A Lesson In Transferable Skills: Former adult movie actress passes the bar.

Trump Allegiance And Owing Money Go Hand In Hand: Time for this Trump PAC to pay up!

Do You Know The Super Rich Firms?: Here they are!

Ty Cobb Says The Guardrails Are Gone: Who is taking advantage of the President’s weaknesses?

The post Is This A Legal Argument Or A Sermon? — See Also appeared first on Above the Law.

According to data collected by ALM, how many firms in the Am Law 100 increased their profits per equity partner (PEP) in 2025?

Hint: Across the Am Law 100, the average PEP in 2025 was $3,588,162.

See the answer on the next page.

The post 2025 Was Hella Profitable For Biglaw appeared first on Above the Law.

But Somali learned that South Korea does not play around.

On April 15, 2026, the Seoul Western District Court convicted Somali (whose real name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael) on four counts of obstruction of business, two under the Minor Crimes Act, and two sexual violence offenses involving nonconsensual deepfakes. Somali was sentenced to six months in a labor prison, plus 20 extra days in detention. He was taken into custody immediately as a flight risk.

Somali first went viral in 2023 in Japan. He rode Tokyo trains blasting racist taunts about Hiroshima and Nagasaki saying “We’ll do it again” while filming commuters’ reactions for views. He trespassed on an Osaka construction site, yelling “Fukushima!” at workers. The trespassing charge was dropped, but he was convicted in January 2024 of obstructing business after storming into a gyudon restaurant, cranking his phone volume to ear-splitting levels, and refusing to turn it down. Osaka District Court fined him ¥200,000 (about $1,400). Japan banned him from returning.

In 2024, Somali was briefly detained at a Tel Aviv protest after making crude, sexually harassing remarks to a female police officer, calling her names and threatening to “slap that a**.”

Then he went to Seoul. There, he live-streamed himself kissing, twerking, and performing a lap dance on the “Statue of Peace,” a monument honoring Korean “comfort women” forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II. He later claimed ignorance of its meaning and issued a half-hearted apology. South Koreans were not amused. For this, Somali was charged for public nuisance in November 2024.

He later went on a nuisance spree in Korea doing things like blasting loud music and dumping noodles on a table inside a convenience store, harassing staff and visitors at an amusement park, playing North Korean propaganda in public, and causing disturbances on buses and subways. This led to the charges that eventually landed him in jail.

So is the six-month sentence too light? Some seem to think so and believe he should have been sentenced to three years as recommended by the prosecutor.

The prosecutor has the right to appeal the sentence and request a longer one. The Constitution of the Republic of Korea has a double jeopardy clause. But since Korea follows a civil law system unlike the U.S., the double jeopardy clause kicks in once the Supreme Court of Korea rules on the issue.

So it is possible that Somali can get a longer jail sentence which many people seem to want. But Somali is a foreigner. After his six months are up, he will be on the first plane leaving Korea likely never to return again. There is a good possibility that he when he returns to the U.S., he will rage against Korea, the judge, the prosecutor, and the people. But assuming he stays relevant, at least no one in Korea will have to worry about Somali again.

Somali is probably one of a few foreigners in a Korean jail. The language barrier can make following prison staff orders difficult. And some prison staff and inmates may know about his antics. So the longer he stays in jail, the more likely the chance of something happening to him. If Somali gets hurt or worse in jail, it may create a diplomatic incident. President Trump has recently criticized South Korea for not helping the U.S. in its war with Iran.

In addition to his six months, Somali is also required to register as a sex offender in Korea. Somali may not care since he is likely to be permanently banished from the country anyway. But he may have to register as a sex offender when he returns to the U.S. pursuant to the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA). And his antics will probably prevent him from getting a visa to travel to other countries as well.

Somali’s conviction should serve as a warning to nuisance streamers. What happened to Somali in Korea will likely be followed in other countries. While it is easier to send a foreigner nuisance back to where they came from, countries may be more willing to send them to jail where they will face a language barrier, be singled out by staff and inmates, and worst of all, be away from their precious audience as they are forced into irrelevancy.

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 Online Troll Johnny Somali Sentenced To 6 Months And 20 Days In South Korean Jail For Being A Sex Offender Nuisance appeared first on Above the Law.

If you feel like “America’s Insane Tax-Filing Process” is a drain on both your time and your wallet, you’re not alone. Even the government recognizes the effort that tax compliance places on Americans, publishing an estimated total annual cost burden for U.S. individual income tax returns. 

It turns out that preparing and submitting individual income tax returns costs taxpayers more than $91 billion a year — nearly half of which represents the opportunity cost of all those lost hours spent tracking down receipts, reviewing instructions, and filling out and submitting the return. 

According to the IRS, it takes taxpayers an average of 12 hours to prepare and file their return. Most also pay an average of $290 for related costs (e.g., tax software, third-party preparers, printing, mailing).

Collectively, Americans spend 1.95 billion hours and $49.76 billion to file their returns. The IRS estimates that the total monetized time and out-of-pocket costs for taxpayers filing a Form 1040 for the 2025 tax year is $91.79 billion. 

Note that this figure doesn’t include actual tax liabilities, “economic inefficiencies caused by sub-optimal choices related to tax deductions or credits,” or the “psychological costs” of doing your taxes.

The post Stat(s) Of The Week: 1040 Blues appeared first on Above the Law.

Texting clients and counsel about small things is often unavoidable and harmless. For instance, I routinely text clients about meeting up at a courthouse or at other places, and sometimes lawyers leave their phone numbers in courthouses so that counsel can text them when a matter is ready to proceed. For more substantive matters, I rarely text clients and counsel, since I do not want to be constrained by space limitations, and I do not want to breach someone’s personal space.

However, clients and counsel sometimes text me about more substantive matters, and in many instances this is fine. If a message does not need much space to be conveyed, and the text occurs during business hours, there is not much of a difference between text messaging and emailing. However, in my experience, texting can often lead to a slippery slope where most communications are conducted via text and at inappropriate times.

I once had a client who preferred to text rather than speaking on the phone or emailing. I wanted to facilitate this client’s preferences, and I responded to all of the text messages she sent. However, she began texting me at inappropriate times. I distinctly remember being at a bar on a Saturday night and seeing a text message from this client light up my phone! I definitely felt like it was a breach of my personal space to be texting me on a Saturday night, and if this person had emailed me, I would have an easier time separating my work life from my personal life.

I have had a few adversaries over the years who also prefer text messaging over email. I have no idea why a lawyer would want to do this, but perhaps the attorney thinks that text messaging builds more rapport among counsel than conducting business through email. Of course, if the text was about something small and it was during business hours, I did not mind receiving a text from an adversary, especially about time-sensitive things I needed to address immediately.

However, some adversaries have mixed texting about personal things with work-related matters, which I do not appreciate in some circumstances. Moreover, some of the text messages from adversaries would come outside of working hours. I completely understand that some attorneys finish work at odd hours, and adversaries might be getting around to tasks outside of the workday. However, again, if the adversary had emailed me instead of texting, I would have a better ability to filter out work matters from my personal space.

All told, emailing and phone calls are a much more preferrable way to communicate with counsel and clients since they allow for longer discussions and are typically conducted within business hours. Once lawyers start texting, this can be a slippery slope that can lead to too much communication by text and exchanges outside of business hours. Accordingly, lawyers should not text counsel and clients about substantive matters if this can be avoided.

Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothman.law.

The post Attorneys Should Often Avoid Texting Clients And Counsel appeared first on Above the Law.

Two years ago, California Bar Court Judge Yvette Roland recommended he be disbarred for his role in the plot to overturn the 2020 election. Eastman’s adult children responded with a hilariously over-the-top screed in Glenn Beck’s The Blaze comparing their father to Jesus on the cross, with the Roland cast as Judas Iscariot.

His GiveSendGo page — where he details his personal stations of the cross and has raked in over a million from the faithful — describes the attorney discipline proceedings as “my own Triduum.”

On Wednesday, the betrayal was complete. The Pharisees, AKA the California Supreme Court, upheld Judge Roland’s findings. Eastman’s name has been stricken from the roll of attorneys, effective immediately. He’s also been hit with a $5,000 sanction, which seems like something of a rounding error given the fundraising, but fine.

“While it may seem a little heavy-handed to compare the work of Eastman and others to the passion and death of Jesus Christ, a little reflection can make clear the connections,” the Eastman kids insist. “Jesus was betrayed and unjustly condemned because he preached a gospel message that was contrary to the desires of the ruling class of his time. Eastman has been betrayed and indicted for speaking up about election illegality and fraud, contrary to the desires of the political establishment and the mainstream media.”

Not exactly.

Their sainted papa didn’t just push an aggressive-but-arguably-defensible legal theory and lose. He peddled legal arguments he knew with certainty would not hold up under scrutiny, conceding to Mike Pence’s legal advisor Greg Jacob that, were the scheme to reach the Supreme Court, it would fail 9-0. And he took pains to ensure that they never got anywhere near a federal judge.

“The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission – either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court,” he wrote in one of his infamous memos. Even after rioters had overrun the Capitol, delaying certification of Biden’s win, Eastman urged that Pence should stay the proceedings, for “one more relatively minor violation” of the Electoral Count Act.

Judge David Carter called Eastman’s counsel “a coup in search of a legal theory” and abrogated attorney-client privilege under the crime-fraud exception.

And yet, Eastman cries that he is a poor victim of the evil, woke elite.

“This partisan weaponization of the bar disciplinary process–not just against me but hundreds of others, including current Department of Justice lawyers, is a serious threat to the legal profession, because one of its very purposes is to discourage other lawyers from taking on controversial causes or clients — controversial to the leftist/Marxist elites, that is,” he insists, vigorously shaking his tin cup. “Filing a cert petition with the U.S. Supreme Court and then, hopefully, getting a chance to have the case heard on the merits, is going to be expensive, perhaps $1/4 million or more.” [sic, and lolwut?]

Oh, dear! What will poor John Eastman do with only an endless stream of FedSoc events, podcasts, wingnut welfare fellowships, and Ginny Thomas speaking gigs to sustain him?

Naturally, Jeff “the Oil Spill” Clark has thoughts.

“He did what lawyers are supposed to do — represent disfavored individuals,” Clark tweeted. “And make no mistake, the elites, especially in bar apparatuses, disfavor and hate President Trump and anyone associated with him with a burning passion.”

Clark, an extremely non-elite graduate of Harvard and Georgetown, served as head of the DOJ’s Civil Division in the aftermath of the 2020 election. He urged his colleagues to send letters to swing state legislatures falsely claiming to have found evidence of vote fraud, and he’s been fighting his own disbarment proceedings in DC for two years now. Send cash!

Meanwhile, Eastman vows to appeal to the Supreme Court, where his onetime boss, Justice Thomas, may be able to do him a solid. Blessed are the martyrs, for they shall inherit the cert petition.

Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast. You can subscribe by clicking the logo:

The post John Eastman Is The Most Persecuted Man Since Jesus — Just Ask Him, He’ll Tell You! appeared first on Above the Law.

Our hope with sharing our story is not to promote or glorify ourselves. Our intention is to inspire others to generosity.

[Post-surgery,] it felt like we had pulled of the biggest project of our careers. I had a tremendous feeling of achievement.

—  Hope Watson, an associate at Thompson Coburn, in comments given to the ABA Journal, concerning her July kidney donation to Bernie Citron, a partner at the firm she’d never met before. “For someone you have never met? Who is younger than my kids? To do this?” Citron said of Watson. “It’s just out-and-out amazing that there are people like Hope out there who would do something like this.” Christopher Hohn, chair of Thompson Coburn, said of the situation in a statement, “What Hope did for Bernie is an extraordinary act of generosity, but it’s also true to who we are as a firm. We have a deeply collegial culture, and we look out for one another, both professionally and personally.” Thompson Coburn donated $25,000 to the National Kidney Foundation in the wake of this touching story.

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 Biglaw Associate Donates Kidney To Partner In Remarkable Act Of Generosity appeared first on Above the Law.

The ABA has been pussyfooting about its commitment to diversity for a year now, and could finally vote to end the diversity accreditation requirement as early as May 15th. Doing so wouldn’t do much in itself — there’s been a moratorium on the provision having any real effect for a while now — but it would signal a turn in the organization’s commitment to “the legal and ethical foundation [of] the American nation. Reuters has coverage:

Hundreds of law professors, deans, students, lawyers and bar associations are urging the American Bar Association not to eliminate its longstanding diversity and inclusion requirement for law schools, which has come under fire amid the Trump administration’s widespread ​campaign against DEI.

The arm of the ABA that oversees U.S. law schools received 47 written comments from individuals ‌and groups asking it to retain or strengthen the law school diversity standard and two comments in support of repealing the rule during a 30-day public comment period that ended on Monday.
…
Eliminating ⁠the rule “will be rightly viewed as capitulating to a rightwing movement hostile to civil rights and the rule of law,” a ​national organization of law professors called the Critical Legal Collective wrote in one of the public comments.

That’s the short and long of it. There have been attempts to re-frame the motivation for closing the racial umbrella on other grounds. One of the more interesting pieces of spaghetti thrown against the wall was that the diversity requirement was an antitrust violation, but if and when the ABA abandons its commitment to diversity, some think tanker at the Heritage Foundation is going to fire up the grill, cook bland food and order Chick-Fil-A so the group doesn’t have to eat their shameful cooking in celebration.

If pressures from the administration or moneyed right wing interests were all it took for the ABA to change its tune, how long until the next domino falls? Will they stop paying lip service to the importance of the rule of law just like they’ve given up on the importance of increased access to the profession? They can hem and haw about how difficult their decisions are, but they won’t have the excuse of saying that they didn’t know the consequences of their actions.

Law Professors Defend ABA’s Law School Diversity Rule Ahead Of Elimination Vote [Reuters]

Earlier: ABA President Says They Aren’t ‘Retreating’ From Diversity Promises. Does He Know What The ABA Has Been Up To?

ABA Strikes Back At Trump, Condemning His Attacks On Lawyers And The Rule Of Law

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.

The post Law Professors Argue Abandoning The Diversity Rule Will Hurt The ABA’s Reputation appeared first on Above the Law.

As we’ve covered extensively around here, Cobb (along with his magnificent signature mustache) has developed a folksy but devastating habit of cutting through the right-wing noise and telling cable news audiences exactly what the situation is. This latest appearance was no different.

Asked about the current state of affairs inside the Trump orbit, Cobb offered a genuinely chilling observation rooted in his firsthand experience. “When I was there, his narcissism would be on display because he would passionately want to do something that seemed out of bounds but people like Gen. Kelly and Gen. Mattis, Nikki Haley, were there to talk him out of it,” he explained. The problem, of course, is that those people — the so-called “adults in the room,” a phrase Cobb himself famously used back in his White House days — are long gone. “They don’t have those guardrails there today,” he lamented.

And it gets more alarming from there. Cobb raised the specter of bad actors filling that vacuum, arguing there “should be some concern that people are using this, using his incapacity, to manipulate decisions.” As a concrete example, he pointed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, suggesting Netanyahu did exactly that “in connection with the decision to go into Iran.” That’s a pretty significant allegation! The idea that a foreign leader is effectively steering American foreign policy by exploiting a cognitively diminished president is not a small thing to say on cable television. And yet, here we are.

On Trump’s general mental state and behavior, Cobb did not exactly offer reassuring takes. Trump’s “vocabulary has shrunk, he’s resorted to profanity and threats, totally impulsive,” Cobb said. He pointed to Trump’s attacks on the late filmmaker Rob Reiner and former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, as well as his ongoing feud with Pope Leo XIV as behavior that “just shows you how crazy this man is.” Hard to argue with that breakdown, honestly.

Cobb also drew a contrast that should probably be getting more airtime. He distinguished between former President Joe Biden’s decline, which he characterized as a “benevolent grandpa losing his memory,” and Trump’s altogether different situation, which he described as “malignant narcissism.” That’s not a semantic distinction. One is a man struggling with the ordinary cruelties of aging. The other is something considerably more dangerous.

None of this is entirely new ground for Cobb. He’s been sounding these alarms with increasing urgency, calling Trump a threat to constitutional norms, warning of justifiable paranoia among Trump’s critics, and labeling the president flatly “gone.” The drumbeat has been consistent. What’s changed is the stakes, and apparently, Cobb’s willingness to name names — including heads of state — when it comes to who might be capitalizing on the chaos.

The people with actual power to do something about any of this remain, as ever, conspicuously silent. But at least Cobb keeps showing up.

You can watch the full interview below.

The post Former Biglaw Partner Warns There Are No ‘Guardrails’ Left Around Trump — And Someone Is Taking Advantage appeared first on Above the Law.

Ed. Note: A weekly roundup of just a few items from Howard Bashman’s How Appealing blog, the Web’s first blog devoted to appellate litigation. Check out these stories and more at How Appealing.

“Two Magicians Warn the Supreme Court About Junk Science; Penn & Teller filed a Supreme Court brief questioning the use of ‘investigative hypnosis’ in a death-penalty case in Texas”: Adam Liptak has this new installment of his “The Docket” newsletter online today at The New York Times.

“Trump-Appointed Judges Rebuke Denial of Covid-19 Bias Rehearing”: Quinn Wilson of Bloomberg Law has this report (subscription required for full access).

“I Almost Never Predict Supreme Court Outcomes. Trump Will Lose This Case.” Linda Greenhouse has this guest essay online at The New York Times.

“Key Senator Says Any AG Pick Who Backed Jan. 6 ‘Dead on Arrival’”: Suzanne Monyak of Bloomberg Law has this report.

“Eighth Circuit swats challenge to Minnesota policy embracing trans athletes; A circuit judge said since Trump’s executive orders aren’t yet established law, they can’t be relied on to prove the likelihood of Title IX violations”: Ryan Luetkemeyer of Courthouse News Service has this report.

“Process to Refund Tariffs to Begin Next Week; Trade court judge says government confirmed it is on track to start processing claims for refunds of Trump’s tariffs invalidated by the Supreme Court”: Lydia Wheeler of The Wall Street Journal has this report.

The post How Appealing Weekly Roundup appeared first on Above the Law.

Asia Carrera, a former pornography actress who graduated from St. Mary’s Law in 2024, just cleared one of the most notoriously miserable hurdles in the legal profession. Carrera — whose real name is Jessica Steinhauser — previously missed passing by just two points, but was able to turn it around during the February 2026 exam. For what it’s worth, according to TMZ, she has no desire to work as a lawyer, she “just wanted to prove she could pass the bar.”

Here’s the celebratory post she made on Facebook after finding out the good news:

Of course the jokes write themselves, but the comparison between lawyers and porn stars completely holds up. Both professions are built on performance, stamina, and the ability to deliver under pressure while someone else critiques your work. Both involve long hours, exacting clients, and a surprising amount of very specific positioning.

Still, credit where it’s due: passing the bar is no joke, no matter your background. If nothing else, Carrera’s pivot is a reminder that the most “nontraditional” candidates might just be the ones best equipped to handle a profession that already demands a little bit of everything.

Retired Porn Star Asia Carrera Passes Texas Bar to Become Attorney [TMZ]

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 Former Adult Film Star Passes The Bar Exam appeared first on Above the Law.

A whole lot of Trump’s personal lawyers embraced the Tobias logic, with Susan Necheles taking the hardest hit.

According to a new FEC filing first reported by NOTUS, Donald Trump’s Save America PAC — the vehicle he uses to pay legal bills — is nearly $500,000 in the red, while owing roughly $1.6 million to a roster of 12 different law firms.

Stiffing lawyers is a time-honored tradition in the Trump orbit. He famously pulled the rug out from Rudy Giuliani after Rudy devoted his entire post-mayoral career, law license, and remaining credibility to peddling the Big Lie. Decades of vendors, contractors, and attorneys could have warned Rudy. Trump has been slapped with hundreds of lawsuits, liens, and other legal interventions for non-payment. Invoicing Donald Trump is a lot like betting on the Washington Generals.

When Susan Necheles — a serious criminal defense lawyer with a long and respectable career — decided to join the Trump team to cross-examine Stormy Daniels, the veteran attorney apparently looked at all that history and cheerily muttered: But it might work for us!

NechelesLaw LLP, is owed more than $660,000.

But while she’s getting stiffed the worst, she’s at least not alone. Wharton Law PLLC, another firm headed by a lawyer who represented Trump in the same trial, is due $112K. Brito PLLC, representing Trump in defamation suits against a variety of media outlets as well as the $5 billion lawsuit against Jamie Dimon for caring about his bank over Trump, is owed $44K. The list goes on. It even drags in Biglaw:

About $400,000 is owed to Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. Trump nominated one of its lawyers last week to a lifelong U.S. appeals court judge position based in New York. Trump also nominated a lawyer from James Otis Law Group LLC in February to a federal judicial post. His PAC owes that firm, located in St. Louis, about $1,700.

And that’s the thing… Trump is paying his lawyers, just not with money.

Todd Blanche, who sat next to Necheles at the hush money trial, is the Acting Attorney General. Emil Bove is on the Third Circuit. This past Friday, Trump nominated Sullivan & Cromwell partner Matthew Schwartz — who worked on Trump’s criminal appeal — to the Second Circuit. Justin Smith, another personal lawyer, picked up an Eighth Circuit nomination earlier this year. Alina Habba’s firm is on the list as well.

Paying in kind is much cheaper than paying in money. Indeed, it costs Trump nothing at all. The rule of law pays the price.

And this is where Necheles’s miscalculation comes into focus. She’s shown zero public interest in serving the administration. She just… did the work for the love of the billable hour. In Trumpland, that’s a critical mistake.

Save America has done this before, burning through donor money on lawyers faster than it could raise it. And the lawyers doing their jobs are left holding the bag.

Perhaps, someday, lawyers will learn that working for Trump only pays in patronage assignments to jobs they’re questionably qualified to hold. Today is apparently not that day. For now, unless lawyers want a cushy job, they should stop somehow deluding themselves into thinking these gigs are anything but pro bono.

Or, hey, maybe — just this one time — it might work for them. Good luck!

The post Trump PAC Deep In Debt… And Owes Lawyers Over A Million appeared first on Above the Law.

What qualifies a firm to be designated as among the Super Rich? As it turns out, Biglaw did so incredibly well in 2025 that the American Lawyer had to adjust the parameters needed to be included on this exclusive list. These are the Biglaw firms that had at least $1.45 million in revenue per lawyer (RPL) (up from $1.1 million in 2024) and $625,000 in profits per lawyer (PPL) (up from $550,000 in 2024). The Biglaw firms on this list are rolling around in cash, and they’re not afraid to flaunt it after coming through ahead of peer firms last year. Per Am Law, the Super Rich list is now down to 37 firms, compared to 41 last year.

Before we get to the members of the 2026 Super Rich list, we’ll let you know the four firms that dropped off, and only one was due to a merger. Those firms are Schulte Roth & Zabel (the firm merged with McDermott Will & Emery, and the combined firm, McDermott Will & Schulte, is a Super Rich firm); Fish & Richardson (didn’t make the Am Law 100); Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft (didn’t make the new financial cut for the Super Rich); and Jones Day (didn’t make the new financial cut for the Super Rich).

Now, without further ado, here are the top 10 firms on the Super Rich list:

1. Wachtell
2. Susman Godfrey
3. Davis Polk
4. Kirkland & Ellis
5. Ropes & Gray
6. Sullivan & Cromwell
7. Quinn Emanuel
8. Skadden
9. Paul, Weiss
10. Cravath

Click here to see the complete list of 37 firms.

Congratulations to all of the Biglaw firms that made it into the Super Rich club in 2025! If your firm performs well enough, 2026 could be your year to shine — after all, almost half of the Am Law 100 is already here!

The Super Rich Keep Cranking It Up—So We Did, Too [American Lawyer]

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 Ranking The Wealth Of Biglaw’s Best: Is Your Law Firm ‘Super Rich’? (2026) appeared first on Above the Law.

You know, “see you tomorrow,” works just fine.

On the third and final day of an evidentiary hearing in the lawsuit against Camp Mystic, Brad Beckworth, an attorney for the parents of one of the 8-year-old victims of the disaster, told the court that Camp Mystic lawyer Thomas Wright of Wright Close Barger & Guzman had informed him and co-counsel Christina Yarnell the previous evening that they were going to burn in hell.

And the KXAN local news has footage.

The exchange arose after a tense hearing. Beckworth told the court that he had approached another lawyer for the camp, Jeff Ray, to tell him, “You know maybe before you talk about the integrity of me and my team, maybe you just ought to ask us about the facts.” Harsh, but within the bounds of professional conversation. Another lawyer from the Camp Mystic team acknowledged that it was a good idea.

According to Beckworth, that’s when Wright entered the chat to say “You’re gonna burn in hell,” before telling Yarnell that she would also, in fact, be burning in hell.

Camp Mystic’s attorneys objected when Beckworth tried to raise this conversation in court. Not that it didn’t happen, but that it was relevant to the questioning of the current witness. Judge Maya Guerra Gamble was not amused. “Did this happen in my courtroom, or somewhere else?” she asked, with the plaintiff side of the table more or less nodding in unison. For his part, Beckworth said he wasn’t as much complaining about the remark, as citing this as indicative of Camp Mystic’s posture, which he argued has been resistant to the court’s authority.

“I believe in March, I explicitly told all the lawyers who were present that all the rules that apply when I’m in the courtroom, apply when I step out of the courtroom,” Gamble said. “I don’t know what happened… but any amount of that conversation that happened would be against the rules in this courtroom — whether I’m here or I’m not here.”

That’s the judicial equivalent of “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.”

Wright’s firm issued a statement saying it did not condone the remarks and that the firm had apologized to plaintiffs’ counsel before court began Wednesday. Wright himself provided a statement to KXAN:

After a long day in court, my emotions were running high, and I let them get the best of me. For that I sincerely apologize to both attorneys, to the court and to all involved. I do not wish to cause any distractions during this trial or any distress to the family of Cile Steward or any of the families of Camp Mystic.

Long days happen. Most attorneys manage not to tell the other side they’re going to burn in hell. Some things you can just keep to yourself.

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. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

The post Lawyer Tells Attorneys For Missing Child That They’re ‘Gonna Burn In Hell’ appeared first on Above the Law.

It got about a day of press coverage, and then legislators everywhere went right back to doing the thing the scientists just told them was dangerous.

Since the letter was published, Idaho signed a law mandating parental consent and age verification for social media. Missouri moved forward with age verification measures for minors using social media and AI chatbots. Greece announced plans to ban teens from social media entirely. At least half of US states have now passed some form of age verification or digital ID law with many others considering similar laws. The European Union continues to push age assurance requirements through various regulatory channels. Australia is trying to get other countries on board with its own social media ban for kids. All of this, proceeding as though hundreds of the world’s foremost experts on security and privacy had said nothing at all.

We’ve been writing about the serious problems with age verification mandates for years now. The arguments haven’t changed, because the underlying technical realities haven’t changed. But this letter deserves far more attention than it received because of how thoroughly it tears apart every assumption that age verification proponents rely on.

The letter starts by acknowledging what should be obvious: the signatories share the concerns about kids encountering harmful content online. This matters, because the go-to response to any criticism of age verification is to accuse critics of not caring about children. These are hundreds of scientists saying: we care, we’ve studied this, and what you’re proposing will make things worse.

We share the concerns about the negative effects that exposure to harmful content online has on children, and we applaud that regulators dedicate time and effort to protect them. However, we fear that, if implemented without careful consideration of the technological hazards and societal impact, the new regulation might cause more harm than good.

Some will argue that this is meaningless without a proposed “fix” to the problems facing children online, but that’s nonsense. As these experts argue, the focus on age verification and age gating will make things worse. It’s the classic “we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this” fallacy dressed up as child protection.

The fact that child safety problems are specific and complex is exactly why simplistic bans and age-gating cause so much damage. And it’s a genuine indictment of our current discourse that refusing to embrace a non-solution somehow gets read as not caring about the problem itself.

From there, the letter walks through the actual problems with these commonly proposed solutions in a level of detail that should be mandatory reading for any legislator voting on these laws. (It almost certainly won’t be, but we can dream.)

First, the biggest problem: these systems are ridiculously easy to circumvent. This point gets hand-waved away constantly by politicians who seem to think that because something sounds like it should work, it must. The scientists have a different view, grounded in actual evidence from actual deployments:

There is ample evidence from existing deployments that lying about age is not hard. It can be as easy as using age-verified accounts borrowed from an elder sibling or friend. In fact, there are reported cases of parents helping their children with age circumvention. There is evidence that, shortly after age-based controls appear, markets and services that sell valid accounts or credentials quickly arise. This enables the use of online services deploying age assurance at an affordable price or even for free. This is the case even if the verification is based on government-issued certificates, as shown by the ease with which fake vaccination certificates could be acquired during the COVID pandemic

We just recently talked about the evidence in Australia showing that a huge percentage of kids have simply learned how to get around age gates. Australia’s biggest accomplishment: teaching kids how to cheat the system.

The letter makes a point that almost never appears in the legislative debates: The threat model for age verification is fundamentally broken because the people building these systems assume the only adversary is a teenager. But since every adult internet user will also be subjected to these checks, and many adults will not want to submit to this kind of surveillance, we’re going to be creating huge incentives for adults to get around these age checks as well, meaning that new industries (some likely to be pretty sketchy) will arise to help people of all ages avoid this kind of surveillance. And that, alone, will make it easier for everyone (kids and adults) to bypass age gates (though in a way that will likely make many people less safe overall):

As its main goal is to restrict the activities of children, it is common to believe that the only adversary is minors trying to bypass age verification. Yet, age verification mechanisms also apply to adults that will have to prove their age in many of their routine online interactions, to access services or to keep them away from children-specific web spaces. As these checks will jeopardize their online experience, adults will have incentives to create means to bypass them both for their own use or to monetize the bypass. Thus, it is foreseeable that an increase in the deployment of age assurance will result in growing availability of circumvention mechanisms, reducing its effectiveness.

The circumvention problem alone should be enough to give legislators pause. But the letter goes further, addressing what happens to people who can’t circumvent the systems, or who try to and end up worse off.

One of the strongest sections addresses the perverse safety consequences. Deplatforming minors from mainstream services doesn’t make them stop using the internet. It pushes them toward less regulated, less secure alternatives where the risks are dramatically higher, and where these services care less about actually taking steps to protect kids:

If minors or adults are deplatformed via age-related bans, they are likely to migrate to find similar services. Since the main platforms would all be regulated, it is likely that they would migrate to fringe sites that escape regulation. This would not only negate any benefit of the age-based controls but also expose users to other dangers, such as scams or malware that are monitored in mainstream platforms but exist on smaller providers. Even if users do not move platforms, attempting circumvention to access mainstream services from a jurisdiction that does not mandate age assurance might also increase their risk. For example, free VPN providers might not follow secure practices or might monetize users’ data (especially non-EU providers that are not subject to data protection obligations), and websites accessed in other jurisdictions through VPNs would not provide the user with the data protection standards and rights which are guaranteed in the EU.

And as we keep explaining: age verification makes adults think they’ve “made the internet safe,” which creates all sorts of downstream problems — including failing to teach young people how to navigate the internet safely, while doing nothing to address the actual threats. As the letter notes, it creates a false sense of security:

The promise of children-specific services that serve as safe spaces is unrealizable with current technology. This means that children might become exposed to predators who infiltrate these spaces, either via circumvention or acquisition of false credentials that allow them to pose as minors in a verifiable way.

So the system designed to “protect the children” could end up creating verified hunting grounds for predators, while simultaneously pushing kids who get locked out of mainstream platforms toward sketchy fringe sites.

Some child safety measure.

The privacy concerns are equally serious. Age verification mandates give online services a justification — indeed, a legal requirement — to collect far more personal data than they currently do. The letter notes that age estimation and age inference technologies are “highly privacy-invasive” and “rely on the collection and processing of sensitive, private data such as biometrics, or behavioural or contextual information.”

And this data will leak. It always does. The letter points to a concrete example: 70,000 users had their government ID photos exposed after appealing age assessment errors on Discord. That’s what happens when you force the creation of massive centralized databases of sensitive identity information. You create targets.

The most alarming part of the letter is the one that gets the least discussion: centralization of power. The scientists warn, bluntly, that age verification infrastructure doubles as censorship infrastructure:

Those deciding which age-based controls need to exist, and those enforcing them gain a tremendous influence on what content is accessible to whom on the internet. Recall that age assurance checks might go well beyond what is regulated in the offline world and set up an infrastructure to enforce arbitrary attribute-based policies online. In the wrong hands, such as an authoritarian government, this influence could be used to censor information and prevent users from accessing services, for example, preventing access to LGBTQ+ content. Centralizing access to the internet easily leads to internet shutdowns, as seen recently in Iran. If enforcement happens at the browser or operating system level, the manufacturers of this software would gain even more control to make decisions on what content is accessible on the Internet. This would enable primarily big American companies to control European citizens’ access to the internet.

This should be the part that makes everyone uncomfortable, regardless of their political orientation.

This brings us to what is already happening to real people right now.

A recent article in The Verge details how age verification systems are creating serious, specific harms for trans internet users. Kansas passed a law invalidating trans people’s driver’s licenses and IDs overnight, requiring them to obtain new IDs with incorrect gender markers. Combine that with age verification laws requiring digital identity checks, and you get exactly the kind of discriminatory exclusion the scientists warned about:

“These systems are specifically designed to look for discrepancies, and they’re going to find them,” said Kayyali. “If you are a woman and anyone on the street would say ‘that’s a woman,’ but that’s not what your ID says, that’s a discrepancy.” The danger of these discrepancies extends not just to trans people, but to anyone else whose appearance doesn’t match normative gendered expectations.

“A lot of age estimation systems are built on a combination of anthropological sex markers and skin texture. This means they fall over and provide inaccurate results when faced with people whose markers and skin texture, well, don’t match,” explains Keyes. For example, one of the most prominent markers algorithms measure to determine sex is the brow ridge. “Suppose you have a trans man on HRT and a trans woman on HRT, the former with low brow ridges and rougher skin, the latter with high ridges and softer skin,” Keyes explains. “The former is likely to have their age overestimated; the latter, underestimated.”

So you have biometric systems that are specifically designed to flag discrepancies between someone’s appearance and their identity documents. And you have a government that is deliberately creating discrepancies in trans people’s identity documents. The result is predictable and ugly: trans people get locked out, flagged, forced to out themselves, or simply blocked from accessing services that everyone else uses freely.

Most of these verification systems are black boxes with no meaningful appeal process. The laws themselves are written with deliberately vague language requiring platforms to verify age through “a commercially available database” or “any other commercially reasonable method,” with nothing about transparency, accuracy, or redress for people who get wrongly flagged or excluded.

And in many of these laws, the definitions of content “harmful to children” are flexible enough to encompass LGBTQ+ communities, information about birth control, and whatever else a given administration decides it doesn’t like. As one of Techdirt’s favorite technology and speech lawyers, Kendra Albert, noted to The Verge:

“I think it’s fair to say that if you look at the history of obscenity in the US and what’s considered explicit material, stuff with queer and trans material is much more likely to be considered sexually explicit even though it’s not. You may be in a circumstance where sites with more content about queer and trans people are more likely to face repercussions for not implementing appropriate age-gating or being tagged as explicit.”

So to summarize: the age verification infrastructure being built across the world (1) doesn’t actually work to keep kids from accessing content, (2) pushes kids toward less safe alternatives, (3) creates verified “safe spaces” that predators can infiltrate, (4) forces massive collection of sensitive personal data that will inevitably leak, (5) creates infrastructure purpose-built for censorship and authoritarian control, (6) systematically discriminates against trans people, people of color, the elderly, immigrants, and anyone whose appearance doesn’t match neat bureaucratic categories, (7) concentrates enormous power over internet access in the hands of governments and a handful of tech companies, and (8) lacks any scientific evidence that it will actually improve children’s mental health or safety.

Seems like a problem.

And 438 scientists from 32 countries put their names on a letter saying so. The letter closes with this:

We believe that it is dangerous and socially unacceptable to introduce a large-scale access control mechanism without a clear understanding of the implications that different design decisions can have on security, privacy, equality, and ultimately on the freedom of decision and autonomy of individuals and nations.

“Dangerous and socially unacceptable.” That isn’t just me being dramatic. That’s the considered, collective judgment of hundreds of researchers whose professional expertise is specifically in the systems being deployed.

Meanwhile, the laws keep passing. Nobody seems to have bothered asking the scientists. Or, more accurately, the scientists volunteered their expertise in the most public way possible, and everyone in a position to act on it decided that the political appeal of “protecting the children” was more important than whether the proposed method of protection actually protects children, or whether it creates a sprawling new infrastructure for surveillance, discrimination, and censorship that will be almost impossible to dismantle once it’s built.

The scientists’ letter called for studying the benefits and harms of age verification before mandating it at internet scale. That seems like a comically low bar. “Maybe understand whether this works before requiring it everywhere” shouldn’t be a controversial position. And yet here we are, with legislators around the world charging ahead, building systems that security experts have told them are broken, in pursuit of goals that the evidence says these systems can’t achieve, at a cost to privacy, security, equality, and freedom that nobody in a position of power seems interested in calculating.

438 Experts Said Age Verification Is Dangerous. Legislators Are Moving Forward With It Anyway.

More Law-Related Stories From Techdirt:

The Right Wing Origins Age Verification Laws Don’t Disappear Just Because They’re Going Bipartisan.
All But 3 Of The 4,499 Refugees Admitted To The US Under Trump Are White South Africans
Oh Look, The MAGA FTC Built The Censorship Industrial Complex It Was Screaming About
ACAB: Cops Are Bringing ‘Delinquency Of A Minor’ Charges Against Adults Who Assist Students During Anti-ICE Protests

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* Judges embrace paralegal’s suggestion for modernizing briefs. [Law360]

* Legal academics plead with ABA to maintain law school diversity standard. [Law.com]

* Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyer expects Trump to issue pardon. [Politico]

* Amicus reform proposal rejected. [Reuters]

* Lawyer and former Virginia Lt. Governor kills wife and self. [Guardian]

The post Morning Docket: 04.17.26 appeared first on Above the Law.

You Can’t Just Call Renovations A “National Security Necessity”: The administration’s ballroom plan has two left feet.

Looking For The Best Summer Associate Programs?: Look no further!

The T14 Is Dead. Long Live The T14: People will still use the term even if the data tells them otherwise.

Dicking Around Is Not A Crime: The only peace disturbance was arresting a protesting grandma!

What A Horrible Time To Show Support: DLA Piper contributed to Eric Swalwell’s campaign after the rape allegations went public.

The post For Some Reason Sotomayor Is The Only One Apologizing — See Also appeared first on Above the Law.

According to data collected by ALM, which firm’s compensation for all partners increased the most in 2025?

Hint: Compensation for all partners increased over 68% at this firm last year.

See the answer on the next page.

The post Partners At This Biglaw Firm Got Quite The Raise appeared first on Above the Law.

If you’ve been following along at home (and if you haven’t, this saga has been going on for months — Judge Leon was side-eyeing the government’s constitutional theory back in January), this is the case where the National Trust for Historic Preservation sued to stop Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom — the one being built on the rubble of the demolished East Wing, with zero congressional authorization and a funding structure Leon once memorably called a “Rube Goldberg contraption.” On March 31st, Leon dropped his preliminary injunction and told the administration that, surprising no one who had been paying attention, presidents don’t get to freestyle renovations on national landmarks without an act of Congress.

But Leon, cognizant of the genuine security complexities at any active White House construction site, included a safety-and-security exception. It was a reasonable gesture. The administration promptly tried to drive a 90,000-square-foot ballroom through it.

This judge is having exactly zero of this nonsense, writing, “It is, to say the least, incredible, if not disingenuous, that Defendants now argue that my Order does not stop ballroom construction because of the safety-and-security exception!”

In today’s opinion, available below, Leon clarified and amended his injunction — and he was not subtle about his irritation with the government’s reading of his original order. Right out of the gate:

Defendants argue that the entire ballroom construction project, from tip to tail, falls within the safety-and-security exception and therefore may proceed unabated. That is neither a reasonable nor a correct reading of my Order!

Gotta love a judge that is unafraid of the exclamation mark! This is a federal district judge — a George W. Bush appointee, lest we forget, not exactly a card-carrying member of the so-called “Resistance” — using the rhetorical equivalent of a buzzer on the administration’s argument.

So what does the amended order actually do? Leon drew a clean line: above-ground construction of the proposed ballroom is stopped. Below-ground construction, including actual national security facilities like bunkers, bomb shelters, military installations, and medical facilities, can proceed. Construction necessary to protect the structural integrity of the White House, handle waterproofing, secure the site, and cover the underground elements can also move forward. What cannot move forward is the ballroom itself.

This is where it gets really delicious for anyone who has been watching this case. The administration previously told the court that the below-ground and above-ground elements of the project were independent of each other. They said the underground work was “driven by national security concerns independent of the above-grade construction.” They even assured the court the below-ground elements didn’t “lock in” the above-ground design. Leon quotes this back to them with what I can only describe as judicial relish.

Defendants’ latest representations that “the entire project advances critical national-security objectives as an integrated whole” are in direct conflict with Defendants’ prior representations that the above-ground and below-ground portions of the project were “independent of” one another.

Leon used the word “brazenly” to describe the government’s latest pivot. That’s gotta sting.

The administration also threw in the argument that security features like missile-resistant steel columns, drone-proof roofing, and bulletproof windows bring the whole above-ground structure within the security exception. Leon dispatched this efficiently, noting that those features are still months or years away from being installed — so any claim of “irreparable harm” from not having them right now is belied by the administration’s own admission that the project won’t be done until 2028.

On the national security classified declarations — four of them — that the government submitted ex parte? Leon reviewed all of them. They apparently shed no light on why an above-ground ballroom is a national security necessity. If the government had something classified and convincing, it didn’t make it into those declarations.

Judge Leon also has a line towards the end of the opinion that low key calls out a lot of Trump 2.0 justifications for doing whatever-the-fuck they want to do: “national security is not a blank check to proceed with otherwise unlawful activity.”

Say it louder for the people in the back. Leon notes that he has taken the national security concerns seriously throughout this case — which is why the exception exists in the first place — but judicial deference is not judicial abdication. He cites precedent standing for the proposition that deference applies “so long as the government’s declarations raise legitimate concerns,” not as a magic incantation that ends all scrutiny.

Leon also took a moment to note, with what I imagine was a certain weary exasperation, that he has “no desire or intention to be dragooned into the role of construction manager.” He never required the administration to get written pre-approval for individual construction decisions. The point of the opinion, he explains patiently, is simply to clarify that the injunction does, in fact, stop the ballroom. That this needs clarification at all says something.

The DOJ has its appeal already pending at the D.C. Circuit, which previously remanded the case for exactly this clarification, so we’ll see what the Circuit does now that Leon has given them what they asked for.

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 Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.

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Most in-house lawyers talk about AI as if it is a future event that will arrive with a contract, a vendor, and a clean implementation plan. The truth is far less organized. AI is already inside your company. It arrived through your employees’ browsers, their phones, their inbox extensions, their creativity, their exhaustion, and their desire to get more done in a day than the system allows. You are governing it whether you mean to or not. The only question is whether you understand what has already begun.

I recorded a “Notes to My (Legal) Self” conversation with Heath Morgan, an in-house attorney who spends his days thinking about AI governance and his nights writing speculative fiction. His book, “The Memory Project,” explores a world in which digital personas from the past and future become part of daily life. As we talked, it became clear that his fictional world is less of a leap and more of a mirror. Companies are already building their own “memory projects” without realizing it. Not curated. Not intentional. Just accumulating. Every prompt, every tool, every autopilot, every quiet workflow decision is creating a parallel record of your business.

Heath said something that stuck with me: “The question is not whether your employees are using AI. It is whether they are using it intentionally or unintentionally.” That distinction is the heart of the problem for in-house counsel. Because unintentional adoption is where risk concentrates. It is also where culture forms.

The New Latchkey Generation Is Already In Your Org Chart

Heath draws a comparison to what he calls the “social media latchkey kid generation.” For 20 years, we gave an entire population powerful technology without meaningful guidance. We are living with the consequences. In the workplace, something similar is happening with AI. Tools are being marketed directly to employees. They promise convenience. They promise saved hours. They rarely mention downstream risk.

By the time legal is ready to publish its polished AI policy, the workforce is already three steps ahead, adopting tools informally. This is how every major technology wave has entered the enterprise. BYOD. Cloud storage. Enterprise messaging. Shadow IT. AI is simply faster and more embedded than anything before it.

Heath’s point is that the legal team’s assumptions are already outdated. You cannot govern AI as if the organization started from zero. You have to govern the reality you inherited. That means mapping actual behavior instead of theoretical workflows.

Corporate Memory Is Being Built Bot By Bot

One of the most interesting ideas in Heath’s book is “conversational time travel.” He imagines a world where people talk to digital versions of themselves constructed from data and past interactions. While it sounds like science fiction, the corporate version is happening right now. Every AI tool used across your company is learning your patterns, documents, tone, internal preferences, and workflows. Even if you never approved it.

If you do nothing, that becomes your corporate memory. Not the official retention schedule. Not the carefully governed document library. The machine memory is built from prompt histories, scraped emails, and user behavior. And once that memory exists in external systems, you cannot meaningfully retrieve it.

Most organizations are not prepared for that. It affects IP strategy. It affects confidentiality. It affects investigations and discovery. It affects employment. It affects vendor risk. And it affects culture, because an organization eventually becomes what it repeats.

The Ethical Frame: Legacy Is Being Written Without Consent

When Heath talks about legacy, he means something broader than posterity. He means the record of who we are that persists in data and models long after the moment passes. The same applies to organizations. Every decision to use or ignore AI tools becomes part of a legacy of accountability.

Ignoring unintentional adoption does not protect the organization. It cedes control. It also weakens your moral authority to govern intentional adoption later. If your teams have spent two years improvising with AI, they will not welcome restrictions that arrive late and without context. Governance fails when it does not reflect reality.

Heath puts it simply: “If we do not engage now, we are outsourcing our legacy to whoever builds these tools.” For in-house counsel, that should feel familiar. It is the same lesson the profession learned with SaaS, cloud, and messaging platforms. Technology expands faster than policy. Culture stabilizes before legal notices. And by the time legal catches up, the risk surface is already shaped.

The Practical Question: How Should In-House Counsel Respond Now

The first step is acknowledging that unintentional adoption is already happening. This is not a failing. It is a signal. Employees are trying to solve real workflow pain that the business has not solved for them. That makes AI governance a partnership project, not an audit.

The second step is to map reality. Not a theoretical inventory. A real one. Which teams are using AI? Which tools. For what purposes? With what data? If you run a risk program, treat it like a shadow supply chain mapping exercise. You cannot govern what you cannot see, and you cannot see what you do not ask.

Once you know what is actually happening, you can design something livable. Lightweight approvals. Clear no-go zones. A set of recommended tools that do not expose the company to unnecessary risk. A permissions framework that reflects the actual risk of the underlying work. And a governance model that prioritizes what matters rather than policing every experiment.

Lastly, you have to think several steps ahead. Because the real risk is not the tools your employees are using today. That is the short-term headache. The long-term risk is the implicit “corporate memory” being built from those choices. You will inherit it if you do nothing. You can shape it if you intervene.

Why This Matters Right Now

Heath’s fictional world includes a moment he calls the “gray data breach.” A catastrophic exposure of intimate personal data that forces society to split into two markets. Privacy by default and privacy as a luxury. It is fiction. It is also plausible. And in the corporate context, we are already watching that divide form. Some companies treat privacy as a fundamental value. Others treat it as a premium feature. Employees are making similar choices, sometimes unconsciously, every time they choose a tool.

Fiction is useful because it lets us ask future questions early. For in-house counsel, the core question is this: What version of your company do you want the future to inherit?

If you do nothing, the answer will be accidental. You will inherit a patchwork of AI tools, fragmented data trails, inconsistent decision logic, and models trained on content you never reviewed.

If you engage, you can make your organization intentional. You can define what is protected, what is shared, what is stored, and what is deleted. You can set the tone for identity, governance, and culture long before regulators decide what the floor looks like.

This is the work of in-house counsel in the age of AI. Identify what is already happening. Shape behavior. Protect the organization. And build a legacy that the future will not regret inheriting.

Olga V. Mack is the CEO of TermScout, where she builds legal systems that make contracts faster to understand, easier to operate, and more trustworthy in real business conditions. Her work focuses on how legal rules allocate power, manage risk, and shape decisions under uncertainty. A serial CEO and former General Counsel, Olga previously led a legal technology company through acquisition by LexisNexis. She teaches at Berkeley Law and is a Fellow at CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. She has authored several books on legal innovation and technology, delivered six TEDx talks, and her insights regularly appear in Forbes, Bloomberg Law, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and Above the Law. Her work treats law as essential infrastructure, designed for how organizations actually operate.

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As Techdirt explained last week, Renea Gamble — a 62-year-old grandmother — was arrested last October at a “No Kings” anti-Trump protest in Fairhope, Alabama for the crime of wearing a 7-foot inflatable phallus from Spirit Halloween while waving a sign reading “No Dick Tator.” Corporal Andrew Babb of the Fairhope Police Department approached Gamble, told her he was “serious as a heart attack,” before throwing her to the ground, calling for backup, and handcuffing the senior citizen for disorderly conduct or something in that vein.

The scene was captured on bodycam footage that subsequently went viral, because that’s what happens with video of multiple cops trying to stuff a giant penis into the back of a squad car. That’s what the internet is for.

Claiming she was engaged in “disorderly conduct,” the officer demanded to know how Gamble would explain the costume to his children. The answer, of course, is that they’re his kids and it’s not the rest of the world’s job to protect him from awkward conversations.

Rather than doing the smart thing and quietly pretending the whole episode never happened, Fairhope’s city attorney doubled down, slapping Gamble with additional charges including disturbing the peace and giving a false name to law enforcement. That last one stemming from Gamble obviously sarcastically telling officers her name was “Auntie Fa” after they’d already pinned her to the ground. Hey, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take!

You also miss a hefty percentage of the obviously frivolous charges you bring, which is what happened here.

On Wednesday, Fairhope Municipal Judge Haymes Snedeker acquitted Gamble on every count — misdemeanor disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, disturbing the peace, and the false name charge. Who would have thought a closing argument that included the immortal line, “There is no constitutional right to wear a total erect penis on the side of the road,” would shrivel in the cold reality of a judicial proceeding.

And yet, even while clearing Gamble, Judge Snedeker engaged in what can only be described as judicial baby-splitting. Concluding that he didn’t believe Corporal Babb was trying to suppress Gamble’s free speech rights, Snedeker suggested there “may have been” enough probable cause for the arrest if not enough to convict.

It strains credulity to see this as anything other than an attempt to stifle her free speech rights. One suspects Judge Snedeker hoped that letting Gamble off the hook while patting the cops on the head and telling them they didn’t do anything wrong would allow everyone to walk away saving face. It took a lot of judicial hubris to think that would work.

One might even call it… cocky.

“As Alabamians, we dare to defend our rights,” [Gamble] said. “This fight is not over.”

Her attorney, David Gespass, said a countersuit accusing the Fairhope Police Department of violating Gamble’s First Amendment rights is likely.

“This is the only reasonable conclusion the judge could have drawn,” he said. “Whether or not there was probable cause, as the judge claimed there was, that’s another question for another time. I disagree with that as well.”

Maybe ixnay on the whole “Alabamians defend their rights” talk. That’s historically not been a great tagline. Still, in this case, it does seem as though Gamble has good cause to pursue the case further.

Since Gamble’s arrest, the local No Kings protests have grown to nearly 1,200 attendees. Gamble herself returned to a recent rally — masked and wearing an inflatable eggplant costume.

How will Babb explain that costume to his kids?!?

Earlier: Prosecutors Still Trying To Convict 62-Year-Old Woman For Wearing Penis Costume To Anti-Trump Protest

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. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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There is some very strategic and intentional thinking that has been part of a much more serious growth effort at some firms. They are recognizing that their relative size and profitability compared to rivals is important.

—  Kent Zimmermann, a partner at the law firm consultancy Zeughauser Group, in comments given to Bloomberg Law, concerning some of the changes that Kirkland’s competitors have made in order to keep up with the biggest of the Biglaw Joneses. “It’s no time to take the foot off the gas,” Zimmermann said.

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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For the unfamiliar: Swalwell — a California congressman, former presidential candidate, fellow attorney, and cable news fixture who made a cottage industry out of Trump opposition — resigned from Congress and abandoned his California gubernatorial campaign after the bottom fell out spectacularly. A CNN investigation published April 10 featured four women describing sexual misconduct by the representative, including a former staffer who says he raped her while she was heavily intoxicated, leaving her bruised and bleeding. That former staffer, who had worked for Swalwell since she was 20 years old, said it was actually the second time he had nonconsensual sexual contact with her while she was drunk, the first occurring back in 2019 when she was still on his staff. Two other women alleged that Swalwell sent them unsolicited explicit messages and nude photos after connecting with them online over their shared interest in Democratic politics. The allegations describe a consistent pattern: Swalwell, the married father of three, targeted women in their twenties who were finding their professional footing, making them feel special before escalating to alleged unwanted physical contact, often tied to heavy drinking.

Swalwell denied everything, calling the allegations “false” and claiming they came from political opponents trying to kneecap the frontrunner in the governor’s race, and had his attorneys fire off cease-and-desist letters to two of the accusers within days of CNN first seeking comment. Neither the denials nor the legal threats did much to stop the bleeding. He dropped his gubernatorial campaign (on April 12) and then, on April 14, resigned from Congress entirely. That’s the backdrop. Now here’s the Biglaw angle, and yes, there is very much a Biglaw angle.

Attorneys at some of the most recognizable names in the Am Law 100 had opened their wallets for Swalwell in a big way. Donors from DLA Piper, Kirkland & Ellis, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, White & Case, Paul Hastings, Morrison & Foerster, and others had contributed tens of thousands of dollars to the Democrat as he championed himself as a rule-of-law crusader and Trump antagonist. For a certain stripe of Biglaw lawyer, Swalwell was catnip — a prosecutor-turned-congressman who spoke their language.

Now those same donors are doing what one might call a reevaluation.

Neal Manne, a Susman Godfrey partner in Houston who made a $5,000 contribution to Swalwell’s gubernatorial campaign last fall, told Law.com he was caught off guard by the allegations. “I was very surprised and disappointed,” Manne said. “It seems like he did the right thing in terminating his gubernatorial campaign and resigning from Congress.” Manne contextualized his support the way many donors do when the person they backed turns out to be, well, this: “[Swalwell] had been active in the House impeachment of President Trump [and] spoke in support of the rule of law, which is something that is important to me as a lawyer, and so I have made a political contribution to him as I have hundreds of other candidates.” Swalwell is, apparently, just one of them.

Manne wasn’t the only Susman Godfrey partner caught in this particular dragnet; partners Bill Carmody, Shawn Rabin, and Stephen Shackelford also contributed thousands to Swalwell’s now-defunct gubernatorial run.

Kristina Lawson, managing partner at Hanson Bridgett in San Francisco, made two separate $5,000 contributions to the campaign and issued a statement that left little ambiguity about where she stands now, “I take these allegations extremely seriously and stand with victims of sexual assault and misconduct. I deeply regret my past support.”

That’s the kind of clean, unequivocal statement crisis PR professionals dream of. Good for her.

UPDATE 4/16/25 9:01p.m.:

An earlier version of this story indicated that, according to reporting by Law.com and publicly available filings, the DLA Piper political action committee made a $5,000 contribution to the Eric Swalwell for Governor 2026 campaign on April 13. However, a spokesperson for the firm pointed Above the Law to additional documentation that indicated the DLA Piper PAC made the contribution on April 1 and voided their Swalwell contribution on April 13.

Look, the donors who gave before April 10 have a ready-made defense: they didn’t know. Swalwell was, by Biglaw’s political calculus, an attractive candidate; an attorney who invoked the rule of law, opposed Trump loudly and often, and had a plausible path to the California governor’s mansion. Manne’s “I’ve given to hundreds of people” framing is, frankly, a pretty honest account of how large-firm political giving works. You write checks, sometimes they cash awkwardly.

The women who came forward described a pattern of sexual misconduct by Swalwell. One former staffer described years of carrying what happened to her in silence. “I’ve always lived with a huge secret,” she told CNN. “The only person who could ruin Eric Swalwell is Eric Swalwell.”

Those women deserve to have their accounts treated seriously. And it’s not surprising tha the Biglaw donors are backing away from Swalwell.

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 Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.

The post Biglaw’s Awkward Reckoning With Eric Swalwell appeared first on Above the Law.

Lawyers do this all the time. They take the call from a recruiter, hear a bigger number, see a better title, and convince themselves it is progress. Sometimes it is. Often it is not. A few years later, they are billing more hours, earning a bit more money, and wondering why they still do not control their practice.

The problem is not the move. The problem is the lens through which the move was evaluated.

Define the Career You Are Actually Trying to Build

Decide early whether you want to be an employee or an owner.

If your goal is to become an equity partner, then you are not just choosing a job. You are choosing a platform to build a business. That requires a different mindset. You are no longer asking what the firm will give you. You are asking what the firm will allow you to become.

That distinction separates lawyers who build careers from lawyers who cycle through firms.

Too many lawyers never pause long enough to define the end goal. They move reactively. They optimize for the next year instead of the next decade. And they wake up years later with a strong resume but no real leverage.

Recognize the Limits of Salary

Understand that salary is the easiest number to compare and the hardest one to grow.

A base salary feels safe. It is guaranteed. It is immediate. It gives you a sense of progress. But it is also capped. It is tied to hours, internal budgets, and decisions made by others.

Contrast that with generating your own work. When you bring in business, the ceiling changes. Your value is no longer tied to what you bill. It is tied to where you originate. That is where careers accelerate.

Yet many lawyers trade that upside for a slightly higher salary. They move to firms where they will be well paid but structurally dependent. They become very good at doing the work, but never get the opportunity to own it.

That is not a short-term trade. That is a long-term constraint.

Press for Real Answers About Partnership

Ask how people actually make equity partner, not how the firm describes it in a brochure.

Every firm says there is a path. Fewer can show you one. Look beyond the talking points. Ask how many lawyers have made equity partner in recent years. Ask how long it took. Ask what level of business they had when they got there.

Also, ask about the buy-in. Even if you do not get an exact number, you should get a sense of the range. More importantly, you should understand what level of originations the firm considers meaningful.

Some firms are transparent. Others are not. When the answers feel vague or constantly shifting, assume the target is unclear internally as well. That makes your job harder.

Clarity gives you something to build toward. Ambiguity keeps you guessing.

Take Inventory of Your Actual Book

Be honest about the work you can bring in today and in the near future.

Many lawyers overestimate this. Others underestimate it. Both mistakes matter. You need a clear-eyed view of your relationships, your potential clients, and the rates they will support.

If your network generates insurance defense or coverage work, that is valuable. But it typically comes with lower rates. If you move to a firm that expects premium rates across the board, your clients may not follow you. Or the firm may not want the work.

That leaves you in a difficult position. You are busy, but not building anything that is yours.

The right firm is not the one with the highest rates. It is the one that aligns with the work you can realistically generate.

Make Sure the Firm Wants Your Clients

Pay attention to what the firm actually values, not just what it says it values.

Every firm has a personality. You can see it in the matters it highlights, the clients it prioritizes, and the lawyers it rewards. If your type of work does not fit that profile, you will feel it.

It may show up in subtle ways. Resistance to taking on certain clients. Questions about rates. Lack of enthusiasm when you bring in opportunities.

Over time, that friction discourages you from developing your own business. You start to question whether it is worth the effort. You begin referring work out instead of bringing it in.

That is how potential books of business disappear before they ever take shape.

Evaluate the Investment in Your Growth

Accept that building a practice requires time, money, and institutional support.

You will need to attend conferences, join organizations, travel, speak, and invest in relationships. Those efforts cost money. They also take you away from billable work.

So ask what support the firm provides. Is there a meaningful marketing budget? Is it accessible? Are there people who can help you develop your profile and expand your reach?

If the answer is that you are on your own, you can still succeed. But you will be doing it without a safety net. Every dollar spent and every hour invested will come directly from you.

A firm that supports your efforts is investing in your future value. That matters.

Think About the Size of the Platform

Consider how far your relationships can take you within the firm.

If you are building a network that spans multiple industries or jurisdictions, you need a firm that can capture that work. A broader platform allows you to say yes more often. It allows you to keep work in-house rather than sending it elsewhere.

Without that platform, you become a connector who cannot fully capitalize on your connections. You introduce opportunities, but cannot service them. Over time, that limits both your growth and your credibility.

A firm with a wider footprint gives you more ways to convert relationships into work.

Align Rates With Reality

Accept that not every client can or will pay top-of-market rates.

There is a natural desire to move up the rate ladder. Higher rates signal prestige and can increase revenue. But they also narrow the pool of clients who can hire you.

If your network includes clients with different budgets and needs, you need a firm that can accommodate that range. Otherwise, you will constantly be trying to force clients into a pricing structure that does not fit.

That tension either drives clients away or keeps you from bringing them in at all.

Alignment between your clients and your firm’s economics is critical. Without it, growth becomes difficult.

Focus on the Long Game

Look past the first year and think about where you will be in ten years.

The first-year numbers are easy to measure. The long-term trajectory is not. But it is far more important.

Ask yourself whether the move puts you in a position to build something that lasts. Will you have the opportunity to develop clients, grow relationships, and create a sustainable book of business? Or will you be primarily servicing the work of others?

The answer to that question will define your career far more than any signing bonus.

Come Back to Where We Started

Make a move that looks like a win on paper, and you may quietly lose ground where it matters most.

The lawyers who get where they want to go are deliberate. They choose environments that support their goals. They align their firms with their clients. They prioritize opportunity over immediate compensation.

They understand that the real objective is not just to work at a firm, but to become part of the business itself.

Everything else is temporary.

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.

The post The Salary Trap: The Move That Looks Better On Paper appeared first on Above the Law.

“It’s not reflective of anything anymore. It’s not a remotely coherent grouping,” ​said Duke law professor Stuart Benjamin, who analyzed 36 years of rankings data in a post on the Volokh Conspiracy blog that ​argued the T-14 is obsolete.
…
Law school admissions consultant Mike Spivey, who closely tracks the rankings, said the T-14 has outlived its usefulness as an indicator of which law schools are consistently the best. A system that ​groups law schools into tiers ​would be more useful ⁠for applicants than an ever-changing ordinal ranking, he said, noting that U.S. News’ medical school rankings follow the tier model.

Benjamin said a single term for the most consistently high-performing schools is ​still valuable and suggested the “T-11,” since 11 schools have remained more stable at the top ​of the rankings.

There’s been a definite vibe shift in what meaning is left in the term; we gave our extended thoughts on its significance on last week’s episode of Thinking Like A Lawyer. And there’s an open question on what’s to blame here: are schools actually jumping around in quality year to year or does this have more to do with the observer? UC Berkeley’s Erwin Chemerinsky commented that the school’s ranking results from shifts in U.S. News’ formula rather than any meaningful change in his school. That’s also what you’d expect to hear from a school that fell out of the T14 — I haven’t come across any naysaying from Stanford about stealing Yale’s spot.

Stuart Benjamin over at Volokh made the point much better than I did on the podcast that the T14 referent is heavily nostalgia-based — he brought the data to prove it! His proposed replacement for the T14 is to go with the T10. Doing so would knock my alma mater out of the conversation, but sacrifices must be made for nice round numbers.

Even if the data shows the T14 is dead, I wager we will witness its undying for years to come. Former members of the T14 wouldn’t benefit from giving up the association (Georgetown and UT come to mind). Newcomers like Wash U. and Vandy have no incentive to get off the pot when they just sat down. And do you really think that partner who is reticent to open PDFs is going change the mental school ranking schema they’ve had for four decades because someone showed them a graph? The “T14” will go the way of “Ivy League.” Ivy League wasn’t even a prestige designation at first — it was a cohort of old schools that played sports together. You probably know the canon Ivy schools: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Yale. But there are many claimants to the Ivy title. You have your public Ivies like Rutgers and William and Mary — with Rutgers being an especially strong candidate from a historical perspective. You have your “Ivy Plus” schools like Stanford and MIT. There’s even a whole book written about the 63 “Hidden Ivies” you could read if you need a scholastic break from billing those hours.

What will be lost if U.S. News debuts next year’s T14 list with 20 members? As a practical matter, not much. Assuming the list tracks job placement after graduation, a list of 20 well-placing schools means that applying students have a wider safety net of schools they can apply to that will let them pay off their gargantuan student loans. If you’re a data-driven prestige hound, you can stick to the T10 to stem the bleeding for a while but let’s not kid ourselves — isn’t this just a legal take on the New Ivies rebranding? Chemerinsky is probably right in that the rankings changing don’t have all that much to do with the schools themselves. The real change is happening inward and our internal models of where these schools fall won’t change all that much.

Law School Ranking Shakeup Sparks Calls To Retire ‘T-14’ [Reuters]

Earlier: End Of An Era: Yale Booted From No. 1 Spot In Historic U.S. News Law School Rankings Shakeup

All You Need To Know About The 2025 U.S. News Law School Rankings

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.

The post The T14 Is Not Dead. It Is Undying, And That’s Okay appeared first on Above the Law.

And for that, Justice Sotomayor apologized. Justice Kavanaugh, meanwhile, is not under any pressure to do anything about greenlighting a new wave of racial profiling.

It’s a reminder that the Supreme Court — and Supreme Court coverage — consistently gets more worked up over possible behind-the-scenes drama than the Court reshaping basic civil rights. It’s also a reminder that conservatives are the biggest snowflakes in the world.

Sotomayor’s University of Kansas remarks referred to Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, the September 2025 shadow docket order inventing the ICE enforcement tactics we now shorthand as “Kavanaugh Stops” in academic literature, legal journalism, and basically everywhere except the chambers of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh used the Court’s emergency docket to lay out — without full briefing or argument — a new law enforcement standard that racial profiling is perfectly fine as long as the minority is also speaking Spanish and working a job that involves a wrench. To be precise, Kavanaugh explained that race can motivate a law enforcement stop if it appears that the minority works “in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants.”

In Brett Kavanaugh’s America, the Fourth Amendment requires a credit check. If you’re Latino right now and you don’t want to find yourself in an El Salvadoran prison by mistake, the best legal advice is to wear a top hat and monocle everywhere you go.

Kavanaugh, writing alone, reassured the public that these stops would be “typically brief” and that U.S. citizens would “promptly go free” once they produced proof of their citizenship. This was, as our colleague Liz Dye put it at the time, horseshit. It remained horseshit 50 days later, when the count of detained U.S. citizens cleared 170. The record in the underlying case included plaintiffs who had been pushed against fences, zip-tied, held for days in unsanitary facilities, denied phone calls, and had their documentation dismissed on the ground they didn’t “look like” their names. Army veteran George Retes. Nineteen-year-old Jose Hermosillo. Julio Noriega. Maria Greeley. Twenty-plus detained children. The Stanford Law Review just published a full-dress legal autopsy of Kavanaugh’s concurrence under the title “Factual Revisionism.”

Against that record, saying Justice Keggy McAssaulterton might “not know any person who works by the hour” was beyond fair for a guy declaring that the entire construction industry is inherently suspect. Saying “race plus looks blue collar equals reasonable suspicion” was a constitutional reboot. Only one of those things got an apology this week.

The reaction to Sotomayor’s original remarks reflect the media’s desperate desire to rebrand legal coverage as The Real Supreme Court Justices Of One First. The decisions are just McGuffins setting up the next gossipy tale of behind-the-scenes tension, which is itself the most obnoxious part of the Supreme Court beat but for the companion narrative of “look at how they’re really all best friends!” Leaks, drama, reconciliation, and a collegiality reunion special replacing Andy Cohen with some T14 law school dean — it’s the circle of Supreme Court coverage life. It’s all distraction. Bread and circuses updated for 2026 America as Big Macs and Big Brother.

Sotomayor’s candor becomes the real disruption rather than the topic she was candid about. And that framing contributed to this apology. And coverage of this apology will now double down on the idea that her comments were the problem as opposed to a refreshingly straightforward account of the substantive shitshow Kavanaugh unleashed when he decided ICE can arbitrarily harass any Brown person with a landscaping business.

As Jay Willis of Balls & Strikes notes, Sotomayor’s apology provides a depressing counterpoint to the latest out of Clarence Thomas. On the same day that Sotomayor felt the need — or, perhaps, was pressured? — to apologize, Thomas delivered a televised broadside declaring that “progressivism” seeks to “replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence” and holds a spirit of “cynicism, rejection, hostility and animus” toward America. He is almost certainly not apologizing any time soon. Sam Alito is out here flying insurrection-curious flags and also never apologized. Though he did throw his wife under the bus over it.

To borrow from a movie about a Harvard Law student, conservatism means never having to say you’re sorry.

The obsession with Supreme Court decorum is a one-way street, which is a feature, not a bug. The more violent the impact of a policy, the more aggressively the perpetrators insist on polite treatment for themselves. It’s essential to the project because, one, it’s vital to distract the public from the actual, tangible harm being done with reality show nonsense. The story can’t be “third generation U.S. citizen zip-tied and beaten by ICE because they’re working as a nanny,” it has to be “liberal justice violates the most sacred taboo of America’s judicial system by hurting her colleague’s feelings.”

And two, a fixation with decorum artificially blunts anyone trying to clearly articulate reality. If you call a racial profiling doctrine “a racial-profiling doctrine,” then it crosses the line into “inappropriate.” Call ICE kidnappings of U.S. citizens “kidnappings” and the scolds come out in droves to brand you “uncivil.” Point out that the author of a 10-page concurrence greenlighting all of that probably doesn’t personally know anyone who works by the hour or have a practical grasp of what it’s like to live that life and — well, you saw what happened.

Sotomayor has spoken publicly this month about her earnest belief in maintaining civil relationships with colleagues even when she dissents so much that she’s running out of synonyms for “disgraceful.” Chris Geidner argued that Sotomayor’s apology is strategically sound because Kavanaugh could be a future swing vote. That’s a fair theory, though I’d like to think even the most cynical of justices are going to do what they’re going to do, and not make decisions about the future of constitutional law based on interpersonal beefs. It also overlooks the power of negative reinforcement: showing someone the smoke he might catch for a bad decision can be at least as persuasive.

In any event, Justice Sotomayor has every right to apologize if she feels she crossed a line or her assessment of realpolitik demands it, but if these are her motivations, those are lines she’s drawn for herself. And those lines only run one way.

Justice Sotomayor apologizes to Justice Kavanaugh for public criticism of immigration opinion [ABC News]
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas blasts progressivism as threat to America [ABC News]

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. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

The post Sotomayor Apologizes For Possibly Hurting Kavanaugh’s Feelings Over The Racial Profiling He Invented appeared first on Above the Law.

Whether it’s for a different lifestyle, political climate, or healthcare system, an ever-increasing number of families are looking to leave the United States for what they perceive to be greener pastures. Social media groups dedicated to becoming an expat are booming, lawyers (and other professionals) are looking for alternative career paths and routes to legal residency abroad, and many are looking to Canada as a potential place to resettle thanks to its physical and cultural proximity to the U.S. This is a challenge for lawyers who are geographically bound by their license and do not want to give up the practice of law, and an oft-repeated question among potential emigrant lawyers is “how do I convert my license?”  

So what does it take to become licensed to practice law in one of Canada’s provinces and how long does it all take? To some extent, it depends: when I launched this adventure in 2017, I had over a decade of American practice under my belt and have since walked numerous of my fellow Americans through the process. Given the amount of inquiries coming from south of our current border, it seems a ripe time to put a handy guide together. 

Without further ado: those with many years of experience face a shorter climb with fewer relicensing exams in their future and a potential exemption from the requirement to article as detailed below. The quickest path is described below, although it should be noted that receiving a license to practice law in one of Canada’s provinces in no way secures an applicant’s immigration status, does not guarantee finding employment, and does not assist in obtaining a residence permit. Please also note that none of the below applies to the province of Québec, which, like the state of Louisiana, operates under a slightly different set of rules. On that note: each of Canada’s provinces, like each of the American states, has its own regulatory body, and admission to one Provincial Law Society (the bar) does not necessarily qualify you to practice in another province. 

Caveats aside, first, a candidate is required to be assessed by the National Committee on Accreditation (NCA). One is eligible for assessment by the NCA if they are licensed to practice law in any state except for Louisiana and attended an in-person, ABA-accredited, law school program. The NCA Application costs C$400 plus the cost of ordering and shipping transcripts from your alma mater. Submit an application to the NCA, and in six to eight weeks, they will provide a list of “assignments” or tasks that need to be done to qualify to take the bar exam. 

Relatively experienced lawyers from the U.S. are generally required to write five out of 14 possible law school equivalency exams (Canadian Administrative Law; Canadian Constitutional Law; Canadian Criminal Law; Canadian Professional Responsibility; and Foundations of Canadian Law) and to take a short legal research and writing course. 

NCA exams are offered on a rolling basis, are open book, and each is three hours long. The cost for each exam is approximately C$500 plus taxes and fees. Assuming a requirement of five exams, budget about a year to complete them all. 

Once the NCA assignments are completed successfully, a candidate can apply for a Certificate of Qualification, which entitles them to write the bar exam in any of Canada’s provinces except for Québec. The bar exam itself is offered twice a year in two sittings that are two weeks apart. In order to receive a license to practice, a candidate must pass the Barristers and Solicitors exams, both of which are one full day, multiple choice, and open book. In Ontario, each exam costs C$865 plus tax, with an additional C$100 fee for the study materials. Other provinces’ exam fees may differ and the cost of the exam is admittedly more challenging to find on the respective provincial law society websites, but should be obtainable from there. 

While self-study seems sufficient for most, various courses are offered to help test takers prepare for the bar exam. Each province has its own rules for admission: in Ontario, test takers have three chances to pass and must apply for special permission to take exams four or more times. The exams are broken down by subject matter, with some crossover questions that morph a substantive subject with professional responsibility. 

Unfortunately for those who are undergoing this process, that’s not it. Most provinces also have an articling requirement to become a licensed lawyer. Articling can be an incredibly valuable experience to learn to navigate a new legal landscape and make connections in a new jurisdiction, but opportunities can be hard to come by and often constitute an eight- to 12-month commitment at a significantly reduced salary. Many experienced lawyers are eligible for an articling exemption, which is applied for separately and decided by the respective provincial law society. 

Once all of these requirement are met, you can sign up for your Call to the Bar (the swearing-in ceremony) that can be done in person or administratively. The ceremonial call must be attended in person and is a lovely reminder of the highlights of the practice of law, while an administrative call is efficient, albeit lacking in pomp and circumstance. Those attending a call in person, or with intention to litigate thereafter should gird themselves to be in costume as Canadian courts still require lawyers to wear robes. Mercifully, we no longer wear wigs. 

Ruth Kalnitsky Roth is a partner at Torkin Manes LLP in Toronto, Ontario, where she brings nearly 20 years of experience to her family law practice. Ruth began her career in San Francisco, California, where she obtained her law degree in 2006. In addition to being a member of the Law Society of Ontario, Ruth is a member of the State Bar of California, the United States District Court of the Northern District of California, and the Bar of Washington D.C. She is also a Fellow of the International Academy of Family Lawyers. 

The post Due North: Navigating Legal Licensing In Canada For US Lawyers appeared first on Above the Law.