Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Jeanine Donohue back to our pages. Click here if you’d like to donate to MothersEsquire. I live and work in...

Ed. note: Please welcome Renee Knake Jefferson back to the pages of Above the Law. Subscribe to her Substack, Legal Ethics Roundup, here. Welcome back! I hope August gave you some time to step away, look up, and enjoy the remains of summer. One of my favorite moments...

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)Think about Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer. As far as I can tell, Cohen was an incompetent, a thug, and a criminal who mindlessly supported Trump. Cohen then had a change of heart. He became an incompetent, a thug, and a...

Ed. note: Welcome to our daily feature, Quote of the Day. It shows that the issues were worse than we thought. The levels of distress were higher than we knew. —  Patrick Krill, co-author of a new national study on lawyer wellness, in comments given to Reuters,...

We’ve officially moved beyond the “ChatGPT made up a few cases” stage of the artificial intelligence ethics crisis. Now, the robots are apparently inventing witnesses and police testimony in murder appeals. Progress! New Mexico attorney Stephen Aarons was held in...

Donald Trump’s project to remake the federal civil service into something that screens for loyalty just hit a road bump in Massachusetts. On Friday, U.S. District Judge George O’Toole granted three federal-employee unions a stay under Section 705 of the Administrative...

When Weil, Gotshal & Manges announced that corporate chair Michael Aiello was leaving for what it pointedly called “a smaller platform” (the platform in question being Cravath), it was tempting to read the line as a single flash of pique from a firm caught on the...

Want to make a dent in the access-to-justice problem? Stop preaching and wringing your hands over how bad it is and start looking for a solution, even if it’s just a start. Which is exactly what the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender (NJOPD) recently did in...

The most important decision an AI agent makes may be the decision not to decide. As legal AI moves from answering questions to participating in transactions, we need systems that know when to stop, ask for approval, or hand the matter to a human. That sounds obvious....

The post With Reconciliation Uncertain, Pentagon Eyeing Plan To Retool FY27 Priorities With Congress appeared first on Above the Law.WASHINGTON — If Congress does not pass the full $350 billion reconciliation funding requested by the Pentagon, the department is...

* Looks imminent? Anyone want odds? [Law360] * Deep dive into how the federalist society got us here. [The Atlantic] * How Legora aims to take on legal industry giants. [Business Insider] * ACC going after another in house counsel group accusing them of training on...

If At First The Supreme Court Tells You To Stop: Missouri Republicans keep unsuccessfully sending its gerrymander to the Supreme Court. Try, Try Again: And the Supreme Court keeps telling them to pound sand. Fifty-One Shades Of ‘Rigged’: DOJ and Education Department...

First Circuit Senior Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson is 75 years old, but you wouldn’t know it from this opinion. Channeling her inner Gen Z, Judge Thompson put out a lengthy bankruptcy opinion that took a sledgehammer to the air of formality that’s surrounded legal...

The One Thing Nobody Has Ever Called Cravath… ‘A Smaller Platform’: Until Weil, which just lost its corporate chair to the firm, gave it a shot. Hear Me Out: Should we really care that a federal court opinion reads like Gen Z slang? We Sure Could Use More Human Rights...

Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day! Who was the first woman in the United States to graduate from law school, earning her degree with honors from the institution we now know as Northwestern in 1870? Hint: When she tried to put it to use,...

Joe diGenova never understood the assignment. The octogenarian former federal prosecutor thought he was being recruited to run the mother of all conspiracy cases and take out every dirty, stinkin’ Democrat at once. He and his wife Victoria Toensing laid it all out in...

Getty ImagesOne of the most surprising things about AI adoption is how differently similar organizations perform. Two legal departments can deploy the same AI platform, invest similar amounts of money, and give people access to the same capabilities, yet their...

Lawyers are creatures of habit, and the legal profession is not exactly known for embracing change. Indeed, many practices that were commonplace decades ago are still followed by some lawyers even though technological advances have made them unnecessary. In some...

Creating authority pages is an essential step for any law firm website. These portions of your website serve as a framework on which to build a digital reputation. They give search engines and AI answer tools the technical cues they need to recognize your content as...

At a time when hard-won discrimination protections in the U.S. are being steadily eroded, we’ve never needed the passion and commitment of young lawyers aspiring to build careers in human rights more than we do today. The National Jurist’s preLaw magazine recently...

Michael Aiello, chair of Weil, Gotshal & Manges’s roughly 600-lawyer corporate department, member of its management committee, and a powerhouse in the indistry, is leaving for Cravath, Swaine & Moore. He is not going alone — Aiello is bringing a team of...

Ed. note: Welcome to our daily feature, Quote of the Day. The pattern is showing the majority of large firms will have smaller first- and second-year associate populations. The further out I look, the greater the level of uncertainty about what their needs are going...

In this episode, I sit down with Amos Guiora, law professor at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law and director of the Bystander Initiative, to talk about his new book, Enablers: Normalizing the Unimaginable. The conversation traces his path from an...

Ed. note: Welcome to our daily feature, Quote of the Day. If everything is checking out, it’s something ​I would consider. I appreciate that at least he came out, although late, he came out and rectified ​the situation. —  President Donald Trump, in comments given to...

The Department of Justice and the Department of Education announced Wednesday that the University of California, Berkeley School of Law spent years discriminating against white and Asian applicants using “race, essay prompts, and other tactics” to tilt admissions...

The post When Clients Ask About AI, How Should Firms Respond? appeared first on Above the Law.From left, Dennis Garcia of Litera, Donovan Bell of CLOC, and Rahul Chhabra of Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer.Although today’s legal technology events, above all else,...

It took a little under 45 minutes for the United States Supreme Court to tell Missouri Republicans to sit down and shut up. With no noted dissents, SCOTUS stayed the dubious district court order that Republicans hoped might allow them to ramrod a new legislative map...

There are multiple things this administration is incapable of doing: winning wars, curbing inflation, not acting like Nazis, wearing shoes that fit them, etc. But if there’s one thing it’s most known for, it’s the unwillingness to take a loss and move on. That’s...

Ed. Note: A weekly roundup of just a few items from Howard Bashman’s How Appealing blog, the Web’s first blog devoted to appellate litigation. Check out these stories and more at How Appealing. “Supreme Court Weighs US Mail Ballot Fight as DOJ Losses Grow”: Zoe...

* Weil corporate chair bolts for Cravath. [Bloomberg Law News] * Sam Bankman-Fried asks Supreme Court for help getting out of jail. [Law360] * Harvard moves up recruiting timeline to allow interviewing in 1L September. [Harvard Crimson] * Joseph diGenova resigns from...

Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day! Once the second-largest law firm in the country, which New York powerhouse Biglaw firm expanded by poaching rainmakers from rivals, paying partners on what business they brought in rather than...

Todd Blanche has been Attorney General for less than a month and he’s already making history, just not the kind that gets you a good entry in the DOJ’s institutional memory. On Wednesday night, Blanche appeared and spoke at the Republican National Midterm Convention...

If you’re an associate at a top New York law firm, you know the drill: an inbox full of recruiter emails with vague promises about “exclusive opportunities.” By the time you’ve sifted through the vague pitches and tracked down the roles that might actually interest...

Everything’s bigger in Texas, and Kirkland & Ellis just proved that the saying applies to Biglaw offices, too. Kirkland has officially become the largest law firm in the Lone Star State, with its Texas headcount soaring to 549 lawyers. With its lightning speed...

The post AI Has Entered The Courthouse…Are You Ready For It? appeared first on Above the Law.The post AI Has Entered The Courthouse…Are You Ready For It? appeared first on Above the Law.

The post Can Your Firm Compete With Litera’s ‘Trailblazers’? appeared first on Above the Law.The post Can Your Firm Compete With Litera’s ‘Trailblazers’? appeared first on Above the Law.

Knowing how to use AI is not a career plan. Neither is assuming you can build a career without learning it. For a young lawyer, the better approach is to develop two sets of skills at the same time: the skills that make you a good lawyer and the skills that help you...

Ed. note: Welcome to our daily feature, Quote of the Day. Over the past months, Patrick Clancy and his family have been subjected to a relentless, escalating and destructive defamation campaign. This campaign of misinformation has been launched and promoted by minor...

What happens when clients really have command of their data? In Part I of this series, I explored how the reimagined law department can redefine who does legal work and how it gets done, while ensuring its institutional knowledge is accessible to AI. The next question...

On Tuesday afternoon, Justice Brett Kavanaugh did something that in almost any other timeline but this current hellscape would be unremarkable. Acting as circuit justice for the Eighth Circuit, he denied Missouri’s emergency bid to reinstate the congressional...

The post Harvey Raises Another $550M At A $15.5B Valuation appeared first on Above the Law.The legal AI company Harvey said today that it has raised another $550 million at a $15.5 billion valuation, co-led by Diffusion and Lightspeed.By my calculations, that puts the...

Last year, Matthew Exton spotted his ex-wife and her family at a local restaurant. After sending a drink to their table and spitting at them on his way out, the now-former Toledo-area attorney returned with a gun and attempted to shoot his ex at point blank range....

For decades, the legal industry adhered to a straightforward division of labor: law schools taught doctrine and law firms taught newly minted lawyers how to actually do their jobs. It wasn’t necessarily the most efficient approach. Law schools struggled to find much...

* Missouri lawmakers threaten to impeach state supreme court if they hold secretary of state in contempt for using redrawn maps that violate state constitution. [KCTV] Meanwhile, the whole thing is back at the U.S. Supreme Court — which already blessed the Missouri...

Trump Judges Blow Off Justices: The U.S. Supreme Court refused to impose Missouri’s illegal gerrymander. Trump-appointed district judge decided to go ahead and do it anyway. While We’re On That Topic…: Can you remember the civil procedure doctrine at issue in...

There are countless law school rankings out there, and we cover just about every single one of them here at Above the Law. But what about rankings for LL.M. programs, advanced degrees that allow law school graduates to sharpen their skills, specialize in a particular...

Despite bigger budgets, in-house legal departments are being squeezed from every angle — by rising talent costs, ballooning law firm fees, and an AI bill nobody budgeted for — and a workload that’s outrunning all of it. Download the 2027 In-House Legal Budget Report,...

A judicial ethics panel has looked at the increasingly common arrangement of a law student cashing a Biglaw check while working, unpaid, inside a judge’s chambers and decided it is all perfectly fine. In the race to lock up talent earlier and earlier, Biglaw firms...

In recent years, due to the high cost of new and used cars, some people have been looking into importing cars from overseas. These grey-market imports have attracted enthusiasts and drivers who want to try something different at a comparable cost. Under current law,...

Welp, a deal is a deal. Elon University School of Law Dean Zak Kramer made his students a promise: hit an 85% first-time bar passage rate as a class, and he’d get a tattoo in their honor. Equal parts motivation and branding… and a little bit of a stunt, but one a dean...

Ed. note: Welcome to our daily feature, Quote of the Day. Mr. President, I would hope that you would consider this young lady and the person she is, what she’s been through, and consider a pardon. —  Kevin Reddington, Lindsay Clancy’s defense attorney, in comments...

Last year, we featured a documentary from Minor Character Theater about Rutgers Law grad Brian Finklebar, the former general counsel to the Willy Wonka Chocolate company as his C-Suite slowly drives him insane with illegal lotteries, rampant labor violations, and...

Most contracting playbooks contain instructions that make perfect sense to experienced lawyers. “Generally resist this provision.” “Accept if commercially reasonable.” “Escalate material deviations.” “Use judgment.” A human lawyer can often work with that language. An...