Above the Law - Thinking Like a Lawyer

Discussing Iowa and the challenges to American democracy.

After taking the spotlight in the impeachment trial... should we have all seen this coming?

Checking in on Elie after a solid week of watching wall to wall impeachment coverage and the wear of the marathon coverage is starting to show. There's not much "legal" about this trial, but we're going to parse through what we can. We also talk a little about Tulsi Gabbard's high stakes defamation suit against Hillary Clinton for calling the Hawaii representative a Russian asset. As a lawsuit it may not come together, but does Gabbard have a moral point?

Joe and Elie chat with Edelson PC about the tech-oriented plaintiff and class action firm's work from protecting biometric privacy rights to addressing sexual misconduct in youth sports with partner Chris Dore and associates Aaron Lawson and Sydney Janzen.

More and more firms are adopting a non-equity partner tier, delaying equity consideration while extracting maximum value from high billing but relatively lowly paid senior attorneys tied to the job by the dangling hope of a future promotion that may never arrive.

With the 2010s wrapping up, Joe and Kathryn focus on all the law firms we've lost over the last decade. Industry pressures, bad strategies, and fraud allegations managed to put several former mainstays to rest over the last 10 years. What lessons can we take from the demise of these once-proud firms? Where is this whole profession heading? Will this next recession finish off what 2009 started?

To close out the year, Joe runs down the top 10 stories of the year at Above the Law. Are there key insights or interesting trends to be gained from reviewing the site’s traffic figures? Probably not, but here we are.

The president of the United States was impeached for only the third time in history. Let the obscure legal theorizing begin! Joe and Elie break down the curious argument that the House doesn’t even need to hand over the articles.

It's bonus season in Biglaw, and the major firms are slowly but surely rolling out their bonus announcements and telling associates what they'll be getting in their stockings this year. But Elie sees a bit of a Scrooge in the early first move and slow matching cycle. What's going on with the legal market and are we really looking at a recession in the making?

Jessica Robinson, Vice President of Client Services at Casepoint, discusses the maturation of the eDiscovery process, project management lessons for effective discovery, the importance of learning the theory of discovery, and the impact of algorithms and AI in the legal field.