Above the Law - Thinking Like a Lawyer

Joe and Elie check in on the legal academy and boy was it a mess this week. One law school is closing. A T14 school claims it's in financial distress. And another school made all its students attend a racist propaganda rally. Just another day in the law school world.

With work flowing away from mid-sized firms with high overhead to either the established elite or small shops, the shape of the legal labor market was bound to change as well. That's where Lawclerk's solution comes in at the intersection of technology and human capital. Joe chats with Greg Garman and Talitha Gray about their platform and how they help efficiently match freelancers with small shops needing a dose of expertise.

Joe and Elie catch their breath by recapping the top legal stories of last week. At the annual meeting of the Association of Corporate Counsel, Elie describes an in-house community deeply concerned with navigating the #MeToo era, the gang discusses the abrupt decision of Baker McKenzie's managing partner to step down for "exhaustion," and the pair argue over a new set of law school rankings.

You've seen all the mainstream media reports of student walk-outs and protests, but what are law school campuses really like these days. Joe and Elie are joined by Melissa Murray, a professor at NYU Law and former interim dean of Berkeley, to discuss the reaction from an insider's perspective and to delve into the overall mood on law school campuses these days. Are law students really desperate for "safe spaces" or is it more nuanced?

Joe and Elie take a serious turn, talking to University of Cincinnati Law Professor Mark Godsey, director of the Ohio Innocence Project, and author of Blind Injustice about the scourge of wrongful convictions, prosecutorial misconduct, and the trouble with local elections. Professor Godsey, a former prosecutor himself, discusses his conversion to an advocate for the wrongfully convicted and his grasp of the psychology that consistently lands the wrong people in prison.

Joe attended this year's Clio Cloud Conference and sat down with Sarah Schaff of Headnote to discuss her legal career and how she's shifted to become an entrepreneur with a product that helps attorneys collect on their bills within hours instead of months.

Joe and Above the Law's Kathryn Rubino react in real-time to the Kavanaugh hearings, recapping the morning testimony of Christine Blasey Ford and watching the Kavanaugh opening statement in all its ripe-for-SNL-parody glory. Since this recording, the vote's been delayed pending an investigation but it's worth taking a step back and ruminating on what we saw.

The legal workplace would be almost unrecognizable to a lawyer of the past. The typewriters are gone, WordPerfect is gone, the fax machines are going, and a whole host of new platforms providing services that those older lawyers could never have imagined. Joe and Elie chat with Casepoint CEO Haresh Bhungalia and Casepoint Chief Strategy Officer David Carns about the legal technology landscape generally and Casepoint specifically and how each are changing the legal workflow.

Before the Kavanaugh nomination took its decidedly darker turn, the nominee spoke tentatively but positively of opening up the courts to cameras and same-day audio. The House has also put forward a bill to expand this transparency. Joe and Elie talk to Andrew Eisbrouch and Jesse Weber of the Guys Who Law podcast and the Law & Crime network. Law & Crime is dedicated to broadcasting live courtroom telecasts to inform the public about the judicial system, so we wanted to know their thoughts on transparency.

Joe and Elie review the week that was in the Kavanaugh confirmation fight. Procedural fights! Threatened explusion! Giving false testimony to the Senate! Mysterious Kasowitz connections! After a wild week, will Brett Kavanaugh still have the votes to narrowly get confirmed to the Supreme Court? We'll just have to wait and find out. But the answer is yes.