ABA Journal Podcasts - Legal Talk Network

In recent years, a growing number of law firms reduced their brick-and-mortar office space as a way to cut costs and also better meet the changing workplace needs of their attorneys. Sherry Cushman says the COVID-19 pandemic has further enhanced the desire of firms to shrink their real estate footprint. Special thanks to our sponsor Alert Communications.

Steven Wright spent six years at the Department of Justice Voting Section witnessing all manner of election chicanery, voter suppression and dark money campaigns. So when he turned his efforts towards fiction, he decided to write what he knew. The result was The Coyotes of Carthage, a literary novel following Toussaint Andre Ross, a Black political consultant sent from his Washington, D.C., agency...

Legal news about President Donald Trump often outrages people, but it shouldn’t. And at the same time, his administration makes outrageous legal statements that many accept as normal, says Kenneth White, a former assistant U.S. attorney known as "Popehat" on Twitter. Now a partner at Brown, White & Osborn in its Los Angeles office, White recently spoke with ABA Journal Senior Writer Stephanie Fran...

The separation of church and state is a concept that is often talked about, but there's hardly a national consensus on what that should look like–or whether it should exist at all. In recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has been shifting towards an "accomodationist" interpretation, say the authors of The Religion Clauses: The Case for Separating Church and State. To Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard G...

Judge Scott Schlegel’s history of utilizing technology in his Louisiana courtroom to make life easier for attorneys and members of the public has come in very handy during the COVID-19 pandemic. When the public health crisis forced the closure of Jefferson Parish courtrooms earlier this year, Schlegel contacted those he knows in the legal tech world for assistance in bringing to fruition a plan to...

What made 1950s America vulnerable to a man like Joseph McCarthy, a junior senator from Wisconsin? In Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy, Larry Tye takes an in-depth look at McCarthy's life. Tye tells the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles that his interest in McCarthy was piqued during his research for a previous book, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon. Ethel Kennedy's me...

While Veena Dubal has adopted to working at home with three young children during the COVID-19 pandemic, the “reply guys” came after the California law professor on Twitter for her support of a 2020 state law that extends employee classification status to gig workers. Dubal tells ABA Journal Senior Writer Stephanie Francis Ward that she thinks that people’s anxieties are running high amid the pand...

Do you know how many billable hours you can devote to a new case? Or whether you need to add another attorney to your firm? Can you afford to take time off from your practice, and if so, how much? If you're one of the lawyers who is kept up at night with worries about your firm's finances, you are not alone. Financial consultant Brooke Lively says that law school does not prepare most people for t...

Chicago lawyer Kathy Ehrhart and her firm represented two of the three defendants in a civil case focused on alleged breach of contract concerning a real estate transaction. Though the video proceedings were not without some technical challenges, Ehrhart says the overall experience was better than she expected. "I think as time went on through the trial, we all felt an increasing ability to recapt...

We are used to hearing about wrongful convictions where a murderer walked free because an innocent person was misidentified. But when Montclair State University professor Jessica Henry was researching material for her course on wrongful convictions, she discovered that in one-third of all known exonerations, the conviction was wrongful because there had not even been a crime. This discovery paved...

This past spring, when few people realized that most July bar exams would ultimately be canceled, Molly Coleman decided to forgo the test, for the time being, despite her lawyer father’s objections. Coleman chats with ABA Journal Senior Writer Stephanie Francis Ward about moving back to St. Paul, Minnesota—her hometown—less than a week before the area erupted in protests following the Minneapolis...

At a time when the country is discussing how the justice system and policing can be reformed, it's critical that we avoid adopting reforms that have damaging consequences. In Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms, authors Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law outline the way that well-meaning movements ended up funneling people into environments where they faced even more...

When COVID-19 closed ABA offices in March, staff sprang into work figuring out how the association could convert its meetings and events to virtual environments. In this bonus episode of Asked and Answered, we're giving you a sneak peek at how the 2020 ABA Annual Meeting came together, some of the exciting guests and speakers who have been lined up, and what exactly it will be like to attend an al...

As a law professor at the University of Colorado Law School, Aya Gruber has seen her Millennial students wrestle with a contradiction that she has long struggled with herself. "On one side of the scale is a Black Lives Matter-informed belief that policing, prosecution and incarceration are racist, unjust, and too widespread," writes Gruber in her new book, The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected...

Supporters of broad reforms to how the legal profession is regulated must do a better job drawing the public into ongoing conversations in several states about such issues, says Paula Littlewood, the former longtime executive director of the Washington State Bar Association. "We need to break outside what I call the echo chamber of the profession and really start bringing the consumer and the publ...

Lawyer and author Brian Cuban chats with ABA Journal Senior Writer Stephanie Francis Ward about how he’s been focusing on what he can control during the COVID-19 pandemic, rather than what he can’t, and what he misses the most. For Cuban, that includes hugs from family and friends, and he’s not sure that they’ll ever be given as freely as they once were. Special thanks to our sponsor, LawPay.

Recent protests over police brutality have raised the volume on calls to defund the police. But while police abolition may be new to some, it's a concept that has been studied and discussed for decades. In his 2017 book, The End of Policing, Alex S. Vitale explains the troubling origins of modern policing, why commonly suggested reforms like training and increased diversity have not been successfu...

When the novel coronavirus began rapidly spreading across the United States earlier this year, Kimball Dean Parker says he felt a strong desire to help consumers and businesses in need. Utah-based SixFifty set out to do what it does best: develop online tools to assist consumers of all types tackle complex legal challenges without breaking the bank. Special thanks to our sponsor Alert Communicatio...

Thirty years ago, between 9% to 10% of federal criminal cases actually went to trial before a jury. That may not seem like a large percentage, but by 2018, only 2% of defendants received a jury trial. To Robert Katzberg, this represents a three-fold crisis. First, citizens are unable to participate and observe the judicial system through jury service. Second, trial attorneys are unable to hone the...

Do you really need a human for the so-called human touch in lawyering, particularly when a big part of the job is convincing the client to be reasonable? Maybe not, according to some people who created apps that they claim help people accomplish tasks traditionally carried about by lawyers. The ABA Journal’s Stephanie Francis Ward talks with legal technologists about how their apps are working to...

As early as the 1930s, presidents were considering putting the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. So who were these other candidates on the shortlist, and why did it take until 1981 for Sandra Day O'Connor to become the first female justice? In this episode of the Modern Law Library, the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles talks with Renee Knake Jefferson and Hannah Brenner Johnson about their decade-lon...

When the novel coronavirus began sweeping across the U.S. earlier this year, Nebraska’s courts system was better prepared to rapidly adjust its operations than some of its counterparts in other states. Michael G. Heavican, the chief justice of the Nebraska Supreme Court, attributes this to the National Pandemic Summit that he hosted in May 2019 for court leaders across the country. In this new Leg...

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson says that near the end of every school year, he has law students come into his office, "usually in tears." They tell the professor that if they'd only known at the start of the year what they'd figured out by the end of the year, they'd be so much father ahead. During his time as a non-traditional law student, Jonathan Yusef Newton found himself coaching and consoling many...

In this new episode of the ABA Journal’s Asked and Answered podcast, Senior Writer Stephanie Francis Ward talks about the similarities between the pageant circuit, law school and the practice of law with pageant winners—some of whom have no school debt thanks to contest scholarships—and a litigator who also works as a pageant coach. Special thanks to our sponsor, LawPay.

When Michael Segal first approached longtime Chicago journalist Maurice Possley about writing about his case, Possley was not interested. Segal's 2002 arrest and subsequent federal trial had been big news in the city, and Segal had been accused of the looting about $30 million from his Chicago company, Near North Insurance Brokerage. Possley had won the Pulitzer Prize for previous stories about wr...