Above the Law - Thinking Like a Lawyer

Donald Trump is threatening a dumb lawsuit against the Pulitzer committee, but is it dumb like a fox? Because the right certainly has New York Times v. Sullivan in their crosshairs. There's still no information about the Supreme Court's investigation into the Dobbs leak. Color me utterly unsurprised. Steve Bannon is heading to jail, but that might not be the end of his legal woes. Maybe that federal pardon wasn't all that and a bag of chips.

Also lawyers don't make enough money... maybe.An anonymous Illinois bar applicant took to Reddit to confess to cheating on the exam. Perhaps "anonymous" should be placed in quotes because the author proceeded to provide a ton of identifying details triggering a bar examiner investigation. Also, new data suggests lawyers should raise rates, but is that really true? And merger mania is back in Biglaw with two top-tier mergers. All that and a brief aside about Liechtenstein admiralty law.Your Opinion MattersHelp us make this show better by completing the 2022 Listener Survey.

Joe went to a conference... here's what went down.The crew couldn't convene this week because of the Clio Cloud Conference, but here's Joe's interview with Pamela Smith talking about lawyer public relations.

But it might make you a sociopath.Ginni Thomas testified to the January 6 committee that she still believes the election was stolen from Donald Trump. They wouldn't call it the "big" lie if it went down easy! But she also testified that she and Clarence don't talk about work, which might be even less believable than her stolen election claim. Also, an attorney billed 277 hours to review 20 documents... that seems like something the firm should've stopped earlier. And Judge James Ho is trying to help conservative Yale students by announcing he'll never hire them. And you thought Ginni wasn't making sense.

Receive The Appropriate Prizes.Did you know that it's not a good idea to keep two sets of accounting ledgers in order to scam banks and skimp on taxes? It's true! And the majority of the Trump family is finding that out as the NY Attorney General files a lawsuit. Have you considered putting your very freedom in the hands of a judge with decades of experience based on your own misunderstanding of one incident in their lives? Trump did that too, proposing Judge Dearie as special master, apparently on the logic that the judge got made at the Department of Justice once and assuming he'd hold a grudge. What about misleading the Supreme Court about the relief you want to be a political pawn? That's frowned upon as well... but no one seems like they're going to do anything about it.

And we speak of mermaids and copyrights.There are people out there planning to digitally replace Ariel in the new Little Mermaid movie with a computer generated white character. This is great news... if you're Disney's outside IP enforcement counsel! Meanwhile, the SCOTUS offseason heats up with Chief Justice Roberts complaining that the public questions the Court's legitimacy and Justice Kagan indirectly points out that it's his fault. Also, maybe ACB forgot whole parts of the First Amendment because she doesn't plan on those existing much longer. And we go down an antitrust rabbit hole at one point.

Also, judges need to get their act together.Did you ever think we'd hear a Supreme Court justice questioning the law school model? Well, it happened! Sandwiched between some nonsense about the Dobbs leak, Neil Gorsuch mused that the United States may not need to force students through 7 years of higher education to practice law. We may not have all the answers, but at least people are talking about it. Also we have a couple of horror stories about judges refusing to respect lawyers with families and the best way to build an office culture.

See, it was an elaborate art piece to demonstrate the futility of law.We breakdown the shenanigans involved in the latest Trump search warrant order... which is in a civil matter... with a different judge... invoking privileges Trump doesn't have... granting relief he didn't even ask for. What does any of that even mean? Good luck to the judge's clerks in their future endeavors after getting handcuffed to this! We also discuss debt relief and how it impacts law students. And we discuss Jones Day and ponder if lawyers are morally complicit in the work their firms perform.

Um... 28 U.S.C. Section... Why Not?The Donald Trump warrant fight provides a scattershot of weird challenges to unravel for the non-lawyers in our lives. We've got collateral attacks and special masters and still no clear sense of how there's any jurisdiction for any of it. But he's found a judge seemingly willing to play along. As a reminder, the job of finding judges like these belongs to Leonard Leo, the guru behind the Federalist Society who now has a billion in shadowy money to play with. Speaking of right-wing law students, Yale Law grad J.D. Vance really understands the opioid crisis in Ohio... because his charity appears to have contributed to it!

We didn't plan to get this deep into the feels, but here we are.Kathryn and Joe sat down to talk about a couple human interest stories in law. Joe discusses the story of AXDRAFT, a Ukraine-based legal tech provider (part of the Onit family) and its struggles and triumphs in the face of an ongoing catastrophe while Kathryn talks about an Afghan judge who fled the country with her law degree sewn into her clothes. All this and a brief chat about ILTACON.