Foley & Lardner announced that Lewis Zirogiannis has joined the firm as a partner in its Litigation Department and Government Enforcement Defense & Investigations Practice Group. Zirogiannis is resident in the firm’s San Francisco and New York City offices.

Zirogiannis’ practice focuses on complex litigation, as well as government and internal investigations and corporate compliance. He has deep expertise in counseling corporations and company executives in connection with litigation and investigation matters in the areas of anti-corruption, anti-money laundering, trade sanctions, information governance, securities fraud, and data privacy and protection, including the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Zirogiannis has appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court and in federal and state trial and appellate courts, and he has conducted investigations in Asia, Latin America, Africa and Europe.

Zirogiannis brings extensive in-house experience from having served six years in legal leadership roles at two global businesses of General Electric Co., where he oversaw global compliance programs and supervised litigation, investigations and regulatory relations. In addition, he previously served as Associate General Counsel and Global Anti-Corruption Officer at American International Group.

Zirogiannis comes to Foley from Reed Smith, where he was a member of the complex litigation and global regulatory enforcement practice groups. He began his legal career as a staff attorney in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and as a federal judicial law clerk in the Southern District of New York before entering private practice.

Holland & Hart announced the addition of Dirk Gaspar, Of Counsel in the firm’s Las Vegas, Nevada office. Gaspar strengthens Holland & Hart’s Construction Practice by bringing experience serving as lead attorney on litigation and transactional matters involving industrial/infrastructure, commercial and residential disputes, insurance issues, and contract negotiation and drafting.

Gaspar focuses his practice on all aspects of construction law, including contract negotiation and drafting, construction defect litigation, disputes, and liens. He has counseled some of the largest developers and general contractors in Southern California and Nevada, including clients in the sports and entertainment, mining, development, and construction industries. Utilizing his background in architecture, Gaspar has represented clients on industrial, commercial, and residential projects.

Prior to joining Holland & Hart, Gaspar worked for boutique construction law firms in Las Vegas and Southern California. He is admitted to practice in Nevada, California, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, and U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada.

Littler, the world’s largest employment and labor law practice representing management, has added Jacqueline A. Mrachek as a shareholder in its Minneapolis office. Mrachek joins from Faegre Baker Daniels, where she co-led the firm’s employment litigation practice.

Mrachek counsels and defends companies in a wide range of employment law matters, including harassment, discrimination, retaliation, wage and hour compliance, drug and alcohol testing, and disability and medical leave requirements. She also regularly conducts workplace investigations and counsels on the enforcement of noncompetes, restrictive covenants and other employment contracts. Mrachek has represented employers before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, and has extensive experience in such sectors as automotive, retail, financial services, health care, insurance, manufacturing and medical devices.

Mrachek received her J.D. from Mitchell Hamline School of Law and her B.A. from College of Saint Benedict. She is a former president of Minnesota Women Lawyers and serves on its advisory board.

Farrell Fritz is pleased to welcome Christopher J. Clarke to its Uniondale office as a commercial litigation associate.

Chris is a South Huntington, NY, resident. Prior to joining Farrell Fritz, he was an associate at Meltzer, Lippe, Goldstein & Breitstone, LLP in Mineola. Chris earned his J.D. from Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center and his B.A. from Skidmore College. He is admitted in New York State; the United States District Court, Eastern District of New York; and the United States District Court, Southern District of New York.

Hanzo, the company known for its pioneering technology in dynamic web archiving for compliance and ediscovery, announced that Hanzo Hold has been named one of six finalists in the LegalLaunch: Product Innovation Competition at Legaltech during Legalweek 2020.

The competition brings together the best in legal technology, new products, and services (no older than twelve months) and gives Legaltech attendees a sneak peek of the future of legal technology.

Business communications have changed dramatically. Today, communications including chats, messages, comments, reactions, attachments, and a myriad of other data types associated with collaboration tools like Slack, have created new challenges for corporate legal teams. The data that these tools generate has barely any relationship to email, much less to the familiar world of paper.

Hanzo launched Hanzo Hold to solve these collaborative data management challenges. Hanzo Hold empowers organizations to apply a legal hold to enterprise Slack data and to adhere to data retention policies while meeting the duty to preserve and discover data for litigation and regulatory use cases.

As a collaboration tool becomes commonplace within an organization, even a small number of users can generate vast volumes of data. Hanzo has invested in its capability to scale ingestion for greater speed and resilience in the face of such data magnitude. Additionally, Hanzo works closely with the team at Slack, regularly evolving the solution to fully utilize the latest updates to Slack’s Discovery API.

Today, companies using Hanzo Hold for Slack can preserve precisely the data needed with targeted preservation, search and view messages in context to efficiently cull data volumes, and easily export data for further review. Hanzo Hold gives corporate legal teams more flexibility in scoping and greater control for a targeted approach to Slack data management.

Dykema, a leading national law firm, today announced that San Antonio-based attorneys Danielle Rushing and Melanie Fry were each elected to hold leadership positions for Bexar County Women’s Bar Foundation (BCWB). Rushing was elected to serve as Vice President, while Fry was re-elected for her position as a Director with the Foundation.

Rushing takes the Vice President role after serving as the Foundation’s Secretary in 2019 and after being selected as a member of the 2019 class of its LEAD (Lead. Empower. Advance. Develop.) Academy. Fry, who is a 2018 graduate of the BCWB Foundation’s LEAD Academy, returns to her role as a Director after being elected for the second consecutive time.

In her practice, Rushing focuses on bankruptcy and restructuring matters. She currently represents several multi-million dollar businesses, particularly in the oil and gas/energy, retail, and transportation industries. Rushing has drafted and argued various motions in state and federal courts. She is involved in several professional and industry organizations, having been recently elected as a Member of the San Antonio Bar Foundation’s Fellows Program and serving as a Director for the San Antonio Young Lawyers Association and Foundation.

Fry leads Dykema’s appellate practice in San Antonio. She has briefed and won cases in the Texas Courts of Appeals, the Supreme Court of Texas, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and the Supreme Court of the United States. Fry’s experience includes high-stakes matters such as personal injury and product defects, contract and business tort claims, consumer financial services disputes, and oil and gas law. Outside of her practice, Fry has served at all leadership levels of the Federal Bar Association’s San Antonio Chapter (including as President in 2015-16) and is a member of Leadership San Antonio Class 45.

Littler, the world’s largest employment and labor law practice representing management, has added Dane Steffenson as Special Counsel in its Atlanta office where he will focus on Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), wage hour and Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) litigation. For more than 17 years, Steffenson was a Senior Trial Attorney at the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) representing its various enforcement agencies in the Atlanta Solicitor’s Office. In this role, he received the DOL’s top national award for litigation excellence.

During his tenure with the DOL, Steffenson served as lead counsel on hundreds of employment law cases, including more than 25 trials and several mediations that involved complex matters under ERISA, Fair Labor Standards Act, OSHA, Service Contract Act, H1-B and various whistleblower statutes. He advised top officials and local managers at the Department’s enforcement agencies on local and national policies and procedures, investigation and pre-litigation issues, and enforcement, litigation and settlement strategies. Steffenson also has extensive experience in all aspects of case preparation, such as developing and executing litigation strategy; drafting effective discovery documents, motions, and briefs; and negotiating settlements.

Steffenson received his J.D., magna cum laude, from the Georgia State University College of Law, his M.A. in International Relations from Baylor University and his B.S., cum laude, from California State University. Additional information on Steffenson’s background is available here.

JD Supra discusses what an attorney is “to do if a customs agent asks to peruse the attorney’s smart phone? Or if a customs agent asks the attorney to identify the clients that attorney is meeting or working on behalf of in the foreign country? Such questions can create a tension for attorneys between their duty to comply with international travel directives and their duty to preserve confidential or privileged client information in their possession.”

“Trips abroad are becoming more common across various practices.”

“Notably, attorneys are not required by the rules of professional conduct to comply with” ABA recommendations. “Whether attorneys adopt these recommendations in their own practices will depend on the type of information attorneys have in their possession, as well as the reasonableness of taking certain precautions.”

Read this article for some traveling tips.

“The beginning of a new year is the perfect time for busy lawyers to take stock of last year’s achievements and to establish plans for being SMART about business development in the coming months. To maximize your business development time, my question to you is: are you being SMART about it? SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time Sensitive. A key benefit to the SMART framework is that you are concentrating time on the most essential areas of your business development activities. SMART provides you with focus, so you can actually achieve your goals.” advises Jason Levin in the Above the Law Career Center.

He briefly goes through the SMART framework.

Read the article.

Suzie Scanlon Rabinowitz writes in the ABA Journal that “Both the perception of and reality for women attorneys is disheartening. According to the National Association for Law Placement, women accounted for 20% of equity law firm partners in 2018. That’s while women have constituted about half of law school graduates for the past 20 years, according to Catalyst, a nonprofit focused on advancing women’s professional progress. By many other key metrics, the law is still male-dominated, especially at its highest levels.”

“In a profession where cultural change happens at a creeping pace, how can we change the perception—and the reality—that success for women at the upper echelons is the exception, rather than the rule? Just as important, how can we elevate the practice of law by fostering diversity in the profession?”

Read the article.

“Teenagers aren’t being imaginative enough with their ambitions as they aspire to a short list of 20th-century occupations in their future careers, according to the OECD.” reports Carolynn Look in Bloomberg.

“Huge changes in the world of work — driven by developments in technology and social media — are having too little impact on the job expectations of young people, according to a report presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos by the Paris-based organization.”

“The report cited a survey of 15-year-olds showing that career ambitions narrowed in the last two decades. Roughly half of boys and girls from 41 countries said they expect to work in one of just 10 jobs by the age of 30. Such roles originate overwhelmingly from the 19th and 20th centuries, such as doctors, teachers, veterinarians, business managers, engineers, police officers, and lawyers.”

Read the Bloomberg article.

“The patient was age 53 when he was transferred to Kindred Hospital. He had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and bipolar disorder in his twenties. When he signed the arbitration agreement in issue, he had required 24-hour nursing care for the previous 13 years, although he was not cognitively impaired at the time of the signing.” reports the Law Office of Donald D. Vanarelli in their blog.

“After he filed a negligence suit regarding pressure ulcers he had developed, the hospital filed a motion to dismiss his complaint and compel arbitration, based on the arbitration agreement the patient had signed. The hospital’s motion was denied, and an appeal was filed. On appeal, the Appellate Division affirmed.”

The appeals court noted “The arbitration agreement was not explained to him; he was only told to sign all the documents. He did so, including the “voluntary” arbitration agreement. Every document was signed within the span of one minute. The arbitration agreement stated that his signature was not a precondition to treatment, and that he could cancel it within 5 days; however, he was not provided a copy of the arbitration agreement.”

Read the article.

“Lawyers and clients often need cash. There is also the element of risk. Lawyers and clients may want to lay off some of the risk of a case on someone else, and the litigation finance industry generally offers non-recourse money.” advises Robert W. Wood in the Taxes section of Forbes.

He explains that “Lawyers may seek funding, the clients alone may seek it, or each may get some, depending on how the deal is structured. But one of the most consistent questions is how taxes will be handled, and that depends on the documents. Financing documents vary materially, so one can’t answer the tax questions without reviewing them. Fundamentally, is this a loan? Is it a sale of a portion of the claim, or of a portion of the fees?”

“These may sound like simple questions, but they can be difficult to answer.”

Read the Forbes article.

“There is perhaps no more consistently vexing problem for transactional attorneys on opposite sides than figuring out a fair contractual resolution for “sandbagging” issues.” warns Allison J. Sherrier in Goulston & Storrs’ What’s Market.

“One problem for attorneys is the extraordinary difficulty of defining and proving what kind of actual or constructive pre-closing knowledge a buyer had or should have had. As a result, lawyers and their clients frequently choose to avoid wrangling over contractual terms associated with sandbagging for fear of blowing up a deal or spending inordinate time to reach agreement on this one problem.”

“Because transactional contracts often fail to address sandbagging, the post-closing resolution of sandbagging issues frequently hinges on applicable common law, and courts in different states have very different views about the proper resolution of these controversies. This makes the choice-of-law provision in transactional contracts extremely important.”

Read the article.

“Exxon Mobil dodged a bullet last month when a judge rejected a novel climate-change lawsuit brought by New York’s attorney general. The case began with a promise from state officials that there would be a historic reckoning for the fossil fuel giant.” reports Erik Larson in the San Francisco Chronicle.

“It ended ignominiously as a failed accounting fraud claim.”

“Globally, humans are on the hook for trillions of dollars if they want to sufficiently reduce greenhouse gas emissions, acclimate to the damage already done and prepare for what is yet to come. As more governments and taxpayers find themselves staring down the barrel at rising climate costs, they are increasingly turning to the courts to hold Big Oil accountable.”

“Federal appeals courts on both sides of the country are considering whether such cases may proceed. Their rulings-one of which may come any day-will have a powerful effect on the future of climate change litigation.”

Read the San Francisco Chronicle’s article.

Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP is pleased to announce that Richard E. Graves has joined the firm’s Nashville office as an associate in the Real Estate Practice Group.

Graves focuses his practice on real estate law and zoning and land use. His experience includes preparing and reviewing purchase and sales agreements, as well as closing documents, on behalf of purchasers and sellers. He also reviews environmental site assessment proposals and reports to ensure compliance with all appropriate inquiry requirements and ASTM standards. In addition, he reviews title commitments, surveys and plats, and private and public property restrictions and regulations on behalf of clients. His litigation experience includes prosecuting and defending easement and title disputes, as well as common law writ of certiorari appeals of decisions of local land use administrative bodies.

Prior to joining Bradley, Graves was an attorney at Frantz, McConnell & Seymour, LLP. He clerked for Judge Sharon G. Lee of the Tennessee Supreme Court.

Graves received his J.D. (magna cum laude) from the University of Tennessee College of Law and his Bachelor of Arts (magna cum laude) from the University of Tennessee.

Eversheds Sutherland is pleased to announce that Stanley Freeman has joined the firm in Washington DC as partner. With more than 25 years of experience,  Freeman’s arrival expands the firm’s education service offering with a practice focused on the representation of postsecondary institutions and adjacent clients in higher education. Before joining Eversheds Sutherland, Freeman was a partner at Powers Pyles Sutter & Verville.

Freeman counsels public and private colleges and universities, allied educational companies, and investors in higher education on administrative, transactional, regulatory and litigation matters. He regularly advises educational institutions on strategic issues pertaining to their participation in federal student financial assistance programs, accreditation, licensure and related regulatory concerns.

Freeman also assists clients concerning regulatory and compliance matters arising under the Higher Education Act of 1965, including program reviews, audits, substantive changes, changes in ownership and control, and other oversight matters.

Freeman has represented numerous schools before the US Department of Education and before other federal agencies, state educational oversight agencies, and accreditors on compliance matters, financial responsibility concerns, legislative issues, and investigative matters. He has also litigated cases in the state and federal courts.

Freeman is a sought-after speaker for college official and student aid administrative audiences and has authored numerous articles on federal student financial aid issues for higher education publications.

Dykema, a leading national law firm, today announced that Danielle Rushing, San Antonio-based attorney in Dykema’s Bankruptcy, Insolvency & Creditors’ Rights Practice Group, was selected by the San Antonio Bar Foundation (SABF) as one of 25 newly elected members to the SABF Fellows Program.

According to the SABF, its Fellows are a group of friends who serves as patron of the charitable heart of the legal community. These elected members make a difference in expanding civics education, filling the gap for access to justice and supporting the pipeline of future leaders in the San Antonio legal family. Fellows are selected for their professional achievements and their commitment to the legal community.

In her practice, Rushing focuses on bankruptcy and restructuring matters. She currently represents several multi-million dollar businesses, particularly in the oil and gas/energy, retail, and transportation industries. Rushing has drafted and argued various motions in state and federal courts.

She is involved in several professional and industry organizations. Rushing currently serves as Vice President of the Bexar County Women’s Bar (BCWB) Association and Foundation and a Board Member for the San Antonio Young Lawyers Association and Foundation. She also previously serves as both Secretary and as a Board Member of the BCWB and was a member of the 2019 class of its LEAD Academy.

She earned a J.D. from St. Mary’s University School of Law and a B.S. from Louisiana State University.

On Jan. 21, the Chicago office of Greensfelder, Hemker & Gale, P.C., celebrated the opening of the new Norwegian Honorary Consulate for Illinois – located at Greensfelder – and introduced Greensfelder Officer Susan Meyer as the newly appointed Norwegian Honorary Consul.

In conjunction with Meyer’s appointment late last year, Greensfelder’s Chicago office was designated by Norway’s Foreign Ministry as the Norwegian Honorary Consulate. Norway’s Honorary Consul assists with consular affairs and helps to facilitate development of business, cultural and educational relations between Norway and the United States.

The Jan. 21 event also featured an address from Harriet E. Berg, Norwegian Consul General in New York, and a medal ceremony honoring Eirik Seim for his overseas service.

In addition to her new consulate role, Meyer is a past president and current member of the Chicago Chapter of the Norwegian-American Chamber of Commerce. She frequently advises companies on matters related to commerce between the United States and Scandinavia. She is also actively involved with the Norwegian-American Defense and Homeland Security Industry Council and the Swedish American Chamber of Commerce. In addition, she is on the board of Women Entrepreneurs Grow Global, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping women-owned businesses expand internationally.

As leader of Greensfelder’s Trademark, Copyright, Media, and Advertising group and a member of the firm’s Intellectual Property and Franchising & Distribution groups, Meyer advises businesses in the areas of intellectual property, franchising, and distribution. She represents companies in the United States and internationally in every stage of development. In addition to her work involving intellectual property transactions, licensing, and dispute resolution, Ms. Meyer has extensive experience in trademark law, representing clients before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board and federal courts. She also works with franchisors on compliance issues and serves as outside general counsel for businesses on general business matters.

“Federal prosecutors allege that a former Morrison & Foerster office operations manager spent more than $400,000 on the firm’s credit card to make personal purchases and transfer money to his PayPal account.” reports Debra Cassens Weiss of the ABA Journal.

“The former employee, Andrew Robertson, faces a preliminary hearing at the end of the month in Washington, D.C., on a federal mail fraud charge.”

“Robertson is accused of spending money on personal purchases that included designer clothing, jewelry, home furnishings, groceries, his Verizon bill and storage units for his personal items.”

Read the article.