Priori Digest #289 | Former Lawyer Turned Fraudster, Bar Exam Class Action Suit & “Kill Switch” Dev Convicted

At Priori, we practice what we preach. On March 25, our in-house legal leader, David Drew, will share an “Inside Look: How Priori’s Legal Team Leverages Flex Talent.”? He’ll join Matt Wheatley, VP of Client Strategy, for a discussion about how we use Priori Talent Marketplace as a resource for strategically managing our legal work. You won’t want to miss this opportunity to take a look behind the scenes of our flexible talent solutions.

?In this 289th edition of the Digest, we look at a former attorney whose impressive but false resume put him in prison, the continuing fallout from the February bar exam administration in California and how a developer’s “kill switch” ended in his conviction.

Warmly,

Basha Rubin | CEO & Co-Founder

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Legal News

• ?? An attorney who used a fabricated background worthy of Catch Me If You Can—claiming to be a U.S. Marine, a former college football player and a Kirkland & Ellis attorney at different times—was sentenced to over three years in prison for using the false identities to get jobs at seven different law firms.
• ?? The fallout from the chaos surrounding California’s February bar exam continues, including a class action lawsuit on behalf of test takers against the company that administered the exam.
• ?? A bill passed in the Mississippi legislature earlier this week has the state joining Florida and Alabama as the first three states to outlaw the production and distribution of cultivated (i.e., lab-grown) meat.?

Legal Trivia

Answers at the end:?

1. Frank Abagnale, notorious con artist and author of Catch Me If You Can, spent time in prison in the U.S. and what other two countries?

2. In what year did the first administration of the LSAT occur? ?

3. What is the name of the central character and lawyer in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities?

Tech News

• ?? A software developer faces 10 years in prison for creating a “kill switch” that activated automatically upon his termination and started infinite looping that caused his employer’s computers to crash.
• ?? If you caught Tuesday night’s Boston Bruins vs. Florida Panthers NHL game and wondered why it looked like a video game, that’s because in a way it was: The Bruins experimented with a fully animated “STEMcast” that included interactive features meant to teach children about math concepts.
• ?? With the clock still ticking on the app’s ban deadline, TikTok announced new parental and safety controls this week, including a “wind-down” feature that, after 10 p.m., replaces the normal view with a screen meant to encourage relaxation.

Legal Quote of the Week

“It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.”?

– Earl Warren, former Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in Fortune magazine (November 1955)

By the Numbers

28%

The percentage of law school professors who have been asked and have made updates to their curriculums to address AI, compared to 31% who have been asked but haven’t made the updates, according to a recent Bloomberg report.

$1.6 billion

The amount of a judgment for IBM that was recently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, after the court declined to reconsider a U.S. appeals court decision.

More From Priori

If you’re interested in the state of the legal operations industry, don’t miss our sessions at ACC Legal Ops Con and CLOC Global Institute this Spring!

• ? April 10 – ACC Legal Ops Con (Chicago, IL): “Supercharging Legal Ops: The Case for Growth Amid Industry Shifts,” featuring legal ops leaders from Ford Motor Company and Stryker.
• ? May 6 – CLOC Global Institute (Las Vegas, NV): “The ABCs of RFPs - From Panel Creation to Project Bidding and More,” featuring RFP pros from Cargill, RTX, Shell and Stryker.
• ? May 7 – CLOC Global Institute (Las Vegas, NV): “Legal Ops at a Crossroads: Making the Case for Strategic Investment During Uncertainty,” featuring industry experts from Disney, IBM and Nationwide.

Legal Trivia Answers

1. France and Sweden.
2. 1948.
3. Sydney Carton.

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