Above the Law - Thinking Like a Lawyer

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474

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Aug 2026

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About the show

Thinking Like A Lawyer is a podcast featuring Above the Law's Joe Patrice, Kathryn Rubino, and Chris Williams. Each episode, the hosts will take a topic experienced and enjoyed by regular people, and shine it through the prism of a legal framework. This will either reveal an awesome rainbow of thought, or a disorienting kaleidoscope of issues. Either way, it should be fun.

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60 recent

August 12, 202631 min

Biglaw Surrenders Were Worse Than We Thought

Remember when Trump lost the birthright citizenship case? Because he doesn't. ----- Despite protestations that its deal with the Trump administration didn't forfeit the firm's independence, Paul Weiss reportedly seriously debated letting Stephen Miller review the firm's webpage edits according to the New York Times. The same reporting turned up the $3.5 million the firm spent to make its first openly transgender partner leave quietly. Elsewhere, Biglaw is now the largest employer of new law grads, even though it's a bigger slice of a smaller pie, with first-year hiring down for the first time since 2014. And having lost the birthright citizenship case, Donald Trump signed new executive orders explaining that he won it, moving one antecedent about six words to the left and calling it a holding. It's kicking off a string of proclamations from the White House that it's the real winner of cases it decidedly lost.

August 5, 202634 min

Will We Never Learn Our Lesson About The Bar Exam?

And summer bonuses have arrived. ----- The profession yet again forced law school graduates to take a closed-book doctrinal memory test to earn the right to perform a job where answering questions from memory constitutes malpractice. And, yet again, the ritual came with a series of catastrophes and a fully canceled test. In Maryland, the test faced delays. Missouri's delays were even worse, reminding us that the NCBE doesn't guarantee a better exam than the much-maligned California experiment. And in Washington, they had to cancel the whole test. In happier news, summer bonuses came to Biglaw -- or at least some of Biglaw -- with Milbank announcing a special treat. Finally, Wachtell's kissgate scandal spilled over into Gibson Dunn's lateral hiring coup, and we're reminded that work-life balance is important.

July 29, 202631 min

Park Benches And Supreme Court Benches

And Todd Blanche keeps trying to get over the Judiciary speedbump. ----- The biggest story in legal last week was an unfortunate guerrilla antagonizing of a couple making out on a park bench... who just happened to be a Wachtell partner and associate. And now an internal HR problem is suddenly national news. Say what you will about the person who filmed it, but "get a room" was good advice. Meanwhile, Todd Blanche's confirmation hearings continued to drag on, with former supporters abandoning him and even some Republicans wondering why he can't commit to ruling out a January 6 slush fund. A new book says Blanche once feared bringing frivolous cases. He seems to have gotten over that. And Elena Kagan publicly claims her colleagues get a "bad rap" for supporting Trump. She's wrong and making these statements unfairly maligns her liberal colleagues facing personal attacks for their work. Oh, and John Yoo is back in the news.

July 22, 202637 min

2026: A Rule Of Law Odyssey

Maybe in several years, we can get it back. ----- A Vault 50 law firm announced deep staff layoffs -- upward of 10 percent -- last week. Is this a sign of things to come -- a byproduct of AI pressure and a precarious economy -- or a unique problem for that firm? Controversy erupted after the Trump administration swiftly fired a legally appointed U.S. Attorney to replace him with an illegally named imposter. The statute authorizes the dismissal, but the replacement undermines law and order, rendering the district functionally incapable of prosecuting anyone legally. And the law firms that settled with the Trump administration to avoid getting dragged into court have... been dragged into court. If only there had been a podcast warning those firms that this was the natural and logical consequence of those deals. Also, spoiler alert for this episode if you aren't familiar with Homer's 3000-year-old poem.

July 15, 202633 min

Collateral Damage Across The Legal Industry

From firms to law schools, innocent bystanders take heat. ----- Everyone talks about conflicts and redundancies, but the saddest merger collateral damage is forcing legacy lawyers to go back through the last six months of their time. That's what's happening to the Cadwalader associates as their timekeeping system merges with Hogan Lovells. On the law school side, the University of Chicago unveiled its new AI policy to keep students genuinely learning while still tackling the reality of a future AI-enhanced workflow. But laptops became the collateral damage there, as the new policy bans students from bringing their computers to class at all. And we have a deep dive into Moana. 

July 8, 202629 min

Supreme Court Narrowly Passes Reading Comprehension Section

But Sam Alito still has a job. ----- The Fourteenth Amendment lays out birthright citizenship in clear terms. Every subsequent legal challenge and all the scholarly work on the subject -- until about a year ago -- agreed on how to read it. Yet, the Supreme Court still managed to split on the question, with a 6-3 decision knocking down Donald Trump's executive order purporting to overturn the key constitutional provision -- that was more accurately 5-4, with Kavanaugh agreeing with the result on other grounds, but joining the dissent in erasing the Fourteenth Amendment. Or maybe it was 6-3 with an asterisk, because Neil Gorsuch went rogue, mostly agreeing with birthright citizenship in the only scenario the Trump administration really wanted to snuff out. Chief Justice Roberts also took his burning desire to be seen as the middle of the Court comically too far, authoring contradictory opinions back-to-back. And Sam Alito did not retire, despite reports. And in Biglaw, we continue to wonder where all the raises are.

July 1, 202632 min

Alito's Outburst And Tough Times For Partners

And a farewell look back as co-host Chris Williams departs the show. ------ Supreme Court action gets spicy as Sam Alito threw a fit from the bench. After Justice Sotomayor took the opportunity to systematically dismantle his reasoning in the asylum case, Alito spoke up out of turn to explain that he'd have brought better arguments if he'd known she planned to dogwalk him. And Biglaw isn't the collegial environment it used to be, with partners being given haircuts by leadership. And we say goodbye to Chris Williams, who is leaving us as a co-host after this.

June 24, 202636 min

Todd Blanche Disgrace Train Rolls On

Supreme Court ignores Judge Newman's rights. ----- All the news that's fit to print agrees that Todd Blanche isn't fit to head the Department of Justice. Something about the whole transforming the DOJ into a weaponized arm of Donald Trump's political grievances thing. The Supreme Court dodged the ongoing Judge Pauline Newman debacle in the Federal Circuit. Her fellow judges have performed an end run around the Constitution, and the rest of the judiciary seems content to just look the other way. And as more folks use AI to brush up their resumes, its biases keep coming out. But does it really produce different legal resumes for men and women?

June 17, 202630 min

Federal Judges Gone Wild

And a new ranking of top law schools. ------ Above the Law's Top 50 Law School rankings are out and a new school tops the list. But a number of other high prestige law schools have slipped out of the top 10... and it's mostly a matter of cost. Meanwhile, we have two federal judges out of control. Judge Ryan Nelson faces misdemeanor criminal charges over a parking lot altercation, which would be a bad look for a federal judge, but not nearly as egregious as his parking job. And we have more on the Eleanor Ross drama, after her initial "apology letters" went public and prompted the Eleventh Circuit to find a new opportunity to look the other way.

June 3, 202633 min

Sex In Chambers Met With Slap On Wrist

A federal judge carried on a two-year affair with a high-ranking law enforcement officer by having sex in chambers and lying about it to investigators. The Eleventh Circuit responded with a private reprimand, concealing the judge's identity. But the judges didn't think through their anonymization strategy nearly well enough and AI cracked the case in minutes, revealing Judge Eleanor Ross of the Northern District of Georgia. Meanwhile, in lawyer ethics, a bar complaint in New York focuses on Todd Blanche, citing the ruling out of Tennessee finding a presumptively vindictive prosecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. And down in Florida, the scores of former judges and other professionals behind the complaint against Pam Bondi -- that Florida previously punted, claiming that it couldn't investigate a sitting Attorney General -- renewed the call, noting that Bondi may be many things, but she's definitely not the Attorney General anymore.