Hear Me Out: Should we really care that a federal court opinion reads like Gen Z slang?

We Sure Could Use More Human Rights Lawyers These Days: So now is a great time to discuss the top schools for human rights law.

Say Bye-Bye To Another Trump Ally: Joe diGenova just resigned and stomped off in a huff.

The post That’s Some Epic Biglaw Shade — See Also appeared first on Above the Law.

Who was the first woman in the United States to graduate from law school, earning her degree with honors from the institution we now know as Northwestern in 1870?

Hint: When she tried to put it to use, her home state refused to license her — for the sole reason that she was a woman.

The post She Earned The First Law Degree Ever Given To An American Woman And She Wasn’t Allowed To Use It appeared first on Above the Law.

Give Direct Answers to Common Questions

The value of long, rambling backgrounds full of keywords has been on the decline for at least a couple of years now. In 2026, pages that provide a clear, direct answer near the top, supported by well‑structured, in‑depth content, tend to perform best in SERPs and are more likely to be surfaced in AI‑generated answers.

To get the most out of applying the direct-answer strategy to your website’s authority pages specifically, start with a short question relevant to your practice area, near the top of the page: If the paragraph immediately following your H1 (page title) doesn’t feel like a great fit, aim for the next paragraph, which should optimally be coming under your first H2 (i.e., try to keep your introduction short-and-sweet so you can move on to the question-and-answer portion of your page content). The benefits of this strategy can extend beyond the opening; consider structuring some or all of your internal headings as narrower questions about various aspects of the practice area the page is designed to address, and make sure that the text below each heading directly answers the question the heading poses.

Call for Backup

Obviously you want to cultivate a tone of authority and gravitas in your own right. You want to showcase your expertise with thorough, carefully articulated and nuanced explanations of subject matter central to your practice area, so that visitors to your law firm website can get a glimpse of why they would want to trust you with their legal concerns. However, search engines know that making an assertion confidently is a far different proposition from having the knowledge to substantiate that assertion. Many readers will know this, too. To build your credibility across traditional search engines, LLMs (large language models), and skeptical human readers, make it a priority to sprinkle your authority pages with contextually-appropriate links to well-known sources that are already recognized authorities on the subjects for which you are citing them.

Choosing High-Quality External Links

When I hire freelance writers to help create the content that will be used in implementing a client’s content strategy, I usually direct them to stick to .gov and .org sources, but that’s really just a shorthand that makes it a little easier to maintain consistency in selection across an entire project, or across SEO (search engine optimization) blogs that may be written by multiple freelancers over a period of months or years as the client’s practice grows and develops. If you are working on a single, concentrated project and working closely with a small core of professionals familiar with your practice, then you can afford to be both more open and more restrictive in your choice of sources. 

Using Third-Party Metrics for Checking Authority Signals in External Links

You can be more open, in that you may not always want to exclude every source whose URL ends in .com or .net; you can also be more “picky,” in the sense that not all .orgs or .govs are equally applicable to your practice area. What you will definitely want to do, if you are refining your selection of sources to use in building the credibility of your own authority pages, is work with an SEO expert to review sites you plan to reference regularly using third‑party tools that measure “proxy” metrics (such as Moz’s Domain Authority, Ahrefs’ Domain Rating, or Semrush’s Authority Score) to help estimate Google’s likely perception of your law firm website’s credibility. 

Because all of these proxies are developed and provided by third parties, none of them will be an exact match for the computations Google’s algorithms use to determine a site’s EEAT (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness). When taken with a grain of salt, however, the various scores they offer can help give you (or your SEO team) a useful point of reference for gauging how strong and trustworthy a site’s link profile appears to search engines. Armed with this information, you can prioritize sources whose credibility adds to your own.

Strut Your Stuff

Let’s start here: Your law firm website needs attorney bios and an “about” page. From there, what the optimal structure and the specific contents of each individual page may need to look like will depend on a number of factors, primarily the size of your law firm and the breadth of practice areas your attorneys cover. Addressing every possible combination for a general audience is an effort that is doomed before it starts. However, there are a few principles you can follow as you plan that may help you narrow down the directions you might want to take and formulate a list of strategy questions to ask your marketing professional.

Solo Law Firms

If you are managing a solo practice, resist the temptation to consolidate the “about” page for your law firm and your own attorney bio into a single page on your law firm website. The rationale here is that search engine bots (and now, to some extent, LLMs) recognize what kind of information a page is supposed to contain based partly on its structured data markup. Generally speaking, the more precise and comprehensive you can be in applying schema tags, the better for your SEO/AIO. Schema markup allows for both LegalService (the tag functions as a subtype of LocalBusiness and can be used with properties from both Thing > Organization and Thing > Place) and Employee (the property type is Person, and it is used on Organizations). Even if your law firm only has a single employee, there is some logic to separating your individual attorney bio from the page providing details about your law firm as a  business

Local Law Firms With Multiple Attorneys

When we think about “large” law firms, we often have in mind organizations with offices in multiple states. These firms may have many attorneys at any particular local office (more on that in a moment), but they present a different set of variables from firms that have one of the larger offices (by headcount) in their city or region, but are not “large” in the same sense as a firm that maintains a constant presence in several distinct states.

These large-for-local firms are going to want to keep the “About” page providing information about the practice itself. They will also usually want a page for each individual attorney practicing with that firm; these individual bios may not be far different from the bio published for the single attorney at a solo firm. However, law firms with this size and organizational structure may also want to consider using the “OrganizationRole” markup to divide attorneys into partners and associates, or to make it easy to credit attorneys and paralegals. The idea here is not to “rank” the individuals working for your law firm, but to create multiple (but mutually compatible) signals search tools can use to categorize the information you are providing about the people involved in the day-to-day operations of your law firm and the roles they play.

Law Firms With Multiple Offices

I told you we would get to the multi-office firms! If your law firm maintains a constant presence in more than one city, you may want to talk with your digital marketing strategist about whether it makes sense to set up a distinct website for each location, or instead to host all of the firm’s services and attorneys on a single website and perhaps organize the attorney bios, in particular, by location. The end decision can make a difference to your local SEO strategy and therefore the way you develop content for your website authority pages.

At the level of the pages designed to establish your authority, however, the core principles are going to remain the same. You are going to want each page to stake out thorough but not overwhelming coverage of the practice area to which they relate, and you are going to want to link not only to authoritative external sources but also to the bios of the attorneys who have a special focus on the topic covered. With a greater number of attorneys, you can often afford to set up a greater number of pages to showcase authority; work with a digital marketing professional to strategize ways to ensure that your law firm website accurately presents the breadth of expertise found among your partners and associates.

Stay Up-to-Date

Your law firm’s “authority” pages are there to showcase your expertise and establish your practice as a source of reliable information that addresses common concerns of interest to the people who would be likely to seek your legal services. To be successful, these pages need to not only present high-quality information delivered in a style that is accessible, but not overly simplified, for non-specialist readers; they also need to ensure that the technical details behind the browser view human users see are optimized to make the contents scannable and ready for indexing by search engine algorithms. Many of those optimizations carry over into positive net effects for AI overviews and answer engines, as well.

To remain effective after they have been put in place, these pages will need to be updated periodically to reflect changes in the legal landscape, refinements to search algorithms, and even the staffing that affects your internal linking strategy. Schedule regular check-ins with your law firm’s digital marketing team, and make sure your law firm goes through a “touch-up” website audit at least semi-annually to keep seeing high-value returns.

Annette Choti, Esq., has over two decades of legal experience and is the Founder & CEO of Law Quill, a concierge legal marketing agency for law firms.  Annette authored the bestselling book Click Magnet: The Ultimate Guide To Digital Marketing For Law Firms, hosts the popular Legal Marketing Lounge podcast, and founded Click Magnet Academy where she teaches professionals to leverage the powerful LinkedIn platform. As a sought after speaker for Bar Associations, Legal Associations, and Marketing Conferences, Annette provides legal marketing insight along with an entertaining twist. Annette used to do theatre and professional comedy, which is not so different from the legal field if we are all being honest. Annette can be found on LinkedIn or directly through email at Annette@LawQuill.com 

The post How To Create Authority Pages That Beat Competitors On Google And ChatGPT appeared first on Above the Law.

Lawyers are creatures of habit, and the legal profession is not exactly known for embracing change. Indeed, many practices that were commonplace decades ago are still followed by some lawyers even though technological advances have made them unnecessary. In some instances, lawyers probably do not even know why they follow certain practices other than “this is how things have always been done.” Law firms should periodically evaluate their procedures and eliminate antiquated practices that waste time, money, and resources.

One of the strangest examples of this involves the blueback (a piece of blue paper that is attached to the back of legal documents and typically contains information about the case and the attorney who prepared the papers). Bluebacks made much more sense when lawyers routinely submitted physical documents to courthouses and litigants. They could protect papers, identify documents, and presumably make stacks of legal filings easier to organize.

Nevertheless, I still occasionally see bluebacks appended to documents that are electronically filed. This means that someone has essentially created a digital representation of a piece of paper whose primary purpose was to accompany another piece of paper. It is difficult to think of a better example of lawyers importing an analog practice into the digital world without asking why the practice existed in the first place. Of course, lawyers should use bluebacks when a court requires them, but otherwise, digitally attaching a blueback seems about as useful as digitally attaching a paper clip.

Wet signatures are another practice that can sometimes seem antiquated. Naturally, certain documents still require original signatures, and lawyers should make sure that electronic signatures are permissible before using them. However, even though electronic signatures are acceptable in many circumstances, some law firms and clients still follow a bizarre ritual when executing documents.

Someone receives a digital document and prints it. Another person signs the paper with a pen. The signed document is then scanned, and the resulting digital document is emailed to someone else. We have essentially converted a digital document into a physical document solely so that it can become a digital document again. This may make sense when an original signature is required, but when it isn’t, lawyers should question whether all of these steps serve any purpose.

Fax numbers are another relic that refuses to disappear from the legal profession. Many law firm letterheads and signature blocks still prominently list fax numbers. There are certainly circumstances in which lawyers still use fax machines, and some courts and government agencies continue to accommodate fax transmissions. But for many lawyers, receiving a fax is an extraordinarily rare event.

Indeed, I am willing to bet that a substantial number of younger attorneys have never actually stood next to a fax machine and sent a document by fax. Some law firms use electronic fax services, so a fax essentially arrives as an email attachment anyway. At that point, maintaining a fax number sometimes feels like keeping a telegraph address on the letterhead just in case Western Union makes a comeback.

Unnecessary mailings are another commonplace antiquated practice. Electronic filing has transformed litigation in many jurisdictions. In New York, for instance, NYSCEF permits attorneys to file and, in many circumstances, serve papers electronically. Yet some lawyers still mail documents even when electronic filing or service has already accomplished everything that needs to be done.

Sometimes mailing is required by a court rule, a judge’s individual practices, a statute, or some other circumstance. If so, lawyers obviously need to send paper copies. But other times, papers are electronically filed, electronically served, and then placed into envelopes and mailed simply because this is what a firm has always done.

These practices might seem harmless, but they add up. Someone needs to print papers, scan documents, prepare envelopes, apply postage, and perform other tasks associated with obsolete procedures. Clients may ultimately pay for some of this work and expense. Multiply these practices across hundreds of matters, and meaningless traditions can consume a surprising amount of resources.

There is also a broader lesson here. Law firms frequently focus on adopting new technology when they discuss efficiency. They purchase new software, experiment with artificial intelligence, migrate data to the cloud, and implement increasingly sophisticated practice-management systems. Those developments can certainly make lawyers more productive.

But improving efficiency is not only about adding new things. Sometimes it involves eliminating old things.

Every so often, law firms should examine routine tasks and ask a simple question: Why do we do this? If the answer is a statute, court rule, client requirement, or some other legitimate reason, keep doing it. If the answer is “because we have always done it this way,” perhaps it is time to reconsider.

The legal profession has enough unavoidable bureaucracy. Lawyers do not need to preserve additional bureaucracy simply because generations of attorneys before us got used to it.

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 Lawyers Should Abandon Some Outdated Practices appeared first on Above the Law.

One of the most surprising things about AI adoption is how differently similar organizations perform. Two legal departments can deploy the same AI platform, invest similar amounts of money, and give people access to the same capabilities, yet their outcomes look completely different. One team quietly transforms the way it works. The other struggles to point to meaningful improvements.

The difference rarely lies in the technology.

Recent industry research reinforces this reality. A recent Axiom survey of more than 500 legal leaders found that AI investment continues to accelerate, but relatively few organizations have progressed beyond the early stages of adoption. Nearly every respondent expects AI spending to increase, yet most cannot measure return on investment, and only a small percentage report successfully scaling AI initiatives across their legal departments. The technology is arriving. The business results are not always following.

This shouldn’t be viewed as a failure of Artificial Intelligence. It reflects something much more familiar. Most organizations have become reasonably good at acquiring new technology, but far fewer have mastered the organizational work required to turn new technology into better outcomes.

That challenge feels particularly familiar within Legal Operations.

For years, Legal Ops professionals have focused on improving the way legal work moves through an organization. They design workflows, establish governance, manage change, measure performance, and help new processes gain adoption. AI didn’t create any of those responsibilities. They have always been essential to building an effective legal function. What has changed is that artificial intelligence now depends on those capabilities more than ever.

Perhaps the biggest misconception surrounding legal AI is that implementation begins with selecting the right platform. In reality, successful implementation often begins with understanding the organization itself.

Every legal department has documented workflows, written procedures, intake forms, and governance policies, but anyone who has spent time inside a legal department knows there is another “operating system” running parallel to the documented one.

That system is composed of informal approval paths that experienced employees instinctively follow. There are trusted relationships that accelerate difficult decisions. Certain business units routinely bypass official intake processes because everyone knows there is a faster path, and experienced attorneys recognize when a policy should be applied literally and when judgment calls for a different approach. Years of accumulated institutional knowledge shape thousands of decisions that never appear in a workflow diagram.

In many respects, legal work exists in two forms: the organization captured in documentation, and the organization people actually experience every day.

Artificial Intelligence can easily learn from policies, templates, and playbooks, but understanding the second organization is considerably harder.

Recognizing this duality helps explain why implementation often proves more difficult than expected. AI systems do not operate independently of organizational culture; they become part of it. If AI tools are introduced without accounting for how work actually moves through a legal department, adoption slows, exceptions multiply, and employees gradually return to familiar habits. The technology itself may function exactly as designed, yet the initiative still falls short because it was built around documented processes instead of operational reality.

Interestingly, AI vendors seem to be reaching the same conclusion. Increasingly, they are spending time observing legal teams, gathering feedback, and studying real workflows rather than simply adding new model capabilities. They recognize that better intelligence alone does not automatically produce better products. To create meaningful value, AI must fit naturally into the environments where legal professionals already work.

This shift has important implications for Legal Operations.

For years, Legal Ops has been the group responsible for improving efficiency, implementing technology, and supporting the business of law. Those responsibilities remain important, but AI elevates them in a different way. As AI becomes embedded throughout contract lifecycle management systems, research platforms, matter management applications, productivity software, and countless other tools, understanding how work actually happens becomes a strategic advantage rather than an operational one.

Organizations that succeed over the next several years may not be the ones with exclusive access to the newest models or the largest technology budgets. They are more likely to be the organizations that understand themselves well enough to implement AI in ways that reflect how their people actually work, make decisions, and collaborate.

Artificial Intelligence is becoming increasingly accessible. Operational understanding is not.

That distinction may ultimately determine which legal departments realize lasting value from AI and which continue searching for it.

Brandi Pack is the Director of Innovation at UpLevel Ops, where she focuses on the practical application of AI within Legal Operations. She leads the firm’s generative AI initiatives, helping legal teams integrate emerging technologies into workflows, governance, and day-to-day delivery. Brandi’s background spans Legal Operations, project management, and IT, with prior roles at Hewlett-Packard, Constellation Brands, and Goodwill Industries.

The post The Future Of Legal AI Isn’t About AI appeared first on Above the Law.

The octogenarian former federal prosecutor thought he was being recruited to run the mother of all conspiracy cases and take out every dirty, stinkin’ Democrat at once. He and his wife Victoria Toensing laid it all out in April on Rudy Giuliani’s Scotch and Dentures Variety Hour. (h/t CNN)

“She was a queen bee and she screwed President Trump to a fair thee well,” diGenova snorted about the recently fired Attorney General Pam Bondi. “What it is she is dumb as a post.”

Toensing agreed that it was a massive error to charge former FBI Director James Comey for making false statements to Congress in Virginia, i.e., where those statements actually took place.

“That should have been part of a conspiracy in Fort Pierce, Florida, which she did not have the sophistication to understand. I never as attorney general would have allowed the one count against Comey in Virginia. I would have saved it for the vast conspiracy,” she huffed.

“You do the same thing with You do the same thing with Letitia James,” diGenova broke in. “You don’t charge her in Virginia on mortgage fraud. you include her on a massive conspiracy account down in Miami with a bunch of people beginning in 2017, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Brennan, James Clapper, and Susan Rice.”

Creative theories of venue aside, the interview shows exactly what diGenova and Toensing expected when they joined the ongoing investigation in the Southern District of Florida. The plan was to round up all of Trump’s enemies, including Jack Smith, Tish James, Jim Comey, and even Barack Obama, and charge them with being part of a “grand conspiracy.” They could defeat the statute of limitations by saying that the crime was ongoing. Or they could call it deprivation of rights, which has no expiration date. With a grand jury supervised by Judge Aileen Cannon, the sky’s the limit!

Except that it wasn’t.

Because, when you’re tasked with using the legal system to go after one of Donald Trump’s enemies, the point is not to build a case. You’re not trying to establish probable cause and prove the elements of a crime. Conviction is more or less irrelevant.

The only thing that matters is getting an indictment so Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel can hold a press conference patting themselves on the back for their great service to the Republic and the Old Man — although you do get extra points for a perp walk that can be played endlessly on conservative media and turned into a meme.

It doesn’t matter if the case falls apart in a few months, bringing the U.S. Attorney’s office into disgrace or even contempt. Charge it, go on Fox, take the “W” — you’ve got prosecutorial immunity anyway, right?

U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, tapped to indict all the antifa protesters in Chicago, knew the deal. He didn’t care about dragging his entire office into the middle of a scandal over prosecutorial misconduct before the grand jury. He indicted the “Broadview 6” and a handful of other dissidents, watched the cases fall apart, and then took his promotion.

U.S. Attorney Ellis Boyle in North Carolina could care less that the Comey seashells case will wash away with the tide.

But diGenova and Toensing were never in on the joke. They’ve been mainlining stringboard-level conspiracy theories since the first Trump administration, when they were getting paid by Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash and huddling up with Rudy and Devin Nunes to undermine the Mueller investigation. They thought this was finally their big moment. And according to CNN, diGenova was pissed to find that he was expected to spend a few weeks securing a piddly indictment of former CIA Director John Brennan and declare “mission accomplished.” And so on Thursday he stomped off in a huff, resigning his role as a special government employee.

DiGenova, who once had to apologize for saying that the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency should be “taken out at dawn and shot” after the 2020 election, had a moment of indiscretion when talking to the New York Post’s Josh Christenson.

“If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” he snapped.

Later he regained his composure, telling the AP, “There’s plenty of evidence in all of these cases to prove the theories of prosecution. It just takes time to get there, and some people want to get there a little faster than others — and you can’t do that.”

Well, of course you can — and if you want to get ahead in Trumpland, you absolutely will. But every cloud has a silver lining. Before you know it, those two crazy kids will back on air with Rudy explaining how everyone but them is too stupid to understand civil procedure.

Trump admin pick to oversee a conspiracy investigation into president’s foes resigns after DOJ clashes [CNN]

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

The post Trump Ally Stomps Off After Discovering ‘Grand’ Conspiracy Is Actually Mid At Best appeared first on Above the Law.

The National Jurist’s preLaw magazine recently released its ranking of the best law schools for human rights on its Human Rights Law Honor Roll, highlighting schools for the strength of their programs. Here’s the methodology that was used:

preLaw magazine grades law schools based on the breadth of their curricular offerings. Scores are weighted as follows: 30% for a concentration, 24% for a clinic, 12% for a center, 12% for an externship, 9% for a journal, 8% for a student group, 5% for a certificate and added value for additional offerings.

Without further ado, according to preLaw Magazine, these are the law schools that earned A+ grades for their human rights law programs (listed in alphabetical order):

• Cardozo School of Law
• Case Western Reserve U.
• DePaul University
• Drake University
• Georgetown University
• Gonzaga University
• Northeastern University
• Regent University
• Rutgers Law
• UC Berkeley
• University of Iowa
• University of Minnesota
• University of Pennsylvania

Click here to see the rest of the Honor Roll.

Congratulations to all of the law schools that made the cut for this important ranking.

Top law schools for human rights law [preLaw magazine / National Jurist]

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 The Best Law Schools For Human Rights Law (2026) appeared first on Above the Law.

Channeling her inner Gen Z, Judge Thompson put out a lengthy bankruptcy opinion that took a sledgehammer to the air of formality that’s surrounded legal opinions since… well, forever. The effect is jarring to anyone familiar with federal judicial opinions. To call it unorthodox undersells it.

And yet, read in full, the opinion untangles a complicated, multiyear bankruptcy saga in a readable — dare I say, pleasant — 40-page account. Honestly, I expected to find myself more critical of this opinion. I’ve been quite critical of judges exploiting the inherent power imbalance to score laughs at the expense of litigants. That said, this isn’t a criminal defendant or fraud victim watching their world become a judicial plaything — it’s a gnarly corporate bankruptcy dispute. In that context, this all… kind of works?

Anyway, it’s safe to say that I’m the minority opinion on this one:

Instituto Médico del Norte v. Greengift Capital does, in fact, fill in the deets, but the opening actually does accomplish the time-honored role of SparkNotes by letting us know the main characters, their motivations, and the source of their dispute with the exact same approach that helped us avoid reading The Scarlet Letter.

Who am I kidding? It was Cliff’s Notes then. And I did read The Scarlett Letter. The Mayor of Casterbridge on the other hand….

We’ll start at the beginning, of course. Back in 1984, Instituto obtained a loan to the tune of $10,683,230 from Ponce Bank to build a hospital in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico.

But Instituto and Ponce quickly fell into a dispute. The dispute’s details are admittedly complicated and not well-documented in the record before us, but here’s what we can glean from the parties’ materials….

This reads like a conversation with your good friend Judge Thompson giving you all the gossip she’s heard about these companies. That’s not how opinions are usually written, but it’s so much more engaging.

But admittedly — and with no disrespect intended towards the bankruptcy court — we struggle to make sense of several key determinations in its dispositive order. We know that bankruptcy courts are quite busy, and they also don’t have an obligation to make specific findings of fact or to elaborate on their decisions when resolving motions for summary judgment. 

Given the byzantine nature of this dispute, the bankruptcy court probably couldn’t lay it all out without taking the sort of narrative approach employed here.

While Instituto’s bankruptcy plan was being worked out, Instituto and Oriental got into it about how much Oriental should be paid. But they worked it out. 

Standard legal writing? No. But, likely a far better picture of what happened than any formal language could convey. The whole dispute drips with the pettiness of a middle school cafeteria incident and would “Instituto and Oriental arrived at an impasse over the proper treatment of the allowed secured claim before reaching a temporary resolution” followed by three paragraphs nobody cares about send the reader that same context?

Not for nothing, if we want to stop AI from training itself to replace human legal writers, Judge Thompson is doing the Lord’s work in messing up the algorithm.

Oh, and then there are the defined terms:

The final plan (which we uncreatively christen “The Plan”) approved by the bankruptcy court incorporated most of the above-reproduced language, but not all.

That’s how all the definitions play out. To all the 1Ls out there: do this, watch your legal writing instructor’s head explode, and then say “sorry, I guess I just care more about modeling my work on a distinguished federal appellate judge than you do.”

Other moments over the following pages: “And then things began to go off the rails,” “Thus spawned more motions,” and, referring to a bankruptcy court determination “(whatever that means).”

With those five sentences, the litigation before the bankruptcy court came to an end.

This line actually stood out the most. The bankruptcy opinion was plenty formal, gathering 1,000 exhibits and proceeding with the cadence of authority before delivering its curt conclusion. The First Circuit opinion is saying — both in substance and with this style — that stiff legalese isn’t always rigor. Sometimes it functions as camouflage for decisions that don’t stand up to the elevator pitch test. To that end, the unanimous First Circuit panel isn’t disrespecting a fellow judge — which is a much more disturbing trend in legal writing than using “deets” — but explaining that formality can become a cage that leads to the wrong result.

Ultimately, the holding here is that litigants were owed an explanation, and the court delivered it in plain (perhaps too plain for many) terms.

Just imagine the legitimacy crisis that could result if a court ran around issuing deeply significant rulings while stubbornly refusing to provide its reasoning! I mean, that wouldn’t be as serious as a judge using the word “deets,” but I’m sure it would be pretty bad.

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

The post Is This Federal Appellate Opinion Too Informal? appeared first on Above the Law.

By any measure, that is a big loss. Aiello is one of the most sought-after dealmakers in the country, and losing your corporate chair and a chunk of his practice group in a single raid is the kind of thing that reshuffles a firm’s internal power structure whether it admits it or not.

Which brings us to the statements.

Cravath’s is a model of gracious recruiting. “I’ve known Mike Aiello for many years, and he and his team are extraordinarily talented M&A advisors and a unique fit within our culture,” presiding partner Faiza Saeed said, going on to praise their belief in collaboration, client service, and “the values that have long defined Cravath.”

Weil’s statement is… well, let’s take a look.

“Mike Aiello and his team have informed us that they are leaving the firm for a smaller platform,” the firm said. “Weil has long believed that an ambitious growth strategy is in the firm’s best interest and intends to accelerate execution of that strategy going forward. We thank Mike and his team for their contributions.”

Describing Cravath as a smaller platform is a choice.

Sure, Cravath has fewer lawyers than Weil… but it’s still fucking Cravath. Cravath is the white-shoe standard-bearer, the firm so central to Biglaw that the industry’s associate pay benchmark is literally called the Cravath scale (despite Milbank’s best efforts on that front) — the scale Weil’s own associates are paid on. Shading them as a lesser platform is wild.

Weil has an aggressive lateral strategy, the firm added 51 lateral partners since the start of last year. In a market where firms are dangling multi-year guarantees to chase $40 million rainmakers, Weil is on a genuinely ambitious growth path. And perhaps the rapid expansion is part of the relevant backdrop that helped motivate the departure — I don’t know. But I definitely know snark when I read it.

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