Above the Law - Thinking Like a Lawyer

In our latest chat, we discuss Biglaw strip club outings, Jeff Clark taking time away from his indictment to be an idiot online, and associates unhappy with a law firm's office tracker. ----- Gunderson Dettmer got a lot of flack on Reddit from folks accusing the firm of hosting a summer event at a strip club. It wasn't a strip club, but it was a nightclub with scantily clad go-go dancers, which do...

Also, how to create a culture that welcomes Biglaw vacations. ------ Amy Coney Barrett recently spoke publicly about how she longs for the days when most Americans couldn't recognize Supreme Court justices, highlighting that justices don't have to be there long for a culture of unaccountability to set in. Speaking of which, the majority of Clarence Thomas's former clerks signed an open letter shru...

A little Broadway for this week's title. ----- Law firm productivity is down, but are we really worried about that? It's a traditional harbinger of layoffs, though something about this market feels a bit different. Meanwhile, a right-wing advocacy group has sued a pair of Biglaw firms for offering fellowship programs aimed at improving diversity -- offering a lesson in forum shopping along the way...

The Fifth Circuit judge made a bunch of headlines last week and we jump into all of them. Plus Texas's use of water saws and Ron De Santis isn't faring well in his battle with Disney. (Always bet on Mickey.)

And they're running out of a bunch of lawyers. A surprising level of jerk content this week as we discuss the value of real Jamaican jerk seasoning, Clarence Thomas getting his RV financed by a health care executive, Alan Dershowitz complaining about his neighbors, and Judge Aileen Cannon botching straightforward criminal law (more than once).

Elena Kagan and Samuel Alito have... very different takes on judicial ethics and what Congress's role is in all of it. Plus, Lindsey Graham has a change of heart about a federal judge because it's politically expeditious. And a deep dive into starting salaries for attorneys.

Alabama is just straight up defying the Supreme Court on election law... but when liberals propose the same thing all of a sudden it's a crisis for the rule of law. I see how that goes. Also a hard-working Biglaw staffer gets caught up in a political backlash to what seems like an honest misunderstanding. And law students have no freaking idea what they're in for.

For real though, don't mention your law school rank in your wedding vows. You may think it cute but literally no one else does. Clarence Thomas has been workin that lifetime tenure racket from the very beginning. And ,careful what you post on social media, unless, of course you just enjoy having to go through the same trial multiple times.

Also more mandatory office policies and a brief primer on the Federal Circuit controversy. The Supreme Court's ethical lapses reached such heights that a fellow federal judge had to step in to publicly ask what's wrong with these people. And it's not just the big ticket scandals anymore, with the Court's reputation so tarnished that folks freak out over non-scandals (or at the most minor ones) lik...

Between threatening Facebook and suing Wachtell, the Chief Twit is pretty active. We also talk about the end of the Supreme Court Term and the struggles in bar prep. ------ Elon Musk is desperately seeking a win and if he can't get it in a cage match against Mark Zuckerberg, he'll try his hand in court. Spoiler: it's going to go just about as badly. He's sent a legal threat to Facebook that fails...

More Supreme Court scandal news as Justice Samuel Alito tried to run out ahead of a ProPublica report with his own Wall Street Journal pre-rebuttal. We're all for confronting your problems head on, but Alito only managed to make himself look worse. A judge in D.C. sides against a man with a marijuana prescription because his neighbor didn't like it. So much for property rights. And we discuss the...

Because someday you might face massive espionage charges... or something. Donald Trump is struggling to find representation in his multi-count federal criminal case and it shows because he just can't stop saying incredibly damaging stuff about his case. Like how he will plead guilty for money. This is what happens after decades developing a reputation for stiffing attorneys. We also have more layo...

When you think about it, is a deputized bear really weirder than keeping classified documents in a bathroom with two chandeliers? Donald Trump got indicted since we last convened. And then the case got assigned to the same judge who got professionally scorched for trying to bail Trump out in the first place. Apparently he thinks the government pays people to plead guilty? It's all very weird. Davi...

Maybe the woman who called the cops on a Black birdwatcher should try using ChatGPT to make up some fake caselaw for her appeal because the real ones aren't helping. After a year of sword rattling that higher education is "hostile to free speech" because students don't appropriately sit quiet and absorb what speakers on stage are laying down, the media grandstanding came to a halt -- and in the ca...

And the Supreme Court's ethical problems just won't go away. Biglaw has always played follow-the-leader. Usually it's about bonuses, but Skadden is taking a big gamble that the rest of the industry will follow it back to a Monday-Thursday office work week. If the rest of Biglaw doesn't follow suit, the giant sucking sound you hear will be Skadden talent lateraling to rival firms. Also the Supreme...

How can one guy mess up this much? Ron DeSantis is about to announce a run for president, but meanwhile he's botching remedial civil procedure and running face first in the Fourteenth Amendment. Also, the Kamala Harris camp seems interested in reigniting her tough-on-crime persona by trashing public defenders. It's dangerous rhetoric that erodes faith in the justice system. Finally, Justice Kagan...

Joe and Chris talk about law school, layoffs, and basic decency. After law schools threw a public tantrum over the U.S. News and World Report ranking, with several withholding key data required to create a credible list, the rankings are now out and... they have serious credibility problems. Missing data, important factors glossed over, and shady employment accounting from the schools result in a...

When you list all of the revelations of the past month, it's impressive. Since we last chatted about Clarence Thomas facing an intractable ethics scandal... more stuff happened! We learned that he also got private school tuition off a donor, that Ginni was getting paid by FedSoc Prime (Leonard Leo) under the table, and that the courts were asked to deal with all of this over a decade ago and decli...

Also Ron DeSantis is getting beaten up by Disney again. The Supreme Court punts on a thorny felony murder case, prompting a conversation over whether the use and abuse of the rule can ever truly be reformed. There's also a super biller out there who managed to bill an average of over 10 hours a day last year. Presumably the attorney is weeping in a corner somewhere. Finally, Disney took its fight...

Yes, there's still more to say about Clarence Thomas. On this week's episode of Thinking Like A Lawyer Kathryn and Chris go back to the Clarence Thomas ethics well as Ted Cruz decides to weigh in. The New York Bar Exam was kind of a debacle, or at least the process of revealing the results was a debacle. And the Supreme Court gave reproductive freedom advocates a small victory last week, which pro...

Who reads all of the statute anyway? The ethical hits just keep coming for Clarence Thomas as a second story about the gifts he collected from Harlan Crow expanded to include buying and maintaining a house for Thomas's mom. Rent free of course. Thomas doesn't have a particularly good excuse for not disclosing this since the text of the disclosure requirements are pretty clear. I guess holding peop...

Clarence Thomas takes some me time. An ethical quagmire surrounds Clarence Thomas. No, not that one. Not that one either. This one is about the gifts he's taken over the years without disclosures. Donald Trump took all of a couple hours after his indictment to start riling up his mob against the judge and prosecutor. And a Paul Hastings associate issues some bad advice.

Also Morgan & Morgan has had it with insurance lobbyists and the legal profession is losing talent to OnlyFans. Ron DeSantis tried to punish Disney by dissolving the local government dominated by Disney flopped when the smart lawyers pointed out that it would put the state on the hook for a deluge of liability. His latest effort to then replace all the board members flopped because while he crowed...

Latest podcast also talks about ranking the best law schools the worst way possible. With March upon us, we created our our bracket-based challenge to rerank the top law schools based on... nothing. If the law schools don't want to provide data to ranking services, we'll show them what that looks like. It's pretty bad. Speaking of bad, a litigant got a bit of a lecture from a federal judge who cau...

Also, Elon Musk really needs legal counsel. Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan is the latest speaker to cry foul that an audience of law students heckled him to death. He's received an apology from Stanford Law School already, but the videos released from the event and the witness accounts appear to show the judge playing the role of wrestling heel. Taking the honest if probing questions from the audience a...