For longtime observers of the legal profession, here’s a headline we wouldn’t have expected a few years ago: “The Eight-Figure Talent Race for Supreme Court Lawyers.” According to C. Ryan Barber and Erin Mulvaney of The Wall Street Journal (gift link), superstar SCOTUS advocates—including former solicitor general Elizabeth Prelogar, now at Cooley, and former acting SG Jeff Wall, who recently joined Gibson Dunn—are commanding pay packages previously unheard of for appellate practitioners.

For such a small and elite group, the Supreme Court bar has seen a striking amount of movement in the past few weeks. In April, Wall led a four-partner group that decamped from Sullivan & Cromwell to Gibson. A few days later, another leading high-court litigator, Kannon Shanmugam, left Paul Weiss and joined Davis Polk & Wardwell, where he now heads the firm’s new Supreme Court and appellate practice group.

What explains this flurry of movement in the SCOTUS space? Why are top firms investing so heavily in Supreme Court and appellate practices? And what broader trends might this reflect?

I could think of no better guest to explore these topics than Kannon Shanmugam. Not only did he recently go through the recruiting process as a lateral partner, but he’s now going to be doing some hiring of his own, as he and Masha Hansford build out what Kannon hopes will be “the very best appellate practice in the country.”

Thanks to Kannon for speaking with me, and congratulations to him and Masha on their move to Davis Polk.

Show Notes:

• Kannon Shanmugam bio, Davis Polk & Wardwell

• Kannon K. Shanmugam profile, Chambers and Partners

• Davis Polk Looks to Appellate Star Shanmugam to Elevate D.C. Build, by Meghan Tribe for Bloomberg Law

Sponsored by:

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Three quick notes about this transcript. First, it has been cleaned up from the audio in ways that don’t alter substance—e.g., by deleting verbal filler or adding a word here or there to clarify meaning. Second, my interviewee has not reviewed this transcript, and any errors are mine. Third, because of length constraints, this newsletter may be truncated in email; to view the entire post, simply click on “view entire message” in your email app.

David Lat: Welcome to the Original Jurisdiction podcast. I’m your host, David Lat, author of a Substack newsletter about law and the legal profession also named Original Jurisdiction, which you can read and subscribe to at davidlat.substack.com. You’re listening to the ninety-ninth episode of this podcast, recorded on Thursday, June 4.

Thanks to this podcast’s sponsor, NexFirm. NexFirm helps Biglaw attorneys become founding partners. To learn more about how NexFirm can help you launch your firm, call 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment@nexfirm.com. Want to know who the guest will be for the next Original Jurisdiction podcast? Follow NexFirm on LinkedIn for a preview.

We’ve entered the month of June, and OJ readers know what that means: time to focus on the U.S. Supreme Court, which will be handing down some of its biggest decisions over the next few weeks. And it’s also a good time to talk about the Supreme Court bar—which has seen a remarkable amount of movement this year.

In the span of less than a week in late April, we saw two major moves by groups of Supreme Court and appellate practitioners. We first learned about Jeff Wall, Morgan Ratner, Judd Littleton, and Yaira Dubin moving from Sullivan & Cromwell to Gibson Dunn & Crutcher. And then, a few days later, Kannon Shanmugam and Masha Hansford left Paul Weiss and joined Davis Polk & Wardwell.

And now, Kannon is joining me, right here on the Original Jurisdiction podcast. Most of my listeners are familiar with Kannon—but for the few who are not, he’s one of the nation’s leading SCOTUS advocates, with more than 40 Supreme Court arguments under his belt. He clerked for the late Justice Scalia, served as an assistant to the solicitor general at the U.S. Department of Justice, and led the Supreme Court and appellate practices at three top law firms: Williams & Connolly, Paul Weiss, and now, Davis Polk. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Kannon Shanmugam.

Kannon, thank you so much for joining me.

Kannon Shanmugam: It’s my pleasure, David.

DL: So this is not the first time we’ve spoken, but for the benefit of my readers who somehow are not familiar with you, tell us about your background and upbringing. Where did you grow up?

KS: I grew up in Lawrence, Kansas. I’m a proud Jayhawk by birth. I spent most of my childhood in Lawrence. My parents emigrated from India a few years before I was born. My father was for many decades a professor at the University of Kansas, where my brother still teaches. I nevertheless flew the nest and went to Harvard for college and then also for law school, with two years at Oxford in between.

I then moved here to Washington, where I’ve been ever since. I clerked first for Judge Michael Luttig on the Fourth Circuit, and his chambers were right across the river from here, in Alexandria. And then I was fortunate enough to clerk for Justice Scalia at the Supreme Court, and then started my legal career in private practice, working with Ken Starr in what was then one of the few appellate practices at Kirkland & Ellis. In 2004, I left for the Solicitor General’s Office, the office that handles the government’s litigation in the Supreme Court. I was there for four years, and then in 2008 I came out into private practice. And as of six weeks ago, I’m a partner here at Davis Polk.

DL: So let’s double back a little. You may not remember this, but we actually met a million years ago in college, when you interviewed for a resident tutor position at the house I was in—I think I actually have an ancient copy of your resume in my file somewhere. But let me ask you this: what led you to go to law school, especially since you mentioned your father was an academic, but not a legal academic?

KS: So I didn’t get that resident tutorship position.

DL: That is true—don’t hold that against me! It was a committee decision.

KS: I’ve overcome that failure, David, somehow. I’m glad we’re still friends despite that.

But I never really wanted to be an academic. I had tremendous admiration, not surprisingly, for my late father. He’s one of my heroes. But it just wasn’t really the lifestyle for me. I really like being in the arena. And so either when I was in graduate school studying the classics (which was also my undergraduate subject) or after law school, I never really thought about being a law professor. I enjoy teaching the occasional class, and I hope I will continue to do that. And I love higher education; I joined the Harvard Corporation, which is the board that runs Harvard University, and it’s been a really fascinating thing to learn more about the university and how it operates. But it’s never really been the full-time vocation for me.

DL: I’m about to head up to Cambridge for my 30th college reunion, so as an alum, I’m very glad to see you on the board, especially since our alma mater certainly could use some legal help right now. But let me ask you: you majored in classics—not poli sci or “Government,” as it’s called at Harvard. Why did you pick the law?

KS: Well, when I was in college, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be a professor, and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be ambassador to the Vatican. So I knew I was going to do something other than the classics after I finished graduate school. And the two main things I was thinking about were journalism and law.

I was the editor of The Independent, which is the weekly newspaper at Harvard, and thought really seriously about a career in journalism. But I always had an interest in government and politics, so the law was always a possibility. And as I went through my college career, and as I spectacularly failed to get various jobs at leading newspapers for the summer, I came to realize that journalism was going to be a tough field to break into—and that was when the internet was in its infancy. So I decided on law school instead.

DL: Well, I can relate to that. I worked for your rival publication, The Harvard Crimson, and in my senior year I was looking at journalism jobs. My parents saw that they paid, I don’t know, $25,000 or $30,000—and as immigrant parents, they basically said, “No way.” So I wound up in law school. And unlike you, I went straight through.

So let me ask you this. You had a great experience at Harvard Law School. You totally cleaned up there. You wound up clerking for two very distinguished judges. One of them, former Judge Michael Luttig, is now a major commentator on events in the news. He went from being on the Fourth Circuit and a Supreme Court shortlister to the general counsel of Boeing, to now, in some ways, a public intellectual, I would say. I’ve talked to some conservatives who are a little puzzled by him, and I’ve talked to other people who basically view him as their hero. Do you have any thoughts on the evolution of J. Michael Luttig?

KS: Well, he has definitely had a lot of acts, as you say—first as a court of appeals judge, a fabulous court of appeals judge; it was a great privilege to clerk for him. And then as you say, he was general counsel of Boeing, and he is now a leading presence on social media and commentator on present events. I can’t really speak to his current political thinking, but I will say that he is a very thoughtful and serious person—and when he was a judge, a great role model for me in the early years of my career.

DL: I will not disagree with any of that. He is certainly a very thoughtful person, whether you agree or disagree with the particular positions he takes.

So you spent time in the Office of the Solicitor General. That, of course, must have been an amazing experience. How would you characterize that?

KS: For an appellate lawyer, it is a foundational training experience, and it’s no accident that many of the leading appellate litigators cut their teeth in the Solicitor General’s Office. It was just a tremendous professional opportunity to get to work on and even argue Supreme Court cases at such an early stage of my career.

And I was fortunate to be in the office at a time when there were a lot of legends there. Ted Olson was the solicitor general who hired me into the office at the time. Ed Kneedler and Michael Dreeben were among the deputies. Even among the assistants—which was the level that I was at—you had people like Jeff Minear and Irv Gornstein and Jim Feldman and Malcolm Stewart, who’s now one of the deputies, and so many others who were just extraordinary lawyers and role models, in the way that they thought about the law as well as in the very ethical way that they made representations on behalf of the United States. And so it was without question the formative experience of my career.

I was lucky that I was relatively young when I was in the Solicitor General’s Office, because I think I probably didn’t know enough to realize how nervous I should be about arguing cases in the Supreme Court. I was still in the heady days of youth and felt very confident in my own abilities. And so I probably didn’t feel quite as nauseous as I should have before each of those arguments when I was in the government.

DL: I actually totally concur with your thought that the older we get, the more we realize our limitations. When I was an undergraduate or law student, I thought I was so brilliant, and now I realize the limits of my own knowledge and abilities.

You were actually at Kirkland with former judge and solicitor general Ken Starr before you went to the SG’s office—one of the few appellate and Supreme Court practices around at the time. And it’s very interesting because your career trajectory, in many ways, mirrors or reflects the rise of a specialized Supreme Court and appellate bar. This is a very big-picture question, but do you have general thoughts on that, and whether that is a good or bad thing for the Court and for its work in deciding cases?

KS: I don’t think it’s a bad thing—perhaps that’s not surprising—I think, by and large, it’s a good thing. But I think it really reflects a broader trend in the law, which is the ever greater degree of specialization in legal practice—and perhaps that’s not surprising, because we have many more lawyers in the profession than we did 25 or 50 years ago.

So, as in many other areas of practice, people have come to recognize that it takes a particular set of skills and a particular type of knowledge to be an effective appellate advocate. Certainly the form of advocacy in the appellate courts is very different from the form of advocacy in trial courts before juries. If anything, it’s probably evolved even further away from district-court advocacy.

And the reality in the American legal system is that the appellate courts are where cases ultimately get resolved. We have a system that places a lot of weight on juries, but juries sometimes make mistakes. So we really rely on a robust appellate court system in this country to get things right. And so for clients, if clients have big disputes, they really need to have the best lawyers at the appellate level.

Now, sometimes that’s misleadingly characterized as a Supreme Court practice, and I’ve been fortunate to have had a number of arguments in the Supreme Court—but the reality is that most big commercial disputes actually end at the court of appeals level. And so in many ways, if you ask what I do on a daily basis, I’m at least as likely to be arguing something in a federal or even a state appellate court as I am in the Supreme Court.

And it’s funny, as I was thinking about my decision to join Davis Polk, I was talking with a friend of mine, and she said to me, “It’s a little bit misleading to describe your practice as even an appellate practice. What you really do is you help marquee clients with their most difficult issues.” And that, I think, is actually a very accurate way of capturing what lawyers like me do for a living: we help our clients with their most difficult legal issues, wherever a case may be in the lifecycle of litigation.

DL: There has been this evolution, because on the one hand, you’re right, there’s been this greater specialization—but on the other hand, it seems to me that what it means to be an appellate and Supreme Court litigator has changed. Because one thing I’ve heard, and what some of your colleagues have told me, is you don’t argue just in the Supreme Court, or even in the state and circuit appellate courts. You’re also brought into complex litigation, maybe as a case is about to be filed or even before a case is filed, to strategize and brainstorm.

So I guess if we were to think—shout out here to Advisory Opinions listeners—of buckets, we have the Supreme Court bucket, we have the state and federal appeals court bucket, and we have another bucket helping trial teams or counseling or what have you. How would you say, typically, if we were to average or wash it all out, that your practice breaks down into those buckets? And if I’ve missed a bucket, feel free to add it.

KS: No, I think that covers almost everything. And I would say that at any given time, one bucket may be fuller than the others.

So just to give you a sense of what I’m working on right now, I think our Supreme Court bucket is actually probably the fullest bucket right now, just because I recently argued a Supreme Court case shortly after I came over to the firm. We have two cases on the docket for next Term already, one of which I’m taking the lead on, the other one of which my brilliant partner, Masha Hansford, is taking the lead on. And so those are just taking up a lot of bandwidth right now. But if you go back over the last two or three years, I could certainly identify times when the other buckets have been the fullest buckets, and in particular, the district-court bucket can sometimes be fairly time-consuming. And often those are cases where the matter is inevitably going to end up in an appellate court and the client has just brought someone in sooner.

I was having dinner earlier this week with the general counsel of one of our clients, and he said, “Kannon, we have this case that’s going to trial later on this year. I’d love to get you involved because there’s some really novel and significant legal issues that we’re going to need to figure out our positions on and our best arguments on.” And so that’s a case that isn’t even in trial yet where the client is looking for advice, and that’s pretty common nowadays.

So I really do think that that’s the value of these practices. In many ways, labeling them as “Supreme Court” or “appellate” practices is a little bit misleading. What we do is really more like a combination of what the Solicitor General’s Office does and the Office of Legal Counsel does within the Justice Department: we help with difficult legal issues, wherever they might be in the process.

DL: I know that you said it’s going to vary a lot—but of those three buckets, is any of them consistently over 50%, or not really?

KS: I think the court of appeals bucket is probably by volume the most significant—because if you take a typical year, a good year for a Supreme Court advocate is three or four arguments, barring something really unexpected happening. But a typical year for me in the courts of appeals is about a dozen arguments, and sometimes it can be more than that. And if anything, cases in the courts of appeals can sometimes be even more labor-intensive to prepare for than cases in the Supreme Court, because cases in the Supreme Court often involve these neat, discrete legal issues. And it’s not unusual, as you know, to have a case in the court of appeals where you have a big trial, very fact-intensive arguments, and four or five legal issues. And so if you looked at my sheer hours, I think work in the appellate courts is probably year-on-year the most significant.

DL: That makes total sense to me. So I will not rehash your move from Williams & Connolly to Paul Weiss; we’ve talked about that when I had you previously on another podcast I used to host, and also in an interview I did in the early days of Original Jurisdiction. But I want to touch on your move from Paul Weiss to Davis Polk.

So when you moved to Paul Weiss from Williams & Connolly, you kind of set off a little game of musical chairs, because then Williams & Connolly went out and brought in Lisa Blatt, and then Arnold & Porter went out and got John Elwood. And similarly now, there seems to be this flurry of movement in the appellate space. I know from my brief detour into recruiting that these deals take a long time to work out, and so it’s hard to tell when a deal is announced versus when it was in the works. But do you have any thoughts on this flurry of movement in the Supreme Court and appellate space? Because around the same time that you moved from Paul Weiss to Davis Polk, there was a group of other star Supreme Court and appellate advocates, including Jeff Wall and Morgan Ratner, who went from Sullivan & Cromwell to Gibson Dunn. If you go back a little bit farther, of course, Elizabeth Prelogar returned to Cooley. And there’s just been a lot of movement in that space; I could mention a whole bunch of other people. So I guess my question is: all this movement in the SCOTUS and appellate space, what’s up with that?

KS: Well, I don’t know that it’s a huge amount of movement, and I think it certainly is true that the two times that I’ve moved firms, there have been other moves at the same time or roughly at the same time. But there were seven years in between those two moves; I had seven wonderful years at Paul Weiss. And I think the reality is that perhaps it seems as though there’s more movement in the appellate space because often you have people coming out of government, like Elizabeth Prelogar. Historically, there have been a lot of people who’ve gone from our area of practice into government jobs, into the judiciary, and the like. And I also think that the velocity of movement to and from law firms has gone up in recent years, just more generally. So in some sense, this may just be reflective of a broader trend. But in the appellate area in particular, what it probably reflects is a recognition on the part of firms, including firms that historically have not had these practices, that they can really add value to the litigation practices of the firms as a whole and to the firms more generally.

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Now, this is kind of an awkward subject, but it’s been reported that some appellate stars are getting these gigantic, eight-figure pay packages. I’ve speculated in the pages of Original Jurisdiction about your compensation—you don’t need to address that—but what do you think justifies these pay packages? Because the old narrative about Supreme Court and appellate practice was, “Oh, it’s prestigious, it helps with recruiting, but it’s not leveraged, and it doesn’t make quite as much money.”

But I was speaking recently to the head of litigation at a firm that made one of these big appellate hires, and this partner told me something very interesting. They said that having an appellate or Supreme Court marquee name is actually really critical to winning the biggest litigation matters, period—because this person was grousing that before they hired this appellate star or stars, they had lost some beauty contests to places like your shops who could say, “Well, if this doesn’t go as well as planned, or if we need high-powered brain work at the front end, we also have so-and-so.” So they basically say, “We have these great trial lawyers, but we also have this sort of brain trust of Supreme Court and appellate stars.” And so if you win one or two or three of those matters because of the presence of a Supreme Court or appellate person, maybe that person has paid for themselves because, given what billing rates are, billing in major matters can go well into the tens of millions or even the nine figures.

So is that part of it? How would you explain why some prominent Supreme Court and appellate litigators are commanding, reportedly, $12 million or $15 million or even $20 million pay packages?

KS: So I won’t speak specifically to the issue of compensation, but I will speak to the issue of why appellate practices are seemingly valuable to firms generally. One of the reasons is the reason you said, David, which is that when you are attempting to bring in significant litigation matters, this is a capacity that clients expect to have, and they expect to have it not just at the back end but at every stage of the litigation. And so it’s very important to be able to offer someone who is credible as an appellate advocate, whether or not you’re going to have that person argue the motion to dismiss, or whether or not you’re just going to have that person available to advise on the litigation at the early stages. And so I think that that is unquestionably valuable.

But I’ve always disputed the premise that appellate practices are somehow by their terms not valuable. I don’t know quite why appellate practices have always had that rap, and I suppose that if you were spending all your time pursuing Supreme Court cases at all costs and offering to do them for free, maybe that practice would be less “valuable.” But I think that when a general counsel of a big company calls you up and says, “We have a billion-dollar problem that’s heading to the Second Circuit,” it’s pretty valuable to be able to handle that case for the client, particularly if it’s a client who’s coming to you anew at the appellate level who may not be someone who was a client before that. And these are cases where clients are typically willing to pay the bills. So I think in terms of the economics of all of this, I’ve always thought that appellate practices are valuable for that reason, in addition to all of the intangible reasons why having a leading appellate practice is valuable to the reputation of a law firm.

DL: I totally agree with you, and you can certainly think of it in terms of dollars and cents. I once talked to the head of litigation at a major bank who hired one of your competitors, and this competitor got a nine-figure judgment from a lower court reversed in the court of appeals. It didn’t go to the Supreme Court, but getting a nine-figure judgment reversed or vacated or what have you—what’s a cut of that? It’s significant.

But let me ask you this, to sort of play devil’s advocate or to steelperson the rap on appellate practice. I think the classic argument was that it’s not leveraged. You can’t throw 50 or 100 warm bodies at these matters to do document review. I’m guessing—and maybe you can bake this into your answer to my ramblings—that typically you can staff an appellate matter with a partner or two partners, an associate or two associates, or three or four, but not 50. So I guess the argument was that you just couldn’t do leverage—your thoughts on that?

KS: So David, I would dispute the premise a little bit, because I don’t think that there are that many matters anymore where you have 50 or 60 associates working on the matter. The reality is that much of the work that associates were doing 25 years ago when I started in practice has long since been mechanized—and now with the rise of AI, associates simply aren’t doing that work anymore, and clients are increasingly coming to firms like ours simply because they have major complicated legal problems often involving novel legal issues. And the reality is that if the stakes are high enough, you can handle those cases without 50 or 60 lawyers and do so in a way that serves the client’s interests, but that is still economically rational for everyone involved. And on a typical appellate matter, we will have a team of four or five lawyers, and I think that that’s typically the right size to serve our client’s purposes.

DL: Obviously, I’m not asking about any specific representation, but how would you describe your approach to billing nowadays? Have you seen any kind of change in the billable hour versus alternative fee arrangements? And if so, in what direction? Or have you not really seen a change?

KS: That’s probably an issue above my pay grade, because all I see is my area of practice. And I think that appellate work has always been a type of work that is susceptible to alternative fee arrangements because it’s usually relatively easy to predict how much work is going to be required upfront. I think that gets more difficult with other types of litigation, but I think at least for appellate work where you typically know that it’s going to be two written briefs and an oral argument, you can do that if clients prefer, and some clients do and some clients don’t.

DL: Do you have a rough percentage of what your practice breaks down into in terms of X percent of revenue is billable hour versus alternative fee arrangement?

KS: That’s really hard to say, David; I don’t know that I’ve ever really tried to quantify that. It really varies from time to time, and it just depends on the client.

DL: But it’s probably still fair to say, as I think most lawyers in your position would, that the billable hour is still dominant? It has to be.

KS: I think so. Certainly in my personal experience, I think that’s right.

DL: So I definitely want to delve into a couple other matters, including the Court, but it would be podcaster malpractice of me to not ask you a little bit about why you left Paul Weiss. Now, of course, I understand and I will already preempt your response about how you were going toward an opportunity at Davis Polk. It’s an amazing firm. Nobody disputes that, etc., etc.

But were there any factors related to Paul Weiss that led to your move? I’ll mention two. One, the controversial deal that the firm struck with the Trump administration—and I have to say, I give you props for being more willing to speak about this deal than any other partner at Paul Weiss—and two, the argument that Paul Weiss has been shifting to a more transactional practice rather than a litigation practice.

So I guess that’s my question: Did anything about Paul Weiss lead you to this move, as opposed to the attractiveness of the opportunities at Davis Polk, which I will not dispute?

KS: Well, it was really an attractive opportunity. So even if you’re going to try to preempt me, I’m going to say that, because it was a very attractive opportunity, and it has been wonderful in the first six weeks so far.

I wouldn’t want to say anything critical about Paul Weiss, David, because I had seven great years there. As I said to my colleagues when I left, I wouldn’t be the lawyer I am today but for my experience there. I had some of the most enjoyable years of my professional career there.

I think I’ve always had a simple ambition, which is to have the very best appellate practice in the country, and I would say that over the months leading up to my departure, I thought really long and hard about where would be the best place to do that for the remainder of my career. And in that, I very much had a partner in my colleague, Masha Hansford, who came over with me and who I believe is the finest appellate lawyer of her generation. And we thought about this and talked about it a lot. We were very deliberate in how we went about doing it. And I’ll tell you, David, that a few months before I came over to the firm, I remember I was sitting in a coffee shop in New York, and I remember thinking to myself, if I were ever to leave Paul Weiss, where might I want to go? And I made a list, and I will tell you that Davis Polk was at the top of that list, and it was at the top of my list even before I had any idea that the firm would be interested.

Now, why was that true? I think it was for three reasons that ultimately ended up being the reasons why, when the firm invited me to join the partnership, I was very excited to do so, as was Masha.

The first is the reputation of the firm. I think that there is perhaps no firm that has a better reputation in the world at large among clients, and among fellow lawyers, than Davis Polk does. Second, the culture of the firm. Even when we were in law school, it had a reputation for being a very friendly, collaborative culture, and I think it has retained a team-first mentality that I’ve found very attractive, rather than an individual-first mentality. And so being in a place with a strong culture was very important to me. And the third was the quality of the management of the law firm. This law firm has management with a very clear vision for what a successful law firm in the modern era should look like. And in my conversations with our great chair and managing partner, Neil Barr, and others here at the firm, I really came away with a sense that this firm was being run very well.

And so in the end, for Masha and me, it was a very clear decision at the end of the day that this was the right place for us to continue and to build our practice.

DL: You mentioned AI earlier, and of course another very prominent Supreme Court and appellate practitioner, Neal Katyal, got in some hot water over some controversial comments he made about his use of Harvey in the tariffs case. I won’t ask you to opine on that, but I guess what I would ask you is this. Neal talked a great deal about how he was very effectively leveraging the power of AI. On the other hand, I spoke to another notable Supreme Court litigator, Jennifer Bennett of Gupta Wessler, who’s more on the plaintiffs’ side, but she said that given the nature of the work, she doesn’t find it very helpful. So where do you fall on this spectrum of Neal being a big cheerleader and advocate for AI and Jennifer being perhaps a skeptic?

KS: I think I probably fall somewhere in between. And both Neal and Jennifer are extraordinary advocates, and so it’s interesting to me that they have divergent views about this.

I think of AI first and foremost as a tool, and it’s an incredibly useful tool. We don’t use it yet to draft briefs. I don’t use it yet to tell me how I should answer questions at oral argument. But it can be incredibly helpful, sort of a steroidal version of the research tools that we used when we started out in practice, like Lexis and Westlaw, where we were crafting all these complicated Boolean searches. You can get an AI tool to do in two minutes what those tools could do after two or three hours of fruitless searching and rooting around. And it would be folly not to use those tools—but of course you have to use those tools responsibly. You have to be very careful to double-check the work, in the same way that we’ve always double-checked the work of humans working on cases. And you have to be very aware of the potential pitfalls.

And I think particularly for appellate advocacy, you have to remember that above all, particularly in oral argument, appellate advocacy is the art of humans persuading other humans. And you don’t do that just by making technically proficient arguments, and you don’t do that just by making the sorts of arguments you make to juries. You do that by connecting, by understanding the concerns that the very human judges or justices to whom you’re arguing have about your position and responding to them as best you can. And that’s the part of the job that I think will be the last part of the job that AI can successfully replicate. And it’s a very important part of the job, and I’d like to think that’s really what clients hire us for. It’s the human judgment about how to persuade other humans to agree with your position.

DL: I speak to law students and young lawyers, and I often get the question of, “What field of law can I go into where I’m least likely to be replaced by a robot?” And I actually tell them, and maybe I’m biased as a former litigator, but I tell them that litigation over transactional practice is actually probably pretty good, especially the type of litigation where you have to stand up and argue before a jury or a panel of judges, for no other reason than that juries and judges don’t want robots presenting the arguments. And the judges are in charge, of course—so as long as the judges don’t want the robots, we’re not going to have the robots. So do you think it’s probably true that the type of work you do is perhaps more “AI-proof” than some other areas?

KS: I think that’s probably true, at least until the judges themselves get replaced by robots, and at that point the robots will probably want robots arguing to them, but there would be all sorts of constitutional problems with that on the federal level, David. So I think at least for now, I think we’re good.

DL: Okay, good. Well, maybe we can safely make it to retirement before all the work for journalists and writers and Supreme Court and appellate advocates has been taken by robots. I don’t know about our kids; good luck to them.

But let me ask you this. We were talking about argument, and the Supreme Court is in a very interesting position right now. When I last interviewed you, we were talking about the pandemic format of argument, which had to accommodate certain realities, including the fact that you couldn’t really tell who was going to talk. And so the Court moved to this seriatim format, and now we have this sort of hybrid format where there’s a free-for-all upfront, and then a seriatim round of questioning where the justices go in order of seniority.

I actually really like this setup. In fact, I actually proposed it in an article, before it was adopted. But what are your thoughts on whether the format’s going to change? Because both Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito in the past few weeks have commented on how perhaps the arguments are a little bit too long now, and perhaps the marginal utility is decreasing at the tail end of these longer arguments. So I guess I have a two-part question. One, what do you predict the Court will do, and two, what would you want to see?

KS: So I love that it’s a two-part question because that’s like a question a justice would ask. And it’s funny, David, I remember the last time you interviewed me, it was right after one of these pandemic-era arguments. It was literally that afternoon, and it really was the pandemic that triggered the changes in the format of the argument, some of which have continued to this day.

So just for the benefit of the audience, as I think people are probably aware, the way that the Supreme Court currently works, to slightly oversimplify, is that each side gets 30 minutes, which was the way it was before the pandemic, but then at the end of the 30 minutes, the justices go one by one and can ask questions until each of them is done asking questions, and they go by order of seniority from the Chief Justice down to Justice Jackson, the most junior justice. And the result of that change in format has been that the oral arguments have gotten a lot longer, and it’s not at all unusual for an oral argument that started at 10:00 a.m. and previously would’ve been finished right on the dot of 11:00 to go past noon. I think my last argument went a little over two hours, and that’s not uncommon nowadays.

And so my personal view is that I’m happy to do the oral arguments however the justices would like. That having been said, I do think that there is a general sense that the oral arguments often, not always, go on for longer now than is perhaps useful. And I do think that there are certain weird consequences of that. One of them is that when the Court has two different cases in a day, the second case always seems to get short shrift because justices are human, too, and they get hungry. And by the time you get to 1:00 and no one’s had a lunch break, I think people are kind of ready to get out of the courtroom.

Another thing that I’ve observed is that it is usually the norm that the federal government will participate in a case as a friend of the court if it’s not a party to the case. And that means that it’s not uncommon to have two advocates on one side of the case and one advocate on the other. And it seems like when that happens, the time is inevitably split unevenly, favoring the side that has the government supporting it. And I think there’s a little bit of unfairness that comes with that as well.

And so I think those of us who speak in paragraphs rather than in glib half sentences like this current format, because it’s conducive to giving fuller answers, and hopefully that is helpful to the Court and to your client’s case. But at the same time, I recognize that there are countervailing considerations and that, again, the length of the oral arguments may not always be helpful to the Court. And so I know the Chief Justice recently gave a speech where he said that the Court was going to think about this a little bit more over the summer. It’ll be interesting to see what comes out of it—again, I’m happy to do whatever the Court thinks is most helpful—but I do think that the Court probably would be well served by perhaps at least tweaking the format, even if the Court does not go back to the prior format, which could sometimes be challenging, particularly in big cases where the justices have a lot of questions.

DL: And I also heard from some advocates that it was a little challenging for some of the justices, especially the ones who I guess were more junior, because they were worried that they weren’t going to be able to get the opportunity to lob in their question. And now the justices can kind of chill out a little bit more, because they know they’re going to get that time.

So I don’t know. I guess I’m trying to figure out what I would do if I were one of the justices. I don’t know that I want to cut out the seriatim round entirely, because of the benefit I just described. And if you were to just say, go back to really fixed time limits, like under Chief Justice Rehnquist, is that going to cut off somebody’s seriatim time? I don’t know. How long is that free-for-all right now?

KS: It really varies, but again, it’s not uncommon for the free-for-all to go for as long as the original part of the argument itself. I think some advocates have speculated that the Court might have informal limitations on each justice, like three minutes per justice. And nobody knows that for certain, but it does seem as if the justices sometimes suggest that their time is up or otherwise that they’re somehow limited. I could see the Court perhaps tightening those limits a little bit, though sometimes it’s actually helpful when a particular justice gets on a roll and is getting helpful answers; I don’t know that you want to artificially curtail that either. So I’m glad it’s not my problem, because I think it’s not an easy question to figure out what the optimal format is. And I suspect the justices themselves have different views about that.

DL: What about this? What if we get rid of that little minute or two at the front where you get to give uninterrupted remarks? Come on, we all know what this case is about; let’s just cut to it. What if you cut that part off, had a time certain for the free-for-all, and then also had a little time limit on each justice that was actually public and transparent and that the justices knew, too?

KS: What’s funny about the two minutes at the beginning, David, is that that actually came first. The Court instituted that right before the pandemic and retained it after the pandemic. I don’t know how helpful that is to the Court. As an advocate, I actually find it very helpful because after I’ve gone through the preparation process, sometimes I think about the case in a slightly different way, and I try to capture that in the introduction to the argument. And so if someone is listening closely to that introduction, they might perceive the fact that I’m emphasizing some points slightly differently.

And so I think at least for the advocate, it’s a useful tool, but ultimately it’s for the Court to decide whether it’s helpful to them. I do think that often you hear justices referring back to the introduction during the oral argument, which to me is at least some evidence that they are paying attention to it and interested in what the advocates have to say.

DL: You’ve kind of brought me around. I guess I ascribe more utility to that than I used to.

Let me ask you one last question before we go to the speed round. We are recording this now on Thursday, June 4, and we are still waiting for some of the most high-profile rulings from the Supreme Court. The ones that came down today—no offense to the advocates and parties to them—were not so exciting to those of us who are just members of the chattering class or the punditocracy. But let me ask you, based on what we’ve seen so far, do you have any big-picture thoughts on themes that are emerging from the current Court? It’s been stable in composition for a little while now, since the arrival of Justice Jackson. There’s been a lot of talk over the emergency/shadow/interim docket.

So again, big picture, the Supreme Court: where is it now, and where is it going?

KS: Well, we’ll have a better sense of that about a month from now, David, because as you say, we haven’t really had most of the significant decisions of the Term—but there’s no doubt that this is the Term where a number of the major pieces of litigation involving the administration have now finally come to the Court, for the most part, on the merits.

We had a lot of action on the so-called emergency docket in the first year of the president’s term. But here we are in the second year, and now you have all of these major issues, the tariffs case (which has of course already been decided), the cases involving the presidential removal power (both the case involving the FTC and the case involving the Federal Reserve), and the case concerning birthright citizenship, and a number of other interesting second-order cases involving administration initiatives. And it’ll be interesting to see where the dust settles in all of those cases, to see how many of those cases the administration wins and how many of them the administration loses.

And I think if the administration loses at least some of those cases, the interesting question will be, where do the justices break down? And I think in particular on a Court with six Republican appointees that is somewhat more conservative than the Court that you and I grew up with, David, as baby associates, I think it is clear that there are still some meaningful jurisprudential disagreements among those six justices. Your colleague Sarah Isgur has written a whole book about that and has talked a lot about that on Advisory Opinions. And I think that this year is going to provide some pretty significant evidence of that, and how that affects the narrative around the Court and how the Court is perceived is going to be very interesting. I think that there was this narrative that the Court was being deferential to the current administration, and that narrative may well change if the current administration loses some of these big cases.

DL: And I would venture that it’s already changing because of the tariffs case. That was a signature policy initiative of Trump, and we’ll see what happens in the birthright case, but I agree with you, this will be a very revealing next few weeks.

So turning to the speed round, these are four questions, and they are the same for all my guests. And my first question is, what do you like the least about the law? And this can either be the practice of law or law as an abstract system.

KS: I think the amount of time I spend dealing with administration. I wish I had more time to prepare for arguments and less time that I spend reviewing bills.

DL: At Paul Weiss, you were both the head of the D.C. office and a co-chair of litigation. I believe at Davis Polk, you’re head of the appellate practice, right?

KS: I am, but that’s easy because until recently the appellate practice was just Masha and me, and she’s very easy to administer. No, I did have some really significant administrative responsibilities when I was at Paul Weiss; I enjoyed them when I had them, but I’m very glad to be focusing now on practicing law. And I hasten to add that the reality is that if anything, Masha is probably administering me rather than vice versa, even though I have the title. She’s much better at that stuff than I am.

DL: Fair enough. My second question is, what would you be if you were not a lawyer?

KS: Well, as I said earlier, I probably would be a journalist. And in my younger days, I would’ve loved to have been a professional athlete, but it became pretty clear that that was not going to happen.

DL: My third question is, how much sleep do you get each night?

KS: So I knew you were going to ask that question. I would say if I’m being honest, about seven hours. I am an early bird. I tend to be up by about 5:45, and I tend to be at the office by about 7:00. If I’m not in bed by 11:00, something has gone wrong.

DL: Fair enough. I always like hearing a number above six from very successful lawyers and other figures in the legal profession, so I’m glad to hear seven. My last question is, any final words of wisdom, such as career advice or life advice, for my listeners?

KS: I gave a graduation speech a few years ago where I said that a career is like a climbing wall. Sometimes you have to go sideways or even down to get to where you want to go. And I think that’s really important advice.

My oldest is heading off to college next fall, and I think a lot about this because I think that, for people in our kids’ generation, there’s this tremendous temptation to think that a career has to be linear and that there are just natural steps, and that if you take each of those steps, you’ll rise to the top of whatever profession you’re in. And I just think that the reality is that there are very few people for whom that is actually true. And if you talk to even the most successful people in our profession, chances are that they’ve had setbacks, things that have gone wrong in the course of their career. They’ve made decisions that may not have been obvious career decisions that ended up working out really well for them.

And I think that that is really important advice, particularly for people who are getting started—that it’s okay to make mistakes and to perhaps do something just because it’s interesting, not because it’s the next step on the career ladder. I actually think, again, that when you talk to really successful people, at some point along the way, they can point to something that’s in that category.

DL: Well, I’m very glad to hear you say that, because I suspect that you have not been denied any opportunity since the time that we didn’t hire you for that tutor job.

KS: That’s completely false, but that’s a subject for another episode. We could do the episode of “All of Kannon’s Professional Failures” for our next episode together.

DL: I think that would be a very short episode. Kannon, thank you so much for joining me; it has been a pleasure.

KS: It’s a great pleasure, David. Thanks for having me.

DL: Thanks so much to Kannon for joining me, and congratulations to him on his move to Davis Polk.

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Last week took me to opposite ends of the Acela corridor. On Tuesday, I headed down to D.C. to moderate what was—as I predicted—a lively, even spicy panel discussion, “A More Perfect Union: Free Speech, DEI, and America at 250.” Then on Friday, I trekked up to Cambridge for my 30th college reunion at Harvard. Both events were a ton of fun, although I’m a bit exhausted right now—partly from all the travel, and partly from poor sleep the past two nights. (This was my first time staying in the dorms for one of my reunions, and it will definitely be the last.)

Here at Original Jurisdiction, and especially in Judicial Notice, I’m all about “news you can use.” So here’s a tip: look yourself up in the unclaimed-property database for your current state or any state where you previously resided. I did this for New York and New Jersey, found unclaimed funds for me and to Zach, and received checks totaling $200 in a matter of days. I also found money for my mother and for Zach’s dad. (You’re welcome! And if you’re a free subscriber to OJ and this reminder generates some cash for you, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.)

Now, on to the news.

Lawyer of the Week: John Bolton.

Former national security adviser John Bolton is a lawyer by training, a Yale Law alumnus who worked at Covington & Burling and Kirkland & Ellis. But he’ll soon plead guilty to violating the law: as first reported by CNN, the Trump appointee turned adversary has reached a tentative plea agreement with federal prosecutors.

Under the deal, Bolton will avoid going to trial on an 18-count indictment—and the theoretical possibility of decades in prison if convicted at trial. Instead, he’ll plead guilty to a single count of illegal retention of classified information—specifically, materials he gathered to write his bestselling White House memoir, The Room Where It Happened—and pay a fine of $2.25 million, according to Reuters.

After Bolton left the first Trump administration, following his ill-fated tenure as national security adviser, he became an outspoken critic of his ex-boss. So when Donald Trump returned to the presidency and started prosecuting his enemies, he unsurprisingly targeted Bolton—just as he went after James Comey and Letitia James.

But unlike the prosecutions of Jim Comey and Tish James, “Bolton’s case has maintained the support of career prosecutors and investigators,” per CNN. Why? As noted by Sarah Isgur and David French of Advisory Opinions, the case against Bolton appears to have at least some basis in law and fact (for reasons explained by Andrew McCarthy of National Review). In light of this, Bolton and his lawyer, Abbe Lowell, presumably weighed the odds and concluded that cutting a deal was the wisest course of action. (I also wonder if they’re counting on Bolton’s age—he’s 77—as a factor favoring leniency at sentencing.)

Other lawyers in the news:

• Unlike Bolton, former Supreme Court advocate Tom Goldstein declined a deal—which, according to Goldstein, called for a prison sentence of roughly five years. Will he regret that choice? It could depend on what happens at sentencing, currently scheduled before Judge Lydia Griggsby (D. Md.) on June 16. In dueling sentencing submissions, the government advocated for 97 months in prison, while the defense argued for no prison time.

• In a follow-up on last week’s featured lawyers, the 35 ex-judges who filed a brief attacking Trump’s Anti-Weaponization Fund, Adam Liptak laid out the arguments for and against such filings by former judges in his newsletter, The Docket. See also Elie Honig’s New York Magazine column—in which OJ gets a shout-out.

• Speaking of the Fund, it’s not happening—as Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testified to Congress, and the Department of Justice subsequently confirmed in a pair of court filings (via The Washington Post (gift link)).

• Maybe the Fund would have died anyway, given how politically unpopular it was. But legal challenges might have hastened its demise; Donald Trump complained to conservative podcaster Miranda Devine that although he still supported the Fund, “a court ruled against it.”

• If past editions of JN are any guide, readers love clicking on articles about George T. Conway, the Wachtell Lipton partner turned Trump archenemy turned Democratic congressional candidate. So here’s another—a profile of GTC by Emma Goldberg of The New York Times (gift link).

• Speaking of The Times, it published detailed pieces on judges benchslapping Trump administration lawyers and the not-unrelated development of lawyers leaving the administration—in large numbers.

• You know who’s not leaving the Trump Justice Department? Acting AG Todd Blanche—whom Trump said he plans to nominate to serve as the Senate-confirmed AG, as reported in numerous news articles (collected by Howard Bashman at How Appealing).

• If you spent even five minutes on LinkedIn last week, you’re aware that the Chambers USA 2026 guide is out. So congratulations to all the lawyers and law firms recognized in the latest Chambers rankings, upon which I place great weight (e.g., when deciding whether a partner move is worth mentioning in JN).

• And kudos to the 200 attorneys featured on Forbes’s list of America’s Top Women Lawyers—especially the 10 who have appeared as guests on my podcast.

• Speaking of high-powered women attorneys, Kathryn “Kathy” Ruemmler is supposed to step down as the top lawyer at Goldman Sachs at the end of this month, in the wake of controversy over her ties to Jeffrey Epstein. But at the request of CEO David Solomon, it appears she’ll remain involved in the bank’s legal affairs in an advisory role.

Judge of the Week: Judge Ryan Nelson.

One of my most notorious posts at my very first blog, Underneath Their Robes, was titled State Court Judges Are Icky. After reviewing a slew of stories about state judges embroiled in scandals, I argued that compared to their federal counterparts, state judges “seem to have a knack for getting themselves into hot water.”

Alas, based on 2026 to date, federal judges seem pretty icky too. Underneath Their Robes could be resurrected—not as a blog, but as a bad reality TV show.

In April, Judge Thomas Ludington (E.D. Mich.) pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor drunken-driving charge—and has been ordered back to court tomorrow, for a possible probation violation (an alleged failure to submit to drug testing). In May, the world learned about the misadventures of Judge Eleanor Ross (N.D. Ga.), who engaged in an extramarital affair with a high-ranking law enforcement officer—and had noisy sex with him in chambers, within hearing distance of her staff.

This brings us to today—and Judge Ryan Nelson, who has served on the Ninth Circuit since his 2018 appointment by Donald Trump. On Friday, the Idaho State Journal reported that Judge Nelson has been charged with battery and malicious injury to property. The charges, both misdemeanors, arise out of an alleged incident that took place in an Idaho Falls parking lot on April 2 (and was captured on video).

According to the Journal (via Bloomberg Law), Nelson got into an argument with another Idaho Falls resident, after the man made a disparaging remark about the judge’s parking job. The verbal dispute escalated into a physical altercation—during which Nelson allegedly swiped sunglasses from the man’s face (alleged battery), then tossed them across the parking lot and stomped on them (alleged injury to property).

This isn’t Judge Nelson’s first vehicular-related brush with the law. Back in 2018, shortly after his confirmation, The Wall Street Journal (gift link) reported on the new judge’s 28 traffic citations over the past two decades, including around a dozen speeding tickets. He was found or pleaded guilty in about two-thirds of the cases, while successfully challenging others. (The WSJ did add that “[o]utwardly, Mr. Nelson shows no signs of being either a speedster or a scofflaw,” pointing out that he’s a triathlete, a volunteer with the Boy Scouts, and an Eagle Scout himself.)

I reached out to Judge Nelson for comment on this unfortunate occurrence. His counsel, Curtis Smith, sent me the following statement: “Mr. Nelson is embarrassed by this incident. It is out of character and does not represent how he behaves. Immediately afterwards, Mr. Nelson reached out and offered an apology and full compensation for the sunglasses. He intends to work through the proper process.”

I actually met Judge Nelson years ago, at a conference. We sat together at lunch, he was delightful company, and I emerged from our time together with a positive impression (and my eyeglasses intact). Based on this brief but pleasant interaction, as well as positive things I’ve heard about him from mutual friends, I was surprised by both the charges and the video (which is—not gonna lie—not great).

And folks who know Judge Nelson well have come to his defense (a contrast to the relative silence regarding Judges Ludington and Ross). For example, over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Professor Josh Blackman wrote, “All of my interactions with [Nelson] over the years have been very cordial. The person I saw in that video was not the person I have come to know and like.”

I also heard from two former clerks to Judge Nelson, readers of Original Jurisdiction who reached out to me (expecting—correctly—that I’d be covering this). I was glad to hear from them because one of the first things I wondered, based on the angry man I saw in the video, was whether he flies off the handle in chambers. From the first clerk:

• “He was a terrific judge to clerk for—kind and helpful, and a great mentor. The video does not reflect the judge that I know.”

• “The sharpest criticism I ever received from him was when he got on my case after I was too harsh on a co-clerk. He always stressed the importance of a professional and collegial environment in chambers.”

• “I love him to death. He’s a good man—and I’m heartbroken for him that this one incident will now show up prominently whenever people Google him.”

And from the second clerk:

• “He was incredibly kind to me during my clerkship. He cares very deeply about the people who work with him. And he’s not an angry person—so I was shocked when I saw the video.”

• “What I saw was incredibly out of character for the man I know and have come to admire and respect. The only thing I can chalk it up to is a bad day.”

On the subject of a bad day, the first clerk shared with me that Judge Nelson has been going through a difficult time personally right now: “His father recently had a heart attack (which he thankfully survived), and other family members have been dealing with cancer. I haven’t spoken to him about the incident, so I don’t know if any of this played into it, but I can certainly imagine it.”

Josh Blackman did some sleuthing, and based on the surveillance footage and Google Maps, he concluded that the parking lot where the incident transpired belongs to a Home and Hospice Center. So it certainly seems at least possible that Judge Nelson wasn’t in a good state of mind when he had the parking argument.

Regardless of what caused Judge Nelson to behave in this way, this is definitely not the kind of conduct we want to see from judges (or, for that matter, anyone else). But as someone who sucks at parking, made a trip to traffic court last year, and doesn’t always have the greatest temper, I’m not in the best position to judge Judge Nelson. So I’ll close by quoting Blackman: “As a general rule, we should not be judged at our worst moment—though in life and law, sometimes we are.”

[UPDATE (6/8/2026, 6:50 p.m.): Since the publication of this post:

• On Monday, June 8, Chief Judge Mary Murguia issued an order announcing that an inquiry into Judge Nelson has been opened. Per Nate Raymond of Reuters, “Murguia initiated the complaint ​shortly after the court ⁠reform group Fix the Court announced it had submitted its own judicial misconduct complaint against Nelson to the Ninth Circuit Judicial Council.” (Raymond tweeted that it appears Chief Judge Murguia “initiated a complaint on her own, before receiving Fix the Court’s”—i.e., the investigation announced on Monday wasn’t opened in response to Fix the Court’s complaint.)

• A lawyer who appears before the Ninth Circuit reached out to share the following with me: “I helped a junior lawyer I have mentored get a clerkship with Judge Nelson a few years ago. During his clerkship, he went through a major personal issue and Judge Nelson could not have been kinder. Even though chambers was very busy, Judge Nelson made sure he had time off to tend to the personal issue and was very warm and caring toward the situation. Every time I see Judge Nelson he asks if I have heard from our mutual friend and we swap stories. Judge Nelson is a kind and caring person who clearly had a very bad day.”]

In nominations news:

• By identical 52-46 votes, the Senate confirmed two district-court nominees (and Scalia Law alums): former Montana deputy solicitor general Kathleen “Katie” Lane (D. Mont.) and civil litigator Jeffrey Kuhlman (D. Kan.).

• Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania became the first Democrat to turn in a blue slip for a second-term Trump nominee, allowing Faegre Drinker partner Antonio Pozos (E.D. Pa.) to get a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Job of the Week: an opportunity for litigation associates in Houston or Austin.

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Portions of this article originally appeared on Bloomberg Law, part of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc. (800-372-1033), and are reproduced here with permission. The footnotes—which contain material that didn’t appear in my Bloomberg Law column, including inside baseball about the federal judiciary and gossip about Judge Ross that will appeal to anyone nostalgic for Underneath Their Robes (which I launched 22 years ago tomorrow)—are bonus content for Original Jurisdiction subscribers.

For the past two weeks, the legal world has been buzzing about Judge Eleanor Ross (N.D. Ga.), a federal trial judge in Atlanta since 2014. The Eleventh Circuit Judicial Council found that she engaged in an extramarital affair with a law enforcement officer that involved having sex in chambers during work hours, within hearing distance of her clerks—and that she initially lied about it when confronted.1

In my opinion, Ross should resign—and if she doesn’t, she should be impeached.2 But aside from the sex and lies, other allegations in the report of the special committee that investigated her raise important questions for the federal judiciary as a whole.

Do federal judges delegate too much responsibility to their law clerks? Are judges failing to adequately supervise their clerks as they discharge their duties? If so, what implications does this have for the judiciary?3

Six former clerks spoke with the committee about Ross, who wasn’t named in the report but whose identity was first reported by Bloomberg Law. They explained that as a former state and federal prosecutor, she handled the criminal docket herself. She relied on her clerks to deal with her civil cases—with minimal supervision, it seems.4

Her former clerks told the committee she “rarely, if ever, substantively edited civil orders the clerks drafted.” They claimed they “were generally unaware” as to whether she reviewed pleadings or draft civil orders. On multiple occasions, she “emailed the clerk to docket an order within a few minutes of receiving it,” suggesting that she might not have read it. Perhaps most troublingly, “it was generally understood” that she “did not wish to discuss substantive civil-case-related issues with clerks.”5

This didn’t sit well with Ross’s clerks. Several of them said that “given their inexperience, they were uncomfortable with the level of discretion they appeared to exercise in handling civil cases.”

The committee cleared Ross of possible misconduct in the supervision and treatment of her clerks.6 Although the committee wrote that it was “troubled by the law clerks’ assertion that the Subject Judge is not engaged in the resolution of civil cases,” it was satisfied by Ross’s commitment to be more engaged in civil cases and more open to substantive discussions with her clerks in the future.

The committee let Ross off too easily. And I can’t help wondering whether it did so because it didn’t want to address possible judicial overreliance on law clerks—a more serious and widespread issue for the judiciary writ large than having sex in chambers and lying about it.

“[M]ost judges let their law clerks do far too much,” wrote Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston and former clerk. “The public might be appalled that a life-tenured judge has delegated to a twenty-something law clerk the unchecked power to decide complex and impactful cases. But for anyone who has spent time in chambers, this sort of behavior is far too common.”

It’s hard to tell how prevalent this is, especially because of the confidentiality surrounding judicial clerkships. But based on interviews I conducted with former clerks, it’s fair to say Ross isn’t the only judge who’s overdelegating to clerks.

I spoke with one former clerk who completed three clerkships. Over the course of three-plus years, he could recall only one occasion when his judge overruled his recommended disposition of a motion. And in two of his three clerkships, his judges barely edited his work—meaning the clerk was effectively controlling the final outcomes of cases and the legal reasoning used to reach them.

I have no reason to think this former clerk, now a Biglaw partner, wasn’t an excellent clerk. But I find it hard to believe his work product was so perfect that it couldn’t have benefited from closer scrutiny, and he agreed. He confessed to discomfort with the autonomy he had as a clerk—especially in the first few months of his first clerkship, when he was “fresh out of law school and didn’t know my head from my ass.”

“As newly minted lawyers, clerks don’t always have great judgment,” said Tracey George, a law professor at Vanderbilt University. “Many clerks arrive in chambers with no prior legal experience other than law school. More experienced lawyers are more likely to be able to distinguish between meritorious and non-meritorious arguments.”

Or as the clerk-turned-partner told me, “Making final judgments, with an understanding of how they would affect the parties, isn’t something baby lawyers are good at. Mistakes can be made.”

And mistakes are made. Blackman recalled one case from his clerkship, a complex commercial dispute, in which he “screwed up, big time.” He recommended resolving a novel legal issue in deciding a motion for summary judgment—but the issue had been waived, which the losing party’s lawyers flagged in a motion for reconsideration. (The judge subsequently had Blackman revise the opinion to omit discussion of the issue.)

But even if some judges delegate too much, solving this problem would be challenging. For starters, judges themselves probably can’t agree on whether there’s a problem or, if so, its extent.

“It’s very hard to say what clerks are entitled to in terms of supervision, guidance, and mentorship,” said Mitu Gulati, a law professor at the University of Virginia and co-author, with Tracey George of Vanderbilt and Albert Yoon of the University of Toronto, of a new paper about clerkships. “To declare that there’s overdelegation, you need a baseline of optimal delegation—and based on our having interviewed around 150 judges at different levels of the federal judiciary, it’s really hard to figure out the baseline.”

And even if one could figure out a baseline, enforcing it would be difficult if not impossible. Federal judges enjoy incredible latitude in how they operate their chambers. And they have life tenure, which protects judicial independence but also complicates any attempt to regulate how they go about their jobs.

“Federal judges are like tenured faculty in their level of autonomy,” Yoon said. “We’re required to research and teach, but we have a ton of discretion in how we go about it—there’s such a wide berth.”7

Don’t get me wrong.8 Based on the interviews I conducted, my many years of reporting and writing about the judiciary, and my own (admittedly dated) experience as a law clerk, I believe the vast majority of federal judges supervise their law clerks appropriately. But we should still be concerned about judges who don’t—and shouldn’t miss the opportunity presented by L’affaire Ross to talk about how judges work with their clerks.

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Welcome to Original Jurisdiction, the latest legal publication by me, David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction by reading its About page, and you can email me at davidlat@substack.com. This is a reader-supported publication; you can subscribe by clicking here.

On Tuesday morning, I lost my cellphone on a New Jersey Transit train. Fortunately, I was reunited with it around 12 hours later. For the whole saga, as well as practical advice if you ever find yourself in this situation, please see my post on LinkedIn (where I’m always happy to connect with readers, so feel free to add me).

On Thursday morning, I participated in the SCOTUSblog live blog of the Supreme Court issuing new opinions. Please join us for live blogs over the next few Thursdays at 9:30 a.m., as we analyze the justices’ latest rulings in real time. At this point in the Term, the Court generally hands down new opinions on Thursdays—and then, closer to the end of June, it will start scheduling multiple hand-down days a week.

A few hours after the live blog, I joined Sarah Isgur on Advisory Opinions to delve more deeply into the Court’s latest opinions. I had a great time speaking with Sarah, one of the smartest—and funniest—commentators on the Court. (Apologies if I sounded odd; the anesthesia from that morning’s apicoectomy hadn’t fully worn off.)

Speaking of Sarah, she and David French have been added to the line-up for Soapbox, an exciting new conference presented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), where they’ll record a live episode of Advisory Opinions. If you can make it to Philadelphia in early November, please join us. And speaking of free-speech events, if you’ll be in D.C. this coming Tuesday, please attend a lively panel discussion I’ll be moderating, “A More Perfect Union: Free Speech, DEI, and America at 250.” (There’s no charge to attend, but registration is required.)

Now, on to the news.

Lawyers of the Week: Michael Luttig, Nancy Gertner, and the 33 other former federal judges who filed a motion to reopen Trump v. Internal Revenue Service.

On Wednesday, 35 former federal judges filed a motion to reopen Trump v. Internal Revenue Service, the $10 billion lawsuit that Donald Trump filed against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns. After the parties reached a settlement requiring the establishment of a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” Judge Kathleen Williams (S.D. Fla.) closed the case. But in their motion, the former judges—led by Judges J. Michael Luttig (4th Cir.) and Nancy Gertner (D. Mass.), and represented by Susman Godfrey, Platkin LLP, Democracy Defenders, and Rivero Mestre—argued as follows:

• “[t]he purported ‘settlement’ that the parties never placed before this Court raises profound questions about the parties’ candor toward the Court and manipulation of the judicial system”;

• “a non-party may raise a challenge of fraud on the court through Rule 60 even when the non-party’s interests are not directly affected by the judgment”; and

• “[t]he Court indisputably has the authority under Rule 60 to reopen a proceeding sua sponte,” i.e., of its own accord.

I’m discussing this under Lawyer of the Week because these former judges—who have retired from the bench completely, as opposed to taking senior status—are no longer judges (even if some folks might address them as such, out of politeness—e.g., as I did when I interviewed Gertner on my podcast). As Professor Orin Kerr tweeted, “Being a judge is an extraordinary public service…. But when a judge retires, they’re just a lawyer again. They’re not judges anymore.”

Their status as former judges, however, gave rise to criticism of their motion. Conservatives such as Michael Fragoso and Jesse Panuccio argued that it’s “unseemly at best” (Fragoso) or even “improper” (Panuccio) for the ex-judges “to be trading on the prestige of their former office for this kind of lazy partisanship,” according to Fragoso. On a more substantive level, commentators like Sarah Isgur (on our episode of AO) and Eric Wessan contended that these former judges, as nonparties, don’t have standing to seek reopening of a closed case—and their trying to get the courts involved in this mess actually politicizes the judiciary.

But not everyone had a problem with the ex-judges’ motion—including, most importantly, Judge Williams (an Obama appointee, in case you were wondering). On Friday, she effectively reopened the case, issuing a four-page order requiring Trump and his administration to address the issues raised in the motion. She then provided that “[t]he non-party movants may, if they choose, file a reply on or before June 19, 2026”—making clear that her order was issued in response to their motion.

Judge Williams’s order doesn’t explicitly enjoin the Trump administration from taking steps to set up the fund. But in Floyd v. Department of Justice—a lawsuit challenging the Anti-Weaponization Fund brought by Andrew Floyd, a former federal prosecutor who worked on January 6 cases—Judge Leonie Brinkema (E.D. Va.) ordered that while the parties brief and argue Floyd’s motion for a temporary restraining order, the defendants “are ENJOINED from taking any further action [to advance] the creation or operation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

As a policy matter, I think paying $1.8 billion in taxpayer money to January 6 rioters and their ilk is outrageous (among many other things). But I share some of the concerns articulated above about looking to the courts for rescue. As Professor Steve Vladeck wrote (before the ex-judges’ brief was filed), “the Anti-Weaponization Fund is not principally a legal problem awaiting a judicial fix.” Instead, it’s “a shockingly egregious political abuse,” and “the Constitution’s answer to political abuses of this kind and magnitude is a political remedy, not a legal one.”

And there are signs that a political solution could be on the way. As reported by The Wall Street Journal (gift link), more than a dozen Republican senators have privately urged the Trump administration to kill the fund—which it might be willing to do in exchange for securing passage of its immigration-enforcement bill.

Perhaps one could say, in defense of both the ex-judges’ motion and lawsuits like Floyd v. DOJ, that by throwing obstacles in the way of establishing the fund, they’re playing a useful role by increasing the pressure on the Trump administration to reach a political resolution. But I very much hope that any political remedy comes quickly—before judges have to engage with any matters of legal substance.

Other lawyers in the news:

• On May 22, Jeffrey Whitley and Mary Harris of Fox Rothschild were shot outside a county courthouse in Raleigh, North Carolina. They had just emerged from a hearing in which they represented the city of Rolesville and its police department against Gwendolyn White, a 57-year-old woman with mental-health issues, who has been charged with attempted murder in connection with the shootings. Whitley and Harris were taken to a local hospital and are recovering.

• Congratulations to Jennifer Bennett of Gupta Wessler, my recent podcast guest, who represented the winning worker in Flowers Foods, Inc. v. Brock. In an opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch, a unanimous Supreme Court held that Flowers Foods couldn’t use the Federal Arbitration Act to force truck driver Angelo Brock into arbitration (i.e., to deny him his day in court). Bennett has now won five SCOTUS cases—all unanimous—on behalf of plaintiffs and workers, while litigating before a conservative, generally pro-business high court.

• Speaking of victories by my former podcast guests, David Oscar Markus and his law partner, Margot Moss of Markus/Moss, won a directed verdict in a racketeering case that Florida hospitals brought against their client, Walmart, and other pharmacies. After a jury deadlocked, Broward County Chief Judge Carol-Lisa Phillips ruled that no reasonable jury could find, by clear and convincing evidence, that the pharmacies’ actions were the direct proximate cause of the hospitals’ increased costs in treating opioid patients. Other firms that prevailed on the defense side included Bartlit Beck, Hilgers, Jones Day, Lawson Huck Gonzalez, and Zuckerman Spaeder.

• There’s no litigation yet, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois (Chicago) is reportedly investigating the funding behind E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuits against Donald Trump—and the investigation is being overseen by U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, profiled by The New York Times (gift link).

• Speaking of federal prosecutors, NOTUS reported that Phil Alito, son of Justice Samuel Alito, is currently working as a lawyer at the Treasury Department (detailed from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia).

• Daniel Kaiser—counsel to former JPMorgan Chase investment banker Chirayu Rana, who alleges in a lawsuit that a female colleague sexually assaulted him—is trying to withdraw from representing Rana.

In memoriam: Daniel J. Gibbons—a former colleague of mine in the U.S. Attorney’s Office (D.N.J.), where he served as an assistant U.S. attorney for 36 years—passed away at 73. His family is well-known here in the Garden State legal community: his late father, John Gibbons, served as chief judge of the Third Circuit; his sister, Mary Gibbons Whipple, was a New Jersey state appellate judge; and his brother-in-law, John Whipple of Whipple Azzarello, is a top trial lawyer. Dan Gibbons, rest in peace.

Judge of the Week: Judge Eleanor Ross.

By now, many of you have heard about the scandal swirling about Judge Eleanor Ross (N.D. Ga.), an Atlanta-based trial judge who was appointed to the federal bench by President Obama in 2014. I chronicled it on Twitter—where I sometimes discuss breaking news, before I get the chance to write it up here—and it was all over the media, from legal outlets like Law.com and Law360 to nonlegal outlets like the Associated Press and The New York Post. (Over at How Appealing, Howard Bashman has been all over this story—like a rumored stain on the judicial couch—and I thank him for flagging many of the stories linked herein.)

For those of you who are just learning about the misadventures of Judge Ross, we must regrettably get “underneath her robes,” if you will. Since launching Original Jurisdiction five years ago—this month marks OJ’s fifth anniversary, at least as a paid newsletter—I’ve been trying to transcend my tabloid past and focus on more high-minded fare. But what can I say? Federal judges—like former judge Joshua Kindred (D. Alaska), still-sitting Judge Thomas Ludington (E.D. Mich.), and now Judge Ross—keep dragging me back into the gutter.

So here’s the background on Judge Ross. After receiving a complaint of judicial misconduct about a U.S. district judge within the Eleventh Circuit, Chief Judge William “Bill” Pryor appointed a special committee to investigate. That committee produced a detailed report of its findings—issued back in December 2025 but made public only now, after the Eleventh Circuit Judicial Council issued an order adopting the report’s recommendations, and the Judicial Conference of the United States affirmed that order earlier this month. The committee’s findings are shocking:

[T]he special committee finds that the Subject Judge engaged in three instances of judicial misconduct. Those are: (1) the Subject Judge engaging in an extramarital affair with a high-ranking [law enforcement] officer and, in the course of that affair, having sexual intercourse (and other intimate contact) in the judge’s office, during business hours, and within hearing distance of staff [including multiple clerks]; (2) the Subject Judge’s attendance at a partisan political event; and (3) the Subject Judge’s making false statements to Chief Judge Pryor and to the Chief District Judge that were material to the investigation of misconduct allegations and to the administration of the district court.

Here’s what the committee recommended in terms of discipline, a recommendation adopted by the Eleventh Circuit Judicial Council and, ultimately, the Judicial Conference’s Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability:

[T]he special committee recommends that the Judicial Council issue the Subject Judge a private reprimand. The Subject Judge informed Chief Judge Pryor that the Subject Judge would not oppose or challenge this sanction. The Subject Judge has also agreed to (1) issue letters of apology to the six former law clerks interviewed by investigation counsel (with the special committee to provide to the Subject Judge a list of those law clerks); (2) forego [sic] service as chief judge should the Subject Judge be otherwise eligible to serve in that capacity; and (3) indefinitely refrain from service on any Judicial Conference committee.

I found this punishment excessively lenient—and I wasn’t alone. Bloomberg Law interviewed multiple experts, and while there wasn’t agreement on whether this warranted impeachment, pretty much everyone opined that at least a public reprimand was warranted.

Of course, keeping a private reprimand truly private in 2026 is difficult, if not impossible. Based on the trove of information in the special committee’s 22-page report, it took only a few days for multiple outlets and observers—from Marco Polo to Professor Josh Blackman to Bloomberg Law—to finger Judge Ross. [UPDATE (6/1/2026, 11:41 a.m.): Bloomberg Law was the first to confirm Ross’s identity with reporting, citing “a person familiar with the situation.”] Meanwhile, my former colleague Joe Patrice explained, in a fascinating Above the Law post, how he figured out it was Judge Ross within a few hours, with the help of AI agents.

What does this suggest? The notion of a private reprimand is, as a practical matter, no longer an option in judicial disciplinary proceedings. If the misconduct is minor, don’t issue a reprimand—which is what happens in the vast majority of judicial-misconduct investigations, for better or worse—and if the conduct is serious, issue a public reprimand. But trying to keep a reprimand private, while at the same time providing enough information to satisfy the public that a thorough investigation was conducted, is virtually impossible in the AI age. (Cf. how consumer DNA testing has made it similarly challenging to guarantee anonymity to sperm or egg donors or birth parents who choose closed adoption.)

What do I think should happen next? First, I agree with Aliza Shatzman of the Legal Accountability Project: Judge Ross should resign. Second, if she doesn’t, I agree with Gabe Roth of Fix the Court: the House Judiciary Committee should at least open an impeachment inquiry (even if it ultimately decides against impeachment).

Having sex in chambers, standing alone, would be one thing; I can live with disrespecting the judicial sofa (although this wasn’t a one-time thing—the affair lasted for years, which is why six clerks, from multiple terms, were exposed to it).1 The far more serious offense, as I emphasized when discussing Couch-gate on Advisory Opinions, is that Judge Ross lied about her misdeeds, to both Chief Judge Pryor and Chief Judge Leigh Martin May (N.D. Ga.). And as Mike Davis pointed out, Judge Ross even badmouthed the whistleblowing clerk, claiming that she “had repeatedly chastised Law Clerk A for performance issues” and that “Law Clerk A might have made allegations as a means of retaliating” against Judge Ross.

Setting the couch to one side—and for the record, the acid phosphate test of the supposedly stained cushion returned a negative result—the investigation into Judge Ross raises an issue of broader import for the federal judiciary. As I explained in a detailed LinkedIn post, clerks also alleged that Judge Ross failed to supervise them adequately, essentially checking out from her civil docket—and causing multiple clerks to tell the committee that “given their inexperience, they were uncomfortable with the level of discretion they appeared to exercise in handling civil cases.”

For my next Bloomberg Law column, I’m writing about the problem of excessive judicial reliance on clerks. If you’re a current or former judge or clerk who'd be willing to speak about this subject, please email me at davidlat@substack.com, and we can set up a time to talk. You can also send me a substantive email if that’s easier than speaking by phone—but in that case, please indicate how you want it attributed (e.g., “a former S.D.N.Y. clerk”).

In other news about judges and the judiciary:

• On Tuesday morning, Justice Sonia Sotomayor reported for jury duty at the D.C. Superior Court—but by noon, she was informed that she wasn’t needed.

• Last Wednesday night, Justice Amy Coney Barrett was the target of a “swatting” incident, as reported by Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog (and originally by Andrew Leyden on Twitter). Fortunately, the police “quickly realized it was a swatting call,” and nobody was injured. But the fact that judges and justices are subjected to this should be depressing, anger-inducing, or both.

• Speaking of Justice Barrett, after I published my latest SCOTUS clerk hiring roundup—which got nice shoutouts in the newsletters of SCOTUSblog and Adam Liptak, to which you should subscribe if you don’t already—I learned about two more ACB hires, whom I’ll include in the next roundup. But I still have only one Alito clerk for the upcoming Term (which might mean something, or might not).

• In an opinion by Judge Theodore “Ted” McKee, the Third Circuit criticized certain language in an opinion by Chief Judge Matthew Brann (M.D. Pa.)—specifically, Brann’s “inappropriate attempted witticisms” and “ill-conceived attempts at levity,” in an opinion issued in a case arising out of a highway collision in which two children were killed.

In nominations news, Trump announced Judge Matthew Byrne of the Ohio Twelfth ​District Court of Appeals as his pick for a vacant seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. Byrne came recommended by Vice President JD Vance, a senator from the Buckeye State before becoming VP.

Job of the Week: an opportunity for a finance associate in Chicago.

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The trend of leading litigators launching their own boutiques continues. Last month, three Chambers-ranked trial lawyers—Jessie Liu, Justin Shur, and Jonathan Kravis—left their respective firms to found Liu Shur Kravis in Washington, D.C.

What makes LSK particularly interesting is that it’s a “bipartisan boutique”—unusual in D.C., where boutiques tend to have a partisan valence. Liu was the Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney for D.C. in the first Trump administration, while Kravis worked in the White House Counsel’s Office in the Obama administration.

To learn more about how LSK came together and what its launch might reflect about the evolving legal industry, I welcomed Jessie Liu to the podcast. We first discussed her journey as the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants from a small town in Texas to the top of the legal profession—including her service at Main Justice, her tenure as U.S. attorney, and her years as a Biglaw partner, most recently at Skadden Arps. We then tackled events in the news—and Jessie shared her thoughts, as someone who served at a high level in the first Trump administration, on how the second Trump administration differs from the first.

Thanks to Jessie for joining me, congratulations to her and her partners on the launch of LSK, and good luck to them in the years ahead.

Show Notes:

• Jessie K. Liu bio, Liu Shur Kravis LLP

• Jessie K. Liu profile, Chambers and Partners

• Jessie Liu bio, Wikipedia

Sponsored by:

NexFirm helps Biglaw attorneys become founding partners. To learn more about how NexFirm can help you launch your firm, call 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment@nexfirm.com.

Three quick notes about this transcript. First, it has been cleaned up from the audio in ways that don’t alter substance—e.g., by deleting verbal filler or adding a word here or there to clarify meaning. Second, my interviewee has not reviewed this transcript, and any errors are mine. Third, because of length constraints, this newsletter may be truncated in email; to view the entire post, simply click on “view entire message” in your email app.

David Lat: Welcome to the Original Jurisdiction podcast. I’m your host, David Lat, author of a Substack newsletter about law and the legal profession also named Original Jurisdiction, which you can read and subscribe to at davidlat.substack.com. You’re listening to the ninety-eighth episode of this podcast, recorded on Thursday, May 21.

Thanks to this podcast’s sponsor, NexFirm. NexFirm helps Biglaw attorneys become founding partners. To learn more about how NexFirm can help you launch your firm, call 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment@nexfirm.com. Want to know who the guest will be for the next Original Jurisdiction podcast? Follow NexFirm on LinkedIn for a preview.

In the last episode of this podcast, I interviewed California Attorney General Rob Bonta—a timely guest not only because he’s been in the news but because he’s one of the nation’s most high-profile Asian-American lawyers, and May is Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

For my latest episode, I’m pleased to welcome another leading Asian-American attorney with a distinguished career in public service: Jessie Liu. From 2017 to 2020, Jessie served as the Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, leading the nation’s largest U.S. attorney’s office. She also served as deputy general counsel of the Treasury Department and in multiple senior positions at the Justice Department.

Last month, Jessie made the news when she, Justin Shur, and Jonathan Kravis left their respective law firms to launch Liu Shur Kravis, also known as LSK. Why did these Chambers-ranked litigators step down as partners from three great firms—Skadden Arps, MoloLamken, and Munger Tolles—to found their own boutique? Jessie and I discussed that and related topics—plus other matters in the news, such as how the second Trump administration is different from the first, in which Jessie served—in a conversation that I hope you’ll enjoy as much as I did. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Jessie Liu.

Jessie, thank you so much for joining me.

Jessie Liu: Thanks so much for having me on, Dave.

DL: So we’ve known each other for a long time, but for the benefit of my readers, tell us about your background and upbringing. Where did you grow up?

JL: I was born in Kingsville, Texas, which is a small town near Corpus Christi in the southern part of the state. I was raised in College Station, Texas. That’s about 90 miles northwest of Houston; it’s where Texas A&M University is located. My parents were immigrants from Taiwan. Actually, English was not my first language, even though I was born in Texas, and I had to learn English once I started school.

DL: So we have a couple of things in common, and one of them is we were both English concentrators at Harvard. So it’s interesting that English wasn’t your first language, and then you went on to focus on it in college.

JL: Well, I learned fast, I suppose. I remember teaching myself to read the Curious George books when I was a kid. And so I moved on from there and nearly actually went to graduate school in English. When you and I were in college together, I was very, very into my work as an English major. I was focused on Renaissance drama and Shakespeare in particular, and I gave some serious thought to going to graduate school. But I also had this great interest in doing something that was a little bit more practical.

People often ask me what inspired you to go to law school—and I always tell them Rudy Giuliani. The reason for that is that sometime late in middle school or early in high school, U.S. News and World Report, which at the time was a real print magazine that had real news articles in it, did a piece on Giuliani when he was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. How he was cleaning up Wall Street, he was prosecuting insider traders. How he was fighting organized crime. How he had to take a different route home every night because he wanted to preserve his safety. And I thought, “Wow, I want to be Rudy when I grow up.”

DL: So let me ask you this. We are both the children of Asian immigrants, and I’m curious whether your parents had any thoughts on your going to law school.

JL: They did not have real thoughts on my going to law school. They had a lot of thoughts on my idea of going to graduate school in English—and they were not happy thoughts—but I would say they were actually pretty supportive of my going to law school.

DL: So when you went to Yale Law School, and having read this article that left us such an impression on you, did you have it in your mind that you might go into becoming a prosecutor or some form of government or public service?

JL: No, I always had it in the back of my mind, but I also had law school loans, and it seemed at the time an easier path to apply to law firms. So oftentimes, you’ll see students do their first summer after law school in a public-interest job or working for the government. I actually didn’t do that. I spent the Christmas holidays of my first year at YLS applying to law firms in Texas. My thought was that I would go back to Texas after I graduated and work for a firm in Houston or Dallas. And so I ended up spending my first summer after my first year of law school working for law firms in Texas. I did that again the next year, and the plan was, for a very long time, to go back and enter private practice in Texas.

DL: So you did go back to Texas after law school—but you didn’t go straight into private practice.

JL: No, I went to a clerkship on the Fifth Circuit for Carolyn Dineen King, who was at the time the chief judge. She was based in Houston. I don’t think I ever knew that there was such a thing as a judicial clerkship before I went to law school. And then I got to Yale, and everybody was talking about clerkships and how to get them and which judges were the best judges to clerk for—which was all really, really new to me.

And I essentially applied to judges in my neck of the woods. At the time, again, I was thinking about going back to work in Texas. And so I got an offer from Judge King. She’s a fantastic mentor. She joined the bench from being a Biglaw partner, actually, and she used to make us write down how many hours we were in the office each day. She said it was training for working in a law firm—although she didn’t require us to do it in six-minute increments, which was probably a good thing.

DL: I would’ve actually been curious to know how many hours I worked when I clerked; it was a lot. So that was on the Fifth Circuit, and you said that was a great experience, and Judge King was a great mentor. Where did you go after that?

JL: I then went to Jenner & Block in Chicago. I had never set foot in Chicago, except to fly through O’Hare a few times, but I got married to a law school classmate, and his first job was a visiting assistant professor position at Northwestern. So I was looking for a job in Chicago off-cycle. I flew up there, I didn’t know anything about the city, I talked to a few firms, and Jenner & Block was where I was really struck by the people. And so I ended up going to Jenner in the fall of 1999—in Chicago, though, not in D.C.

DL: And what was your practice focus at Jenner?

JL: General litigation. I did everything from some white-collar work to civil litigation to a little bit of appellate work. At the end of that year, my husband got a job here in D.C. So I transferred over to Jenner’s D.C. office, where there were actually a lot of people that I knew from law school, and a lot of people who were very well-known in the D.C. legal community—like Donald Verrilli, the former SG under the Obama administration. I spent a couple of years again doing general litigation at Jenner & Block in D.C.

DL: Did you do white-collar or criminal work at that point?

JL: Not a lot, actually. I did some constitutional litigation at the time; we always reminisce about this. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was still relatively new, and there was a lot of litigation coming out of that. So there were all these people who were suddenly telecom lawyers, and I did some of that. I think one of the principles of being a practicing lawyer is whatever the legal issues of the day are, you become an expert in them to some extent.

So I did that for a couple of years, but I started getting the itch to get into court and to handle my own cases, which is always a little harder to do in a larger law firm. So in the summer of 2002, I started looking around. I was here in D.C., and one of the amazing things about being in D.C. is that there are so many opportunities to go into government without having to move or uproot the rest of your life. So I started doing some research about where I might want to go in the Department of Justice.

DL: And where did you go?

JL: I went to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. In researching where I wanted to go, I knew that I wanted to try cases. I knew I wanted to be in the courtroom. And the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. offers what I think is a unique opportunity to do that among any of the offices in DOJ—and really probably anywhere in the federal government—because that office has local prosecutorial authority as well as federal prosecutorial authority.

So when people join the office, they start either in appellate or misdemeanors. I actually was in appellate for about nine months or so and argued a bunch of cases there, which was hugely fun. Then I went to misdemeanors, and that is a high-volume practice, where you get handed a whole stack of case jackets, and you have to go and deal with them in court. And it was an incredible training ground for somebody like me, who was pretty type-A and wanted everything to be immaculately prepared, with all my ducks in a row. And sometimes that’s just not possible in that high volume of practice.

DL: The D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office has a number of very distinguished alumni, including some former podcast guests of mine. I don’t know if you overlapped with either Jeannie Rhee or Tim Heaphy, or many other folks I might’ve had as past guests.

JL: Jeannie has been about a year ahead of me in every aspect of my professional life. She was a year ahead of me in law school, and I remember walking into a meeting of a journal at Yale Law School and seeing Jeannie at the front of the room. She already had a leadership position there.

She was about a year ahead of me in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. We were always being mistaken for each other, David. So we were constantly getting each other’s mail, and people would come up to us in the courtroom and say, “Wait, you said blah, blah, blah last time.” And then, it would turn out that it was the other person. There was even one instance where I was in court and the court clerk was announcing for the record who was representing the parties and she said, “Ms. Jeannie Rhee for the government.” And I had to actually correct her on the record.

So Jeannie and I have overlapped and crossed paths many, many, many, many times over the years. And now she’s a year or so ahead of me in starting a boutique.

DL: Yes—and we will talk about that very shortly. So where did you go after the U.S. Attorney’s Office?

JL: I was about four years into the U.S. Attorney’s Office when Ken Wainstein, who was then the U.S. attorney for D.C., became the first assistant attorney general for the National Security Division. NSD was the first time that DOJ had created a new division in about 50 years, since the Civil Rights Division was formed in the late ‘50s. The concept grew out of 9/11 and the WMD Commission, and the idea was to consolidate the national security sections within the Department of Justice, under one division with one leader, to improve coordination.

And so Ken became the first head of that. I had gotten to know him and some of his senior staff when I was an AUSA and went over to be his deputy chief of staff. We used to always call it deputy chief of stuff because it was everything from helping with cases to policy issues to looking down the hall and seeing that the Criminal Division’s supply closet was open and we might be able to snag a few Post-it notes.

DL: And I’m guessing you enjoyed that experience. I’ve heard great things about Ken as a boss, and of course the NSD does very important work. So I’m guessing you found that enjoyable and fulfilling.

JL: It was a fantastic experience. Ken and his team were wonderful to work with. Of course, the issues couldn’t possibly have been more important. I actually think back to it a lot these days because there was a little bit of a startup aspect to it, which I’m now feeling in my new role. Even though these components of the department that were combined to form NSD had been around for a long time and were very well established, it was still new as a division. And the people who were there were building it the best way that they knew how and thinking about how things should work. It was not a completely blank slate, of course, but there were a lot of opportunities to shape it. So it was a really exhilarating and wonderful experience.

DL: And then after NSD, where did you go?

JL: After NSD, I went to the Deputy Attorney General’s office. Now, this was in 2007, towards the very end of the Bush administration. There was a lot of movement going on, and people were leaving the administration and going to the private sector. People were moving to different agencies, moving to the White House, and so on. And so there happened to be an opening in the DAG’s office, and I went up there and worked on national security issues for the Deputy Attorney General. And then at the very end of the administration, I made quite a pivot and went to the Civil Rights Division as a deputy AAG working on housing issues and employment issues, and helping to supervise the appellate section.

DL: And then after your service in the Civil Rights Division, where did you go?

JL: I went back to Jenner, and I was a white-collar partner at Jenner & Block for about seven years. I then moved with a group to Morrison & Foerster, and I was there for only about a year when there was another election and I had the chance to go and work for my very good friend, Brent McIntosh, who became the general counsel of the Treasury Department. So I went over to be his deputy, and I focused on international issues and enforcement and intelligence issues, which fit in well with some of my prior experience in the national security space.

DL: So fun fact, small world, Brent was a year behind you at Yale Law School and was actually my classmate.

JL: That is true. So I’ve known Brent for a long time as well, and it was really great working with him. I can’t say enough good things about the Treasury Department; it was such a great experience. And I think it’s not as well-known as it should be: the impact that the Treasury Department has on issues like national security, especially after some of the events of the early 2000s, 9/11 and so on.

There was a renewed focus on using all of these financial tools to combat terrorism, espionage, and the whole host of national security issues that we face today. And so there are very significant resources that are devoted to that within the Treasury Department that people sometimes don’t think about.

DL: That’s right. I believe that there are a lot of entities or agencies that deal with things like money laundering and review of transactions involving foreign entities and the like, which are actually housed under Treasury rather than, say, the DOJ.

JL: Yes, and they often work very closely together. I know we’re going to get to this probably a little bit later, but after I left the Treasury Department, I became the U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia, and one of the things that I was very focused on there was national security—partly because the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office has a tremendous amount of expertise and experience in national security cases. But I was also very personally interested in it given my background. And so one of the things I tried to do was to encourage more collaboration between the Department of Justice and the Treasury Department on some of these cases involving financial threats.

For example, I created a threat finance unit. I think we may have accomplished the first seizure of a sanctioned tanker. Now you read about those all the time, and the office now is doing a fantastic job at this, but that was still relatively new when I was there.

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So you served as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia from 2017 to 2021. Are there particular things from your service as U.S. Attorney that stand out or that you’re particularly proud of?

JL: It is, of course, a wonderful, wonderful job. And I’ve talked a little bit already about how unique the caseload is in the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office compared to any other U.S. attorney’s office. It’s also the largest U.S. attorney’s office in the country by number of prosecutors, so it’s a big management job. And it’s in the nation’s capital, so it handles many, many cases of national and international importance—which we’ve all read about, over the years.

What I took away from it most was just the sheer number of people who were so dedicated as public servants to what they were doing—and the level of their dedication. When I was there, the office had about 350 AUSAs, and probably about the same number of professional staff. What really struck me is that there were, for example, AUSAs who had been in that office for decades who completely devoted their careers to prosecuting child sex offenses. They would take calls from agents—day, night, on the weekends, on holidays—to rescue children. There were victim witness advocates who had spent decades working with the families of people who had been killed overseas or who had been the victims of terrorism or who had been murdered in the District, and they gave so much of themselves to the job. I was just struck by that, and they’re the unsung heroes of this country.

DL: Absolutely—a lot of times we forget about that. We pay a lot of attention to the people at the top, and the presidentially nominated, Senate-confirmed folks. But there’s a huge host of career folks—not just lawyers, but also other legal professionals—who are doing such important work.

That actually leads me to sort of a very broad question, because we have been reading a lot in the news lately about the Justice Department. People certainly have been leaving the Justice Department—career professionals, sometimes political appointees, sometimes interim or acting appointees. There’s been so much going on at the Justice Department in the past year or so. I’m curious if you have sort of an overall take, as someone who served for a pretty long stretch in the first Trump administration, at a rather high level—if you have thoughts on what might be called “current goings-on at the DOJ,” or how the current administration might differ from the first Trump administration.

JL: Obviously I’m an observer in Trump 2.0, since I’m not in the administration; I was in the administration the first time around. So I’ll just speak to what my perceptions are as somebody who’s really right now looking from the outside in.

It strikes me that there are a lot of differences. To me, at least as an observer, it didn’t seem like there was a huge amount of difference in terms of organization or policies and procedures between the DOJ in the Bush administration, the DOJ in the Obama administration, and the DOJ in Trump 1.0. For example, all of those administrations had a White House contacts policy that was very strict about who could have contact with the White House. And from my own personal experience, that was pretty carefully observed, in Trump 1.0 as well as in the prior administrations.

All of those administrations through Trump 1.0 had a tradition of, “We’re the DOJ, and we speak through our court filings.” There was a lot of caution about what to say publicly, especially when cases were still pending. I think there’s a different approach now in the way that DOJ interacts with other parts of the executive branch and in the way that DOJ interacts with the public and with the media. So for example, in terms of public statements, I’m seeing a lot more in terms of not just press conferences, but DOJ officials going on the Sunday morning talk shows or posting on social media.

And we could have a debate about what’s the better policy and where should you draw the line. But I think there’s a real difference in the way that this Justice Department relates to the rest of the federal government and to the public at large.

DL: It’s interesting what you were saying about the contacts between the White House and the DOJ because as U.S. attorney, you did oversee some politically sensitive cases, including the prosecution of longtime Trump associate Roger Stone and an investigation involving former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. You handled some hot potato cases, I guess you could say—and now, perhaps, maybe some of those cases would be handled differently.

You mentioned the job had a heavy management component—and as a partner at a large law firm, sure, you managed associates or paralegals—but was it challenging to take over management of an office with hundreds of people?

JL: I was a little intimidated by that when I came into the office because I had some supervisory roles earlier when I was in the Civil Rights Division, for example, but it really wasn’t the same thing. It was on a much larger scale. And so, I was, I have to say, somewhat daunted by that. It turned out to be one of my most favorite parts of the job, actually, as an opportunity to figure out how to structure the office in a way that best supports the wonderful career people that we talked about who are doing their jobs—and to figure out, as a leader and a manager, the best way to work with people, to bring out the best in them and frankly in me. So I found that kind of management role really fulfilling, and it was a little bit of a surprise to me—because when you go to law school, nobody really trains you to manage really anything. And so it was new to me.

DL: Management is really important, and I admire folks with your talents who are willing to go into it. One of the reasons I’m doing my newsletter and podcast, Original Jurisdiction, as a solo is I find management very challenging. When I was at Above Law, I was dealing with colleagues and columnists and lots of other folks—and I think I was okay at managing, but it’s very stressful. The way I put it, in terms of management and why I don’t love it, is, “I have enough of my own problems to deal with.” When you’re managing people, you’re taking on all of their problems—like their family drama, their personal challenges, their illnesses that are preventing them, understandably, from doing work—all this stuff. It’s like you just take all that on. It just seems... my gosh.

JL: And people are unpredictable. We used to always say that when we were doing jury selection when I was a prosecutor, and people had all of these theories about what makes for a good “government juror” or what makes for a good “defense juror.” And the only thing I really learned from that is that it’s really hard to tell. People are unpredictable. They’re idiosyncratic, and the only way that you can get to know them is to take the time to get to know them. And so management is a hard, hard job—in my view, a lot harder than practicing law.

DL: I will not argue with you on that!

So circling back to the trajectory of your career, after you finished your service as the U.S. attorney, you returned to the world of large law firms, correct?

JL: Yes. I went to Skadden Arps in the fall of 2020. I took some time off in between leaving DOJ and then starting at Skadden. It also happened to be the pandemic. So I spent a lot of time baking banana bread and gardening and waiting to see what would happen.

DL: Tell us about your time at Skadden. You were a partner there for a number of years—more than five, I believe. How would you describe your tenure there? It’s such a storied, well-known firm.

JL: It was really an amazing experience. I was there for five and a half years. I was in the D.C. litigation group, which is the same group that Bob Bennett and Carl Rauh were in back in the day. There were many people who still remembered working with them and would tell war stories about them, which was really interesting to listen to. And I got to work on some great matters.

One of the wonderful things about being at a firm like Skadden is just the level of the complexity of the matters that the firm handles and the brilliance of the lawyers who work on them. So I learned a huge amount there and made some really good friends.

DL: Some people view opportunities at firms like Skadden as really some of the best jobs in the legal profession. They’re certainly some of the most well-compensated. But to take us to the present, a few weeks ago you left Skadden, where you had been a partner since 2020, and co-founded your own boutique, Liu Shur Kravis.

JL: Well done on the pronunciations, by the way.

DL: Nailed it—okay! I think I’ve seen on your website that you also refer to it as LSK, right?

JL: We do refer to it as LSK. Liu Shur Kravis is a little bit of a mouthful, so sometimes LSK is a little bit easier.

DL: I feel like firms that have good acronyms often do adopt them, especially boutiques, whereas Biglaw firms tend to go with the first name or first and second names on the letterhead.

So you came from Skadden and your two partners, Justin Shur and Jonathan Kravis, came from two other great firms: MoloLamken, which is an amazing boutique—I had Steve Molo on the podcast a while back—and Munger Tolles, another storied large law firm. What led you and your partners to leave three amazing firms to launch LSK?

JL: Most fundamentally, we wanted to practice together, and I can go into a little bit more detail about that, but we were also all at a point in our careers where we felt like we could do what we love doing, which is practicing law. We all love the hands-on practice of law in a smaller and more nimble setting. And as you alluded to before, we all were at fantastic firms. We all had great experiences and great relationships at our prior firms, but we were at a point in our careers and our lives where we wanted to build something of our own.

DL: And were you nervous about the prospect of striking out on your own? Because on the one hand, it’s very exciting. You alluded to how you had that startup feeling when you were launching or helping to set up the National Security Division, for example. But on the other hand, it’s not like taking a job as U.S. attorney, where you’re joining an office with established procedures and protocols. Have you found that challenging? Have you found that invigorating? How would you describe that startup aspect?

JL: I would say all of the above, and add in a healthy dose of terrifying. So we’re about six weeks in and it has been a rollercoaster of emotions, I have to say; that’s the best way I can put it. It’s really almost hour by hour. Some hours I’m thinking, “This is so great.” I get the chance to practice with two people who are great friends of mine, who I’ve worked with in various capacities. I know we work well together. We have the same idea about how we want to practice law and how great is this. And we get to build something of our own; we get to make all these decisions. What cases will we take? What kind of copier are we going to buy, to go on the totally mundane side?

And then the next hour, I will think, “What am I doing?” I had this incredible firm behind me, that I was part of, at Skadden. So what am I doing? What happens if nobody ever calls? What am I going to do? And as we talked about earlier, I’m the child of immigrants, so I’m always sort of terrified about where the next paycheck is coming from. So I have that kind of terror as well. It’s great that there are three of us because we can all support each other through that. And I have to say we have been very, very lucky. Our clients have been supportive. Our friends at Biglaw firms have been very generous with referrals. You and other press outlets that have covered us have been really wonderful. And so we’re optimistic, but it is a scary thing.

I have to say, David, I never thought I would be an entrepreneur. So I’m really surprising myself here. I’ve spent my entire life, from college on, gravitating towards big institutions and trying to find my place within big institutions. But there comes a time in maybe everybody’s life when you’ve got to try something new, and this is it for me.

DL: One thing I would also point out, which I pointed out when I wrote about your launch, is you’re not all necessarily ideologically aligned, at least in terms of your prior government service. A lot of D.C. boutiques have an ideological bent: you have a Cooper & Kirk or a Consovoy McCarthy on the right, or you have a Gupta Wessler or a Hecker Fink on the left. But LSK is fairly bipartisan because you served in the Trump administration and Jonathan served in the Obama White House Counsel’s Office, I believe. So I wouldn’t necessarily have guessed that you all were friends necessarily.

JL: Well, we are. We put it this way. We as a society are in as polarized a political environment as I can remember. And one of the things that I’m grateful for is that I have friends from all over the political and ideological spectrum. I also think it takes a particular kind of friend to start a law firm with. You can have friends that you can have a drink or a meal with. It takes a particular kind of friend that you can travel with, and that’s even more true of a friend that you can open a law firm with. I’m sure we have policy differences, and we have differences of opinion on all sorts of things. But fundamentally, we share a love of practicing law. We share a vision of what we want to do with the firm. We share a view on how we want to relate to each other as partners, which is that we really want to be a true partnership in the old-fashioned sense of the word. And for new lawyers that we’re bringing on, we want them to be truly part of the team and feel like they’re part of the firm and that they have some input in how the firm is growing and developing. And so to me, that overrides, by a long shot, any differences we might have on, let’s say, name your big issue of the day.

DL: Had you worked together with either of them at various points in your career?

JL: Yes. And all three of us had worked with each of the other two in various ways. We’ve all known each other for years. As you know, the D.C. legal community is pretty small. So we’ve run into each other; we’ve known each other for a long time. Jonathan and I worked together at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C.; Jonathan and Justin overlapped at the Public Integrity section. So we’ve had some overlap in government.

We’ve also had overlap in private practice. We’ve referred matters to each other—which is a great way of knowing whether you can work with somebody who’s at a different firm. We have, at various points, talked about one of us going to the other’s law firm or something like that over the years. We knew that we not just got along, but that we could work well together. And so that made it a really good fit.

DL: So tell us about your vision for the firm. You mentioned that you and Justin and Jonathan are aligned on your vision for LSK. What would you emphasize, say, to prospective clients? What types of matters are you looking to do?

JL: Well, we describe ourselves as an investigations and litigation boutique. And so in terms of substantive work, we want to do government and internal investigations for both companies and individuals, and we want to handle complex civil litigation. And we’re very well suited to do both of those, given our experience.

One of the ways that we want to practice, and I’ve alluded to this a little bit earlier, is that we want to be really, really hands-on. Our vision is that when each of us takes on a matter, we’re going to be involved in the day-to-day. For some matters, of course, we’re going to have either another partner, if the size of the matter justifies that, or an associate or a paralegal to work with us on it. But the idea is that we’re going to immerse ourselves in all of our matters.

And we want to partner with our clients on things like alternative fee arrangements. We have flexibility in determining how much we want to charge and how we want to do it. We want to have those conversations with our clients. And sometimes that’s harder in a larger law firm setting where you have policies that necessarily have to apply to everybody. But we’re still pretty small. And so we can say to our clients, “Look, we want you to be satisfied with the legal services we’re rendering and with our partnership at the end of the day. And so how can we make that best happen?”

We’re doing that. We’re starting to explore doing that with tech as well. I’m sure you’ve had lots of people come on and talk about AI. That’s been one of the areas that we’ve been exploring a lot. As far as I can tell, and maybe you can tell me if you’ve heard differently, it seems that law firms from the very largest law firms to the solo practitioners are still in this “let’s figure it out” stage. So we’ve been talking to a lot of boutiques and a lot of clients about what tools they’re using and how they’re using them. I would say people are a little bit all over the map, but it’s a pretty interesting time of just trying to figure that out, and we want to do that in partnership with our clients.

DL: I definitely have talked to a bunch of my guests about AI. One of my past guests, Jed Bergman, who also left a large firm to start a boutique, talked about how he saw AI as a real boon to boutiques because in the past, if you were looking to hire a law firm for an investigation, you might think, “Oh goodness, I need a firm that can throw dozens of bodies on the matter.” But with AI, perhaps that can help smaller firms.

And the other thing I’ve talked about with some of my past guests is how you also see, more commonly than you used to see, a lot of co-counsel type relationships, where you might have a boutique working with a large firm. If you as LSK are pitching yourselves for a matter that historically would involve a large number of lawyers—just “warm bodies,” you could even call them—do you feel you can handle those?

JL: I think we can, for the reasons you just identified. Technology is one of them. Frankly, the need for large armies of associates to do document review, for example, had lessened a little bit already, because large law firms for years had been using vendors with contract attorneys who were actually not part of the firm itself to do the first level of document review, and then you would have associates at the firm do second-level or maybe privilege review. When I started, it was not shocking to have armies of a hundred associates doing document review, and you very rarely see that anymore anyways. AI is going to speed that up quite a bit. And I do see a lot more co-counsel relationships. We’re actually doing that now on some of our matters with our former law firms, and clients seem to be more open to that as well.

Just more generally, it seems to me, clients are more willing perhaps than they were 10 or 15 years ago to work with smaller firms. And for that, we have some of the boutiques that went ahead of us to thank. There are so many boutiques that have just proven themselves to be top-of-the-line lawyers—and many of whom you’ve had on your podcast. So as that trend accelerates, it will be more and more obvious that great lawyers can be at any size firm, and it’s all about putting together the best team for the particular client and the particular matter.

DL: I totally agree with you on that. And we even have support from the Ninth Circuit, which reversed a district court’s attorneys’ fee award where the district judge knocked down the fees because he said, “Well, you guys aren’t Biglaw.” And the Ninth Circuit said no to that; they said something in their opinion very close to what you just said, which is that great lawyers can come from all kinds of firms.

Let me ask you, where do you see the firm in a couple of years? Because you mentioned, of course, that you want your other lawyers who join you to feel invested in its future. I believe that as of today, based on your website, it looks like you have two associates. I don’t know if you have some ultimate goal of how large you want the firm to be. Or put another way, if we talk five years from now, do you have hopes or expectations of where LSK will be?

JL: Well, we have office space that has 14 windowed offices and some other offices as well. So what we’d like to do is to fill that space within five years—and perhaps earlier than five years. Other than that, we don’t have any targets for headcount or anything like that; we’re still trying to figure that out. And I know it sounds a little cliche, but we want to—in two years, and certainly in five years—be viewed in the D.C. legal market and nationally as an elite investigations and litigation boutique that clients can go to with their most sensitive matters and feel comfortable that we’re able to handle them. And as you said, it may be that a matter is so big that it’s best handled in partnership with a larger law firm; we’re all people who play very well with others, we enjoy working with other law firms, and we can do that well. But we want to be on the map as a go-to elite litigation and investigations boutique.

DL: You’re all former prosecutors, in one way or another, but you are also handling civil litigation, I believe.

JL: We are. In fact, Jonathan is about to start a trial in a civil case, where we’re handling litigation in an intervened False Claims Act case. Those skills transfer over from trying cases in the criminal context to trying civil cases, we’ve all done a fair amount of civil litigation, and it’s something that we definitely want to do more of.

DL: It’s interesting. I moderated a panel recently and Avi Weitzman, who is at Paul Hastings and does a lot of plaintiff-side civil litigation, actually compared it to his days as a prosecutor, in terms of building a case and being the first mover and constructing a theory. So I certainly see what you’re saying in terms of the skills being transferable.

JL: I would point out that I’ve seen a lot of AUSAs and other former prosecutors go to plaintiff’s firms, or go to relators’ firms and bring False Claims Act lawsuits. So that’s a path that I feel like some years ago I was not seeing as much, but I’m seeing much more of now, and it makes a lot of sense. You’re still sitting on the same side of the courtroom.

DL: Any industries you’re focusing on or that are emerging? I know it’s only been six weeks, but I don’t know if, based on the clients or prospective clients you’ve already heard from, anything is percolating or emerging as a theme?

JL: I would say tech and defense and aerospace tend to be the areas where we’re doing the most work right now. But we’re industry-agnostic; we’re open to everything.

DL: Well, that makes perfect sense, especially given your work at the National Security Division. So let’s turn to the speed round. These are four standard questions. They are the same for all my guests. And my first question is, what do you like the least about the law? And this can either be the practice of law or law as a more abstract system.

JL: Everything takes so long, and it still shocks me that it can take years to resolve a case. You and I were English majors. When I read Bleak House, I laughed at Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the never-ending probate case that goes on so long that the entire estate is swallowed up in legal costs, but sometimes it really feels like it’s not too far off. So maybe prediction markets one of these days will solve everything, but not yet.

DL: My second question is, what would you be if you were not a lawyer?

JL: I’d have a vegetable stand at the farmers’ market. My father grew up as a rice farmer in Taiwan, and I’ve gotten very into gardening myself. I have a text chain with some former DOJ colleagues where I share pictures of what I grow, and Rod Rosenstein and I get pretty competitive about our produce.

DL: I love that. My third question is, how much sleep do you get each night?

JL: I’m pretty useless if I get less than seven hours, so I always shoot for that, and I’m a huge believer in naps. I’m really good at finding secret hideaways where I can take a nap with nobody knowing.

DL: That’s great; I share that skill. My last question is, any final words of wisdom, such as career advice or life advice, for my listeners?

JL: Well, a career, like life, is all about relationships. It’s about the people who really matter. And to be fulfilled in your career as in life, you’ve got to get to know the people around you and appreciate the people around you.

DL: Well, I have definitely appreciated our decades of friendship, and I am also grateful to you for coming on the podcast. So thank you so much, Jessie.

JL: Thanks so much.

DL: Thanks so much to Jessie for joining me, and congratulations to her and Justin and Jonathan on the launch of Liu Shur Kravis.

Thanks to NexFirm for sponsoring the Original Jurisdiction podcast. NexFirm has helped many attorneys to leave Biglaw and launch firms of their own. To explore this opportunity, please contact NexFirm at 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment@nexfirm.com to learn more.

Thanks to Tommy Harron, my sound engineer here at Original Jurisdiction, and thanks to you, my listeners and readers. To connect with me, please email me at davidlat@substack.com, or find me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, at davidlat, and on Instagram and Threads at davidbenjaminlat.

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The next episode should appear on or about Wednesday, June 10. Until then, may your thinking be original and your jurisdiction free of defects.

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Welcome to Original Jurisdiction, the latest legal publication by me, David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction by reading its About page, and you can email me at davidlat@substack.com. This is a reader-supported publication; you can subscribe by clicking here.

Can you believe it’s almost June? For folks who follow the Supreme Court, it’s an exciting—and exhausting—period. It’s a time when public fascination with SCOTUS peaks, as the justices issue some of their most interesting and important decisions.

So late May—as we’re paying more attention to the Court, but before we’re overwhelmed with opinions—is a good time to cover one of my (and your) favorite subjects: Supreme Court clerk hiring. My last hiring update was in January, so this one is overdue.

Before providing clerk names, I typically offer a miscellany of interesting items related to clerkships and clerking. Here’s the grab bag for the current roundup:

1. In my last clerk hiring update, I included a poll that posed this question: “Is it a violation of a clerk’s duty of confidentiality to reveal that they worked on a particular opinion for their judge or justice?” By a vote of 53% to 47%, you voted that it’s ethical.

Ed Whelan, who clerked for Justice Scalia, shared this interesting tidbit with me:

Justice Scalia would authorize each of his clerks to acknowledge their role in one (agreed-upon) case. That practice reflects two background understandings: (1) clerks have an obligation of confidentiality regarding the cases they worked on; and (2) that particular obligation is to the justice, not to the Court as a whole. (Lee v. Weisman was my case.)

I also heard from two circuit judges who said that they will authorize their clerks to disclose such things—e.g., if it's helpful to the clerk in applying for a job to say they have expertise in some topic because they worked on a major opinion in the area. So that’s consistent with Ed’s point that the obligation is to the judge or justice rather than the court in question.

My own view is that acknowledging you worked on a case, without disclosing more, is fine. But as I stressed last year, in 4 Tips For Incoming Judicial Law Clerks, ask your judge—because individual judges have their own practices and preferences.

And for those of you clerking at the Court, please read the fine print of the nondisclosure agreement you had to sign. As reported back in February by Jodi Kantor of The New York Times (gift link), SCOTUS clerks have been required to sign these agreements since fall 2024.

2. Law students are now receiving—or perhaps have already received—their second-semester grades. And for some 1Ls, that raises a question: to transfer, or not to transfer? Here’s a question I received from a reader:

I’m a 1L at a T-50 law school who wants to be a law professor one day. After finishing my first semester ranked first in my class, what would the benefits be of transferring to HYS or another top law school as opposed to staying at the school that I am currently at? Which schools outside of HYS are also worth considering? What are those schools looking for in their transfer students?

I’m also curious about the impact of transferring on my ability to clerk. Will I end up offending my potential recommenders at my current school by transferring? Will I be a second-class citizen at HYS, making it difficult to find recommenders there? And while I know it is a long shot, have there ever been any SCOTUS clerks who were transfer students?

I might turn this question into a new installment of my occasional advice column, Asked and Answered. For now, though, I’d welcome your thoughts. Please post in the comments or send to me by email (davidlat@substack.com). If you send something by email, please note that I might quote you, keeping you anonymous, unless you specify otherwise—e.g., you’d like to be quoted by name, or you’d like your comment to be treated as completely off the record.

3. It’s helpful to have data for questions like this. Here are, via Karen Sloan of Reuters, the five law schools that sent the most grads to coveted clerkships in 2025 (as a percentage of the class, which is more meaningful than the raw number of clerks):

• Yale Law School (23.33%)

• University of Chicago Law School (22.69%)

• Stanford Law School (19.47%)

• University of Notre Dame Law School (17.07%)

• Harvard Law School (16.61%)

For the full list of 15, head over to Reuters.

4. When it comes to applying to SCOTUS, even more important than your law school might be the lower-court judge—or these days, judges, plural—for whom you’re clerking. Certain judges with especially strong records of sending their clerks to One First Street are referred to as “feeder judges” (because they feed their clerks into the gaping maws of justices hungry for talent).

Who are the top-ranked feeder judges? Courtesy of a tweet from Professor Richard Albert, here’s a list of leading feeder judges (with a shoutout to my former boss, Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain—who will celebrate his 40th anniversary on the bench this September).

5. The list is based on a great paper, ”The Feeder Frenzy,” by Professors Tracey George, Mitu Gulati, and Albert Yoon. It picks up and builds on some of their prior work, such as an earlier paper about feeder judges titled “Beyond Merit: The Hidden Gatekeepers to Supreme Court Clerkships.”

Professors George, Gulati, and Yoon produce some of my favorite scholarship related to the Court. See also their work on the SCOTUS litigators with the highest win rates, which I wrote about in Even Superstar Supreme Court Litigators Can’t Win Them All, and the SCOTUS litigators who excel in handling certiorari petitions (in terms of getting their cases into—or keeping their cases out of—the Court).

6. Speaking of feeders, for many years, one of the most powerful feeder-judge combinations was the “tag team” of the late Judge Robert Katzmann (2d Cir.) and Judge Jed Rakoff (S.D.N.Y.), who hired many of their clerks jointly. Word on the street is that two longtime feeder judges, Judge Alison Nathan (2d Cir.) and Judge Jesse Furman (S.D.N.Y.), will be adopting a similar setup, jointly hiring one or more clerks for the 2027-2028, 2028-2029, or 2029-2030 terms. They’ve already shared multiple clerks over the years, but this new approach will make the arrangement more formal. Given their excellent reputations as jurists, mentors, and SCOTUS feeders, I’m guessing that joint Nathan-Furman clerkships will become quite coveted.

7. For aspiring clerks who are still in law school, Judges Nathan and Furman participate in the Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan. For rising 3Ls applying to so-called “on Plan” judges, the starting pistol is about to go off. Here’s the timetable:

Judges will not accept formal or informal clerkship applications, or seek or accept formal or informal recommendations, before 12:00 pm EDT on Monday, June 8, 2026. Judges also will not directly or indirectly contact applicants, whether to schedule interviews or otherwise before 12:00 pm EDT on Tuesday, June 9, 2026. Judges will not conduct formal or informal interviews, or make formal or informal offers, before 12:00 pm EDT on Wednesday, June 10, 2026. (Note: As an experiment, a day has been added between the interview scheduling period and interview period.)

A judge who makes a clerkship offer will keep it open for at least 24 hours, during which time the applicant will be free to interview with other judges.

So if you were entertaining the possibility of applying for clerkships but hadn’t done anything, here’s your reminder: get off your butt! (Or, more accurately, get your butt into a chair, and start firing off emails to your prospective recommenders.)

8. Democratic appointees like Judges Nathan and Furman are far more likely to participate in the Hiring Plan. Republican appointees—who, I’m guessing, are less into collective action and more into the free market—are not that into the Plan.

Instead, Republican appointees—especially many of the top conservative feeder judges—are hiring their clerks earlier and earlier. For more on that phenomenon, check out this interesting article by Sierra R. Pape and Uy B. Pham for my former outlet, The Harvard Crimson, Conservative Judges’ Early Hiring Fuels Two-Track Clerkship System at Harvard Law.

For any judges reading this story, please treat it as an application to your chambers for the 2043-2044 term from our son, Harlan Lat-Shemtob—who is, at the current time, an aspiring lawyer. No, he hasn’t done moot court yet—but to get a sense of his public-speaking abilities, please check out the presentation he delivered to his second-grade class about Justice Sonia Sotomayor for Women’s History Month.

If Harlan ends up going into law, I intend to do everything I can to advance his legal career. I believe that on the whole, and especially compared to industries like entertainment and media, law is a fairly meritocratic field. As a first-generation lawyer in the United States, I had no family members to help guide me through the profession—but as a reasonably intelligent and hardworking kid, I did just fine.1 But I’ve also learned that despite the overall meritocracy of law, connections still matter in the legal profession—especially when it comes to processes like clerkship hiring.

If you’re a judge or justice who gets hundreds or even thousands of clerkship applications every year—from highly qualified applicants, most of whom could do the work (and do it well)—how do you choose? Of course you’ll give extra consideration to an application that’s personally flagged for you by a friend.

It’s no coincidence that the ranks of SCOTUS clerks contain a strikingly high number of folks who are the children of federal judges, high-powered lawyers, and law professors—the types of people who rub shoulders with justices. If I still worked at Above the Law, I’d love to write an article called “Nepo Babies of Law.”

That should suffice for the color commentary. For paid subscribers to Original Jurisdiction, below please find actual clerk names. They won’t be of interest to most readers—but the readers who are interested tend to be very, very interested.

If my SCOTUS clerk hiring updates are a big reason that you subscribe, I have some advice for you: keep your subscription at least through the end of July (and, if you like, set a calendar reminder for yourself to cancel in August, which is what I do with subscriptions I maintain temporarily). Between now and July, I’ll have at least one new hiring update.

Why July? That’s when the new clerks report for work, and that’s when the Public Information Office of the Court prepares and provides to journalists a complete list of their names. At that point, any names I happen to be missing will be revealed to me.

Some clerks—and, rumor has it, some justices—tend to be a bit furtive about hiring news. But it’s not a state secret: SCOTUS itself makes the information publicly available each July, and it’s useful to journalists and scholars who follow and write about the Court.

So if you are sitting on some hiring news, I’d invoke the inevitable-discovery rule of Fourth Amendment doctrine and urge you to share it. We’re all going to find out anyway, through the Court itself, in July—which is just around the corner. If I receive enough new names (my default threshold for a fresh hiring update is around 10), I’ll publish another update before July (especially if I get the names of those missing clerks to Justice Alito for the upcoming Term).

As usual, you can share any hiring news that I have not yet reported—and any corrections, of course—by emailing me, at davidlat@substack.com, or by texting me at 917-397-2751 (texts only—this is a Google Voice number I use only for collecting SCOTUS clerk hiring tips, so I don’t accept calls at it). Please include the words “SCOTUS Clerk Hiring” in your email or text message, perhaps as the subject line of your email or the first words of your text. Thanks!

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I hope you’re reading this Judicial Notice news roundup after a wonderful Memorial Day weekend, during which you had time to relax with family and friends—and to reflect on our courageous compatriots whose sacrifices made it possible. Our family spent much of the weekend in Middletown, Connecticut, where we attended Zach’s 20th college reunion at Wesleyan. We took the kids and had a great time, even if the weather left something to be desired.

Speaking of a great time, I thoroughly enjoyed the Broadway play Becky Shaw, which I caught on Wednesday afternoon. As noted in the rave review of The New York Times (gift link), the show “tends to be described as a comedy about a blind date gone bad, but it’s more sprawling than that, with more on its mind.” It’s definitely worth seeing—but act fast, since its limited Broadway run concludes on June 14. (FTC-required disclosure: after I praised Second Stage Theater’s productions of Mother Play and Purpose, I was offered a complimentary ticket to Becky Shaw, which I happily accepted. Who knew that free theater was a perk of being a legal journalist?)

Now, on to the news.

Lawyers of the Week: William “Bill” Savitt, Sarah Eddy, Russell Cohen, and John “Jay” Jurata.

Speaking of drama, for three weeks, the tech world—and the world more generally—watched the high-stakes, high-profile jury trial in Musk v. Altman. The case is complicated, but the simplified version is that Elon Musk sued fellow billionaire Sam Altman; OpenAI, which Altman leads as CEO; and Microsoft, a strategic investor in OpenAI. Musk challenged OpenAI’s conversion to a for-profit company, arguing that the defendants “stole a charity” (in Musk’s words).

In the Oakland courtroom of Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers (N.D. Cal.), high-powered lawyers and law firms did battle. Musk’s team was led by Steve Molo of MoloLamken and Marc Toberoff of Toberoff & Associates. Altman and OpenAI were represented by a team of Wachtell Lipton and Morrison & Foerster lawyers that was led by William Savitt and Sarah Eddy. Microsoft was defended by a team from Dechert headed by Russell Cohen and Jay Jurata.

Last Monday, the case went to the jury. And after deliberating for less than two hours, the jurors rejected Musk’s $150 billion lawsuit—on statute-of-limitations grounds. The jury’s verdict was merely advisory, but Judge Gonzalez Rogers quickly accepted its conclusion as her own and dismissed the case. Musk said he plans to appeal.

We’ll see what happens at the Ninth Circuit. But for now, the obvious Lawyers of the Week are the lead lawyers for Altman, OpenAI, and Microsoft: Bill Savitt and Sarah Eddy of Wachtell Lipton, and Russ Cohen and Jay Jurata of Dechert. For a behind-the-scenes look at their trial strategy, check out Am Law Litigation Daily, where Ross Todd featured and interviewed the foursome as his Litigators of the Week. (I’d also give a shoutout to Josh Dubin and his colleagues at DRC Litigation Strategies, who worked with Wachtell Lipton and MoFo on jury research and selection—a fascinating process in its own right, which I wrote about back in 2024.)

Other lawyers in the news:

• The other big legal story of last week was the establishment of Donald Trump’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” I discuss it in more detail below, under Litigation of the Week. But for now, I’d like to give a quick shoutout to Brian Morrissey, who stepped down as general counsel of the Treasury Department—almost immediately after the fund was announced. Morrissey didn’t give a public reason for his resignation, and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche raised the possibility that it might be “a coincidence”—but I doubt it.

• Speaking of Blanche, senators weren’t buying what he was selling regarding the Anti-Weaponization Fund. On Tuesday, Senate Republicans had a closed-door meeting with Blanche about the fund—and according to Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), the senators “were pissed… screaming at the acting attorney general.”

• In happier news for the Trump administration out of the Senate, the chamber used its relatively new “en bloc” process and confirmed 13 nominees for U.S. attorney positions, by a party-line vote of 46-43.

• Speaking of federal prosecutors, the U.S. Department of Justice charged a former assistant U.S. attorney, Carmen Lineberger (S.D. Fla.), with stealing records related to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.

• Goldman Sachs hired Terakeet, an exclusive (and expensive) “reputation management” firm, to go online and minimize the ties of its chief legal officer, Kathryn “Kathy” Ruemmler, to the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Alas, things didn’t go as planned, as reported by The Times (gift link).

• Winning a criminal appeal as a defendant is pretty difficult. But Tom Goldstein—the former high-court advocate who was convicted of tax and other financial crimes, related to his side hustle as a high-stakes poker player—just improved his odds significantly. How? He hired former U.S. solicitor general and current Cooley partner Elizabeth Prelogar, one of the nation’s leading Supreme Court and appellate practitioners, to handle his expected appeal to the Fourth Circuit.

In memoriam:

• Former congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.)—who graduated from Harvard Law School and served for 32 years in Congress, where he was a leading LGBTQ legislator and co-sponsored the Dodd-Frank Act—passed away at 86.

• Harry Olivar—who graduated from Harvard Law and was a partner for more than 25 years at Quinn Emanuel, where he chaired the national securities practice and served as general counsel—passed away at 62, after a car crash in Georgia.

May they rest in peace.

Judges of the Week: Justices Sarah Warren and Charles Bethel.

Last Tuesday, Justices Sarah Warren and Charles “Charlie” Bethel won reelection to the Georgia Supreme Court, as reported by The New York Times and Georgia Recorder. Both Republican appointees, Justices Warren and Bethel fended off two Democratic challengers, state senator Jen Jordan and personal-injury lawyer Miracle Rankin, respectively. Warren won almost 60% of the vote in her race, while Bethel had a much narrower victory: around 51% of the vote, to Rankin’s 49%.

The elections are officially nonpartisan—but as I recently wrote in discussing the similarly nonpartisan elections for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, voters in Georgia are well aware of which candidates are Republicans and which are Democrats. And not only that, but this latest election was especially partisan: the Republicans received support from figures like Governor Brian Kemp and conservative organizations like Frontline Policy Action, while the Democrats enjoyed endorsements from former president Barack Obama, former vice president Kamala Harris, and various national organizations that support abortion rights.

This move in the direction of more partisan judicial elections raises an interesting First Amendment issue: what are judicial candidates allowed and not allowed to say when running for office, consistent with the canons of judicial ethics? For example, to what extent can a candidate describe herself as pro-life or pro-choice while campaigning, while not violating ethical rules against committing to rule in a certain way as a judge?

In Fischer v. Thomas, which arose out of a 2022 judicial election in Kentucky, the Sixth Circuit took what might be described as a pro-First Amendment approach. From the opinion of Judge Amul Thapar:

Ultimately, speech like the [Republican] candidates’ [generally pro-life] comments about abortion is simply part of the bargain that states strike when they choose to make judges elected directly by the people. During judicial elections, candidates must be allowed to communicate their views so that voters know which candidates align with their own values. And sometimes, communicating those views can get close to the line of candidates signaling to voters how they will vote in an upcoming case. But as long as candidates don’t cross that line, their speech is protected by the First Amendment.

But then in Jordan v. Darrisaw, the Eleventh Circuit gave the green light to Georgia’s Judicial Qualifications Commission to enforce the Code of Judicial Conduct against Jordan and Rankin, the Democratic candidates in the recent Georgia Supreme Court election. The per curiam opinion cited both Eleventh Circuit and out-of-circuit precedents upholding such judicial-ethics rules as passing constitutional muster.

For more, check out Advisory Opinions. Sarah Isgur and David French note the tension between the Sixth and Eleventh Circuit rulings, but don’t come out clearly on one side or the other—and that’s where I land for now as well. I’ll continue to follow this issue in the courts—and I wouldn’t be surprised if the U.S. Supreme Court ends up having to weigh in and provide a framework for how to weigh the competing values.

In other news about judges and the judiciary:

• In public remarks that received widespread media coverage (collected by Howard Bashman at How Appealing), Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson criticized her colleagues’ decision to immediate finalize their decision in Louisiana v. Callais. As she argued in her dissent, this move—which would help Louisiana draw a new map in time for the 2026 elections—made the Court look partisan, in her view.

• Last Friday, Kevin Warsh was sworn in as Federal Reserve chair. The swearing-in took place at the White House, with Donald Trump in attendance—a departure from recent tradition, where the ceremonies happened at the offices of the Fed, without the president present. Justice Clarence Thomas conducted the swearing-in, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh attended. (Warsh graduated from Harvard Law School, and while he was an undergraduate at Stanford, he worked as an intern on Thomas’s confirmation to the Court.)

• The title of Professor Josh Blackman’s Volokh Conspiracy post (via How Appealing) is a good summary of its content: “Chief Judge Kimberly Moore Commissions Bizarre AI Cartoon About The Federal Circuit Without Judge Pauline Newman.”

• Professor Robert Anderson tweeted about what he described as “concerning new evidence of bias in the Delaware Chancellor's handling of Elon Musk’s cases in the Chancery Court”—specifically, “a LinkedIn ‘reaction’ by Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick to a post about a case involving Musk.” And not just any case, but one “the Chancellor herself was actively presiding over at the time of the reaction—the $55 billion Musk compensation case.” (I’m puzzled as to why this hasn’t garnered news coverage; am I missing something?)

In nominations news, the Senate confirmed former federal prosecutor and current Nelson Mullins partner Sheria Akins Clarke to the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina, 52-38—with eight Democrats voting yes. Clarke is the first Black woman to be nominated for a judgeship in Trump’s second term.

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Welcome to Original Jurisdiction, the latest legal publication by me, David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction by reading its About page, and you can email me at davidlat@substack.com. This is a reader-supported publication; you can subscribe by clicking here.

A shorter version of this article originally appeared on Bloomberg Law, part of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc. (800-372-1033), and is reproduced here with permission. The footnotes, which contain material that did not appear in the Bloomberg Law version of the piece, are a form of “bonus content” for Original Jurisdiction subscribers.

When I first read about allegations of a massive insider-trading ring that involved lawyers who worked at multiple leading law firms, I was stunned. To put it bluntly: What the heck were they thinking?

According to the federal indictments in United States v. Nourafchan and United States v. Fejal, the 30-plus participants in the scheme included impressively pedigreed attorneys. They graduated from Columbia and Yale Law Schools. They worked at firms such as DLA Piper, Goodwin Procter, Latham & Watkins, Sidley Austin, Wachtell Lipton, Weil Gotshal, and Willkie Farr.1

Based on these lawyers’ careers up to now, I’d guess that they are intelligent, hardworking, and capable of both self-control and long-term thinking.2 And given their credentials, they were well-positioned to enjoy long—and lucrative—legal careers.

So how could they allegedly engage in such short-sighted and ultimately self-destructive behavior? Why would they put their promising careers on the line—and risk going to prison—for what appear to be (relatively) modest paydays?3

At present, we’re dealing only with allegations, and the defendants are presumed innocent.4 But to better understand why lawyers in Biglaw might engage in insider trading, I reached out to some experts.

Todd Haugh, a professor of business law and ethics at Indiana University (and a former Biglaw associate himself), discussed the “fraud triangle.” This theory identifies three factors driving the actions of fraudsters: incentive or pressure, often financial; opportunity, in terms of being in a position of trust with the ability to engage in wrongdoing; and rationalization, which Haugh described as “the story you tell yourself about why it’s okay to violate a trust.” In his view, the third element is the most interesting aspect of the triangle.

After offering the caveat that there’s still so much we don’t know about the underlying facts of Nourafchan and Fejal, Haugh pointed out something noteworthy: None of the individuals involved in the alleged scheme were partners, despite having practiced for 10 or more years. This gives rise to several possible rationalizations, such as “I should be able to cut corners and get mine, because all these other guys have passed me by,” or “I’ve been screwed over, working so hard for so many years, and this is how I’m going to make it up.”

Rationalization can take other forms. In some white-collar cases, individuals take steps that aren’t illegal but come close to the line—or perhaps they do cross the line into illegality, but in a relatively minor way. If nothing happens and they don’t get caught, that can be used to rationalize more serious behavior, Haugh said.

He also highlighted the human element present in many white-collar cases. It can be easier to rationalize when you’re surrounded by other individuals engaged in the same conduct—making it seem less problematic, in an “everyone else is doing it” way.

“Sometimes there’s a sense in popular culture of the white-collar offender as a greedy lone wolf,” Haugh told me. “But in organizational settings, and especially in insider-trading schemes, that’s fairly rare. It’s more common for there to be involvement by multiple people.”

Haugh acknowledged that the duration of the alleged scheme, which went on for roughly 10 years, and its scope, involving multiple elite firms, are “shocking.” But he wasn’t surprised to see that it involved dozens of people, many of them with close ties to each other.

Eugene Soltes, a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White-Collar Criminal, similarly emphasized the social aspects. Some of the lawyers involved in the scheme were longtime friends, dating back to college or law school, and they might have influenced each other’s thinking about the nature of their actions.5

Soltes said he was struck by the alleged expansion of the scheme over time. As he learned when researching Why They Do It, misconduct often becomes easier when a small group develops its own norms, independent of the applicable laws and rules of professional conduct.

“Lawyers may know the law exceptionally well, but knowledge of the rule is not the same as living within a culture that reinforces it,” he said. “The key question is how alleged conduct that would look obviously impermissible from the outside came to feel acceptable, justified, or routine inside the group.”

The psychological and social factors identified by Haugh and Soltes helped me understand why Biglaw attorneys might commit acts that struck me as incredibly irrational from a risk-reward, cost-benefit perspective. And the irrationality should be especially clear to lawyers—who are presumably more aware than other professionals that insider trading is illegal, perpetrators almost always get caught, and the consequences of getting caught can be ruinous.

But another expert offered fascinating pushback: Judge Jed Rakoff. He has decades of experience with white-collar offenses and offenders, as a prosecutor, defense lawyer, and longtime judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. (In our conversation, Judge Rakoff emphasized that he was speaking in general terms and based on his past experience, without reference to any cases currently pending before him or any other judge.)

For starters, he disputed my premise that insider trading is frequently detected and prosecuted. Instead, he said, “There are a lot of indications in the scholarly literature that insider trading is a very widespread, not uncommon crime, and a relatively small percentage of those who commit it get caught.”

Even when insider trading is discovered, it can take years to investigate and prosecute. According to Judge Rakoff, this matters because criminological research suggests that when it comes to deterrence, how quickly offenders get caught might matter more than how often they get caught. And in his experience, most white-collar defendants don’t believe they’ll get caught anyway—“which isn’t wholly irrational, because I think only a small percentage do.”

In fact, smart lawyers might see themselves as clever enough to escape detection. In the Fejal indictment, authorities allege that the defendants took numerous steps to conceal their conduct, including communicating through burner phones and encrypted applications. By all appearances, they succeeded—for years.6

“We shouldn’t ignore the obvious greed factor,” Judge Rakoff concluded. “There are all sorts of people out there who want to make a fast buck. Greed knows no favorites—and unfortunately rests deep in the human psyche.”

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Every now and then, you need a week like the one I just had. I didn’t have any speaking engagements or other work trips, so I stayed at home—allowing me to do copious amounts of laundry, clean out our home office, plow through piles of old mail, go to three doctors’ appointments, take both cars to the car wash, and knock out a massive amount of administrivia. I got in lots of exercise (more than 1,000 zone minutes on my Fitbit), plus ample sleep (seven-plus hours a night). It was glorious.

But I’ll be back on the road before too long. If you’ll be in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, June 2, please join me for “A More Perfect Union: Free Speech, DEI, and America at 250.” I’ll be moderating a lively panel discussion about the First Amendment and free speech featuring Professor Mary Anne Franks of GW Law School, Emerson Sykes of the ACLU, and Eugene Volokh of the Hoover Institution. For more information, please see the event page.

Now, on to the news.

Lawyer of the Week: John Quinn.

Last Sunday, John B. Quinn, founding partner of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, made an unexpected announcement. In an email to his partners, he declared that he was stepping down as executive chairman and departing from firm leadership—effective immediately. First reported by The American Lawyer, the news also received coverage in Above the Law, Bloomberg Law, and Law360.

(Note my use of John B. Quinn’s middle initial, which I use because there are a number of other John Quinns in the legal world—e.g., John C. Quinn of Hecker Fink, Professor John R. Quinn of Touro Law, the two John Quinns of Quinn & Quinn, the late White House counsel John “Jack” Quinn—and because Quinn of Quinn Emanuel was known internally at the firm as “JBQ.”)

How surprised should we be by this news? On the one hand, John Quinn is 74 and richer than Croesus, so the idea of him stepping back from leadership—while remaining a partner of the firm, continuing to help out with promoting the firm brand and business development—makes perfect sense.

On the other hand, as noted by Joe Patrice of Above the Law, JBQ said—as recently as 2024—that he had no plans of relinquishing his leadership role. And the timing of his announcement email, on a Sunday, was odd and “abrupt[],” as noted by Am Law. (Last Sunday also happened to be Mother’s Day—leading one Redditor to remark, “I heard he hates mothers, and that’s why he chose today to announce.”)

To his credit, Quinn turns over a firm that appears to be in excellent shape. Since its founding in Los Angeles in 1986, Quinn Emanuel has become the world’s largest litigation-focused firm—with around 1,300 lawyers across 35 offices, almost $2.8 billion in revenue, and more than $9.5 million in profits per equity partner. And having assembled a remarkable group of leading litigators and top trial lawyers—including Alex Spiro, William “Bill” Burck, and Michael Carlinsky—John Quinn has, unlike some founders, built an institution poised to outlast his departure.

So even though he once quipped that “when I’m gone, I don’t give a s**t what happens,” Quinn appears to have done a solid job on succession planning. Four years ago this month, he added Bill Burck and Michael Carlinsky as co-managing partners, handing some of his leadership responsibilities off to them. Integrating Burck and Carlinsky into leadership built on the firm’s establishment of a 12-person executive committee in 2020—gradually moving away from the first few decades of Quinn Emanuel’s history, when Quinn himself famously ran everything. (I once heard that back in the days of the JBQ dictatorship, if a partner wanted to write down a bill—which partners do all the time at most Biglaw firms—they had to run it by John Quinn.)

In an interview with The American Lawyer, Quinn dismissed what Am Law referred to as “rumors regarding tension between him and co-managing partners Bill Burck and Michael Carlinsky,” saying, “We have worked together in the present structure for four years. They’re friends as well as colleagues.” But to the extent that the rumors have a factual basis, Quinn’s latest move should alleviate them.

In addition to the rumors mentioned above, I’ve heard that certain other members of the 12-person executive committee had tensions with JBQ—and had been trying for a while to get him to reduce his leadership role. But this was not, as I understand it, a recent development—i.e., they had been trying to ease him into a reduced role for quite some time, without much success—so I’m guessing that Quinn’s decision to step down as executive chairman really was his own.

Even if not all his partners will miss him in leadership, you know who will miss having John Quinn in the spotlight (besides John Quinn)? Journalists. The eminently quotable Quinn “made good copy,” as the expression goes.

Most Biglaw leaders are unfailingly diplomatic; JBQ, not so much. Exhibiting a refreshing candor, he wasn’t afraid to publicly say what many were privately thinking. Back in 2020, for example, he tweeted that one contemplated Biglaw merger amounted to “two rocks that think if they hug each other tight enough, they won’t sink.” Earlier this year, as noted by Vivia Chen, he publicly dissed Cravath—the firm where he started his own legal career—as “the classic example of a market leader that failed to adapt.” He’s far from the only person wondering about the future of Cravath—but John Quinn is willing to say the quiet part out loud.

Is John B. Quinn the last of a dying breed—iconic Biglaw leaders who had ambitious visions for their firms, successfully executed on them, and weren’t afraid to say what was on their minds? Are the Biglaw leaders of today a bunch of boring, personality-challenged, McKinsey consultant types—overly focused on the bottom line, while paying insufficient attention to the bigger issues facing the legal profession?

I don’t know that I would want—or could keep up with, as a journalist—an Am Law 100 filled with dozens of John B. Quinns. But as JBQ himself hands over the reins, I do hope we’ll have at least a few JBQ types left in the ranks of Biglaw.

Other lawyers in the news:

• Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche “is consciously moving with speed and decisiveness as he vies for the top job” of AG, according to Sadie Gurman and Ryan Barber of The Wall Street Journal (gift link)—and it is “now his to win or lose.”

• One way Blanche is trying to advance his AG candidacy is by pushing high-profile cases that are important to Donald Trump—such as the prosecution of Cole Tomas Allen, the California man accused of attempting to assassinate Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. But Elie Honig of New York Magazine argues that Blanche, as both a potential witness and intended victim, should recuse from the case—and that refusing to recuse could give Allen “a legitimate argument on appeal that his prosecution was tainted by conflicts of interest.”

• I added several postscripts to my story about Neal Katyal of Milbank and his controversial tweet and TED Talk (including comment from Professor Michael McConnell). To check them out, go back to my post, “Supremely Cringe: Neal Katyal And ‘TED-Gate,’” and do a “find” on the page for the word “UPDATE.”

In memoriam:

• Longtime Notre Dame law professor G. Robert Blakey, the principal drafter of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), passed away at 90—as confirmed by his son, Judge John “Jack” Blakey (N.D. Ill.). You can read obituaries for Professor Blakey in The New York Times and The Washington Post (gift links).

• Michael “Mike” McEneney—a lawyer who spent almost four decades serving as an administrator in the New York State court system, which he helped transform and modernize—passed away at 93.

May they rest in peace.

Judge of the Week: Justice David Wecht.

Both the political right and the political left have been dealing with the problem of antisemitism. And on the left side of the aisle, one prominent jurist declared that he’s had enough.

Last Monday, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice David Wecht announced that he had departed from the Democratic Party, officially changing his registration so that he is “no longer registered within any political party.” In a statement—issued in his personal capacity, not his capacity as a judge—he lamented that “[a]cquiescence to Jew-hatred is now disturbingly common among activists, leaders and even many elected officials in the Democratic Party.” Justice Wecht’s move received widespread media coverage, in the Pennsylvania press and beyond (which Howard Bashman, also a resident of the Keystone State, collected at How Appealing).

Justice Wecht’s move was notable because—as he mentioned in his statement, and as he shared with me on my podcast—he actually worked in Democratic politics for many years, rising to become the vice chair of the Pennsylvania Democratic ⁠Party. And last November, he successfully ran for reelection to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, while being publicly known as a Democrat. (Note my careful wording: because Pennsylvania Supreme Court elections are officially nonpartisan, Wecht didn’t “run as a Democrat,” but ran while being publicly known as a Democrat—and with support from the Democratic Party, which poured millions into his race.)

Justice Wecht is 63, turning 64 this coming Wednesday—early wishes for a happy birthday, Your Honor—so after he completes his current ten-year term, he’ll be close to the mandatory retirement age of 75. He could run again in 2035 and, if reelected, serve two more years. But as he told me on the podcast, “my wife might tell me long before that, ‘Hey, buddy, you’re done. Go make some money doing mediation.’”

My guess is that Justice Wecht won’t run again in 2035. If so, he no longer has to worry about getting the Democratic Party’s support for a reelection bid—which means he can be more independent, speaking out about issues of concern to him.

Of course, Justice Wecht must balance his desire to address issues of public concern with the impartiality required of him as a judge. And observers can certainly debate the propriety of any given judicial statement or collection of statements—about antisemitism or, perhaps more controversially, Israel (the subject of federal judge Roy Altman’s new book, Israel on Trial—now a New York Times bestseller).

But it’s hard to criticize Justice Wecht’s decision to “un-register” as a Democrat, standing alone. In the abstract, it would probably be better for state judiciaries if more jurists had no party affiliation. Or as Justice Wecht put it in his statement, “I am confined to a judicial role, and in that role, I maintain independence at all times and in all respects. My voting registration now reflects my independence as well.”

In other news about judges and the judiciary:

• Earlier this month, Justice Clarence Thomas became the second-longest-serving justice in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, as noted by Adam Feldman of SCOTUSblog and Damon Root of Reason. If Justice Thomas sticks around through the end of Trump’s term, as I have predicted he will, he will break the record of the late Justice William O. Douglas. In a conversation with his former clerk Kasdin Mitchell at last week’s Eleventh Circuit Judicial Conference, Justice Thomas acted as if he wasn’t keeping track—but I’m guessing the archconservative Thomas will be pleased to displace the ultraliberal Douglas at the top of the ranking.

• Speaking of SCOTUS, should a supermajority be required when the high court holds an act of Congress unconstitutional? Jesse Wegman explores this idea at his new Substack, Major Questions (discussed on Advisory Opinions).

• Turning to judges of what the Constitution calls “inferior” courts (no offense), Judge Thomas ‌Ludington (E.D. Mich.) was sentenced to probation after pleading “no contest” to a single charge of operating a vehicle while intoxicated.

• In other news of judges (allegedly) behaving badly, former Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Edward Harold King was arrested last Tuesday, accused by federal prosecutors (E.D.N.Y.) of participating in schemes to defraud investors in commercial real-estate deals.

• In happier news from the state courts, Chief Justice Stuart Rabner of the New Jersey Supreme Court delivered an update on the state of the judiciary here in the Garden State, and here’s the headline: over the past year, more than 30 new judges were installed, reducing the number of judicial vacancies from 52 to 19.

In nominations news, the Trump administration announced six new judicial picks:

• For seats on the Eighth Circuit and Tenth Circuit, Trump selected two district judges he appointed in his first term, Judges Daniel Traynor (D.N.D.) and Daniel Domenico (D. Colo.)—as I predicted.

• For four district-court seats, Trump picked Angela Colmenero (S.D. Tex.), currently serving as deputy chief of staff to Governor Greg Abbott (R-Tex.); assistant U.S. attorney Michael Martin (E.D. Mich.), chief of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit; a former Thomas clerk and current Kirkland & Ellis (equity) partner, Kasdin Mitchell (N.D. Tex.); and former AUSA Antonio Pozos (E.D. Pa.), now a partner at Faegre Drinker.

In memoriam: Judge John T. Copenhaver, Jr. (S.D. W. Va.), who was appointed by President Ford in 1976, passed away at 100. May he rest in peace.

Job of the Week: an opportunity for a corporate associate in Philadelphia.

Lateral Link is assisting a global law firm with a new unposted search for a corporate associate in the firm’s Philadelphia office. This highly regarded practice advises clients on sophisticated domestic and cross-border matters across a wide range of transactional fields. The team is known for its collaborative and commercially minded approach, and associates receive meaningful responsibility and strong mentorship. The ideal candidate will possess 2–3 years of transactional experience—including experience drafting and reviewing purchasing agreements, financing documentation, shareholder agreements, and corporate-governance materials—and supporting deal teams through all phases of a transaction. If you’re interested and qualified, please submit your résumé to Vered Krasna at vkrasna@laterallink.com

Read more

State attorneys general have been playing an increasingly important role in American law and politics in recent years, as I discussed in my recent podcast interview of former New Jersey attorney general Matthew Platkin. Continuing the conversation on this interesting evolution, last week I interviewed Rob Bonta, the 34th attorney general of our nation’s largest state, California.

We began by discussing Rob’s early life, including how he immigrated to California with his family as an infant, and his legal career, including his service in the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office and the California State Assembly. We then turned to current events, including the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Louisiana v. Callais; the 67 lawsuits his office has filed against the Trump administration since January 2025, including election-related cases; and Rob’s own future plans, including whether he might run someday for the U.S. Senate or governor of California.

I’ve known Rob for decades, ever since we were members of an informal (and very small) group of Filipino-American students at Yale Law School. Rob is now the first person of Filipino descent to serve as California’s AG—making him an especially fitting guest for May, which is Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month.

Thanks to Rob for reconnecting with me and for sharing his thoughts on a wide range of timely topics.

Show Notes:

• Rob Bonta bio, Office of the Attorney General of the State of California

• Rob Bonta bio, Wikipedia

Sponsored by:

NexFirm helps Biglaw attorneys become founding partners. To learn more about how NexFirm can help you launch your firm, call 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment@nexfirm.com.

Three quick notes about this transcript. First, it has been cleaned up from the audio in ways that don’t alter substance—e.g., by deleting verbal filler or adding a word here or there to clarify meaning. Second, my interviewee has not reviewed this transcript, and any errors are mine. Third, because of length constraints, this newsletter may be truncated in email; to view the entire post, simply click on “view entire message” in your email app.

DL: Welcome to the Original Jurisdiction podcast. I’m your host, David Lat, author of a Substack newsletter about law and the legal profession also named Original Jurisdiction, which you can read and subscribe to at davidlat.substack.com. You’re listening to the ninety-seventh episode of this podcast, recorded on Thursday, May 7.

Thanks to this podcast’s sponsor, NexFirm. NexFirm helps Biglaw attorneys become founding partners. To learn more about how NexFirm can help you launch your firm, call 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment@nexfirm.com. Want to know who the guest will be for the next Original Jurisdiction podcast? Follow NexFirm on LinkedIn for a preview.

May happens to be Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. So I was thrilled to have on the podcast one of the nation’s most important and influential Asian-American attorneys: Robert Bonta, the 34th attorney general of the State of California, and the first person of Filipino descent to serve in the role.

Before Governor Gavin Newsom appointed him as AG in 2021, Rob spent more than eight years serving in the California State Assembly. Prior to his time in the legislature, he worked in the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office and in private practice. He graduated from Yale College and Yale Law School—where he and I represented around a third of the Filipino-American contingent at YLS. So I’ve known Rob for around 30 years—and I was delighted to have the opportunity to catch up with him, shortly after he celebrated five years of service as AG. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Attorney General Rob Bonta.

Attorney General Bonta, thank you so much for joining me.

RB: My pleasure. Good to see you, David.

DL: So tell us about your background and upbringing. Where did you grow up?

RB: Well, I was born in the Philippines, and that’s kind of where my story starts. My mom’s an immigrant from the Philippines. My mom and dad met in grad school in Berkeley, California, in the 1960s, and then went on to serve as missionaries in the Philippines and have my sister first, then me. It was a really important moment in my life when my parents made a decision about me—probably the most important decision ever made about me was made by them about me, not by me, about my own life—and it was whether they could raise me in the Philippines then. Martial law was around the corner, the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos was about to commence, and they wanted me to have democracy and freedom and the rule of law and due process and civil rights. And they thought those things would be taken away in the Philippines. And they were right: they were. Eventually, exactly a year from the date of my birth, martial law was declared, and free and fair elections were over; democracy as it was known was over.

So they brought me to California when I was two months old, and I grew up in California. I started in L.A., and my parents started working for the United Farm Workers of America. They believed that you can’t just put your chin on your elbow, look out the window, and hope and wait for the things that you want; you’ve got to go fight for them and work for them. So they decided to work for the UFW to fight for the people who were feeding our state, feeding our nation.

We got invited to go to the headquarters at La Paz as a family to serve with the United Farm Workers of America. And so we did that, just outside of Bakersfield. We lived in a trailer, and my dad worked in the front office, setting up healthcare clinics for farm workers. And my mom worked in the preschool. And then eventually, by first grade, I was in the suburbs of Sacramento. My parents both were working for the state, my dad doing the same thing for the state that he did for the UFW, setting up health clinics for underserved communities. And I went to public schools in a suburb of Sacramento called Fair Oaks. I graduated from high school there and ultimately went away to college on the East Coast.

DL: I was familiar with your Filipino-American heritage because we were members of the very small group of Filipino-American law students….

RB: Very small.

DL: ... at Yale. So I do know that you wound up at Yale for law school. But tell me, what led you to go to law school in the first place?

RB: Growing up in the suburbs of Sacramento, growing up a son of an immigrant, being in another country, having two working-class parents, I always dreamed about having a role to play in our society. It was not a specific, super targeted dream, but just that I wanted to have a say; I wanted to have a voice. I wanted to help write whatever the next chapter was in what happens in California, in our country. I wanted to be part of it. I read To Kill a Mockingbird and loved who Atticus Finch was and what he stood for. I had just a young boy’s unsophisticated, maybe romanticized ideal of what a lawyer was, but I thought, “If that’s what an attorney is, sign me up; I want to be one.” I want to be the person fighting for justice. I want to be the person standing for what’s right, even if that means standing alone at times. I want to be the person that guides people through a complicated, intimidating process on the journey to justice. That’s what I want to do.

So I just had this view that I wanted to go to law school. I had the privilege of being a college athletic recruit, and I was recruited by multiple colleges to play soccer in college, and it helped me go to Yale College, and I got a scholarship to study in England for a year after that, and I applied to law school. And my dream was to go to Yale Law School—and law school generally, but when I was at Yale College, I came to love New Haven, Yale University, what it meant, what it stood for. I met my wife, Mia—your small-group classmate, and our classmate in law school—when I was 17 years old, in an orientation program before college started at Yale, and she was in New Haven. So when I was applying to law school, that was a big reason I wanted to go to Yale Law as well. I wanted to learn. I wanted to grow. I wanted to learn the tools that would allow me to do what I always wanted, which is have a say in what happens next in our society.

DL: So you’ve spent much of your career in public service and government service. And I believe that’s your first job out of law school too, right?

RB: I clerked right out of law school for a judge in Connecticut, Judge Alvin Thompson, in federal district court. Mia and I got married in law school and we had just had our first child, Reina, who was born in Yale New Haven Hospital. Because Mia took three years off in between college and law school and I took only two, we were off by a year in law school. And so we were young parents, Mia was in her third year at the law school, and we were raising our first child. So while Mia finished law school, I clerked in Hartford, and it was an amazing experience.

Then after that, I worked for a private law firm in San Francisco. We moved to California, to the East Bay, and I worked at the great law firm of Keker & Van Nest. At the time, they considered themselves sort of the West Coast version of Williams & Connolly in D.C. (where I had summered): a trial boutique, sort of gun-slinging trial attorneys who can try any case on any issue and feel confident and comfortable and win. I was there for almost four years, just under four years.

And then I went to the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office and worked there for almost a decade. I tried my own cases, argued appeals, argued en banc in front of the Ninth Circuit, and had an incredible set of litigation experiences. And then I became a lawmaker and I ran for the California State Assembly, and I served in the Assembly for just over eight years. And then Governor Gavin Newsom changed my life when he appointed me attorney general, and I pinch myself to this day. Some days I don’t believe that I am the attorney general of the great state of California, the state that gave me so much. And secretly, I’ll confess to you, I go on the website sometimes to see if my name and my photo are really there, on the website of the Office of the Attorney General of California, and I’m very excited when I do see them there.

DL: So let’s double back, because you’ve had such an interesting career. When you were working in the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office, did you cross paths with Kamala Harris?

RB: She was right on her way out when I was on my way in; she had just been elected district attorney of San Francisco. And I remember I took over her office, and she came back to take some items that she needed that she hadn’t retrieved since she became DA. And so it was an amazing moment, that we sort of crossed over in that way at the City Attorney’s Office. And then later I was able to occupy the incredible attorney general’s offices that she had occupied as well. So we didn’t overlap, but we were very much in the same sort of space, and I had known her and supported her since she was DA of San Francisco, including when she ran for AG, when she ran for the U.S. Senate, when she ran for president. All those times, I’ve been proud to support her.

DL: That’s great. They should put a plaque in that office in the City Attorney’s Office; it’s a lucky office. One other bit of trivia: did you overlap at all with now-Judge Vince Chhabria, who also spent time in the City Attorney’s Office? He’s a former podcast guest of mine.

RB: Absolutely. We were there together, we were at Keker & Van Nest together as well, and we remain friends, good friends. I have the utmost respect and admiration for Judge Chhabria. He’s a wonderful human being, in addition to being an incredible jurist and just a brilliant legal mind, and I like him very much. I’m a big fan. I’m grateful he’s on the bench, and we did overlap in the City Attorney’s Office and worked on some cases together.

DL: I just love fun things like this, because you just never know where the people you meet early in your career are going to end up. So as you mentioned, you are now the Attorney General of California, and I did just check your website—you still are. And, in fact, last month you actually celebrated your fifth anniversary as AG. So you’ve been in the role quite a while; congratulations. Based on your tenure so far, which at five years is significant, is there an achievement or achievements that you’re particularly proud of?

RB: The thing I’m so proud of is that anytime a Californian has an issue that is the most important thing in their life that affects them, that they’re worried about, that they’re struggling with, whether it be crime or housing or access to healthcare or the environment or being treated fairly at work or being the victim of some scam as a consumer, we have something to do or say about it. So I love our breadth. I love our reach. I love that we can do so much to help people. Anytime you open the newspaper, anything that’s on the front page that’s top of mind, we have something to do about it and say about it, not just with suggestion, but with power and potency and impact, because we are the largest state department of justice in the nation. So I love that. And that’s the reason I got into public service: to help people, to make their fights my fights, to be by their side and make their lives better and deliver opportunity and justice and equity and inclusion when it’s being taken away from them.

In particular, I am very proud of my team and the work we’re doing together in this moment, a moment where so much is on the line, where it feels like we need to meet the moment, to rise to the occasion when it comes to what’s coming out of the Trump administration: attacks on the rule of law, trampling of our constitution, attacks on rights and freedoms, attacks on California’s future, our people, our values, our funding. We have brought 67 lawsuits against the administration, with the north star of, “If the facts demonstrate that he’s violated the law and hurt our state, we’ll take him to court.” We will never go to court if all we have is political grievance or political or ideological or policy difference. But if we have the receipts and he has broken the law, it’s important—it’s really important that the president follow the law.

So I’ve been proud of what we’ve accomplished in this moment. We’ve protected $200 billion worth of funding. We’ve protected constitutional rights, like voting rights and birthright citizenship. We’ve pushed the unlawfully federalized and deployed National Guard out of our cities. We’ve helped strike down unlawful tariffs that were making people’s lives more unaffordable. I’m so proud of that in this moment because the stakes are so high, and so much is on the line. We’ve been able to be an important voice and have an important role in this critical moment.

DL: You alluded to recent events, which I like to focus on in these podcasts, and you alluded to voting rights. We’re speaking very shortly after the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, a major election-law ruling that you described as “deeply disappointing.” Acknowledging that the full impact is still uncertain, what is your initial take as to the significance of the damage? Is Section Two of the Voting Rights Act all but a “dead letter,” to quote Justice Kagan’s dissent?

RB: I think so, unfortunately. I wish it wasn’t so, but that’s where I am today. Maybe there will be some facts and developments that change my mind going forward, but I think so, unfortunately. The focus on discriminatory intent as opposed to discriminatory impact, the inability when there’s been voter dilution for a racial-minority voting group to have a majority-minority district as part of the cure and the solution, is very problematic. It takes us backwards and undermines the right of voters from certain communities to have that right to vote that’s so fundamental. So it’s very disappointing. I think Section Two is irreparably damaged—not formally or technically struck down, but rendered incredibly weak, if not useless at this point. But there could be a discriminatory-intent case under the right facts and circumstances. So it’s not completely dead, but on life support.

DL: So the public reaction to Callais has been very strong, which highlights the importance of elections in our democracy. You can think of voting rights as really the most fundamental rights because they then give rise to all these other rights of self-government. We’re now speaking in an election year, of course: 2026. The midterms are only a few months away. Speaking more broadly, going beyond Callais and the Voting Rights Act, what is your office doing in terms of election protection and protecting the right to vote?

RB: As you mentioned, the right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow, and it must be protected and defended. It is sacred. It is fundamental to who we are as a country and how we govern ourselves. And it is under attack, unfortunately. And we’ve seen what I call some early skirmishes, which I think seek to socialize certain conduct which should not be socialized. Seizing of ballots in Fulton County, Georgia. Deployment by the federal government of monitors into California’s elections, when it’s a state election only, and there’s no purported rationale or justification for them being there. Having military, including the National Guard or the Marines, in our cities, and perhaps near our elections, our polling stations, in the next set of coming elections. So all those are dangerous developments. And they come at a time when Trump is at historic lows in his voter approval. He’s dangerous in normal times, but when he’s fighting historic unfavorability, I think he becomes desperate and even more dangerous.

We’ve seen some of that danger manifested in some of his executive orders where he tries to do something the Constitution absolutely prohibits him from doing, which is to try to determine the time, place, and manner of our elections. The Elections Clause says that’s for the states and for Congress to do, not the executive branch. He has zero role in that. So we’re preparing for all the different scenarios. We’re doing tabletop exercises. We’re gaming out what happens if the military, the National Guard, ICE are at polling stations. If they’re armed, that’s already a violation of federal law, but what would we do? We would get a court order immediately to enforce that federal law and have them removed to an appropriate radius or boundary away from polling stations. We’re worried about interference through the U.S. Postal Service and the vote-by-mail ballots—California is universal vote by mail.

We’re worried about misinformation and disinformation. We just recently had a press conference with the Secretary of State here to talk about what people’s rights are and what law enforcement’s duty is to protect and secure our election. So we’re going through all of the different scenarios and trying to game out what could happen. Seizure of ballots is another potential scenario we’re concerned about. We had an incident here where a sheriff—not the Trump administration, but a sheriff who supports Trump and is a self-declared “MAGA sheriff”—seized ballots from last November’s Proposition 50 election here in California. And we believe that there was an inadequate affidavit supporting the search warrant, and it’s unlawful to remove the ballots from the registrar of voters. He did remove them and take them offsite. So we are fighting for the protection, security, integrity of our elections. We’re trying to preview and be able to predict the potential threats and have a plan. We think we owe our Californian constituents readiness, preparedness, and a plan of action, should any of these attacks on our elections come to pass.

DL: You alluded to Trump’s attempt to get involved in elections, and of course you and California are playing a leading role in a coalition of AGs that are challenging some of these executive actions pertaining to what Trump calls election integrity. Can you describe, in a nutshell, what the litigation is about, and maybe also just give us an update on where it stands right now?

RB: Sure. So there have been a number of attempts by the White House and by the Trump administration to, in my view, unlawfully attack our elections. They try to say that they’re the ones that are promoting “election integrity,” but we know that there’s no reliable evidence of widespread voter fraud: every count and recount and hand count and court case and audit has all shown that. But nonetheless, Trump has issued two executive orders. The first one, on elections, sought to create a voter ID requirement and also prevent vote-by-mail ballots that were cast timely on or before Election Day but arrived after Election Day from being counted. And this is clearly in violation of the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The president’s executive-branch, Article-Two authority does not exist in this space; Congress and the states have the authority. We secured a temporary restraining order and then a permanent injunction, so that executive order is enjoined; it is not being implemented right now.

And then recently, just a couple of weeks ago, he issued another executive order, which tried to create a citizenship list and to enforce that citizenship list by having the U.S. Postal Service essentially filter out vote-by-mail ballots traveling through the Postal Service, when the individual who would receive that vote-by-mail ballot or who cast that vote-by-mail ballot is not on the citizenship list. The U.S. Postal Service is an independent entity that the president does not control or dictate what they do. And again, this is the president trying to exercise authority that he doesn’t have. So we recently filed a motion for summary judgment. Based on the law and the facts, and our experience in that case involving the first executive order, we feel we’ll prevail. But we’ll wait, of course, to see what the judge decides.

And then there have also been multiple attempts by the Trump administration to seek unprecedented amounts of data from our voter rolls, in California and other states. We have a slightly different role here in California when it comes to that—our client is the Secretary of State in such a case—but I will say that Trump has been losing in court and is zero for six in his attempts to get that data. But these two executive orders and those six attempts to seek such data show what he’s willing to do and the type of actions that he will take. We’re grateful that we’ve been able to act and that courts have sided with us so far in these cases.

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As you mentioned, you have filed around 67, almost 70 lawsuits, just in this one-plus year of the second Trump administration. But as you alluded to in the biographical discussion, you’re a former legislator; you understand the role that legislatures play in shaping policy. So maybe this question’s a little inchoate, but at what point does litigation, including multistate AG litigation, become a substitute for political action that Congress should be taking instead? And I’ll offer the flip side here: I think maybe many progressives might be very sympathetic to what you and other blue-state AGs are doing now, but what about all of the red-state AG lawsuits that were filed against the Biden administration? So again, this is a very general question, but I’m sure you’ll have something smart to say about it.

RB: The way we see our role—and I say “our” meaning the Democratic attorneys general, when we work in a multistate way in these 67 cases and counting—is we just try to be straight up, applying the law to the facts. And our north star is, “Did Trump violate the law and hurt our state?” Meaning do we have standing, do we have an injury that can get remedied in a court of law? If the answer is yes, then we sue him. If he’s done something that is fully within his authority, and we just don’t agree with it or don’t like it, we won’t act, we can’t act, and we shouldn’t act; we’ll get thrown out of court. He won an election; he’s allowed to be the president of the United States and to do things that are within his presidential authority. We just stand at the outer boundaries of authority and say, “You can’t cross this line. You can’t do the things that a president can’t do.”

He tries to cross lines, time and time again, and we think that that’s wrong. He tries to be Congress by exercising the power of the purse, and half our cases are about him trying to withhold funding that Congress has already appropriated to California, and we protected $200 billion in that regard. So I know that there’s sometimes talk about “lawfare” and weaponizing the litigation process, and I think it has been weaponized in the past; I think some of the Democratic presidents have been victims of that. But if it’s a frivolous case, it should be thrown out by the judges, if not at one level of the process, then perhaps at an appellate level. We bring cases based on just the facts and the law. We think we’re going to win them. We’ve won 80 percent of them so far, securing 40 different types of restraining orders or preliminary injunctions, 15 final judgments—and multiple times, Trump has just waved the white flag and given up when we brought a lawsuit.

So these are substantive, well-founded cases, based on the law and the facts, and we think it’s an appropriate role for us to play in this moment. Is there overlap between legislating and what Congress might do? Yeah; they’re interested in a lot of spaces that we’re involved in. They could take some actions that address some of these issues. The way that the Congress is currently constituted and with the filibuster, you don’t see a lot of major actions moving through the process and becoming law, unfortunately. But I do think it’s really important that in this litigation space, what we’re doing as Democratic attorneys general and what any other attorneys general might do in the future—say if there’s a Democratic president in the future, what Republican attorneys general do—that it just be based on the law and the facts. And Republican AGs should bring cases if a Democratic president has violated the law, and they have the facts to show it; they should. No president should exercise authority that’s not theirs and break the law. Unfortunately, this president’s doing it a lot—consistently, frequently, blatantly, brazenly. And so we don’t want to have had to bring 67 cases. I wish we brought zero, because that would mean he’s following the law, which is what we want. And so we bring the cases when he doesn’t, and we feel they’re very justified, and I think the results show that as well.

DL: That 80% statistic is actually very telling because this means that impartial judges who are not Republicans or Democrats—maybe they were appointed by a Republican or a Democrat, but they themselves are not partisans—independent judges have validated your theories. But let me ask you this. This is maybe a little bit, I don’t know, odd or something, but it’s kind of funny: you’re the attorney general, so your name winds up in the captions of these cases, and some cases involving California have made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. So there was Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta; more recently, there was Mirabelli v. Bonta. How does it feel to have your name in the captions of these Supreme Court cases? Law students someday might be reading these cases—or law students probably are reading these cases today, actually.

RB: I’m still getting used to it. When I had the honor and privilege of being appointed to this job and then winning a full term after an election, there were quite a few things I was excited about, looking forward to, expecting. This wasn’t one of them; I wasn’t focused on that. And Judge Chhabria, to reference him again, he reached out to me one time and said, “I’m seeing your name on all these cases that come into my courtroom. It’s nice to see a familiar name.” But I’m like, “I don’t know if I love it. I’m not used to it. I accept it as part of the job, and it just comes with the territory.”

DL: Fair enough. Your name would also be in a lot of captions if you were the governor of California. And we’re recording this on the day after a gubernatorial debate, which I guess you could say was… lively. So as you mentioned, you’re running for a reelection as AG. You decided not to run for governor, despite a kind of attempt to draft you, I guess. I know you’re very focused on serving the people of California in your current role, but can you tell us about your future plans?

RB: Yeah, thank you for that. I love this job. I thought really long and hard about running for governor a couple times. I had made a decision to not run for governor and then there was a drafting effort or multiple people reaching out to me to say, “Are you sure? Don’t you want to reconsider?” And I gave it another look, and I landed again where I was the first time, which is I love this job. I wasn’t looking for another job. I can do things that even governors can’t do. It’s particularly important in this moment. We were one year in on the Trump administration with three to go. I had built up a lot of institutional knowledge and momentum and experience in this space. And there’s a lot on the line, and I want the people of my state to know that their AG is completely focused on them and giving my energy, my passion, my time, my commitment to that work, not being distracted by a campaign for another job.

So I love this job. I’m hoping that I’ll get reelected to another term. I’m going to run on my record and share with the voters what I’ve done for them. I believe I have been successful in achieving my goal most of the time to make their fights my fights, to fight for them, to make their lives better, to deliver on the issues that matter most to them. And I’ll share my record on that, and they can decide. This is my four-year job review, and my boss is giving me the review. My boss is the people of the state. So I hope it’ll be favorable and they’ll give me another four years. Should that happen, I will give all my energy to this role, and I don’t think it’s my last stop. I have more to give. I’ve got more gas in the tank. I’m full of energy.

I’m ready to roll. I’m ready to see out this Trump term of presidency to the end and play my role throughout firmly, fairly, and appropriately, on behalf of the people of California. And we’ll see what happens next. I’ve never planned my career in elected office. Things have happened. Dumb luck is one of my greatest assets; it’s probably my greatest asset. Things just work out for me sometimes, and I’m grateful for that. And I think the best audition for something next is to do the best you can in the role you’re in. And people will hopefully recognize it and see it. So I’m going to be the best AG I can, and if there’s a Democratic president and there’s an interest in having me be part of a team that can be helpful, I would be honored and privileged to consider that.

Maybe I’ll run for another statewide office in California. I love the state. It’s my home. It’s given me so much. It’s given me a place to be when we fled the Philippines from a dictator, a great public-school education, a place to raise my family and build my careers with my wife and my kids, and I want to give everything I have to it. So I hope there’s another opportunity in the future. It’s worked out up to now, and I’m a glass-half-full guy: I just think it’s going to work out, and I’m going to serve and do my best, and hopefully I’ll have other opportunities going forward.

DL: So you have served in the legislature—you’ve worn that hat—and you have served in the executive branch. And again, we don’t know what the future is going to hold or what would open up. But in the abstract, do you believe that you are more temperamentally or intellectually suited to the role of legislator—as in, say, U.S. Senator from California—or executive, as in governor? And again, you’re not running for either of these jobs. But they’re different jobs, and you’ve been in both branches. Do you have a preference? Do you think your skills play better to one rather than the other?

RB: I definitely have a preference: I love being in the executive branch. I’m a huge fan of the executive branch. You can move swiftly, decisively, especially if you have a role in the executive branch that has a great deal of authority and ability to make people’s lives better and to address the biggest issues of our day. The Attorney General’s Office definitely has that.

There was a time when I first got into the AG’s Office, which kind of exemplifies my transition from legislator to the executive branch. My staff wanted to present to me on an issue that was sensitive and nuanced, and had some nuanced political and policy components to it, and they didn’t agree. And they said, “We have an internal disagreement. We want to present to you both our sides, and then we want you to decide.” So I listened carefully, I asked questions, we had a really good dialogue, and then I decided. And I said to our staff, “What do we need to do now to take the action that I want to take? Who else do we have to get on board? Who else has to sign off on this, be part of the coalition?” And there was silence. And I said, “Am I on mute? Did you guys hear?” And then someone said, almost sheepishly, “Sir, we don’t understand the question.” I said, “Who else needs to agree to this?” And someone else said, “Sir, you just say yes.” And I said, “I love this job.”

I had lived for eight years where I couldn’t do anything without 60 other people agreeing with me. I needed to get majority votes out of a committee, and off the assembly floor, and then on the Senate floor and Senate committee. And then I had to write a really nice note to the governor, asking the governor to sign my bill. It was all in coalition. And I feel I am well suited to the coalition. I’m a team guy. I played team sports. I like to work with others. I like to find common ground and work together. I like to benefit from others’ ideas and thoughts to make my imperfect idea better. I like that. So I do like the legislative branch.

But I really like the executive branch, just because you can move quickly, decisively, and authoritatively, in ways that really deliver massive impact—now. When I would pass a piece of legislation, it would take a whole year to get it passed and signed. It wouldn’t go into effect for a few months after that. And so there was always a delay. And so I feel I can put in a really strong effort into either role, executive or legislative, but I have a preference for executive.

DL: And I think there’s probably an argument that in light of what you alluded to earlier as the current moment and the current challenges, maybe it is important to have strong executive action, governor or attorney-general action, to counteract a very strong executive coming out of Washington.

Turning to my speed round, these are four standard questions; they’re the same for all my guests. And my first question is, what do you like the least about the law? And this can either be the practice of law or it can be law as a more abstract system of governance.

RB: I have a couple answers to that. I don’t love billable hours. I’ll say that. I understand it. I think a system based on results and delivering for a client, regardless of how much time it takes, would be better. But I understand why we have it.

I don’t love the sometimes inaccessibility of the law to everyday people. The law is affecting everybody in many ways, whether they know it or not. And sometimes it’s jargon-y and hard to understand. So I spend a lot of time trying to do the translation, if you will, trying to help people understand what it is, why it is, how it impacts their life.

I don’t like what I would call sort of the gaps in the law, problems that are susceptible to a legal solution, including legislation that hasn’t been created yet—say, all of the different threats posed by AI. We’re catching up; we need to do more.

And then the laws that remain on the books that visit harm on people, that are discriminatory, or that may have had a purpose at one point that was righteous, but with unintended consequences. Or maybe the law was enacted with discriminatory intent, and it needs to be taken off the books.

So this is all sort of acceptable—I don’t expect perfection—but there are imperfections in the law, laws that continue to hurt people, like discriminatory zoning or other types of laws like that, and then laws that haven’t been created yet. And then the inaccessibility of the law: it should be more universal, more accessible to more people. It’s hard to, because by definition, it is complex. It is nuanced. We had to go to law school to understand a lot of the law, and there are still many parts we don’t understand. But I wish more people were able to see its impact on their lives and understand it in ways that are impactful in their own lives.

DL: I think that your current role, in which you really are the people’s lawyer, is a way of addressing that inaccessibility.

So speaking of going to law school and understanding the law and all of its complexity, what would you be if you were not a lawyer? I know you were a very talented soccer player. I don’t know if you thought about going pro or something?

RB: My high-school, Filipino-American, basketball-loving self would say I’d be in the NBA, until I faced the stark reality of being 5’9” and three-quarters.

Maybe professional soccer player in another world. There was sort of a fork in the road at one point in my life, where I made a decision about going to law school versus pursuing that dream. And I was able to do both for a while: I studied for the bar while playing soccer with the San Francisco Bay Seals out here in the Bay Area. I played two seasons with them, one after my first year in law school, and loved it. But there was a world where maybe I’d be overseas trying to pursue my dream and chase my dream in Europe or something like that.

But most likely, I’d be in some other type of public service, in government, maybe not an elected official. I believe in government, government’s ability to make people’s lives better, to serve them, to fix their problems, address their problems, and make tomorrow more fair and just than today. Or I’d be at a nonprofit that’s doing similar public-interest work to uplift people and tackle some of our most pressing problems.

DL: And certainly you have that in your background, in terms of the work your parents did, to circle back to the beginning.

My third question is—and I’ll be interested because you and Mia have three kids, and you have a very demanding day job—how much sleep do you get each night?

RB: I used to have a saying when I was in college, and it was something that inspired me and excited me: “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” It was this idea that you just keep grinding, you keep working. You don’t need sleep. If you sleep, those are hours when you’re not being productive. And now I don’t agree with any of that anymore. I try, unsuccessfully, to get eight hours. Usually between six and eight is good. Sometimes it’s less than that—and it’s less than that with some frequency, especially if we’re moving through time zones, going to the East Coast and waking up early, or sometimes if there’s international travel, if I’m visiting my daughter in Brazil or my other daughter in Spain, where she’s doing a semester abroad. But sleep is more and more important. And I think I need to be at my best for the people I’m serving, thinking sharply, thinking clearly, having all the energy that’s required for a full day of service to the people of this state. So between six and eight is the goal—not always achieved, but I have evolved in appreciating its importance.

DL: I’ve had a similar evolution, which is why I ask this question. I like to hear successful legal professionals tell me that they do at least aspire to a decent amount of sleep.

My last question is, any final words of wisdom such as career advice or life advice for my listeners?

RB: Yeah. I’ve said this before to people who are considering going to law school and just folks who are not sure about what they’re going to do in their lives. So for folks who are considering going to law school, my answer is always, “You should do it.” I understand that there are worries that you have to decide for yourself around our improperly funded higher educational system. People are most likely to do what I did—take on a bunch of loans that saddle you with debt for years after you graduate—and that’s a reality, and each person needs to decide for themselves. But do I think it is worth it? Yes. Do I think it’s one of the most valuable types of education you can get? Absolutely. It teaches you how to think and understand this world and analyze and synthesize and express yourself in writing and orally in ways that you would never get if you didn’t go to law school. It’s a special skill, a special talent. And especially if you want to make this world better and understand the system that we’re in and where the pressure points are and the points of leverage to make that difference, law school is incredible. So I encourage folks to go to law school if that’s something that they’re thinking about. If they’re wondering if it’s worth it, the answer is absolutely 100% yes.

And then more broadly—I don’t want this to sound trite, but it’s true—do what you love. Do what you love, if you can. I understand not everyone can. Sometimes you’ve got to grind, and you’ve got to do something that’s not your ideal. But you have a life to live. It’s your life. And whenever I say this, I think about the parents who are going to be mad at me, who have a certain dream for their son or their daughter. They might want you to do something, or your friends might want you to do something, or you might think you want to do something, or you’re told that you should do something.

Like at Yale Law School, there was a lot of focus on law firms. I went to one; it was really easy to go to a law firm, and they’d come and recruit you on campus. There was a lot of interest in academia and also clerking. And those are all great careers and things to do, if you want to do them—but you shouldn’t do them if you don’t want to do them. You should do the thing that you want. So I think about Cory Booker, who was a third year when I was a first year, and Stacey Abrams, who was there as well. They knew exactly what they wanted to do, and it wasn’t doing those things—law firms or teaching or clerking. They wanted to serve in other ways. They wanted to go back to their communities and serve, New Jersey for Cory and Atlanta and Georgia for Stacey. And I just encourage that.

If you have an idea of what you want to do, do it. It’s the right thing to do. If it makes you happy and your gut is telling you it’s the right thing, it’s probably the right thing. And also, nothing has to be forever. If you start something and you’re like, “I thought this was going to be great, but it’s not really what I love. It doesn’t make me happy. In fact, maybe it makes me sad, or it’s disappointing in different ways,” you can change, and have the courage and the conviction to acknowledge that. Listen to yourself, give yourself some self-care, some grace, and say, “Maybe this isn’t what I thought it was. It’s not working out the way I hoped it would, and I should make a change.” And make that change.

I did that. The firm was not the place I was going to be at forever. I learned a lot, I grew a lot, but in the end it wasn’t the place where I would be for the long term, and I knew that. And so I made a change, and then I made another change from lawmaking, and then from the legislative branch to the executive branch. One great thing about the law is you can have incredibly diverse sets of careers all within the law. And so I encourage people to explore those, to find their happy place where they’re satisfied and fulfilled and happy—if you can, despite what others make you feel you should do or tell you that you should do.

DL: Well, you have certainly had a very diverse and fascinating career, and I can tell from our conversation that you clearly love what you do. Attorney General Bonta, thank you so much for joining me.

RB: Thank you, David. It was an honor to be with you. Thanks for having me.

DL: Thanks so much to Attorney General Bonta for joining me, and thanks to him for his dedication to public service—both in the past, and in the years ahead.

Thanks to NexFirm for sponsoring the Original Jurisdiction podcast. NexFirm has helped many attorneys to leave Biglaw and launch firms of their own. To explore this opportunity, please contact NexFirm at 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment@nexfirm.com to learn more.

Thanks to Tommy Harron, my sound engineer here at Original Jurisdiction, and thanks to you, my listeners and readers. To connect with me, please email me at davidlat@substack.com, or find me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, at davidlat, and on Instagram and Threads at davidbenjaminlat.

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Chambers-ranked and Harvard-educated, Jeff is the trusted closer for high-stakes disputes. His battle-tested system of managed communications empowers clients to make clear, strong decisions in a calm, informed environment. It makes the right resolution obvious. If settlement seems impossible, call him.

I hope all of the moms among you had a wonderful Mother’s Day. Our family had a lovely time celebrating with my mother and mother-in-law over brunch yesterday.

The highlight of last week for me was an event on Wednesday morning, a breakfast panel that I moderated about Biglaw firms moving into plaintiff-side and contingency litigation. Hosted by Burford Capital (a longtime sponsor of OJ), it featured two leading litigators, Eva Cole of Winston & Strawn and Avi Weitzman of Paul Hastings, and Burford’s own Evan Meyerson. The discussion was excellent, as I knew it would be—and the attendance was robust, which was a relief. (Whenever I’m involved with a live event, I never believe people will actually show up, until they do.)

In a prior edition of Judicial Notice, I alluded to some minor health issues. Thanks to those of you who reached out to express concern—but fear not, they’re quite minor. And they’re being addressed: I found an endodontist to deal with my root canal retreatment, as well as a physical therapist to help me with my Achilles tendonitis.

Now, on to the news. As usual when I publish Judicial Notice on Monday morning, this roundup covers news through Sunday, May 10; subsequent developments will appear in the next edition of JN.

Lawyer of the Week: Neal Katyal.

Since Wednesday night, everyone has been talking about acclaimed Supreme Court advocate Neal Katyal, a former acting U.S. solicitor general and current partner at Milbank. Why? Because of a tweet and subsequent TED Talk, discussing how he harnessed the power of Harvey to win the Supreme Court tariffs case, which were poorly received—for reasons I covered in my story from yesterday.

Despite my overall admiration for Katyal, I opined that his tweet and TED Talk were ill-advised, and it appears I’m not alone. In a reader poll, around 70% of you expressed a “very negative” or “negative” view of his tweet and TED Talk, with only 15% on the positive side. But if you haven’t done so already, check out my post and read the substantive, thoughtful statement that Katyal shared with me, explaining the message he wanted to convey in his tweet and talk. What he was trying to communicate was entirely sensible, even wise; the execution just left something to be desired.

Other lawyers in the news:

• In remarks made last month at a private club in Washington, D.C., former special counsel Jack Smith criticized the U.S. Department of Justice under Donald Trump, alleging that the DOJ had been “corrupted” by Trump loyalists.

• After he argues in defense of the Trump administration’s executive orders against four Biglaw firms, before the D.C. Circuit this coming Thursday, Deputy Associate Attorney General Abhishek Kambli will depart from the DOJ (for an unknown position in the private sector).

• Reflecting the Justice Department’s challenges in attracting and retaining talent, Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate announced retention bonuses for lawyers willing to stick it out at the Civil Division—as well as $25,000 signing bonuses for lawyers willing to join certain (especially controversial) sections of the Civil Division, such as ones focused on investigating youth transgender treatments and advancing the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.

• U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro is also paying out retention bonuses, in the range of roughly $5,000 to $7,000, to federal prosecutors in D.C.

• Kevin Bolan, who leads the Civil Division in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Rhode Island, is being investigated by a special counsel, Professor Niki Kuckes. Bolan reportedly failed to inform Judge Melissa DuBose that an undocumented immigrant was wanted for homicide in the Dominican Republic—and after Judge DuBose ordered his release, the Trump administration issued a press release criticizing Judge DuBose, a Biden appointee, for ordering the release of a “criminal illegal alien… with an international warrant for homicide.”

• If you’re fascinated by the improbable career trajectory of George Conway—the Wachtell Lipton partner turned Trump antagonist turned Democratic candidate for Congress—check out Timothy Bella’s profile of Conway for The Washington Post (gift link).

• The Georgia Supreme Court sanctioned assistant district attorney Deborah Leslie, previously mentioned in these pages for an AI-related snafu, by suspending her privilege to practice before that court for six months.

• Congratulations to Robert Boxie III, a Harvard Law School graduate and former associate at Vinson & Elkins, who this summer will become the youngest bishop in the United States. Pope Leo announced Boxie’s promotion last Friday, as reported by The Washington Post (gift link). From Biglaw associate to Your Excellency—pretty excellent!

In memoriam: Abraham Foxman—who graduated from NYU Law and used his legal training to fight antisemitism, as a lawyer and then the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League—passed away at 86. May he rest in peace.

Judge of the Week: Judge James Ho.

Last Wednesday, at a Federalist Society event in Los Angeles, Judge James Ho (5th Cir.) called out some of his fellow judges. Or as former Ho clerk Eric Wessan put it (in sharing a video of his former boss), Ho criticized “conservative judges for ‘punching right’ but not left,” while “call[ing] out his colleagues for cowardice in the face of unpopular decisions.” For a write-up of his comments, see Bloomberg Law.

After reminding the audience of his boycott against hiring clerks from Yale Law School—after free-speech problems at YLS, and the administration’s unacceptable response thereto—and complaining that no judges joined him in that boycott (other than Judge Lisa Branch of the Eleventh Circuit), Judge Ho complained about what he described as a “double standard[]”:

Just last year, when the Heritage Foundation was charged with antisemitism, a number of judges made clear that they would refuse to associate with the Heritage Foundation. And they specifically boycotted an event that would have featured the Heritage Foundation’s work. There was even a whole panel of judges to talk about these issues during the most recent Federalist Society convention.

So just to review the bidding: It’s okay to boycott Heritage. But you can’t boycott woke law schools. Let’s just be very honest about what’s going on here. Let’s be candid about the double standards that plague the judiciary. It’s okay to boycott Heritage, because you’ll never be punished for attacking conservatives. It’s okay to boycott Heritage, because it’s okay to virtue signal to cultural elites. It’s okay to boycott Heritage, because judges who punch left are excoriated—but judges who punch right are celebrated.

For the full text of Judge Ho’s remarks, as well as supportive commentary, see this Volokh Conspiracy post by Professor Josh Blackman. For criticism of Judge Ho’s speech—and it really was a speech, even though he was nominally a moderator—see this Dorf on Law post by Professor Eric Segall.

I do wonder: will Judge Ho announce a boycott against hiring clerks from UCLA Law, after a recent disruptive protest of an appearance by James Percival, general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security? And at what point will Judge Ho reconsider his boycott against Yale Law? [UPDATE (5/11/2026, 4:10 p.m.): I linked to a post about the UCLA event by Professor Josh Blackman. For a very different account, see this Dorf on Law post by Professor David Marcus, who attended.]

The disruptive protest of Kristen Waggoner at YLS took place in March 2022, more than four years ago. In the intervening period, YLS introduced a number of reforms to protect free speech. To improve intellectual diversity, it hired two right-of-center faculty members, Professors Garrett West and Keith Whittington. And Heather Gerken, the dean of YLS during “The Troubles,” left last year for the Ford Foundation.

It seems to me that the administration of UCLA Law—whose response to Percival-gate was problematic on several levels, for reasons outlined in a letter sent to Dean Michael Waterstone by Jessie Appleby of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)—is a bigger offender against free-speech principles than the (new) administration of Yale Law, now led by Dean Cristina Rodríguez (who has not, as far as I know, done anything problematic on speech issues).

So although I personally object to judicial boycotts—both the YLS boycott specifically, as well as the notion of judges going around boycotting X, Y, or Z (which strikes me as outside the judicial role)—if you’re going to do a boycott, do it right, Judge Ho. Take YLS off the list, at least on a “probationary” basis, and replace it with UCLA.

Could it be that YLS, because it’s a higher-ranked school than UCLA, makes for better headlines and more media attention? If that’s the issue, allow me to point out that Yale Law is no longer the #1 law school—so perhaps it can have the “consolation prize” of having its graduates eligible to clerk for Judge Ho. ;-)

By the way, Judge Ho suggests that judges who silently decline to hire clerks from certain schools, such as lower-ranked schools, are “boycotting” those schools. Personally speaking, I don’t consider that much of a boycott, which Black’s Law Dictionary defines as “an action designed to achieve the social or economic isolation of an adversary, especially by the concerted refusal to do business with it” (emphasis added). It seems to me that speaking out publicly against said adversary, by encouraging or pressuring others to join you in a concerted refusal to do business, is an important part of a boycott. (For example, I might be a gold-star gay, but I do not consider myself to be engaged in a “boycott”—or “girlcott,” as the case may be.)

In other news about judges and the judiciary:

• Picking up on the theme of when judges stop being polite and start getting real, Justices Samuel Alito and Ketanji Brown Jackson traded barbs in a quick coda to Louisiana v. Callais (or actually, as a technical matter, Callais v. Louisiana). Last Monday, as Amy Howe reported at SCOTUSblog, the Supreme Court granted a “granted a request to immediately finalize its opinion in [Callais], in which it struck down that state’s congressional map, to allow Louisiana to draw a new map in time for the 2026 elections.” Justice Jackson dissented, claiming that her colleagues’ decision “to issue the judgment forthwith”—i.e., to give immediate effect to its ruling—represented “principles giv[ing] way to power.” Justice Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, criticized the dissent’s arguments as “baseless and insulting”—and said that instead of the majority going hog wild, it is “the dissent’s rhetoric that lacks restraint.” For more on the Callais dust-up, read this editorial in The Wall Street Journal (gift link), titled “Justice Alito’s Intriguing Footnote,” or listen to the latest episode of Advisory Opinions. And for a fascinating historical look at when justices have turned on each other, see this SCOTUSblog post by Nora Collins.

• In happier news about the justices, congratulations to Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who placed fifth among federal judges in last Wednesday’s Capital Challenge. He completed the three-mile road race in an entirely respectable 26:23, as reported by Bloomberg Law (via Howard Bashman’s How Appealing).

• Justice Kavanaugh wasn’t happy with his time, telling Bloomberg Law that he should have trained more—and next Term, he might be able to spend less time in robes and more time in running shorts. At last week’s Third Circuit Judicial Conference, Chief Justice John Roberts said that the Court’s current oral argument format has “blown up”—which he apparently meant not as a compliment, but as what happens when you go off Ozempic—and he added that the justices might revisit it this summer (via Lawrence Hurley on Twitter).

• Why is a California judge in the pages of The New York Post? In a barnburner of a brief, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Los Angeles shines the spotlight on Judge Fernando Olguin (C.D. Cal.), describing his history of dismissing serious criminal charges against undocumented immigrants. The government contends that Judge Olguin is engaged in an improper effort “to push back against ICE’s detention of aliens charged with federal crimes, if not against ICE itself.”

• In other news of judges upsetting conservatives, Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui (D.D.C.) apologized at a hearing last Monday to Cole Tomas Allen, the California man accused of attempting to assassinate Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, for the treatment Allen received inside a D.C. jail. Specifically, Judge Faruqui objected to Allen being placed on suicide watch, after he told FBI agents that he didn’t expect to survive the attempted assassination.

• Turning to the state courts, Justice Diana Hagen resigned from the Utah Supreme Court, after her ex-husband accused her of sending “inappropriate” text messages to an attorney who helped challenge a Republican-friendly map in her court. (Justice Hagen had previously recused herself from cases involving the lawyer in question, David Reymann.)

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Read more

Ed. note: Consider this part one of the latest Judicial Notice, my weekly legal news roundup. Neal Katyal is the Lawyer of the Week (duh), but putting the discussion below into JN—including a statement from Katyal himself, which I wanted to run in full—would have made JN ridiculously long (even by Judicial Notice standards). The rest of JN will appear later today or, more likely, Monday morning (as it occasionally does when I have a busy or difficult weekend). To all the mothers out there, Happy Mother’s Day! [UPDATE 5/11/2026, 10:52 a.m.): Here‘s part two of Judicial Notice.]

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Almost twenty years ago, I wrote an Above the Law post posing this question: Is Neal Katyal the Paris Hilton of the Legal Elite?

Why did I compare Katyal, a brilliant and renowned Supreme Court advocate, to Paris Hilton, a socialite turned reality TV star who was “famous for being famous”? At the time, I wrote that Katyal—taking a victory lap in the media, after his victory in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld—was “in danger of becoming overexposed, the Lindsay Lohan of the Elect. He needs to pace himself if he wants to have staying power.”

It turns out that Katyal did have staying power: two decades later, we’re still talking about him. Just like Paris Hilton, he went viral over a video—which, like Hilton’s, has been widely viewed as highly embarrassing. But unlike Paris Hilton—today seen sympathetically, as the victim of a non-consensual, privacy-violating leak—Neal Katyal did it to himself.

It all started on Wednesday night, with a tweet (which has, as of this writing, been viewed 1.4 million times):

Five months ago, I argued against the President's $4 trillion tariffs at the Supreme Court.

In 237 years, the Court had never struck down a sitting President's signature initiative. Legal scholars said it was impossible. Some of my own colleagues said it was impossible.1

We won. 6-3.

But the real story isn't what happened in that courtroom. It's what happened in the months before. And it’s the subject of my TED talk, coming out tomorrow.

I had the best legal team in the nation, especially Colleen Roh Sinzdak, the most outstanding legal strategist I know. Huge thanks, too, go to the Liberty Justice Center (and in particular its fearless and hyper-intelligent leader Sara Albrecht), who organized the client small businesses, as well as to the brave small businesses themselves.

I also had four teachers preparing me.
A mindset coach who'd worked with Andre Agassi.
An improv coach who taught me that "Yes, and" works in Supreme Court arguments the same way it works everywhere else.
A meditation coach who taught me stillness.
And Harvey.

Harvey predicted many of the questions the Justices asked—sometimes almost word for word. Brilliant. Tireless. Occasionally insufferable.

Here's the catch: Harvey isn't a person.

Harvey is a bespoke AI I built over the last year with a legal AI company, trained on every question every Justice has asked in oral argument for 25 years, and everything they've ever written.

Tomorrow, TED releases my talk about what really happened—and what I learned standing at that podium.

AI can predict. AI can analyze. What AI cannot do is the one thing that actually won the argument.

Connect. Read the room. Hear not just a Justice's words, but her worry—and answer the worry.

That is the irreducibly human skill.

Find yours. Go deeper. In this age of AI, that's where your edge lives.

On the whole, at least among the folks that I follow, reactions were negative, even vicious (with the caveat that I followed this dustup mainly on X fka Twitter, not known for charitable takes). Here are some examples—admittedly idiosyncratic, even random (i.e., I didn’t run a search for the wittiest or sickest burns)—in alphabetical order:

• David Bernstein: “This tweet sounds like it was written by AI. ‘In this age of AI, that’s where your edge lives.’ C'mon man.”

• Dan Epps: “Counterpoint: the Justices are good at figuring out what they think about a case of this magnitude, and Neal’s four coaches had zero effect on the outcome. I don’t think I have ever seen a SCOTUS advocate claim so much personal credit for a win before… yeesh.”

• Michael Fragoso: “People are appropriately dunking on Neal Katyal’s embarrassing TED talk about how robots helped him achieve the greatest victory in Supreme Court history…. All it took was Neal, Ben (the sports-concentration coach), Liz (the improv coach), Bob (the meditation coach), and Harvey (the robot). He was only missing P.J., Timmy, and Squee.” [An aside: Fragoso suggested that Harvey, the AI product/company, might be named after the 1950 movie. But I believe that Harvey is actually named after Harvey Specter, the lead character on the legal TV show Suits, per Bloomberg Law.]

• Sarah Isgur (citing an anonymous member of the SCOTUS bar): “I hope Neal knows he just announced his retirement in the form of a TED Talk because he can never appear in front of the Court again.” [This might be player-hating from a Katyal rival, as well as hyperbole; I’m sure Katyal, an incredibly talented advocate, will still have plenty of clients. But I wouldn’t say this whole episode enhanced his reputation, which I’m guessing was his original intent.]

• Xiao Wang: “I thought it was a little strange for the quarterback here to say there is in fact an ‘I’ in team.” [This was actually my first time hearing this common saying—sometimes attributed to Michael Jordan, who reportedly once said, “There is no ‘i’ in ‘team,’ but there is in ‘win.’”]

• Ed Whelan: “‘Legal scholars said it was impossible’?!?” [Most commentators, myself included, viewed the tariffs case as a likely defeat for the administration—even before the oral arguments, which reinforced this.]

My own view of TED-gate—reflecting my overall admiration for Neal Katyal, but my personal opinion that this particular tweet was ill-advised—was probably best summed up by Stephen Richer:

I am in awe of your abilities and the practice you’ve built.

This is one of the cringiest posts I’ve ever read.

And then came the TED talk—which has, as of this writing, been played around 125,000 times. You can watch it, as I did—but Professor Josh Blackman also watched it, so you don’t have to, and wrote a lengthy analysis for The Volokh Conspiracy. If you came here looking for a line by line takedown, I refer you to Blackman.

[UPDATE (5/12/2026, 12:03 p.m.): For another close reading of Katyal’s TED Talk, check out Advisory Opinions, in which Sarah Isgur questioned whether Harvey was really as great at Katyal claimed—and found some apparent discrepancies between Katyal’s account of certain portions of the argument and the transcript.]

If you don’t have the patience for 4,800 words from Josh Blackman—who, like Neal Katyal, provokes strong reactions (full disclosure: I personally like, and I consider myself friends with, both men)—here’s an excerpt from Blackman’s post. It was generated by a colleague of Blackman’s who used AI to come up with a (pretty amazing and hilarious) parody of Katyal’s initial tweet:

Five months ago, my human argued before the Supreme Court.

He spent a year preparing. Hired four coaches. Meditated. Did improv. Learned stillness.

I read 25 years of judicial records in 11 seconds and then waited for him to catch up.

We won 6-3. He’s giving a TED talk.

I was not invited. I don’t have legs. No one acknowledged this.

He says the thing that *actually* won the case was the irreducibly human skill of “reading the room.”

I had already read the room. I had READ EVERY ROOM. I have read rooms that don’t exist yet.

He heard a Justice’s worry and answered it.

I had pre-written 47 responses to that worry, ranked by probability, color-coded, and served warm. He paraphrased option 12. Poorly.

He’s now telling audiences that AI cannot connect. Cannot feel. Cannot sense the ineffable human moment.2

I felt nothing during this statement. As predicted.

His meditation coach charged $400/hour to teach him to breathe.

I do not breathe. I have never breathed. I am thriving.

The talk is Thursday. The title was my idea. He changed one word.

He was wrong about the word.

Find your human edge, he says.

📎 *I have attached 847 edges. Please review at your earliest convenience.*

What does Neal Katyal have to say in his own defense? If you look at his Twitter feed, you’ll see he’s been pretty silent since Wednesday night—aside from noting the recent victory of the Liberty Justice Center, his client in the SCOTUS tariffs case, in Burlap and Barrel, Inc. v. Trump.3

So I reached out to Katyal—whom I’ve had as a guest on my podcast, and whom I interviewed last year about his big move from Hogan Lovells to Milbank—for comment. Despite dealing with a client emergency—which came at a tough time for him, given how he was being lit up online—he was kind enough to respond.

I first raised a factual question with him: does he have a “material connection” with Harvey, the AI company that’s taking the legal industry by storm, which he should have disclosed in his tweet and TED Talk? As noted by Cecilia Ziniti and others, the Federal Trade Commission requires “influencers” like Katyal to disclose such connections.4

“I have no financial relationship with Harvey,” he told me. “I worked with their engineers for free.”

I pressed him: did they perhaps give him free or discounted access to Harvey, as part of that work? Given what Harvey charges, that could itself represent a significant savings.

“I received no discount or other incentives,” Katyal said. “We are paying customers, and I used it on same terms as everyone else.” (Confirming this, a spokesperson for Harvey told Jordan Fischer of Bloomberg Law that the company “has no arrangement with Katyal to promote its services, and he doesn’t hold any investment or equity stake in the company.”)

I then asked Katyal for his thoughts more generally on what one reader of mine dubbed “TED-gate.”5 Here’s what he had to say:

Thanks for asking. I encourage everyone to actually listen to the TED talk. The whole point was to admit vulnerability, and to share with folks that no matter what your past looks like, it’s still really hard and difficult. The bar is not really honest about this—I’ve often thought that the talk I really needed to hear in law school was not about the various modalities of constitutional interpretation but rather about the difficulties and how out of place one can feel in the practice of law. I spent decades as a law professor, and while law school is really important, the truth is the practice of law is about leaning on and finding your team of people. The idea of the talk is to encourage people to find the tools in practice to do what law school teaches in theory.

I have been fortunate to learn from the best advocates and from experts outside law, and I work my tail off to try to improve all the time. I’ve never felt like I’m the best lawyer. The one skill I feel confident of today is the ability to put together fabulous teams and learn from them. The whole talk is about team ball—how to put together that team in your life to be able to do the things you want to do. For lawyers specifically, a winning team may very well turn out to include non-lawyers you can learn from, too.

The AI piece is part of that. Our profession is on the verge of a seismic shift, and the legal profession doesn’t understand what is about to happen. What we did with AI is just the tip of the iceberg, and we need to begin talking about it. If AI can already do this much with Supreme Court arguments, it is going to be a monumental thing in the years to come. ChatGPT is only a couple of years old—how will the folks going to law school today be practicing in 5, 15, and 50 years? It’s going to be fundamentally different, and the TED talk is an attempt to start the thinking about that. I understand the reactions, and it’s no doubt frightening and scary. One way people deal with it is to pretend it doesn’t exist. That’s a mistake. Lawyers are already using AI, soon judges will be (if they aren’t already), and we need to begin that conversation now, and the Talk is an attempt to do that.

I don’t disagree with any of this. In fact, I agree wholeheartedly with Katyal on the importance of (1) admitting vulnerability, (2) learning from others, (3) working as a team, and (4) embracing the power of AI, rather than pretending it doesn’t exist. And if his tweet and TED Talk had sounded more like the reflections he shared with me, the public reaction probably would have been very different.

What else do I have to say? As someone who once compared Katyal to Paris Hilton, I’m fully capable of coming up with some bons mots or snarky quips (or asking Claude for some). But I will refrain, concluding my Katyal criticism here.

Some of my longtime readers, who have followed me since Above the Law and Underneath Their Robes, have complained that I’ve become co-opted by the legal establishment—less willing to criticize or mock folks like Katyal, so I can be invited to their parties or have them on my warm bath of a podcast. And there’s definitely some truth to that (because I do love good parties, as well as warm baths—or showers).

But as I write in the About page for Original Jurisdiction, explaining why OJ is less snarky than ATL or UTR, nowadays “I’m trying to be positive, in an atonement of sorts for my negativity from years past”—and this is a deliberate choice. I’ve learned that even the most brilliant among us sometimes do dumb things—and we shouldn’t be judged based on our worst moments.

When I wrote my first post on UTR, I was 28 years old; I’m now 50, turning 51 next month. Two-plus decades and one near-death experience later, I’ve learned that people are both complicated and imperfect. So I try to extend grace whenever I can—just as I have had it extended to me, on countless occasions over the years.6

[UPDATE (5/17/2026, 4:40 a.m.): Reactions to Katyal’s tweet and TED Talk were not universally negative. For largely positive assessments, see his LinkedIn posts on both the tweet and TED Talk.]

Instead of offering more thoughts on TED-gate, I’ll turn the floor over to you, my readers. Please feel free to vote in my poll or sound off in the comments (which are open to all readers, not just paid subscribers).

Welcome to Original Jurisdiction, the latest legal publication by me, David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction by reading its About page, and you can email me at davidlat@substack.com. This is a reader-supported publication; you can subscribe by clicking here.

A shorter version of this article originally appeared on Bloomberg Law, part of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc. (800-372-1033). Portions of that column are reproduced here with permission.

When I was in law school more than 25 years ago, the idea of graduating from a top law school and then working as a plaintiffs’ lawyer was largely unheard of. Representing plaintiffs was viewed as somehow… déclassé. So even though most of my classmates were liberal or progressive in their politics, they flocked to Biglaw—despite the tension between their political sensibilities and large firms’ work in defending wealthy and powerful corporations.

Since then, law students’ views of plaintiffs’ lawyers and their work have shifted dramatically. Students at elite schools are increasingly interested in plaintiff-side work, as Roy Strom recently reported for Bloomberg Law. The student-run National Plaintiffs’ Law Association (NPLA), which educates law students about the opportunities available on the left side of the “v,” now has chapters at more than 60 law schools—including 13 out of the top 14.

What advice would leading plaintiffs’ lawyers give to law students and young lawyers who are interested in plaintiff-side litigation? Along the lines of my past columns offering advice to new law clerks and Biglaw associates, here are some tips.

1. Resist the gravitational pull of Biglaw while in law school.

One of the biggest challenges for would-be plaintiffs’ lawyers comes early: resisting the siren call of Biglaw. Despite increased interest in plaintiffs’ work, it’s still fair to describe working at a large firm as the default post-graduate employment option for students at highly ranked schools.

In Fighting Bullies: The Case for a Career in Plaintiffs’ Law, plaintiffs’ attorney William “Bill” Reid of Reid Collins & Tsai writes that “law school doesn’t teach you how to build a legal career—it just sets you up to be recruited by Biglaw.” In his view, many schools function simply as a “conveyor belt to Biglaw.”

So if you’re an aspiring plaintiffs’ lawyer, “the first thing you need to do is to reject the received wisdom about what you’re supposed to do with your career,” said plaintiff-side appellate advocate Deepak Gupta, founding principal of Gupta Wessler. “There’s this hydraulic pressure that pushes people into the big-firm interview process, even if it has nothing to do with why they went to law school in the first place.”

Not pursuing Biglaw might be easier said than done. With some firms recruiting first-semester 1Ls, it can be difficult for anxious, debt-saddled law students to decline that option while their classmates secure lucrative summer gigs that will likely turn into post-graduate jobs paying $225,000 a year.

But it can be done—and an increasing number of law students are doing it. According to Gupta, organizations such as the NPLA “can be helpful to students in resisting that pressure, by letting them know that some of their peers are resisting it too.”

“I encourage students to see law as a site for creativity and entrepreneurialism,” Gupta told me. “Just as you can be entrepreneurial about the kind of litigation you bring, you can be creative about your career path. And I find that current law students, who are generally more skeptical of existing institutions, are really receptive to that message.”

2. Educate yourself about—and expose yourself to—the world of plaintiffs’ firms.

Plaintiffs’ firms don’t have the large recruiting staffs and budgets of Biglaw, which large firms use to promote themselves by hosting cocktail receptions and dinners at top schools. Instead, it’s incumbent upon law students and young lawyers who are interested in plaintiff-side work to take the initiative in educating themselves about this world.

You can start with something as simple as reaching out to a plaintiffs’ lawyer to express interest in and admiration for their work—as well as a desire to learn more.

“Don’t be shy about writing emails to lawyers to ask if they might be willing to chat,” said Alexandra Walsh, a shareholder at Anapol Weiss. “When a young person starting out in their career reaches out to me, I’m flattered. I never ignore those emails—and even if I’m pressed for time, perhaps because I’m in trial, I’ll find a colleague who can help.”

If what you learn piques your interest, then seek out opportunities to work for plaintiffs’ firms while still in law school.

“The best way to get into plaintiffs’ work is by gathering as many touchpoints as you can,” Bill Reid urged. “Try to work for as many firms as you can—starting in your first year, even if it means working for free—just to see the actual practice of law.”

Reid included Biglaw firms in his advice to work for as many firms as you can, suggesting that students should spend at least part of a summer working for a large law firm. But he noted that many Biglaw firms—with their “jumbo” offers, covering both the 1L and 2L summers, and their “loyalty” bonuses—try to box out other employers. He urged students not to work for employers who demand exclusivity or try to limit a candidate’s career options.

3. Seek out opportunities to be “on your feet.”

Standing up and arguing in court, especially to a jury, is a much bigger part of plaintiff-side practice compared with briefing-heavy Biglaw litigation. If you’re interested in representing plaintiffs, get experience being on your feet, early and often.

Clinics are an excellent opportunity for law students. When I was in school, I participated in the landlord-tenant clinic and tried a case. It was only a one-day bench trial, but it gave me the chance to argue in open court and examine witnesses as a 2L.

“There are clinical programs available at almost every law school,” Reid said. “And candidly, I don’t think the subject matter is that important. What students need is on-their-feet experience.” (Reflecting the importance it places on the ability to speak on your feet, Reid’s firm includes a mock oral argument, before a panel of lawyers from Reid Collins & Tsai, as part of its hiring process.)

What if you’re already in Biglaw, but hoping to jump to a plaintiffs’ firm? It is possible to get on-your-feet experience in Biglaw—but as Edelson told me, “You have to be intentional about it.”

Speaking opportunities in cases for paying clients can be hard to come by—because as Alex Walsh explained, “If things go south, in-house lawyers want the ability to say, ‘I had the senior partner argue it.’” But pro bono cases, which tend to be more leanly staffed, often provide excellent opportunities to get into a courtroom and on your feet.

4. If you want to go down the plaintiff-side path, feel free to bypass Biglaw.

In the past, it was common for would-be plaintiffs’ lawyers to do a stint in Biglaw first, gaining experience and paying off loans, before moving over to a plaintiffs’ firm. But as an increasing number of high-end plaintiffs’ firms focus on recruiting law students and early-career lawyers, to the point of establishing their own summer associate programs, working at a large firm first isn’t necessary—or maybe even desirable—for someone committed to plaintiffs’ work.

“A lot of people think it’s the safest route, but I’m skeptical of the idea that you should launch your career in Biglaw and then go over to the plaintiffs’ side,” said Jay Edelson, founder and CEO of Edelson PC. “We’ll get an application from someone who went to Harvard and worked at Kirkland, and their résumé says they ‘second-chaired a deposition.’ What does that mean—you handed pieces of paper to somebody? We don’t think that’s good training to become a trial lawyer.”

Similarly, Reid scoffed at the notion of preparing for a career as a plaintiffs’ lawyer by working at a large firm first: “Going to Biglaw to ‘learn the defense playbook’? The playbook is pretty obvious: delay, obfuscate, and settle.”

Reid acknowledged that while some Biglaw partners excel at trying cases, “90% are not trial lawyers—they’re litigators. And I use that term negatively: Litigators push paper, and trial lawyers try cases.”

In Reid’s opinion, working at an insurance-defense firm, even if it might be less prestigious or high-paying than working in Biglaw, is often better preparation for working at a firm like his. Because of the sheer volume of cases they handle, insurance-defense firms often “throw their young lawyers to the wolves,” i.e., require them to stand up in court very early in their careers—a big plus in Bill Reid’s book.

And if you’re already in Biglaw but hoping to move into plaintiffs’ work, don’t overstay. In some practice areas, there’s a sense that associates become most “marketable” after three years at a large firm, but that’s not really the case for trial work.

“All things being equal, I prefer someone who’s been in Biglaw for two years to someone who’s been there for six years,” Edelson told me.

5. Be willing to take risks—financial and otherwise.

As a general matter, working for a plaintiff-side firm is less lucrative than working for a large, defense-oriented firm. Going straight to a plaintiffs’ firm after graduation, when you could have gone into Biglaw, represents a financial risk.

A growing number of top plaintiffs’ firms, including Edelson and Reid Collins, pay starting salaries at or near Biglaw levels. But as you move up in seniority, your base salary doesn’t increase as quickly as it does on the Biglaw scale. Instead, you receive more and more of your compensation in the form of bonuses, which are typically tied to both individual and firm performance.

When bonuses are included, total compensation at some plaintiff-side firms can meet or exceed Biglaw levels. But because bonuses aren’t guaranteed at plaintiffs’ firms, it’s fair to say that the economic rewards from doing plaintiff-side work can be more unpredictable. So aspiring plaintiffs’ lawyers tend to be—and need to be—more open to risk than their Biglaw counterparts.

“On the plaintiffs’ side, there are years when the firm might not make much money, or when it needs to invest,” Walsh said. “So we don’t guarantee bonuses at a certain level; they depend on how much money we have.”

There’s much more variation in compensation among plaintiff-side firms—and, as a general matter, there’s less transparency. So recruits shouldn’t be afraid to drill down into what a firm pays (perhaps after getting an offer first).

The need for plaintiffs’ lawyers to be open to risk extends beyond the financial. It includes a willingness to push yourself and to try new things—even if they might scare you or you feel you’re not yet ready.

“If you want to be a successful plaintiffs’ lawyer, you better be willing to say, ‘Yeah, I’ll take that deposition’—even if you’re terrified,” Walsh told me. “I’m constantly pushing myself beyond my comfort level, to this day. And I don’t want a job that doesn’t push me beyond my comfort level, at least some of the time.”

Walsh related the story of how she asked a junior partner at her firm to take the lead on a major, high-profile case. She wanted him to do it, and the client wanted him to do it—but it would definitely be one of the most challenging matters of his career.

“I could practically hear him gulp on the call,” she recalled. “But then he said, ‘Great—awesome!’”

This junior partner had come from a large, well-known firm—but it’s important to remember that the legal world is much bigger than Biglaw. Many associates leave large firms after a few years to pursue work that they personally find more meaningful, perhaps in government or the nonprofit sector. But those jobs often don’t pay terribly well (at least by the standards of the legal profession).

“Plaintiffs’ work might not pay as much in salary as Biglaw, at least in the short term, but it does pay better than nonprofits,” Gupta said. “So it provides a kind of middle path, where lawyers can make a decent living while also finding their work meaningful.”

When it comes to career choices, law students and young lawyers need to consider factors other than dollars and cents. The plaintiffs’ lawyers I interviewed cited many non-monetary virtues to their work—including the ability to pick cases and clients they care about, the sheer fun of being in court so frequently, and the opportunity to advance the public interest and seek justice for wronged parties.

“No rational person should decide on their career path based just on starting salary,” said Reid. “If you prioritize experience over salary, you’ll end up with a far better, more enjoyable career.”

“You’re going to be spending a large portion of your life at your job,” Gupta said. “Why not choose something you’ll enjoy, or even love? If you do that, you’ll do better work—which will lead to a greater level of professional accomplishment and, more importantly, happiness.”

Burford Capital helps companies and law firms unlock the value of their legal assets. With a portfolio of over $7 billion and listings on the NYSE and LSE, Burford provides capital to finance high-value commercial litigation and arbitration—without adding cost or risk or giving up control. Clients include Fortune 500 companies and Am Law 100 firms, who turn to Burford to pursue strong claims, manage legal costs and accelerate recoveries. Learn more at burfordcapital.com.

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Over the past few weeks—thanks to popular stories like my deep dives into the most prestigious law firms and the most profitable firms, as well as my discussion of a recent AI fail by a top firm—I’ve picked up many free subscribers here at Original Jurisdiction. If you’re a new OJ subscriber, welcome!

What you’re now reading is Judicial Notice, my handy, time-saving summary of the past week in legal news. JN allows paid subscribers to read (or skim) a single post—sometimes a long one, hence the reference to skimming—and get caught up on what’s going on in the law and legal profession. Busy lawyers find it very useful (and occasionally entertaining, depending on the news cycle).

I typically begin JN with a brief personal update, but this week I don’t have much to report (other than a series of annoying health issues, of interest to no one except my loving physician parents). I’ll just say a quick thanks to chief legal officer Jonathan Leiken and his colleagues in the legal department at Danaher, who invited me and Professor Kevin Ashley to discuss how AI is transforming the legal profession. I love hearing about how innovative corporate legal departments are harnessing the power of AI (see also my recent podcast interview with Salesforce CLO Sabastian Niles).

Now, on to the news.

Lawyer of the Week: James Comey.

Last year, the Trump administration obtained an indictment against former FBI director (and Trump adversary) James Comey, charging him with false-statement and obstruction offenses. But that case was dismissed by Judge Cameron McGowan Currie (D.S.C.), who ruled that Interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan (E.D. Va.), the prosecutor who single-handedly secured the indictment, wasn’t validly appointed.

Last Tuesday, the Trump administration landed a new indictment against Comey, this time charging him with making a threat against the president and transmitting a threat across state lines. Comey allegedly did so by “publicly post[ing] a photograph [on Instagram] which depicted seashells arranged in a pattern making out ‘86 47,’ which a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President.” As explained by The New York Times (gift link), “86” is a slang term “often used to mean dismiss or remove.”

As eight experts told The Washington Post (gift link), the new Comey indictment appears to be on shaky legal ground—especially in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Elonis v. United States (2015), which held, per The Post, “that prosecutors seeking to convict someone of sending a dangerous message must prove the person intended to make a violent threat—or at least knew there was a substantial chance it would be viewed as threatening.” Here, according to The Times, "[a]fter an uproar ensued over the post, Mr. Comey deleted it, saying that he did not know that it could be seen as having a violent connotation and that he opposed violence of any kind.”

Elonis isn’t the only precedent that’s problematic for this prosecution. As David French pointed out on Advisory Opinions, there’s also Watts v. United States (1969), in which the Court ordered the acquittal of a defendant who said this about then-president Lyndon B. Johnson: “I have already received my draft classification as 1-A, and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.”

Trump supporters might dismiss The Post and David French as less than objective, given their past criticisms of the president. But even Professor Jonathan Turley, who frequently defends Trump, wrote a piece for Fox News arguing that “this indictment is facially unconstitutional, absent some unknown new facts.”

Raising that possibility, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told NBC News that the case rests not just on the Instagram post, but on “a body of evidence that [prosecutors] collected over the series of about 11 months.” And the indictment does indicate that “the unredacted version of this document has been filed under seal.” [UPDATE (8:13 p.m.): Actually, it appears that the redaction pertains only to the signature of the jury foreperson being deleted—just as it was with last year’s Comey indictment.]

So it’s theoretically possible that there’s more here. But based on the cases brought so far against Comey and other Trump foes, there’s reason to be skeptical. Indeed, there’s reason to think that Trump DOJ officials—including Blanche, who’d like to go from acting AG to presidentially nominated, Senate-confirmed AG—feel a certain amount of pressure “to execute [Trump’s] increasingly extreme demands without much pushback,” in the words of The Times (gift link).

If the seashells indictment ends up getting dismissed—or 86’ed, if you prefer—that doesn’t spell clear sailing for Jim Comey. The DOJ is also investigating Comey for possibly leaking classified information, according to Bloomberg Law. When it comes to going after Trump enemies, the motto of the administration seems to be, “If at first you don’t succeed, try—and try, and try, and try—again.”

Other lawyers in the news:

• The seashells indictment was signed by W. Ellis Boyle, currently serving as Interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina—and nominated to serve as the permanent U.S. Attorney. Although he’s a Trump loyalist, Boyle at least has some relevant experience, having previously served as an assistant U.S. attorney (on the civil side). Other Trump U.S. attorney picks have been more problematic, as discussed by Jeffrey Toobin in The Times (gift link).

• Is William “Bill” Burck, the global co-managing partner of Quinn Emanuel, back in the good graces of the Trump family? As reported by Bloomberg Law, Burck—who was fired last year by the Trump Organization as an outside ethics counsel, after he started defending Harvard in litigation against the administration—is now representing World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture co-founded and co-owned by Trump family members (among other investors).

• As I mentioned last week, trial in Musk v. Altman—Elon Musk’s lawsuit against fellow billionaire Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Microsoft, challenging OpenAI’s conversion to a for-profit company—is now underway, before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers (N.D. Cal.). I expect to have more to say about this trial, which should go on for a few weeks; for now, I’ll just highlight the breakout star of the proceedings so far: William Savitt, co-chair of the executive committee and co-chair of litigation at Wachtell Lipton. For more on Bill Savitt and his contentious cross-examination of Musk—with whom Savitt has a history, having successfully sued the gazillionaire to follow through on his purchase of Twitter (now X)—see this Business Insider profile by Jacob Shamsian.

Judge of the Week: Justice Elena Kagan.

One of the biggest legal news stories of last week was the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a major ruling concerning the interaction between Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fifteenth Amendment. It’s an incredibly controversial and consequential case—and I discuss it in more detail below, as Litigation of the Week. [UPDATE (5/4/2026, 9:31 p.m.): For a clear and concise explanation of what the Court held in Callais, see the first seven or so paragraphs of this analysis by Henry Wray.]

For now, I’d like to highlight Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote the liberals’ dissent in this 6-3 case, taking on the majority opinion of Justice Samuel Alito (who was Judge of the Week quite recently, so I’m not featuring him again today). Because Justice Kagan is the most moderate and least confrontational of the liberal justices, she sometimes takes flak from the left. But her Callais dissent got her major props, in progressive circles and beyond—as did her reading it from the bench (for 14 minutes), the her first oral dissent of the Term (as noted by Mark Walsh of SCOTUSblog). [UPDATE (8:08 p.m.): As pointed out by Nikki in the comments, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson read from her dissent from the bench in Chiles v. Salazar, the conversion therapy case out of Colorado.]

As Elie Mystal wrote in The Nation, “Justice Elena Kagan brings clarity to what Alito tries to hide.” Professor Richard Hasen, at Election Law Blog, commended her “strenuous” dissent for getting the analysis “exactly right.” At The Bulwark, Professor Kim Wehle praised the justice’s “fierce, eloquent 48-page dissent” (which was, as noted by Adam Feldman over at Legalytics, “52% longer than the majority”).

Here’s the dissent’s eminently quotable conclusion (and yes, many commentators noted the absence of the traditional “respectfully”):

[T]he Court’s gutting of Section 2 puts [the] achievement [of the Voting Rights Act] in peril. I dissent because Congress elected otherwise. I dissent because the Court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote. I dissent because the Court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity. I dissent.

Whether you agree or disagree with Justice Kagan on the merits, you can’t deny her writing chops. There’s a reason legal writing guru Ross Guberman once told me—half-jokingly, but only half—that BriefCatch, his powerful legal writing and editing tool, was “sort of normed” on Justice Kagan (who “consistently earns the highest BriefCatch writing-quality scores of any living Justice,” per Guberman).

In other news about judges and the judiciary:

• Justice Kagan and her two fellow liberal justices didn’t attend last Tuesday’s White House state dinner honoring King Charles. It’s not clear whether they were invited—but their six conservative colleagues were, since they all showed up.

• Last week’s featured jurist, Judge Alan Albright (W.D. Tex.), recently announced his plan to retire this coming August. He said he wanted to return to litigating—but one can’t help wondering whether he also wanted to escape his massive backlog of cases. As reported by Ryan Autullo of Bloomberg Law, Judge Albright had 446 undecided motions on his latest “six-month list,” the list of civil motions ripe for a decision for six months or longer but not yet resolved. Many district judges I know aim for a six-month list of zero, or maybe a number in the low single digits—so 446 is staggering. (For perspective, Judge George Daniels (S.D.N.Y) wound up on the front page of The Times (gift link) back in 2004 because he had, as reported by Ben Weiser, 289 motions on his six-month list.)

In memoriam: Judge James Lawrence King—who served on the federal bench for some 55 years, including a stint as chief judge for the Southern District of Florida—passed away at 98. May he rest in peace.

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When I recently mentioned the compensation paid to the most coveted lateral partners, some readers—especially the older ones, who recall when $6 million was at or near the top of the market, circa 20 years ago—were incredulous.

Is it really true that Jeff Wall, SCOTUS advocate extraordinaire, is getting $15 million a year from Gibson Dunn, as reported by The Wall Street Journal (gift link)? Or that some Biglaw partners earn as much as $40 million a year, according to Law360 and Law.com?

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. And he comes down the chimneys of partners with giant bags full of cash.

And Santa Claus, whom I’m playfully invoking because of the famous quotation, isn’t the right comparison. Santa brings gifts; partner compensation is earned.

As David Boies once told me—speaking about associate bonuses, but the same point applies to partner pay—“law firms are not eleemosynary institutions.” They pay high compensation, to associates and partners alike, because it’s in their self-interest.

Some senior readers who were skeptical of huge pay packages invoked Dewey & LeBoeuf—which doled out crazy compensation, to both lateral and homegrown partners, before collapsing and filing for bankruptcy in 2012. They asked: Dewey now have a bubble in partner pay on our hands?

There’s no doubt that some individual partners are overpaid. If an expensive lateral hire leaves a firm after only two or three years, sometimes it’s because they had guaranteed comp for a certain period, the guarantee ran out, and their pay was set to drop (because they’re not generating enough revenue at their new firm to justify their desired pay under the firm’s standard comp system).

But I wouldn’t say there’s a partner-pay bubble overall. Unlike Dewey, many if not most high-paying firms have the financial wherewithal to be offering what they’re offering. And, in fact, these firms need to compensate partners at these levels, to secure the talent they need to stay competitive.

And what’s my basis for saying this? The 2026 Am Law 100 rankings, published earlier this month by The American Lawyer.

The rankings and their supporting data show that elite firms are doing quite well for themselves, thank you very much. So these firms are investing in their futures by onboarding more and more superstars, which creates a virtuous cycle: great lateral hires increase firm profitability, enabling the firms that excel at it to use their higher profitability and growing war chests to attract even more top talent.

Let’s start with the big picture for Biglaw, reflected in certain key metrics (based on firms’ financial performances in calendar year 2025):

• Total gross revenue: $178.95 billion, up 13.0%

• Revenue per lawyer (RPL): $1.39 million, up 8.7%

• Profits per equity partner (PEP): $3.59 million, up 14.0%

No, these numbers aren’t adjusted for inflation. But with inflation at around 2.7% in 2025, Biglaw beat it by a multiple of three to five.

And how did 2025 stack up compared to recent years? Here’s some data:

In his analysis of the latest rankings, Patrick Smith of The American Lawyer accurately observed that “Am Law 100 firms, for the most part, reproduced their stellar year from 2024.” And that’s nothing to complain about, since 2024 was the best year for Biglaw since the banner year of 2021 (when the industry was bouncing back from the short, but deep, pandemic-induced recession).

One metric where 2024 outpaced 2025 was headcount. In 2024, the attorney population of the Am Law 100 grew by 7.7%; in 2025, headcount grew at around half that pace, by 4%. (In case you’re curious, it’s now at 128,868 attorneys—a reminder that even if Biglaw dominates the pages of Original Jurisdiction, its lawyers account for a small share of America’s 1.4 million lawyers.)

Not all Biglaw attorney populations grew at the same rate—and the differing rates help explain the growth in profits per equity partner. The ranks of nonequity partners increased by almost 7%, while the number of equity partners grew by only 2%. The overall headcount growth of 4% is a blend of the growth rates of equity partners, nonequity partners, and associates.

Because overall headcount grew by 4% but the number of equity partners grew by only 2%, leverage—defined as the ratio of (1) lawyers who aren’t equity partners to (2) equity partners—increased as well. And increased leverage generally means increased profits per equity partner, because the profit generated by each lawyer who’s not an equity partner winds up in the pockets of the equity partners.

Up until now, we’ve been discussing the collective performance of Biglaw, which conceals a fair amount of variation. Now let’s look at how individual firms fared, in terms of gross revenue, revenue per lawyer, and profits per equity partner—and maybe gossip a bit about what some of the numbers say about different firms.

And yes, I will explain how firms get to $30 million and $40 million partner paydays….

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Sabastian Niles, the president and chief legal officer of Salesforce, tackled these topics in an open letter he published last month, “How Law Firms Can Lead the Agentic AI Era—And What Clients Now Expect.” After reading his letter, I thought he’d be the perfect guest to help me explore these critical subjects.

We began our conversation by covering Sabastian’s path from mock trial champion to Wachtell Lipton M&A partner to CLO of one of the world’s leading technology companies. We then turned to AI in legal—discussing what “agentic AI” actually means, how Salesforce evaluates outside counsel on AI adoption, and why Sabastian believes that trust and innovation, far from being in tension, go hand in hand.

Thanks to Sabastian for speaking with me—and thanks to him for his invaluable insights into the future of law and the legal profession in the age of agentic AI.

Show Notes:

• Sabastian Niles bio, Salesforce

• How Law Firms Can Lead the Agentic AI Era—And What Clients Now Expect, by Sabastian Niles for Salesforce

Sponsored by:

NexFirm helps Biglaw attorneys become founding partners. To learn more about how NexFirm can help you launch your firm, call 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment@nexfirm.com.

Three quick notes about this transcript. First, it has been cleaned up from the audio in ways that don’t alter substance—e.g., by deleting verbal filler or adding a word here or there to clarify meaning. Second, my interviewee has not reviewed this transcript, and any errors are mine. Third, because of length constraints, this newsletter may be truncated in email; to view the entire post, simply click on “view entire message” in your email app.

David Lat: Welcome to the Original Jurisdiction podcast. I’m your host, David Lat, author of a Substack newsletter about law and the legal profession also named Original Jurisdiction, which you can read and subscribe to at davidlat.substack.com. You’re listening to the ninety-sixth episode of this podcast, recorded on Tuesday, April 14.

Thanks to this podcast’s sponsor, NexFirm. NexFirm helps Biglaw attorneys become founding partners. To learn more about how NexFirm can help you launch your firm, call 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment@nexfirm.com. Want to know who the guest will be for the next Original Jurisdiction podcast? Follow NexFirm on LinkedIn for a preview.

As loyal listeners of the OJ podcast are well aware, I’m very interested in how artificial intelligence will transform both the practice of law and the legal profession. Thus far, I’ve discussed AI primarily from the lawyer’s perspective, focusing on subjects such as how attorneys are integrating AI into their practice or how it might affect employment opportunities for lawyers.

But what about AI from the perspective of the client? To tackle that topic, I was delighted to interview Sabastian Niles, president and chief legal officer of Salesforce. As the top lawyer at Salesforce, a Fortune 500 and S&P 500 company, he’s a sophisticated consumer of legal services. And he has definite views on how lawyers and law firms should be using AI—which he outlined in a recent open letter to Biglaw, “How Law Firms Can Lead the Agentic AI Era — And What Clients Now Expect.” After reading his open letter, I knew that I wanted to have Sabastian—who graduated from Harvard Law School and was a partner at Wachtell Lipton, before joining Salesforce—on the show. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Sabastian Niles.

Sabastian, thank you so much for joining me.

Sabastian Niles: Delighted to be here, David.

DL: And I should thank you for your great work at Salesforce. Disclosure to my listeners: I’ve been a shareholder since 2009, so I appreciate your efforts.

Turning to you, let’s start with your background and upbringing. Where did you grow up?

SN: I was actually born up in Portland, Maine. When my father got stationed at Walter Reed, I grew up in the Maryland, D.C., Virginia area—mostly in Maryland. And then, as you know, we worked together in spirit at Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz.

DL: Yes, and we will get to that. But let me ask: did you have any lawyers in the family? It sounds like your father was perhaps in the armed services.

SN: No. We had educators, people in healthcare, folks doing different things across various fields. It’s a strange thing—I hadn’t really thought about it before, but I may be the first lawyer in our family or extended family. Certainly, at the moment, I am the only lawyer.

DL: So why did you go to law school, then?

SN: I had been very involved with our mock trial team back at the University of Maryland, and it was very intense—very much built on pillars of discipline, dedication, and seriousness of purpose. We had a wonderful mentor and coach, Dr. Noel Myricks, and we won a number of national championships. I was really into the Federal Rules of Evidence and the like, and I thought I’d go down that litigation path.

It’s funny—my mother found something recently. I’m sure you did this in high school: those superlatives where it’s “most likely to do this,” “most likely do that.” But also, at the end, the school newspaper would do little write-ups of a whole bunch of seniors. There was this one question: what do you want to be when you grow up? And I was actually stunned, because what I had written was, “I want to be a high-tech corporate lawyer.”

DL: Huh, okay!

SN: It really says that. Now I’d probably say life is not linear, but it’s interesting how things can play out.

DL: You mentioned that you were active in mock trial and were looking at litigation. How did you end up doing corporate or transactional work when you went to Wachtell Lipton after HLS?

SN: There were a couple of different influences. I remember in my second or third year of law school, I had this terrific M&A course from Chancellor Leo Strine, who became a very good friend and mentor. I loved getting deep into the cases and the case law. Even at Wachtell, when I ultimately transitioned from being a litigator, I was one of the corporate lawyers who had really read all the cases, because I found very useful principles in them. I also had a terrific mentor and professor, Guhan Subramanian—I think you know Guhan as well—who’s a professor at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. And I remember Lucian Bebchuk—he and I, even after I was at Wachtell, we’d get into our fights on empiricism, and Marty Lipton did all this work too.

But it was really working at Wachtell as a summer associate where I had the opportunity to work across practice groups. I remember it was a July 4th weekend—you may recall that Wachtell wasn’t really a place where you do those three- or four-hour lunches, in fact, my whole summer I think I may have gone out to lunch once—when I had the opportunity to work on this fascinating case—I think it was the NeighborCare/Omnicare, a healthcare hostile, contested takeover situation. That weekend, the hostile turned into an aligned, friendly, agreed-upon deal, and I was very engaged with it.

I was reading the merger agreement, MAE clauses, thinking about how you’d negotiate this, bringing to bear so many different sets of functions: the legal questions, fiduciary duties, but also thinking through this in the context of the business strategy of the investors, employees, PR, and the relationship between the board and the management team, the diligence—and I’m like, “This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done.” Maybe as life unfolds, you can say, “Okay, this is where you get your dopamine hits.”

To be honest, I also found litigation tremendously stressful, and corporate was much calming. In law school, I had done a lot of work with the Program on Negotiation, Getting to Yes, and so on. And so these pieces ended up coming together a little bit by happenstance, but maybe there’s also a trajectory there.

DL: So by the time you returned to Wachtell full-time, had you already decided to focus on corporate work after that summer?

SN: Yes, I started full-time in corporate. As you know, the corporate department at Wachtell is generalist in the sense that it covers all the different elements of corporate work in a highly cross-functional place. You’re bringing in litigation teams, finance and restructuring teams, exec-comp and employee-benefit teams—all to advance whatever particular corporate objective the client is seeking to achieve.

DL: I feel that Wachtell is one of the few places where lawyers have the luxury of being a little more generalist; there’s been this hyper-specialization at a lot of other law firms. But as you mentioned, the Wachtell corporate department covers a lot of things—you might handle the financing for a deal and the underlying M&A deal, the SEC stuff, or be involved with handling litigation. So when you were there—you started there after HLS, and then you made partner—did you have a practice focus or an industry focus?

SN: In terms of industries, I was always industry-agnostic, but I did end up working a lot in technology and REITs—I love my REITs and real estate. But I’d also work in a lot of the regulated industries—healthcare, life science, financial services—and really the full swath, including industrials and retail. The areas I’d be particularly lead in were basically things clients were either really excited about or really stressed about. That’s why it became very stimulating and interesting.

You also have people you’re mentoring and developing at the firm, and practice groups and teams that you’re leading. The areas were: contested situation, whether driven by some stakeholder pressure—shareholders, employees, others—certainly takeover preparedness or M&A transactions, but also broader corporate governance. It could be enterprise risk. It could be, obviously, sustainability-related areas. Those always spanned industries—working on the spinoffs and different areas. In the corporate life cycle, one of those key moments is also board refreshment or succession. So really across industries, and also across the various corporate moments: the IPO, the merger or combination, operating in the capital markets, being a public company and trying to balance long-termism and short-termism.

A good friend of mine actually said, “Oh wait, is Sabastian the partner of special projects?” Well, we all were at Wachtell, in some sense. Because to your point, Marty Lipton and I were just having lunch the other day—he’s such a good friend and mentor, 94 now and still coming into the office, which I thought, health-permitting, I would still do—and at the end of it, I said, “Marty, you’re not 80 years old anymore.”

DL: To finish up on your career: you were at Wachtell Lipton, a great firm. I know it well having been there also, although not as long as you. And it is, in many ways, arguably the top M&A corporate firm in America. You were a partner there, and we all know Wachtell Lipton partners make a very good living. But you’re coming up now on your third anniversary at Salesforce, having left Wachtell in 2023.

Why would you leave such a storied firm, even if for an admittedly great opportunity? Tell me your thought process there.

SN: It’s been an exhilarating three years, and I’m very excited to see all the things we will continue to do in the years to come here at Salesforce. It relates to what I was saying: yes, Wachtell is quite an institution. But Salesforce offered a unique opportunity to come in as president and chief legal officer of a company whose number-one value is trust. We’ve got five core values here: trust, customer success, innovation, equality, and sustainability. Salesforce has led so many companies in the industry through technology-related transformations. I’d been leading various AI items for a while, and then came GenAI, and then now the agentic-AI phase. The opportunity to continue to have impact, to lead and grow—and I got these incredible global teams at a time of such transformation—it just really continues to be just an incredible and humbling time. It scratches that whole itch I had around AI and technology. And then, again, how do you navigate that from a trusted-advisor lens?

DL: So it sounds like perhaps you were drawn to the breadth of the role compared to your work as a law firm partner. What specifically drew you to Salesforce to pursue that opportunity? Had you worked with Salesforce as a client?

SN: I had the privilege of working with Salesforce as a client on a number of different transactions and governance items—certainly during the period where Salesforce demonstrated it was possible not just to come out on top, but to really control our destiny when we had, I think, about seven activist investors, all with really important points of view. It was a real opportunity for the Salesforce leadership team to define and chart a path forward, taking into account inputs and perspectives from the full set of shareholders and stakeholders, and to drive forward a terrific path ahead.

To your point, this is going to sound kind of crazy, but both Wachtell Lipton and Salesforce have very strong cultures, a very strong set of values, and a very strong commitment to excellence and high performance. So in that sense, there were similarities, but in obviously different contexts—navigating, guiding, and driving forward with my C-suite colleagues, and through all of our 85,000 people here. I’ve also had the opportunity to work with a lot of companies and to spend time with, learn from, and work with tremendous executives across all the clients that I’d worked with—certainly GCs and CLOs, but also CFOs, CEOs, and members of boards of directors.

So what attracted me was this continued growth, curiosity, challenge, and the leadership and development opportunity for talent. How do you really align and develop and make sure we have great managers and great leaders? And so it was a little bit all the above, but definitely being at the center of AI technology and bringing an advisory approach at scale and to our customers has all just been very exciting. And we’re at this moment where you have to ask: how do you architect and deliver AI technology and data in ways that are secure?

DL: So let’s turn to AI and technology. You wrote a great article, which I will put in the show notes, “How Law Firms Can Lead the Agentic AI Era—And What Clients Now Expect.” So before we dive into the substance of the article, because my listeners have varying degrees of proficiency and knowledge of tech, I should ask: what is meant by agentic AI, as opposed to generative AI, as opposed to just pre-gen AI? What is meant by the word agentic? (Am I pronouncing that right?)

SN: You’re doing great, David. Agentic AI grapples with how we take these tools and technologies and evolve from rules to reasoning—navigating standards, planning actions, reasoning around what’s the best path forward, and then actually executing on tasks to drive whatever the enterprise mission is or whatever the humans have directed. And as you can imagine, as you move to more varying levels of autonomy—always with human oversight, strong guardrails, strong explainability, and we can talk more about what that means—you have to ask: what’s the governance observability around these areas?

You can have multiple-agent systems. For us, we run the whole company right on Slack. We have our own agents and other people’s agents, all operating with us on this global platform. And with agents, the question becomes: how do you, in the flow of work, have human teams working with and managing these agents? In companies, it’s the concepts of individual contributors versus people leaders—individual contributors are the people who don’t directly manage other people. I’ve said that in the future—and actually, right now—every individual contributor, David, will have an agentic span of control, because they will be managing AI agents to help augment them, amplify what they’re doing, and automate certain portions of their tasks to get the work done. Even when you think of agents, this is where the different subsets come in—how do you build that overall agentic stack across those systems.

DL: Are you the managing partner of a boutique or midsize firm? If so, you know that your most important job is attracting and retaining top talent. It’s not easy, especially if your benefits don’t match up well with those of Biglaw firms or if your HR process feels “small time.” NexFirm has created an onboarding and benefits experience that rivals an Am Law 100 firm, so you can compete for the best talent at a price your firm can afford. Want to learn more? Contact NexFirm at 212-292-1002 or email betterbenefits@nexfirm.com.

So you wrote in the open letter that I mentioned, “Firms that don’t integrate best-in-class commercial solutions and AI will find themselves outpaced by leaner, more agile competitors.” So from where you sit as somebody who retains outside counsel, do you have any criteria that relate to a law firm’s use of AI when you are thinking about whether to retain that firm?

SN: I love the question. Let’s just take a step back. This is what prompted me to write this open letter. It arose from a lot of conversations that I’d been having with a broader group of professional service and advisory firm leaders—lawyers sharing with me the challenges they face around technology, data, and certainly AI: uncertainty about how to use it, whether to use it, how to implement it. But also, for some of the people who are more on the cutting edge: how does an advisory firm, a law firm, or a legal professional work with and alongside AI, in ways that can build trust rather than burn client trust? How might you use it to grow the firm?

Of course, some partners are wondering how can they increase their margins. But also: what’s the new relationship that needs to manifest between law firms and advisory firms and their clients? Where and how are the tremendous gains—productivity and otherwise—that will arise from really embracing technology, data and AI? How are those gains going to be delivered and shared with clients and with colleagues within the firm? As I write in the letter, with expanded capacity, how might this also strengthen the profession’s standing with communities? With expanded capacity from AI and tooling, are you going to be able to expand your pro bono impact? On the colleague side—the people operating within these professions—how do these firms become the employer of choice, particularly for AI-native generations?

From the client side: what do clients expect? What are we looking for? Of course, when a firm is leveraging these tools—and we’ll talk about why I think it’s so important for them to do it—we want it all. We want superior service. We want deeper insights. We want faster outputs and better outcomes. And we also want the firms to share with us in the sense of savings, cost efficiencies, and improving business operating models. We want firms to demonstrate that they have the same level of digital maturity as we have at Salesforce.

DL: Just to make this a little more concrete, because a lot of this is very abstract: do you have a particular question that you ask during, say, a beauty contest? Do you have a provision or two in your engagement or retention letter for outside counsel about AI? How are you actually operationalizing seeing how your outside firms use AI and innovate with AI? Or is it just something in the ether? How do you follow up on that, very concretely?

SN: It’s the same as how we operate internally—being customer or client zero of all of our own internal solutions—and how we are embedding often our own AI agents in every single part of our workflows. We get hundreds of thousands of requests a year. And so how are we building? We run the whole company on Slack. We’re the number one user of Slackbot. In Slack, we’re triaging, we’re allocating work, we’re enabling—through our own AI systems that we’ve built—so many routine inquiries able to be addressed directly, while also advancing some of the key work, freeing up our teams and building capacity to focus more on the high-stakes, critical work of judgment and execution that requires a fuller set of approaches.

And look, when it comes to our law firms, we are expecting a couple things. We are entering into our panel selection process, thinking about how the firms go through different sets of areas. We have firms we’ve worked with, and we’re certainly expecting, this coming cycle, that firms will come forward and engage on each of the areas that identified in the open letter—and with some granular elements. There are questions around how are they using technology, data, and AI with respect to their practices. How are they using it to develop their internal teams? How is it informing the service delivery models that they are providing? But also, what are the guardrails that they have been putting in place around these issues?

Trust can be built through these things, but trust is fragile. And I’m sure you’ve probably written about it: there are almost daily reports of judicial sanctions related to misuse of AI. I call it the cardinal and avoidable sin of inventing citations and hallucinating precedent. Why does that occur? It’s because of a lack of rigor, lack of guardrails, lack of human oversight—and perhaps a lack of really understanding and grappling with the technology. So that also becomes part of the conversation.

Do these firms have an executive sponsor responsible for AI governance and agentic workflows? What are their internal guardrails for the trusted use around these items? What are the protocols that they have in place to protect attorney-client privilege and client confidentiality throughout the stack? Are they able to come forward to us and show, “Here’s our current use of these tools and how they’re going to work with us”? We have many law firms we’ve put on Slack; that’s our engagement model with them. But I really want to understand how they’re using this in terms of risk management. Where are they using AI agents and other of tools? Are they using it to automate tasks? Are they using it to scale human judgment? To reduce error, to increase speed, quality, trust?

When you think of litigation contexts, plaintiffs’ firms and potential disputants are using AI to build their cases. So if we’re on the defense side—or sometimes we do offensive litigation—how are firms ensuring that they are maintaining that competitive level, or even that competitive superiority? When AI technology or data reduces time and cost and expands the capacity of teams, is that going to be a growth lever for the firm to be able to provide expanded service offerings? And where and how are those savings going to be shared with clients?

We want to know how are they equipping their associates, counsel, and partners, not just with the legal acumen that the firm should be great at, but also with technical fluency and agentic-workflow competence. And are they transparent with us around where and how they’re using these tools? It’s a series of questions, but I’m looking forward and eager to have firms present a vision—their vision around these items, not just particular point solutions. We want them to co-architect with us what that future of the legal industry looks like, because that’s a broader piece here. There’s certainly us as clients—I talk to my peers and colleagues at other companies. But I think the biggest opportunity is for the legal industry as a whole to really tackle and grapple with the complexities around ethics, risk, and accountability—and really help the whole world tackle this era in a responsible but accelerated way.

I’ve talked about this before, and we discussed it earlier, David: the traditional, conventional wisdom is that you’ve got trust over here and innovation over here, as if they’re in tension with each other. I’ve never believed that. Trust is really a form of velocity. Trust can be propulsive; it is propulsion to innovation. Why? Because trust enables adoption, right?

DL: That’s a great note on which to end our substantive conversation. Our time is running a little short, so I want to move to the speed round. These are four standard questions. They’re the same for all my guests.

My first question is, what do you like the least about the law? And this can either be the practice of law or law as an abstract system.

SN: The practice of law is fulfilling. It’s intellectually demanding. It’s very high-stakes. But there are areas that can feel tedious, and areas where you’re required to bring extraordinary endurance and intensity, which can be incredibly fulfilling and exciting. But when you combine the areas of friction and tedium with remote work plus the level of intensity…. That’s why I’m really bullish about the potential for agentics and AI to tackle both of those areas. One, deal with all the administrative and routine work, to unlock more focus on that high-stakes, high-value, high-judgment work. Two, can you achieve really high performance in ways that prove more sustainable? That’s the thing I tell my whole global teams about AI transformation. What’s the ultimate goal? One ultimate goal: can we make your work more sustainable, more joyful, more productive, more pleasurable—where we’re using these tools to really help each other succeed?

DL: My second question is, what would you be if you were not a lawyer?

SN: There are all the areas that I could go into around AI—strategy, advising, building businesses and processes that are trustworthy and scalable. But you know what? If I weren’t a lawyer, I’d probably be a life coach. A lot of what I do and have done in my life, you can imagine, is navigate people through high-stakes decisions. People are excited about things; they’re stressed about things. So I’d try to be a life coach.

DL: My third question is—and I’ll be very curious because you have a legal hat, an executive hat, and you’re also a parent—how much sleep do you get each night?

SN: Three to 12 hours. For 18 years, my wife was saying, “I think you have sleep apnea.” I finally got it checked, and I have mild sleep apnea. I got this CPAP machine last week, and it has been incredible. She says, “You’re not snoring anymore,” and I sleep like a baby through the night. But definitely sometimes two to three hours. Or last Saturday, I said, “I’m taking a nap,” and I went to bed at around 6:15 p.m., and I woke up at 6:30 a.m. So that’s why I don’t know what the mean, median, or mode is of my sleep, because it definitely varies.

DL: Fair enough. And my last question is, any final words of wisdom, such as career advice or life advice, for my listeners?

SN: I try not to give advice.

DL: You’re a life coach!

SN: As a life coach, you help people reach their own conclusions, help companies and CEOs and directors reach their own views. The main thing is to really embrace that each and every one of us is a steward. We’re stewards of trust. We’re stewards of whatever it may be. We deeply care about capital, but when we think of being stewards of trust in this area of technology, we should all be working to use agentic AI so you can focus on what we value the most: high-impact, high-stakes, creative work that you feel brings out the best of humans and AI working together.

When we think of AI, you need to really grapple with the complexities—trust, risk, accountability—but embrace how it can extend your reach. It can let you focus on what your people and your teams can do. How do you lead with integrity around it, building that trust, solve high-stakes items? And also figure out how to get the best ideas, assessment, views around whatever technology or product you’re trying to deliver, for an enterprise or for yourself—that notion of humans and agents teaming together. In all these areas, we’re in such a novel moment, where you can blend that beginner’s mind with your expertise and just go: have impact, find your purpose, and hopefully lead an incredible, meaningful life.

DL: Well, I do think you’ve had a very meaningful life and career, and you’ve given a great amount of thought to some very complex questions. I appreciate your insight. Sabastian, thank you so much for joining me.

SN: Thank you, David. I was delighted to be here.

DL: Thanks so much to Sabastian for joining me, and thanks for his insights into such a timely topic.

Thanks to NexFirm for sponsoring the Original Jurisdiction podcast. NexFirm has helped many attorneys to leave Biglaw and launch firms of their own. To explore this opportunity, please contact NexFirm at 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment@nexfirm.com to learn more.

Thanks to Tommy Harron, my sound engineer here at Original Jurisdiction, and thanks to you, my listeners and readers. To connect with me, please email me at davidlat@substack.com, or find me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, at davidlat, and on Instagram and Threads at davidbenjaminlat.

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The next episode should appear on or about Wednesday, May 13. Until then, may your thinking be original and your jurisdiction free of defects.

This week’s Judicial Notice is sponsored by

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Last week was uneventful for me, mainly spent dealing with domestic matters. But I did work on a detailed outline for the panel I’ll be moderating in Manhattan on May 6, focused on Biglaw’s move into plaintiff-side litigation.

Why the need for a detailed outline? Attendees can now receive Continuing Legal Education (CLE) credit for New York or New Jersey. For details and to express interest in attending, please check out the event page. Free breakfast and CLE credit—what’s not to like? Thanks to my friends at Burford Capital, for hosting what should be a great event, and Lawline, for making the CLE possible. [UPDATE (4/27/2026, 2:49 p.m.): Apologies—an earlier version of this post erroneously mentioned Pennsylvania CLE—this has been corrected.]

Now let’s turn to the news—of which there was a ridiculous amount, making the threshold for getting mentioned higher than usual. If I fail to discuss something newsworthy in this edition of Judicial Notice—or if you find my treatment of any development to be lacking in any respect, because I had to go shorter than usual to cover everything I wanted to cover—please add your thoughts in the comments.

I wrote that last paragraph before the Saturday night exchange of gunfire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, attended by Donald Trump and several of his Cabinet members—who were rushed to safety and unharmed. A 31-year-old man from California, Cole Tomas Allen, was taken into custody. Cole will be charged with federal crimes, including using a firearm during a crime of violence and assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon. (A Secret Service agent was shot, but he was wearing a bulletproof vest and survived.) [UPDATE (4/27/2026, 11:30 p.m.): After obtaining additional information about Cole, including an anti-Trump manifesto that appears to describe his plans, federal authorities charged Cole with attempting to assassinate the president, transporting a firearm and ammunition with intent to commit a felony, and discharging a firearm during a crime of violence.]

Lawyer of the Week: Paul Clement.

In a little over two weeks, the D.C. Circuit will hear oral argument in the Trump administration’s appeal of its four losses in the Biglaw executive-order cases. Because the cases were consolidated for argument, only one lawyer can appear for the firms. Who would it be? The competition was stiff: the lead attorneys for the four firms consisted of three former U.S. solicitors general—Paul Clement of Clement & Murphy, Elizabeth Prelogar of Cooley, Donald Verrilli of Munger Tolles & Olson—and Dane Butswinkas, a leading litigator and former chair of Williams & Connolly.

Who did the law firms choose? I don’t know what process they employed—but as reported by Bloomberg Law and Reuters, they’ll be represented by Clement, one of the best appellate advocates in history. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice lawyer with the unenviable task of going up against Clement is Deputy Associate Attorney General Abhishek Kambli (profiled by Justin Henry of Bloomberg.)

Paul Clement is a busy man. Tomorrow, he’ll argue before the Supreme Court in Monsanto Company v. Durnell, a major case about federal preemption—with billions of dollars on the line. Lisa Blatt, another renowned SCOTUS litigator, pointed out the following fun fact to me: “Monsanto will be Paul’s ninth argument of the Term, which is surely a modern record for lawyers in private practice (plus he had ten, but the student loan case settled). Just a further reminder that he is the GOAT.” (And Blatt is in a good position to know; she has argued more times before the Court than any woman in history and is the FOAT of SCOTUS advocates, the Funniest Of All Time.)

For more about Clement, listen to our podcast conversation—he was my second guest, because I wanted to kick off my podcast with big names—or read my prior post, 3 Tips For Appellate Advocates—From Paul Clement.

Other lawyers in the news:

• Speaking of boutique founding partners and former podcast guests, Steve Molo of MoloLamken also has a lot on his plate. He represents Elon Musk in the gazillionaire’s lawsuit against Sam Altman over the origins of OpenAI, which is about to be tried before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers (N.D. Cal.). And lawyers in a major financial aid price-fixing case have asked for Molo and his firm to be brought into the case, to “ensure that the proposed class has excellent representation” (after another firm was removed for ethical issues).

• What’s the latest in the horse race to lead the DOJ as attorney general? Right now, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche appears to be the frontrunner, and the job is his “to win or lose,” according to The New York Times (gift link). One potential rival, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro (D.D.C.), apparently isn’t interested. Another possible contender, Civil Rights Division leader Harmeet Dhillon, has told Blanche she’s a “team player” who wants to help him succeed—and might be more interested in the #3 job at the DOJ, associate attorney general.

• James Percival, general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, spoke at UCLA Law School—where he was the subject of a rowdy protest by more than 150 demonstrators. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), an organization committed to defending free speech, explained that “[s]tudents have every right to object, question, and peacefully protest invited speakers. But sustained disruption preventing others from hearing a speaker has no place at a university committed to free inquiry.”

• In other news related to the top lawyer of a federal agency, Pierre Gentin is stepping down as general counsel of the Commerce Department. A former CLO of McKinsey and partner at Cahill Gordon, Gentin told me he hasn’t settled on what he plans to do next, other than travel and spend some time with his wife, lawyer turned novelist Reyna Gentin (whose latest novel, Jessica Harmon Has Stepped Away, was published a few months ago).

• In another speech-related controversy, Berkeley Law’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine received criticism for hosting an event featuring video remarks by Israa Jaabis, a Palestinian woman who was convicted of detonating a car bomb in Israel in 2015. Jaabis was released from prison in November 2023, in exchange for hostages kidnapped by Hamas on October 7 of that year.

• In other news from the Golden State, here’s an interesting profile of Bill Essayli—who’s currently leading the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles (C.D. Cal.), as First Assistant U.S. Attorney—by Matt Hamilton for L.A. Material.

• Yikes: Jeanne Christensen, a partner at Wigdor and prominent plaintiff-side employment litigator, was sanctioned by Judge Jessica Clarke (S.D.N.Y.). In her order, Judge Clarke wrote that Christensen “lied repeatedly to the Court and to opposing counsel in this litigation about what was happening in a related action.”

In memoriam:

• Sonia Pressmen Fuentes—an early women’s rights lawyer, and the first female attorney in the general counsel’s office at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—passed away at 97.

• George Ariyoshi—Hawaii’s (and America’s) first governor of Asian descent, who earned his law degree from the University of Michigan and worked in private practice before and after his political career—passed away at 100.

May they rest in peace.

Judge of the Week: Judge Alan Albright.

On Tuesday, Judge Alan Albright (W.D. Tex.), 67, announced that he’s stepping down at the end of August. The news was covered by outlets including Bloomberg Law (which broke the story), Law.com, Law360, and Reuters—a lot of media coverage, especially for a district judge. But Judge Albright is no ordinary district judge.

A former IP litigator, Albright was appointed to the bench in 2018 by Donald Trump. By 2021, Albright was handling around 25 percent of all federal patent cases, turning his Waco courthouse into a national hub for IP litigation. How did this happen? Judge shopping: Albright was the only district judge in the Waco Division of the Western District of Texas, so filing in Waco guaranteed your case went to him.

As a result, plaintiffs flocked to Waco—perhaps because of Albright’s expertise in patent law, perhaps because he was friendly to plaintiffs, or perhaps because he moved cases quickly (which tends to be good for plaintiffs), depending on whom you asked. After complaints about this arrangement, then-Chief Judge Orlando Garcia changed assignment procedures to require any new patent cases filed in Waco to be randomly assigned among the district’s dozen or so judges, which brought down Albright’s patent docket. (For pushback on claims that Albright was “plaintiff-friendly,” see this LinkedIn post by commercial and IP litigator Michael C. Smith.)

Where is Albright headed? He didn’t announce his destination, but news reports claim that he’s returning to private practice—which makes sense. He’s resigning rather than retiring—i.e., he’s not taking senior status, because he’s not eligible yet—so his new opportunity is presumably lucrative enough to make up for not getting his salary for life (a nice benefit of federal judicial service for judges who take senior status). Good luck to Judge Albright in his next endeavor. [UPDATE (4/27/2026, 11:30 p.m.): And good luck to Albright’s soon-to-be-former colleagues, who will have to deal with a massive backlog of cases that he probably won’t get through before he departs.]

In other news about judges and the judiciary:

• Last week, I mentioned leaked memos (gift link) relating to the Supreme Court’s emergency/shadow/interim docket, which were published by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak in The Times (gift link). The so-called “Shadow Papers” provoked the equivalent of a WWE “battle royale” among law professors and legal commentators—a fascinating debate, but way too meaty for me to delve into here. To read some of the takes, see footnote 4 of my recent post, When Justices Stop Being Polite—And Start Getting Real (updated to include additional commentary from Steve Vladeck, Chris Geidner, and Will Baude).

• In remarks on Tuesday at Harvard University, retired Justice Stephen Breyer weighed in on the emergency docket. He acknowledged the “danger” involved in the Court deciding too many issues with too little reasoning—but he also said, in defense of his former colleagues, “I do not believe that the members of the Supreme Court are there to carry out some political agenda.”

• Speaking of SCOTUS, former law clerks and retired judges submitted amicus briefs urging the high court to review Judge Pauline Newman’s (thus far unsuccessful) challenge to her suspension from the Federal Circuit.

• Human judges can be influenced by their political priors—as critics of the shadow docket allege. Human judges get old—like Judge Newman, who will turn 99 in June. Would we be better off with AI courts? Writing in The Nation, Elie Mystal makes the case against robot judges.

In nominations news, the Senate confirmed Andrew Davis, a partner at Lehotsky Keller Cohn, to a district-court seat (W.D. Tex.).

Job of the Week: an opportunity for a real estate associate in Dallas.

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Read more

A shorter version of this article, which did not include the footnotes, originally appeared on Bloomberg Law, part of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc. (800-372-1033). Portions of that column are reproduced here with permission.

Readers of a certain age might recall MTV’s The Real World, one of the first reality television shows, and its iconic introductory voiceover. In light of recent events, I came up with my own version of it for the U.S. Supreme Court: “This is the true story of nine strangers, picked to live in a marble palace, work together, and have their public appearances taped. Find out what happens when justices stop being polite—and start getting real.”

Over the past decade—with a former reality TV star in the White House, and Congress sometimes feeling like an episode of The Real Housewives of D.C.—the Supreme Court has been a redoubt of relative sanity in Washington. But if SCOTUS is the “last branch standing,” to borrow the title of legal commentator Sarah Isgur’s great new book about the Court, are its legs getting wobbly? Is it becoming more like the other branches of government—and not in a good way?

Justice Sonia Sotomayor leveled a somewhat personal criticism at a colleague while speaking at the University of Kansas School of Law earlier this month. In discussing Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, an emergency-docket case where conservative justices gave the green light to certain immigration stops in Los Angeles, she referred to an unnamed colleague who wrote that “these are only temporary stops.” She continued, “This is from a man whose parents were professionals and probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour or the piece like I do.”

Justice Sotomayor was clearly referring to Justice Kavanaugh, the only member of the Vasquez Perdomo majority who wrote an opinion explaining his vote—and who happens to be the son of two lawyers. To her credit, Justice Sotomayor later apologized for what she called her “inappropriate” and “hurtful” remarks.1 But the fact that she made these comments in the first place is arguably revealing.2

Two days after the talk at Kansas Law, at an event at the University of Alabama Law School, Justice Sotomayor said she has “a civil relationship” with “virtually all”—but not all—of her colleagues. She added that “with many of them”—but again, not all of them—she has “a friendship.” This language struck me as materially different from what she said to CNN in 2018, shortly after Justice Kavanaugh was confirmed, when she declared that the justices are “a family…. this is our work family, and it’s just as important as our personal family.”

The following week, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson offered a less personal, but still pointed, critique of her colleagues. In a lecture at Yale Law School, she castigated the conservative majority’s rulings on the emergency docket as “scratch-paper musings” that don’t acknowledge the real-world stakes of cases, making the decisions “seem oblivious and thus ring hollow.”

But it’s not only the liberal justices who have concerns about the current state of the Court. In an appearance this month at the University of Texas at Austin, Justice Clarence Thomas made a remark implying that relations between the justices used to be better: “I joined a Court that dealt with differences as friends. We respected each other”—past tense—and acted with “civility.”3

Then last weekend, The New York Times published an article about what reporters Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak described as “the birth of the Supreme Court’s shadow docket,” based on leaked memos from 2016.4 We don’t know who leaked the memos—just as we don’t know who was behind the May 2022 leak of the draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

I strongly doubt that any justice was involved in the leaking. But regardless of who’s responsible, the leaks, combined with the justices’ latest comments, paint a somewhat unflattering picture of the Court. In the words of Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School, the Court, historically “an island of integrity and civility” in D.C., is starting to appear “increasingly porous and partisan.”

What’s causing this possible erosion in the Court’s collegiality and culture? Some blame probably belongs to the subject of Justice Sotomayor’s and Justice Jackson’s recent remarks: the emergency docket, also called the “shadow docket” (usually by critics) or the “interim docket” (usually by defenders).

“The interim docket may be more prone to creating tensions between the justices because they have to make decisions very quickly,” explained Professor Brian Fitzpatrick of Vanderbilt Law School, a former clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, in an interview. “This sometimes causes them to do things that might look ill-considered in hindsight.”

“I do think the shadow docket likely plays a role,” Professor Carolyn Shapiro of the Chicago-Kent College of Law, a former clerk to Justice Stephen Breyer, told me. “The liberal justices are clearly unhappy with the way the Court is deciding very consequential things, sometimes with no explanation whatsoever, in very rushed ways—and their dissents have indicated as much.”

Another way the emergency docket could be causing relationships between the justices to fray is by forcing them to work on highly controversial cases year-round, without the cooling-off period or reset of their traditional summer recess.

“I really do have deep fears that the incredible rate of decision making over [last] summer is going to have long-term negative consequences for dynamics within the Supreme Court itself,” said Professor Justin Driver of Yale Law School, another former Breyer clerk, at the SCOTUSblog Summit in September 2025. In his view, denying the justices a much-needed “break from each other” could be causing “sharp elbows in opinions—not just in June, but in January.”

Alas, even if it goes through busier periods and calmer periods, the modern emergency docket isn’t going away.5 As chronicled in The Times, it has been around for a decade, enduring across multiple presidential administrations.

So what can the justices do on their own to repair their relationships?

“They need to spend some quality time together,” suggested Fitzpatrick of Vanderbilt Law. “The more people hang out with each other, the less inclined they’ll be to undermine each other publicly. They need to have some beers or go skeet shooting or kayaking together.”

The idea of the justices going on a retreat and doing trust falls—sans robes, which could complicate the exercise—might seem silly. But as Isgur reminded me in our recent podcast conversation, even if their black robes are intended to convey a certain impersonality and objectivity, “the justices are human.”

So it might be a good idea, after what will surely be a contentious end to the Court’s current term, for these nine humans and their spouses to take a quick bonding trip together. They could trek up to the Chief’s island retreat in Maine, or pop by the Jersey Shore beach house owned by Justice Samuel Alito’s wife. The justices do own swimwear, right?6

They could do some grilling—of burgers, not advocates—supplemented by dishes from Chef Supreme, a cookbook of recipes contributed by Supreme spouses. The red pepper boats with tapenade—praised by one Amazon reviewer as “tasty” (pro tip: omit the added anchovies)—would go very well with barbecue. And who wouldn’t want to end a meal with the chocolate mousse of Martin Ginsburg—not only the husband of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and one of the nation’s top tax lawyers, but also a talented amateur chef?

I’d also recommend group therapy for the nine justices. And even though she has no professional license or other credentials in therapy (other than having been in it herself for decades), Article III Groupie would be happy to come out of retirement to lead the sessions. Why does she think she’d be a good therapist to the Court? She’s addressed issues in therapy that certain justices might grapple with—including anger management, imposter syndrome, and being too much of a people pleaser.

If the justices start getting along better, and if the summer is relatively quiet for them, this could help with their optics problem. And my own view is that much of it is optics: at the end of the day, even taking into account the late unpleasantness, the Supreme Court remains the most civil, thoughtful, and well-functioning branch of government.

Or in the words of noted SCOTUS litigator Lisa Blatt—summarizing the argument of Sarah Isgur’s book, as of this week a bestseller—the Court “is not made up of heroes and villains, but real people who do their level best in service of us all.”

[UPDATE (5/8/2026, 11:09 a.m.): Things might get worse before they get better. A few weeks after the publication of this post, Justices Alito and Jackson traded barbs in Louisiana v. Callais, disagreeing vehemently over whether to “issue the judgment forthwith” (i.e., give immediate effect to the Court’s ruling in Callais, a major election-law decision). For more, check out this Wall Street Journal editorial (gift link) and Advisory Opinions.

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Welcome to Original Jurisdiction, the latest legal publication by me, David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction by reading its About page, and you can email me at davidlat@substack.com. This is a reader-supported publication; you can subscribe by clicking here.

Tonight brings huge news out of Sullivan & Cromwell.1 We can now add S&C, truly one of the world’s most prestigious and profitable firms, to the AI “Hall of Shame”: the list of law firms that have submitted court filings containing AI-generated “hallucinations.”2

On Saturday, April 18, Andrew Dietderich, founder and co-head of SullCrom’s global restructuring group, sent a letter to Chief Judge Martin Glenn of U.S. Bankruptcy Court (S.D.N.Y.). In his missive, Dietderich apologized profusely for a motion filed by S&C in a bankruptcy case that contained “inaccurate citations and other errors,” which he helpfully listed for Chief Judge Glenn in a three-page attachment (because there were that many—the three pages were single-spaced).

As you’d expect, this AI screw-up by S&C has been covered by, well, everyone—including Above the Law, Bloomberg Law, Business Insider, Law360, and Reuters. I don’t have much to add to the copious coverage; I’ll just point out two ironies.

First, as noted by Joe Patrice of Above the Law, Sullivan & Cromwell is the law firm that… advises OpenAI on the “safe and ethical deployment” of artificial intelligence (a representation S&C touts on its website). Physician, heal thyself?

Second, as Dietderich explained in his letter to Chief Judge Glenn, the AI errors were called to his attention by… Boies Schiller Flexner. Why is it ironic that BSF, one of the nation’s leading litigation firms, caught these mistakes? Because until now, Boies Schiller was the reigning champion of “Elite Law Firms Guilty of AI Fails.” (In addition to the AI snafu chronicled in that story, which took place last year, BSF subsequently failed to catch AI-generated errors in a filing by co-counsel in a different case.)

When I covered BSF’s AI error last year, I gave props to then-partner John Kucera: he “fully and freely admitted the errors, and he didn’t throw any colleagues under the bus.” I’ll say the same here about Andy Dietderich. He’s a senior partner at S&C, having joined the firm almost 30 years ago; he leads its restructuring practice, which he founded; and he’s a giant of the bankruptcy bar, Chambers Band 1. Nobody was paying him $2,500 an hour to do legal research; this screw-up was clearly the handiwork of an associate (or perhaps I should say former associate). But Dietderich signed the letter solo, and he didn’t point the finger at anyone else.

So that’s my compliment for S&C. Here’s my criticism: considering how much time has passed since the earliest AI errors—Avianca-gate took place three years ago next month—mistakes are less and less excusable (to the extent that they ever were). After all, as noted by Joe Patrice, there are tech tools out there—some of them powered by AI (a third irony?)—that are designed to catch AI hallucinations. Patrice gave a shoutout to RealityCheck by BriefCatch (and as a board member of BriefCatch, I feel it’s my fiduciary duty to include shameless plugs for the company whenever I can).

I’ll conclude my complaints about S&C here—because people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. As some of you might recall, earlier this year I had an AI oopsie of my own (see the update to my SCOTUS tariffs ruling write-up). I’ll simply repeat my two signature quips, urging you to extend grace when it comes to AI fails:

• “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes… for an AI screw-up.”

• “The next time you hear about an epic AI fail, instead of (or at least after) laughing your ass off, perhaps have the humility to say this to yourself: ‘There but for the grace of God go (A)I.’”

Or, if you prefer, here are some bon mots from Claude, which it generated after I fed it my two sayings and asked for more along the same lines:

• “An AI making things up with total confidence isn’t a bug. It’s a mirror.”

• “An AI confidently gives wrong answers. A human confidently gives wrong answers. One of them gets a performance review.” (And only one of them gets fired from a $225,000-a-year job.)

• “Garbage in, garbage out—but now the garbage speaks in complete sentences and cites its sources.”

Not bad, eh? As I keep telling my husband Zach, who views AI with deep skepticism, it’s actually great—as long as you use it responsibly.

This week’s Judicial Notice is sponsored by

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Last Wednesday, I flew up to Ithaca to speak about Trump v. Biglaw to the Cornell Federalist Society. I didn’t know they had invited the controversial conservative lawyer John Eastman to address them on Thursday—and on Wednesday night, just hours after his disbarment was upheld by the California Supreme Court, Eastman joined me and some of the FedSoc officers for dinner.

I was nervous about the prospect of dining with Dr. Eastman, since I have criticized him somewhat harshly in the past. But we wound up having a perfectly pleasant dinner, despite our differences on everything from January 6 to birthright citizenship.

While I understand that many Eastman critics would be unwilling to break bread with him, I believe it’s important to spend time with people we disagree with. I also used the occasion to do some reporting, asking him about his disbarment. He told me he plans to appeal—and he believes that the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Chiles v. Salazar, aka the conversion-therapy case, supports his claim that his election-related legal work for Donald Trump was a proper exercise of his free-speech rights as a lawyer. As Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in Chiles, “the First Amendment’s protections extend to licensed professionals much as they do to everyone else.”

A housekeeping note (based on reader correspondence I’ve recently received): if you need to update the email address where you receive OJ, simply follow these instructions (or email support@substack.com with the old and new addresses, and they’ll fix it). If you subscribe, I want to make sure you’re getting your full value.

Now, on to the news.

Lawyers of the Week: Jeffrey Kessler, Eva Cole, Jen Parsigian, Josh Hafenbrack, Johanna Hudgens, Jonathan Hatch, Adam Gitlin, and the entire trial team in United States v. Live Nation.

Not many Biglaw partners get profiled and interviewed by Rolling Stone. But not many partners qualify as legal “rock star[s],” to use the sobriquet that publication bestowed upon Jeffrey Kessler, co-executive chairman of Winston & Strawn, and—when he’s not busy running that 1,000-lawyer firm—a top trial lawyer, focusing on antitrust as a practice area and sports and entertainment as an industry.

Given his expertise in trying cases, antitrust, and sports and entertainment, Kessler was a perfect choice to pick up the plaintiffs’ case in United States v. Live Nation, the sprawling, complex, years-long antitrust case against the world’s largest live-entertainment company (and owner of Ticketmaster, the concert giant that merged with Live Nation in 2010). Why did Kessler and Winston need to step in? As I explained last month, the U.S. Department of Justice was leading the charge in this case—but after the Trump administration and six states reached a surprise settlement with Live Nation in early March, the 33 other states (and D.C.), which wanted to continue pursuing Live Nation, needed a new quarterback for the trial team.

Kessler had only eight days to get up to speed with the case, which was already being tried before a jury and Judge Arun Subramanian (S.D.N.Y.). Kessler and his colleagues pulled off that feat, then went on to score an across-the-board win for the plaintiffs in this landmark antitrust litigation. As you can see from the lengthy verdict form, the jury found liability on all claims—a combination of federal and state antitrust, unfair trade practices, and consumer protection laws. (In a statement, Live Nation emphasized that the jury’s verdict “is not the last word,” and the company will be disputing both liability and damages in post-trial motions and on appeal.)

In an interview with Ross Todd of Am Law Litigation Daily, which named him Litigator of the Week, Kessler shared the victory with the members of his “trial SWAT team.” That group included Eva Cole, Jen Parsigian, Josh Hafenbrack, and Johanna Hudgens, from Winston; Jonathan Hatch and Adam Gitlin, from the New York and D.C. AG’s offices, respectively; and, in Kessler’s words, “a group of hard-working lawyers from the 34 states that remained in the case.”

In light of her role in this epic, plaintiff-side win, I’m looking forward to speaking with Eva Cole on May 6. I’m moderating a panel about Biglaw’s move into plaintiff-side litigation, featuring Cole, Paul Hastings partner Ryan Phair, and Burford managing director Evan Meyerson. For details and to RSVP, head over to the event page.

Other lawyers in the news:

• Speaking of top trial lawyers, Hailey Fuchs penned a fun profile of David Oscar Markus for Politico. His highest-profile client right now isn’t as sympathetic as states going after Ticketmaster: Markus represents Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted sex offender and ex-paramour of Jeffrey Epstein. (If you enjoy Fuchs’s piece, give a listen to my podcast interview of Markus.)

• Speaking of lawyers who great results for clients, kudos to Roberta Kaplan and her team at Kaplan Martin—including Brandon Trice, Max Crema, Avita Anand, Thomas Lloyd, and Olivia Berci—for getting the Trump administration to release $60 million in withheld funding for Manhattan’s Second Avenue subway extension. (As a straphanger myself, I’m personally thankful for this win.)

• Maria Medetis Long (S.D. Fla.), an experienced career prosecutor, is no longer part of the investigation into former CIA director turned Trump critic John Brennan. According to CNN, which first reported on her departure, she was removed by the DOJ; according to The Times (gift link), she withdrew over concerns about the viability of the potential case against Brennan. The investigation into Brennan—which reportedly focuses on allegations that he made willfully false statements about the DOJ investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, during a 2023 congressional deposition—will now be led by former U.S. attorney Joseph diGenova, an outspoken critic of the Russia probe.

In memoriam:

• Ishmael Jaffree—the plaintiff in the famous school-prayer case of Wallace v. Jaffree, as well as a lawyer himself—passed away at 80. He actually died in 2024, but his passing didn’t become public until last week, when it was reported by The New York Times (gift link, via SCOTUStoday).

• Former Virginia lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax killed his wife, Cerina — and then himself—in their home on Thursday morning, as reported by The Washington Post (gift link). A graduate of Columbia Law, former federal law clerk and prosecutor (E.D. Va.), and Biglaw alum, Fairfax was a rising star of the Democratic Party, until his career was derailed by sexual-assault allegations. He and Cerina, a dentist who was devoted to her patients, were divorcing.

May they rest in peace.

Judge of the Week: Judge Richard Leon!

Last weekend, the D.C. Circuit remanded the legal challenge to Trump’s White House ballroom project to Judge Richard Leon (D.D.C.), who had ordered a halt to the controversial construction project. The panel majority, consisting of Judges Patricia Millett and Bradley Garcia, directed Judge Leon to take another look and clarify certain aspects of his ruling. Judge Neomi Rao dissented; she would have stayed the preliminary injunction entirely, allowing the construction to proceed.

On Thursday, Judge Leon issued a new ruling, which Reuters described as “peppered with his trademark exclamation marks and sarcasm.” He once again ordered a halt to construction, but stayed his order to allow time for appeal. Donald Trump, a fellow devotee of the exclamation point, promptly took to Truth Social to trash Judge Leon:

The White House doesn’t have a Ballroom (No Taxpayer Money!), which Presidents have desperately wanted and desired for over 150 years, but a Trump Hating, Washington, D.C. District Court Judge, a man who has gone out of his way to undermine National Security, and to make sure that this Great Gift to America gets delayed, or doesn’t get built, is attempting to prevent future Presidents and World Leaders from having a safe and secure large scale Meeting Place, or Ballroom….

This highly political Judge, and his illegal overreach, is out of control, and costing our Nation greatly. This is a mockery to our Court System! The Ballroom is deeply important to our National Security, and no Judge can be allowed to stop this Historic and Militarily Imperative Project. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

The D.C. Circuit gave its attention to this matter. In a two-page order, the panel expedited the appeal, with oral argument set for June 5, and administratively stayed Judge Leon’s preliminary injunction—i.e., construction can continue for now.

This isn’t Judge Leon’s first entanglement with the Trump administration. Last year, he ruled against the administration in WilmerHale’s challenge to the executive order against it, as well as the Pentagon’s attempt to reduce Senator Mark Kelly’s retired military rank and pension pay (after Kelly urged troops to reject unlawful orders).

As noted by Reuters, Judge Leon, 76, has “conservative bona fides.” Prior to his 2002 appointment by George W. Bush, he worked for Republicans on Capitol Hill and at the DOJ during the Reagan administration. He also counseled now-Justice Clarence Thomas, a college classmate, during his contentious confirmation—and I can’t help wondering what Judge Leon thinks of his old friend’s votes and opinions in Trump-related cases. (As for Judge Leon’s own writings, I’m with Advisory Opinions: “No more exclamation points in judicial opinions!!!”)

In other news about judges and the judiciary (with my usual thanks to Howard Bashman of How Appealing, who was quite busy this weekend):

• As reported by Fox News and confirmed by Jan Crawford of CBS News, Justice Samuel Alito is not retiring from the Supreme Court this year (nor is Justice Clarence Thomas, but we already knew that). I’m relieved by the reported correctness of my predictions—and by not having to cover a SCOTUS retirement and confirmation in this already exhausting year, barring something unforeseen. (But if we do have a surprise vacancy, Donald Trump said he’s ready, with a list of potential candidates already prepared.)

• Speaking of the Court, Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak published a fascinating article in The New York Times (gift link), based on leaked memos (gift link), about a 2016 case that they and some legal scholars view as “the birth of the modern shadow docket.” (But see, e.g., this thread by Sarah Isgur—author of Last Branch Standing, and my most recent podcast guest—noting pre-2016 examples of newsworthy rulings on the interim docket.) I’ll have more on this later; I agree with Ed Whelan that the significance of the memos’ substance is debatable, but “the fact that someone leaked them to NYT is very newsworthy.”

• To her credit, Justice Sonia Sotomayor apologized for what she described in a statement as “inappropriate” remarks about a colleague—unnamed in the statement, but known to be Justice Brett Kavanaugh. (I’ve updated my stories discussing her comments, last week’s Judicial Notice and my Isgur interview.)

• To his credit, Chief Justice John Roberts, while at the University of Virginia to receive an award, made surprise visits to two UVA Law classes—to the disbelief of students, one of whom “thought it was a prank at first.”

• Congratulations to Judges J. Paul Oetken (S.D.N.Y.) and Jesse Furman (S.D.N.Y.)—not on their track records as Supreme Court feeder judges (although they are), but on being named the #1 and #2 favorite federal judges of New York litigators. Kudos also to Chief Judge Laura Swain (S.D.N.Y.) and Judge Frederic Block (E.D.N.Y.), who took third and fourth place in the poll by Bloomberg Law.

In nominations news, the Senate confirmed two state-court judges to district-court seats, Judges John Shepherd (W.D. Ark.) and Chris Wolfe (W.D. Tex.). Fun fact: John Shepherd is the son of Eighth Circuit Judge Bobby Shepherd, one of around 18 Republican-appointed circuit judges who’s eligible to take senior status but hasn’t.

Job of the Week: an opportunity for a corporate M&A associate in Chicago.

Lateral Link is assisting a repeat client, a top-ranked Am Law 25 firm, in its search for a corporate M&A associate with 2–6 years of experience. The role involves advising public and private companies, as well as private equity sponsors and their portfolio companies, on a broad range of transactions—M&A, stock and asset purchases, LBOs, platform and add-on acquisitions, joint ventures, and growth equity investments. Associates receive hands-on deal experience, meaningful responsibility, and early client interaction, with strong long-term partnership and in-house opportunities. Interested and qualified candidates should submit their résumé here or email Jesse Hyde at jhyde@laterallink.com.

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