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Graduate Spotlight

 “Becoming comfortable with change and new experiences has been an important part of my journey,” says Tanner Schenewark. “I didn’t know what type of law I wanted to practice coming into law school. BYU Law gave me a lot of options and flexibility while I was figuring that out.”

A formative influence for Schenewark was his involvement with BYU Law’s Deals Academy, an immersive, multi-day deal making program in New York City that guides students through the process of mergers and acquisitions. “Being exposed to corporate law confirmed for me that it was the direction I wanted to go,” he says. Schenewark interned with Clifford Chance, a prestigious multinational law firm. After graduation he will join the firm’s transactional group. “There’s so much good that can be done from that platform––that’s one of the most exciting things about it for me,” he says.

Another highlight for Schenewark was a blockchain and cryptocurrency law course with Professor Matthew Jennejohn. “I was able to get involved with groups at Clifford Chance who were doing that type of work and feel really competent doing it,” he says. D. Gordon Smith, dean of BYU Law, also inspired Schenewark to think deeply about the future and how he could give back. Schenewark launched the New York Law Society, which invites practitioners from New York City firms to speak at BYU Law and also holds résumé and cover letter workshops tailored to corporate law. “We really want to build momentum and make that path easier for future students,” he says.

Ultimately, BYU Law has helped Schenewark to understand what drives his interests. “Law school has also done a good job of teaching me what really matters. One thing that can be crushing to law students their first year is the idea that you are defined by your grades,” he says. “If I had one message to send, it would be that being at BYU Law is enough. You have the tools to succeed. I hope future students will understand and be encouraged by that. You have every option open to you.”

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The Girls in Granbury

BYU Students Helping Prevent Expunged Records from Popping Up in Background Checks

Annie Knox, KSL.com | Posted - May 1, 2021 at 8:03 p.m. Deseret News

SALT LAKE CITY – It's no secret that even low-level criminal convictions can get in the way for those seeking to find a new apartment, change jobs or obtain a professional license. But for many, having the case sealed doesn't change that. Even after expungement, the records can linger online and in databases maintained by background-check services.

A group of law students and professors at Brigham Young University is now seeking to change that. They've created a new guide to help Utahns and those outside the state make sure the cases don't continue to haunt them. The online tool, Goodbye Record, also helps states and employers take steps to honor expungements.

"The court system is set up to protect society, to protect individuals, but at the end of the day, people who are eligible for expungement have all served their time," said Marie Kulbeth, an attorney and adjunct professor helping to oversee the initiative. "They've completed everything that they were told they had to do to fulfill the debt they have to society, but society doesn't really give them a break."

Kulbeth noted many have picked up low-level criminal charges while in the throes of addiction but are now in recovery and leading a life free of crime. She said they deserve a second chance.

"Everyone knows somebody with an addiction. It's part of your life, whether it's you as an individual, a family member, a friend, a colleague. You know somebody who has had the struggle," she said. "There's also the underlying idea of, 'What is justice without mercy?'"

In 2019, the Beehive State became second in the nation to adopt a so-called clean slate law, following Pennsylvania in granting automatic expungements for certain crimes. The Utah law allows those with nonviolent misdemeanor cases to have the records automatically sealed within five to seven years, but it's not up and running just yet. The state court system is at work building the complex computer system it will use to do so.

"Utah's kind of ahead of the curve in that area," said Tanner Schenewark, a BYU graduate who took the LawX class earlier this year. "Hopefully we can get this taken care of in more states."

The pandemic prevented Schenewark and his colleagues from meeting with Utahns to hear their about their experiences with expungement, but the team gathered those perspectives in the form of a survey. The results illustrated the stranglehold an old conviction can maintain on a person's professional and personal life, Schenewark said.

"They have families, they have dreams, and they have jobs," he said. "And a lot of that has to go on hold if the state doesn't get it right, or if employers don't act the way they should."

With guidance from Kulbeth, Utah Supreme Court Justice Deno Himonas and others, the eight BYU law students developed the batch of resources in one semester.

One webpage provides information on how to file complaints with U.S. regulators if a company reports an expunged case to an employer — a violation of federal law — and on getting in touch with a national expungement clearinghouse to flag cases for removal from databases.

States can take action, too. Most have contracts with background-check companies purchasing public records tied to criminal cases, Kulbeth said. So the BYU law students came up with a model contract — based on a version used in Pennsylvania — that grants the state digital access to a company's online records in order to double-check that sealed cases are no longer listed.

The records often linger for reasons that aren't nefarious, the Florida-based Accurate Information Systems notes on its website. It can be a challenge for the screening companies to make sure they're keeping up as records are sealed. Sometimes, a police agency or a different type of government agency will fail to remove a case from its own rolls, so the information shows up in the company's searches.

Utah's Administrative Office of the Courts is reviewing the contract it uses with those sorts of businesses, said spokesman Geoffrey Fattah, and is considering potential tweaks in line with what the BYU students recommend.

Their project identifies ways employers can address the issue as well. It invites them to take a pledge to support the initiative and raise their dissatisfaction if a sealed case shows up in a screening.

At the Utah Supreme Court, Himonas is cheering the students' work.

"Rather than trying to replicate other efforts," the justice said, "LawX studied the space and sought to understand what the real choke points are to create some really innovative approaches to the expungement process."

Good Day Granbury!

 

BYU Law Students Develop Web Resource To Address Flaws In Expungement Process

Bob Ambrogi

Eight students in the LawX legal design lab at BYU Law have developed an online resource, called Goodbye Record, that is designed to address flaws in the process for expunging criminal records in Utah and potentially other states as well.

I’ve written a number of times about LawX, a lab program launched in 2017 in which law students use design thinking to analyze and address critical issues in access to justice. In each semester-long lab, the students tackle a different issue.

Previous LawX projects have resulted in the development of SoloSuit, to help consumers respond to debt collection lawsuits, and which spun off as a private company, and Hello Landlord, designed to help tenants more effectively communicate with their landlords about issues that can lead to eviction.

In an interview yesterday, Marie Kulbeth, one of three adjunct professors who led the lab this semester, and Tanner Schenewark, a 2021 graduate who participated in it (and who will now join Clifford Chance in its New York office), told me that they chose expungement as their topic this year in part because of BYU Law’s past experience offering a Pro Bono Expungement Clinic.

The students initially planned to develop an app to help individuals apply for expungement. But as they investigated the issue as part of the design-thinking process, they found the bigger problem was that expungement often failed to result in the fresh start it was designed to provide.

They found that flaws in the system and outdated online information often make it difficult to fully erase a criminal past, even after obtaining expungement, resulting in online remnants that show up in background checks and often prevent individuals from obtaining housing or employment.

Given these findings, the students abandoned the app idea and instead built an online resource that addresses three main constituencies that can play a role in helping to ensure second chances for those who have had their records expunged: employers, individuals and governments.

“The idea is really to provide an electronic toolkit for the problem,” Schenewark said.

The employer component, which Goodbye Record calls the partner component, is directed at employers and invites them to take the Fair Shot Pledge to implement and support a series of measures to help reduce instances of misreporting, thus giving qualified individuals a fair shot at employment. Companies that take the pledge may display their corporate logo on the Goodbye Record website to let potential employees know they support individuals seeking a fresh start.

The individual component informs people on how to navigate post-expungement roadblocks, including how to report violations to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department pf Housing and Urban Development, and how to communicate with the expungement clearinghouse to help background-check companies remove expunged records from commercial databases.

Currently in Utah, individual petitioners are responsible for reaching out to all the different agencies to make sure their records are expunged. This cannot be done electronically and often requires individuals to take time away from their work or job searches.

The government component addresses potential legislative and administrative solutions, including ways states and courts can improve the final step of expungement, limit access points and require commercial data subscribers to update their databases.

One solution the students developed to address the government component is improved contract language between governments and data subscribers. The students found that courts and government agencies have contracts with public records companies to regularly provide criminal data, and that those companies often resell their data even further downsteam. But when expungements are granted, the companies do not always update their data, so criminal records still appear in online databases and in criminal records checks.

The students developed contractual language for governments to use with these companies that does two things. First, it requires the companies to regularly update their databases to reflect expungements. Second, it provides an audit procedure to ensure that companies comply.

The students are also pushing for states to adopt legislation to shift the burden of distributing expungement orders from the individuals who are granted expungement to the agencies that maintain these records.

Earlier this month, the LawX students presented their findings to the Utah Supreme Court and Utah’s Administrative Office of the Courts. As a result, the Administrative Office has committed to amending its Compiled Data Dissemination Agreement to incorporate the students’ language.

It is also considering backing the legislation that would shift the burden of distributing expungement orders from individual petitioners to the Utah Bureau of Criminal Identification, which would be authorized to electronically request that other state agencies remove expunged information from their records.

While the students’ efforts have so far focused on Utah, they designed Goodbye Record to be a national resource and they plan to take their lobbying efforts to other states now that this has been launched.

In addition to Kulbeth, who is also COO and general counsel at SixFifty, the lab was also led by adjunct professors Eric Vogeler, general counsel and CCO at Genesis Block, and Justin Whittaker, principal at Invisible Co., who shared his expertise in product and business development and design thinking.

The lab also consulted with Utah Supreme Court Justice Constandinos “Deno” Himonas, known nationally for his role in developing Utah’s regulatory sandbox.

“I am really excited about this project,” Himonas said in a statement provided by LawX. “It is such a powerful example of design thinking and application. Rather than trying to replicate other efforts, LawX studied the space and sought to understand what the real choke points are to create some really innovative approaches to the expungement process.”

Given that Schenewark is now headed off to begin a career as an associate in the transactional group at Clifford Chance, I asked him if he thought his LawX work on a criminal justice problem contributed anything to his future career.

As it turned out, it was his summer associate position at Clifford Chance, a firm known for innovation and where he had the opportunity to work with the legal automation startup Josef, that whet his appetite for legal tech and led him to enroll in LawX.

Working through the design-thinking process in LawX showed him how complex legal problems can be and how many moving parts must be managed to address them, he said.

“When you’re able to come up with a solution that’s elegant and effective, I think that was a huge outcome,” he said. “I hope that I’ll take that forward in my career.”

Kulbeth pointed to something else the students learn. BYU Law seeks to instill in students not just a sense of justice, but also of mercy, she said, and expungement is one aspect of the criminal justice system that truly implicates mercy.

The person granted expungement has done their time, completed any probation, paid any fines, and now wants a chance to live their life and be part of their community.

“To me, that’s the meaning behind the project,” Kulbeth said. “We can’t have a perfect justice system. We know we don’t have one. So we have to have a way for mercy to be incorporated into the system.”

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Ingrid Priscilla Schenewark's Blessing Day