Although today’s legal technology events, above all else, showcase the many ways AI is disrupting the industry, at least one speaker at ILTACON 2026 noted changes in another area. 

As parents and educators are well aware, elementary school students can’t just come up with the right answer to a math problem anymore. In the AI age, they’re also graded on how well they document the process that got to the result. 

Law firms face a similar dynamic, notes Donovan Bell, a CLOC board member and former head of global legal operations at Intel. 

When law firms are explaining AI use to clients, their least effective response is to just list the tools they’re using at a high level. Instead, they need to show their work — and to do so in detail. 

“I was fortunate to have a firm sit down and give me a presentation,” Bell says, recalling an outside counsel who detailed exactly how AI was involved in the full life of a matter. 

The presentation demonstrated the value AI was providing as an enabler for the work, its effects on lowering costs, and how lawyers were using technology throughout the process to ensure the highest quality output.

“That really appealed to me,” he says. “It made me sit up, lean forward, and definitely say, ‘OK, I want to hear more, and definitely want to work with you.’”

Bell’s comments came on a Litera masterclass panel that went into detail on how law firms should — and should not — respond when clients ask about their use of artificial intelligence tools. 

Still, detailing AI use to every client is a big ask, notes Litera GC Dennis Garcia, the discussion’s moderator.

The question has been coming up in RFP responses, security questionnaires, retainer agreements, and amendments to those agreements. 

“It seems like a relatively straightforward question, which could be easy to answer,” he says. “And the reality is, it’s not so easy to answer, because you just can’t say, ‘Hey, we’re using these AI solutions or tools.’ You need to get deeper.” 

From Cringe to Based 

If a law firm wants to make clients run for the exits, shallow, formulaic responses are a good way to make that happen. 

If the firm is promising change without a baseline to track the change, for example, or failing to demonstrate understanding of the company’s particular workflows, clients will cringe. 

“I want to know: Do you understand the core of the challenge that we’re trying to meet?” Bell says. 

Another red flag: leaving out the firm’s own technology professionals and featuring only lawyers when detailing the firm’s technology use to a client. 

“We want to see the right capabilities within the firms now, to help them shape and use this technology,” notes Rahul Chhabra, a former legal operations professional at Meta, now the director of applied AI at Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer.

Firms can instead win over their clients by getting into the weeds, sharing as many specifics and details as possible. This allows them to showcase how they are using AI and the strategic thinking behind its implementation. 

The firm can detail things like how the proverbial “human in the loop” is participating in the work, how risk is being effectively managed, and areas where it might be appropriate for a partner to engage.

“It’s not just me saying, ‘Hey I see you’re using AI, so why isn’t the bill rate going down?’” Bell notes. “But it’s more so: ‘Here’s the life of the matter, and here’s the cost of that matter, and how not only am I able to optimize the cost, but also here’s where you’re effectively managing the risk.’”

Getting in the Weeds

So if firms want to keep their clients happy and remain competitive today, they need to communicate individualized reports on AI adoption to them all. But what does an effective report look like, and how can they best go about it?  

“You just can’t give one standard answer to each of your clients regarding this question, right?” Garcia says. “You have to make it a tailored and bespoke answer that is responsive to their needs.”

These reports must lay out the strategic thinking behind the firm’s technology use and implementation — and do so in as much detail as possible, with as much specificity to the client as possible. They must document how the technology is bolstering the services they deliver, while also controlling expenditures. 

It’s a process that Biglaw is still in the early stages of figuring out.

“I think it’s hard because a lot of us as law firms, we are not in the business of data,” Chhabra notes. “We are in the business of providing advice, and we are really good at that.”

Firms may struggle to report exactly what has changed through technology implementation, he says, because a lot of times they don’t have a fleshed out baseline to compare it to. 

Chhabra notes how Litera Foundation supports a law firm’s efforts in meeting a challenging moment. 

The system centralizes matter history, lawyer credentials, and client data into connected, searchable profiles that fuel faster, more credible pitches and proposals. It’s the type of support he needs to handle the volume and demands he’s facing.

“I think it’s really valuable to have tools like that, that connect all of your business services systems, and which can start giving you insights into a matter,” he says. “We as firms are now thinking through that and shaping that.” 

Where Transparency Leads

As the panel neared its Q&A phase, Garcia asked the audience for a show of hands. The question: “Has anyone effectively measured return on AI investment?” 

Almost no hands went up.  

“Do you know who is responsible for determining whether AI is working?” drew a few more. 

It’s a dynamic that has been well documented in recent studies.

For Chhabra, keeping up with the rapid pace of change is a key driver.  

“Today, we don’t have all the answers of how it’s actually helping us get return on investment,” he says. “But if we do not learn these tools today while we’re trying to figure out the ROI answer, we are going to be left behind.” 

And for law firms, many of the business benefits ultimately boil down to client service.

If firms can provide services to them more quickly and more effectively, Chhabra says, they can bill for this outcome. It’s a model that can go beyond value-based pricing to outcome-based pricing. 

He gave the example of a company offering to pay a firm a $2 million bonus on top of their fee if they can close a litigation matter within six months. 

If it’s a product company and it’s building a new supply chain that’s being held up by the litigation, the value for the client could be $100 million — and they’d be willing to share 5% of that money. 

To bring about these arrangements, transparency and detail in client communications are essential, he notes. What is the thinking behind the strategy? What are the important issues? What is the outcome you really want? 

“So there’s a lot of that,” Chhabra says. “Those conversations when you’re transparent with your clients, when you’re having the real conversations with them.”

For more about Litera Foundation, you can book a demo here.

The post When Clients Ask About AI, How Should Firms Respond? appeared first on Above the Law.

[I] really missed the counselor side of being a lawyer. I think I could be a much better counselor now than I was ​before I went on the bench.

— Former U.S. District Judge Alan Albright of the Western District of Texas, in comments given to Reuters, concerning his decision to join A&O Shearman as an intellectual property litigation partner in Austin, Texas. Albright’s courtroom became the country’s most prominent venue for patent litigation during his time on the bench.

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 Patent Litigation’s Most Famous Judge Makes His Biglaw Move appeared first on Above the Law.

Here is what I meant. If law firms bill by the hour and if AI does what every vendor says it does, its use would, by definition, reduce billable hours. That, in turn, reduces revenue and profit. It means, instead of a return on investment, they are actually taking a loss on investment. Call it the LOI.

(There is an important exception. When AI tools perform back-office functions, the opposite is true. These tools can reduce administrative costs, eliminate non-billable time, speed collections, and allow fewer people to perform internal functions. And all that reduces costs and increases profitability. That ROI can be and probably is being measured.)

For substantive tasks, use of AI will undoubtedly replace work done by associates and paralegals that was billed by the hour. It’s a net loss. No wonder firms are reluctant to use AI tools. No wonder they can’t figure out the ROI. There’s not all that much.

A Paradox

It’s a paradox: when AI is used by law firms, there is indeed a calculable ROI for the clients that are charged by the hour. If their lawyers use AI tools, the client’s bills simply will go down and go down by measurable amounts. When AI turns 15 hours into one, the clients are happy.

So, clients are all too eager for firms to make investments, often substantial investments, in AI. But these investments and AI use only help the clients and hurt the lawyers that just spent a fortune on technology. No wonder everybody keeps talking about ROI at conferences without quite managing to find it. It’s a difficult and, to be frank, somewhat unfair situation.

Another Phenomenon at Work

There’s another phenomenon at work here as well. Traditionally, under the billable hour model, clients would demand that work be pushed down to the lowest-cost provider while maintaining the approximate level of quality. It might take more time to do the work, but because the rate was lower, the net cost to the client was less. We’ve all had the conversation: why can’t you get an associate or paralegal to do that? I don’t need to pay you at your rate for it.

Hence, law firms built leverage pyramids. Those pyramids enabled firms to satisfy the client but still make money. And any loss of revenue from the work done at the reduced rates was made up by forcing associates to work long and hard to keep the machine running. Indeed, firms not only maintained profitability; they often increased it.

But with AI, that model is no longer as effective. AI eats the pyramid from the bottom up. It can do a lot of work that was previously pushed down to humans. Faster and at almost no hourly cost to the client. The profitability protection the leverage model provided essentially evaporates. Which is another reason firms aren’t itching to drive the shiny new car that they were convinced by vendors they absolutely had to have. It just sits in the garage, unused, and frankly, unwanted.

Is There a Solution?

One typical solution offered to the paradox is for firms to take a long view and say to themselves that if they reduce their bills by using AI, they will get more clients in the future. The problem is that’s a pretty indirect ROI, and it’s difficult to put a number on. It’s little more than a hope. And hope doesn’t sell well to a room full of angry equity partners wondering why their end-of-the-year distribution went down.

Another would-be solution is for lawyers to just up their rates to more than make up for the overhead cost of the AI tools and the lost hours. But to make up that profitability gap, rates would have to rise to astronomical levels. And clients would balk.

Do you really believe a client would willingly pay $5,000 per hour? $6,000? $10,000? I practiced for a long time, and I can assure you I never met a client whose response to a $10,000 rate would be wonderful, where do I sign?

Then there’s the favorite answer by pundits. Move away from the billable hour and to an alternative billing model. Flat fees. Subscription-based billing. But culturally, that’s very hard since everything about the modern law firm revolves around the billable hour. Compensation. Advancement. Partner status, power, and prestige. It’s the operating system.

And even if firms move away from the billable hour, it’s hard to believe that they can maintain the same level of profitability. Having done flat fees, I know how the client thinks: they are all for flat fees, provided the fee is less than what it would otherwise be. And it’s also challenging for firms to reduce the costs of producing the work enough to make up the difference.

It’s also difficult to calculate ROI based on that type of move. There’s an incredible amount of disruption to changing operating systems, and to be honest, some clients even resist such a move, thinking that if they can force their firms to use AI, the billable hours will be reduced, as will their bills. So why move to a different sort of fee structure that would not have the same bang for the buck?

Can We Talk?

But the best solution is something law firms and clients are reluctant to do. Law firms and clients need to talk to each other. Duh. They need to have honest conversations about how work is done and what it costs. I say reluctantly based on experience. Every time management or a well-heeled consultant tried to sell some “talk to your clients” initiative, that’s where it ended. With just talk. 

Lawyers are an independent breed. They don’t like being told how to communicate with their clients. They don’t like having hard conversations about these subjects, particularly when it comes to money.

And make no mistake, for these kinds of discussions to be productive, a few things have to happen. Law firms, on the one hand, would have to realize that they have a duty to use tools that allow them to represent their clients effectively and efficiently. Clients, on the other hand, would need to understand that while they are entitled to the benefits of technology, firms still need to make a profit.

They can’t do good work and retain top-of-the-line talent unless they can adequately compensate those doing the work and keep the lights on. Clients also need to recognize that forcing firms to make substantial AI investments which strangle their profitability is not sustainable.

And clients need to make genuine commitments to their law firms that if they employ AI, the firms will get more work. Not just mouth it with what feels like a wink and a nod. It can’t be like the discount spiel I used to hear from clients: if you discount your rates, we will send you more cases. Somehow, all I got was less money for the same amount of work.

In short, clients need some ownership in how their firms use the technology. Firms and clients need to design workflows together. Both sides need to agree on what efficiency looks like and who receives what portion of the resulting value. Clients and their lawyers need to sit down together and determine what work AI can improve, how much investment is required, and how the benefits and costs can be shared. Not just realized by one side of the relationship.

Right now, what we have is a standoff: the client’s AI ROI is often the law firm’s AI loss.

So, can we talk?

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 AI ROI For Law Firms: There’s Not Any appeared first on Above the Law.

Then Pam Bondi got booted from office and over 120 scholars, practitioners, and former judges wrote to remind the Florida Bar that this obliterates its lone excuse for not taking action. The Florida Bar has ignored this fact for months now.

Now, Florida’s made up “constitutional officer” doctrine has a new customer!

The Bar has refused to open an investigation into DHS General Counsel James Percival after he posted on social media telling his followers to consider four current federal judges as on par with the murderers and rapists that the administration profiles under its “Worst of the Worst” branding. In “Worst of the Worst, District Judge Edition,” Percival explicitly named federal judges who ruled against his office and sent his January 6 flying monkeys off to add to the rash of violent threats against federal judges.

To this, the Florida Bar responds that it, “does not investigate or prosecute sitting officers appointed under the U.S. Constitution while they are in office” because doing so “could encroach on the authority of the federal government concerning these officials and the exercise of their duties.”

The complaint was brought by Democracy Defenders Fund and Lawyers Defending American Democracy alongside 128 former federal and state judges, including retired Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Peggy Quince and Barbara Pariente, Michael Luttig, Nancy Gertner, Shira Scheindlin, and Ursula Ungaro. They asked the Bar to probe Percival for violating Rule 4-8.2(a) with his posts. This is the provision that bars lawyers from making statements they know “to be false or with reckless disregard as to its truth or falsity concerning the qualifications or integrity of a judge….”

The Florida Bar, wanting no part of protecting judges or the judicial system, ran back to the simple trick that got it out of the Bondi inquiry originally. Where does the Bar find this ethical Hall Pass for federal officials? This is the rule the Bar keeps hiding behind, in full:

Inquiries raised or complaints presented by or to The Florida Bar about the conduct of a constitutional officer who is required to be a member in good standing of The Florida Bar must be commenced within 6 years after the constitutional officer vacates office.

That is Rule 3-7.16(d). It’s a statute of limitations extension, not a bar on acting until the subject of the complaint leaves office. The Florida Bar should know this because they went to the Florida Supreme Court in 2022 and asked that the rule be rewritten to allow them to punt investigations while the person is in office and the court said NO. In Re: Amendments to Rules Regulating The Florida Bar-Chapters 3 &14 (Sep. 7, 2023).

Eagle-eyed readers might notice that the rule is expressly limited to officials whose jobs are conditioned upon Florida bar membership, which is in there because the rule only extends to Florida state officials under the state constitution. Neither the United States Attorney General, nor the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security need Florida bar membership. Indeed, in Florida, the definition of constitutional officer is limited to offices explicitly created by the state constitution. In fact, all the “constitutional officers” in Florida are elected officials and the Bar itself has always read this rule with that limit in mind.

But the Florida Bar contends that expanding this to a ban on investigating federal employees is in the vibes of the rule.

Rather, the Bar is taking the position that anyone in the federal executive branch requiring Senate confirmation by statute is both a de facto constitutional officer of Florida and somehow covered by the rule’s limitation to officers “required to be a member in good standing of The Florida Bar.” Percival could theoretically move his own membership to inactive this afternoon and keep the job.

Ignoring the Bondi complaint was bold and unwarranted, but at least she ran the Department of Justice. The general counsel isn’t even in the line of succession to run DHS! The Florida Bar is running an immunity doctrine of undisclosed scope with no published standard for who qualifies and no obligation to explain itself, because the one time anybody tried to force the question the Florida Supreme Court dodged it on standing rather than touch it.

The Florida Bar also told a complainant it had an active file open on Lindsey Halligan, and then walked the statement back the day after. They didn’t cite the “constitutional officer” line then, but if they’re extending it to Percival, they likely wanted to cover Halligan too, but the complaint arrived after she left office and even their most creative minds couldn’t bring themselves to untie the intellectual knot of claiming this constitutional appointment logic extends to people the courts conclusively determined to be illegally appointed. So that complaint joins the post-firing Bondi complaint as something the Bar just ignores without even attempting an explanation.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, sensing an opportunity to grandstand, wrote the Bar demanding dismissal of a “meritless” complaint on the theory that criticizing government officials isn’t misconduct and “[j]udges are no exception.” Professor Steve Vladeck noted that criticizing judges is indeed valid expression, but that Percival wasn’t a commentator, but the lawyer for a litigant. Counsel for a party to active litigation telling the judges what their rulings are going to cost them is an entirely different matter. Which, of course, is why states have rules like Rule 4-8.2(a).

The underlying conduct fits squarely within that rule. Judge Esther Salas, whose son was murdered at her home by a man angry about her rulings, warned that Percival was putting a bullseye on the judges he named. The Marshals Service logged more than 400 threats against individual federal judges in fiscal 2026, reaching roughly 12 percent of the active bench. Percival’s list contained no Republican appointees, despite judges from both parties having ruled against this administration’s immigration operation over 10,000 times in the second Trump term. This highlights the selective nature of the threat — Percival may disagree with many decisions, but he selected only judges that couldn’t possibly offend his fellow Republicans when posting the next targets for his mouth breathing followers.

Percival marked the occasion with dignity and humility:

If the profession is to survive this administration, licensing authorities need to get serious about sanctioning and disbarring these people. These are not close ethical calls. This is the exact behavior that we created professional discipline to punish, and every time a licensing authority looks the other way it undermines the rule of law and its own credibility.

The Florida Bar’s disciplinary function is run by cowards with no respect for the integrity of the profession. The rest of the nation’s professional licensing institutions don’t have to be.

Earlier: DHS General Counsel Names Four Federal Judges ‘Worst Of The Worst’ As Threats Against Judiciary Hit 564
New Ethics Complaint Reminds Florida Bar That Pam Bondi Isn’t Attorney General Anymore
Lindsey Halligan Under Investigation And The DOJ Is Big Mad About It
When Florida Bar Said It Was Serious About Ethical Violations It MEANT To Say, ‘Yes, Sir. Glory To The MAGA Empire!’
Bondi Says She’s The Bar Now
Which Trump Administration Lawyer Most Deserves To Lose Their License? An ATL Madness Bracket
Disbar Them All: The Only Accountability Left For Trump’s Lawyers

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 Florida Bar Hides From Ethical Responsibilities, Shrugs As DHS Lawyer Compares Federal Judges To Murderers And Rapists appeared first on Above the Law.

Professor Derek Muller of Notre Dame Law School recently took a look at which law schools produced the most professors over the past decade at his Substack, Law School Docket. Using hiring data compiled by Illinois Law professor Sarah Lawsky, Muller examined where professors hired between 2017 and 2026 received their law degrees.

Raw hiring totals don’t tell the whole story here. Muller also compared those figures with each school’s average graduating class size for 2020, 2021, and 2022. Twenty-nine law schools placed at least five graduates into academia during the decade studied.

Which schools are most likely to produce future law professors? Here are the top 10, ranked by placements as a percentage of graduating class:

1. Yale University: 8.6% (182 professors)
2. Stanford University: 2.6% (48 professors)
3. Harvard University: 2.0% (119 professors)
4. University of Chicago: 1.9% (41 professors)
5. New York University: 1.5% (69 professors)
6. Vanderbilt University: 1.0% (19 professors)
7. University of Michigan: 0.9% (30 professors)
8. Northwestern University: 0.8% (22 professors)
9. Columbia University: 0.8% (35 professors)
10. University of California, Berkeley: 0.7% (25 professors)

Yale’s performance is truly in a class of its own. About one out of every 12 graduates goes on to become a law professor. No other school even comes close. Stanford, which finishes in second place, clocks in at just 2.6%.

Harvard produced far more professors in raw numbers than Stanford or Chicago, but Stanford performed better when class size was taken into account, with Chicago close behind. Vanderbilt also punched above its weight, placing 19 graduates into academia for a rate of 1%.

To see the full list, click here⁠.

And what about the schools at the bottom of the list? American, Fordham, and George Washington each placed five graduates into the legal academy, amounting to about 0.1% of their graduating classes. Texas also placed five professors, while UC Law San Francisco placed six, with both schools posting rates of 0.2%.

Congratulations to all of the law schools whose graduates made their way into academia. They’re now helping to educate — and perhaps inspire — the next generation of lawyers and law professors.

Which law schools produce the most law professors? [Law School Docket]

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 Want To Become A Law Professor? These Law Schools Offer The Best Odds appeared first on Above the Law.

Walk into a busy personal injury firm on any Tuesday and look over a paralegal’s shoulder. Multiple tabs are open: intake, document management, a records portal, e-signature, the calendar, and a settlement spreadsheet.

Ask what’s slowing them down, and they won’t blame the software. They’ll say they’re buried, holding the cases together with a to-do list that lives in their head. The case files are technically in the system. They’re also in several other systems, which makes the paralegal the human link connecting all of them. It gets the job done, and it’s one of the most expensive habits in the firm, the kind that never shows up on a budget line.

Why PI firms keep buying more tools

Here’s how it happens. A firm buys a case management tool. It doesn’t handle something the PI practice needs, so the firm buys another to fill the gap. Then another. Each purchase makes sense on its own, and nothing ever gets retired. Soon the firm is running many separate tools. Each solves a single problem. None holds the case together, and every handoff between tools is a chance for a detail to slip.

So when something feels broken, most firm leaders ask the same question: what should we buy next? It’s the wrong question. The better one is simpler: can our whole team work inside one system built for how a PI firm actually runs? That is what CloudLex was built to do: not one more tool, but a single connected ecosystem replacing the patchwork. CloudLex stands on three pillars: the CloudLex Platform, where every case is managed from accident to resolution; Lexee AI, responsible AI built into that platform; and Paralegal Services, trained PI paralegals working directly inside your case files.

What “connected” actually means

Picture that same Tuesday inside one connected ecosystem. When intake logs the call, the case exists. When medical records arrive, they land in the case itself: requested, tracked, and delivered from inside the matter. When the demand gets drafted, it’s built from the records intake created months ago. When a partner asks for status, the answer is already there.

Plenty of tools can store a document or message a client. That was never hard. The real question for personal injury software is tougher: does the case ever have to leave it? With multiple separate tools, the answer is yes, constantly. That is why the work keeps landing back on a person. Inside CloudLex, where the entire case lives and moves in one place from accident to resolution, the answer is no. That single difference separates buying tools from running a connected firm.

It’s also why built-exclusively-for-PI matters. General platforms carry hourly billing and retainer workflows a contingency practice never touches. And in contingency work, the cost of fragmentation never shows up on a bill. It shows up as a weaker demand, a slower negotiation, or a settlement that closes for less than the case was worth.

Why AI fails on disconnected tools — and works here

Once firms feel the pain of tool sprawl, the instinct is to add one more thing that promises to fix it. Right now, that thing is AI. But AI is rarely the hard part. To be useful in a PI firm, it needs one thing above all: the complete, current case file: the full record, today’s data, inside the case. Add AI on top of multiple disconnected systems and it inherits the mess. A demand or chronology built from an incomplete record isn’t a time-saver; it’s a new risk. The AI was never the bottleneck. The disconnected tools underneath it were.

This is why Lexee AI, CloudLex’s built-in AI, is reliable where bolt-on tools are risky. Lexee AI is responsible AI, fast and dependable: it drafts demand packages from the case facts already in the file, generates medical summaries and treatment timelines with expert review, and answers questions about any case in plain language. It works from the full case in context, never a partial copy. The accuracy comes from the case being complete and in one place, not from the AI being fast.

The firms that win the next decade

The firms that win the next decade in PI won’t be the ones with the most tools or the fastest AI rollout. They’ll be the ones working inside a single connected ecosystem built for PI, where the case finally stays in one place.

You didn’t spend years in law school to become the human link between your tools. You’re here to work the case, build the demand, and fight for your clients. That’s the work that finally gets your attention back.  If you’d like, you can request a demo of the CloudLex Ecosystem at a time that works for you.

Michael Abdan is a Partner at CloudLex, Inc. A seasoned litigator licensed in New York and Florida with a strong knack for business, Mike has spent the past 15 years helping hundreds of plaintiff personal injury law firms modernize their practices. His unique blend of legal knowledge and industry experience lets him connect with and cultivate relationships across the PI community — because he genuinely understands the needs and goals of his peers.

The post PI Firms Don’t Need More Tools. They Need Fewer. appeared first on Above the Law.

Recent reports of cyberattacks on some of the world’s largest law firms offer a sobering reminder of that reality. WilmerHale reportedly paid at least $18 million to the cyber extortion group Luna Moth after an attack, while Goodwin reportedly paid about $10 million. Weil reportedly paid between $18 million and $20 million after a separate incident. Combined, the ransom payments alone approach $50 million.

Those figures are staggering, but the ransom amounts aren’t the most important part of the story.

The Attack Wasn’t Necessarily Sophisticated

Goodwin said its incident began when a single employee was deceived into providing credentials to an unauthorized person. In another recent incident, Mayer Brown said an employee mistakenly sent documents to someone who had misrepresented their identity. The firm said the third party never gained access to its systems.

Different incidents, but each has the same underlying lesson. Sometimes the easiest way to bypass sophisticated cybersecurity defenses is to simply convince someone to help you.

Social engineering has existed for decades, but attackers continue to refine it. Today’s attacks may involve someone impersonating an IT technician, calling an employee directly to request remote access, or creating enough urgency and credibility that the victim believes the request is legitimate.

That poses a particularly difficult challenge for law firms because attorneys and staff are trained to be responsive. Clients expect quick answers, and partners want problems solved. Attackers understand these workplace dynamics and exploit them to their advantage.

Technology Can’t Fix Everything

None of this means firms should stop investing in cybersecurity technology. Strong technical controls remain essential and can limit damage even after a mistake occurs. But technology has limits.

An employee who voluntarily provides credentials may circumvent protections designed to prevent unauthorized access. Someone who approves a multifactor authentication request they didn’t initiate can defeat one of the industry’s most important security controls. An employee who grants remote access to someone they believe is from IT may effectively escort an attacker past a layer of expensive security technology.

That’s why cybersecurity awareness training can’t be an annual video employees click through while answering email. Employees need to understand how attacks happen and how to independently verify whether someone claiming to be from their IT department or technology provider is legitimate. Most importantly, they need permission to slow things down when something doesn’t feel right.

Make Verification Normal

Law firms can make social engineering significantly harder by establishing simple verification procedures.

If someone claiming to be from IT unexpectedly contacts an employee, the employee should know how to verify that person’s identity using a trusted phone number, an internal messaging system, or an established help desk process. Requests involving passwords, remote access, financial transactions, sensitive documents, or multifactor authentication should automatically trigger additional scrutiny.

The goal isn’t to make employees suspicious of everyone. It’s to make verification part of the firm’s culture. Attackers thrive on urgency. They want employees to act before thinking, whether the request supposedly comes from the managing partner, the accounting department, an IT provider, or an important client.

A culture that encourages employees to pause and verify unusual requests removes one of the attacker’s greatest advantages.

The Human Element Still Matters

Another lesson buried in these enormous ransom figures is that cybersecurity isn’t only a problem for firms without adequate resources.

The firms being targeted are among the largest and most sophisticated legal organizations in the world. They have substantial technology budgets, experienced security professionals, and access to virtually every cybersecurity tool available. Attackers are successfully targeting people all the same.

That’s something every law firm should consider, regardless of size. You can spend a fortune making the locks on your doors stronger. But if someone can convince an employee to hand over the key, those locks suddenly matter a lot less. The answer isn’t more fear. It’s better preparation, better training, and a workplace where verifying an unusual request isn’t treated as an inconvenience.

Sometimes the most important cybersecurity question an employee can ask is also the simplest, “How do I know you are who you say you are?”

Michael C. Maschke is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Sensei Enterprises, Inc. Mr. Maschke is an EnCase Certified Examiner (EnCE), a Certified Computer Examiner (CCE #744), an AccessData Certified Examiner (ACE), a Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), and a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP). He is a frequent speaker on IT, cybersecurity, and digital forensics, and he has co-authored 14 books published by the American Bar Association. He can be reached at mmaschke@senseient.com.

Sharon D. Nelson is the co-founder of and consultant to Sensei Enterprises, Inc. She is a past president of the Virginia State Bar, the Fairfax Bar Association, and the Fairfax Law Foundation. She is a co-author of 18 books published by the ABA. She can be reached at snelson@senseient.com.

John W. Simek is the co-founder of and consultant to Sensei Enterprises, Inc. He holds multiple technical certifications and is a nationally known digital forensics expert. He is a co-author of 18 books published by the American Bar Association. He can be reached at jsimek@senseient.com.

The post The Cybersecurity Control Money Can’t Buy appeared first on Above the Law.

Larry Parres led the bankruptcy practice at Lewis Rice LLC. That we’re writing in the past tense is a bit of a spoiler for where this story is going. Parres worked on the Chapter 11 of DCA Outdoor, Inc., a Kansas City-based collection of roughly 20 nursery, tree farm, and garden retail entities that filed in February 2025 owing Frontier Farm Credit around $95 million. Every entity was owned and controlled by founder Tory Schwope and none of them had any independent directors.

According to an adversary complaint the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors filed in May, Lewis Rice spent the next seven months representing Schwope rather than the estates that the firm technically represented. That case was just voluntarily dismissed without prejudice on August 20 and Parres is suddenly no longer at Lewis Rice. Perform whatever math you need on that one.

The complaint cites Parres’s own emails, running through the bankruptcy from even before filing, when Frontier conditioned debtor-in-possession financing on installing a chief restructuring officer:

DEAL BREAKER—WE ARE NOT GOING TO PUT A CRO IN PLACE—NOT HAPPENING SO REMOVE IT COMPLETELY.

A CRO is the mechanism by which a lender keeps financing a borrower it no longer trusts to run itself. Opposing one on behalf of the estate is a defensible litigation position — CROs are expensive, and sometimes the incumbent management genuinely is the cheapest competent option. That didn’t seem to be the firm’s motivation here, because the court appointed a CRO anyway. The next day, according to the complaint, Parres emailed his colleagues to tell them that “Tory remains our client so please make sure he agrees with all Juanita decisions before we act” — Juanita being Juanita Schwartzkopf, the court-appointed CRO whose entire function was to make decisions that didn’t route through Schwope.

The complaint claims Parres bcc’d Schwope on this email.

Schwope allegedly wrote back: “Thanks, pal.” Parres, per the complaint, responded that he had Schwope’s back, that Lewis Rice would “continue to bust our ass for you.”

“For you” is sort of the whole sticking point.

The Committee claims that 64.2 percent of Lewis Rice’s billed time went to matters primarily benefiting Schwope as opposed to the various estates paying Lewis Rice for representation — specifically, the Committee alleges that Lewis Rice acted to aid Schwope in a plan to buy back the estates at a discount after shedding debt. Only about 3.4 percent went to anything resembling maximizing estate value. Of that, asset disposition — the mechanism by which the estates would generate recovery for creditors — got less than one hour across the entire engagement.

In March 2025, per the filing, Parres congratulated his team: “Great work guys and know you client appreciates your efforts not to mention Lewis rice appreciates the revenues.”

Parres’s Lewis Rice bio still comes up in preview when you Google him, but heading to the website delivers a “Page Not Found.” The firm informed the St. Louis Business Journal last week that Parres is “no longer a member.”

Last year, Winston & Strawn faced similar allegations. When long-time clients go bankrupt, one would think that might trigger heightened guardrails given how easy it will be for the creditors to point the finger if anything looks fishy.

On the other hand… firms appreciate the revenues.

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 Bankruptcy Lawyer Out After Firm Accused Of Working For The Wrong Client appeared first on Above the Law.

* House Republicans begin inquiry into the Eleventh Circuit’s probe of Judge Eleanor Ross. [Bloomberg Law News]

* Lawyer arrested for terroristic threat against teen relative. [ABA Journal]

* Recording artists sue Suno, claiming the AI provider is stealing their identities. [Rolling Stone]

* The revolving door between Jones Day and the Trump administration continues to spin. [Law360]

* Second Circuit rules public school district can ban teachers from hanging Pride flags. [Bloomberg Law]

* Former Google engineer sentenced to 12 months for stealing AI secrets. So if some cut-rate model starts giving really bad internet search summaries, you know the culprit! [Courthouse News Service]

* A&O Sherman hires judge who dominated patent cases as part of the less-socially-destructive-but-still-bad consequence of Texas federal court judge shopping. [Reuters]

The post Morning Docket: 09.02.26 appeared first on Above the Law.

‘A Whorehouse And Las Vegas’: Ty Cobb reviews Trump’s ballroom.

Legal Tech Love-In: Everyone in legal tech is hopping into bed with each other. Figuratively (we hope). The big rundown on last week’s ILTACON and how it relates to swinging.

Fools For Clients: Wall Street banks want Biglaw to cut its bills because they can get answers from AI. These are not serious people.

Pangram Perils: Law professors up in arms about AI have put their faith in AI tools to detect AI. That’s a dangerous proposition.

Erin Piacenti, Fordham Law ’21 And Bank Of America VP, Killed In Times Square Attack: The 32-year-old had celebrated her second wedding anniversary three weeks earlier.

The post It’s Not Illegal If Nobody Has Standing To Say So — See Also appeared first on Above the Law.

In 1858, which Illinois trial lawyer defended a young man charged with murder and dismantled the prosecution’s case by producing an almanac? The government’s star witness swore he’d watched the fatal blow from 150 feet away, clear as day, by the light of the moon, but the almanac revealed the moon was only in its first quarter and riding low on the horizon, nearly set, at the hour of the crime.

Hint: He handled this case without a fee, as a favor to the defendant’s widowed mother, an old friend from his hardscrabble youth.
See the answer on the next page.

The post The Star Witness Swore He Saw It In The Moonlight — Big Mistake appeared first on Above the Law.

The former Hogan & Lovells partner, who left Biglaw to serve as special counsel in the first Trump White House, has since made it his apparent life’s mission to say out loud what everyone outside of MAGAland is thinking. This is a man who has not exactly been stingy with alarm bells. Cobb has warned there are no “guardrails” left around Trump, called the president’s crypto self-dealing the greatest onslaught of corruption in the history of mankind, and gone on cable to flatly describe a useless Congress and an “evil” President.

Anyway, the extremely opinionated Cobb turned up on CNN last night to react to the East Wing being turned into a monument to gold leaf. And his objection wasn’t only about the law.

Asked about Chief Justice John Roberts’s dissent, the one that noted the ballroom’s plain illegality before the majority shrugged and decided no one had standing to say so, Cobb got a little sentimental.

“I mean, it certainly touched me because, as somebody who had spent a lot of time in the White House and in or about the grounds, it was a beautiful setting and a historic setting,” Cobb said.

Emphasis on the past tense, before delivering the bon mot: “It’s turning into, you know, some combination of a whorehouse and Las Vegas at this stage of the game with all the gold and paving of it,” he said. “So, it’s tragic what’s going on. But sadly, it’s going to continue, at least for the time being.”

Say what you want about a whorehouse, at least it’s honest about the transaction. Here the majority dressed political favoritism in a poor imitation of standing doctrine and called it a day.

Watch the full appearance below.

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