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NITA Publishes Remote Advocacy Primer for Trial Lawyers, Litigators

The National Institute for Trial Advocacy (NITA), the world’s leader in advocacy skills training and publications, is pleased to announce the release of its new eBook, Remote Advocacy: A Guide to Survive and Thrive. It is a collection of thirteen essays that helps trial lawyers and litigators adapt to the whiplash changes, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, in their practices and the justice system. The digital primer is well-priced at $30 and is available in WebPDF, Kindle, and Apple iOS versions.

With topics ranging from video-conferencing etiquette, attorney-client interviewing and relationship building, ethics, and discovery, to mediation and arbitration, pro se litigants, and hearings from a judge’s perspective, Remote Advocacy provides practical guidance for lawyering in a time of extraordinary change. NITA’s Director of Publications Eric Sorensen explains its conception:

When the COVID-19 shutdowns began to hit and schools, businesses, and lawyers were being forced to move online to conduct their everyday activities, those of us who were already working remotely took note, but didn’t necessarily grasp the monumental change that was taking place. It wasn’t until I sat in on a 100-person call for advocacy professors who were trying to figure out how, on a moment’s notice, to start conducting classes online that it hit home: working remotely was a foreign concept for many in the legal profession and the number and variety of challenges could be overwhelming for many. With our team of editors, we began kicking around ideas on how to help, and thus the survival guide was set in motion. We turned to NITA faculty and authors who had done it, and who were doing it, to get their best advice on how to not only survive this leap into a new world but to thrive . . . and they delivered, in the form of this eBook.

Contributing author and NITA faculty member Christian Hendrickson of Sherman & Howard in Denver states, “This concise manual is not only an interesting read, but provides a real head start and practical tool for the new world in which we lawyers will be presenting our cases. It also reminds counsel to focus on effective advocacy and civility, no matter the forum in which and circumstances under which they are representing their clients. We’ll all be better for reading Remote Advocacy.”

“Remote Advocacy is about adapting the rule of law to the world of isolation, while prying open the door to a glimpse of a future tempered by the COVID-19 era,” states fellow contributor and NITA faculty member and author Reuben Guttman of Guttman Buschner & Brooks in D.C. “It’s classic NITA: teaching skills to cope with the present while anticipating the future.”

Additional information about NITA’s Remote Advocacy eBook can be found here and through Wolters Kluwer, NITA’s publishing partner. The National Institute for Trial Advocacy is the world’s leader in advocacy skills training and publications. A 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization based in Boulder, Colorado, NITA is a service organization made up of a volunteer network of lawyers, judges, and esteemed advocates across the globe whose mission is to train and mentor lawyers to be competent and ethical advocates in the pursuit of justice. To learn more, visit nita.org, or call us at (303) 953-6828

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Thank you for your service

With the masses huddled in their homes
Communicating by video and iPhones

Neighbors on lawn chairs; six foot spread
Passing time bantering; contemplating the dead

Little children perched by window sill
Peering at an idle world; so many ill

Busy sidewalks once crisscrossed the city
Now lonely lanes; desolate or empty

20 million pondering their plight
Out of work; perhaps out of fight

Amidst the dismal confluence of circumstance
The overlooked souls who give us a chance

EMT’s and nurses and laboratory technicians
Hospital service workers, and ER physicians

Grocery store staff and the delivery drivers
Policemen and the folks who put out the fires

Immigrant meat packers and transit workers
Telephone lineman and sanitation collectors

The unsung supporters of basic existence
They tempt the virus absent resistance

No OSHA proscription and no protection
Too many of them have died from infection

History will reflect and lay out the blame
Yet, tempered by loss, we will not be the same

In case we forget let’s make it quite clear
We owe some souls who checked their fear

They are the voiceless; the little guys
Invisible workers who risked their lives

May they find appreciation in a post virus day
May their employers consider raising their pay

May their jobs become safer and more secure
May dignity grace them on the factory floor

And for now; this fleeting moment in time
Just one single line; one without rhyme

“Thank you for your service.”

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Whistleblowers Beware

By Reuben Guttman

For fraudsters, government expenditures are a license to steal. One thing fraudsters know is that with trillions of dollars in expenditures from federal and state governments in healthcare dollars and bucks for battle tanks and fighter jets, there are not enough eyes watching the till to keep cheaters in line.

Now, in response to a pandemic, the government has pushed over $2 trillion out the door in stimulus money. Government dollars will be earmarked for grants, loans, and for the procurement necessary to battle the COVID-19 pandemic and mitigate the economic consequences of the consequent quarantine.

With government investigators already stretched too thin in enforcing compliance, there will be a need for whistleblowers to pick up the slack. Whistleblowers are no more than everyday honest citizens with an inherent litmus test fabricated from common sense and integrity which causes them to raise questions when they see impropriety. Though the current President has through his words and conducted attempted to cast a pall over the conduct of whistleblowers — particularly as they have lent transparency to his conduct — the truth is that we are a nation whose rule of law was tempered for the better by the work of whistleblowers. Those challenging the statute quo eradicated the evil of slavery, brought voting rights to women, worked to eradicate discrimination in our educational systems, and have challenged workplace harassment and discrimination based on race, gender, religion and sexual orientation. Whistleblowers have exposed unlawful pharmaceutical marketing practices and scams by fraudsters selling college and graduate degrees.

Whistleblowers now have a new challenge. In the provision of healthcare supplies and healthcare itself, they will have an opportunity to be the watchful eyes who can protect government expenditures and the quality of healthcare. In businesses — large and small — across the country they can monitor applications for government grants and loans and make their voices heard when they see impropriety.

For those who step forward and seek to bring transparency to wrongdoing, there is in existence a law dating back to 1864 that provides individuals the right to step into the shoes of the government, report fraud, and bring litigation in the name of the government to seek economic redress on behalf of the government. That statute is called the False Claims Act allowing redress against those who cheat the Federal Government. More than 20 states — including California, New York, Illinois and Florida — have their own False Claims Acts allowing whistleblowers to bring litigation when the fraud involves sate dollars.

There has been over the past several weeks clamor about the importance of this statute and perhaps a need to amend it to make it more effective in batting the fraud that will arise out of the misuse of stimulus dollars. Those who litigate under the False Claims Act know that the law was thoughtfully drafted and is effective. It needs no amendment. What is needed is an administration that fully respects the importance of whistleblowers. Americans need an administration that will fully staff — at the agency level — the ability to investigate and analyze the information and complaints brought forward by whistleblowers. We need an administration committed to imposing the full panoply of damages — treble actual damages and civil penalties — on wrongdoers. And we need an administration that goes after individuals and not merely the corporate shells that provide cover for their misconduct.

Whistleblowers are our heritage; they are an American tradition. Honoring them and protecting our stimulus dollars means aggressive enforcement compliance under a law that is on the books and works.

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Coronavirus can mean a death sentence to prisoners

We got used to treating people as categories, not human beings.
By Nancy Gertner

Even with the coronavirus spreading in prisons, even though incarceration could be fatal and the crime rate during the pandemic has cratered, some officials will not listen to public health experts.

In one federal courtroom, a defense lawyer argued for a client’s release before trial because he was an insulin-dependent diabetic, which, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, increased his risk of infection; the judge refused, saying, as the lawyer told me, the CDC studies must be taken with a “grain of salt,” since it is a “novel” virus. The lawyer persisted: Given the fatality rate of COVID-19, the court should err on the side of caution; none of the defendant’s charges warranted death. To this judge, “erring on the side of caution” meant prison; release denied. While there may have been reasons for the decision, the judge’s comment has troubling echoes of President Trump’s disparagement of expertise. Worse, it shows a stunning lack of empathy.

In a second federal courtroom, another judge refused pre\trial release for the opposite reason. Defense arguments about COVID-19 were “systemic,” and the defendant had not shown he was especially vulnerable. Of course COVID-19 arguments are systemic; they are about a risk so severe that it has upended this country. As Columbia University scholars noted in an April 21 letter to Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, with “medically vulnerable and forcibly proximate” prisoners, those risks require that the governor systematically release prisoners to ease pressures on space and staff.

Read the full article here.