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And the Supreme Court's ethical problems just won't go away. Biglaw has always played follow-the-leader. Usually it's about bonuses, but Skadden is taking a big gamble that the rest of the industry will follow it back to a Monday-Thursday office work week. If the rest of Biglaw doesn't follow suit, the giant sucking sound you hear will be Skadden talent lateraling to rival firms. Also the Supreme Court's ethical follies continued with John Roberts teasing a secret plan to cure its ethical woes, while Gibson Dunn took a turn as legal industry laughing stock with a shoddily researched letter on behalf of Harlan Crow. And the Court sided with a grandmother after the county stole $25,000 from her... but dig a little deeper and her case wasn't as sympathetic as it looked.

How can one guy mess up this much? Ron DeSantis is about to announce a run for president, but meanwhile he's botching remedial civil procedure and running face first in the Fourteenth Amendment. Also, the Kamala Harris camp seems interested in reigniting her tough-on-crime persona by trashing public defenders. It's dangerous rhetoric that erodes faith in the justice system. Finally, Justice Kagan lashes out at Justice Sotomayor over intellectual property rights.

Joe and Chris talk about law school, layoffs, and basic decency. After law schools threw a public tantrum over the U.S. News and World Report ranking, with several withholding key data required to create a credible list, the rankings are now out and... they have serious credibility problems. Missing data, important factors glossed over, and shady employment accounting from the schools result in a broken list. Congratulations boycotting schools! You've managed to make it all worse. Meanwhile, in Ohio a pregnant lawyer sought a continuance after being put on emergency bed rest and got denied by the state supreme court because screw your human frailties. Finally, Dechert joins the layoff trend with a 5 percent global cut. As always, we wonder if this has broader significance or not.

When you list all of the revelations of the past month, it's impressive. Since we last chatted about Clarence Thomas facing an intractable ethics scandal... more stuff happened! We learned that he also got private school tuition off a donor, that Ginni was getting paid by FedSoc Prime (Leonard Leo) under the table, and that the courts were asked to deal with all of this over a decade ago and declined. Meanwhile, Lewis Brisbois faced a massive defection with upwards of 150 attorneys bolting for a boutique and prompting a leadership change. Still, with over a thousand attorneys how much does it really matter to shed a few hundred? Finally, Florida passed a new piece of performative racism legislation targeting permits for undocumented workers including DACA participants... and this places Dreamer attorneys in jeopardy of losing their licenses.

Also Ron DeSantis is getting beaten up by Disney again. The Supreme Court punts on a thorny felony murder case, prompting a conversation over whether the use and abuse of the rule can ever truly be reformed. There's also a super biller out there who managed to bill an average of over 10 hours a day last year. Presumably the attorney is weeping in a corner somewhere. Finally, Disney took its fight with Ron DeSantis up a notch with a new lawsuit that hasn't made everyone happy. Become a host of the ABA Law Student Podcast: Apply Here!

Yes, there's still more to say about Clarence Thomas. On this week's episode of Thinking Like A Lawyer Kathryn and Chris go back to the Clarence Thomas ethics well as Ted Cruz decides to weigh in. The New York Bar Exam was kind of a debacle, or at least the process of revealing the results was a debacle. And the Supreme Court gave reproductive freedom advocates a small victory last week, which prompted Justice Samuel Alito to tear down his female colleagues.

Who reads all of the statute anyway? The ethical hits just keep coming for Clarence Thomas as a second story about the gifts he collected from Harlan Crow expanded to include buying and maintaining a house for Thomas's mom. Rent free of course. Thomas doesn't have a particularly good excuse for not disclosing this since the text of the disclosure requirements are pretty clear. I guess holding people to the text of the laws they break only matters for poor people facing life in prison whose lawyers sleep through trial. We also discuss a new spate of layoffs and why we still feel cautiously optimistic about the second half of the year and the decision by U.S. News to delay its law school rankings.

Clarence Thomas takes some me time. An ethical quagmire surrounds Clarence Thomas. No, not that one. Not that one either. This one is about the gifts he's taken over the years without disclosures. Donald Trump took all of a couple hours after his indictment to start riling up his mob against the judge and prosecutor. And a Paul Hastings associate issues some bad advice.

Also Morgan & Morgan has had it with insurance lobbyists and the legal profession is losing talent to OnlyFans. Ron DeSantis tried to punish Disney by dissolving the local government dominated by Disney flopped when the smart lawyers pointed out that it would put the state on the hook for a deluge of liability. His latest effort to then replace all the board members flopped because while he crowed about his legal maneuvering to cable news, Disney publicly noticed some land use meetings and entered deals that functionally transferred the board's power to the company through the life of the last surviving descendent of King Charles III, making Lilibet of Sussex, the youngest of the group, arguably Disney's most important princess. Meanwhile, Morgan & Morgan has informed staff that it's no longer granting additional curtesies beyond those legally required after the insurance lobby secured massive a giant tort reform package in Florida. And a judge and young lawyer have both left the legal industry for OnlyFans... in case any of you are looking to lateral.

Latest podcast also talks about ranking the best law schools the worst way possible. With March upon us, we created our our bracket-based challenge to rerank the top law schools based on... nothing. If the law schools don't want to provide data to ranking services, we'll show them what that looks like. It's pretty bad. Speaking of bad, a litigant got a bit of a lecture from a federal judge who cautioned for more civility in filings and let's just say he did not get it. Finally, we return to the hybrid work model with a study in contrasts. One firm announces that it's going to close up the office for the month of August while another puts bonuses in jeopardy if an associate prefers to work in the office on different days. One of these firms will have a happier roster before this is all said and done.

Also, Elon Musk really needs legal counsel. Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan is the latest speaker to cry foul that an audience of law students heckled him to death. He's received an apology from Stanford Law School already, but the videos released from the event and the witness accounts appear to show the judge playing the role of wrestling heel. Taking the honest if probing questions from the audience and obstinately refusing to answer to further frustrate the students. Elon Musk fired up his Twitter machine to lurch the company into a potentially massive liability before someone -- presumably a lawyer -- told him about wrongful termination. Maybe he shouldn't be too quick to ditch the requirement that he run every Tweet by a lawyer first. Finally, Merrick Garland is taking heat for the fact that it's 2023 and Donald Trump has yet to be charged for anything stemming from the Capitol riot. But Garland's right.

And a pop quiz: do you know what 'bofadeez' is? Judge Roger Benitez of the Southern District of California decided to use his marshal to take a 13-year-old girl out of the audience and handcuff her in the jury box. Apparently, he didn't realize arbitrary acts of psychological torture upon children was frowned upon in this establishment. Now the Ninth Circuit is looking into a formal complaint. Also, those Dr. Rick commercials scold people turning into their parents for trying to leave voicemails, but it might be worth checking to see what the voicemail greeting you set 10 years ago says. Because for one aspiring lawyer it wasn't great. Finally, the Fifth Circuit's Judge Ho thinks it's wrong to prosecute political rivals on made up charges and frighteningly he's in the minority on this question.

And Sidney Powell drew the judge she needed at the right time. It may tickle the search engine algorithms, but the phrase "quiet quitting" seems out of place among lawyers. A firm sued one of its former attorneys for "quiet quitting" on them and now she's hired Wigdor to countersue, which is about as loud as lawyers can get. Meanwhile, the Texas judge hearing the state bar's complaint against Sidney Powell was a tad too quiet with a sparse summary judgment order kicking the case citing confusion about exhibit numbering. Finally, Wikipedia tried to stand up for the Constitution... the federal government told it to sit down.

On this week's podcast, we discuss a North Dakota law firm sued its associates and won, seeking to clawback paychecks for failing to meet billing requirements during the pandemic. Wasn't there a program to protect employers from cutting salaries during the downturn, you might ask? There was! And the firm took gobs of it. Also, Clarence Thomas is likely getting a statue in his honor, because as they say in Unforgiven, "deserve's got nothing to do with it." Finally, the one simple trick to $100 million in billables that the Third Circuit doesn't want Jones Day to know about.

On the latest episode of Thinking Like A Lawyer, Kathryn and Chris ponder the need for a rule against Confederate flagsin courtrooms in the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA the year of our Lord 2023. Speaking of bold stances on things that should be obvious, the American Bar Association would really like a Supreme Court ethics rule, but we know that's not happening. Plus if you want your full bonus this year at Perkins Coie, you're going to have to bill more hours. Which is a crappy move, but still better than the layoffs slow-moving through Biglaw.

Also, let's talk about Biglaw and cancel culture. How much continuing power should a judge have over the lives of defendants who plead guilty? A judge recently forced a woman to withdraw and apologize for statements diverting blame for an incident that she'd admitted to in court. A January 6th defendant is in hot water for the same thing. Prosecutors use overcharging and the ordeal of trial to leverage defendants into pleading guilty but a guilty plea has to mean something, doesn't it? Also, we discuss whether Biglaw has a cancel culture problem (it doesn't) and Judge Ho's case research (it's bad).

Also, some salty law school talk. Every high schooler has a group text chain and then a chain where they complain about the people they don't like on the group chain. Brett Kavanaugh is unaware of the second chain. Because when you have to do public tours to convince people that you have friends, you don't have friends. Meanwhile, a law professor didn't take too kindly to a student request. And while cursing at students isn't acceptable, the frustration probably was justified. Finally, there are a lot of thorny ethical challenges in this world, but some conflicts are pretty clear. Like, $62 million clear.

And what's going on with the legal market right now? The Supreme Court's inquiry into the source of the leak of its draft opinion in Dobbs failed to find the culprit among the clerks and permanent staff. Attorneys familiar with internal investigations pointed out that the report appeared carefully drafted to mislead the public without technically lying about the failure to investigate the people with the most access and motive, leaving the Court's legitimacy more compromised than when the investigation started. Meanwhile, an attorney caught billing hundreds of hours for document review he didn't do earns a suspension, and Goodwin Procter makes heads spin as its layoffs are immediately followed with a major lateral move.

Also, Joe Biden's documents elicit special counsel attention. A (now former) senior attorney at an Ohio law firm texted an associate blasting her for interviewing for another job while on maternity leave. The controversy laid bare the persistent threat of pregnancy discrimination, but also the ways these attitudes fester when management fails to take swift, decisive action. The Department of Justice appointed a special counsel to look into Joe Biden's mishandled classified documents in a case of Republicans needing to be careful what they wish for. Also Marjorie Taylor Greene found herself on the wrong end of a scathing cease and desist from Dr. Dre's legal team and Elon Musk continues to struggle with the aftermath of obliterating Twitter's legal department.

It’s only the beginning. While Goodwin Procter announced a major round of attorney layoffs, Holland & Knight announced a blockbuster expansion by adding Waller Lansden. Two different paths both driven by industry uncertainty: should firms cut or grow their way out of declining demand? Also, Ginni Thomas kept doing Ginni Thomas things.