Professor Michelle S. Jacobs moderates a discussion held by the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations about the role of race in the 2008 election

The Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations held a discussion on Oct. 30 about the role race has played in the 2008 election.

Professor Michelle S. Jacobs moderated the event, engaging the audience of about 25 on issues that have been pushed to the forefront with the rise of presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Jacobs cited a recent CNN poll in which seven out of 10 people said race did not play any role in this election. “They’re lying,” responded one audience member.

“I think with the current state of the nation and obviously the economy, I think those who would be affected by race are more willing to put that aside for the better candidate,” said another participant. “I think race is always going to be an issue. Even if they don’t come out and say it, it’s going to be in the back of their heads.”

Another student said the seven out of 10 were thinking that this was an aspiration.

One student explained how race has mattered in this election in his opinion.

“I see race being a part of this election in terms of what you’re able to get away with and what you’re not able to get away with in terms of who you are,” he said. “If you’re Barack Obama, you’re not allowed to have an unwed pregnant teenage daughter and be running for president.”

One audience member commented that some people are probably voting for Obama just because he’s black. Jacobs responded that people in Iowa, which Obama won in the Democratic primary, are almost all white.

“I do think there are some people who vote for him because he’s black, but I think this idea that he’s gotten as far as he has because black people have voted for him is yet another myth, because we’re only 12 percent,” Jacobs said.

When one person suggested that Obama “acts white” more than past black politicians, another quickly responded.

“I’m interested to know what it means exactly to act white,” she said. “Does being educated mean that you’re acting white? Does that mean that education can be only white or can you be brown-skinned and be educated and not be considered acting white?”

The issue of Obama being half black and half white also came up.

“At the beginning, if there was anyone who wasn’t supporting Barack Obama, I felt like it was the black community that wasn’t supporting him because we heard the comments of ‘Oh, it’s a black guy, he’s probably not qualified, blah blah blah,’ coming more from the black community, I felt, than from other communities,” one student said, adding that the fact that Obama is half white may have helped him with some of the black community.

Jacobs started off the discussion quoting Colin Powell saying that a race or religion should not matter in a presidential candidate. She then asked if an Arab-American or Muslim would ever be elected to U.S. President.

“I think ever is a very long time,” said an older participant. “Now it would be difficult, but when you think about how our country has changed since when I grew up in the 40s and 50s, you can’t say never. No black man could’ve ever gotten as far as Obama has in the 40s.”

While most in the discussion seemed to think race has definitely played a role in the election, the examples why it has mattered varied.

“When I bring in the issue of race, it is a major issue for me,” said one student. “I was mixed heritage growing up and my children will be even more mixed. I know what it is to be a little kid and see who the president is on TV and what that does to a nation.”

Assistant State Attorney Teresa Drake spoke in Bailey Courtroom about domestic violence on Oct. 31.

Assistant State Attorney Teresa Drake refers to her job as “homicide prevention.” Drake, county court division chief for the Eighth circuit, spoke at the Levin College of Law on Oct. 31 about her experiences prosecuting domestic violence cases, stressing the importance of attorneys handling such cases with both delicate care and fierce advocacy.

“Control issues in a relationship are the hallmark of a batterer,” Drake explained.

The mechanisms that abusers use to control their victims, according to Drake, are varied and include social isolation, monetary restriction, verbal attacks, physical attacks, and threats. Many abusers also use children to communicate threats, send messages, and manipulate their victims.

According to Drake, 73 percent of all emergency room visits and 70 percent of all calls to law enforcement occur when victims are attempting to leave their abusers. Additionally, most domestic violence abuse victims who die at the hands of their abusers die after they have left the relationship — the abuser’s answer to losing control over the victim.

In order to help protect victims once abuse has been reported, Drake works closely with Peaceful Paths, a Gainesville-based domestic abuse help network, and Three Rivers Legal Services, which helps provide legal assistance to underprivileged clients. Drake praised the Gainesville area for having such strong programs to aid domestic abuse victims.

Help being available, however, does not necessarily mean that victims will seek it.

Drake addressed several of the complex reasons why victims are often unwilling to come forward. One reason is that many victims do not even realize that they are victims, because the image of a woman with a black eye or a broken nose has been burned into society’s collective consciousness as what a domestic abuse victim must look like.Instead, Drake explained, most victims will have either less-visible injuries or no injuries, and victims will often not identify an occasional shove or push as abusive. Similarly, many victims of emotional abuse do not identify themselves as victims since they also lack the physical traits of abuse.

Just as not all abuse victims will have bruises, Drake noted that not all abusers seem abusive and are often highly charming masters of manipulation. She also addressed the issue of providing legal representation to a batterer. While many shudder at the thought, Drake pointed out that batterers also need an attorney who will have the best interests of any children in mind and will direct the abuser to appropriate outlets to work toward stopping the abusive behavior.

In determining if a potential client is in fact a potential batterer, Drake identifies three warning signs: minimizing, denying, and blaming. She added that the batterer will often make unsubstantiated accusations against the victim, deflecting fault from themselves.

By assisting victims of domestic abuse in escaping from an abusive relationship, and by prosecuting perpetrators of domestic violence, Drake hopes to break the cycle of abuse in relationships that otherwise could have ended in tragedy.

For more information about types of domestic violence and help available to victims in the Gainesville area, visit www.peacefulpaths.org.

E-discovery writer Ralph Losey addresses those in attendence at the Sedona E-Discovery Evening held at the UF Levin College of Law.

It’s time for the legal profession to move into the 21st century and for law students to consider a new and rapidly expanding field.

A distinguished group of experts spoke about the importance of electronic discovery at Tuesday’s “E-Discovery Evening,” which was co-sponsored by The Sedona Conference and the Levin College of Law.

Noted e-discovery writer Ralph Losey stressed how different the world has become with modern technology and how lawyers are doing a poor job adapting.

“We’ve been graduating people out of law school who are prepared to practice law in the 19th century,” said Losey, a shareholder at Akerman Senterfitt. “They’re prepared to work with Abe Lincoln, who had a partner and an associate. They went through papers, and they went to a trial courtroom.”

Law students are still generally trained to review a limited number of documents and build a case around what is given to them. But today’s cases can have millions of electronic documents in a variety of formats that have to be reviewed, Losey said.

“You’re not trained to deal with 5 million documents. Cases now – with just 10 witnesses in a corporation – they’re going to have millions of documents,” Losey said. “You cannot look at each document. That’s the real world; it’s not the Abe Lincoln world of just having a few paper documents.” Patrick Oot, Verizon’s director of electronic discovery and senior counsel, gave the example of Verizon buying out MCI to show how complicated e-discovery issues can be.

There were over 2.4 million documents (1.3 terabytes of date) that had to be reviewed in that case, Oot said.

This required 115 attorneys at one firm doing privilege review and 110 attorneys at another firm doing timeline review. It took four months with attorneys working every day for 16 hours a day to finish the review, Oot said. Overall, just the review process cost over $13.5 million for outside counsel alone. Going forward, technological advances will make searching the documents more efficient.

Oot recently read an article that said there were only about 200 lawyers nationwide that can handle e-discovery issues well, but that number needs to grow quickly.

“As our general counsel put it when we first started this [e-discovery] group, he said, ‘This is the only practice within the company that I actually see growing,’” Oot said. “Federal regulatory, litigation, antitrust, intellectual property – he sees those groups shrinking where we’re hiring people all the time.”

With the e-discovery field growing so rapidly, The Sedona Conference has been at the forefront of establishing best practices in the field. One of the principles The Sedona Conference stands for is cooperation with opposing counsel on discovery issues.

“You want to be adversarial, obviously, but at the same time, I don’t think you want to be adversarial on the issues pertaining to what information is available,” said Joseph P. Guglielmo, a plaintiff e-discovery expert for Whaley, Drake & Kallas.

Guglielmo emphasized not asking for something from opposing counsel that you would not be comfortable producing.

One reason the opposing attorneys should cooperate is to satisfy judges, Guglielmo said. He remembers waiting for a pretrial conference about discovery when the judge called a case in which the lawyers argued about discovery issues.

“I won’t get into details with what she said, but she basically told them not to come back in her courtroom again, either one of them – that there would be sanctions if they brought another discovery issue to her attention, because they were things that she believed could’ve been worked out if the phone was picked up,” Guglielmo said.

Ken Withers, a distinguished e-discovery writer with The Sedona Conference, moderated the event. He has been working with e-discovery since 1987, he said.

In this time, two events have made discovery much more important, Withers said.

First, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were amended in 1983 and 1993 to allow more discovery, Withers said.

“The number of cases that actually went to trial was decreasing, and it’s now less than three percent of all cases filed,” he said. “Discovery went from being a means to an end – getting to trial – to being the end in and of itself. The stakes of discovery where thereby raised.”

Second, the desktop PC has led to the exponential growth in the amount of data in the world, Withers said.

The Honorable David Baker, a United States Magistrate for the Middle District of Florida, spoke about e-discovery from the judicial perspective.

All speakers agreed that this is the future of discovery and students should try to learn about it. Bill Hamilton, a Holland & Knight e-discovery expert who organized this event, teaches an e-discovery class – one of the first in the country – at the UF Levin College of Law.

“Be smart, look at where the future is, look at the trend,” Losey said. “This is where the opportunity lies. Take these courses on e-discovery; learn about it. Nobody else in the firms you go to are going to know anything about it, trust me… There are a few firms, but there are very few, so this is a time of opportunity. You’ve got to study this stuff.”

Added Oot: “If you want to work in this space, you might as well hitch your wagon to the star, because it’s a really good place to be.”

Elizabeth Bialow Pekin, director of attorney marketing and sales at Oasis Legal Finance, finances legal funding for plaintiffs involved in personal injury cases.

As Americans feel the effects of economic turmoil, some can’t afford to put food on the table, let alone wait years for a case to be settled.

That’s where Elizabeth Bialow Pekin (JD 91) comes in.

Pekin is director of attorney marketing and sales at Oasis Legal Finance, a Chicago-based company that advances money to plaintiffs who are involved in personal injury cases.

“It’s the most interesting thing right now because of the economy,” she said.

Being unable to work due to an injury can mean the loss of a livelihood for many of Pekin’s clients.

“Most of these people are everyday working people that had manual labor type jobs,” she said. “They get behind on a few bills and everything spirals from there.”

Cases can often take years to resolve and lawyers can’t ethically lend their clients money. With the current economic downturn, people are desperate, Pekin said.

“The clients are not people that can go to banks,” she said “They’re contacting us because their phones are getting cut off and they can’t pay for school supplies for their children.”

Often, injured plaintiffs can’t get the surgery they need because they can’t afford to miss work.

“That’s an amazing part of the business: We can advance the plaintiffs money so that they can actually get off work to get surgery,” Pekin said. “It actually makes their case more substantial,” Pekin said.

The money that plaintiffs receive from Oasis is not a loan, but rather a non-recourse advance. Oasis purchases an interest in the potential proceeds of the personal injury case.

“If the case is lost, they don’t have to pay us back,” Pekin said. “The collateral is the case.”

Financially assisting plaintiffs allows attorneys to stay the course of the case and not feel rushed by their clients to settle early.

“We come in and we give a small percentage of the value of the case,” she said. “That can help the attorney really stay involved in the claim and get the maximum value for the client,” she said.

Pekin became interested in the concept of financially assisting plaintiffs while practicing workers compensation law.

“I spent half the day talking to my clients and they were asking me, ‘Can you please call my landlord and ask them hold off? I’m going to lose my house.’”

When Pekin became involved in the groundbreaking field six years ago, it could take three weeks to a month to secure funding for a plaintiff. Oasis has made the process more speedy, efficient and attorney-friendly.

“Now an attorney can call my office at 10 a.m. requesting $15,000 and I can have that money out the door by the afternoon,” she said.

Oasis Legal Finance is now the largest company in the legal funding industry.

Pekin is licensed by both the Florida and Illinois bars and works with a variety of cases. She handles all of the attorney referrals that come in from Florida.

“It’s interesting from a legal perspective because we are reviewing all these different kinds of cases to assess whether or not we would want to make an advance to the plaintiff.”

Pekin once helped a homeless man buy clothing so that he could go to trial.

“The lawyer called me and said, ‘My client just needs $500 so he can get a hot meal and I need to put him in something: He’s got a court hearing,’” she said. “The plaintiff was able to use the $500 advance to buy a suit for the hearing and buy food to eat.”

Pekin enjoys being able to use her law degree in a creative way.

“I love that I’m not necessarily practicing law but I’m allowed to have that connection still with the law,” she said. “When I hear these clients and they tell me that we helped put food on the table, it really is rewarding just to be able to help.”