Above the Law - Thinking Like a Lawyer Legal Talk Network

Donald Trump sought a mistrial in his New York trial based, in part, on our articles being "humorous, irreverent." The GOP frontrunner did not succeed. Ron DeSantis messed with the rights of professors and now has to pick up the tab for their Biglaw lawyers. Or, more accurately, Florida taxpayers will pick up the tab. But that's just the price Floridians have to pay to help their governor finish third in the primaries! We're still waiting to see if more firms join the Milbank pay scale, but in the meantime a host of anonymous naysayers are mouthing off to the press in a pathetic effort to dissuade the market from following suit.

It's been over a week and no firm has yet to announce that it will match Milbank's latest series of raises. Or, more accurately, cost of living adjustments. Meanwhile, Cravath took the plunge on income partnerships, becoming the latest firm to abandon the time-honored one-tier partnership model. And the turmoil over Nixon Peabody's effort to sneak Donald Trump onboard as a client sparks calls for leadership change.

For most major law firms, the prospect of representing Donald Trump and stamping the firm's name on his nutty pet arguments is a non-starter. Over at Nixon Peabody, the firm jumped right in, bringing on the former president as a client and filing a brief complete with the zany "Brandenburg means it can't be an insurrection" argument that Trump's been having all his lawyers make. Partners don't seem happy about this turn of events. But, since we recorded, we've learned that firm leadership doesn't really care that partners are concerned. We also discuss Sam Bankman-Fried's absurd courtroom sketch and the aesthetic brilliance of Jane Rosenberg's dark and brooding courtroom sketches. Finally, a number of Biglaw firms sent an open letter castigating law school deans for campus antisemitism.

Stroock strikes out.
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We thought the end might be near for Stroock & Stroock & Lavan when we recorded this episode. We were right. And with that, the Biglaw world moves to exclusively one or fewer ampersands. A senior lawyer tried to pull a prank on an airplane. It ended badly. And we discuss the last time newly elected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson tried to run something. It was a law school and it failed in epic fashion.

LSAT's decision is not totally... illogical.
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The LSAT is ditching logic games from upcoming tests and the Above the Law gang is conflicted over whether or not that's a good thing. There's a good argument that the section disproportionately disadvantaged folks with vision issues. On the other hand that was a deficiency that admissions could address on the back end, but without that score schools no longer have a pattern recognition evaluation -- and what's more "thinking like a lawyer" than pattern recognition? We also discuss NYU Law Review getting sued by Stephen Miller and a lawyer citing Hitler approvingly.
 

A Clio Cloud Conference roundup.
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Joe checks in from the 2023 Clio Cloud Conference joined by Legaltech News editor-in-chief Stephanie Wilkins, dean of legal tech journalism Bob Ambrogi, and Legal Talk Network producer Laurence Colletti to talk about legal technology and the small law market. We talk artificial intelligence, hot legal trends, and access to justice.