Nonrefundable Retainers: Impermissible Under Fiduciary, Statutory and Contract Law

Since the New York Court of Appeals banned nonrefundable retainers, numerous other courts have joined in prohibiting this widespread practice of lawyers charging a fee for services in advance and keeping the fee even if the services are not performed. This may reflect increased judicial recognition of the effect of egregious fee practices on the image of the bar and the role such practices play in the declining esteem in which the legal profession is held. Among the more provocative contributors to this ongoing debate, Professor Steven Lubet recently reviewed our work advocating the ban against nonrefundable retainers and posed a number of questions about the per se prohibition against them. In this Article, we respond to Professor Lubet\u27s questions as well as to those posed by other scholars. In Part I, we discuss the client discharge right, the cornerstone upon which the absolute ban on nonrefundable retainers rests, and respond to a series of arguments concerning its meaning, how it may be impaired, and whether it may be waived. In Part II, we show that legitimate purposes that may be served by nonrefundable retainers cannot avoid impairing the client discharge right, but that other fee arrangements that do not impair that right can easily be designed to serve some of those ends. In Part III, we extend an invitation to address the issues we have identified to all those who believe that a per se ban against nonrefundable retainers is unnecessary to prevent the abuses they generate. We have previously extended this invitation to devise a less inclusive rule that would in a practical and self-effectuating way prohibit the abuses while permitting the attainment of legitimate purposes. Unfortunately for the debate, however, none of the participants have accepted this invitation. We therefore think it bears repeating

The new requirements relating to going concern evaluation and disclosure provide a critical improvement to the financial statements taken as a whole

The going concern principle assumes that an entity will continue to exist into the future. This assumption implies that the entity will not be compelled to end their operations, liquidate their assets, or go into bankruptcy. It is an integral assumption in financial statements since it allows for the deferral of recognition of certain expenses until a period of time into the future, when the company is still assumed to exist. Members of management, as well as financial statement auditors, are required to identify signs that could indicate that an entity will not be able to continue their operations into the near future. Some of these signs include a trend of operating losses, loan defaults, legal proceedings against the entity and so forth. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) updated the going concern guidelines so that issuers of financial statements are uniform in frequency and substance of going concern determination. Prior to the Accounting Standards Update, U.S. GAAP lacked sufficient guidance about management’s responsibility to evaluate whether there is substantial doubt of the entity’s ability to continue as going concern. In order to clarify the uncertainty, FASB issued a new financial reporting standard. This new reporting will be in effect for the annual period ending after December 15, 2016. The updated standard will require management to perform annual and interim assessments of an entity’s ability to continue as a going concern for one year from the date of financial statements issuance

Hippocampal Subregions Differentially Associate with Standardized Memory Tests

Recent studies suggest that individual hippocampal subregions perform distinct cognitive operations and are differentially targeted by aging and disease. Although originally developed to assess global hippocampal function, whether performance on standard memory tests used in neuropsychological batteries is associated with individual hippocampal subregions remains unknown. Here we addressed this issue by imaging 210 neuropsychologically characterized subjects using a high-resolution variant of functional magnetic resonance imaging that generates maps reflective of basal hippocampal metabolism. Regression analysis revealed memory tests that differentially associate with two hippocampal subregions, the entorhinal cortex (EC) and the dentate gyrus (DG). Whereas performance on the delayed retention component of the Selective Reminding Test was associated with the EC, performance on the recognition component of the Benton Visual Retention Test (BVRT) was associated with the DG. Furthermore, elevation in blood glucose, previously shown to target the DG, was found to correlate selectively with the recognition component of the BVRT. These findings provide further evidence that the hippocampal subregions perform distinct roles, and, interpreted in the context of previous neuropsychological and imaging studies, confirm that aging and Alzheimer's disease target different hippocampal subregions

Zero-Point cooling and low heating of trapped 111Cd+ ions

We report on ground state laser cooling of single 111Cd+ ions confined in radio-frequency (Paul) traps. Heating rates of trapped ion motion are measured for two different trapping geometries and electrode materials, where no effort was made to shield the electrodes from the atomic Cd source. The low measured heating rates suggest that trapped 111Cd+ ions may be well-suited for experiments involving quantum control of atomic motion, including applications in quantum information science.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures, Submitted to PR

Ultracold molecules: vehicles to scalable quantum information processing

We describe a novel scheme to implement scalable quantum information processing using Li-Cs molecular state to entangle $^{6}$Li and $^{133}$Cs ultracold atoms held in independent optical lattices. The $^{6}$Li atoms will act as quantum bits to store information, and $^{133}$Cs atoms will serve as messenger bits that aid in quantum gate operations and mediate entanglement between distant qubit atoms. Each atomic species is held in a separate optical lattice and the atoms can be overlapped by translating the lattices with respect to each other. When the messenger and qubit atoms are overlapped, targeted single spin operations and entangling operations can be performed by coupling the atomic states to a molecular state with radio-frequency pulses. By controlling the frequency and duration of the radio-frequency pulses, entanglement can either be created or swapped between a qubit messenger pair. We estimate operation fidelities for entangling two distant qubits and discuss scalability of this scheme and constraints on the optical lattice lasers