• Nicolás Maduro faces narco-terrorism charges in the US and awaits trial while legal fees remain unpaid.
• He was arrested in Venezuela and brought to the US in early January of this year.
• Maduro's Thursday court hearing focused on how his defense lawyers will get paid.

Eighty-two days after US military forces seized him and his wife from Caracas, Nicolás Maduro, the toppled president of Venezuela, walks into his 26th-floor Manhattan courtroom for the second time.

He has a long road to his trial.

The US Justice Department's narco-terrorism and weapons charges against Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, still do not have a trial date. His attorney has said he expects "voluminous" motions challenging his seizure and detention.

The criminal case hasn't gotten to those issues yet.

Thursday's hearing focuses on how those lawyers will get paid.

The Venezuelan government has said it would pay for Maduro's and Flores's legal fees. But the payments are being held up by the US Treasury Department, which has not issued a waiver on the sanctions against Venezuela. Kyle Wirshba, the lead prosecutor in the case, said the payments were withheld because of "national security and foreign policy" reasons.

The issue appears to annoy US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, the 92-year-old judge overseeing the criminal case.

Peering through his large, round glasses that magnified his cheeks, he asks Wirshba how — when the Trump administration was doing business with Venezuela — Maduro and his wife could possibly present a "national security" threat.

"The defendant is here. Flores is here," Hellerstein says. "They present no national security threat."

Since their arrest, Maduro and Flores have been held in the Metropolitan Detention Center, the infamous Brooklyn jail that has also been the temporary home of Sean "Diddy" Combs, Luigi Mangione, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Jeffrey Epstein's associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

Thursday's court hearing, across the East River, in Manhattan, begins 40 minutes late. Across the street from the courthouse, groups of pro-Maduro and anti-Maduro protesters shout at each other in front of a playground.

When Maduro walks into the courtroom, he has a bright, beaming smile on his face.

"Good morning!" he booms, wearing a jail outfit of a drab khaki smock over a bright orange shirt.

He shakes hands with his lead attorney, Barry Pollack, best known for representing Julian Assange. Then he turns to the journalists sitting on dark-wood benches in the audience and wishes them "good morning" again.

Flores, wearing the same outfit, plus a brown scrunchie holding back her blonde hair, says nothing.

When they sit at the defense table, they wear big, black headphones through which they hear the court proceedings translated into Spanish for them.

During the hearing, Flores's attorney Mark Donnelly says "First Lady Maduro" needed an echocardiogram to evaluate an issue with her heart.

"There are no titles to be used in this court," the judge says, before telling the lawyer to keep him informed if Flores didn't get the treatment she needed in jail.

Venezuela's now-former first couple ended up in New York City to face an indictment brought by the Department of Justice.

Prosecutors accuse them of participating in a decadeslong drug-trafficking conspiracy involving Colombian terrorist organizations, which enriched themselves and their family at the expense of Venezuelan citizens. The charges include narco-terrorism, cocaine importation, and machine gun possession.

In January, after US forces captured the couple from a military fort in Caracas where they were staying, President Donald Trump called Maduro an "illegitimate dictator" responsible for funneling "colossal amounts of deadly illicit drugs" into the United States.

The President said that he and his wife "now face American justice" for their "campaign of deadly narco-terrorism."

From the White House on Thursday, Trump called Maduro a "very dangerous man who has killed a lot of people" and said the charges against him were for just "a fraction" of his conduct — with more to come.

"Other cases are going to be brought, as you probably know," he said.

But today is not yet about the core of the matter.

Wirshba, the prosecutor, argues that it would be inappropriate for OFAC, the part of the Treasury Department that grants licenses for sanctions waivers, to allow Maduro and Flores to access the wealth of the nation they "plundered."

According to Wirshba, Maduro should have anticipated he could not have gotten the money from Venezuela to the US due to the sanctions, leading Hellerstein to remark upon the oddness of the Venezuelan president being captured from his nation and brought to New York City.

"He didn't think he would be in this court?" The judge asks with a sarcastic tone.

Hellerstein — who has overseen cases involving financial scammers like Charlie Javice, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and the 9/11 terror attacks in his 28 years on the bench — calls Maduro's case "unique."

While there have been other cases that addressed whether criminal defendants could use potentially "tainted" funds to pay their lawyers, all of those cases involved money that was already held in a US bank. In any case, Hellerstein says, Venezuela had already agreed to pay for the legal defense.

When a criminal defendant can't afford their own lawyer, a judge can appoint one for them. But Hellerstein says the "investigative responsibilities" that would be required to defend the complex narco-terrorism case would overwhelm the resources of a publicly-funded lawyer.

But it remains unclear what Hellerstein could do about it. Forcing OFAC to issue a waiver would require a separate lawsuit brought in a different court, in Washington, DC, Wirshba says.

The only remedy, Pollack says, was to "dismiss the case" and let Maduro walk free.

Hellerstein initially pours cold water on the idea.

"I'm not going to dismiss the case," he says.

But if OFAC didn't soon change its position, he would consider it.

"I think it is such a serious step — I'm not going to take it now," Hellerstein said.

After one and a half hours, Hellerstein decides he would hold another hearing, at an unspecified later date, to determine what steps he should take.

When Maduro leaves the courtroom, he only glances back at the audience behind him. He shakes the hands of his attorneys and walks stiffly toward the door. Flores kisses her lawyer, Donnelly, on the cheek.

Outside, the protesters are leaving. As a man passes by the courthouse, he yells: "Viva Maduro!"

• Jeffrey Epstein victims and Bank of America reached a settlement in a class-action lawsuit.
• The terms haven't yet been publicly disclosed.
• JPMorgan paid $290 million and Deutsche Bank paid $75 million for similar lawsuit settlements.

Bank of America settled a proposed class-action lawsuit from Jeffrey Epstein accusers who alleged the bank facilitated the now-dead pedophile's sex-trafficking operation, court records show.

Lawyers for the bank and a group of Epstein accusers told the judge overseeing the case during a pretrial conference last week that they "reached a settlement in principle," according to a Monday update to the case's docket.

The terms of the settlement were not made public.

US District Judge Jed Rakoff, who is overseeing the case, gave a March 27 deadline for the parties to file public documents laying out the settlement's terms, and an April 2 hearing to decide whether to approve them.

"The women entrapped and abused by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell started a monumental reckoning with their brave voices and fearlessness," Sigrid McCawley, an attorney at Boies Schiller Flexner representing the Epstein accusers, said in a comment. "The road to justice for these women has been long and trying. Today's resolution of the case against Bank of America is one more step on the road to much deserved justice."

A representative for Bank of America declined to comment. In previous public statements and court filings, the bank denied wrongdoing.

The settlement scuttles a scheduled deposition for Leon Black, the billionaire ex-CEO of Apollo Global Management, which was set for March 26.

The accusers' lawsuit had alleged that Black's more than $150 million in transfers to Epstein — which Black has said was for financial and estate-planning services — facilitated Epstein's sex-trafficking. Bank of America should have paid closer attention to Black's accounts and any transactions related to Epstein, the lawsuit said.

Black has separately been asked to testify before the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating Epstein, on May 13.

JPMorgan agreed to pay $290 million, and Deutsche Bank agreed to a $75 million payout, to settle similar lawsuits brought by the same group of lawyers representing Epstein victims.

Rakoff previously tossed a parallel lawsuit the attorneys brought against BNY — formerly Bank of New York Mellon Corp. — but allowed portions of the case against Bank of America to move forward.

In an earlier court hearing, Rakoff said he would be disappointed if the cases against BNY and Bank of America didn't go to trial.

"I don't want to discourage you from settling," the judge said. "There are some of my colleagues that think settling is always the way to go. But I'm much more selfish and I would love to see two very good trials."

• Anthropic's Jeff Bleich says AI will end the billable hour's dominance in legal billing.
• Billable hours mean lawyers get paid more when they spend more time on work.
• But AI tools eliminate "tedious" work, which devalues the time lawyers spend overall, Bleich said.

The billable hour's time is approaching midnight, according to Anthropic's top lawyer.

"I don't think the billable hour is the solution, and we've known it for a long time," Jeff Bleich, the AI company's general counsel, said Thursday.

Speaking at the American Bar Association's White Collar Crime Institute in San Diego, Bleich said that artificial intelligence tools are eliminating the need for companies to hire armies of lawyers to do lucrative yet "tedious" work.

"Now we've got a technology that's going to eliminate the sorts of things that allow people to become wealthy off of tedious work," Bleich said on the panel, alongside top lawyers at Google, IBM, and Liberty Mutual. "That was not what lawyers are trained to do, and not what we ultimately look to lawyers for."

The much-maligned billable hour is the standard method that law firms use to bill their clients.

Attorneys track the work done for each client, often in six-minute increments, tally them up, and charge their clients accordingly.

While the billable hour has been useful to help companies and other clients understand what they are paying lawyers for, it has also "created a wedge," Bleich said.

Under the current system, "the interests of firms are at odds with the interests of their clients," he said. Companies want lawyers to resolve problems quickly, but law firms get paid more when the work takes longer.

"Clients want you to solve the problem as efficiently as possible and with as little drama as possible," Bleich said. "And if you're a company, the bigger the case gets, and the more dramatic it gets, and the more complicated it gets, and the more work that has to be done — the more lucrative it is."

The other panelists largely agreed with Bleich's remarks.

"The value is no longer you putting in time," said Damon Hart, the top lawyer at Liberty Mutual. "The value is your strategy, your results."

Anne Robinson, IBM's general counsel, told the audience that she's open to working with them to figure out more creative billing methods.

"I'm open to firms coming and saying, 'I'd really like to work with you on this matter or this type of work, I get that the billable hour model is not one of aligned incentives, and so let's sit down and talk about what you expect as far as outcomes and how we can both get there in a way that reflects your pressures and your priorities,'" Robinson said.

Bleich said he still values the work of outside law firms, but wants them to find an alternative to the billable hour that works for everyone.

"We're not going to sort of cheap out and starve you," Bleich said. "On the other hand, you have to have an economic model that works. And the firms that adapt to that faster and better will be leapfrogging other firms, because they'll be more attractive to work with."

Bleich's comments come at a critical moment for Anthropic, which sued federal agencies this week after the Trump administration effectively blacklisted it following the collapse of contract negotiations with the Department of Defense.

In the lawsuit, Anthropic is represented by WilmerHale, one of the law firms that Trump targeted last year with an executive order that was quickly blocked by a federal judge.

"I like firms that show some spine," Bleich said following the panel, when asked about using law firms that fought back against Trump's executive orders targeting them. He declined to comment on the lawsuit itself.

WilmerHale is distinguished in another way: Reginald Heber Smith, who in the early 20th century managed the Big Law firm — then called Hale and Dorr — is widely credited with inventing the billable hour.