I really miss tournaments, especially late stages of them and how everyone else played scared and it was so exploitable when you could make good moves because hey, another one is starting in 5 minutes. Like a Friday night when I wasn't really doing anything else, it was fun.

I'm hearing talk that family/custody is also picking up right now. I think partly because some people can't adapt and be adults and figure it out when the agreement said pick Jimmy up from school. But to be fair, I'm also hearing that it's at least one person working overtime at the hospital now and they need to figure out what to do. Also, unfortunately I'm hearing DV is picking up too, mostly anecdotally from friends who know cops and the like, every call is about this, especially when booze is involved.

I talked to an insurance adjuster last week, a lot less people driving now and he said he's seeing a lot less cases come his way. My neighbor said he was on the phone with one who straight up told him I'm going to offer you X but my ceiling is Y, I'm guessing they have extra money to give out, or will.

Definitely some sectors are going to come out of this better than before, and maybe some areas will have the fat cut.

Doing work for one of 1a/1b favorite sports teams. Feelsgoodman.

Something cool that came out of the pandemic: I convinced a NY court to consider a matrimonial case an emergency and allow me to file it during the pandemic. Even Mary Kate Olsen had her request denied.

have about 3 trials a month scheduled starting in September until the end of the year. Really cannot imagine trying to do a jury trial right now. Kind of doubt the jury will be particularly sympathetic to plaintiffs and if we truly have to wear masks (as it stands that is the directive) it will be incredibly awkward...on the other hand if the jury pool is forced to be younger that may be alright with me

I'm running a Lawyer/Law SHEEP in POG that reveals in about 22 hours.

Just had a thought that it might be more fun with some extra lawyers thrown in if anyone is interested. Super quick, easy & basic & no actual law knowledge necessary.

I just did a covid social distance trial. It was complete and utter bullshit. If client wasn't a complete crook, probably liar, and a generally unlikeable person, I would appeal.

Half the jury was in the box, half in the audience. I had to have my back towards half the jury for the entire trial. I did my best to talk extremely loud and open my body up, like be standing at a pivot so they could all see me, but it was hard.

Jurors in audience were like 30 yards from witness testifying and didn't care about the action at all.

Entire ****ing thing was a trainwreck. Defense counsel has been practicing over 30 years and done hundreds, if not thousands, of trials. He agreed with me that the entire thing was awful.

I ended up getting zero'd on causation. Case was not worth much of anything but I just hate losing to snakefarm.

MVA where CL suffered soft tissue injury. Does physical/manual labor as a job. About 2 years post accident, decides to have surgery bc the injury never quite heals right. CL's depo was really bad and was caught contradicting himself numerous times re: did he work or not post accident. I only took to trial bc treating physician did the expert depo for free and Snakefarm refused
to offer higher than 5k. My total costs into case were under 3k but still sucks to lose.

If you got any questions, shoot me a PM.


edit: Should add I'm not blaming the loss on covid. It was probably a loser from the start. But Covid distancing rules and what not certainly didn't help

Can you explain how this game works?

That particular game is over, but the general idea with sheep is just to try to submit what you think will be the most common answer (without regard for correctness).

Currently in the process of hiring my second staff person to help around the office. Anyone have any techniques, skills, advice, etc?

I hired my first staff member and it went well. I ran it through indeed to hire, but I admit I got lucky that it has worked out so well.

Anyone have any good advice/horror stories?

Might be obvious, but ask them if they know anyone? Good people tend to know good people. Maybe even offer them some money if the person works out? The temp agencies charge you a lot for this.

If you can get those appeal monies I'd do it. Someone is going to make Covid case law, why not you.

I've only had Zoom hearings. All my criminal cases in one court have been extended over subsequent orders from March of this year to March of next year. Time excluded.

Transactional work has barely changed honestly. Definitely feel for the litigators.

Litigators are busy AF in cannabis!

I’m kinda surprised there hasn’t been a push to “legalize” online poker, at least on the federal level so that we could bring back Party Poker from 2004 (Lol).

But seriously all the lost gambling revenue plus it’s perfect because you stay at home.

Was basically just told we should keep doing things a certain wrong way because we’ve been doing it that way for years and changing things now would require an accounting change.

That’s just going to rock too many boats.

Client signed off on that despite doing things the wrong way literally costs them tens of millions a year.

The more time I spend in Tax the more convinced I become tax minimization is secondary to audit/penalty risk minimization, and not by a small margin, at least for really big clients I’ve been working with.

That’s insane.

God our jobs are dumb.

Sarbanes–Oxley or Dodd-Frank?

I don’t think it’s our jobs he’s talking about, he’s saying staying compliant with regulations is so overwhelming it’s taking over for everything else. They’re scared and would rather over pay just in case. Right?

His job is to make sure it’s done the right way, but even when he discovers that things are being done the wrong way the practical implications (e.g., the raised risk of audit) dictate that inertia rules the day.

Kudos to you if that doesn’t make you feel the futility of being a corporate lawyer, but it sure does for me.

It’s not just raised risk of audit. Some IRS penalties are way out of proportion to the nature of the offense.

A missing Schedule O is 10k a month for example. Imagine a PE structure potentially missing literally hundreds of Schedule Os because of a mistake in characterizing a holding entity somewhere. That’s tens of millions a year in penalties even if the mistake actually led taxpayer to overpay.

This is somewhat surprising given that all I’ve heard is the IRS is way understaffed, especially in enforcement personnel. I would think companies would take the opposite approach in the last ten years or whatever.

You don't need a lot of staff to just say "hey, your treatment of this entity this year means you owe me <some stupid number of x> Schedule Os for last <dumb number of months y> and therefore you owe us x * y * 10,000 in fines."

Companies REALLY hate IRS audit risks. They are extremely costly both in terms of manpower. Worse, changes in deferred tax liability/asset means you need to explain to shareholders wtf happened and nobody wants that.

Yeah I get that. I also work in the federal government. You have no idea how understaffed we are. I can't speak for all areas, and I personally think it's an allocation of resources issue (some people sitting around doing nothing others working their butt off), but yes, it really is that bad.

Put it another way, someone dropped the ball at the corporation and didn't do this, and it's their job to do this. Noticing it's missing is almost by definition a higher order task that involves more work.

Now I feel it.