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Disability Law

Lawyer alleges BigLaw firm fired her 11 days after she disclosed epilepsy diagnosis, violating disability law

By Debra Cassens Weiss

April 10, 2025, 9:00 am CDT

A former lawyer at Ballard Spahr has filed a lawsuit alleging that she was fired for taking medical leave after suffering gastrointestinal problems and a seizure.

Kimberly Steefel, a former of counsel for Ballard Spahr, filed the April 8 suit in the U.S. District for the Southern District of New York, Law360 reports in a story noted by Above the Law.

Steefel learned that she was being fired in October 2022 on the day that she returned to the law firm’s New York office from medical leave, according to her suit. Only 11 days before she had disclosed her epilepsy diagnosis and her medical provider’s recommendation for an accommodation in the form of a flexible work schedule, the suit says.

Steefel suffered from gastrointestinal problems and what she thought was her first seizure before beginning the medical leave. She later sought “16 reasonable accommodations for her epilepsy,” the suit says.

The accommodations stemmed from the effect of epilepsy on stamina and concentration and the need to “avoid environments pervaded by anxiety and hostility,” which can lower the seizure threshold, according to the suit.

There was no attempt to discuss accommodations, the suit says. Steefel was initially told that her employment would end no later than mid-January 2023, but the date was later pushed back to mid-April 2023.

Before she learned of her firing, Steefel had “received nothing but praise and positive feedback” for her work, the suit says.

Her suit alleges discrimination, retaliation, hostile treatment and wrongful termination on the basis of Steefel’s disabilities and gender in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and state and local anti-discrimination laws.

The suit alleges that the firm has a history of discriminating against disabled people, pointing to Ballard Spahr lawyer job ads with “nonsensical physical requirements” that include the ability to “stand, walk, bend and stoop,” to sit for long periods of time, and to “lift up to 40 pounds.”

Steefel also alleges that her practice group, the employee benefits and executive compensation group, created a hostile work environment on the basis of sex.

The group had a “systematic practice” of “replacing the junior- or mid-level female attorneys with other female attorneys at the same or lower level, thus keeping the cycle of maintaining females at lower-level positions only, and at the same time, hiring into and promoting to more senior-level positions only males,” the suit says.

Ballard Spahr provided this statement to the ABA Journal: “The firm disputes the allegations contained in Ms. Steefel’s complaint, and in particular, that she was terminated due to an alleged disability or her gender. The firm will defend the case vigorously.”

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3. Once-homeless University of Chicago law grad…

Homelessness

Once-homeless University of Chicago law grad getting treatment, hopes to return to law practice

By Debra Cassens Weiss

March 19, 2025, 12:41 pm CDT

A University of Chicago Law School graduate who lived for two years on the streets of Los Angeles has moved back home with his mother in Virginia and hopes to resume law practice.

Rob Dart moved home in January and has been taking anti-psychotic medication for more than three months, the Wall Street Journal reports. He is taking online continuing legal education classes and hopes to regain his law license.

The Wall Street Journal had chronicled efforts by Dart’s family to help him in articles published this month and in May 2024. He began hearing voices when he was 35 years old and returned to his mother’s home at that time. He received medication and therapy for two years but quit treatment in 2022 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dart ended up homeless in Los Angeles. His sister and mother had traveled to California to try to help him, but he often rejected them.

The Wall Street Journal’s coverage spurred some people to offer help. One reader set up a tab for Dart at a coffee shop. Another connected Dart’s family with a psychiatrist affiliated with a Pasadena, California, hospital who said he would treat Dart when he was willing to accept help.

Late last year, Dart began treatment at the hospital. But during the wildfires in Los Angeles earlier this year, Dart successfully petitioned for release. Days later, he agreed to return to his mother’s home and began treatment.

Online records indicate that Dart was admitted to law practice in Illinois in 2004 and in California in 2009. He was suspended in California for failure to meet state CLE requirements in 2022 and for failure to pay fees in 2023. He also failed to show compliance with Illinois CLE requirements and was last registered there in 2022.

Dart’s last registered address with Illinois attorney regulators was at the Wilshire Law Firm in Los Angeles.

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True crime has become a paint-by-numbers game. The formula is often copied and pasted, and finding a novel approach in the field is rare.

With that in mind, you can imagine my skepticism when I saw yet another true crime documentary suggested to me on Netflix. This time, it was The Kings of Tupelo: A Southern Crime Saga touting itself as a “bizarre true-crime tale” in which “an Elvis impersonator’s conspiracy theory sets off a feud that spirals into an attempted presidential assassination.”

That’s a lead that will make you take notice.

Still, I hated the first episode of the three-part documentary. Honestly, I almost didn’t make it to the second installment.

‘Welcome to Tupelo, Mississippi, where things are different.’

The vast majority of episode one focuses on explaining the environment viewers will navigate. The introduction revolves around one of Tupelo’s most famous sons: Elvis Presley. Elvis “tribute artist” Paul Kevin Curtis, who goes by K.C., is our narrative guide.

One thing is clear: Presley was born in Tupelo, and the town will never let you forget it.

I understood the need to set the stage. Still, the process was far too prolonged. Some of it helped introduce main characters, but that was the exception. I understand the production team’s desire to fixate on the film’s geographical pull—the “South,” and its trappings play a large part in the story—but it was a tad bit overdone.

Nevertheless, I’m glad I made it to the second episode … because this ish is bananas.

Paul Kevin Curtis appears on NBC News’ Today show in 2013. (Photo by Peter Kramer/NBC/NBC Newswire/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)

‘It was my introduction into the world of conspiracy …’

After meeting his future wife and becoming a father, K.C. realizes he can’t support his family just singing and dancing. He starts a janitorial business focusing on the Presley hook and seems to do well. In 1999, he lands a large contract with North Mississippi Medical Center to clean their facilities.

According to K.C., while working in a hospital morgue in 1999, he stumbled across a refrigerator containing a severed head and other body parts. He relays the finding to anyone who will listen, quickly catching the ire of the hospital administration. He’s fired, and by his own admission, “that night [he] made a decision to send the rest of [his] life trying to uncover the truth” of those severed body parts.

At this point most of the audience has no doubt picked up on K.C.’s peculiarities.

He quickly purchases a Gateway computer and spends day and night searching the internet and scouring chatrooms and message boards for information regarding body-part harvesting and trafficking conspiracies. Based on reports from his then-wife, brother and others around town, K.C. became somewhat obsessed with the idea that the hospital was involved in organ and body-part trafficking. According to local law enforcement, K.C. started to pop up consistently on their radar.

He was undeterred by what he describes as police harassment. He was “onto something,” and no one was going to stop his “one-man crusade” to share online the information he was discovering. K.C. drafted legislation on the topic and appeared to work very hard to introduce it to local politicians. His abrasive and obsessive tactics bring the ire of local and national politicians, though.

‘I guess God chose me … I am a warrior ninja with a sword of justice.’

He mentions his divine purpose multiple times throughout Kings of Tupelo. K.C. believes God has chosen him to fight the powers that be and expose the underbelly of body-part harvesting and trafficking. By the middle of the second episode, it’s clear he experiences delusions of grandeur at best and some sort of undiagnosed mental health issue at worst.

Throughout the series, I constantly found myself asking when the shoe was going to drop regarding some sort of medical diagnosis. The closest we get is a short segment where his family has him temporarily committed, but there is little discussion or further information.

Paul Kevin Curtis in Netflix’s The Kings of Tupelo: A Southern Crime Saga. (Photo courtesy of Netflix)

If you practice criminal defense, you know how often mental health issues arise in criminal cases. We go so far as to keep a copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. Obviously, my job isn’t to diagnose my clients, but it’s good to know the potential signs in undiagnosed individuals. And if they have a diagnosis, it’s helpful to have more insight.

Working with a client who experiences mental health episodes can be challenging, but there are degrees of difficulty depending on the individual client.

Here, K.C.’s delusions of grandeur could merely be a primary feature of a delusional disorder, or they could be a symptom of something else, like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder—or many other conditions. Coupling this with what seems like consistent paranoia, though, gives the impression there may be more to the story than the documentary gives off. Make no mistake: He is coherent and sometimes quite funny—purposeful or not—throughout the documentary.

Nevertheless, like many of my clients who exhibit symptoms of an underlying issue, it’s hard to know whether K.C.’s “eccentricity” is an indicator of a potential diagnosis or simply quirks associated with his peculiar personality. Regardless, as his ex-wife explains, “Kevin did not have a big grip on reality.”

‘Sir, I haven’t bought rice in years … I never eat rice.’

When local politicians receive letters containing the poison ricin, K.C.’s name comes up as a possible suspect. When then-President Barack Obama in 2013 receives one such letter, the feds get involved and trace the letters back to a Tupelo mail office; K.C. is arrested and investigated as a terrorist.

His brashness and grandiose demeanor dig him even deeper. Had he mailed letters to all those people? Of course he had. Which politician hadn’t he contacted about his body-part-trafficking legislation? But as authorities begin to examine K.C., things don’t seem to fit. How could this Elvis tribute artist/janitor concoct such a high-level attack? Things didn’t add up—until they do.

I won’t get too far into the twist, as I really want you all to watch the series. It is wonderfully chaotic, and the team behind the documentary deserves applause for stepping outside the genre’s comfort zone.

OK, one hint: The twist involves a feud with a karate instructor.

And it’s this type of mania that ultimately sets Kings of Tupelo apart and makes it well worth the watch. The second half plays out like a cross between a Cohen brothers movie and Step Brothers, the classic Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly film. I mean that in the absolute best way possible.

If this sounds compelling, don’t ask me how; just go with it and find out for yourself.

Adam Banner

Adam R. Banner is the founder and lead attorney of the Oklahoma Legal Group, a criminal defense law firm in Oklahoma City. His practice focuses solely on state and federal criminal defense. He represents the accused against allegations of sex crimes, violent crimes, drug crimes and white-collar crimes.

The study of law isn’t for everyone, yet its practice and procedure seem to permeate pop culture at an increasing rate. This column is about the intersection of law and pop culture in an attempt to separate the real from the ridiculous.

This column reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of the ABA Journal—or the American Bar Association.

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Judiciary

Federal judge who sought female attorneys among class counsel has acknowledged sex-bias concerns, order says

By Debra Cassens Weiss

March 25, 2025, 9:21 am CDT

A federal judge who called for female attorneys to be “adequately represented” on the leadership team for plaintiffs in multidistrict contraceptive litigation has “acknowledged the concerns created by her statements,” according to an order closing an ethics inquiry.

U.S. District Judge M. Casey Rodgers of the Northern District of Florida “has taken appropriate voluntary corrective action that acknowledges and remedies the problems created by her statements,” wrote Chief Judge William H. Pryor Jr. of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Atlanta in the March 20 order.

Conservative activist Mike Davis, the founder of the Article III Project—a conservative group—filed a complaint against Rodgers after she said during a Feb. 21 case management conference and in a Feb. 23 order that she thinks that female attorneys have to be “adequately represented” on the leadership team given the female plaintiffs in the contraceptive drug Depo-Provera litigation.

Davis had released the complaint and his organization, the Article III Project, published online articles about it. He alleged that Rodgers’ statements amounted to discrimination based on sex and constituted judicial misconduct.

Rodgers omitted references to sex when she invited applications for leadership positions in a Feb. 28 order. All applicants would be considered based on merit, she said in the order. Then, in a March 13 hearing allowing nearly 70 applicants to give presentations, Rodgers said she would not give preferences to women to avoid the appearance of impermissible sex discrimination.

Pryor said Rodgers’ voluntary corrective action was sufficient while warning that judges can’t discriminate based on sex when selecting class counsel.

Pryor noted a 2013 statement by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in a cert denial in which he criticized a judge’s “unique” requirement that class counsel fairly reflect the composition of plaintiffs.

What Alito described as a unique practice “has been touted as a ‘best practice’ in multidistrict litigation,” Pryor said. “Commentators openly encourage judges who preside over these actions to consider impermissible characteristics like sex or race when they appoint leadership counsel.”

Notions about a lawyer’s ability to fairly and adequately represent class interests “must exist within the bounds of the rules that govern judicial conduct, and those bounds prohibit discrimination based on sex,” Pryor said.

Law360 and Reuters are among the publications with coverage of the order, noted by How Appealing.

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I’ve spent much of my career in the legal industry as a lawyer and a law firm business administrator. I don’t have the demographic profile of a typical American lawyer or even a typical BigLaw business director. My parents, Italian Americans from Greater Boston (one of whom is a second-generation American) did not graduate from college, and no one in their families went to law school or became a lawyer.

I graduated from law school in 2010, during one of the worst job markets of the past several decades—in the wake of a financial crisis that gave rise to widespread unemployment and wage stagnation. I was always taught to put my nose to the grindstone, to never complain, to eagerly volunteer for more work—whether that meant staying at the office late or working on weekends. “You’re lucky to have the work” was the dominant refrain, and we find that sentiment returning today—in another employer’s market.

When I began my career as a lawyer, I always wanted to learn more and take on more responsibility—the more that I did and produced, the more like a real, worthwhile human being I felt—at least at first. I would do anything to make my family proud. But I slowly became more unmoored, isolated from family, friends and my values. My whole personality was buried under inauthentic, fawning people-pleasing, saying yes regardless of the mental and emotional costs, adding projects and hours in the hope that it would make me feel like I was accepted and belonged.

When you’ve been masking with all your might since you were a small child, you end up feeling incredibly lost, alone, alienated and afraid, unable to develop a clear picture of who you are. You constantly ask yourself whether you really know anything about your personality and values, creating a constant, unbearable sense of dread and extreme dysphoria.

But this kind of strenuous masking is a requirement for success in the corporate world if you are neurodivergent or struggle with mental illness. The expectation to be an extrovert and deliver consistent high performance created a sense of unrelenting feeling of being overwhelmed.

My mental health issues come with an acute sensitivity to rejection, but ironically, this has led to personal and professional habits that have made rejection seem almost inevitable: among them paralyzing perfectionism and rumination. Though it would take years and an almost deadly breakdown to recognize it, I was experiencing acute, life-threatening burnout.

Over the years of acute mental illness, my day-to-day life got darker and scarier. I tried to quell what became hourly panic attacks with various forms of self-medication. As the years passed, I spoke extensively with some of the country’s top therapists and psychiatrists. No one knew quite how to diagnose me or which pills to give me. Commonly prescribed drug therapies and treatment programs failed to help, and they have often made my symptoms worse.

After years, I finally reached a point of physical and psychological exhaustion that made suicide feel like a good (or better) option. I began to have very persistent, frightening thoughts about how nice it would be to simply not exist. In my mind, nothingness looked like rest from constant pain and anxiety and exhaustion, like sleep and perfect, endless peace.

On Sept. 14, 2023, after years of quiet struggle, I tried to take my life in a hotel room in Chicago. The idea of going to sleep and never waking up seemed like my best bet, like the only chance I had left for any relief, the only way to be able to rest my mind, my body and my heart. I was disappointed to wake up in the hospital.

We remain in the earliest days of understanding mental illness, a preparadigmatic stage in which the results of studies often are not replicable, and we find a lack of consensus among the various available models used to explain it.

We hear a lot these days about a mental health crisis, but no one really knows what that means; so much of the information that we would have to know lives on the other side of our collective unwillingness to change the social and institutional structures that are hurting us. It lives in unshared stories and the pain that we hide to try to save face.

Even after having lived with major mental health issues, I can’t shake my outmoded ways of thinking about them and the people they afflict—myself included. We’re all judging people with mental health issues because we’ve been trained to and because we think that tough, capable, high-achieving people are supposed to power through. More than that, we think that highly credentialed professionals are simply not the kinds of people who have mental health issues in the first place.

Top firms attract smart, talented and driven people who personify what has come to be known as hustle culture. We are taught to measure our self-worth in degrees, credentials, job titles, promotions and—perhaps more than anything else—money and status. For many of us, there is no shame worse than looking weak to our high-achieving, high-earning peers. Our culture is one of toxic productivity, fixated on endless growth.

This fact has become more and more conspicuous as so many of our hardest workers and highest earners seem to be the most impoverished among us in terms of free time and peace. Burnout and overwork have now become a crisis and an epidemic, responsible for millions of deaths every year. Deep feelings of isolation and purposelessness seem to be a feature of the prevailing social and economic paradigm, rather than a bug. “Hopelessness is at epidemic levels,” with a growing number of Americans experiencing chronic depression and despair.

Credentialed “knowledge workers” like nothing more than to flex on social media, cultivating the appearance of a person who really cares and would help. But when push comes to shove, stigma remains the dominant and overriding fact and cultural mode, present in every conversation about mental health generally and suicide in particular.

Our glorification of powering through challenges without taking time to recover or assess underlying issues is a maladaptive response to chronic stress and exhaustion. It perpetuates the worst aspects of hustle culture by ignoring the structural and systemic factors that have led us here, isolating people by making us think that everything comes down to our choices.

I’ve had several people, including colleagues, friends and family members, suggest or state outright that mental health issues are not a real disability or even a genuine health issue—at least not as real as physical health issues—notwithstanding the fact that we have known for decades that mental health issues have a real and tangible impact on physical health, and that the brain is indeed an organ and part of the body.

After my suicide attempt, the first thing I heard from those closest to me was: “So when are you getting back in the saddle?” and “I know you can do better—just try harder!” One of my closest family members even encouraged me to end my life. Only my productivity mattered.

Much of the resilience discourse and the practices that we have adopted in the corporate world have become completely toxic. Our culture teaches us that if one is struggling with mental health issues, they are essentially weak and just have to try harder. The prevailing message remains: No one is looking. It’s your responsibility to keep pushing.

David S. D’Amato is an attorney, a businessman and an author of popular and scholarly articles. His writing has appeared in the Hill, Forbes, Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, the Washington Examiner and many other publications, and his work has been cited by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, among others.

ABAJournal.com is accepting queries for original, thoughtful, nonpromotional articles and commentary by unpaid contributors to run in the Your Voice section. Details and submission guidelines are posted at “Your Submissions, Your Voice.”

This column reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of the ABA Journal—or the American Bar Association.

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3. BigLaw attorneys who are ‘frequent practitioners’…

Civil Procedure

BigLaw attorneys who are ‘frequent practitioners’ in federal district can’t be admitted pro hac vice, judge says

By Debra Cassens Weiss

March 5, 2025, 3:45 pm CST

Two Baker & Hostetler lawyers won’t be able to represent a compounding pharmacy in a lawsuit against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, at least for now, after a federal judge in the Northern District of Texas denied their application to appear pro hac vice.

Partner Andrew M. Grossman and associate Marc N. Wagner cannot be admitted pro hac vice because they are “frequent practitioners” in cases filed in the Northern District of Texas, said U.S. District Judge Mark T. Pittman of the Northern District of Texas in a March 3 order.

Law360 covered the decision, noting that pro hac vice motions “are common and usually regarded as an afterthought. They are rarely denied.”

A pro hac vice admission means that a lawyer has been admitted to practice in a jurisdiction in only one particular case, Pittman said. In the past year, however, Grossman submitted three such applications, while Wagner submitted four of them in the Northern District of Texas, including the applications in the case before Pittman.

The lawyers, Pittman said, are encouraged “to file applications to be admitted to practice in this court, and [this court] would happily welcome them as members of the bar.”

Grossman is licensed in Washington, D.C., and admitted to practice before nearly every federal appeals court. Wagner is licensed to practice in Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.

Wagner and Grossman did not immediately respond to an ABA Journal email seeking comment. They are among six Baker & Hostetler lawyers who signed the Feb. 24 suit and among four who planned to seek pro hac vice admission in the case.

The suit challenges an FDA decision to remove the weight loss drug semaglutide from a shortage list, which meant that compounding pharmacies were no longer allowed to help satisfy demand. The plaintiffs in the suit are a compounding pharmacy and a trade association that represents compounding facilities.

Pittman appears to be a stickler for the rules. He previously dismissed a suit because of a missed deadline to file a certificate of interested persons and sanctioned two lawyers in a different suit for submitting declarations instead of notarized affidavits as he had directed.

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It’s a well-worn saying that the law always lags behind technology. It makes sense. We all remember the old song about how a bill becomes a law and how long the whole process can take. By the time you get to the verse about a president signing something into law, technology has either evolved into something even more cutting edge or become obsolete—replaced by a newer, shinier toy.

When it comes to data protection and privacy, some states have already taken the lead in trying to protect consumer data. But in these political times, expecting or hoping for the federal government to follow suit seems about as likely as seeing pigs fly. Throw in new revolutionary types of tech, such as generative artificial intelligence, and what was once just a lag has the potential to turn into a gulf.

In this episode of the Legal Rebels Podcast, Benjamin Mishkin, a member of Cozen O’Connor’s technology privacy and data security practice group, talks with the ABA Journal’s Victor Li about what the regulatory landscape looks like regarding data protection and privacy and what we can—and can’t—expect in the near future.

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In This Podcast:

Benjamin Mishkin

Benjamin Mishkin is a member of Cozen O’Connor’s technology privacy and data security practice group, and he focuses his practice on technology and data privacy. He advises clients in complex data transactions, software agreements and intellectual property matters. Mishkin is well-versed in data use and data license agreements governing the exchange of confidential data, including California personal information protected by the California Consumer Privacy Act, European personal information protected by the General Data Protection Regulation, protected health information under HIPAA and other sensitive data types. He works with clients to ensure that their sensitive data is protected by robust cybersecurity requirements.