#big law

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How the kleptocrats and oligarchs hunt civil society groups to the ends of the Earth

It's a great time to be an oligarch! If you have accumulated a great fortune and wish to put whatever great crime lies behind it behind you, there is an army of fixers, lickspittles, thugs, reputation-launderers, procurers, henchmen, and other enablers who have turnkey solutions for laundering your reputation and keeping the unwashed from building a guillotine outside the gates of your compound.

The field of International Relations has studied the enemies of the Klept in detail: the Transnational Activist Network is a well-documented phenomenon. But far more poorly understood is the Transnational Uncivil Society Network, who will polish any turd of sufficient wealth to a high, professional gloss.

These TUSNs are the subject of a new, timely scholarly paper by Alexander Cooley, John Heathershaw and Ricard Soares de Oliveira: "Transnational Uncivil Society Networks: kleptocracy’s global fightback against liberal activism," published in last month's European Journal of International Relations:

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5e5a3052-c693-4991-a7cc-bc2b47134467/download_file?file_format=application%2Fpdf&safe_filename=Cooley_et_al_2023_transnational_uncivil_society.pdf&type_of_work=Journal+article

The authors document how a collection of institutions – some coercive, others organized around good works – allow kleptocrats to take power, keep power, and use power. This includes "wealth managers, company providers, accounting firms, and international bankers" who create the complex financial structures that obscure the klept's wealth. It also includes "second citizenship managers and lawyers" that facilitate the klept's transnational nature, both to provide access to un-looted, prosperous places to visit, and boltholes to escape to in the face of coup or reform. It includes the real-estate brokers and other asset facilitators, who turn whole precincts of the world's greatest cities into empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky, while ensuring that footlose criminal elites always have a penthouse to perch in when they take a break from the desiccated husks they've drained dry back home.

Of course, it also includes the PR managers and philanthropic ventures that allow the klept to launder their reputation, to make themselves synonymous with good deeds rather than mass murder. Think here of how the Sacklers used charity to turn their family name into a synonym for culture and fine art, rather than death by opioid overdose:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

Beyond providing comfort to "Politically Exposed Persons" and "High Net-Worth Individuals," TUSNs are concerned with neutralizing TANs. Activists in these transnational networks play an inside-outside game: in-country activists will recruit peers abroad to bring attention to the crimes of their local kleptocrats. These overseas partners target the klept in the places they go to play and spend, spoiling their fun – and if they succeed in getting corrupt leaders censured abroad, then in-country activists can leverage that bad press to fight the klept at home.

To fight this "Boomerang Effect," TUSNs seek to burnish corrupt officials' reputations abroad, getting their names on humanitarian prizes, beloved sports teams, cultural institutions and great universities. They seek to capture international governance institutions that might wrong-foot kleptocrats, co-opting them to enable and even celebrate looters.

When it comes to elite philanthropy, TUSNs are necessarily selective. Kleptocrats' foundations don't fund anti-kleptocratic groups – they stick to "education, public health, the environment and the arts." These domains steer clear of human rights questions that might implicate their benefactors. Russian oligarchs love children's charities and disability rights – provided they don't target the Russian state.

If charitable giving is reputation laundering's carrot, then "reputation management" is the laundry's stick. Think of organized copyfraudsters who clone websites that have criticized their clients, then backdate the articles, then accuse the originals of infringing copyright in order to get them de-listed from Google or taken offline altogether:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops

Reputation managers also spend a lot of time in court. In the UK – the world's leader in libel tourism, thanks to a legal system designed to let posh monsters sue muckraking journalists into silence – Russian oligarchs have perfected the art of forcing their critics to shut up and go away:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/04/londongrad/#enablers

Indeed, London is a one-stop shop for the global klept, a place were forelock-tugging Renfields will buy you a Mayfair mansion under cover of a numbered company, sue your critics into silence, funnel your money into an anonymous Channel Islands account:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/07/the-klept/#pep

They'll sell you whole galleriesworth of "fine art" that you can have relocated to a climate-controlled container in a Swiss or Irish freeport:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poesy-the-monster-slayer/#moneylab

They'll give your thick-as-pigshit progeny a PhD and never check to see whether he wrote his thesis himself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSE%E2%80%93Gaddafi_affair

Then they'll hook you up with a cyber-arms dealer to hunt your enemies by capturing their devices:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/27/gas-on-the-fire/#a-safe-place-for-dangerous-ideas

But don't let Brexit stop you from shopping for bargains on the continent. The Golden Passports of the EU – available in a variety of flavors, from Maltese to Cypriot to Portuguese – offer the discerning failson access to the luxury good shops and fleshpots of 27 advanced economies, making it a favorite of the Khmer Riche – the junior klept of Cambodia's ruling faction:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/cambodia-hunsen-wealth/

But golden passports are for amateurs. Skilled klepts travel on diplomatic passports, which offer the twin benefits of free movement and consequence-free criminality, thanks to diplomatic immunity. The former Kazakh dictator's son-in-law enjoyed a freewheeling diplomatic life in Vienna; one daughters of the dictator of Tajikistan had a jolly time as an envoy to DC; another, to London (where else?).

All this globetrotting serves a second purpose: when rival elites seize power back home and force the old guard into exile, those ex-monsters can show up in the lands they called their second homes and apply for asylum. It turns out that even bomb-the-boats UK will welcome any asylum seeker who enters via the private jet terminal at City Airport (to be fair, these "refugees" have extensive properties in Zone 1 and country places in the Home Counties, so they won't need housing).

This stuff works. After Kazakh state goons murdered at least 14 protesters at a Zhanaozen oil facility in 2011, human rights groups around the world took up the cause. But they were effectively neutralized by TUSNs, with former UK PM Tony Blair writing on behalf of the Kazakh government to the EU condemning any kind of international investigation into the mass killings (add "former Prime Ministers" to the list of commodities for sale in the UK to sufficiently well-resourced murderer).

The authors close their paper with two case-studies. The first is of the daughters of Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, Gulnara and Lola. And President Karimov was indeed a dictator: he trapped his population within his borders, forced them to use unconvertible scrip in place of money, and ordered the murder of hundreds of peaceful protesters, plunging the country into international isolation.

But while Uzbeks were sealed within their borders, Gulnara Karimov became an international player, running a complex network of businesses that mixed the products of the nation's oilfields with her family's fortune. She solicited – and received – bribes from Teliasonera, MTS and Vimpelcom, who were all vying for the contract to provide service in Uzbekistan. All told, she extracted more than $1b in bribes, laundering them through Latvia, Hong Kong and New York. She acquired real-estate in France and Switzerland, and her spree continued until her father collaborated with Uzbek security to seize her assets and place her under house-arrest.

Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva was Gulnara's estranged younger sister. She and her husband Timur Tillyaev ran the Dubai-based SecureTrade, which did extensive business with "opaque Scottish Limited Partnerships," laundering more than $127m in a single year to offshore accounts in the UAE and Switzerland. They acquired many luxe assets – a jet, a Californian villa, and an LA perfumier.

Lola styled herself as the face of the Karimovas abroad, a "philanthropist and cultural ambassador." She was a UNESCO ambassador and commissioned works of monumental art – and also sued the shit out of news outlets that reported factual matters about her family repressive activity at home. She organized AIDS charities in the name of Uzbekistan – even as her father was imprisoning a writer for publishing a book explaining how to have safer sex.

The second case-study is on Isabel dos Santos, "Africa's richest woman," daughter of Angolan dictator Jose Eduardo dos Santos. Isabel's vast fortune stemmed from her personal capture of vast swathes of the third-largest economy in Africa: "telecommunications, banking, diamonds, real estate and cement, among many others." Isabel enjoyed seemingly limitless access to state credit and co-investment, and was given first crack at newly deregulated industries. Foreign firms that invested in Angola were required to "partner" with Isabel's businesses.

Isabel claimed to be a "self-made woman" – a claim credulously parroted by the western press, including the FT. She used her homegrown fortune to become a major player abroad, especially in Portugal, where she was represented by the leading Portuguese law-firm PLMJ. Her enablers are who's who of corruption-loving lickspittles: McKinsey, Ernst and Young, Boston Consulting Group, and the Spanish BigLaw firm Uri Menendez.

Isabel cultivated a public facade of philanthropic giving and public spirited activism, serving as head of the Angolan Red Cross. She attended Davos and spoke at the LSE (she was also invited to Oxford, but her invitation was subsequently rescinded). On social media, she dismissed critics of her wealth and corruption as "colonialists," decrying their "racism" and "prejudice."

Isabel dos Santos's corrupt sources of wealth were finally, irrefutably exposed through the Luanda Leaks, in which the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists mapped the network of "top banks, management consultants and legal firms that were central to dos Santos’s operations."

Both case studies shed light on the network of brilliant, driven enablers and procurers without whom the world's greatest monsters would falter. It's a rare window on a secretive world, one that is poorly understood even by its inhabitants. As Michael Mechanic wrote in Jackpot, his 2021 book on vast, intergenerational fortunes, the winners of the lucky orifice lottery often lack any real understanding of how The Money is structured, grown and protected:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#affluenza

This point was reiterated by Abigail Disney, in a brave piece on what it's like to grow up subject to the oversight of these millionaires who babysit the children of billionaires:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

This is an important contribution to the literature. We naturally focus on the ultrawealthy individuals whose reputations and fortunes are the subject of so much attention, but without the TUSNs, they would be largely helpless.

Going to Burning Man? Catch me on Tuesday at 2:40pm on the Center Camp Stage for a talk about enshittification and how to reverse it; on Wednesday at noon, I'm hosting Dr Patrick Ball at Liminal Labs (6:15/F) for a talk on using statistics to prove high-level culpability in the recruitment of child soldiers.

On September 6 at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/24/launderers-enforcers-bagmen/#procurers

Image: Sam Valadi (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/132084522@N05/17086570218/

CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

--

Colin (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palace_of_Westminster_from_the_dome_on_Methodist_Central_Hall_(cropped).jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[jonostroveart]

BIG LAW

Today, in yet another spectacular display of chicken-hearted cravenness, four more Big Law firms rolled over on their backs in supine surrender and promised the Mango Mussolini at least half a billion dollars worth of pro bono legal services. By my count, they’ve failed about half a dozen of the lessons outlined by Timothy Snyder in his book On Tyrrany. 🙈

[clingy-10000iq-moments]

Big Law's secret lawyer trick

[minilibrarian]

Just finished my first week as a summer associate at my dream law firm and I feel so tired, but so overwhelmed with gratitude.

On my first day walking into my office, I saw the freshly vacuumed carpet and almost burst into tears. Growing up I used to help my parents clean a local office building and dream of having one of my own one day as I picked up their trash and vacuumed up their mess.

This has truly been a full circle moment.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones:

Late Friday night, the White House released the latest tranche of Trump executive actions and directives aimed at further kneecapping some of the nation’s most famous lawyers and law firms the president believes are obstructing his agenda or have tangled with him in the past. One of the late-night directives is entitled “Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court.” Both terrifying and hilarious given its author, the memo instructs Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to aggressively pursue court sanctions and disciplinary actions against lawyers and law firms that engage in “grossly unethical misconduct,” which it mainly seems to define as lawyers and lawsuits Trump doesn’t like. Singled out for persecution are immigration lawyers and “Big Law” firms with pro bono practices that represent immigrants or litigate against the federal government, as well as Democratic Party lawyer Marc Elias.

Trump launching a war on “frivolous” lawsuits is pretty rich given his long misuse of the legal system. As a private citizen, Trump was involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits, many of which involved his refusing to pay people for work they did for him. For instance, ahead of his 2005 wedding to Melania, Trump ordered two crystal chandeliers for the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago from an 82-year-old Latvian immigrant in West Palm Beach who specialized in making replicas of chandeliers that hung in Versailles. He then allegedly stiffed the man on most of the bill, and when the owner complained to the local paper, Trump sued him claiming the installation work was shoddy. The businessman ended up having to settle for only a third of what he was owed. “My client [was] just a small businessman. No big corporation. He just didn’t have the money to fight Mr. Trump,” his lawyer told Mother Jones in 2016, adding that Trump’s behavior in the chandelier case is apparently “his modus operandi.”

Habitual frivolous lawsuit filer Donald Trump declares war on “frivolous” lawsuits, meaning lawsuits against his dangerous and tyrannical policies.

[uboat53]

"Companies' in-house lawyers are also nervous. They want to make sure their outside counsel is willing to fight the government if necessary. One lawyer working in a company's general counsel office told Business Insider that her company's advisors at a law firm that made a deal with Trump said it was necessary to hold onto influence with regulators. 'It just feels very cynical,' said the in-house lawyer, who wants to redirect work to other firms. 'I don't feel comfortable, if you're going to cave in front of the government, that you're going to represent me in front of the government.'"

Well that's an angle of the "law firms knuckling under the Trump Administration" story I hadn't thought of before.

Source

[shrinkrants]

This scares me and turns my stomach--details on how "Big Law" actually holds the reins of the DNC.

...these lawyers aren’t just unethical, but are in many ways the reason that the Democratic Party is as enfeebled and pathetic as it seems to be. Big Law is the brains of the Democrats, with the actual elected officials, often meek pleasers with little experience wielding real power, as ornaments who serve up slop on centrist and leftism and other meaningless terms. The alchemy of Big Law was always the way in which you seamlessly revolve in and out of government — the allure of making a lot of money and governing. That is what is shattering. Relatedly, for the first time in my lifetime, Democratic voters are turning against their own leaders. Forty percent of Democratic voters approve of Congressional Democrats, and 49 percent disapprove. Last year, 75 percent approved and just 21 percent disapproved. At town halls, Democratic members of Congress are encountering not support but rage. As Axios reported, a “senior House Democrat told Axios that a colleague called them after a town hall crying and said: “They hate us. They hate us.” Democratic voters haven’t fingered Big Law as the culprit, so the question right now is whether corporate America and Big Law will remain homeless, or whether firms like Paul Weiss can recapture what they had. But there is deep rage in the Democratic base and on the right at oligarchy.

[uglycryinglawyer]

flame emoji

ok hiiiiii ... good2know that that blaze feature works .... will unlikely be using it again while im unemployed </3 (my big law job officially starts in the fall).

welcomeee. whether you're a future ugly crying lawyer or not, im so so happy youre here :)<3.

ill be studying for the bar for the next 11 weeks but ill post something each day for you all.

please lmk if you want me to talk about anything in particular, otherwise, you'll only be subject to my random ramblings & musings.*

*you'll be subject to my random ramblings & musings no matter what - first rule of fight club (aka a career in law it seems) is qualifiers. are. everything.

[whoaaaoaoo]

big lawyer is that you?

maybe i shouldn’t respond to wrong number texts any more

[newslink7com]

Trump Hit With Major Lawsuit by Susman Godfrey Over Controversial Executive Order as $940M in Legal Concessions From Big Law Firms Pile Up

A fourth elite law firm has sued President Trump, accusing him of unconstitutional retaliation. Meanwhile, five others have pledged nearly $1 billion in pro bono work to avoid similar crackdowns.

👉 Read the full story at NewsLink7.com

[lunarmoment]

Trump attacking big law firms and the law firms bowing at the knee coming to ”settlement agreements” is a really, really bad sign. Because we need more of those these days.

[biglawwoes]

Law students: you will make a LOT of VERY MINOR and seemingly even obvious mistakes in your first year that you’ve never made or never would normally make but are making because you’re nervous/overworked/rushed/etc.

Sometimes you will even have a situation where someone draws attention to the mistake and you make the same mistake again.

Any mid level, senior associate, or partner that would hold a such a minor mistake against you is not only an asshole but also a hypocrite.

Now if you’re like doing malpractice, I can’t help you with that. But forgetting to attach a redline or scheduling a meeting super early in the morning, or some other very fixable mistake is usually NOT that deep and any person worth working with will cut you some slack until you get your bearings.

If you’re at a free market firm, you don’t have to work for those types of people. Find people you like, who instill and inspire confidence in you, and whose work and communication styles match your own then go from there. Teach assholes a lesson.

If your work is centrally staffed, have a conversation with your staffing manager/practice group manager/whatever department it is in your firm that keeps conversations confidential, and tell them you want to try a different type of work or that you’ve been wanting to work with someone else. They should try their best to accommodate you.

Remember, you are not alone. Mistakes--even seemingly obvious ones--are VERY common at this stage. And you just have to get through at least a year so another job will take you seriously when you try to leave lol

[minilibrarian]

Sooooo excited to have solidified work as a summer associate this summer at a big law firm 🤭

This is literally a dream come true I don’t know what to do with myself…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Katie Phang:

“Eliminating lawyers as the guardians of the rule of law removes a major impediment to the path to more power.” Behold one of the most powerful opening lines in Judge Beryl Howell’s 108-page blistering Memorandum Opinion permanently blocking any federal agency from enforcing Trump’s Executive Order 14230 against Perkins Coie. Trump gets hit with yet another brutal benchslap with language like: “EO 14230 takes the approach of ‘Let’s kill the lawyers I don’t like,’ sending the clear message: lawyers must stick to the party line, or else.” Within days of being targeted by this EO, Perkins Coie sued the Trump Administration. Trump had suspended any active security clearances held by any Perkins Coie employee, terminated any federal contracts with the firm, called for the investigation of the law firm’s DEI practices/policies, prevented any law firm employee from entering federal buildings “when such access would threaten the national security”, limited government employees from “engaging” with law firm employees, and barred all federal agencies from hiring any Perkins Coie employees. Why? Because Trump is a petty man-child who didn’t like the fact that Perkins Coie had previously represented his political opponents like Hillary Clinton, is currently representing a group of transgender military service members against the Trump Administration, and because pro-democracy lawyers like Marc Elias used to be an attorney at the firm. Trump whined and complained that Perkins Coie had been “weaponized” against him. (I know, yet another glaring example of Trump’s lack of self-awareness). Perkins Coie immediately sought a Temporary Restraining Order, which was entered the day after the firm filed suit on March 12th, with Judge Howell finding that the EO was unconstitutional and textbook “viewpoint discrimination plain and simple.” She also found that Trump’s “retaliatory animus” was clear from the language of the EO and related fact sheet. Instead of having the matter proceed all the way to a trial, Judge Howell granted Perkins Coie’s Motion for Summary Judgment, entering a Permanent Injunction against all of the defendants. It’s truly noteworthy that the court entered summary judgment because the standard is high and most judges usually just let the case go to trial. In this instance, the Trump defendants put forth their best arguments and evidence, the court was required to assume it was true in the light most favorable to the defense, and TRUMP STILL LOST! So the fact that Judge Howell granted summary judgment in this case and entered this permanent bar against Trump’s EO is a very clear message being sent to him that she knows exactly what he’s about. Trump even tried to get Judge Howell disqualified from the case, but that motion was denied. Trump also tried to get Perkins Coie’s Amended Complaint dismissed and that was denied. Instead, the court found that “the Trump Administration’s blunt exercise of power in EO 14230 to target Perkins Coie for adverse actions by every Federal agency violates the Constitution in multiple ways” including the First Amendment’s right to free speech, the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, and the Sixth Amendment’s right to counsel. Unlike some other Big Law firms which capitulated in advance or in the face of similar EOs, Perkins Coie and three other firms have refused to bend the knee. Their courage, and that of the law firms and lawyers who are bravely representing them, did not go unnoticed by Judge Howell: “If the founding history of this country is any guide, those who stood up in court to vindicate constitutional rights and, by so doing, served to promote the rule of law, will be the models lauded when this period of American history is written.”

Anti-American traitor Donald Trump got slapped good by Judge Beryl Howell for his unconstitutional executive order aimed at Perkins Coie.

[616swanda]