. Short-term financial success is producing costly long-term casualties. But those injuries won’t land on the leaders making today’s decisions. By then, they’ll be long gone.

So What?

Why should clients concern themselves with the culture of the big firms they hire? For one answer, consider two young attorneys.

Associate A joins a big firm that pays well enough to make a dent in six-figure law school loans. But Associate A understands the billable hour regime and the concept of leverage ratios. Associate attrition after five years will exceed 80 percent. Fewer than ten percent of the starting class will survive to become equity partners. Employment at the firm is an arduous, short-term gig. In return for long-hours that overwhelm any effort to achieve a balanced life, Associate A gets decent money but no realistic opportunity for a career at the firm.

Associate B joins one of the few firms that have responded to clients demanding change away from a system that rewards inefficiency. Because billable hours aren’t the lifeblood of partner profits, the firm can afford to promote more associates to equity partner. Associate B joins with a reasonable expectation of a lengthy career at the same firm. Continuity is valued. Senior partners have a stake in mentoring. The prevailing culture encourages clients to develop confidence in younger lawyers. Intergenerational transitions become seamless.

Associate A tolerates the job as a short-term burden from which escape is the goal; Associate B is an enthusiastic participant for the long haul. If you’re a client, who would you want working on your matter?

The Same Old, Same Old

As clients have talked about refusing to pay for first-year associate time on their matters, big firms’ upward profit trends continue. But the real danger for firms and their clients is a big law business model that collapses under its own weight.

As it has for the past eight years, Altman-Weil’s recently released 2016 “Law Firms In Transition” survey confirms again the failure of leadership at the highest levels of the profession. Responses come from almost half of the largest 350 firms in the country. It’s a significant sample size that provides meaningful insight into the combination of incompetence and cognitive dissonance afflicting those at the top of many big firms.

When asked about the willingness of partners within ten years of retirement to “make long-term investments in the firm that will take five years or more to pay off,” fewer than six percent reported their partners’ “high” willingness to make such investments. But at most firms, partners within ten years of retirement are running the place, so the investments aren’t occurring.

Almost 60 percent of firm leaders reported moderate or high concern about their law firms’ “preparedness to deal with retirement and succession of Baby Boomers.” Meanwhile, they resolve to continue pulling up the ladder, observing that “fewer equity partners will be a permanent trend going forward” as “growth in lawyer headcount’ remains a “requirement for their firms’ success.”

Do law firm leaders think they are losing business to non-traditional sources and that the trend will continue? Survey says yes.

Do law firm leaders think clients will continue to demand fundamental change in the delivery of legal services? Survey says yes. (56 percent)

Do law firm leaders think firms “are serious about changing their legal service delivery model to provide greater value to clients (as opposed to simply reducing rates)”? Survey says no. (66 percent)

Do clients think law firms are responding to demands for change? Survey says most emphatically no! (86 percent)

But do law firm leaders have confidence that their firms are “fully prepared to keep pace with the challenges of the new legal marketplace”? Survey says yes! (77 percent)

If cognitive dissonance describes a person who tries to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously, what do you call someone who has three, four or five such irreconcilable notions?

At too many big law firms the answer is managing partner.

LAW SCHOOLS AND THE NEW YORK TIMES

Posted on June 23, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

On June 17, Noam Scheiber’s article, “An Expensive Law Degree and No Place to Use It,” appeared in The New York Times. He focused on individual human tragedies resulting from the legal education bubble.

Four days later, Professor Steven Davidoff Solomon countered with his Times column, “Law School Still a Solid Investment, Despite Pay Discrepancies.” Notwithstanding the title, he’s moving in Scheiber’s direction.

Learning from Mistakes

Professor Solomon’s prior ventures into legal education haven’t gone particularly well. In November 2014, he wrote “[T]he decline in enrollment could lead to a shortage of lawyers five years from now.” Highlighting Thomas Jefferson School of Law as one of the marginal schools fighting to remain alive, Solomon suggested, “It may be tempting to shut them in these difficult times, but it can cost tens of millions to open a new one. Better to invest and cut back on expenses for a while and see what happens.”

Consistent with his area of expertise — financial and securities regulation — Professor Solomon was relying on the market to work. But in legal education, it never gets a chance. Bankruptcy laws and the federal student loan program insulate law schools from accountability for their graduates’ poor employment outcomes.

Waiting to “see what happens” became a triumph of hope over reality. For the Thomas Jefferson class of 2013, the full-time long-term JD-required employment rate nine months after graduation was 29 percent. For the class of 2014, it was 30 percent. Even with an additional month for the class of 2015 to find jobs, the ten-month FTLT-JD-required employment rate was 24 percent. But the school did win that nagging fraud case brought by a recent graduate.

In April 2015, Solomon’s column on legal education and the profession was so riddled with errors that I climbed out of a hospital bed to write a responsive post culminating in this question, “Whatever happened to The New York Times fact-checker?”

Almost There

With all of that carnage in the rearview mirror, Professor Solomon’s June 21 article assumes a more moderate tone. Most importantly, he acknowledges the different legal education markets that exist for new graduates: “[I]t is clear that it is harder out there for the lower-tier law schools and their graduates.”

Noting that some big firms announced starting salary increases to $180,000 for the class of 2016, he cautions, “Only the lucky 17 percent of graduates earn salaries this high. To be in this group, you needed to go to a top 10 school or graduate in the higher ranks of the top quartile of law schools. Things are harder for every other law graduate.”

Solomon also accepts the bimodal distribution of starting salaries that results from the different markets for law graduates: “[W]hile 17 percent of graduates earned median salary of $160,000 in 2014, about half had a median starting salary of $40,000 to $65,000.”

The article could and should have ended with this: “Either way, it is clear that it is harder out there for lower-tier law schools and their graduates.”

In Defense of Fellow Professors?

Four days before Solomon’s article, Noam Scheiber’s Times piece profiled once-hopeful students at Valparaiso University School of Law. They’d incurred massive debt for a JD degree, but couldn’t find jobs requiring one. Scheiber also quoted a professor who recently headed the school’s admissions committee: “If we could go back, I think we should have erred a little more on the side of turning people down.”

Immediately after the publication of Scheiber’s article, social media took over when a law professor complained in an open letter to Scheiber: “Have you seen this line of peer-reviewed research, which estimates the boost to earning from a law degree including the substantial proportion of law graduates who do not practice law?”

The cited “line of peer-reviewed research” consisted of one study, co-authored by that professor in 2013. When Scheiber invited the professor to identify any factual errors in his article, the professor provided six alleged mistakes. For anyone interested in diving into those weeds, Scheiber posted the six items and his response on his Facebook page, including this:

“It’s not worth reviewing the controversy about your work on law graduate earnings here, since the criticisms are well-established. But suffice it to say, I think it’s strange to respond to a claim that the economic prospects of people graduating after the recession have fundamentally changed relative to those who graduated before the recession with a study that only includes people who graduated prior to 2009.”

(UPDATE: On Friday, June 24, the professor responded to Scheiber’s response.)

Among the many other criticisms to which Scheiber refers is the 2013 study’s failure to consider differences among law schools in their graduates’ incomes. In other words, it ignored the actual law school markets.

Nearing the Finish Line

Professor Solomon’s latest article centers on the importance of recognizing those different markets. But he still cites the 2013 study for the proposition that “most law students earned a premium of hundreds of thousands of dollars over what they would have earned had they not gone to law school, even taking into account the debt they accrue.”

Even so, Solomon’s slow walk away from the 2013 study improves on his April 2015 column. There, he relied on it to suggest that an “acceleration in compensation results in a premium of $1 million for lawyers over their lifetime compared with those who did not go to law school.” Now he’s down to “hundreds of thousands of dollars” for “most law students.”

Professor Solomon teaches at a top school, UC-Berkeley. He knows that plenty of students at other schools have a tough road ahead. Solomon no longer refers to an overly broad $1 million lifetime premium. He has also added a qualifier (“most law students” — meaning a mere 51 percent) — to whatever he thinks the study proves about the economic benefit of a JD. In other words, he has rendered the 2013 study meaningless to anyone considering law school today.

So why does Professor Solomon continue to cite the study at all? Better not to ask. Accept progress wherever you find it.

ABOUT THAT LAWYER SHORTAGE…

Posted on May 4, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Facts are stubborn things — almost as stubborn as persistent academic predictions that boom times for attorneys are just around the corner.

Back in 2013, Professor Ted Seto at Loyola Law School-Los Angeles observed, “Unless something truly extraordinary has happened to non-cyclical demand, a degrees-awarded-per-capita analysis suggests that beginning in fall 2015 and intensifying into 2016 employers are likely to experience an undersupply of law grads, provided that the economic recovery continues.”

In November 2014 after the Bureau of Labor Statistics proposed a new and deeply flawed methodology for measuring attorney employment, Professor Seto weighed in again: “If the new BLS projections are accurate, we should see demand and supply in relative equilibrium in 2015 and a significant excess of demand over supply beginning in 2016.” His school’s full-time long-term bar passage employment rate for the class of 2015 was 62 percent — slightly better than the overall mean and median for all law schools, which are just under 60 percent.

Likewise in 2014, Professor Rene Reich-Graefe at Western New England University School of Law used what he described as “hard data” to argue, “[C]urrent and future law students are standing at the threshold of the most robust legal market that ever existed in this country.” The Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics published his dubious analysis leading to that prediction. Within ten months of graduation, only 43 percent of 2015 graduates from Professor Reich-Graefe’s school found full-time long-term jobs requiring bar passage.

Fact-sayers v. Self-interested Soothsayers

To his credit, Professor Jerry Organ at the University of St. Thomas School of Law has been fearless in challenging the relentless optimism of his academic colleagues. And he does it with the most persuasive of lawyerly approaches: using facts and evidence.

Analyzing the ABA’s recently released law school employment reports for all fully-accredited law schools, Professor Organ notes that the number of graduates dropped in 2015. But for the second straight year, so did the number of full-time long-term jobs requiring bar passage.

Professor Organ offers a number of explanations for this result: declining bar passage rates; regional factors that reduced hiring in Texas and elsewhere; the impact of technology. But whatever the reasons, he suggests, “[T]his employment outcomes data provides a cautionary tale.”

Proceeding Without Caution

“The fact that the employment market for law school graduates appears to have stagnated and even declined to some extent over the last two years,” Professor Organ continues, “may mean that risk averse potential law school applicants who focus on post-graduate employment opportunities when assessing whether to invest in a legal education may remain skittish about applying, such that this year’s good news on the applicant front may be somewhat short-lived.”

The “good news on the applicant front” to which Professor Organ refers is his projection that applications for the fall 2016 entering class are on track to increase for the first time since 2010. But he offers a cautionary note there as well. Law schools at the upper end “will see more enrollment growth and profile stability in comparison with law schools further down the rankings continuum.”

Perilous Predictions

Some prognostications are safer than others. Here’s mine: Faculty and administration at weak law schools will continue using the overall decline in the number of all applicants to persist in their misleading sales pitches that now is a “Great Time to Go to Any Law School.” They will discourage inquiry into more relevant facts.

But here they are: At the 90th percentile of all 204 ABA-accredited law schools, the full-time long-term bar passage-required employment rate for 2015 graduates was just under 80 percent. At the 75th percentile, it was 67 percent. But at the 25th percentile, it was 49 percent. And at the 10th percentile, it was only 39 percent.

It will always be a great time to go to some law schools. It will never be a great time to go to others.

WARM BODIES

Posted on April 27, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Colleges have entered a game that law schools have been playing for years. According to a recent New York Times front page headline, “Colleges Seek Warm Bodies From Overseas.” The title of the online version was equally pointed: “Recruiting Students Overseas to Fill Seats, Not to Meet Standards.”

For years, law schools have been dropping standards to fill classrooms. Marginal schools have been the worst offenders, and the profession is now paying the price in declining bar passage rates. But even among top schools, a more subtle and profitable technique has pervaded law school business plans for years: expanding LLM programs.

The Numbers

From 2006 to 2013, the number of law students enrolled in non-JD programs increased by almost 50 percent — to more than 11,000. Leading the way are LLM programs that now exist at more than 150 law schools. And students from foreign countries are flocking to them.

What began decades ago as a noble effort to encourage international cultural diversity has become a cynical method of revenue generation. The Times article focuses on colleges that use foreign recruiters. But its money quotes apply to law schools:

“[T]he underlying motivation for the university…is to get warm bodies in the door.”

“It is ethically wrong to bring students to the university and let them believe they can be successful when we have nothing in place to make sure they’re successful.”

“[C]olleges began to look at foreign students, who pay full tuition, as their financial salvation.”

Need Money?

Warm bodies. Graduate outcomes that aren’t the schools’ problem. Students who pay full tuition. If you’re running a law school as a business, the solution to declining revenues from a JD program becomes three letters: LLM.

Professor George Edwards at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law explains:

“I would like to think that U.S. law schools are creating LLM programs or expanding existing programs primarily for altruistic reasons…The reality is that law schools are businesses, and to stay afloat they must generate revenue to pay law school expenses, such as faculty salaries. Law school revenues primarily come from tuition revenues, and revenues are down due to fewer U.S. students enrolling in the degree programs for the basic U.S. law degree, the JD.”

“U.S. law schools have been seeking ways to make up for lost revenue,” Professor Edwards continues. “One way is to create or expand enrollment for international LLM students who may not have the same worries that are driving JD enrollment downwards.”

And so, he concludes,

“The desire to increase law school revenue has triggered a proliferation of new LLM programs and triggered the expansion of existing LLM programs.”

So What’s the Problem?

What exactly should a law school’s mission be? Some deans are unwilling to ask the question because they fear honest answers: revenue generation, short-term profits, and maximizing U.S. News rankings. Moving away from those safe harbors risks reorienting the profession toward what it was when they decided to become lawyers.

An institution’s mission statement should be the starting point for every decision its leaders make. Law schools are no exception. From the faculty hired to students admitted to programs offered, clear goals produce coherent behavior. But at law schools throughout the country, discussions about objectives — what they are and what they should be — aren’t happening.

Restating platitudes is easy. Developing a statement of principles to govern conduct is a challenge. Requiring consistent action in accordance with those principles creates accountability.

For centuries, the legal profession has occupied a transcendent role in the preservation of civilization. Law schools have been the custodians of that tradition. To retain that stature, the people who run them should view their responsibilities as something more than managing just another business. If they don’t, their schools will become exactly that.

THE REAL STORY OF THE NEW YORK PRIMARY

Posted on April 20, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

It was a “Dewey Defeats Truman” moment.

Shortly after the polls closed on primary election night in New York, CNN made a bold prediction. Its exit polling showed Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders locked in a tight Democratic primary race. Clinton’s win would be close, Wolf Blitzer said: 52 percent to 48 percent.

Less than an hour later, that prediction was as laughable as the famous November 3, 1948 Chicago Tribune headline announcing that voters had elected Thomas E. Dewey President of the United States.

Statistically, the CNN call was far worse. In the end, Truman beat Dewey 49 to 45 percent. Clinton won New York — 58 to 42 percent.

When the News is News

One interesting aspect of the CNN mistake is how quickly it disappeared from public sight. That’s because all major media outlets use exit polling to predict results as soon as they can. First-predictors are the first to attract viewers. There’s no incentive for any of them to throw mud on a process that they all use as a marketing gimmick.

Another aspect is the paucity of discussion over what went wrong at CNN. I don’t know the answer, but this article isn’t about that. It’s about the real lesson of the episode: The use of statistics can be a perilous exercise.

Law Schools

Data are important. It’s certainly wise to look at past results in weighing future decisions. But it’s also important to cut through the noise — and separate valid data from hype.

For example, if less than one-third of a particular law school’s recent graduates are finding full-time long-term jobs requiring a JD, prospective students are wise to consider carefully whether to attend that school. But it becomes more difficult when some law professor argues that the average value of a legal degree over the lifetime of all graduates is, say, a million dollars.

It’s even more challenging when law deans and professors repeat the trope as if it were sacrosanct with a universal application every new JD degree-holder from every school. And it sure doesn’t help when schools with dismal full-time long-term JD employment outcomes tout, “Now is the Time to Fulfill Your Dream of Becoming a Lawyer.”

Law Firms

Likewise, based on their unaudited assessments, leaders of big law firms confess that only about half of their lateral hires over the past five years have been breakeven at best. And that not-so-successful rate has been declining.

Law firms are prudent to consider carefully that data before pursuing aggressive lateral hiring as a growth strategy. But it becomes more difficult when managing partners seek to preside over expanding empires. And it doesn’t help when law firm management consultants keep overselling the strategy as the only means of survival.

Data should drive decisions. But the CNN misfire is a cautionary tale about the limits of statistical analysis. Sometimes numbers don’t tell the whole story. Sometimes they point people in the wrong direction. And sometimes they’re just plain wrong.

CRAVATH SURVIVES

Posted on April 6, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Partner defections from Cravath, Swaine & Moore are so rare that when they happen, it’s major news. Without exception, such events generate predictions that the firm’s lockstep compensation structure is doomed. Scott Barshay’s move to Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison provides the latest fodder for such false prophets.

From The Wall Street Journal: “The move raises questions about the ability of law firms that tie partner compensation to seniority to retain top talent during an M&A boom.”

From The American Lawyer: The move “casts new doubts on the viability of Cravath’s pure lock-step model of compensation, an outlier in a market where rivals have a freer hand to invest in top talent.”

As Yogi Berra said, “It’s deja vu all over again.”

In 2010, Barshay Was a “Young Gun”

Six years ago, I wrote about three young partners featured prominently in The Wall Street Journal. In their late-30s and early-40s, they had “taken a more pro-active approach, building new relationships and handling much of the work that historically would have been taken on by partners in their 50s.”

This week, I went back and read the Journal article again. One of those partners was Scott Barshay, then 44-years-old.

“In the current big law world,” I wrote in June 2010, “Cravath’s experiment is risky. Will young partners remain loyal or use their newly gained client power to pursue financial self-interest elsewhere? Will Cravath be forced to modify or abandon lock-step so that it can retain young partners controlling clients and billings?”

“I don’t know. Equally significant, I suspect those most directly affected by what the article characterizes as a ‘sea change at one of the best-known and most conservative of white-shoe law firms’ don’t know, either.”

Six Years Later

Well, now there’s a record: no sea change yet. Cravath gave Barshay an opportunity to develop clients and a reputation. He’s now a “go-to” corporate dealmaker. And he’s picking up his marbles — if he can — and “going to” Paul Weiss.

“More significant, say legal experts, is the prospect that Barshay’s departure will weaken Cravath’s much-vaunted cultural ‘glue’,” reports The American Lawyer’s Julie Triedman.

Who are these “legal experts,” anyway? Probably the same consultants and headhunters who benefit most from two pervasive and dubious big law firm strategies: growth for the sake of growth and aggressive lateral partner hiring.

More Data to Come

The reports that Barshay’s move could affect Cravath’s compensation structure assume that he left for more money. Paul Weiss’s chairman fueled those rumors by describing his firm’s system as modified lockstep that provides “flexibility at the upper end for star performers.” At Cravath, the upper end of the pay structure is reportedly $4 million. Barshay will probably make more at Paul Weiss. But at some point, does the answer to how much is enough always have to be “more”?

Headhunters offer predictable analyses. According to The American Lawyer, Sharon Mahn, “a longtime legal recruiter and founder of Mahn Consulting in New York who frequently places top partners at elite firms,” said Barshay’s defection “really sends a message that no firm is immune, that old-school firms can no longer rest on their laurels. This is a game-changing move.”

Those words might scare some big law firm leaders. After all, the warning is a twofer: it feeds their fears along with their confirmation bias. But it won’t faze Cravath. Departures like Barshay’s are rare, but the firm has seen them before.

As Cravath’s current presiding partner C. Allen Parker noted, “Partners are in lockstep systems because they believe it’s the best system for their clients and provides the most satisfying partnership environment.”

The “Deja Vu” Part

In May 2007, a reporter for The American Lawyer asked Cravath’s then-presiding partner Evan R. Chesler whether partners would stick around if the firm made less money.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. “I think there is more glue than just money.”

We now know the answer. Most will stick around and the firm properly ignores the rest. Barshay wasn’t the first “young gun” featured in the May 2010 Wall Street Journal article to leave the firm. That distinction went to James Woolery. In January 2011, he went to JP Morgan Chase as a senior dealmaker.

Two years after that, Woolery negotiated a huge three-year pay package to join Cadwalader, Wickerhsam & Taft as the chairman’s heir apparent. On the eve of his elevation to the top spot, Woolery left to co-found an activist hedge fund. According to the Journal, Paul Weiss agreed to jettison its activist investor representations to make room for Barshay. So maybe the two Cravath young guns will meet again — on opposite sides of the table.

Motives and Outcomes

Only Barshay knows for sure why he left Cravath. According to Thomson Reuters, It ranked second worldwide in announced deals for 2015. Paul Weiss was nineteenth. Barshay offered the standard “great opportunity” rhetoric that always accompanies such moves.

“This was such an amazing opportunity for me and for our clients that I couldn’t say no,” Mr. Barshay told The New York Times. “Joining Paul, Weiss was like getting an invitation to join the dream team.”

Most of corporate America thought he was already on one. At Paul Weiss, he’ll have to develop his own — a task far more daunting than fielding the clients gravitating to Cravath. Talent can create value, but underestimating the value of a franchise is a big mistake.

The Cravath glue remains.

THE LATEST BIG LAW FIRM STRATEGY: PERFECTING ERROR

Posted on March 30, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

NOTE: Amazon is running a promotion. The KINDLE version of my novel, The Partnership, is available as a free download from March 30 through April 3, 2016.

Two months ago in “Big Law Leaders Perpetuating Mistakes,” I outlined evidence of failure that most big law firm leaders ignore. Back in December 2011, I’d covered the topic in “Fed to Death” The recently released trade paperback version of my latest book, The Lawyer Bubble – A Profession in Crisis, includes an extensive new afterword that begins, “The more things change…”

The failure is a ubiquitous strategy: aggressive inorganic growth. In response to facts and data, big law firm leaders aren’t stepping back to take a long, hard look at the wisdom of the approach. Instead, they’re tinkering at the margins in the desperate attempt to turn a loser into a winner. To help them, outside consultants — perennial enablers of big law firms’ worst impulses — have developed reassuring and superficially appealing metrics. For anyone who forgot, numbers are the answer to everything.

Broken Promises

One measure of failure is empirical. Financially, many lateral partners aren’t delivering on their promises to bring big client billings with them. Even self-reporting managing partners admit that only about half of their lateral hires are above breakeven (however they measure it), and the percentage has been dropping steadily. In “How to Hire a Home-Run Lateral? Look at Their Stats,” MP McQueen of The American Lawyer writes that the “fix” is underway: more than 20 percent of Am Law 200 firms are now using techniques made famous by the book and movie “Moneyball.”

“Using performance-oriented data, firms try to create profiles of the types of lawyers they need to hire to help boost profits, then search for candidates who fit the profile,” McQueen reports. “They may also use the tools to estimate whether a certain candidate would help the firm’s bottom line.”

There’s an old computer programmer’s maxim: “Garbage in, garbage out.”

Useless Data

Unlike baseball’s immutable data about hits, runs, strikeouts, walks, and errors, assessing attorney talent is far more complicated and far less objective. Ask a prospective lateral partner about his or her billings. Those expecting an honest answer deserve what they get. Ask the partner whether billings actually reflect clients and work that will make the move to a new firm. Even the partner doesn’t know the answer to that one.

Group Dewey Consulting’s Eric Dewey, who is appropriately skeptical about using prescriptive analytics in this process, notes, “An attorney needs to bring roughly 70 percent of their book of business with them within 12 months just to break even.” He also observes that more than one-third bring with them less than 50 percent.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with assessing the likely value that a strategically targeted lateral hire might bring to the firm. And there’s nothing wrong with using data to inform decisions. But that’s different from using flawed numerical results to justify growth for the sake of growth.

Becoming What You Eat

Beyond the numbers is an even more important reality. Partners who might contribute to a firm’s short-term bottom line may have a more important long-term cultural impact. It might even be devastating.

Dewey & LeBoeuf — no relation to Group Dewey Consulting — learned that lesson the hard way. During the years prior to its collapse, the firm hired dozens of lateral rainmakers. But as the firm was coming apart in early 2012, chairman Steven H. Davis was wasting his breath when he told fellow partners there wasn’t enough cash to pay all of them everything they thought they deserved: “I have the sense that we have lost our focus on our culture and what it means to be a Dewey & LeBoeuf partner.”

Half of the partners he was addressing had been lateral hires over the previous five years. Most of them had joined the firm because it promised them more money. They hadn’t lost their focus on culture. They had redefined it.

TRUMP, CHRISTIE, EDUCATION, AND STUDENT DEBT

Posted on March 2, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Did anyone else notice Governor Chris Christie’s expression as he stood behind Donald Trump on Super Tuesday evening? Perhaps he wasn’t feeling well. Or perhaps he was discovering more than he wanted to know about the man he’d endorsed for the presidency of the United States.

Monday night before the big primaries, Christie had told his New Jersey radio audience, “I am the highest level endorser that Donald Trump has had. I’m the person with the most experience in governing that is in his circle.” He said that there was “absolutely no question” that Trump listens to him.

Self-Delusion

“I’ve known him personally for 14 years,” Christie continued. If so, he should ask himself why Trump would listen to him. Now that Christie has dropped out of the primary race, why isn’t he just the latest addition to the Republican front-runner’s list of “losers”? That’s Trump’s world — winners (like him) and losers (like Sen. John McCain). Besides, Trump prides himself as an outsider who disdains almost anyone associated with government.

Maybe Christie will be an exception to Trump’s loser rule. The day after Super Tuesday, a Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind poll found that the dominant word that New Jersey voters used to describe their governor was “bully.” The next most frequent adjective was “arrogant.” Maybe Trump sees those as redeeming qualities. Perhaps he sees a bit of himself in the New Jersey governor.

Political Death Spiral

There’s another possible explanation for the odd look on Governor’s Christie’s face Tuesday evening: unhappy realization. The New Jersey “bully” had become a Trump “tool.” He’d played all-in with his political career and the impact was swift and certain.

Christie’s former national finance co-chair, Meg Whitman, slammed him:

“Chris Christie’s endorsement of Donald Trump is an astonishing display of political opportunism. Donald Trump is unfit to be president. He is a dishonest demagogue who plays to our worst fears. Trump would take America on a dangerous journey. Christie knows all that and indicated as much many times publicly. The governor is mistaken if he believes he can now count on my support, and I call on Christie’s donors and supporters to reject the governor and Donald Trump outright. I believe they will. For some of us, principle and country still matter.”

According to the Fairleigh Dickinson poll, after endorsing Trump, Christie’s New Jersey statewide approval rating dropped from 33 percent to 27 percent.

Desperate Measures

Christie said that he didn’t agree with Trump on everything, but he did on taxes, job creation, and strengthening America’s leadership in the world. How does he know where Trump stands on anything? The only Trump “positions” on those issues are sound bites that produce audience applause, not substantive debate. His positions change constantly — even on whether he knows certain people.

For example, on Sunday morning, he told Jake Tapper at CNN that he didn’t even know who David Duke, the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, was:

“Just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke…I know nothing about David Duke. I know nothing about White Supremacists. And so you’re asking me a question about people that I know nothing about….I just don’t know anything about him.”

The next day, Trump said he didn’t hear Tapper’s question: “I was sitting in a house in Florida, with a bad earpiece. I could hardly hear what he’s saying.”

Anyone who buys that explanation deserves everything that Trump is selling.

On more substantive policy issues, Trump is all over the map. He says whatever gets him through the moment. He says whatever his audience wants to hear. For Republican primary voters supporting him, substance has yielded to anger that has created a cult of celebrity. They cheer empty words.

Actions v. words

But glimmers of Trump’s real self emerge from his actions. Here’s an example of Trumpism at work. Last fall, he decried the government for making money on student loans. In a November 2915 forum in Iowa, he added that too many graduates are “borrowed up, and they can’t breathe, and they get through college and the worst thing is, they go through that whole process and they don’t have any job.” If elected, Trump said he planned “do something very big with student loans” — including providing refinancing “for people who have loans who literally can’t do anything.”

“Something very big.”

What could it be? Something “great”; something “huge.” Maybe there’s a clue in Trump University.

It used a Wall Street address that implicated New York registration requirements. As Steven Brill reported last November, “New York State law requires that anything calling itself a university must apply, be vetted, have all instructors vetted and then be certified, none of which Trump did. Despite repeated warnings from state education regulators beginning in 2005, Trump persisted in operating out of 40 Wall St. until winding down operations in 2010.”

Before folding, the “University” was renamed the “Trump Entrepreneur Initiative.” It didn’t offer degrees. The course of study began with free seminars on insider real estate moneymaking techniques. It encouraged attendees to purchase additional sessions — up to one-on-one mentoring packages costing $35,000. It left many “students” in debt.

Measuring Success

But Trump’s program made money for Trump. According to Brill’s examination of public records, “Trump University collected approximately $40 million from its students – who included veterans, retired police officers and teachers – and that Trump personally received approximately $5 million of it, despite his claim, repeated in our interview, that he started Trump University as a charitable venture.”

Trump claims to have surveys showing a 98 percent satisfaction rate — “better than Harvard” — and is confident that he will win all of the pending lawsuits involving the now defunct “university” bearing his name. But perhaps what really bothers him about the government “making money on student loans” is that the money should be going to him instead.

By the way, because Trump University and its successor Trump Enterprise Initiative failed, maybe that makes him a loser, too.

LSAT v. GRE – RHETORIC v. REALITY

Posted on February 24, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

[NOTE: The trade paperback edition of my book, The Lawyer Bubble – A Profession in Crisis (Basic Books, 2016) — complete with an extensive new AFTERWORD — is now available at Amazon.]

The Wall Street Journal reports that the University of Arizona College of Law has begun accepting GRE scores in lieu of LSATs. Two other schools — the University of Hawaii and Wake Forest — are performing validation studies to determine whether they, too, should make the move to GREs.

At Arizona, Dean Marc Miller said, “This isn’t an effort to declare war on anybody. This is an effort to fundamentally change legal education and the legal profession.”

To “fundamentally change legal education and the legal profession,” accepting GRE scores instead of LSATs seems like a misfire. Beyond the rhetoric is a reality that might reveal what else could be going on.

The GRE Is Easier

According to the executive director of prelaw programs at Kaplan Test Prep, Jeff Thomas, “The GRE is regarded as the easier test. The entirety of the LSAT was meant to mimic the law-school experience, while the GRE was not created for that particular purpose.”

But the fact that the GRE is easier doesn’t explain why some law schools want to use it. Self-interest and U.S. News rankings might.

LSATs Are Telling a Sad Story

As LSAT scores of entering classes have dropped at many schools, so have bar passage rates. According to the University of Arizona School of Law’s ABA Reports, its median LSAT for matriculants in 2012 was 161. For 2015, it was 160. That’s not much of a decline, but at the 25th percentile, the LSAT score went from 159 to 155.

According to the school’s website, in July 2013, 92 percent of first-time test takers passed the Arizona bar exam. In July 2015, the passage rate was 84 percent.

The GRE Isn’t the LSAT

Such trends suggest another possible reason for allowing students to substitute the GRE for the LSAT: It buys law schools time and complicates prelaw student decision-making. At many schools, year-over-year LSAT score comparisons have documented the willingness of many deans to accept marginal students. The easiest way to stop such time series analyses is to make that test optional.

The GRE will be a new data point. Until schools report those scores for two or three years, it won’t reveal trends in admitted student qualifications. That will deflect attention away from the “declining quality of admitted students” narrative that has become pervasive. Never mind that the narrative is pervasive because, based on LSATs and undergraduate GPAs for matriculants at many schools, it’s true. (Between 2012 and 2015, the University of Arizona School of Law’s undergraduate GPA for matriculants dropped at all three measuring points — the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles, according to its ABA reports for those years.)

The Heavy Hand of U.S. News rankings

In addition to confusing the story on the declining quality of applicants, law schools have another reason to accept the GRE. Applicants will take both exams and pick the better result for law school consumption. It’s analogous to the current ABA rule allowing schools to use only a student’s highest LSAT score.

Prelaw students who do badly on the LSAT will submit the GRE score instead. The ongoing self-selection of poor LSAT scores away from the applicant pool will increase the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile LSAT values for the scores that remain. Until all schools adopt the GRE option, it will help the U.S. News rankings of the schools that do it.

There’s precedent for such behavior. Most high school students take the SAT and the ACT. Where a college allows either score, students submit the higher one.

Look Beyond the Rhetoric

Trends at the two other schools mentioned in the WSJ article might be relevant to all of this. At the University of Hawaii, compare the 2012 and 2015 ABA forms reporting LSATs for matriculants:

75th percentile: 2012 – 160; 2015 – 158

50th percentile: 2012 – 158; 2015 – 154

25th percentile: 2012 – 154; 2015 – 151

Likewise, at Wake Forest the results are:

75th percentile: 2012 – 165; 2015 – 162

50th percentile: 2012 – 163; 2015 – 161

25th percentile: 2012 – 159; 2015 – 157

At this point, the appropriate legal phrase is res ipsa loquitur — the thing speaks for itself.

The ABA is planning to determine independently whether the GRE meets its accreditation requirement allowing schools to use the LSAT or another “valid and reliable” test when making admissions decisions. The profession’s leading organization is likely to approve the switch. That’s because doing so will perpetuate what has become the ABA’s central mission in legal education: protecting many law schools from scrutiny and meaningful accountability.

That’s about as far as you can get from trying “to fundamentally change legal education and the legal profession.”

SCALIA’S VACANCY — NEWS v. OPINION

Posted on February 16, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

The battle lines are drawn: President Obama will name his choice to succeed Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court; Senate Republicans are determined to block it. One aspect has become striking: Which side has the better argument that history supports its position? It turns out, there’s another battle happening there: news versus opinion.

On the same day, February 16, 2016, two of the most widely read newspapers in the world, carried these contradictory headlines:

“In Court Fight, History Backs Obama” appeared in The New York Times.

“No Clear Confirmation Parallels in Recent Court History,” said The Wall Street Journal.

Who’s Right?

Unless you read both newspapers, you wouldn’t think there was any disagreement on the question of historical precedent for filling the current Supreme Court vacancy. The Times article appears on the paper’s op-ed page. But here’s the real kicker: The WSJ carries its version as a straight news item.

The Journal’s readers saw “news” declaring “no clear confirmation parallels” to the present situation. It cites and purports to distinguish only two earlier precedents.

In 1968, the Senate prevented President Lyndon Johnson’s lame-duck appointment of Justice Abe Fortas to succeed the retiring Earl Warren as Chief Justice and the naming of Judge Homer Thornberry to the Fortas seat. Eventually, President Nixon filled those vacancies. (The Journal doesn’t mention that it took Nixon two unsuccessful nominations — Haynsworth and Carswell — before getting Blackmun over the hump.)

The other Journal example is the oft-cited case of Justice Anthony Kennedy. A Democratically-controlled Senate approved him unanimously in 1988. Apparently believing that distinctions without a difference matter, WSJ reporter Brent Kendall notes that prior to Kennedy’s confirmation, the Senate rejected President Reagan’s first choice, Judge Robert Bork, and that his second choice, Judge Douglas Ginsburg, withdrew.

At the end of his article, Kendall identifies Jess Bravin — Wall Street Journal Supreme Court reporter with a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a J.D. from University of California-Berkeley — as having “contributed to this article.”

Another Opinion

At best, The Wall Street Journal article is incomplete. Ironically, The New York Times op-ed includes more facts than the Journal’s news item. Professor Timothy S. Huebner notes: “On 13 occasions, a vacancy on the nation’s highest court has occurred — through death, retirement or resignation — during a presidential election year. This does not include the most recent and frequently cited example, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was nominated by Ronald Reagan in November 1987 to fill a vacancy and won confirmation from a Democratic-controlled Senate in February 1988.”

Professor Huebner continues, “In 11 of these instances, the Senate took action on the president’s nomination. In all five cases in which a vacancy occurred during the first quarter of the year the president successfully nominated a replacement.”

What’s the Difference?

The distinction between news and opinion matters. Editors have a responsibility to make that difference clear, especially in our age of political polarization. Due to the power of confirmation bias, consumers of media tend to limit themselves to views they embrace. It keeps people comfortable in belligerent adherence to an understanding that may, in fact, be incomplete or even wrong.

In October 2014, PEW Research reported, “Those with consistently conservative political values are oriented around a single outlet — Fox News — to a much greater degree than those in any other ideological group: Nearly half (47%) of those who are consistently conservative name Fox News as their main source for government and political news.” Both Fox News and The Wall Street Journal are parts of the Rupert Murdoch family’s media empire.

Liberals tend to be, well, more liberal in their choices of news sources. According to the PEW study, “On the left of the political spectrum, no single outlet predominates. Among consistent liberals, CNN (15%), NPR (13%), MSNBC (12%) and the New York Times (10%) all rank near the top of the list….”

The predispositions of their constituencies create a special obligation for the media. There’s money in fomenting divisiveness. Blurring the line between “news” and “opinion” might advance a political agenda or sell advertising space, but it’s making the country’s problems worse.

In my opinion.

A DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

Posted on February 10, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

The Wall Street Journal’s front page headline tells only part of story: “Legal Fees Cross New Mark: $1500.” The February 9 article lists the range of partner hourly rates at some big firms: Proskauer Rose from $925 to $1475; Ropes & Gray from $895 to $1450; Kirkland & Ellis from $875 to $1445; and so on and so on and so on.

That’s great if you can get it, but most firms can’t. The 2016 Georgetown/Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor “State of the Legal Profession” tells a second part of the story: realization and collection rates have plummeted. How much a firm bills doesn’t matter; what it actually brings in the door does. In 2005, collections totaled 93 percent of standard rates. By the end of 2015, it was down to 83 percent.

The Music Stopped, Almost

Annual standard hourly rate increases have blunted the profit impact of declining collections, but trees stopped growing to the sky about ten years ago. Except in bankruptcy courts. That’s the third element of the story and the profession’s dirty little secret: one of the most lucrative big law practice areas has no client accountability for its fees. Even worse, the process facilitates pricing behavior that spills over into other practice areas.

Take the recent Journal article. Where did the reporters get the detailed hourly rates for the firms it identified? A note at the bottom of the chart reveals the answer: “Source: Bankruptcy court filings.” If managing partners exchanged their firms’ hourly rates privately, it would raise serious antitrust issues. But in bankruptcy, publicly filed fee petitions do all of that work for them.

It gets worse. In bankruptcy, no one forces attorneys into the discounting that produces the current 83 percent overall average collections rate. Remember the infamous “Churn that bill, baby” email involving DLA Piper a few years ago? That was a bankruptcy case. Traditional mechanisms of accountability are ineffective. Unlike a solvent corporate client, a company in trouble has little leverage in dealing with its outside counsel. Until it emerges from a Chapter 11 reorganization, the days of minimizing legal expenses to maximize shareholder value are suspended. If it winds up in Chapter 7 liquidation, those days are gone forever.

At the same, time, the lawyers handling the bankruptcy have little risk. They get paid ahead of everyone else. Lawyers for creditor committees are a theoretical check only. They, too, get paid first and the members of the exclusive club of big law firm attorneys reappear. Their roles may change — debtor’s counsel in one bankruptcy may be creditors’ attorney in another and the liquidating trustee’s lawyer in yet another. In none of those capacities is there any incentive to rock the long-term, “paid-in-full hourly rate” boat.

More Theoretical Accountability

The U.S. Trustee receives all attorneys’ fees petitions before courts approve them. The Trustee can object, but it doesn’t have sufficient resources to analyze detailed line item time and expense entries on the thousands of pages that firms submit. The Trustee issued new guidelines that became effective for cases filed after November 1, 2013. Perhaps they will make a difference. But in the end, they are still guidelines and the final decision on attorneys fees resides with the bankruptcy judge.

As hourly rates have increased to the $1500 level that the Journal highlights, courts have given their rubber stamps of approval to the trend. Rather than challenge the high rates that all firms charge, bankruptcy judges determine merely that they are “reasonable and customary” because, after all, comparable firms are charging them for comparable work. The circularity is as obvious as the resulting payday for the lawyers. Someday, media attention and popular outrage may force meaningful change that has yet to occur.

Worse Than It Seems

Considering the 83 percent collection rate in the context of the nearly 100 percent rate for bankruptcy lawyers yields an insight relevant to the fourth and final part of the larger big law firm story. In particular, the current 83 percent collection rate is deceptively high. If a firm’s average is 83 percent and its bankruptcy lawyers collect close to 100 percent, then firms with large bankruptcy practices have non-bankruptcy clients pushing some practice areas into deep concessions off standard rates.

Likewise, combining this fact with two conclusions from the Georgetown/Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor Report produces ominous implications for such firms:

— “Demand for law firm services…was essentially flat in 2015,” and

— Bankruptcy experienced the largest negative growth rate in demand by practice area.

Unless the country heads into a recession that few economists expect, the continuing reduction in bankruptcies will drive overall average collections dramatically lower. That’s bad news for big law firms with significant bankruptcy practices.

Back in 2011, an icon of the bankruptcy bar, the late Harvey Miller of Weil, Gotshal and Manges, defended his firm’s approach to legal fees: “The underlying principle is, if you can get it, get it.”

Miller isn’t around anymore, but his unfortunate credo for a noble profession survives — for now.

[NOTE: The trade paperback edition of my book, The Lawyer Bubble – A Profession in Crisis (Basic Books) — complete with an extensive new AFTERWORD — will be released on March 8, 2016 and is now available for pre-order at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.]

BIG LAW LEADERS PERPETUATING MISTAKES

Posted on February 3, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

In January 2014, the annual Georgetown/Peer Monitor “Report on the State of the Legal Market” urged law firm leaders to shun a “growth for growth’s sake” strategy. The year 2013 had been a record-setter in law firm mergers; lateral partner acquisitions were the centerpiece of what many big law firm leaders passed off as a “strategic plan.”

The Report offered this damning observation:

“In our view, much of the growth that has characterized the legal market in recent years… masks a bigger problem — the continuing failure of most firms to focus on strategic issues that are more important for their long-term success than the number of lawyers or offices they may have.”

Since then, the situation has deteriorated.

The Destabilizing Lateral Hiring Frenzy Continues

In 2015, there were more lateral moves in big law firms than at any time since 2009. Morgan, Lewis & Bockius’s mass hiring of 300 former Bingham Mccutcheon partners contributed significantly to the total, but the continuing lateral frenzy is evident. Was the 2014 Georgetown/Peer Monitor wrong? Has aggressive inorganic growth become a winning strategy?

The answers are No and No.

Those answers are not news, but a recent ALM Legal Intelligence analysis suggests that they still are correct. As MP McQueen reports in the February issue of The American Lawyer, “[The] study of 50 National Law Journal 350 firms conducted with Group Dewey Consulting of Davis, California, and released in November found that 30 percent of lateral partner hires delivered less than half their promised book of business after a complete year.”

The co-author of the report notes that lateral hiring is “the top growth strategy for many firms today but there is an incredible lack of empirical evidence as to whether laterals are achieving their promise.”

It’s actually worse than that. The evidence suggests that most lateral hires are disappointments to the firms that acquire them.

Cognitive Dissonance

The survey reported that 96 percent of respondents said that “hiring lateral lawyers with a client following” was “very important” or “moderately important” to their revenue growth strategy. In other words, virtually all firms continue to defy the Georgetown/Peer Monitor Report’s 2014 admonition.

But the survey respondents also said that only 49 percent of lateral hires delivered at least 75 percent of expected client billings. The other 50 percent did worse. Almost one-third of laterals delivered less than half of what they’d promised. And remember, those are anonymous, unaudited responses from the leaders who brought those laterals into the firm. The reality is far worse than they admit.

Likewise, as I’ve written previously, managing partners responding to the Hildebrandt/Citi 2015 Client Advisory’s confidential survey admitted that only about half of their lateral partners were break-even at best. As the Client Advisory reported:

“For all the popularity of growth through laterals, the success rate of a firm’s lateral strategy can be quite low. For the past few years, we have asked leaders of large firms to quantify the rate of success of the laterals they hired over the past five years. Each year, the proportion of laterals who they would describe as being above ‘break even’, by their own definition, has fallen. In 2014, the number was just 54 percent of laterals who had joined their firms during 2009-2013.” (Emphasis supplied)

That’s down from two years ago when managing partners self-reported to Citi/Hildebrandt a self-defined break-even or better rate of 60 percent. At alarming speed, most big law leaders are running their firms backwards.

Costly Mistakes

The cultural impact of aggressive inorganic growth is not susceptible to measurement, so it gets ignored in the prevailing law-firm-as-a-business model. But there are plenty of recent examples of the potentially catastrophic costs. Just look at Howrey, Dewey, and Bingham McCutchen — three recent collapses on the heels of stunning lateral growth spurts.

“Nonsense,” big law leaders are telling themselves. “We’re not like those failed firms. They had unique problems. We’re special.” Sure you are. Things look great until it becomes apparent only too late that current partner profits are the only glue holding partners together. If money lured laterals into your firm, someone else’s more reliable money can lure them away.

But even in the not-so-long run, top-line growth through misguided lateral hiring produces bottom-line shrinkage. Laterals are expensive on the front end. On the back end, it can take years for the failure of financial expectations to become apparent. The ALI study estimates that lateral hiring misfires can reduce law firm profit margins by as much as 3 percent and profits per equity partner by 6 percent.

Why?

If lateral hiring is bad, why are so many firms committed to it as a growth strategy. One answer is that it’s not always bad. Some of my best friends are laterals. Their moves benefitted them and their new firms. In every one of those cases, culture was at least as important as money to the partners’ decisions to relocate and their new firms’ desire to recruit them.

But that doesn’t account for firms that continue to pursue aggressive inorganic growth as an unrestrained strategic policy. When the odds of success are no greater than the flip of a coin, confirmation bias displaces judgment that should be a key attribute of true leadership.

That leads to another explanation for the continuing lateral hiring frenzy: The opposite of leadership. Most managing partners relish the creation of ever-expanding empires over which they can preside. Having made more than enough money to feed their families for generations, now they’re feeding their egos.

Unfortunately, those appetites can be insatiable.

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TRUMP AND THE MORGAN LEWIS MESS

STUDENT LOANS AND BETSY DeVOS

ANOTHER BIG LAW FIRM STUMBLES

OPEN LETTER #3 TO PRESIDENT-ELECT TRUMP: A JOB FOR JEFF SESSIONS

OPEN LETTER #2 TO PRESIDENT-ELECT TRUMP: YOUR ELECTORAL COLLEGE RANT

OPEN LETTER #1 TO PRESIDENT-ELECT TRUMP

INDIANA TECH: ANOTHER COSTLY LESSON IGNORED

JAMES COMEY AND THE FBI

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S ATTORNEY GENERAL? — PART 2

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S ATTORNEY GENERAL? — PART 1

TRUMP’S THREATS

TRUMP’S TAX RETURNS: PART 2 — FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

BIG LAW RESISTS THE ASSAULT ON DEMOCRACY

THE ABA’S TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY

THE NHL, BRAINS, AND LAWYERLY DENIAL

ASSOCIATE PAY AND PARTNER MALFEASANCE

LAW SCHOOLS AND THE NEW YORK TIMES

ABOUT THAT LAWYER SHORTAGE…

WARM BODIES

THE REAL STORY OF THE NEW YORK PRIMARY

CRAVATH SURVIVES

THE LATEST BIG LAW FIRM STRATEGY: PERFECTING ERROR

TRUMP, CHRISTIE, EDUCATION, AND STUDENT DEBT

LSAT v. GRE – RHETORIC v. REALITY

SCALIA’S VACANCY — NEWS v. OPINION

A DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

BIG LAW LEADERS PERPETUATING MISTAKES

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