Biden's circuit nominees, a disbarred author, Paul Hastings' new M&A co-leader and lawyer mental health ??
Reuters Legal
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???Good morning.?In today's Legal File: A U.S. Senate panel advanced the nominations of President Joe Biden's picks for the 7th and 9th Circuit, D.C. ethics panel rebuffs a disbarred legal author's petition to be reinstated, Paul Hastings adds Gibson Dunn's M&A co-chair in New York and how an employer's focus on productivity and revenue affect a lawyer's mental wellbeing. We break it all down below ??
A U.S. Senate panel on Thursday advanced the nominations of two of President Joe Biden's?picks ?for federal appeals courts, including John Lee, who would become the first Asian-American judge to serve on the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12 to 8 to send the nomination of Lee, a federal judge in Chicago, to the full Senate for consideration. This after Lee faced criticism by Republicans at the judiciary panel hearing last month over a May 2020 ruling that they said infringed religious rights.
The panel also voted 11 to 9 to advance the nomination of Salvador Mendoza to serve on the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Mendoza has served since 2014 as a federal judge in Richland, Washington. He was a local court judge for many years before that.
The Senate so far has confirmed 16 of Biden's circuit nominees, and 11 others, including Lee and Mendoza, are awaiting further action at the committee or before the full Senate. Overall since he took office last year, Biden has appointed 66 trial and appeals court judges.
Disbarred attorney and author Joel Joseph, who has written extensively on the law, has failed to show he is fit to resume practicing in the profession, a Washington, D.C., attorney ethics panel said in a?report ?released on Wednesday.
The D.C. Court of Appeals in 2015 disbarred Joseph, 73, as a reciprocal penalty after a Maryland court took that action over allegations that he deceived state and federal courts in California about where he was living.
The report from a hearing committee of the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility recommended that the D.C. Court of Appeals, which administers attorney discipline in the nation's capital, deny Joseph's?petition ?to be reinstated to the bar, saying that he "has not proven that he recognizes the seriousness of his misconduct."
"The nature and circumstances of petitioner's misconduct is serious and troubling. Lying to a court about his residency to obtain admission pro hac vice directly relates to [his] honesty, integrity and judgment."
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Paul Hastings has hired a new co-leader to its mergers and acquisitions practice from rival Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, further growing the headcount in its New York office.
Eduardo Gallardo was co-chair of global M&A at Gibson Dunn as well as head of the firm's shareholder activism defense group. His recent clients have included AT&T in its $1.4 billion sale of Warner Bros Games’ Playdemic to Electronic Arts in June 2021.
Paul Hastings said it aims to have nearly 400 New York-based lawyers total by the end of 2022. It?hired 43 restructuring attorneys ?from New York-based Stroock & Stroock & Lavan in March. The firm also added three partners from rival Shearman & Sterling to its infrastructure and energy and corporate practices in New York last month.
A recent study surveyed 1,959 lawyers in California and Washington, D.C., dividing them into three groups based on what they said their employer values most highly: their ability to produce revenue; their skill and professionalism; or not being valued or receiving no feedback.
Attorneys who say their employers value them mainly for their productivity and financial worth tend to have worse physical and mental health than those who feel valued for their talent, skill and humanity, according to the peer reviewed study published this month in the scientific journal Behavioral Sciences.
Lawyers working at large law firms were more likely to feel valued according to their financial worth, while government lawyers were overrepresented among the group that reported feeling unvalued, according to the study.
The study was co-authored by Patrick Krill, an attorney who advises legal employers on wellness issues, along with three researchers from the University of Minnesota’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.
Krill said he hopes the findings will prompt legal employers to assess their own values and how they communicate them to attorneys.
“Take a look at your evaluation process, your mentoring process, your work allocation process, your internal communications—all of it,” Krill said. “What’s the message? Do people feel like you just care about their about billable hours, or do you actually care about how good of a lawyer and a person they are?”
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