South Carolina lawyer and accused murderer Richard “Alex” Murdaugh now faces an indictment for alleged fraud and money laundering crimes.
Meanwhile, killing two lawbirds with one post.
August 21, 2022
August 11, 2022
It's The Damned Dogs -- They Refuse to Eat the Stuff
Greetings, Dog Brothers (and Sisters). In a rare lucid moment at the Annual Meeting, ABA Executive Director Jack Rives aptly compared ABA's failed membership marketing to a famous failed marketing campaign for dog food. It was only a moment, after which, he again took shelter in the comfort of the usual platitudes and near-total denial of reality.
For background, since I haven't updated in awhile, as of this time last year, ABA's total membership was internally reported at 165,956, vastly down from the 410,000 members claimed in fiscal year 2018, and down another 7,209 members from 2020. It appears that 116,108 of these were licensed attorneys, as opposed to the various affiliated professionals who pay dues as non-attorney members. ABA's own reported survey sets the number of licensed attorneys in the United States at 1,327,910 in 2021, so the 116,108 dues-paying attorneys in ABA this time last year represented about 8.7% of the nation's licensed attorneys.
In February of this year, at the Mid-year meeting, Jack Rives gave a rambling report on what he characterized as "real progress" from the implementation of the new membership model (now rechristened the "value proposition"). After a disjointed discussion on ABA's "new strategy" of "fail fast, learn faster," Rives made an effort to spin the 2021 membership loss into something positive. Recognizing that both membership numbers and dues revenues were significantly down, and that ABA had in fact missed its membership targets, he pointed out that they did very well recruiting new members, although there were difficulties retaining those members (which explains the persistent, net negative membership trend).
In April of this year, ABA was forced (chiefly by actions of the State of Florida) to modify its "diversity" quotas for CLE panels. Also in April, ABA Journal was put behind a paywall in an effort to induce readers to sign up for ABA memberships.
In his address to the House of Delegates at the August 2022 Annual Meeting, Rives omitted any detail as to how fiscal year 2022 membership numbers compare to last years numbers, but acknowledged that membership is now the association's "most critical issue." Although his report was even more rambling and disjointed than his February report at the Mid-year meeting, the usual happy talk was not in evidence. To prevent the pointless loss of 20 minutes of your lives, I will summarize the significant points.
Avoiding any detailed year-to-year comparison of real numbers, Rives stated that the consultants have identified the "available market" at around 850,000 potential members (for some reason less than the universe of licensed U.S. attorneys) and estimated that ABA only has 20% of these people as actual members. This is almost certainly a fudged estimate, as it would mean a significant improvement over 2021 membership, which would have been reported in detail had it actually occurred.
Rives acknowledged that surveys of non-members reflect the two most common reasons for rejecting membership are: 1) it is not worth the cost; and 2) ABA is too political. This led to an unfocused discourse not really responsive to the criticisms, the gist of which is that, instead of doing anything to change the reasons people reject membership, ABA's newest new strategy is to launch a "brand equity campaign" to "change perceptions" and apparently thereby convince potential members that it is worth the cost and is not too political.
In the course of that discussion, the analogy to the failed dog food campaign was the jewel. Rives mentioned how the marketing executives had blamed the dogs for refusing to eat the food, but then he failed to grasp how this nailed ABA's problem precisely. As my old folks would have said, "He done babbled a bibfull there." The very point of his own parable, the very moral of his own story, was that when you have a basically defective product (e.g., an ABA that lawyers don't want, or dog food that dogs will not eat) you can't fix that with a glitzy marketing campaign. Somehow, that got past him (and apparently, everyone else at ABA as well). So, a "brand equity campaign" it is.
Ruh-Roh, Rhaggy, rey're rumming ru rhange rour rerreprons!
https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2022/08/executive-director-addresses-hod/
August 9, 2022
I dont think the LA Times knows what "secret" or "judges" means
Tom Girardi’s epic corruption exposes the secretive world of private judges
A Times investigation draws on newly revealed records about Tom Girardi’s legal practice, opening a window onto the secretive world of private judges.
You have to go to the fourth paragraph to realize they are talking about f*cking JAMS. How are those "secret" judges and not, you know, mediators or arbitrators? Do plebes not know that arbitrators exist? Does the LA Times not know what an investigation is?
https://apple.news/AtvsHrymRSAOxSIPkFe70yA
August 4, 2022
Ayman al-Zawahiri dies on Kabul balcony, sipping coffee at 5:55 am
Ayman al-Zawahiri had apparently gone way underground after the Seals raid that killed Bin Laden in Pakistan, but moved to Kabul - blocks from the British Embassy - after the Taliban took control of that city following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/01/us-strike-afghanistan-kills-al-qaida-leader-ayman-al-zawahiri
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