Sexual Harassment

* Waymo and Uber head to court in self-driving car battle. Uber’s characterizing Waymo’s allegations of industrial espionage as a conspiracy theory and hopes no one reads too much into the fact that Uber ran an industrial espionage group for years. [NPR]

* On February 2, Ropes & Gray was engaged by USA Gymnastics to investigate allegations of sexual abuse by Larry Nassar. Hey gang, we all loved the movie, but Groundhog Day doesn’t mean you actually get a do-over on all the stuff you screwed up before. [American Lawyer]

* John Dowd and Jay Sekulow don’t want Mueller to interview Trump. Ty Cobb thinks transparency and cooperation are the best policy. The existence of this story suggests Dowd and Sekulow are winning the internal struggle. [Business Insider]

* The Supreme Court isn’t going to intervene to protect Pennsylvania’s gerrymandered districts… [Courthouse News Service]

* … So, Pennsylvania Republicans are looking into impeaching the state supreme court justices who ruled against them. [Daily Intelligencer]

* Is this the least qualified lawyer to helm a Gitmo case? He certainly thinks so. [NY Times]

* Speaking of Gitmo, there’s a fight brewing over the Defense Department’s recent decision to strip prisoners of their rights to own their own art. [Hyperallergic]

* When the Brits refuse to extradite to the U.S., maybe it’s time to reconsider prison conditions. [The Intercept]

* Katten Munchin opens up in Dallas. [Law360]

* In case you missed it, Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times has noticed a trend when it comes to Chief Justice Roberts and who he’s been aligning himself with at the Supreme Court. He may not yet be a moderate, but he seems to be shying away from “the reliably right-wing triumvirate” of Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch. [New York Times]

* “The document speaks for itself.” All three of former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates’s lawyers are withdrawing as counsel, and will only explain why in documents filed under seal. Only his Biglaw attorney who is known for his plea deals remains. Gates is under indictment in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. [POLITICO]

* According to the latest year-end report from the Wells Fargo Private Bank’s Legal Specialty Group, law firm revenue and profits were up in 2017, and demand had increased for legal services. As usual, the most profitable firms at the top of the market outperformed their smaller counterparts. [American Lawyer]

* Trump administration policies having to do with immigration, specifically the H-1B visa program for foreign workers, may force many Biglaw firms to move to their practices to the cloud sooner than they would have liked. In times of “political uncertainty” like these, Biglaw can’t rely on “offshore labor arbitrage” for IT outsourcing. [TechTarget]

* The GC of the American Red Cross has resigned following the publication of a report that he praised a former colleague who was the subject of an internal investigation and pushed out of the organization for alleged instances sexual misconduct. [Corporate Counsel]

* Disgusting: A Georgia lawyer who asked a witness to recant an eyewitness account of her son’s molestation has politely gave up his license to practice law after pleading guilty to felony witness tampering and attempting to suborn perjury. [Big Law Business]

* According to his friends, President Trump is reportedly planning to ask Attorney General Jeff Sessions to prosecute special counsel Robert Mueller and his team. Considering he’s done nothing wrong, it’s anyone’s guess as to what Mueller could possibly be prosecuted for, but that’s neither here nor there. [CNBC]

* For the first time in more than 80 years, the Senate has confirmed a circuit court judge with a missing blue slip. Yesterday, Judge David Stras of the Minnesota Supreme Court was confirmed to the Eighth Circuit, with a 56-42 vote that threw decades-old tradition to the wind. [The Hill]

* “It’s really important that lawyers in large firms know that they can sign up….” In the short time since the initiative was announced, more than 500 lawyers have signed up to take on cases for the Time’s Up legal defense fund, and they’ll be able to provide free consultations to victims of workplace sexual harassment. [Big Law Business]

* The robots are coming: Former payroll managers from Dechert claim in a federal age and gender bias suit that they were laid off because they were the oldest women employees in the department. The firm says that’s not the case, since it was cloud-based technology, not discrimination, that took their jobs. [Legal Intelligencer]

* A California appellate court has breathed new life into a proposed class action that accuses Tinder of charging older users more money to use the enhanced version of the app. The judge who wrote the opinion reversed the lower court using slang very familiar to dating app aficionados. We’ll have more on this later. [The Recorder]

* Just in time for the State of the Union, the Ninth Circuit ruled that immigrant children can be railroaded out of the country without access to a lawyer. Maybe they’ll avoid Trump’s ire tonight. [The Hill]

* Have you read about the Presidents Club dinner? If not, then you can read here, but it’s basically Tailhook for rich people. Now read about the law firm partners who may or may not have shown up including a Fried Frank partner who “did not attend the dinner and left shortly after arriving” which is an Escher painting of a statement. [Legal Cheek]

* New study from ALM Intelligence and Harvard Law School suggests part of the reason women are underrepresented at the partnership level is a propensity to selecting lower risk paths earlier in their career, locking them out of greater opportunities. Of course, this fails to answer what happens in the law that tends to encourage women to step off the path, but it’s valuable for diagnosing the problem. [American Lawyer]

* Money laundering with the Russians… yeah, lawyers aren’t supposed to do that. [Daily Business Review]

* Texas judge blocks law requiring respect for unborn children, provoking a fierce outcry from politicians worried about the sanctity of life. Texas has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, but who really cares about that? I mean, once they get past negative 8-and-a-half months they stop being cute. [Dallas Morning News]

* Sad news, the former shadow attorney general of the UK, media lawyer Arthur Davidson, has passed at 91. [The Guardian]

* Grumpy cat should be a little less grumpy after winning $710,000 in a licensing case. [Courthouse News Service]

* Remember that judge who gave a Stanford swimmer 6 months for a rape conviction? Yeah, he’s poised to get kicked off the bench. [NY Daily News]

* Can you get a DUI in an autonomous vehicle? A lot of people aren’t familiar with State of Oregon v. The Autobots. [Versus Texas]

* Ty Cobb is a lot less eager to meet with Mueller under oath than his client. [New York]

* Apparently “AI” is now a verb. That’s… awful. [Legal Week]

* Your summer associate lunch plans have taken a hit — Le Bernardin sued over everything from shortchanging employees to sexual harassment. [Le Bernadin]

* Your work email is probably in the Dark Web. It’s also probably on your firm website, but that doesn’t sound as menacing. [National Law Journal]

* New York will only do business with ISPs that adhere to net neutrality in a move that many states are expected to copy. I’m sure the states rights-loving politicians who worked tirelessly to kill neutrality will hail this as a triumph of federalism. [New York Law Journal]

* The effort to hijack “religious freedom” to legalize discrimination continues to be plagued by members of Satanic Temples invoking the same law to secure personal freedoms that governments routinely curtail. [Huffington Post]

* Cy Vance is barring donations to his campaign from lawyers with business before his office, resolving a conflict that was obvious to everyone but him. [ABC News]

* Mary Jo White admits Debevoise made a mistake in naming confidential witnesses in its report that functionally exonerated the University of Rochester in a massive sexual harassment investigation. Well, when they’re described as “confidential” witnesses this would seem to be a mistake. [American Lawyer]

* Prosecutors want to retry Senator Menendez and have a list of demands for the new trial like, “not letting defense attorneys talk.” [New Jersey Law Journal]

* HLS students open a startup bringing AI into document categorization following in the proud tradition of Harvard undergrads who dropped out to become tech moguls. [Legaltech News]

* Discrimination suit against Winston & Strawn hinges on what it means to be a “partner.” In other words, can firms placate attorneys with empty titles without accepting the consequences? [Litigation Daily]

* Pennsylvania’s gerrymandered map gets the benchslap. [NPR]

* Paramedics rushed to Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s apartment on Friday after the diabetic jurist experienced a low blood sugar episode. She was not hospitalized, and went to work because she’s “doing fine.” Somewhere, President Trump is cackling gleefully about one of his predictions. [POLITICO]

* After a months-long drought, the Supreme Court will finally issue some opinions today. This is the slowest the high court has been in issuing opinions since 1868. Did Justice Neil Gorsuch’s arrival on the bench set SCOTUS efficiency back by 150 years? [Big Law Business]

* Taylor Weyeneth, the 24-year-old who was recently appointed by Trump to be the nation’s deputy drug czar, is just like most Trump appointees without any experience. His résumé full of “errors,” and he forgot to mention that he lost his job at a law firm after not showing up. [Washington Post]

* “Even though David Boies has the energy of a 4-year-old, he is in the twilight of his career,” so a new generation of partners at the firm are preparing to move Boies Schiller into the future after Boies and Jonathan Schiller step back from their active leadership roles. [American Lawyer]

* A Dentons partner whose firm was gobbled up by the Biglaw behemoth last year has been suspended and placed on a leave of absence after word of his alleged inappropriate sexual behavior with female employees at his legacy firm for around to management. [American Lawyer via RollOnFriday]

* California has been going after the LSAC for years over its disability accommodations for people who want to take the LSAT, and now the state wants the council to be held in contempt. LSAC thinks California needs to study reading its comprehension. [The Recorder]

* Are you ready for some disparaging team names in football?! Many people are likely to continue calling them the “Washington team,” but in the wake of the Matal v. Tam Supreme Court case, the Fourth Circuit has officially vacated the decisions that canceled the Washington Redskins’ trademark registrations. [USA Today Sports]

Ed. note: We will not be publishing on Monday, January 15, in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

* Will Geoffrey Berman, acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, recuse from Deutsche Bank matters? It sure sounds like he should…. [Bloomberg Politics]

* Judge Shira A. Scheindlin and Joel Cohen offer advice to companies on how to handle sexual harassment allegations in a manner consistent with due process. [Guardian]

* And Glenn Reynolds has this modest proposal, also related to the problem of sexual harassment (in the federal judiciary): abolish clerkships. [Wall Street Journal]

* A quartet of tax law professors explain how a proposal to transform state and local tax payments into deductible charitable contributions to state and local government organizations could actually work.
[Slate]

* From Biglaw to big bucks: former associates Stephen Scanlan and Travis Leon sell their law-related startup, XRef, for a cool $10 million. [RollOnFriday]

* Professor Eugene Volokh: “There’s a fine line between being a ‘badass’ and….” [Volokh Conspiracy / Reason]

* “Appeals court OKs F-Bombs for federal trademark protection.” F**king finally. [Techdirt]

* The Dewey & LeBoeuf criminal case ends with a whimper: former accounting manager Victoria Harrington just got sentenced to unconditional release (i.e., no prison time). [Law360]

* While the #metoo phenomenon receives deserved attention for uncovering decades of vile behavior, it also presents business opportunities. Stroock & Stroock has put together a group headed by ormer U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin and former New York State Attorney General Robert Abrams to conduct internal investigations for companies concerned about harassment on their watch. [New York Law Journal]

* Idiot techie fired after saying women weren’t smart enough to work in Silicon Valley files class action suit against Google with help of idiot lawyer who thinks this is a “shot across the bow” of tech companies that they need to be more serious about creating hostile work environments… or something. [The Recorder]

* The SDNY takes judicial notice that Louis Vuitton needs a sense of humor. [Law360]

* An Italian judge is accused of turning his law school into a misogynistic “cult.” Oh Italy… just like us. [Washington Post]

* Kirkland has done a little more poaching. [American Lawyer]

* Tips for aspiring GCs. [Corporate Counsel]

* The last substantive line of Macmillan’s response to Trump’s cease and desist highlights the lockdown argument against Trump’s litigious posturing — “yo, you realize discovery goes both ways, right?” [Slate]

* Attorney General Jeff Sessions is planning to challenge immigration judges over their authority to close cases without rendering decisions — because in doing so, they’re allowing immigrants to remain in this country without legal status of any kind. [ABA Journal]

* Has a new era in textualism arrived at the Supreme Court? An examination of the use textualism by justices and attorneys at the high court since 2013. [Empirical SCOTUS]

* According to a new survey, a “sizeable” amount of sexual harassment goes down at annual academic meetings. We hope this isn’t the case at the 2018 meeting of the American Association of Law Schools, which is wrapping up tomorrow. [TaxProf Blog]

* Attorney Charles Harder may have brought Gawker to its knees, but Michael Wolff, the author of the book that the president wants banished, isn’t afraid of him. [Law and More]

* Check out the 11 craziest crime stories from the year that was. Some of these are almost too hard to believe happened in real life. [Versus Texas]