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WHAT WE'RE WATCHING

TRUE VALUE - Two years ago, lawyer and mental health consultant Patrick Krill set out to test a hypothesis: Is the commodification of the legal field, such that it looks more like big business than a profession, tied to deteriorating mental and physical health among attorneys? The answer appears to be yes, according to a study Krill published with the University of Minnesota's psychiatry department this month in Behavioral Sciences. Having surveyed nearly 2,000 attorneys in California and Washington, D.C., in summer 2020 about their well-being and the value they felt they represented to their employers, Krill's team discovered that lawyers who felt valued for their individual skills were happier, less stressed, less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, and less likely to quit their firms or the profession altogether than those who felt like billing units or got no meaningful feedback. "Lawyers spend a lot of time, effort and money to become lawyers, and most probably pride themselves on their intellect and their skill," Krill told Law.com's Dan Roe. "If they're not being recognized for that in a meaningful way, that core psychological need we all have is going unmet. I think it's reasonable to say that feeling like you're in a primarily transactional relationship with your employer doesn't lead to the best mental health outcomes.

SERVED VIA SERVER -  While some of us are still trying to figure out what the heck NFTs actually are, there are lawyers out there finding new and novel uses for them. In a first, Miami attorneys served a defendant with a temporary restraining order in the form of a non-fungible token, or NFT, following the approval of the "service token" by a justice of the New York Supreme Court, Law.com's Michael A. Mora reports. The lawyers are Joe Dewey and Andrew Balthazor, attorneys in Holland & Knight's asset recovery team. They said this new strategy in serving an anonymous defendant is an example of how innovation in the blockchain landscape could provide legitimacy and transparency to a market sector critics have called ungovernable.  "This gives us one mechanism to at least serve legal process on a person who controls an address that's involved with the virtual currency that was affected," Balthazor said. "Before this, we would have to identify some other identifiable information about the person in order to serve them. The judge, in this context, recognized the difficulty in serving this defendant, and authorized us to do so in the right context." The dispute in this case is based on the unauthorized access to and the theft of nearly $8 million worth of various virtual assets based on the Ethereum blockchain, according to the complaint.

WHO GOT THE WORK?℠ - Peter Chu and Marty B. Ready of Wilson Elser have entered appearances for Fragrantica Inc., Zoran Knezevic and Elena A. Knezhevich in a pending copyright infringement lawsuit. The suit, filed April 15 in California Southern District Court by Sriplaw on behalf of ABG Images UK Ltd. trading as Iconic Images Ltd. and photojournalist Douglas Morley Kirkland, accuses Fragrantica of posting Faye Dunaway and Marilyn Monroe photographs on their website without authorization or permission. The case, assigned to U.S. District Judge Linda Lopez, is 3:22-cv-00523, ABG Images (UK) Ltd et al v. Fragrantica, Inc et al. >> Read the filing on Law.com Radar and check out the most recent edition of Law.com's Who Got the Work?℠ column to find out which law firms and lawyers are being brought in to handle key cases and close major deals for their clients.

ON THE RADAR - The U.S. Small Business Administration and its administrator Isabella Casillas Guzman were slapped with a lawsuit Friday in District of Columbia District Court. The suit, filed by Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton on behalf of the Harlem Globetrotters, pursues APA claims in connection with the agency's denial of emergency federal financial assistance amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Counsel have not yet appeared for the defendants. The case is 1:22-cv-01679, Harlem Globetrotters International, Inc. v. U.S. Small Business Administration et al. Stay up on the latest deals and litigation with the new Law.com Radar. 

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