On The Merits

Operation Varsity Blues was the code name given to the investigation of parents that spent millions of dollars to increase their children's chances of getting into universities like the University of Southern California. Many of the parents who were charged entered guilty pleas, but the first two to stand trial were convicted earlier this month. Patricia Hurtado covers the courts for Bloomberg New...

For his 100th column for Bloomberg Law, Roy Strom looked back at the seismic changes that have taken place in the legal industry during the pandemic. He says the pandemic has shown many of the country's biggest law firms that there is much more to Big Law than chasing prestige. Law firms are now opening satellite offices in Salt Lake City and Austin, Texas. And we've seen Big Law continue to move...

On this special weekend episode of the podcast, Bloomberg Law’s Paige Smith reads her recent story on how laws that allow companies to pay disabled workers below minimum wage may be changing soon.

When some companies started implementing vaccine mandates on their employees, it was only a matter of time before they applied the same rules to their job applicants as well. According to a recent survey, nearly one third of employers are now disqualifying candidates who cannot or will not confirm that they've received a Covid-19 vaccine. Bloomberg Law's Erin Mulvaney is reporting on this trend. H...

The Supreme Court's bombshell 5 to 4 ruling this month on Texas's new abortion restrictions law was both an end and a beginning. It put an end to the hopes of abortion rights activists who wanted to overturn this law before it took effect, but it also marked the beginning of a frenzy of litigation aimed at getting this issue back before the court as quickly as possible. And the litigation has come...

As recently as 2018, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas received only 90 patent cases or 2.5% of the patent cases filed nationwide. However, after Judge Alan Albright took the bench in Waco, Texas, his federal court has become a hotbed of patent litigation. Just last year, Albright saw nearly 800 new patent suits filed. On this episode of our podcast, On The Merits, Albright...

Delta Air Lines grabbed some headlines late last month with its plan to encourage its employees to get vaccinated against Covid-19. It would not fire employees who refused to get the shot, but would rather impose on them a $200 monthly surcharge. Then, last week, President Joe Biden made even bigger news by announcing a sweeping plan to require vaccination for all federal employees, federal contra...

Since 2008, Britney Spears’ life has been controlled by a conservatorship. Renewed interest and public support for ending the conservatorship followed the release of a documentary film, Framing Britney Spears, which highlighted the efforts of the #FreeBritney movement. But how did it come to this? What role can trusts and estates attorneys play in helping high net worth clients avoid ending up in...

The video game maker Activision Blizzard, Inc. is being sued for gender discrimination and harassment. The $60 billion company, behind games that include Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, isn't being sued by female employees in this suit though. They're being sued by the state of California. California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing says its two-year investigation into Activision Bl...

On this special weekend episode of On The Merits, reporter Lydia Wheeler reads her story about the difficulties some long-Covid victims are facing with insurance claims. Click here to read the story in print.

Several states opted to temporarily suspend their bar exams when the pandemic broke out last year. This led many in the legal community to question why the exam exists in the first place. Now at least one state is seriously considering alternative ways to certify new law school grads. The Oregon Supreme Court is currently weighing a proposal that would make the bar exam just one of several options...

Morgan Stanley's chief legal officer issued a memo earlier this month that has the legal world buzzing. In it, Eric Grossman all but demanded that the law firms working with the financial industry giant end their pandemic work-from-home policies. News of an in-house counsel dictating to outside law firms the locations from which their lawyers should be working (news that was first reported by Bloo...

A team of Bloomberg reporters has been reaching out to elections officials in every state for months to try to get a sense of how often voting fraud actually happens. In all, they found roughly 200 instances over the past two years, where people were charged or convicted for alleged voting fraud. On today's episode of On The Merits, we hear from the lead reporter on this team, Alex Ebert, about vo...

Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and once the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, has been disciplined over his role in the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Other lawyers who represented the President could also get hit with sanctions. What does it mean to have your law license suspended? What can and can't lawyers do when they've been sanctioned? And why are these at...

Amy Chua, the Yale Law School professor and self-described "tiger mom," is making headlines again amid a battle with her Ivy League employer. On this episode of On The Merits, Chua talks to Bloomberg Law columnist Vivia Chen about why she finds herself embroiled in controversy now and how challenging it's been for her family. Have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave...

In April, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the Department of Justice would investigate policing practices in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky., following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Now many law enforcement experts expect to see cities enter into consent decrees to address civil rights violations at the hands of the police, among other operational reforms. Consent d...

On this weekend edition of our legal news podcast, On The Merits, Bloomberg Law editor Carmen Castro-Pagan tells us about a federal judge who grew so frustrated by a protracted discovery dispute that her feelings could only be expressed through with one simple character: 🤯 Have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

The country's biggest, most profitable law firms—think Milbank, Davis Polk, Paul Weiss, and Cravath—are falling all over themselves to increase the salaries of their associates with many bumping up the wages of first-year associates to more than $200,000. On this episode of our weekly podcast, On The Merits, Bloomberg Law's Meghan Tribe explains what's driving this attorney salary arms race, and s...

Attorneys who leave the federal government after an administration change usually get snatched up quickly by Big Law firms and corporations. But a Bloomberg Law analysis found that hasn't been the case this year. Nearly six months after Donald Trump left office, more than 80% of top lawyers in Trump’s administration have landed somewhere since he left office, even if their roles are part time or n...

On this special weekend episode of On The Merits, reporter Bobby Magill reads his story about the rush to obtain a federal mining permit before an expected Biden administration environmental regulatory change. Click here to read the story in print.

Can your employer require you to get a Covid-19 vaccine? Many legal experts say yes, but very few employers are actually taking that step. Some, of the few who have, are now facing litigation. On this episode of On The Merits, Bloomberg Law's Robert Iafolla talks about a few of the recent lawsuits challenging employer vaccine mandates. He says, even if they get tossed out of court, they're already...

Earlier this year, our companion podcast, [Un]Common Law, published a series looking at the experiences of African American lawyers and judges working in the legal industry—which, to this day, remains one of the least diverse professions in America. Now, more than a year since George Floyd’s murder, and the wave of soul-searching in the legal industry that followed, 16 of the nation’s largest law...

On this holiday weekend edition of Bloomberg Law's legal news podcast, On The Merits, we hear about a federal judge who likes to pepper his opinions with references to Taylor Swift, "The Lion King," and other bits of pop culture ephemera. Carmen Castro-Pagan, an editor on our Legal Intelligence desk, talks about the creative writing style of Judge Joshua D. Wolson and about why some judges like to...

Entertainment law is not quite as glitzy or glamorous as you may have heard. That’s especially the case for music industry lawyers who work with up and coming hip hop artists. On our weekly legal news podcast, On The Merits, we learn what it’s really like behind the music from lawyers Desiree Talley, Gerard Anthony, Karl Fowlkes, and Tiffany Ballard. They say attorneys who represent artists must b...

On this special weekend episode of On The Merits, reporter Holly Barker reads her story about what happens to aging lawyers when they get dementia, and what happens to their clients. Click here to read the story in print.