Musk's 2018 tweet under SEC scrutiny again, online classes gain popularity among law students, U.S. law firm for Russian Bank faces bank hurdles
Reuters Legal
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???Good morning from the Legal File! On the docket today: Tesla in more trouble with the SEC over Elon Musk's 2018 tweets about taking the company private. Online classes are gaining more popularity among law students, a new ABA survey shows. Banks are shunning Manhattan law firm Brafman & Associates who is attempting to represent Russia's sanctioned VTB Bank. UPenn law professor Amy Wax who is facing sanctions, is crowdfunding her legal defense.
Tesla received a second subpoena from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its Chief Executive Elon Musk's tweets in 2018 about taking the company private, the electric automaker disclosed in a regulatory filing on Monday.
The company said it received the subpoena on June 13 and will cooperate with the government authorities. In November last year, the regulator had subpoenaed Tesla related to a settlement that required Musk's tweets on material information to be vetted.?
Musk had in 2018 settled a lawsuit by the regulator over his go-private tweets by agreeing to let the company's lawyers pre-approve tweets with material information about the company. In June, Musk appealed a judge's refusal to end this 2018 agreement with the SEC.?
Twitter?on Friday partly blamed its ongoing battle to close its $44-billion acquisition by Elon Musk for a surprise fall in quarterly revenue and a net loss. The results come as Twitter has sued Musk for dropping his offer to buy the company, and is now preparing for a legal showdown in a trial set to begin in October.?
A new?American Bar Association?survey showed?slightly more than half of the law students who responded said they would choose a remote-learning?Zoom?class over one that is held in-person.?
The student responses will help guide upcoming discussions about whether the ABA’s rules regarding distance education should change, said William Adams, the ABA’s managing director of accreditation and legal education:
“We definitely will be looking at and deciding, ‘Should we expand what we currently permit? Should we just remove the limits completely? Should we think about other regulations to ensure it’s being done well?’”
Law schools have largely returned to in-person learning but are offering more latitude for remote classes than before the pandemic, in part to accommodate professors and students with health risks.
AccessLex, a nonprofit aiming to make law school more accessible, published?data?last month from a survey of more than 1,700 students. It found that second- and third-year students were more likely than first years to be?dissatisfied?with online learning. Just 43% rated it as "good" or "excellent," while nearly 90% gave their pre-pandemic education high ratings.
Lawyers who have agreed to represent Russia’s sanctioned VTB Bank in U.S. litigation say a third bank has refused to work with them to handle legal fee payments, forcing them to request more time to enter the case.
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Manhattan law firm Brafman & Associates has been trying since early June to formally sign on as defense counsel for VTB in a lawsuit claiming the bank facilitated payments connected with the 2014 downing of a Malaysia Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine.
International law firm Latham & Watkins?said?in April that it intended to withdraw from representing the sanctioned bank. The Brafman firm has said it cannot enter the case until it is paid.
In a court?filing?Friday, Brafman lawyer Marc Agnifilo said the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control confirmed that payments to the firm for its representation of VTB would be legal, despite U.S. sanctions, because the bank is named in a federal lawsuit.
Still, two U.S. banks have outright declined to process a payment from Russia, Agnifilo said. Another bank said the law firm was too small to take on as a client, and the attorneys are waiting to hear back from a fourth bank. The firm has contacted two more banks about accepting VTB’s payment, according to Agnifilo:
“VTB deserves legal representation, the plaintiff deserves to have the claim resolved and the court deserves to have the case move forward, and we will continue to search for a solution.”
University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax is seeking to crowdfund her legal defense against the university’s?charges?that she repeatedly violated its non-discrimination rules.
Wax this week launched a GoFundMe campaign with a goal of raising $300,000 and had raised more than $90,000 as of Friday morning. Nearly 400 people have made donations ranging from $5 to $10,000 from an anonymous donor. Wax wrote on her GoFundMe page:
“I am committed to fighting Penn’s efforts to banish and punish me, (...). But resisting Penn’s campaign is expensive.”
Penn Law Dean Theodore Ruger in June?asked?the university’s faculty senate to review Wax's conduct and impose a “major sanction” against her, which could result in her suspension or firing. Ruger?said?back in January that the school would investigate Wax’s conduct, which has been a source of controversy at the Philadelphia campus for years.
That investigation, conducted by law firm Quinn Emanuel, uncovered nearly a dozen previously undisclosed instances in which students said Wax made racist, sexist or homophobic comments in class, Ruger said in his June 23 letter to the faculty senate.
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