Above the Law

It’s Still A Good Time To Be A Lawyer. So Far.

Stephen Embry — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:46:21 +0000

It’s a good time to be a lawyer and for law firms if you believe the latest information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But you have to wonder what exactly is going on here. All we hear is how legal technology and AI will replace much of the work lawyers do, so jobs and profits should be down.

But, according to an article that appeared in Reuters, the total number of jobs in legal reached over 1.2 million last month. That was an increase of over 1,200 from April’s numbers and, according to the article, is up over 7% in the past five years. Legal jobs include lawyers, paralegals, and legal assistants.

On top of this, 2025 and the first quarter of 2026 were profitable too, says the article and other reports. Several firms recently boosted associate bonuses and salaries. Milbank announced it will pay its associates anywhere from $235K to $455K and other firms say they will match those salaries, according to reports.

What In The Sam Hill Is Going On?

It really makes you wonder what’s happening. Supposedly, AI and automation were going to replace much of what those in legal do, prompting theories anywhere from the death of the billable hour to the death of lawyers and law firms. In 2023, for example, Goldman Sachs predicted some 44% of legal work could be automated.

Yet the evidence so far is to the contrary. One possibility is what Gina Passarella discussed and what I wrote about recently: lawyers and law firms just aren’t changing how they have always done things very much. And, the theory goes, why should they. Plenty of demand and, as Passarella put it, “why leave any money on the table.” Indeed, AI has increased such things as litigation since the cost of bringing cases is reduced by AI tools, an important fact for those bringing contingency-fee cases.

Passarella’s hypothesis though is that the clients, under increasing pressures to lower cost, will begin making demands on their outside lawyers to cut costs, making them make better use of AI tools. Which in turn would reduce the need for so many lawyers and perhaps the dependence on the billable hour.

But clearly that hasn’t happened. It’s business as usual and that business is good.

It Hasn’t Happened… Yet

But let’s not get too comfortable. Just because it hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it won’t.

Yes, demand for legal services continues to be high and may even increase as new and different matters crop up. So even with the adoption of technology, AI and automation, the amount of work that needs to be done increases so that practicing law remains a very profitable endeavor. But as the tech and AI tools get better, at some point, they may catch up with the work and do what’s been long predicted, forcing a decline in the need for human lawyers.

It’s also possible that legal, which is known for not being in any hurry to adopt technology, just hasn’t got there. That the AI revolution impacting other industries will eventually hit legal. Add to this an economy which it seems, despite evidence to the contrary, is continuing to purr right along.

That suggests that while cost containment is important to business and clients, it’s not a priority right now. We see this in the willingness to approve sometimes staggering rate increases, for example. We also see it in the unwillingness of many — both in-house and outside firms — to adopt alternative fee structures beyond the billable hour model.

But if the economy tanks, then businesses are going to demand cost cutting much more vigorously and aggressively than they have so far. That could put legal in the crosshairs. Dramatic and rapid change has happened before. Video conferencing was clearly possible pre-COVID, but wasn’t used. But when we had to use it, we embraced it and adapted it pretty quickly.

And we haven’t gone back. The same could happen to legal if we hit a downturn: rapid adoption of AI across the board.

That would mean the legal bubble could burst, leading to layoffs and disruption.

The Bubble Hasn’t Burst — Maybe It Won’t

The evidence so far has been that a steady demand and a steady economy aren’t making businesses make hard choices and cuts, and this has allowed lawyers and law firms to continue as usual. And perhaps that won’t change.

We have seen this gap between predicted doom and reality before. When ATMs came on the scene, most thought it was the end of banking. Instead, there are more banks and bankers than ever, they just perform different functions than handing out paper money.

So the same may happen with law and lawyers. Indeed, there’s still a huge untapped demand for services. More complex matters and legal issues are being created every day. The billable hour still rules the day.

As with so many things with AI, it’s hard to predict where things will end up. But lawyers and law firms shouldn’t just assume that things will keep going just like they are. The boom could go bust, and if it does, those that have prepared will survive.

Those that haven’t? Remember Blockbuster and BlackBerry. You might be next.

Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger, and writer. He publishes TechLaw Crossroads, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law.

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The 2026 Salary Wars Are On… So Where Is Biglaw?

Kathryn Rubino — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:57:00 +0000

It has been more than a week since Milbank fired the starting gun on the 2026 salary wars, and the compensation scorecard is filling up fast. Recruiters predicted a rapid wave of matches. And they were right — with one notable catch: the firms doing the matching are almost all litigation boutiques.

Look at the current scorecard. Of the firms that have moved on salary increases since Milbank’s announcement, the list reads like a who’s who of elite commercial litigation shops: Hueston Hennigan; Vartabedian Katz Hester Haynes; Quinn Emanuel; Groom Law Group; AZA; Elsberg Baker & Maruri; Wilkinson Stekloff. And of course, Susman Godfrey, which didn’t just match Milbank, they went above it, setting off their own boutique compensation arms race that led to Holwell Shuster & Goldberg following suit. (Kellogg Hansen is also above market, but they have been for a while without others matching it.) The one traditional Biglaw firm that moved (McDermott) did so on the same day as Milbank’s announcement, before the ink was barely dry. And then… mostly silence from the big guys.

In 2023, when Milbank announced raises in November, the Biglaw matches came within weeks. Cravath moved on November 28, three weeks after Milbank, and once Cravath spoke, the floodgates opened. You can see it in the 2023 scorecard: the list of matches went from a trickle to a torrent the moment the market had its official blessing from Cravath. That’s how the compensation cascade works: Milbank starts it, Cravath ratifies it (or comes over the top), everyone else falls in line.

We are not there yet in 2026.

The working theory, and it’s a reasonable one, is that traditional Biglaw is waiting. Not because the money isn’t there (Biglaw had a very good 2025, and the Am Law 100 numbers reflect it). And they’re not philosophically opposed to paying associates more, hell they know they have to pay top of the market to keep the elite talent train. But because the lockstep model runs on consensus, and nobody wants to be the firm that moved before Cravath and then had to recalibrate. So the white-shoe crowd watches and waits while the litigation boutiques do the early running.

Which brings us to the other story happening in parallel, and it’s what’s getting the Biglaw associates talking (well, this and the epic Knicks run).

The Susman scale is a boutique phenomenon (sure, Susman’s revenue puts it in the rarified air of Biglaw, but at its heart, it’s a boutique) and it’s a reflection of what elite litigation-only shops can do when they run lean, bill at premium rates, and compete fiercely for a small pool of exceptional litigators. It’s a different market than the lockstep Biglaw world, and the Milbank scale remains the operative benchmark for the broader industry unless and until someone disrupts it at the top.

Who could do that? Realistically, Cravath. That’s always been the dynamic: Milbank moves, the market follows, and the whole thing resets only if Cravath comes in over the top. Davis Polk could theoretically make a move too, but if history is any guide, the firm most likely to shake up the Biglaw compensation ladder is Cravath. Until that happens, Milbank’s new numbers are the standard.

There’s one more thing worth noting here, and it’s directed squarely at the Biglaw firms still sitting on their hands: the raises are effective July 1. That means you have a minute before your associates are technically behind on pay. But here’s the thing: everyone knows you’re going to match. You know you’re going to match. The only people pretending otherwise are the partners who haven’t sent the memo yet.

So why the wait? Why give your associates the heartburn? The only plausible strategic reason to hold off is the prospect of a re-raise — if Cravath comes in over the top for some class years, as it did in 2023, you’d theoretically have to run the administrative process twice. But is that really so onerous that it justifies leaving your associates to refresh their inboxes and wonder if their firm values them? The administrative burden of a second compensation memo is approximately zero compared to the goodwill cost of making people feel like an afterthought during a salary war everyone is watching in real time.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1

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Schenck Price Competes Smarter With Lexis+ With Protégé

lfaubert — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:18:00 +0000

As part of its industry insight series, LexisNexis^® Legal & Professional features Schenck Price, a full-service law firm based in New Jersey, highlighting how the firm is using Lexis+^® with Protégé^™ to support higher-quality legal work, strengthen client relationships, and compete more effectively in the Northern New Jersey/New York metro market.

“When it comes to choosing where to invest our resources in the tech space, it boils down to one word: Trust,” said John Ursin, Managing Partner, Schenck Price. “The market is flooded with legal AI companies who make many promises. We needed to partner with LexisNexis due to its unmatched relationship with the legal sector and its long track record of providing the very best legal tools.”

Ursin emphasized the firm’s approach to legal AI as a strategic investment in better lawyering, not simply faster output. As larger firms continue to expand and client expectations rise, Schenck Price is focused on using AI to help its attorneys deliver sophisticated work efficiently while preserving the firm’s value as a strong regional player. “

We cannot compete and deliver without the right tools,” said Ursin. “Our firm is investing heavily in the integration and adoption of legal AI technology. We are committed to delivering the highest level of legal services. AI is a central focus.”

The firm underscores why trust played such a central role in Schenck Price’s decision to work with LexisNexis. In a legal AI market crowded with new entrants, the firm prioritized trusted legal data, long-standing industry credibility, and confidence that its technology partner could support attorney-client confidentiality and keep pace with rapid innovation.

LexisNexis worked closely with Schenck Price on training and enablement, helping support adoption through both foundational onboarding and smaller, practice-specific sessions. Ursin shared that the combination of trusted technology and ongoing guidance helped increase confidence and embed day-to-day use across the firm.

As a mid-size firm, Schenck Price is using AI to extend the reach of its lawyers and deliver work at a level often associated with significantly larger firms, without taking on more overhead.

“AI allows us, as a 100-attorney firm, to provide services more like a firm double our size. We use AI to amplify our talent and relationships,” Ursin said.

The Schenck Price case study and video reflect LexisNexis’s continued commitment to helping law firms adopt and embed legal AI in practical, trusted ways that improve work quality and client service.

Learn more about the Schenck Price and LexisNexis story.

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Clio Acquires Jurisage, Paving The Way For Canadian Launch Of Clio Work And Other Canadian AI Tools

Robert Ambrogi — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:29:11 +0000

Clip described the deal as as ‘a foundational investment’ in the future of legal AI in Canada.

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Goals Are Not Magic, They Are Systems: Why Most Professionals Never Reach The Goals They Set

Frank Ramos — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:46:24 +0000

Every day, people make promises to themselves. They promise to lose weight, bring in more business, improve their trial skills, write a book, learn a new technology, spend more time with family, or finally tackle the project they have postponed for years. For a few weeks, motivation runs high. Calendars fill up. New planners appear. Fresh goals seem exciting. Then reality arrives. Client emergencies happen. Trials get continued. Depositions get scheduled. Travel intervenes. Life gets busy. Within a few weeks, many goals have already been abandoned.

The problem is not ambition. Most professionals have plenty of ambition. The problem is that many people confuse goals with plans. A goal is simply a destination. A plan is the route. Yet too many people spend their time thinking about where they want to go rather than how they will get there. They imagine the result while ignoring the process. They focus on the finish line while neglecting the daily steps required to reach it.

The Goal Is Not the Work

One lesson I learned years ago is that goals themselves accomplish nothing. Writing down a goal does not make it happen. Announcing a goal does not make it happen. Talking about a goal certainly does not make it happen. The work begins only after the goal has been identified.

Many lawyers know exactly what they want. They want to become equity partners. They want to become general counsel. They want to try more cases. They want to build a book of business. They want to become recognized thought leaders. Those goals are important because they provide direction. But direction alone is not enough. A lawyer who wants to generate a million dollars in business development revenue must determine how many lunches, presentations, articles, meetings, phone calls, referrals, and follow-up conversations will be required to reach that objective.

Goals point the way. Systems move you forward.

Small Actions Create Large Results

Most people underestimate the power of small actions repeated consistently over time. They expect dramatic breakthroughs. They look for shortcuts. They search for one big opportunity that will change everything. Occasionally, that happens—most of the time it does not.

A lawyer who writes one article will probably not become widely known. A lawyer who writes 100 articles over several years may develop a reputation that opens doors throughout the industry. A lawyer who attends one networking event may not generate business. A lawyer who consistently attends events, follows up, builds relationships, and remains visible over time often develops a strong referral network.

The same principle applies to nearly every professional goal. Consistency usually defeats intensity. A person who works toward a goal thirty minutes a day for a year often accomplishes more than someone who works feverishly for a weekend and then stops.

The challenge is that consistency is not exciting. It is repetitive. It is often boring. It requires patience. Yet that is where most meaningful accomplishments originate.

Motivation Comes and Goes

One of the biggest mistakes people make is relying on motivation. Motivation feels wonderful when it is present. The problem is that it rarely stays. Some mornings you feel energized. Other mornings you do not. Some weeks,everything seems possible. Other weeks, everything feels difficult.

People who depend on motivation often stop when motivation disappears. People who develop discipline continue moving forward even when motivation is absent.

Every professional eventually encounters days when progress feels slow. Articles are harder to write. Business development efforts seem ineffective. Trial preparation becomes exhausting. Learning new skills becomes frustrating. Those moments do not mean the goal is wrong. They mean the work has become difficult.

Discipline carries people through periods when enthusiasm fades.

The Power of Written Goals

There is something powerful about putting goals into writing. Written goals create accountability. They transform vague hopes into concrete objectives. They force clarity. They require specificity.

A goal that says, “I want to be healthier,” is difficult to measure. A goal that says, “I will walk thirty minutes five days each week,” creates a standard that can be tracked. A goal that says, “I want more business,” lacks precision. A goal that says, “I will meet with fifty referral sources this year,” creates a measurable target.

Written goals also allow professionals to evaluate progress honestly. Without measurement, people often confuse activity with achievement. They feel busy and assume they are advancing. Sometimes they are simply moving in circles.

Why Accountability Matters

Most people perform better when someone else knows what they are trying to accomplish. Accountability introduces responsibility. It creates external pressure. It encourages follow-through.

That accountability can come from a mentor, colleague, spouse, coach, friend, or professional group. The source matters less than the structure. When another person asks whether progress has been made, excuses become harder to justify.

Law firms understand this concept well. Associates receive assignments with deadlines. Partners track performance. Clients expect updates. Accountability drives execution throughout the legal profession. The same principle applies to personal and professional goals.

Goals that remain private often go unfinished.

Obstacles Are Part of the Process

Many people assume obstacles indicate failure. They do not. Obstacles are evidence that progress is occurring.

Every worthwhile objective encounters resistance. New business efforts generate rejection. Professional growth requires discomfort. Learning unfamiliar technology creates frustration. Leadership responsibilities introduce challenges. Trial work brings uncertainty. None of those realities is a sign that a person should stop.

In fact, the absence of obstacles may indicate that the goal is not ambitious enough.

The professionals who achieve significant goals are not necessarily the smartest people in the room. They are often the people who continue moving after encountering setbacks. They understand that temporary failure and permanent failure are not the same thing.

Adapt Without Abandoning

One of the most valuable skills for achieving goals is adaptation. Circumstances change. Markets shift. Priorities evolve. Opportunities emerge unexpectedly.

That does not mean goals should be abandoned whenever difficulties arise. It means strategies should be adjusted when necessary.

A lawyer pursuing business development may discover that speaking engagements produce better results than networking events. Another may find that articles create stronger relationships than social media posts. A third may discover that industry conferences generate more opportunities than local bar functions.

The destination remains the same—the route changes.

Too many people quit when they should adjust.

The Compound Effect of Time

People often overestimate what they can accomplish in a month and underestimate what they can accomplish in five years.

The lawyer who reads ten pages a day may complete dozens of books annually. The lawyer who develops one new professional relationship each week may create hundreds of meaningful connections over time. The lawyer who improves one skill each year may become remarkably effective after a decade.

These results rarely appear dramatic in the moment. They become obvious only after sufficient time has passed.

Success often looks sudden from the outside. From the inside, it usually reflects years of effort that nobody noticed.

Start Before You Feel Ready

Many professionals delay action because they believe they need additional preparation. They want more confidence, more information, more certainty, or better timing.

Perfect conditions rarely arrive.

The first article will not be perfect. The first presentation will not be perfect. The first business development meeting may feel uncomfortable. The first attempt at a new skill may produce disappointing results.

That is normal.

Progress belongs to people who begin before they feel fully prepared. Experience often provides answers that planning alone cannot produce.

Action creates momentum. Momentum creates confidence. Confidence creates additional action.

The cycle starts only when someone begins.

The Real Secret

People often ask for the secret to achieving goals. They expect a complicated answer. Most of the time, the answer is surprisingly simple.

Decide what matters.

Write it down.

Break it into small steps.

Measure progress.

Adjust when necessary.

Continue when it becomes difficult.

Repeat longer than most people are willing to repeat.

There is nothing glamorous about that process. There is also nothing mysterious about it. The challenge has never been understanding what works. The challenge has always been doing what works consistently enough for results to appear.

Goals are important because they provide direction. Systems are important because they create movement. When those two elements work together, progress becomes possible.

And while there are no guarantees, people who commit to the process give themselves a far better chance of arriving where they want to go.

Frank Ramos is a partner at Goldberg Segalla in Miami, where he practices commercial litigation, products, and catastrophic personal injury. You can follow him on LinkedIn, where he has about 80,000 followers.

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A New Salary Scale Has Emerged: Elite Boutique Matches Susman’s $450K Pay Grid

Staci Zaretsky — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:02:00 +0000

For most of the legal industry, the question remains whether firms will match Milbank’s new associate salary scale. But among the nation’s most elite litigation boutiques, a different benchmark is beginning to emerge — the recently announced Susman Godfrey scale. For these firms, matching Milbank may no longer be the end goal.

Earlier this week, Susman raised associate salaries to as much as $450,000, with first-year associates now earning $240,000. The move put the famed litigation shop above the prevailing market rate and created what appears to be a second compensation track for firms looking to compete for the very best talent.

It didn’t take long for another firm to sign on.

Commercial litigation boutique Holwell Shuster & Goldberg has announced that it will match the Susman scale, becoming the first firm we’ve seen adopt the new pay grid. Here’s what the firm’s updated salary scale looks like:

Members of the firm’s management committee — former Southern District of New York Judge Richard Holwell, Mike Shuster, Dan Goldberg, and Blair Kaminsky — closed their compensation memo with a note of appreciation for associates: “On behalf of the entire partnership, we want to thank you for your hard work, your commitment to providing top-tier legal services to our clients, and for continuing to make HSG a very special place to practice law.”

Congratulations to everyone at Holwell Shuster & Goldberg!

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of compensation updates, so when your firm announces or matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus/Matches”). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we also use for salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish. Thanks for your help!

Staci Zaretsky is the managing editor of Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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Morning Docket: 06.11.26

Above the Law — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:43:00 +0000

* Ahem. “My Mayor is Muslim, my bagel is Jewish, my Christian the opposite of the nationalist caricature that pure grifters like Alito & Thomas contrive... Knicks in 5." [ESPN]

* "Meta, YouTube Lose Bid To Void $6M Addiction Verdict." Can't read Law360? Well, smash that like button and click subscribe and maybe you can learn the news! [Law360]

* Trump judges add "won't admit 2020 was a legitimate election" to things they won't admit alongside "RACIAL SEGREGATION IS BAD." [Daily Beast]

* Cross-Atlantic mergers bring out the claws. [Legal Cheek]

* NLJ headline is about the Senate pressing a judicial nominee about clerk hiring. The guy REFUSED TO SAY WHO WON THE 2020 ELECTION. The abject uselessness of media. [National Law Journal]

* Bill Gates testifies about Epstein the way Windows Me came out... not good, but knowing there were way worse options [Reuters]

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Boutique Firms Beat The Market — See Also

Chris Williams — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 23:00:00 +0000

Wins In The Courtroom And The Salary Race: So much money!

Kellogg Feeds Their Associates’ Wallets: They even included a special bonus!

Boutique Starts Their First-Years At $255K!: Desmarais LLP is showing off their generosity in a big way!

Quick And Speedy Compensation!: Trial boutique Elsberg Baker & Maruri matches Milbank!

Wilkinson Stekloff Joins The Salary Bonanza: Woop Woop!

Seward & Kissel Joins The Salary Train: Good on them! Now, where's the rest of the firms?

More Prosecutorial Abuse: Prosecutor used cop database to spy on romantic competition.

Conservative Law Professors Feel The Need To Hold Back: Is this a free speech issue or what it takes to keep things social?

The ATL Law School Ranking Is Live!: See where your dream school (and actual school) place!

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Legal Ethics Sure Can Get Sticky

Kathryn Rubino — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:33:00 +0000

Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day!

Cape Fear, the psychological thriller, is getting an Apple TV remake. What book is it based on?

Hint: The remake (as well as the award winning 1991 film) is centered on questionable ethical choices by attorney(s).

See the answer on the next page.

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Formal Law Firm Mentorship Programs Are At Death’s Door

Jonathan Wolf — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:02:00 +0000

It’s the case at any large law firm or big government legal office, or at least it used to be, that every new associate attorney is paired up with a more experienced senior attorney as part of a formal mentorship program. Mentors are supposed to help their mentees develop their legal skills, conform to firm culture, and, over time, build their own book of business.

Formal mentorship programs look good on paper. In reality, though, they are increasingly failing new lawyers.

I learned this week that my own former law firm mentor, with whom I was first paired back in 2014, passed away. Evidently she suffered from head and neck squamous cell carcinoma. I’m sorry to say that I did not learn of this until it was too late.

Although we had a lot of good experiences over the years too, we had a bit of a falling out. I felt exploited. I became embittered. Eventually she parted ways with the firm that I continued to work at for several more years, and not amicably. Still, I wish I could have seen her before the end, maybe told her it was all water under the bridge, even if it would have been a white lie.

The thing is, I don’t think my generally negative experience with a formal law firm mentorship program was all that unique. Anecdotally, I don’t think I’ve seen even one instance of a fully thriving formal mentor-mentee relationship at a private law firm.

At least at first, many law firm mentees have to rely on their mentors for work. This gives the mentor massive power over the mentee. Yet, if the mentee fails to meet his or her billable hour requirement by the end of the year, even if it’s because he or she has been left to rot on the vine by the mentor for some perceived deficiency, it’s not like the mentor is going to step in and take the bullet for that.

Perhaps in eras past when people started at one firm and stayed their entire careers there was more incentive to invest in individuals. Now, with the mentor, mentee, or both almost sure to depart at some point for greener pastures, it’s understandably more difficult to commit.

Today, pretty much the only thing that keeps a mentor focused on the mentee’s best interests is the mentor’s own magnanimity. How many partners at big law firms have you met who are truly unselfish?

Now, I’m sure plenty of partners at big law firms are reading this right now: You don’t have to send me emails extolling your good works. I’m not here to judge. Human nature is what it is. Just don’t try to look at me with a straight face and pretend that you’d sacrifice your year-end bonus to help out an associate randomly assigned to be your mentee six months ago.

Hard data about law firm mentorship programs is not easy to come by. Apparently, a survey from 2019 found that only 29% of Millennial attorney respondents said a formal mentor had played a significant or crucial role in their career (and I’d wager that quite a few within that 29% answered as they did only from having developed a Pavlovian response to any opportunity presented to kiss their mentor’s ass).

One neuroscientist who studies psychopathy found that “lawyer” ranked second only to “CEO” as the career containing the most psychopaths. Perhaps randomly pairing a naive 20-something just out of law school with someone who’s managed to rise high in this field is an inherently dodgy prospect.

Informal mentors are another story. I’ve a collection of informal mentees, who I just call friends, and I still get a call or a text from one of them almost daily. The key there is choice. After a little time, it’s not that hard for most people (MAGA diehards notwithstanding) to figure out whether a person really gives a damn about them.

At the end of the day, I don’t think formal mentor programs at large law firms are reparable, at least absent massive changes in the entire American legal system. If you’re reading about a law firm’s supposedly great mentorship program on their website, I would advise taking that with a huge grain of salt. Set your expectations accordingly.

As for my own former mentor, I hope wherever she is now, she’s at peace. Perhaps at this point it really all is water under the bridge.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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Trump Memo On AI Aims To Avoid Repeat Of Anthropic Debacle

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. - Breaking Defense — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:32:00 +0000

The 'National Security Presidential Memorandum' urges closer collaboration with AI companies — as long as they’re compliant with Pentagon demands — and orders a sweeping revision of Biden-era guardrails on military AI.

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Court Sanctions Lawyers From Both Sides In The Same Lawsuit For Filing Briefs With AI-Hallucinated Cases

Steven Chung — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:00:00 +0000

Three years ago, I wrote about one of the first instances of a lawyer citing fake cases generate by artificial intelligence (AI) in their legal briefs only to have the court call them out on it and consider sanctions. While most would think that the news that went viral in the legal community would serve as a deterrent to those tempted, it has not. Over the past three years, courts have increasingly sanctioned attorneys for submitting briefs containing fabricated citations generated by AI tools.

Most of these benchslaps involved an attorney on one side of a lawsuit. But this is a case where the court caught both sides redhanded.

In Withers v. City of Aberdeen, Tom Withers sued the city for breach of contract. The venue is the United States District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, Aberdeen Division. Each side was represented by two attorneys with each side having one local counsel and an outside counsel admitted pro hac vice.

At one point, Aberdeen filed a motion for summary judgment, and Withers filed an opposition. When the court reviewed the filings, it could not locate some of the cited legal authorities. So the court ordered a hearing to demand explanations from both sides. Each side then asked the court’s permission to file corrected briefs. In those filings, the pro hac vice attorneys admitted to drafting the memorandums using AI and not cite checking the authorities cited. The local attorneys admitted that they did not check their co-counsel’s memorandums for accuracy before filing them.

At the hearing, all of the attorneys involved generally admitted that they failed to cite-check the memorandums they signed off on and accepted responsibility. But two of the attorneys’ explanations are worth mentioning.

One attorney was shocked at the court’s order and claimed that she did not know that AI can cite false cases and didn’t know what a hallucinated case was. The court found this explanation to be insufficient and incredulous. The court then stated that this attorney continued to file AI-generated and unverified memorandums after she received notice from the court. This resulted in another sanction from the Louisiana Bankruptcy Court for filing two memorandums with AI-hallucinated case law.

The other pro hac vice attorney involved stated that she used AI software that was built for in-house legal research, only used it for 90 days, and that it was custom made to produce results from the state where she practices but not from Mississippi. It is not clear whether the term “in-house legal research” means an office-use legal research tool or if it is software specifically tailored to in-house corporate attorneys. She also admitted to this being her first time handling a Mississippi case.

After considering the facts and the explanations from the attorneys, the court imposed sanctions on all of the attorneys involved. For the two local counsel who simply signed off the memorandums, they were each ordered to pay $1,000. The two pro hac vice counsel were sanctioned $2,500 and $3,500.

Also, every attorney involved has been disqualified from the case. The pro hac vice attorneys have had their admissions revoked and are banned from seeking admissions to the court for two years. The court will also send a copy of its sanctions order to the state bars where each of the attorneys are practicing where they will decide the appropriate response.

The judge also cancelled the trial.

While this could have been an interesting way to pit AI vs. AI to see which is better at motion drafting, it remains that AI cannot cite cases correctly even after several years. If the general public sees this, they will not only lose more respect towards the profession, but they will try their luck with AI and use it to conjure up more lawyer jokes.

I did not name the attorneys involved for several reasons. First, being mentioned on Above the Law leaves a big mark on the internet, and I think the professional repercussions they suffered now and possibly later is enough. The important lesson is that courts and state bars will get tougher on attorneys who do not wisely use AI. Second, I would like to know why some attorneys are taking a risk on their professional reputation by submitting AI-generated legal memoranda without verifying accuracy. I would like to hear and anonymously share their stories so that others will learn from their mistakes. I think it is not enough to attribute their behavior to pure laziness. If you want to share your (or your “friend’s”) story, please send me an email.

Gavel Bang: Rob Freund for finding this gem.

Steven Chung is a tax attorney in Los Angeles, California. He helps people with basic tax planning and resolve tax disputes. He is also sympathetic to people with large student loans. He can be reached via email at stevenchungatl@gmail.com. Or you can connect with him on Twitter (@stevenchung) and connect with him on LinkedIn.

The post Court Sanctions Lawyers From Both Sides In The Same Lawsuit For Filing Briefs With AI-Hallucinated Cases appeared first on Above the Law.

Trouble For Midsize Law Firms: Is The Titanic Sinking?

Stephen Embry — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:32:00 +0000

A law firm economic theory has been expressed by people like Professor Ben Barton in his 2015 book “Glass Half Full: The Decline and Rebirth of the Legal Profession” and others. The basic premise is that in the future, large firms will survive and prosper because of their ability to scale, make technological investments, and their ability to handle large and complex matters. And of course their reputation.

Small firms will succeed by becoming specialized boutiques and having lower overhead. But the ones in the middle — the proverbial midsize firms — will struggle the most. They lack the ability to scale and the specialization and agility of the boutiques.

I had written about this barbell-looking long-term picture pre-2020 based on some research by ALM and also by LexisNexis. Since then, the theory has been largely ignored or outright rejected. But the recent Thomson report “Q1 2026 Law Firm Financial Index Analysis: The Quiet Rate Erosion Impacting Midsize Law Firms” gives some new credence to the idea.

And if it’s correct, it appears the midsize market ship Titanic is taking significant water.

A Definitional Issue

When we discuss midsize law firms, we need to be careful with definitions. A midsize firm in one city may be either a smaller or larger firm in another location. What I, coming from a large firm background, consider a midsize firm may be different than someone with a different background would consider. Some would say a 25 person firm is midsize while others would say midsize starts at 50.

The Thomson report doesn’t help much since it doesn’t define midsize other than by comparing the statistics of the midsize market with Am Law 100 and 200 firms.

Nevertheless, certain generalizations can be made about the report’s conclusions and their impact on law firms that are typically locally or regionally oriented, have fewer full partners than the Amlaw 100 and 200 firms and try to be traditional full service law firms.

Turbulent Times For Middies

The report, published May 26, 2026, has three main findings:

Midsize rate growth in the first quarter and in 2025 was significantly less than the rate growth at Am Law 100 and 200 firms.

Midsize firms had the least growth in technology and knowledge management investment than not just Am Law 100 and 200 firms but of any segment.

Midsize firms have a low investment in recruiting expenses and are virtually absent from the lateral market.

According to the report, not only is the midsize rate growth modest, their expense growth rate was also the highest of any segment.

The report summed it up this way: “Slowing demand and lagging rate growth, the highest direct expense growth but the lowest technology investment, and minimal lateral recruiting investment … together these divergencies show a widening gap between earnings and costs.” It’s a scary picture.

A Troubled Future

And if this trend continues, it will get worse. The gap in investment in talent and technology means larger and smaller firms will be able do more with less. Their overall cost to the client could, in turn, be less even if their rates are higher. That could impact demand for midsize firms.

Of course, failure to recruit talent, particularly at the lateral level, will mean midsize competitors end up with lawyers with more skill and expertise. The result: more work for competitors and less for the midsize.

And think about what it means for the more talented partners at midsize firms. Lower rates and higher costs translate into reduced profitability. Reduced profitability translates into reduced compensation. Talented partners aren’t likely to stick around when they could make more money at a larger or for that matter, smaller, firm.

Well, you say, midsize will still be able to get the work from businesses and individuals that aren’t bet the company but still need more sophisticated servicing than small firms can provide. The meat and potatoes work that in many respects has traditionally powered the midsize firms: work from local business and wealthy individuals.

But that ignores reality. In the age of AI, smaller firms can do that sort of work perhaps just as well and at a lower cost to the client. Just because things have always been a certain way doesn’t mean they always will be.

So there are threats on all sides of the equation for the midsize firms.

How Did We Get Here?

It’s legitimate to ask what got midsize firms to this point. There are several factors. But one that stands out is the consensus decision-making model most midsize firms employ. In many Am Law 100 and 200 firms, there is greater centralized decision making by management committees. These firms are run much more like a business.

In part this is because investment costs for things like technology and recruiting are spread among large numbers of partners. The financial impact of these costs to individual partners is low, making it easier for them to go along. It’s also because partners in these larger firms have gotten used to centralized management that developed over time.

In small and solo firms, it’s easier to get consensus among the partners for expenditures as well. Fewer numbers for one thing. And for boutique firms, there is a commonality of purpose that makes agreement easier.

But these decision-making issues spell trouble at the midsize level. Typically, midsize management has less control and decision-making ability. Instead, the partnership as a whole often has to be involved in and agree with investment and financial decisions. Not only does that take a lot of time, it’s often hard to get agreement on anything: saying it’s like herding cats is an insult to the cats.

And because the financial impact on individual partners is greater, there are more holdouts. In many respects, midsize firms function like a bunch of individual lawyers sharing space.

Where Do Midsizes Go From Here?

It’s a difficult problem to find solutions for, again assuming that the new report is correct. One option is for the middies to merge with one another and try to bootstrap themselves into the Am Law 200 at least. But that won’t in and of itself, solve the leadership and management situation, it only means that costs will spread among more. That could help but won’t close the gap without more.

Midsize firms could adopt the smaller firm boutique strategy and focus their firms into fewer areas of specialization. Certainly, a number of midsize law firms specialize in particular practice areas: the statistics for those firms likely look quite a bit different than those from a general purpose midsize firm that considers itself full service.

Adopting this model would enable more unity of purpose, an ability to retain specialists in a given area and perhaps increase profitability. But it means reducing the impact and clout of many longtime partners. Given the consensus decision-making model, that doesn’t seem all that likely to happen.

The best option is likely increasing technological capabilities through investment, commitment, and training. Midsize firms could adopt an AI-first attitude. That would enable them to do more with less and compete more directly with larger and smaller firms on cost. And it would enable them to maximize their advantage in resources over the very small firms. But that requires sacrifice and commitment and a sea change in attitude. And partner buy in.

So Is There A Solution?

Which brings us to a final point: sometimes the economics of the marketplace just have to play out. If the smaller and larger firms can do work better at a lower price than the traditional midsize firm, the real winners are the clients which after all we are in the business of serving. If the midsize firms can’t or won’t compete on this basis, there is no inherent reason that they should continue to exist, at least in the way they do now.

And therein lies a solution for the midsize firms, if there is one. They need to analyze how they can better serve their clients than the smaller and larger firms. And then focus relentlessly on that, investing in the future and making decisions with that as their guiding star.

Maybe that’s their local connections and involvement in areas where that’s important that larger firms can’t always replicate. Maybe it’s an appeal to talent based on having the best of all worlds: smaller firm collegiality and larger firm capabilities. Maybe it means greater specialization and purpose.

The Thomson Reuters findings make one thing clear: continuing to do what they have always done isn’t going to work. Continuing to believe the Titanic won’t sink as the water floods in is a recipe for the same disaster.

Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger, and writer. He publishes TechLaw Crossroads, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law.

The post Trouble For Midsize Law Firms: Is The Titanic Sinking? appeared first on Above the Law.

FIFA World Cup 26: Safe From Drones, Watched By Everyone?

Michael J. Epstein — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:04:00 +0000

Like a lot of people in this region, I’ve spent the past few weeks thinking about the World Cup.

Part of that is simple excitement. We do not get many opportunities to host an event of this scale. In a matter of days, millions of people from around the world will be watching matches played right here in our backyard. For soccer fans, it is the equivalent of having the Olympics come to town.

There is also something refreshing about seeing efforts to make the tournament accessible to ordinary people.

On Tuesday, New Jersey announced that hundreds of free World Cup tickets would be distributed at no cost to youth soccer players, military families, healthcare workers, pediatric patients, first responders, and others who serve their communities. Similar initiatives have appeared elsewhere in the region. It is hard not to like that idea.

Big sporting events often feel as though they are designed for corporations, sponsors, and people willing to pay eye-watering prices on the secondary market. Giving local families a chance to attend helps remind us who these events are supposed to be for.

But while reading about those ticket programs, I found myself thinking about something else.

Nothing is free.

The tickets may be.

The event itself certainly is not.

Behind every match, every fan festival, every watch party, and every packed stadium sits an enormous security operation that most of us will never see.

Road closures.

Command centers.

Airspace restrictions.

Law enforcement coordination.

Cybersecurity teams.

And increasingly, systems designed to detect, track, and respond to drones.

That last one caught my attention.

A decade ago, the idea that a major sporting event would need extensive drone-defense planning would have sounded far-fetched. Today, it is viewed as common sense. The technology has become inexpensive, widely available, and capable of causing serious problems in the wrong hands.

No reasonable person wants an unauthorized drone flying over a crowded stadium.

If security officials tell me they need technology to prevent that from happening, I believe them.

That is not where my concern begins.

My concern begins when temporary solutions have a habit of becoming permanent fixtures.

We have seen this before.

A new threat emerges. Government agencies and private partners develop tools to address it. The public accepts those tools because the threat is real. Most people conclude, understandably, that safety outweighs inconvenience.

Then time passes.

The emergency fades.

The technology remains.

The World Cup presents an interesting example because it is forcing us to confront that question in real time.

Officials have compared the tournament’s scale to hosting dozens of Super Bowls in a single month. The security challenges are enormous. It would be irresponsible not to prepare.

At the same time, preparation now involves capabilities that previous generations could scarcely imagine.

Sensors can detect activity from significant distances away. Cameras are smarter than they used to be. Data moves faster. Information can be shared among agencies almost instantly.

Again, none of this is inherently bad.

In fact, much of it is beneficial.

The issue is not whether these tools should exist.

The issue is whether the public understands how they are being used and what happens after the tournament is over.

Who keeps the data?

For how long?

Who has access to it?

What oversight exists?

What safeguards prevent mission creep?

Lawyers tend to ask these questions because we spend our professional lives dealing with unintended consequences. We know that powers granted for one purpose often find their way into others. Sometimes that expansion is justified. Sometimes it is not.

Either way, transparency matters.

I support doing whatever is reasonably necessary to keep fans safe. Most people do. Nobody wants to read headlines about a preventable tragedy when the tools existed to stop it.

But safety and accountability are not opposing values.

They are supposed to work together.

The World Cup will bring unforgettable moments to our region. Some lucky kids will attend matches they never thought they would see in person. Families will create memories that last a lifetime. Communities will come together around a global event that transcends language, politics, and borders.

That is the visible side of the tournament.

The less visible side is the infrastructure being built to protect it.

Both deserve our attention.

Because when the final whistle blows and the crowds go home, the free tickets will be gone.

The memories will remain.

The question is whether some of the surveillance systems remain too. And that is a conversation worth having before they become part of everyday life.

Michael J. Epstein, a Harvard Law School graduate, is a trial lawyer and managing partner of The Epstein Law Firm, P.A., a law firm based in New Jersey.

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Biglaw’s ‘Rising Tide’ Isn’t Lifting Every Partner’s Boat Anymore

Staci Zaretsky — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:28:00 +0000

Ed. note: Welcome to our daily feature, Quote of the Day.

The last decade has been so strong in terms of firm performance that the rising tide was lifting all boats, and some of those boats were rising too much. [Having a portion of compensation fixed] helps to push more money at the top to the people who are really driving the success of the firm.

—  Lisa Smith, a law firm consultant at Fairfax Associates, in comments given to Bloomberg Law, concerning why some Biglaw firms have embraced nonequity partnership structures. By creating a tier for senior associates and counsel to receive partner titles without diluting equity, firms can reserve a larger share of profits for their highest-performing equity partners.

Staci Zaretsky is the managing editor of Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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‘Suffering Causes People To Make Mistakes,’ Says Prosecutor Who Used Cop Databases To Spy On Romantic Rival

Kathryn Rubino — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:02:00 +0000

A Connecticut prosecutor who allegedly went full scorned-spouse — yelling outside a woman’s apartment complex, sending 41 text messages in a single hour, and oh yeah, using her privileged access to restricted law enforcement databases to dig up dirt on her husband’s alleged romantic interest — has been granted an accelerated rehabilitation program on the computer crimes charges. Complete it in nine months, and the whole thing goes away in March 2027.

Connecticut Superior Court Judge Walter A. Menjivar granted the diversionary program to Christa Baker, also known as Christa O’Connell, on two computer crime charges, giving her nine months to successfully complete the program before the case against her is dismissed. The stalking charges were also dropped at the hearing.

The computer crimes here aren’t abstract. State police allege Baker accessed databases known as eProsecutor and MAJEB (Municipal Access-Judicial Electronic Bridge) on multiple occasions to pull information on the victim. Baker had two separate systems she was not supposed to be using for personal background checks on a romantic rival, and she used both. Repeatedly.

Baker, a senior assistant state’s attorney in New London and a prosecutor since 2006, has been on administrative leave with pay since August 13. So, yeah, she’s been collecting a government paycheck while this whole saga played out.

At the hearing, Baker addressed the court with the kind of statement that sounds profound if you don’t think about it too hard. “Suffering causes people to make mistakes,” she said. And, “This has destroyed my family, and if I could take it all back, I would.”

Her attorney, John Nazzaro, leaned even harder into the sympathetic framing. “She wanted to very much adhere to the rules of ethics and did not realize that she was running afoul of any computer access law, but she was under a lot of strain in trying to preserve her family,” Nazzaro said.

Sure, she just wanted to preserve her family. By running unauthorized database queries on the woman her husband was sleeping with, through law enforcement systems she was entrusted with as an officer of the state. The “I didn’t realize it was illegal” defense is interesting coming from someone who has spent two decades as a prosecutor.

The underlying facts, per the arrest warrant, are vivid. Baker allegedly showed up outside the victim’s apartment complex in Norwich in December 2024 and yelled, “I know you’re here with your whore, tell her to come outside.” The victim told police she didn’t go outside because she was on parole and knew Baker was a prosecutor.

Subsequent text messages from Baker included, “I gave you a warning. You want to play we can play.” At one point, Baker sent 41 messages within an hour. The victim also allegedly responded with a series of calls, texts, and unwanted contact to Baker’s friends and family.

According to reports, police interviewed Baker and she admitted the statements could have been perceived as a threat.

“The ‘play if you wanna play,’ I could see, yes. But the ‘you gotta remember the choices will come back around on you’ is not a threat,” Baker told state police, according to the warrant. “That is karma.”

The accelerated rehabilitation program is available to first-time offenders in Connecticut for lower-level charges, and getting it isn’t entirely unusual. The system worked out pretty well for Christa Baker… which, given that she spent nearly 20 years as part of that system, perhaps shouldn’t surprise anyone.

If you have tips about attorney misconduct or Biglaw news, text us at 646-820-8477.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1

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Even If Law Professors Are Self-Censoring, Let’s Not Rush To Any Conclusions About ‘Liberal Bias’

Chris Williams — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:34:47 +0000

Even with the Court majority checking box after box on the Project 2025 to-do list, conservatives are interested in maintaining the position that their views are censored or that they are being ostracized just for sharing them. This is a silly position, of course. Actual censorship would look like the government disappearing plaques that recognize the existence of slavery or stripping information about Black and female veterans from government websites. It would look like the White House having a snitch list for left-leaning media sources. Actual ostracizing would look like excluding whatever legacy media refuses to be lapdogs from the White House or, I don’t know, literally bragging about how many people you’re deporting despite some of them having been born here.

Conservative oppression, to the degree that it exists, is measured by their feelings. I have no doubt in my mind that Amy Wax feels like a free speech warrior for speaking disparagingly about her students and inviting white supremacists to speak in her classroom, but the First Amendment isn’t a blank check to foster a hostile learning environment for your students. The things we say and do have social consequences, and it seems that so much “conservative censorship” boils down to “I can’t believe you’d let opinions get in the way of our friendship” when the opinion is “Racially profiling apparent Mexicans is cool and great, actually.”

A recent survey of ~2,000 law professors appears to show that conservative law professors are afraid to speak their minds. Reuters has coverage:

More ‌than half of the surveyed faculty members — 56% — reported at least occasionally feeling unable to express their opinions for fear of how students, colleagues or administrators would react, according to a report released Tuesday by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonprofit free speech advocacy group.

What follows are some percentages that stuck out to me:

Conservative faculty members reported the most pressure to self-censor, at 72%. That compared with 60% among moderates and 50% among liberal faculty, reinforcing the common perception that law schools are skewed toward liberal ‌students ⁠and professors…81% said a liberal individual would be a positive fit at their law school, while only 44% said a conservative person would ⁠be a good fit…Conservative law ⁠faculty were more than three times as likely as liberal law faculty to report that they at least occasionally hide their political beliefs from other ⁠faculty in a bid to keep their jobs.

Is it fair to read that the data reinforces the perception that law schools are skewed toward liberals? I think what’s happening is that institutions of learning are skewed toward civility and conservative in-group behavior has become aggressively anti-civil since the Trump era. Take the 81% of professors believing a liberal would be a positive fit compared to 44% believing a conservative would point. While I don’t know the political leanings of the chompy Biglaw associate, I do know that a good chunk of the stories I’ve seen across my tenure at ATL involving students of conservative political leanings don’t paint the best pictures of sociability. Remember the fried chicken trap house FedSoc event a couple years ago at Yale? Conservative students. The White supremacist constitutional law paper that said voting rights should be culled and people may have to die to secure the White America the founders intended? Conservative student and judge. I use conservative there broadly — all sorts of alt-right or outright fascists crowd under the conservative umbrella. “Liberal” students just aren’t doing those sorts of things. You might get an occasional “The Rule of Law is good” or “Journalists and literal infants should not be routinely shot in the head as a government’s anti-terrorism initiative,” but none of that compares to campus Republican leaders getting caught in racist group chats. No shit conservatives might not fit in as well as the average liberal — one of their calling cards is bragging about how rude they get to be to people. Remember Joe Rogan rejoicing that people can say r***** again because Trump was back in office? What would the liberal equivalent even be? Now that Mamdani is mayor, I can openly refer to strangers as neighbor? One of these is obviously more pleasant to be around.

This isn’t a free speech thing, campus or otherwise. Conservatives in general aren’t that pleasant to be around for extended periods of time. That’s part of why they’re having such a shitty time on dating apps and why they keep complaining that so-and-so won’t have dinner with them for Thanksgiving. The guy who couldn’t care less if the EPA was disbanded and nothing prevented companies from forcing us to drink sludge out of our tap water doesn’t excel at interactions requiring empathy and keeping up common niceties. Surprise, surprise. That doesn’t change if you’re a student or a professor. Liberals, annoying as they may be, are at least socially savvy enough to refer to you as you’d like to be referred to without getting turned into a meme for cursing out Elliot Page.

Unless liberals have a monopoly on civility, the self-censorship data as presented shouldn’t be enough to “reinforce” the idea that law schools are skewed against conservatives. Especially when there are things that point to the contrary like law professors and deans getting punished because they didn’t lick the boot hard enough or deans who may have lost their job because they are openly gay.

Earlier: Amy Wax Plots Racial Discrimination Suit Unless Penn Forgives Her For Denigrating Students, Bringing White Supremacists To Class

White Law Student Has Multi-Million Discrimination Suit Against Howard University Thrown Out

Tenured Law Professor Allegedly Removed From Class Over Political Comments

Fired Arkansas Law Dean Gets Wave Of Support From Law Professors

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boat builder who is learning to swim and is interested in rhetoric, Spinozists and humor. Getting back in to cycling wouldn’t hurt either. You can reach him by email at christopherrashadwilliams@gmail.com and by Tweet/Bluesky at @WritesForRent.

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GRRRRREAT News As Firm Announces Above-Market Salaries AND Special Bonuses

Joe Patrice — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:06:00 +0000

Today seems to be the day to announce over-the-top raises. One firm that prides itself on staying ahead of the market dropped a new updated pay scale that maintains it leading position, and threw in special bonuses up to $75K for good measure.

Kellogg Hansen saw the market compensation scramble and raised it. Kellogg already paid on a $260K scale. That’s jumping up to $275K effective July 1. And the good news carries all the way through the associate class.

Post-3L associates start at $240,000 — already five grand over the first-year number the rest of the market just finished raising. By the seventh year, and for of counsel, the base hits $505,000, fully $50,000 north of the market ceiling the new market standard set. Where the rest of Biglaw raised its seniors by 20 thousand, Kellogg topped everyone off with another 30.

And the base is only, as the box would say, one part of a complete breakfast:

In recognition of these efforts and the firm’s strong performance, the Executive Committee has approved special bonuses ranging from $20,000 to $75,000. To be eligible for the bonuses, associates and Of Counsel must have been on pace, through May 31, to meet or exceed 2,000 hours for the year, and be at the firm on July 7, when the bonuses are paid.

Those are a lot of Special Ks to hand out.

Congrats.

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of this stuff. So when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Matches”). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we’ll also use for salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.
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Boutique Firm Raises First-Year Pay To $255,000

Joe Patrice — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:29:00 +0000

As most of Biglaw still can’t figure out how to match the new Milbank scale, Desmarais LLP is out here blowing it away for its most junior team members.

Which isn’t really a surprise… this is a firm that has treated beating the market as a personality trait since roughly 2012 when it made the salary mantra “NY to $180” a reality years ahead of the rest of the industry. Now, the elite IP litigation boutique has informed associates and summer associates that its base salaries are going up effective July 1.

And it’s extra good news for attorneys in their first three years.

The class of 2022 catches up with the market, but while the rest of the industry leans slightly away from juniors, Desmarais is sweetening the pot for young lawyers it can train up to elite IP litigators.

But just because compensation catches up with Biglaw at more senior levels, the whole story gets missed by the match-or-don’t-match tables. A fifth-year at a Milbank-scale firm earns that $385,000 by chasing a soul-crushing billable hour target, while the Desmarais associate earning the same doesn’t live under the tyranny of the billable hour. Desmarais doesn’t bill by the hour — the firm charges clients by litigation stage and result — and consequently imposes no hourly targets. That’s not to say the firm isn’t working hard, but there’s a psychological benefit to not having to stare at your numbers in November, trying to figure out what you can plausibly do to still make a bonus.

That sort of math is fine for tax lawyers, but don’t make the litigators suffer!

Congratulations to everyone at Desmarais.

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of this stuff. So when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Matches”). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we’ll also use for salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish.

(Check out memo on the next page…)

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.
The post Boutique Firm Raises First-Year Pay To $255,000 appeared first on Above the Law.

Firm Matches Milbank’s New Salary Scale, Sealed With A Kiss…el

Joe Patrice — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:01:00 +0000

Seward & Kissel is not a firm to be outdone. This is a firm that built a 508-foot miniature golf hole across its Manhattan office and annually runs the wildest ugly sweater competition around. So it comes as no surprise that the firm is bringing that energy to its associate compensation, joining the new Milbank pay scale effective July 1.

In a memo to associates sent after 9 p.m. last night, management committee chair Daniel Bresler laid out the new pay scale as “an exciting update regarding associate compensation.”

This news arrives while many… many other top firms still seem to be twiddling their thumbs.

To stay competitive in the battle for talent — a battle that’s as heated as ever right now — the market will all fall in line with this scale. So the best differentiating signal a firm can send it is the speed of adoption. By responding swiftly, Seward let its people (and potential hires) know that it cares as much about keeping them paid in line with the market as it does about having fun.

(You can check out the full text of the memo on the next page…)

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of this stuff. So when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Matches”). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we’ll also use for salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.
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Salary Match Mania Continues At Elite Litigation Boutique

Staci Zaretsky — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:16:00 +0000

The associate salary dominoes keep falling. While some firms are still crunching numbers and weighing their options, boutique firms continue to move with surprising speed, sending a clear message to associates: if the market is paying more, they don’t intend to be left behind. For associates keeping score at home, the list of firms matching Milbank’s new salary scale is growing by the day.

Yesterday afternoon, D.C.-based litigation boutique Wilkinson Stekloff announced that it will match the new Milbank scale. Known for offering bonuses that regularly blow the market out of the water, it’s hardly surprising to see the firm make a quick move on associate compensation. In an email announcing the raises, the firm’s partners thanked associates for their hard work and dedication to both the firm and its clients.

Here’s a look at the firm’s updated salary scale:

Congratulations to everyone at Wilkinson Stekloff!

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of compensation updates, so when your firm announces or matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus/Matches”). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we also use for salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish. Thanks for your help!

Staci Zaretsky is the managing editor of Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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Another Boutique Firm Beats Biglaw To The Punch On Associate Pay

Staci Zaretsky — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:28:00 +0000

When it comes to associate compensation, boutique firms are leaving Biglaw in the dust. While many of the industry’s largest firms have yet to announce whether they’ll match Milbank’s new salary scale, elite boutiques have been quick to fall in line. The latest firm to join the growing list of matches is one that has built a reputation for rewarding top talent.

Trial boutique Elsberg Baker & Maruri was founded just over two years ago after David Elsberg, a founding member of Selendy Gay Elsberg, departed the elite boutique to launch his own firm alongside his former Quinn Emanuel colleagues, Rollo Baker and Silpa Maruri. Since opening its doors, EBM has already made headlines for its generous associate bonuses. Now, the firm is matching the latest Milbank salary scale. Here’s the firm’s updated salary structure:

Class of 2026/2025: $235,000

Class of 2024: $245,000

Class of 2023: $270,000

Class of 2022: $320,000

Class of 2021: $385,000

Class of 2020: $410,000

Class of 2019: $440,000

Summer associates at the firm will also receive pro-rated raises. That’s likely to earn plenty of goodwill from the law students hoping to jumpstart their careers there.

“We hire associates of the highest caliber whose superb work has been central to delivering exceptional outcomes for our clients and driving our firm’s strong performance,” founding partner David Elsberg said. “We’re grateful for their contributions and committed to recognizing and rewarding them.”

Congratulations to everyone at Elsberg Baker & Maruri!

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of compensation updates, so when your firm announces or matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus/Matches”). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we also use for salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish. Thanks for your help!

Staci Zaretsky is the managing editor of Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or connect with her on LinkedIn.

The post Another Boutique Firm Beats Biglaw To The Punch On Associate Pay appeared first on Above the Law.

The 2026 ATL Top 50 Law School Rankings Are Here!

Vera Djordjevich — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:45:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce the release of the 14th annual Above the Law Top 50 Law School Rankings.

Why do people go to law school? To become lawyers, mostly. And most people also want to make a decent living at it — or at least not be saddled with debt for the rest of their working lives.

That’s why Above the Law’s law school rankings focus on the outcomes for graduates (e.g., bar passage, job placement) rather than the inputs from students (e.g., LSAT score, undergraduate GPA).

Our formula includes six components. Employment represents the bulk of a school’s score as the key element in two separately weighted criteria: legal employment (full-time, long-term jobs that require bar passage) and “quality jobs” (which include positions in large, typically high-paying law firms and federal judicial clerkships). We have used the latest ABA employment data for the Class of 2025.

We also factor in first-time bar passage rate and the cost of obtaining a law degree. The final two components, collectively representing 10 percent of a school’s score, reflect the number of alumni currently serving as federal judges and the number who have clerked for the U.S. Supreme Court in the last five years. (Read more about our methodology here.)

Here are the Top 10 law schools for 2026:

University of Chicago (+2)

Duke (-1)

University of Virginia (+1)

Penn (+1)

Yale (+3)

Vanderbilt (+4)

Columbia (+2)

Cornell (-6)

Northwestern (-3)

University of Michigan (-3)

The University of Chicago, a perennial favorite among the top 5, is back on top for the first time since 2021. Meanwhile, Duke has slipped to second place, while UVA and Penn each moved up a notch. Yale rounds out the top five.

You’ll notice that a few other elite schools — e.g., Harvard, Stanford, NYU — don’t appear in the top 10. It’s obviously not because they aren’t great law schools. They just didn’t score as well in our ranking criteria, which focus on certain concrete data, such as job placement and cost of attendance, and leave out other less tangible qualities like selectivity and prestige.

That said, both Stanford and NYU did move up the rankings this year, thanks primarily to higher job placement scores. Stanford also reported an impressive first-time bar passage rate of nearly 100%. Conversely, slightly lower quality job scores resulted in ranking drops for Cornell and Michigan, though both remain in the top 10.

In fact, most of the ranking shifts are attributable to changes in schools’ employment and, to a lesser extent, bar passage scores. One of the benefits of our formula is that it highlights schools that may not be top of mind for everyone but have still succeeded in placing the bulk of their students in well-paying legal positions for a relatively lower cost. For example, the University of Arizona made it into the Top 50 this year, thanks to impressive bar passage and job placement rates.

We recognize that not everyone shares our perspective on what makes a top law school. For those with different priorities, visit the ATL Law School DIY, an interactive tool where you can adjust the relative weights of 11 factors yourself to customize rankings based on your personal needs and goals.

Learning After Law School

Once you’ve got your law degree, how do you keep your professional skills up to date? Share your perspective in this brief survey, and you may be eligible to win a $250 gift card.

The post The 2026 ATL Top 50 Law School Rankings Are Here! appeared first on Above the Law.

Elite Litigation Powerhouse Susman Godfrey Goes Above Market On Associate Pay

Staci Zaretsky — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:02:00 +0000

For Susman Godfrey, 2026 has been anything but business as usual. The elite litigation firm spent much of the last year battling the Trump administration in court over an executive order targeting the firm, further cementing its reputation as one of the legal profession’s most outspoken defenders of the rule of law. Now, apparently not content with making headlines in the courtroom, Susman is making waves on the compensation front as well. Long known for handing out eye-popping bonuses, the firm has become one of the first to push associate salaries beyond the new market scale set by Milbank just last week.

As reflected on the careers section of the firm’s website, Susman is raising associate salaries above the new Milbank scale. Take a look at the firm’s updated salary grid below.

Grad/Comp Year Salary
2025 240,000
2024 250,000
2023 275,000
2022 325,000
2021 395,000
2020 420,000
2019 450,000

Susman is paying above market across the board, with associates earning between $5,000 and $10,000 more than their peers at firms following the Milbank scale. At a time when most Biglaw firms are still deciding whether to match the new market rate, Susman has already moved past it. Couple these salaries with the firm’s enormous year-end bonuses, and you’ve got a compensation package that helps explain why Susman never seems to have trouble attracting top talent.

Congratulations to everyone at Susman!

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of compensation updates, so when your firm announces or matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus/Matches”). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we also use for salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish. Thanks for your help!

Staci Zaretsky is the managing editor of Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or connect with her on LinkedIn.

The post Elite Litigation Powerhouse Susman Godfrey Goes Above Market On Associate Pay appeared first on Above the Law.

Morning Docket: 06.10.26

Above the Law — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:52:00 +0000

* En banc rehearing of case about Kat Von D's Miles Davis tattoo will leave one side kind of blue. [Courthouse News Service]

* Federal judge cancels trials and punishes both sides for fake AI cases. [New York Times]

* As we wait on the birthright citizenship case, Trump's administration seems to be preemptively violating the Fourteenth Amendment. [Balls and Strikes]

* "Prosecutor admits to accessing databases to spy on romantic rival." [ABA Journal]

* Surprising no one, the DOJ took the shadow docket ruling installing Alabama's racist election maps and felt emboldened to declare the EEOC's employment discrimination enforcement efforts illegal. [Reuters]

* Trump getting a new Fifth Circuit nominee, so Ken Paxton has a future after November. [Bloomberg Law News]

* Kalshi asking for employer info to avoid some instances of market manipulation. Notably not "is your dad personally ordering the strike you just bet on." [Law360]

* Judge tells government to stop trying to get out of tariff refunds. [New York Law Journal]

The post Morning Docket: 06.10.26 appeared first on Above the Law.

Small Firm, Big Compensation — See Also

Chris Williams — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 23:30:00 +0000

AZA Bumps Up Their Pay Scale: Ahmad, Zavitsanos & Mensing P.C. pay their associates for their excellence!

You Get What You Pay For: Trump’s lawyers keep missing easy deadlines.

Fired Law School Dean Files Sexual Discrimination Suit: Despite clear successes, he was fired several months after marrying his husband.

Just A Nomination For Now: Will Todd Blanche actually get confirmed?

Dead Lawyer Theory: Will LLMs and laziness push out actual human lawyering?

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Biglaw Partner Headed For The Federal Judiciary

Kathryn Rubino — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 23:02:00 +0000

Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day!

Senator John Fetterman returned the “blue slip” for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania nomination of Antonio M. Pozos, allowing the nom to move forward. Which Biglaw firm counts Pozos among its partners?

Hint: The Michigan Law grad was a federal prosecutor at the Department of Justice before he moved to Biglaw.

See the answer on the next page.

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Meeting Clients Where They Are In An AI World

Stephen Embry — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:16:00 +0000

What do you do when your client knows more about the law and strategy than you do? Or at least thinks they do. That’s the dilemma a lot of lawyers and legal professionals face these days. Clients come into the office armed with all sorts of advice and information they have obtained from publicly facing AI systems, information which is often just wrong.

Let’s Face It, Clients Are Using AI

I was talking to a couple of criminal lawyers recently about this very subject. They say it happens all the time. And it’s not just that the clients have information that may or may not be correct or even helpful. It’s the confidence that the clients seem to have in that information. Which makes the lawyer’s job that much harder when the information or recommended strategy is wrong. It takes time away from the case handling to constantly try to convince the client that the bot is off base. A bot that, of course, says things with such confidence.

I’m sure it’s the same on the civil side. The problem is not just one of convincing the client that what they got from the bot is bad, it’s the seeds of mistrust that are being sown. The law and strategy are often gray areas. Many times, there is no clearly right answer, no foolproof strategy or guaranteed outcome. The best answers often stem from the lawyers’ combined experience, judgment and know how, much of which can’t be duplicated by a bot.

If I Had A Better Lawyer

But when the client begins to wonder that the lawyer’s recommendations are wrong based on what a bot tells them, the client starts to think: I would be getting a better result if I had a better lawyer. A lawyer who would do what ChatGPT recommends.

Add to this the fact that all too often AI tools will tell a person what it thinks the person wants to hear. And you have real and nagging problem. It’s a problem that will lead to a lot of time and energy being spent trying to convince the client that they should be listeing to you, not ChatGPT.

And it’s a problem not just at the beginning of the case when the client walks in the door. It runs throughout the case. If the client goes to ChatGPT before they see their lawyer, you can bet that they are going to go back to ChatGPT every time the lawyer tells them something they don’t want to hear or don’t believe. Which will lead to more and more arguments, distrust, and disruption for the human lawyer.

Not to mention the fact that the client may be revealing attorney-client privileged information in its discussions with the bot. As I have previously discussed, placing confidential material in a public AI platform risks waiving the privilege since it may no longer be considered confidential. It’s hard enough for lawyers to use AI and avoid this waiver. It may be well-nigh impossible for a client trying to get the answer they want to hear to not tell the bot more than they should.

Using AI To Turn The Tables

One of the criminal lawyers I was talking to did have a bit of a solution, however. His strategy when a client tells him something that came from a bot that’s wrong is to ask the client about the input they provided. He then tries to show them that with a proper input, asking the right question, a more accurate result can be obtained that’s often, he says, in line with his advice. He also shows the client how by working with the prompt to suggest a desired result affects the outcome.

Of course, successfully doing what this lawyer suggests takes time, work and effort. It also requires a good understanding of how AI works and how to construct prompts. But it’s better than having an ongoing battle with the client over AI outputs. And, frankly, it also takes some courage since there’s a risk that the bot may be right and the lawyer wrong. That’s a reality that is uncomfortable.

But if so, so much the better. By constructing good prompts, AI sometimes comes up with good stuff and we owe it to our clients to be open to different views. Frankly, the lawyer should be checking their views and ideas against AI tools on the front end to be prepared for the client armed with AI-generated information.

I like the idea. It saves time. It reduces disruption. It breeds trust. I found over the years, for example, that if you can anticipate what a client thinks and will say and then show them why they are misguided, it enhances their confidence in you. And using AI in an educational way moves the relationship more to one of a team with a lawyer, client, and AI tools all working together to get better results with less friction.

And by the way, it squares with our ethical duty under the competency Rule 1.1 to know and understand the benefits and risks of technology. That applies not only to the technology we use as lawyers but the technology we can reasonably expect our clients will be using. And today, that’s AI.

Our clients, like virtually everyone else, are going to be consulting AI about their legal problems and what we are telling them. So we better be using AI as well. Not using tools our clients are using can lead to a very tense and unsatisfying attorney client relationship. Practicing law is hard enough, let’s not make it harder.

So let’s get real and meet our clients where they are. When the client walks into your office, be ready with your bot.

Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger, and writer. He publishes TechLaw Crossroads, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law.

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The Emersonian Lawyer: The Compass And The Resume

Jeff Cox — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:33:00 +0000

Auth. note: This is the first essay in The Emersonian Lawyer, a series about what Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophy has to say about the specific pressures, compromises, and possibilities of a legal career. The series draws on Emerson’s core essays, Self-Reliance, Compensation, Circles, The Over-Soul, The Poet, and Nature, and applies them to the actual mechanics of practicing law. It is not a self-help series. It is a philosophical one, written in a practitioner’s register.

There is a question most lawyers never ask, not because it is unanswerable, but because the credential machine never stops long enough to let them.

Are you following your compass, or your résumé?

These are not the same direction. They may not even point toward the same hemisphere. The résumé follows what is legible: the clerkship that looks right, the firm with the correct name, the practice group that is growing. The compass follows something harder to name: the sense, when you are doing a particular kind of work with a particular kind of problem, that you are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing. Not performing. Not executing. Being.

Most lawyers can remember the last time they felt that. The number of years between that memory and today is worth noting.

The Scene

It is late on a Tuesday. A partner at a large firm is reviewing a junior associate’s memo. The work is excellent: thorough, technically sound, impeccably structured. The partner edits it the way she always edits it: tightening the analysis, softening the conclusion, adjusting the register so the client hears what it needs to hear rather than what the law actually says. She is very good at this. She has been very good at this for eleven years.

She sends the memo back with tracked changes. She closes her laptop. She sits for a moment in a quiet office.

The moment passes. She opens her laptop. There are fourteen more emails.

This scene is not a tragedy. It is not even unusual. By every external measure, this lawyer is successful. She is a partner at a major firm, which means she survived a selection process with brutal attrition. She makes more than her parents earned in their lifetimes. She is, on the credential machine’s ledger, a clear success.

What the ledger does not record is the thing she felt, and didn’t quite feel, in that moment of quiet.

The Machine

The legal profession has built one of the most elaborate credentialing architectures in any professional field. Law school rankings, which sort applicants by LSAT scores and undergraduate GPA into numerical hierarchies. Law review membership, granted by a competition administered by the students who won the prior year’s competition. Federal clerkships, which confer prestige in inverse proportion to the court’s distance from Washington. Lateral market signals, which communicate your value in basis points of book of business. The partnership track, which sorts again, and then again, until the survivors emerge at the other end with the title and the equity stake, and sometimes discover, at that moment, that the thing they had been pursuing is not quite what they imagined.

Each of these credentials is real. Each one communicates something true about the person who holds it. The LSAT measures something. Law review membership demonstrates something. A federal clerkship is genuinely formative. None of this is fiction.

But what the credential machine communicates, taken as a system, is not who you are. It is how legible you are to institutions that need to sort people quickly. Those are different things, and confusing them has consequences that accumulate slowly and arrive suddenly.

The machine is not malicious. It is not a conspiracy. It is a sorting mechanism that does exactly what sorting mechanisms do: it optimizes for the characteristics it can measure, and it renders invisible the characteristics it cannot. The credential machine can measure your LSAT score. It cannot measure whether contract litigation is the problem you were built to solve. It can measure your law school GPA. It cannot measure whether the clients you serve are the ones whose problems feel, to you, like problems worth the years of your life you are spending on them.

The sorting function is useful. It is just not a compass.

What Emerson Saw

Ralph Waldo Emerson was not writing about lawyers. He was writing about poets. But what he observed in 1844, in an essay called The Poet, applies to every professional who has chosen a credential over a calling, or who has discovered, partway through a career, that they may have done so without quite realizing it.

Emerson distinguished between two kinds of people: those who are shaped by their circumstances (who become what the institution needs them to become) and those who are compelled by a vocation they did not entirely choose. The first group, he argued, becomes legible. The second group becomes present. These are not the same achievement.

His argument in Self-Reliance goes further. The person who leads with credentials, Emerson suggests, is confessing something: that they trust the institution’s judgment about their value more than their own. That they have outsourced the question of who they are to the bodies authorized to certify it. This is not vanity or weakness. It is the rational response to a system that rewards legibility and punishes ambiguity. But it is also, Emerson insists, a form of self-abandonment so gradual that most people never notice when it happened.

The résumé answers a question: What have you done that institutions will recognize?

The compass answers a different question: What are you here to do?

These two questions can, in fortunate cases, produce the same answer. But the credential machine is not designed to produce that fortune. It is designed to produce lawyers. Legible, credentialed, institutionally sorted lawyers, not this particular lawyer, with this particular nature and this particular set of problems they were built to solve. The machine does not know who you are. It knows what you scored.

But there is something the machine is missing that is prior to the score, and Emerson named it in his first book, published in 1836, eight years before The Poet, before Self-Reliance had found its famous formulations.

Nature is Emerson’s foundational claim: there is a reality prior to institutional construction. The credential machine did not create it. The rankings did not measure it. The clerkship did not confer it. What it is: the actual constitution of what a person is, their specific quality of attention, the problems that genuinely absorb them, the work that activates the deepest current of what they are. Emerson called this a person’s nature, and he meant the word literally. Not temperament. Not personality. The actual ground of what you are and what you are for, which exists beneath everything the machine has layered on top of it.

In Nature, Emerson describes a moment he called the “transparent eyeball”: the experience of genuine perception when the ego steps aside and what remains is direct contact with reality as it actually is. The machine forces the lawyer to serve the ego and the institution. The compass does the opposite: it strips the ego away so the lawyer can serve the law itself. This is closer to seeing the forest for the trees than to any flow state, closer to apprehending the whole than to any feeling of comfortable fit. The lawyer who has been there knows. Not because it was comfortable. Because it was real.

The compass, in other words, is not a preference. It is a response to something that was always there. The machine did not create it. It can only obscure it.

A compass is a crude instrument. It tells you nothing about the destination. But it was enough to let the ancient mariners leave familiar coastlines and discover the world.

The Man Who Didn’t Use the Machine

Robert Houghton Jackson was born in 1892 in Spring Creek, Pennsylvania. He attended Albany Law School for one year, then left. He apprenticed under a country lawyer named Frank Mott in Jamestown, New York, reading cases in Mott’s office, accompanying him to court, learning the practice of law by practicing it. He was admitted to the bar in 1913 without a law degree. By the credential machine’s logic, he was not quite legible.

He went on to become Solicitor General of the United States, then Attorney General, then Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. In 1945, Harry Truman appointed him Chief American Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal, where Jackson had to construct the legal architecture for trying crimes that had no precedent in international law: inventing categories, drafting charges, making arguments before a court that had never existed for conduct that had never been prosecuted.

Jackson did not accomplish this because he had the right credentials. He accomplished it because he had followed, his entire career, a compass that pointed consistently at a single question: what is the relationship between law and political power, and what does it mean for a civilization when that relationship breaks down? That question led him from a country law office in upstate New York through the New Deal to the Supreme Court to a courtroom in Bavaria where it mattered more than any credential could have prepared him for.

He was also, by his own account and by the account of everyone who knew him, an Emersonian. He had read Emerson deeply and returned to him throughout his life. He modeled his professional conduct (his insistence on independent judgment, his resistance to capture by any single client or institution, his commitment to articulating the law rather than merely winning cases) on principles he found in Emerson’s essays.

Jackson appears here not as a model to emulate. Very few lawyers will construct international tribunals. He appears here as something more useful: proof that the compass route exists. That following your actual nature rather than the credential sequence is not naive. That the lawyers history occasionally requires are not the ones most legible to the machine.

He is also a provocation. Jackson worked with what was in front of him: the cases available in Jamestown, the clients who walked through Mott’s door, the government positions that opened during the New Deal. He did not wait for the right credential to arrive before beginning. He oriented himself by compass and moved.

One more thing needs to be said about Jackson, honestly. He is not offered here as a spotless figure. His record on race (including his role in legal decisions that now stand as among the profession’s most consequential failures) belongs to the full account of who he was and what he did. The direction he followed is what matters for this argument. And that direction is not his alone.

If the compass points toward a reality prior to institutional construction (toward a nature that existed before any ranking system sorted for it), then it is available to everyone the machine has excluded as surely as it was available to Jackson. The machine has historically denied the compass route to lawyers who did not look like him: through bar exam barriers, through clerkship networks that ran on personal connection, through the entire architecture of the credentialing system that this series examines. The Emersonian argument is a critique of that denial, not a celebration of the one person who navigated around it in one historical moment. The direction is universal. The machine is what distributes access to it unequally. That is part of the indictment.

What This Series Is

The Emersonian Lawyer is a series of essays about what Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophy has to say to the practicing lawyer, the law student, and the legal professional who has begun to suspect that the credential machine and the compass are pointing in different directions.

It is not a wellness series. It will not offer you balance, or resilience strategies, or advice about billing fewer hours. The legal profession already has those books, and they are not wrong so much as insufficient. They treat the symptoms without touching the diagnosis.

The diagnosis, stated plainly, is this: the legal profession has built a system that produces competent lawyers who are estranged from their vocation, and it has done so systematically, at scale, for decades. The ABA’s own data (which shows sustained rates of anxiety, depression, and professional dissatisfaction that are among the highest of any credentialed profession) is not an anomaly. It is the system’s output.

Emerson has something to say about this. Not because he was writing about lawyers, but because he was writing about exactly this: what happens to a person who has built a career around institutional legibility rather than genuine vocation, and what it looks like to navigate back toward the compass.

This series has been shaped by an ongoing conversation with Professor Kevin Lee, a legal philosopher whose work in civic personalism offers both a challenge and a complement to the Emersonian framework. His challenge, which this series will engage directly: does the compass route lead somewhere genuinely universal, or has it historically been available only to lawyers who already had standing, who looked like Jackson, who moved in the networks that the machine was built to serve? That challenge sharpens the argument. The answer this series offers: the compass points toward something prior to institutional sorting, available to everyone the machine has excluded. The machine is what restricts access. Naming that restriction is part of what Emerson was doing, and part of what this series does.

This series will work through five of Emerson’s core essays (Self-Reliance, Compensation, Circles, The Poet, and The Over-Soul) and the foundational Nature, which grounds all of them. Each essay will apply one of these texts to a specific friction in legal professional life. Along the way, Jackson will serve as the series’ biographical protagonist: not a saint, not a simplified hero, but a lawyer who made the Emersonian moves in real institutional conditions and left a documented record of how he did it, with an honest accounting of where he fell short.

The essays that follow will be specific. They will name the credential machine by its parts. They will apply Emersonian philosophy to the billable hour, the lateral market, the partnership track, the in-house role, the captured judgment of the associate who softens the memo because softening memos is what the institution requires.

They will not tell you what to do. Emerson does not tell you what to do. What he does (what this series will attempt) is to give you vocabulary for something you may already sense but have not quite found the language to name.

The compass is always there. The machine is very loud. But the compass is always there.

Jeff Cox, Esq. is Director of Brand at Steno and a Florida-barred attorney with a career bridging legal operations at Citigroup, legal data and analytics at UniCourt, thought leadership strategy at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, and AI product marketing at vLex. A prolific writer with over 100 bylines in Above the Law, Legaltech News, ABA journals, and other leading publications, he served as 2025 Board Chair of Bay Area Legal Services, a Tampa Bay nonprofit law firm providing free civil legal services to low-income residents, and currently serves on its Development Council and AI Working Group.

The post The Emersonian Lawyer: The Compass And The Resume appeared first on Above the Law.

Sorry, Associates, But Those Knicks Seats Were Always Going To Clients

Staci Zaretsky — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:44:00 +0000

Ed. note: Welcome to our daily feature, Quote of the Day.

These kinds of tickets go to platinum A-plus clients. The vast majority of people (lawyers) faced with this decision give to clients because you get such goodwill with this kind of thing.

—  Irwin Kishner, co-chair of Herrick Feinstein’s sports law and corporate department, in comments given to the American Lawyer, concerning how Biglaw firms handled coveted tickets to last night’s Knicks game. Gibson Dunn scored courtside seats after winning an auction benefiting the Garden of Dreams Foundation. As for Kishner? He watched the game from home.

Staci Zaretsky is the managing editor of Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or connect with her on LinkedIn.

The post Sorry, Associates, But Those Knicks Seats Were Always Going To Clients appeared first on Above the Law.

Grad/Comp Year	Salary
2025	240,000
2024	250,000
2023	275,000
2022	325,000
2021	395,000
2020	420,000
2019	450,000