In the Counsel's Chair

In this episode of In the Counsel's Chair, host Jack Needham sits down with Adam Silver, chair of the Fair Political Practices Commission, California's campaign finance and ethics watchdog. Appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2024, Silver traces the agency's roots to Proposition 9, the post-Watergate ballot measure that created the FPPC and some of the strictest campaign finance and ethics rules in...

In this episode of In the Counsel's Chair, host Jack Needham sits down with Joshua Robbins, a partner in the Orange County office of Crowell & Moring, to talk about a different way of thinking about trial advocacy. A former federal prosecutor who began his career in international arbitration, Robbins explains how working in systems with limited discovery taught him to prepare for trial from da...

Los Angeles County Superior Court announced Wednesday that a select group of its judges will begin using AI tools to help prepare and manage cases — a first for the largest trial court in the nation. We sat down with Shlomo Klapper, the founder and CEO of Learned Hand and the man behind that initiative, to find out what it means for judges, lawyers and the justice system when AI enters the courtro...

Mid-size law firms are getting squeezed from both ends. Big law has the capital to invest in AI and the salaries to attract top talent. Boutiques can specialize tightly and move fast. So where does that leave everyone in the middle? Melanie Chaney, firm-wide managing partner of Liebert Cassidy Whitmore, has a front-row seat to that question. LCW has grown from 45 attorneys to 120 over the past two...

When Jason de Bretteville's client refused to take the easy off-ramp -- a dismissal that would have let everyone walk away quietly -- it set the stage for a sanctions ruling that may finally put teeth into a 30-year-old law. The court was blunt: widespread practice doesn't make a practice acceptable. Jason is a partner at Stradling Yocca Carlson & Rauth LLP, Chair of the firm's Litigation Depa...

When Yakub Hazzard's team discovered that opposing counsel had improperly kept a privileged memo in a high-stakes Motown royalties case, it became a turning point. "That was like the game changing moment in the litigation where it went from the plaintiff seeming to have a lot of momentum to them being completely on their heels." Now Chair of Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp, Yakub shares three case...

Vid Prabhakaran has a clear belief about AI in law: "We don't believe that AI is going to replace lawyers, but we do believe that lawyers who use AI in a sophisticated way are going to replace lawyers who don't." And when he hears partners argue that associates need drudgery work because it's foundational to their future success, he's blunt: "I think they're full of it." As partner-in-charge of Da...

In this episode of In the Counsel's Chair, Kristina Lawson offers a roadmap for attorneys considering a leap into public service — and explains why more lawyers should be willing to make it. Kristina is the first female Managing Partner in Hanson Bridgett's 65-year history, overseeing more than 200 attorneys across eight California offices. She's also a former Mayor of Walnut Creek, current chair...

In the third episode of In the Counsel's Chair, David Kaye shares his perspective on global free speech monitoring and contemporary threats to expression in America. David Kaye spent six years as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, traveling from Ethiopia to Japan investigating how governments enable -- or suppress -- free speech. Now a clinical professor at...

Daralyn Durie and a group of colleagues took what most would consider a terrible risk in 2009 -- launching a boutique trial firm in the middle of the financial crisis, operating out of a borrowed conference room with spotty cell reception. Fourteen years later, after building Durie Tangri into a 37-lawyer firm known for high-stakes IP and class action defense, the partners merged with Morrison Foe...

John Nadolenco didn't plan to become a class action defense specialist — he made a strategic bet during the dot-com era that bigger, higher-stakes cases would define the future of Big Law. Three decades later, as managing partner of Mayer Brown's Los Angeles office and after a series of high-stakes class action defense wins (including at the U.S. Supreme Court), he's proven himself right. In this...

Introducing In the Counsel's Chair -- a new podcast from the Daily Journal talking to legal leaders across California and beyond.