So Long And Thanks For All The Bonuses

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Patrice:

Hello. Welcome to another edition of Thinking Like A Lawyer. I’m Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I’m joined by some other Above the Law folks. Kathryn Rubinos here.

Kathryn Rubino:

Hey,

Joe Patrice:

Chris Williams is here. Hey, and we are back doing our usual roundup of some of big stories from the week that was in legal, but first we chat to each other, kind of an unstructured format we call Small Talk.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, good news. I have already won small talk. I dunno if you knew it was a competition, but it is, and I have won because I just got back from Disney World.

Chris Williams:

That would usually be a great entry into the competition, but Los Angeles is kind of going through some shit.

Kathryn Rubino:

Are you in Los Angeles?

Chris Williams:

Okay. I guess you win. You make

Joe Patrice:

A good point, and that’s Disneyland.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yes, I was at Disney World in Florida with my nieces and daughter and some family, and it was amazing everything. I wanted to be very much in that Disney bubble, not really paying attention to the events of the world. So coming back has been a little bit like drinking water from a fire hose kind of a moment, but I had a great time at Disney. I got my daughter’s first haircut on Main Street USA, which was a big goal for me. I did the Tiana Bayou Adventure, which was sort of the redo of the racist splash mountain, which was delightful and I really enjoyed it. Although I have thoughts, I have a lot of opinions about Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. Notably, I feel like they do Tiana Dirty because they put her in this new outfit that’s like this explorer outfit, and I don’t really have a problem with changing the outfit, but it’s not in any of her traditional colors, either the blue dress or the green dress that she’s known for within the original movies. It’s yellow and tan, which she seems odd to give her a new haircut. She has at least three, maybe even four haircuts or hairstyles during the original movie, and they give her a different one for the ride, which I don’t really understand. It looks a lot more like her mother in the original movie than her herself, so I don’t really, I feel like they do her dirty and it’s not really giving good Tiana vibes, but the ride itself was a lot of fun. Mama Odie has

Some fantastic moments in the ride. I really liked that. That was a big highlight. We also did Epcot really, really good time though overall I could talk a lot more, but this is not in fact a Disney podcast.

Chris Williams:

We believe you. Yes. I just wanted to mention the small taste of what the Insurrection Act would look like and Elon and Trump’s breakup. Those happened over the and over the week and that was great. Some great television from my phone.

Joe Patrice:

The Elon Trump makeup breakup was some real comedy and

Chris Williams:

Also Happy Pride, the Richest Man and the Orangest Man breaking up for everyone to see during June. That’s great

Joe Patrice:

Tv and in light of that, we also have the Navy trying to get rid of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall trying to erase them from history

Kathryn Rubino:

And Harvey Milk.

Joe Patrice:

Well, right, the Navy. That was the attachment to Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williams:

This is new to me.

Joe Patrice:

Yes. Well, last week, because it was Pride Week, the Department of Defense said that they were going to get rid of Harvey Milk, the boat that’s named after Harvey Milk. Obviously, they timed this in light of pride in order to troll more salt wound to all that kind of stuff. However, while that’s the headline, the issue reading further into it, it’s that they also ordered an evaluation to strip the name of vessels named after Black Supreme Court, justice, Thurgood Marshall, and also Ruth Bader Ginsburg, because we’re going to do whatever we can to erase people from history. Also, Harriet Tubman, who they’re pretty apparently the new thing is they think she didn’t exist is the new right wing talking point is that Harriet Tubman isn’t real.

Chris Williams:

Wait, is there like a SS Jbo? I didn’t know that Harriet Tubman had ships named after her Ginsburg. Yeah, I’m sure Harriet Tubman has trained named after her. Yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

Amazing. Amazing.

Joe Patrice:

Yes, but you, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has a replenishment oiler ship. The class, it’s actually part of a class. People who aren’t military nerds, a lot of times, most times ships are part of a class and there’s a flagship of that class, and then a bunch of copies. Like the USS enterprise in Star Trek was a constitution class ship, that sort of thing. So yeah, the Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a ship that’s part of the John Lewis class of replenishment ships. But yes, they’re going after all of these. Anyway, so

Chris Williams:

Did they have a Ruth Bader Ginsburg inspired ship that had one black crew member? Oh, because that’s the real history that gets ignored, and I wish we talked about it more often. I

Kathryn Rubino:

Mean, Above the Law has written about that frequently write, that’s the we. Oh

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, the Thurgood Marshall was also part of the Lewis class. I had to look that up. I felt like that was true.

Kathryn Rubino:

They’re just going to get rid of the entire Lewis class, aren’t they?

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, it seems like that’s the goal, but yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

Oh, this is all great news.

Joe Patrice:

The Earl Warren was also, oh no. Earl Warren also exists, but was not on the list of ones.

Kathryn Rubino:

I wonder what is different about that.

Joe Patrice:

I mean, but yeah,

Kathryn Rubino:

Shocking. Really

Joe Patrice:

Shocking. The John Lewis is not on the list, so the John Lewis itself is not on the list, so maybe it’ll be

Kathryn Rubino:

That is actually wild. We just happened,

Joe Patrice:

So yeah. All right, so there we go. That’s a bunch of things going on. I guess we should get started on real conversation. I mean, honestly, this episode, since there’s a lot of catching up going on, it might be a little rapid fire talking about budgets of stuff, but we’ll get to the end of small talk and move moving.

Chris Williams:

Just to be clear, if not for just your sake, Joe, but also for the listeners, this show generally is Rapid Fire Catch of the Week,

Joe Patrice:

So that

Chris Williams:

Shouldn’t really be different.

Joe Patrice:

A lot of times it’s a structured catch of the week. This time it might get off into some tangents,

Kathryn Rubino:

And I will freely admit I am unlikely to be as caught up on the stories as I typically am, but I will learn about them along with our audience. Good news.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it was a wild week.

Kathryn Rubino:

It was a good week to be gone.

Joe Patrice:

The Supreme Court legalized reverse discrimination claims. They screwed up and accidentally blasted out all of their orders before they were officially published because they don’t understand technology.

Kathryn Rubino:

Again,

Joe Patrice:

Pam Bondy got hit with an ethics complaint, a bunches of things, but let’s also, Damien Williams left Paul Weiss, which I guess is a bigger event that you wanted to talk about because it leads into another story.

Kathryn Rubino:

Apparently, Pam Bondy’s brother officially lost the election. That’s

Joe Patrice:

What

Kathryn Rubino:

Pam Bondy’s brother. That was a story you originally covered a few months ago, Joe. All

Joe Patrice:

Right, so fine. We’ll talk

Kathryn Rubino:

About that. It’s going to be rapid fire it evening.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, so the DC bar was electing, its new president, Pam Bondy’s brother was running for that. Brad Bondy, who is a big law partner, he was running for the job. Folks came out in massive force. The voter turnout for the DC bar election was well beyond

Kathryn Rubino:

What it

Joe Patrice:

Normally is. Yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

He was a 43% turnout, which is wild, and Brad Bondi lost by a tenfold margin. Diane Seltzer won with almost 35,000 votes, and Brad Bondi got 3,400. Yeah,

Chris Williams:

Damn. Yeah, that needs to be a shame plaque that comes with that. It’s impressive how bad he lost.

Joe Patrice:

So I wrote this up when it first started, and I’ve actually taken attack of being a little bit more sympathetic to poor Brad Bond because I honestly don’t think that Brad Bondi is running to run the DC bar in some Machiavellian effort to shield the Trump administration from ethics complaints or anything like that. The president of the DC bar doesn’t really even have that power. The ethics part of the DC bar is largely separate. I think generally, I genuinely believe this is a guy who probably wanted to run for this office for a while. He probably just wanted to run

Kathryn Rubino:

Timing

Joe Patrice:

Actually matters. Yeah, exactly. He wanted to run to reform CLE or whatever boring things that people do when they have that job. But as Kathryn pointed out, the key to comedy is timing and when your sister also,

Chris Williams:

It took me a second good delivery, by the way.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. When your sister becomes the Attorney General and starts committing well enough acts that there’s already a multi-fold ethics investigation, ethics complaint filed against her in Florida, your candidacy is kind of in trouble, and it’s unfortunate that somebody’s aspirations have to be subordinate to the fact that their sister does that. But

Chris Williams:

I think what happens, think the real question. The real question here, which for some reason we’re all ignoring is what is the acceptable amount of distance? Like sister? No, but second cousin, would that have been okay? Probably. Probably. I mean,

Kathryn Rubino:

I think that if they had different last names, that would’ve helped tremendously. I think there’s a lot of, I’m not voting for Bundy right now, is probably fair sentiment,

Joe Patrice:

And Brad Bondy, by all accounts is not particularly politically active, but all of these folks who largely on the Republican side, who complained about how he was being railroaded, and this shouldn’t be about this whatever, are largely the same people who thought that Joe Biden needed to go to prison because his son had a job once. So sometimes people’s families, when you’re in public service, they have an influence on how things go, and sometimes it’s fair, sometimes it’s unfair, but it’s always something of a reality, and in this case, even if we think it is unfair, I did think that, I think Bondi Brad, I’m speaking of probably had missed his strategic moment. I think that when this first all started, he really needed to come out immediately and just disown any connection, be like, I have been a thorn in my sister’s side since I put bubble gum in her hair when

Kathryn Rubino:

She was five years old. I pulled her pigtails, and I’ll still do that from theBar never

Joe Patrice:

Liked her. Yeah. He needed to go hard that way instead,

Chris Williams:

Honestly, I think he just made a big PR mistake. He should have just dropped the eye

Joe Patrice:

Bond.

Chris Williams:

Brad Bond one is a much cooler name,

Joe Patrice:

Right? Well, yeah,

Chris Williams:

And then people don’t look, people aren’t smart enough to be like, oh, he’s related. He would’ve just been Brad Bond. Nobody would’ve known. He could have had cool oh oh seven advertisements and you fucked it

Joe Patrice:

Up. Well, now everyone’s mad about oh oh seven. You’re tracking all that story. So there’s a new James Bond video game, and they have a younger James Bond and it, it’s apparently an early in his career thing, and everyone’s going like, well, this looks like woke garbage. I don’t quite even understand it. It’s still like a white guy bond, but I don’t know. Is he less

Chris Williams:

Misogynistic or something?

Joe Patrice:

No, apparently so somehow they’ve decided that it’s woke to just look like anything at this point. Yeah, but that’s the current video gamer controversy, whatever. So yeah, no, I think the Brad Bondi,

Kathryn Rubino:

I digress.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, digress. Should have probably admitted the problem. That’s a thing. He spent the entire campaign largely acting like it’s ridiculous that anyone suggests that there’s an issue here, and it’s like, no, no, no. Lean into, I get that there’s an issue. Here’s why it’s not. One would’ve been a smarter move, but whatever. Here we are. He’s lost. That wasn’t even the story we were talking about, but yeah, let’s talk about the story. We

Kathryn Rubino:

Were talking about live news. Live news is,

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Okay, so

Kathryn Rubino:

Yes, Paul Weiss was the first firm, if you’ll recall, way back in March, feels like 1 million years ago, but they were the first firm to capitulate to Donald Trump signing a deal promising $40 million in pro bono payola to conservative causes, whatever that means, and get out from underneath the ones executive order aimed at the firm. Since then, the consequences for the cap capitulating firms we’ve talked about extensively on this podcast, but there’s still a coming, you guys. There’s still happening over the last, I think, three or four days. Paul Weiss has lost four major litigation partners, which isn’t great news for them. Damien Williams, former US attorney for the Southern District of New York is bouncing. He’s headed to Jen and Block that tells you quite a bit. Obviously we’ve talked about Gender block is one of the four firms that are fighting the Trump administration and these sorts of executive orders. So trading a capitulating firm for a fighting firm says quite a bit,

Joe Patrice:

And Rush Atkins is leaving too, right?

Kathryn Rubino:

Yes. Rush Atkinson’s leaving, Melissa Zala and Kyle Smith are all leaving and all headed to the same place. Done Isaacson Re, which is the litigation boutique that was created by Karen Dunn and several of her colleagues,

Joe Patrice:

Bill Isaacson and yeah,

Kathryn Rubino:

In order to not practice underneath the sort of shadow of capitulation. And so those three partners are dipping out for Dunn Isaacson. There’s at least three associates that have also left for Dun Isaacson and reportedly they’re recruiting heavily from Paul Weiss, and this is unlikely to be the last set of hires that the boutique makes from Paul Weiss.

Joe Patrice:

When Karen and Bill moved over there from boys, they moved over into kind of a role of being taking over that group. We have co-head of the department and stuff. Their influence runs deep in that Paul Weiss litigation department, and so I think that they can probably pull a lot of the cream of that crop. They’re obviously also taking over their client base, which was, I mean, they represent Google and stuff like that. Also provides them a, if you’re going to hang up your own shingle, it’s nice to hang up your own shingle with a book of business involved, including Google.

Kathryn Rubino:

I think

Joe Patrice:

Google and Apple and all that

Kathryn Rubino:

S firm’s going to be. All right, and I think it’s really interesting. We’ve talked a lot about the consequences of their own actions, and I think that Paul Weiss is for fairly or not getting a bigger brunt of the negative consequences, but that’s also, I think because pre capitulation, they really hung themselves out as a firm that cared about a lot of these issues and seems like the sort of firm that would take a stand against the Trump administration for the rule of law, all that kinds of stuff. And when you kind of hang yourself out that way, you shouldn’t be surprised that the lawyers that you recruit under that sort of banner when you change course aren’t happy. That’s not shocking.

Joe Patrice:

Well, yeah. There’s several firms in the elite world who pride themselves on being corporate mercenaries and Paul Weiss has historically branded itself

Kathryn Rubino:

Differently

Joe Patrice:

And yeah, I think you’re right. I think they get a lot more flack because of that. Well, partially they were first and partially because of the cognitive dissonance with the branding

Kathryn Rubino:

And the cognitive dissonance, I think means that they’re probably going to have far more people leaving the firm than say, a Skadden for example, or Kirkland, which doesn’t really have that kind of branding. I think you’re going to see a lot more folks who leave Paul Weiss,

Joe Patrice:

So obviously we’ve talked a little bit. I think about this definitely have written about how part of this gap in who’s surrendering and who’s fighting runs along a litigation heavy versus transactional heavy business mix. Firms that were more transactional heavy were more likely to surrender than ones who litigate for obvious semi fairly obvious reasons that now we’re seeing manifest with litigators from these firms moving to other places because to the extent they’re litigators in a full service firm where they’re with a transactional bias, they have reason to leave. All that makes sense. The question’s going to be when a firm like Paul Weiss gets rated so thoroughly on its litigation side, does this start to impact the transactional side? Now, obviously these are different, but the value of a full service firm is full service.

There’s synergy and you can leverage different departments to provide the full suite of legal services under one roof. When you cease to be in a position to do that, what happens? Do I take my transactional work to that firm when I know I can’t turn around and use them for the litigation that comes out of it later? That’s going to be the real test. I think some of these firms, part of the reason they made these sorts of deals is they must have already thought throwing litigation under the bus was acceptable collateral damage. As it gets more and more pronounced, at what point does it move from acceptable collateral damage to we’ve really hurt ourselves, and that’s going to be the,

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, and I think that Paul Weiss will be that canary in the mind.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, so continuing the Harvard Law Review was part of, got some flack from the usual. Oh, no. They discriminate against people that we’ve been hearing a lot discriminate against white people that we hear a lot of from folks, but we also learned an interesting little tidbit about why they might be the ones that are getting the most attention like that.

Chris Williams:

I’m sure that’s a lead in, but it’s cryptic because like Fasor or because of DOJ?

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, so you’re talking about the

Chris Williams:

Snitch?

Joe Patrice:

Yes. Got you. The important part of the story is I found out that it was a snitch. Got you.

Chris Williams:

Okay. It was unclear. I knew the direction. I knew the direction. I just needed a couple extra letters on the board.

Joe Patrice:

There are Quidditch games where they have a harder time finding this niche than this.

Chris Williams:

Wow. Wow. That was terrible. That was terrible. You just burned so much goodwill, but no, so Steven Miller’s involved in this. Of course. No, they had to be. Yeah, no, so the baseline story for the folks that aren’t aware, the Department of Justice is investigating Harvard Law Review for discriminating against white men because they’re the only demographic that matters. The way that they did it mirrors the way that Fast orp, which sounds fake, also targeted Harvard Law Review for allegedly doing the same thing. They got some conservative newspaper involved called Free Beacon where screenshots were shared that appear to look incriminating, but it turns out they’re actually from years prior to the students with Fair Administration versus Harvard decision, and there were screenshots are being used as justification, say, Hey, they’re discriminating in 2024, 2025. That’s the baseline. The person that leaked the screenshots was a member of the Harvard Law Review surprise, who is now working under Stephen Miller,

Joe Patrice:

Who spent his years away from in between the Trump administrations running all these Fs or complaints as, yeah, so

Chris Williams:

Right, gay parades, things like

Joe Patrice:

That. Right. Yeah.

Chris Williams:

So that’s the quidditch angle that Joe was going for that we found out the snitch went to go work with Steven Miller.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, because obviously all of these sorts of cases are dumb. To go back to another Steven Miller Law Review case, they attempted to sue and they went after NYU law review, and their unnamed plaintiff was somebody who hadn’t even applied to be on the law review yet, because that’s the whole problem. They can’t really find these mediocre grades plaintiffs to bring these suits because at the point that they actually get on a law review, they more or less, they either aren’t on the law review and there’s clear grades that you can point to for why they’re too dumb to be there, or they get on and then they have very little interest in burning the bridge. So it was weird that this one had risen to having this kind of detail that the government would get involved in, and it’s because we had a snitch. So be careful out there. All Laura views, you can’t trust anybody.

Kathryn Rubino:

I mean, that should be obvious. Did you ever read or hear about the book What EL Don’t Trust Anyone is already the theme of Law

Joe Patrice:

School, of Law School

Kathryn Rubino:

And Law Review especially. Right. This shouldn’t be shocking information, but here we are.

Chris Williams:

A quick Supreme Court tie in, there was a recent Supreme Court decision that I think it was like a nine oh decision, basically saying that litigants that are trying to make reverse race discrimination claims don’t have to have some higher special standard than people that are members of protected classes. So when Fast or and what have you eventually end up making these sort of claims against Harvard or whatever place has the gall to invite smart black people onto their law reviews, it’ll be easier for the unnamed white plaintiffs to make the discrimination case.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, for sure. It wasn’t unfortunate one, it is bad, but I understand the

Nine oh rational, just the idea that you probably have to have the same standard. It’s probably in a practical sense, harder to prove, but as a legal sense, you probably have to have the same standard. But it was kind of unfortunate. I heard people make the argument that there’s some cagey political movement within the court that sometimes the dissenters are joining to make things unanimous, to build some sort of political capital within, and I’m like, oh, well then that’s a mistake. I don’t think those are deals that are going to get honored on the backend

Chris Williams:

For

Kathryn Rubino:

Sure.

Joe Patrice:

Anyway.

Chris Williams:

There are occasionally cases where I don’t like the outcome, but I understand the rationale. Like Chevron, Chevron, for example. I get why that case went out that way. I even think that may makes sense about not being able to delegate particular constitutionally vested responsibilities. I don’t like it, but it makes sense. I think the way this discrimination suit played out, it makes sense. I do wish there was a way to factor in the historical angle, but as far as the law is concerned, I’m not sure how you would write that in. Yeah,

Kathryn Rubino:

So as of 2024 in the AM law 100, there were 15 law firms that only had one variety of partnership. They Only had equity partners. They were Skadden, Robeson, gray, Jones Day, Davis, Polk Sullivan and Cromwell, Covington, Cleary, Debevoise, Wilmer Wachtel, Arnold and Porter Williams and Connolly Schulte, ballad Spar, and Seman Godfrey. Since then, however, at least five of those firms have done an about face and added or are thinking about adding non-equity tiers to the partnership. The most recent of which is Devo is, but also Ropes and Gray, Schulte, Skadden Cleary, Wilmer Hale. That’s a lot.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, so I think we’ve come to the point where the non-equity partner thing, there was a dream of pushing back against that and it’s gone. So now what we probably used to call special counsel or something like that are now all get to call themselves partners without any of the actual being a partner part of it. We’ve talked about some of the issues with this. Obviously

There’s been some allegation, which seems to be borne out, that this has become an unfortunate dead end position for lawyers in particular, women and lawyers of color who are rising up the ranks. They get pushed into this get billed as, Hey, we made a partner, but they aren’t really a partner because they aren’t a partner in the business, which that’s really unfortunate. It is also being used. We have some reason to believe as part of a, well before this administration, when corporations openly said they cared about having diverse legal representation teams, they were being added to teams in order to say, see, we do have a diverse team of partners on this case, but they weren’t really partners. So those have been big problems with it. Now, the flip side, of course, is that it affords folks a career path who may not want to go into the full partnership issue. This has long been an argument made on for women who are starting families, this is a place to put somebody to keep their career moving forward, theoretically, maybe with a look toward equity partnership down the road, but without keeping them stuck as an associate in those years where they might be taking years off in between. That’s the good argument for it.

Kathryn Rubino:

I mean, I think that it is just becoming more and more of a reality. There are only what nine left that aren’t actively considering this possibility. I imagine if we have this show in a year, we’re going to look at half of that number if that. I think that it just becomes a reality, and I think that if your firm doesn’t have a non-equity tier and you’re at that kind of level, it’s probably easier to lateral and to make other career moves if you have that title on your resume. So in that

Joe Patrice:

Sense, assuming, yeah, exactly. Well, that was part of the justification for it at one point, but at this point, now that everybody has this title and everyone knows what this title is, I don’t think anybody sees the word partner and immediately assumes they’re a partner.

Kathryn Rubino:

Sure. I think that that’s true, but if you are one of the few firms that only has equity partners, of course, and your sort of would be maybe in the non-equity tier, but instead have a council title, maybe that makes your life a little bit more difficult, is all I’m saying. Yeah. I’m not even sure if it’s good or bad at this point. It’s just the reality.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. All right. Well, that was a series of rapid fire conversations. We

Kathryn Rubino:

Warned you.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, we were all over the place, but I think we came to a good stopping point. Thanks everybody for listening. You should be subscribed to the show so you get the episodes when they come out. You should leave reviews and all that sort of good stuff. You should be following the Jabo Katherine’s other podcast. I’m also a guest on the Legal Tech Week Journalist Round Table. There are other shows by the Legal Talk Network. You can check out. You should be reading Above the Laws. You read these and other stories. Before we talk about ’em here, follow folks on social media at atl No, at Above the Law dot com. It’s how Blue Sky does publications. I’m at Joe Patrice. She’s at Kathryn one. Chris is at Wrights for Rent, and I think that’s peace. Everything we need. Bye. Peace.

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