Survivor mentality: Law firms are seeking out professionals to hold active shooter drills

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By Angela Morris (ABA Journal, December 2018)

Last year, a Houston lawyer went to Las Vegas to attend a country music festival but came home a survivor of a tragic type of mass violence that has become all too common in modern America.

When a gunman opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at the Route 91 Harvest festival, killing 58 concertgoers and wounding 546, this attorney survived using the survival mindset she had learned when her law firm hosted an active shooter defense course at the office.

“I’ve had four people come forward and tell me the training I’ve provided saved their lives when an active shooter showed up,” says Stephen Daniel, the Houston Police Department instructor and senior community liaison who trained the survivor at her law firm. Daniel says she and her firm wished to remain anonymous because the shooting was so traumatic.

In a country where mass shootings happen with increasing frequency, it’s becoming more common for law firms to bring active shooter defense instructors on-site to teach their lawyers and staff about how to survive a shooting situation. Daniel says he’s taught attorneys at 30 Houston-area law firms about the “run, hide, fight” method of surviving an active shooter. Daniel was one of the active shooter instructors to present sessions at successive annual conferences of the Association of Legal Administrators, where some law firm administrators first got the idea to bring the active shooter training to their firms.

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Tips for How to Make the Best of Rest Time and How to Know You Need It

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By Angela Morris (Texas Lawyer magazine, December 2018)

Texas law students yearning for rest and relaxation will get a chance later this month, but winter break isn’t just a time for leisure.

To make the most of the monthlong holiday, law students should fit in R&R, while also setting aside time to reflect on the pros and cons of the finished semester, set goals for the upcoming semester and jump-start job searches for summer jobs.

Texas Lawyer connected with a student bar president, a career services director and an academic success expert at three law schools spread across Texas to get their top tips about balancing the break. Here are their answers to our questions, edited for brevity and clarity.

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Tort Reform Turns 10

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By Angela Morris (Texas Lawyer, September 2, 2013)

There’s no doubt that 2003’s major medical-malpractice reforms dramatically cut both the numbers of med-mal suits in Texas and doctors’ med-mal insurance rates. But there’s disagreement about its affect on the state’s physician population.

In 2003, when the Texas Legislature debated House Bill 4, supporters and opponents predicted the impact. Supporters said HB 4 would retain and attract physicians and improve patients’ access to care. Opponents said it would prevent certain plaintiffs with legitimate claims from finding lawyers to represent them.

What really happened during 10 years of tort reform?

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Purvi Shah Is Perfecting the Art of ‘Movement Lawyering’

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by Angela Morris (law.com, Nov. 29, 2018)

Purvi Shah has a vision that law should serve society as a building block for equality and an architect for justice.

But the deep-rooted societal problems of racism and inequality surfacing in U.S. culture—including police shootings and sexual harassment—have made Shah see that lawyers must do more to realize her vision.

Shah, founder and executive director of Movement Law Lab, 
has embarked on a journey to train and support lawyers and legal organizations dedicated to placing the full force and power of the law behind communities fighting for social justice. The idea, known as “movement lawyering,” is getting a boost from Shah’s nonprofit, which funds and incubates projects by attorneys and legal organizations looking to make a difference.


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Make room for chatbots at your firm, LawDroid founder says

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By Angela Morris (ABA Journal)

Chatbots have a place in a law office, says legal chatbot creator Tom Martin, because they can handle busy work that eats up precious time in a lawyer’s day.

Martin is the founder of LawDroid, a company that creates legal chatbot apps that mimic human conversations when talking with potential clients.

For example, a reception bot on a firm’s website can answer questions about the lawyers who work there and the services they provide, and it can schedule clients for consultations, Martin explains. By wiping out such mundane tasks, it frees up time for meaningful human interactions between lawyer and client that no machine can master.

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Lawyers Contribute Pro Bono Hours After Sutherland Springs Shooting

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by Angela Morris (Texas Lawyer, November 2018)

“I was processing the totality of it. I saw right then and there we were going to have family law issues, probate issues,” Wilson County Attorney Tom Caldwell recalled. “When I came home that night, I was so shook up by it, I told my wife I would handle them all. She said, ‘No, you are not.’”

Next, he called for help from his friend, Tom Keyser, a past president of the San Antonio Bar Association, who put Caldwell in touch with SABA’s Community Justice Program, which assists low-income people with civil legal matters.

That connection set a plan in motion that eventually attracted 100 lawyers from the San Antonio community who pledged to volunteer to help victims, survivors and their families with legal issues that arose from the tragic shooting. SABA’s Sutherland Springs initiative has already called upon half of those 100 volunteer attorneys, helping with matters large and small—from answering a client’s question over the phone, to taking on full representation. All of the lawyers gave their services free of charge, and volunteer attorneys are still standing by today to help survivors and victims’ families with legal issues that spring up later.

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Baby Lawyers: How to Manage Your Career Before You Have A Job

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For the vast majority of the Lone Star State’s baby lawyers, November is an important month to decide which path to take toward their future careers.

Although a minority of Texas law graduates have already accepted job offers from big law firms, there’s a different timeline for new lawyers looking to land jobs in small and midsize law firms, government agencies and the public-interest sector. Many legal employers wait until bar exam results come out in November to extend job offers to recent graduates. For current students who participated in on-campus interviews in October, many summer job offers will begin rolling in this month.

With a lot on the line, Texas Lawyer reached out to assistant deans of career services at three law schools spread across Texas to get their advice about how grads should tackle this important and stressful time, making the best decision about their future careers. Here are the top five tips for starting on the career path.

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With the rise of cryptocurrency, estate lawyers caution that it shouldn’t be treated like any other asset

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by Angela Morris (ABA Journal, November 2018) As the cryptocurrency craze spreads, the mainstream public is investing in bitcoin and other digital currencies. With dollar signs in their eyes, they might not think about what happens to their cryptocurrency when they die. Cryptocurrency, such as bitcoin or Ethereum’s ether, could vanish into thin air unless estate-planning lawyers spur their crypto-loving clients to make inheritance plans. But there are traps for estate-planning attorneys to watch for in order to ensure that heirs will have access to a client’s cryptocurrency after death, while making sure the client won’t be giving up the keys to the castle prematurely. “This is a whole new area for estate-planning lawyers,” says Pamela Morgan, an attorney and author who founded Empowered Law and trains lawyers about cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. “It’s an opportunity to grow your client base­—to attract new people who never thought about this before.” Read this story at ABAJournal.com.
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For Breast-Pumping Lawyer Moms, Accommodations Often Fall Short

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by Angela Morris (Law.com, Oct. 31, 2018, Link or download PDF)

The old saying, “Don’t crying over spilled milk,” doesn’t apply when you’re a nursing lawyer-mom, using a toilet as a table while pumping your breast milk during your practice group’s annual retreat.

Utilizing the bathroom as a makeshift baby-food kitchen wasn’t labor and employment litigator Elise Elam’s first choice. She recalled she was relegated to the loo only after staff in the retreat facility offered up a room with a non-closing door that left a gap where she could see the speaker talking to all her colleagues. The toilet stall was private, at least. After she finished pumping and started to gather her gear, that’s when it happened: Elam’s milk spilled all over the toilet and floor. She acknowledges—she cried.

“It was stressful,” explained Elam, staff attorney at Frost Brown Todd in Cincinnati.

Like many nursing lawyer-moms, Elam is happy with her law firm’s breastfeeding accommodations—she has a private office and closes her door with a do-not-disturb sign when she expresses her milk—yet she continues facing struggles when depositions, hearings or legal conferences take her away from home base for extended periods of time. Courthouses have emerged as a primary problem area for nursing lawyers who need a private place, and time, to pump milk for their babies.

One group advocating on behalf of breastfeeding attorneys is MothersEsquire, a Facebook group with 3,000 lawyer-moms spread around the nation, which created a breastfeeding accommodations advisory committee in early 2017.

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Are law firms committed to disability diversity? A handful of firms have taken action

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As the nation in October celebrates National Disability Employment Awareness Month, statistics show that the legal profession as a whole either isn’t doing its fair share to recruit, retain and advance attorneys with disabilities, or it has failed to be inclusive enough for disabled lawyers to feel comfortable disclosing their impairments. Many law firms state generally that they’re welcoming to people with disabilities, but only a handful have put their words into meaningful action. … This article published in the ABA Journal on Oct. 24. Click here to read the story, or you can download a PDF here.
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