Joe Patrice is an Editor at Above the Law. For over a decade, he practiced as a...
Kathryn Rubino is a member of the editorial staff at Above the Law. She has a degree...
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021....
Published: | May 18, 2022 |
Podcast: | Above the Law - Thinking Like a Lawyer |
Category: | Legal Entertainment , News & Current Events |
Does the new Texas social media law banning platforms from moderating content really require you to listen to this episode? Well, it’s on Twitter so now you’re compelled! Frustratingly, this reasoning is just as stupid as the Fifth Circuit’s crayon-scratched opinion rubber stamping the statute. It’s an opinion so bad that Justice Alito immediately swooped in to get the appeal rolling. Meanwhile, we also talk about the changing nature of in-house counsel and the growth of “legal operations” as the chief operating officers of legal departments, a judge with a penchant for handcuffing lawyers, and the latest law school dean hypocrisy.
Special thanks to our sponsor, Posh Virtual Receptionists, LLC.
[Music]
Joe Patrice: Hello.
Kathryn Rubino: Hello. How are you?
Joe Patrice: Good. We’re back to that, the interrupting the introduction thing.
Kathryn Rubino: Well, cow, moo.
Joe Patrice: Yeah.
Kathryn Rubino: Sorry. That was a good joke. Do you remember that, when you were kid?
Joe Patrice: The punch line to what do they interact – what the cows say? Yeah.
Kathryn Rubino: Moo.
Joe Patrice: No, that’s good. That’s good. Yeah. This is Thinking Like a Lawyer, which you could totally tell from the seriousness with which it began. I’m Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I am joined by Kathryn Rubino. – Well, I was prematurely joined by Kathryn Rubino, I guess. Yeah.
Chris Williams: Always on time, always on time.
Joe Patrice: And now, on time, I’m joined by Chris Williams. We’re from Above the Law. We are going to give you a rundown of some of the week’s best stories in the legal world, the legal world of us.
Kathryn Rubino: Well, I think we’ll also be giving you kind of an update as to what the best stories of the week were, Joe, because you were not with us this Wednesday.
Joe Patrice: I was not here, which I guess that signals the beginning of small talk, which as we all know means I’m going to play a different sound effect here. – I’m going to go with the Chris sound effect. Yeah.
Kathryn Rubino: Amazing. That is a thing that happens.
Chris Williams: Speaking honestly, my voice is just so melodic. It’s so good.
Joe Patrice: I mean, that could have been on the new Kendrick album.
Chris Williams: No, because then it would have actually been a good album. Don’t get me started.
Kathryn Rubino: Wow, sounds fire.
Chris Williams: Don’t get me started.
Joe Patrice: I mean, the whole point was to get you started on that, I think.
Chris Williams: I’ve heard Spottie 21Rs that had more content than that album.
Kathryn Rubino: That is a debate (00:01:46) right there.
Chris Williams: I miss the double-clutching in comparison.
Joe Patrice: Fair enough. So, yeah, not a fan of that album apparently.
Kathryn Rubino: So, did you listen to some music this weekend, Chris? Is that what we’re hearing here?
Chris Williams: Yes. I did listen to something besides the Kendrick dissertation masquerading his music. Listened to some nice – a great artist, Future. I enjoyed the Future album dropped a while ago. Well, not even a while ago. It’s I guess like last month. Anyway.
Joe Patrice: Well, then it’s the past album.
Chris Williams: Boo.
Kathryn Rubino: Boo.
Chris Williams: Tomato this man. No, no.
Kathryn Rubino: Tomato, tomato.
Chris Williams: No. What is it?
Joe Patrice: Boo, you suck.
Kathryn Rubino: There you guy. That’s a sound I can get behind when it’s towards Joe Patrice.
Chris Williams: Shouts out to the firm that enjoys the sound effects, but yes. This weekend for the nerds and bastards that understand what level of hell I went through to do this, I’m playing the soul level run run-through of Elden Ring and I beat the fire giant, and I’m now in Crumbling Farum Azula and I’m about to fight the Godskin Duo, and for everybody else who has no idea what that means, you now know what it’s like when your non-lawyer friends hear you talk about work.
Joe Patrice: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been hearing from our old colleague and former co-host of this show, Elie Mystal, I’ve been hearing a lot about his Elden Ring adventures. So, yeah, I do not play it but I have heard how difficult that is.
Chris Williams: It’s like for people – for Catholic priests, who are like the old like, what is it, aesthetics who are like, “Oh, I’m tired of hitting my back with a whip,” just get Elden Ring. It’s just the same thing. Same thing, better graphics, but yes, it’s a very rewarding weekend. When I went up with my friends in New York, they got some tattoos and I got a cool sweatshirt, and it has like a cute bunny on it. It says, “Be fucking nice.” So, it’s nice to, you know, spread joy in my little idiosyncratic way, with threats, and so yeah, good weekend on this side.
Kathryn Rubino: Yeah. I personally enjoyed it was basically spring, at least spring, possibly summer this weekend, and it looks like we’re actually turning – have officially turned the corner and it’s nice out. I spent most of Saturday outdoors. Who does that? Who does that? Apparently me. Look at that. Look at that. So, that part was also really nice and spring has sprung, and I’m into it. I’m into it. I won’t be. I’m sure once I’m like in the heat, the worst parts of the summer, but right now I’m very excited to not be freezing cold constantly. How about you Joe? What did you do this weekend?
Joe Patrice: No, I was not going to go into what I did this weekend.
(00:04:59)
I was going to utilize the entree that you gave to ask me about small talk to then transition to a topic a little bit. So, this is kind of—
Kathryn Rubino: The end of small talk right here?
Joe Patrice: This is going to be – well.
Kathryn Rubino: Pour a little out for small talk?
Joe Patrice: I mean, it’s not over yet, right? Like I mean, it can only be over when – we hear the end of this.
Kathryn Rubino: See. It’s terrible, people.
Joe Patrice: Yeah, so no, but again the thing—
Kathryn Rubino: But you weren’t here because—
Joe Patrice: The transition is I wasn’t here because I was attending the clock global institute, which is the corporate legal operations, consortium. I think not — you know, like I always screw up exactly who it is because it is so very much clocked. I was at that, which it’s already been alluded to, that I was told while I was there, but somebody I met with that they specifically love the sound effect and it gets them every time. They’re not expecting it.
Kathryn Rubino: “I’m coming for you.”
Joe Patrice: Yeah, fair enough. Anyhow, so I was there. This is, you know, less politically significant than maybe some of the stories we’ve had to talk about lately, but it was an interesting event to attend. It’s my first time attending it because it’s just never been on my radar as much as some of the other shows that I go to. I thought it was fascinating. It was very interesting to see something from the corporate side and the transactional side, because I’m much more a former litigator so that transactional side has always been a bit of a mystery to me, but this was interesting.
Kathryn Rubino: So, did you easy to crack the code?
Joe Patrice: I mean, I met a lot of folks, and learned a lot of things about how it operates. So, this is a show basically where several years ago this is a job that didn’t even exist, let alone a conference that didn’t exist. There was for decades and decades in-house counsel that has operated as a series of silos basically that meet at a general counsel and that’s about it. Over the past few years starting basically with a book club like less than a decade ago, the job of legal operations has basically been created, the idea of having someone, maybe a lawyer, maybe not a lawyer, but someone in a role under the general counsel who really runs the department operations as opposed to having a general counsel whose skillset may not be that sort of management. There’s a real sense of handing this off to someone who’s a professional at streamlining the legal op, the legal departments processes. This show was giant. It was the biggest thing The Bellagio had hosted in three years, which obviously there was a pandemic in there, but still.
Kathryn Rubino: That’s probably a big reason why, but yeah.
Joe Patrice: But I mean, we’ve been “back for a year” and it still was—
Kathryn Rubino: Had we though?
Joe Patrice: Yeah. And it was still bigger.
Kathryn Rubino: So, what’s one of your big takeaways from the show?
Joe Patrice: My big takeaway was this creation of this legal ops role, which when I first started hearing about it several years ago I thought, “Well, that’s kind of a flash—” I don’t know, but it’ll catch on.
Kathryn Rubino: Flash in a pan.
Joe Patrice: It clearly has and it’s exciting to the extent that we always talk about lawyers being luddites who don’t understand the power of technology. The fact that these departments are handing over a lot of this operational power to folks who are motivated to advance and streamline the profession, now all of a sudden these corporate legal departments are really utilizing their spend on new solutions to things.
I saw a lot of cool stuff and reconnected with somebody that I worked with at Cleary, who now has a product out there that basically utilizes – leverages AI to pull key contract terms and just put them out there for everybody to see, which benefits not just the legal department but sales, and everything too. I talked to a company that is allowing companies to get on top of hundreds and hundreds of contracts, understand what’s out there, pull data from it, benchmarking, very interesting stuff to just hang out and learn. So, yeah, the transactional department’s transactional work which is the bread and butter of a lot of these legal departments, especially to the extent they interact with the rest of the business units, yeah, there’s a lot going on there. It’s an exciting place, especially after a lot of the shows I go to, you know, the e-discovery shows and stuff like that, that you don’t feel like the people at those conferences are there to really buy new things and, and so on. But everybody I was talking to you there was, “I’m here to figure out what I want to make our department’s new billing operation or billing platform,” or whatever. So, very interesting, really had a lot of fun, and I think we will be adding this to our yearly rotation of conferences to go to because I learned a lot of stuff by chatting with people there.
Kathryn Rubino: Great.
Joe Patrice: And one of the things of course, being that everyone generally likes our sound effects. That’s the big thing.
Kathryn Rubino: Well, and everyone has a role to play, which is I think another kind of key takeaway, right?
(00:10:00)
I just thought that you were going to talk about it. That’s what I thought. I was trying to help.
Joe Patrice: I know. Well, I wasn’t going to give you that satisfaction but, yes.
Kathryn Rubino: Why make it be a smooth transition? Come on.
Joe Patrice: That rings.
Kathryn Rubino: Come on, we could make it awkward.
Chris Williams: And I’ll be honest, it looked like Joe didn’t get it, but that’s okay because he doesn’t have to because of our sponsors.
Joe Patrice: Right, there we go. Well done.
Kathryn Rubino: Nicely played. Nicely played.
Joe Patrice: Let’s hear from Posh.
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Joe Patrice: All right, so back. What’s the big legal stories of the week?
Kathryn Rubino: So, certainly one of the bigger impacts I think is the story that Chris actually covered for us, and it looks like the Fifth Circuit is through the looking glass on this one.
Chris Williams: Listen, so there was a—
Joe Patrice: That’s glass breaking. It wasn’t a great one but, yeah, that’s what I was trying to do.
Kathryn Rubino: Okay, okay.
Joe Patrice: All right, go.
Chris Williams: Speaking of, at times I wish I had some censorship.
Joe Patrice: Great.
Chris Williams: So, there was a case that went through the Fifth Circuit, where I think it was Texas did something that was clearly like the government restricting speech. You know, we have this weird thing in America where corporations are people, right? And they’re targeting corporations that have I think, the cutoff was like 50 million or so like the followers or users, basically accusing them of viewpoint discrimination because they would do things like take down posts that are like, “Oh, the Klan bombing black churches, not too bad.” Like they would just say racist things and, you know, that violated like terms of service and like, say Twitter or Facebook somebody would take it down, and they would be like, “Oh, you’re silencing the rights, people’s right to speak.” And apparently, the Fifth Circuit’s like, “Yeah, you can’t do that,” but I’m like this is compelling speech. Like, this is just straight up compelling speech and it’s wild that this is coming from the right, who’s usually like corporations are with all of this.
Joe Patrice: Yeah.
Kathryn Rubino: Once again, what this proves is that the right does not have – they have kind of pulled the wool over the public’s eyes, pretending like there’s some sort of a coherent judicial philosophy as opposed to, “This is the result we want.”
Joe Patrice: So, the whole social media legal framework is based around, so you’ll hear more about Section 230 over the coming years, because unfortunately there’s no growing bipartisan agreement on screwing up how speech works on social media, but the goal of Section 230 is to suggest that if you put out a platform like a Facebook or something like that, Facebook doesn’t get to be sued because somebody does something on that platform, you know, that’s defamatory or whatever, harassing, yada, yada.
That said, those organizations tried to not have that on there. That’s the terms of service argument that Chris raised. So, they can moderate stuff, but they are not legally liable if they fail to catch something, which seems like a good way of doing this. On the left there are people who complain that this has led to stuff like horse paste being pushed as a COVID cure. On the right they say people are, you know, deleting stuff about how the election was stolen by Italian space lasers.
Chris Williams: Wait, what?
Joe Patrice: So, yeah, that’s the prevailing election thing that Hugo Chavez and the Italian space lasers stole. Anyway, the point is so both sides are now trying to push this, “Let’s get rid of Section 230,” and that’s bad and what Texas passed was this bill that said it’s now illegal and you can be sued for taking down someone’s post on social media for violating, you know – based on it, violating one of these terms of services, which is a compelled speech issue, but also ridiculously, poorly-thought-out one, which brings us to the events of this weekend.
Kathryn Rubino: This past weekend, yeah.
Joe Patrice: The mass shooting in Buffalo that was being live twitched
Kathryn Rubino: Live twitched.
Joe Patrice: Obviously, Twitch was like, “Well, this is horrible and we’re taking it down.” This of course—
Kathryn Rubino: Yeah, I think within two minutes of being, yeah – it went dead, the live, the feed. They stopped the feed as quick as they were able to find it.
Joe Patrice: Right, and that’s what I think a lot of us would say was the appropriate thing to do when you’re seeing live footage of a murders.
Kathryn Rubino: Mass shooting.
(00:15:00)
Yeah.
Joe Patrice: That said, this violates Texas’s new law that the Fifth Circuit decided was constitutional, because you’re taking it down based on what happened – you know, you’re taking down somebody’s thing and violating their free speech in the Fifth Circuit’s mind. I don’t think it’s too much of a shock that even Sam Alito seems to feel that this needs to be reviewed very quickly.
Kathryn Rubino: I mean, it is kind of a shock that it is kind of a shock that Sam Alito thinks that, but glad he’s joined the party at least on one thing.
Joe Patrice: Well, as Thomas has said in public before the he thinks that these laws are correct, the fact that Alito reached down and emergency pushed this suggests that this is a place where Thomas and Alito may have a break, and that Alito may even see this as problematic.
Kathryn Rubino: There’s some daylight between those two. Yeah.
Chris Williams: So, just to clarify, the way this Texas law breaks down, if I go on Facebook right now just like post links to the worst things I could find on rotten.com. and then Facebook is like, “Oh, that violates terms of service. You can’t show beheadings,” I have grounds to sue?
Joe Patrice: Yeah.
Chris Williams: That’s ridiculous.
Joe Patrice: That’s how it’s set up, yeah.
Kathryn Rubino: Yes. Yes, correct.
Joe Patrice: And that’s the thing. Now, they’re going to try I think to create – it’s very vague and badly written but think they’re going to try to cobble together a version—
Kathryn Rubino: Remember when that used to be a reason to overturn?
Joe Patrice: Right. And I think they’re going to try to cobble together a version that would carve out stuff like mass shootings and so on and so forth, but keep the whole, “If I talk about, ‘Hey, let’s all get together and, you know, bomb a church,’ that that could stay,” which because they want that part to stay because that’s the important public square function of social media to allow malicious to come together.
Chris Williams: And the wild thing is, you don’t even have to do like the metaphoric that, “Oh, this was a metaphoric play on words that’s actually (00:16:50) poetic.” It’s like, no straight up. You’re just advocating for violence now.
Joe Patrice: Yeah.
Chris Williams: The way that I could imagine this for like non-legal people to like understand what’s going on is like people understand like, you know, say you’ve got the lawn, right? Somebody walks on your lawn, you don’t like them there. That’s trespassing. But let’s say you have a billboard just set up or like a thing, or you can put sticky notes and like say hi to your neighbors or what have you like, “You can walk on my lawn but just don’t say anything rude,” right? And if somebody walks up and is like, “Oh, I hate gay people,” and it’s like, “It’s my board. I don’t want this on my board, one. Two, I don’t want this to be associated with me because it’s front of my house, on my property. I take it down,” then a police officer walks up and like, “Hey, you can’t take that down,” and like, “Why? It’s my board,” and they’re like, “No, no, no. You can’t take that down because your board is popular. And then, like, “Well, wait, what about my neighbor who also has a board who can put up a ticket whenever they want? They can do that,” and the police officer is like, “Yes, they can put up and take down whatever they want because they’re not as popular as you,” all right? So, this is like penalizing popularity, because you’re so well known you can no longer freely associate, and people can’t put up whatever they want.
Joe Patrice: And that’s perfectly right.
Chris Williams: It’s ridiculous.
Kathryn Rubino: That’s a great analogy.
Joe Patrice: Now, that’s a great analogy because the quasi-legal justification of this is, sure they’re a private company, but they are so popular that they basically become a public square and should be treated like the government which, yeah, the idea—
Chris Williams: And just to be clear, this means that smaller places like Parlor, if I go on Parlor and I’m like, “Oh, maybe trans people shouldn’t be murdered in the street,” that can be taken down without wild abandon, “Hey, that’s leftist speaking.” But if I go on Facebook and I tried it, and I take down a common or somebody says, “Trans people should be murdered,” I woke up, I opened myself up to lawsuits.
Joe Patrice: Yeah, and that is entirely the argument because of the way they tried to justify it with this public square argument. That is entirely true and, moreover, if you ever get in an argument with these people, the stupid stuff they’re going to bring up are these – there are some cases where the First Amendment has been, you know. We put First Amendment restrictions on private companies in the past, but the facts around those are so wildly different than something like Twitter or Facebook because they’re about – back in the day there used to be these things like company towns, coal miners would be mining and the only place they were allowed to live was in a town owned by the company and they could shop in only stores owned by the company with money given to them by the company, and in those sorts of situations the courts have said, “Look, the company can’t prevent these people from speaking just because they say, ‘Oh, we own the only places in town where they could speak.’” That is a wildly different situation than voluntarily joining Facebook and making it popular, but that’s the kind of – those are the line of cases you’re going to see in these decisions as more and more of these crazy folks write opinions on this. Anyway, it’s really problematic.
Kathryn Rubino: You know, what else is really popular?
Joe Patrice: Yeah?
Kathryn Rubino: The DC bar exam.
Joe Patrice: Is it popular? Okay.
Kathryn Rubino: Well, that’s going to be a bit of a sticking point. I’ll quickly run through some of the fact of what’s going on before we get to what I think is the most interesting part of this story.
(00:20:05)
And definitely there’s a lot, there’s a lot going on here, but DC bar exam back in April was like, “There might be some limited seats on the bar exam.” No other details, “We’ll let you know closer to the registration deadline,” which is May 12th. Cool, cool. May 2nd they come out and they say, “We lost our normal place where we have in-person bar exams,” because remember last year was, well, virtual because you know, pandemic. And so, “We have this new location. We only want to do one location because that’s best for test taking and there’s going to be 1,100 seats. Don’t worry. Last year there were 2,200 people who wanted to take the test.”
Joe Patrice: That seems like a lot more.
Kathryn Rubino: That’s not a great number, but they went further and were like, “Hey, we’re going to give DC residents–” or no, no. “Folks who attend or have graduated from DC law schools priority for getting seats at the bar exam.” Problem is by the time they said this, this is the actual numbers, the registration deadline – because it’s a UBE District. By the time they made that clear, many other jurisdictions who also administered the UBE’s deadlines had come and gone. So, not great. A bit of a happy-ish not really ending, at the end of last week they decided that there was going to be a secondary location, another 450 seats would be added. Cool, you know, makes it a little bit better but again, not as many people. The total number of seats is still fewer than the people who took it in 2020 in-person – or not 2020, but 2019 in person, and all that good stuff. Great.
Here’s what I think that the sticky little bit of it is. The law school deans of law schools that were not in the District of Columbia were pretty annoyed about all of this because their students are about to not be able to take the bar exam and, you know, just kind of the timing of it all is very suspect for a problematic, et cetera, you know, “If you’re going to do this, you should let people know so they have plenty of time to make their plans,” which seems not unreasonable. But then, the DC law school deans came out and said, “Actually, we’re the ones who asked for this because, you know, most of our people want to stay in the district. This is only fair, et cetera, et cetera,” but the thing that was interesting is they referenced, in that particular letter, they referenced what happened in 2020, which was that New York because of COVID had said that they were going to do a similar kind of prioritization for New York law schools. Of course, this all wound up being moot because, you know, the pandemic and wound up being entirely virtual but, you know, they had made that plan and when New York made that plan, plenty of law school deans who were not in New York were pretty annoyed about it because their students were the ones that were about to be left out in the cold which, you know, whatever. But as it turns out, the group of folks who ask for preferential treatment for their students in 2022 in DC, at least some of them are the same folks who complained about the preferential treatment for New York back in 2020.
Four law schools are on both lists, two specific, actually same individuals both at Georgetown and at Howard, are the exact same folks who signed both letters. So, it’s a very much a, “We’re against preferential treatment if it hurts us, but totally forward if it helps,” which, you know, is not the most consistent.
Joe Patrice: That is really problematic, the receipts issue. Yeah, you know, when New York did that and said, “We’re only going to let people from New York schools take the test at the height of the pandemic,” it’s an unfortunate response, but it seemed to make the most sense.
Kathryn Rubino: There was a logic there for sure.
Joe Patrice: Like, the pandemic meant that bad things had to be done to make things work, that made sense. The whining about it, I understood and I felt bad for folks who were going to be left out by it but, you know, the legal system needed people who tend who were planning to be local folks to get through as quickly as possible to keep the pipeline going. The right answer would have probably been to have multiple bar exam –more administrations of the bar exam or, you know, real reform that got rid of it or something like that but, you know, given the situation, and when these deans started complaining, I rolled my eyes then, and the fact that they totally hypocritically are now demanding the same treatment is wow.
Kathryn Rubino: And you know, there’s been a lot of coverage of it. Obviously, it’s a big deal and for folks who are potentially not going to be able to take the bar exam that they’ve been planning on taking, it’s a really big deal, and I feel like they’re being, you know, very much jobbed in this whole situation. And when I’m pointing to other issues, I don’t want to sort of diminish the fact that there are definitely people who are going to be screwed by this plan, but this sort of gull, the real gull of like in 2020 being like, “This is bullshit,” and then turning around in 2022 and being like, “Remember that bullshit?” It helps us now. Let’s see – that’s a particular kind of hypocrisy.
Joe Patrice: Yeah. No, true, true. I think we mind that subject. We have a little bit of time for some other things to discuss.
(00:25:02)
So, Kathryn?
Kathryn Rubino: Well, you know, there’s not much really here except for the fact that it happened but there is a judge who has a penchant for handcuffing attorneys in her court, which came out in the form of a public reprimand.
Joe Patrice: Wait, so handcuffing attorneys in her court?
Kathryn Rubino: Yeah.
Joe Patrice: Okay, so now I’m intrigued as to why the attorneys need to be handcuffed here.
Kathryn Rubino: There were two instances, which were completely unrelated and they happened within I think 10 days of one another. So, a very, very short period of time in which both of these incidents happened, but basically there had been some sort of an argument in the hallway outside of the courtroom. The first one was between the attorney and the attorney’s client’s mother-in-law, and there were some testy words said, whatever, outside the came into the court. The judge was like, “What happened. You should apologize,” and started lecturing the attorney about decorum.” They were like, “I’m not going to apologize,” and then she, the judge, had the bailiff escort the attorney to the jury box and shackled him, and proceeded then for another 20 minutes due to have the rest of the hearing about – there was a protective order. So, you know, not what one imagines one does.
And the other one was a similar situation where it was an attorney whose client was seeking a protective order and they were not representing the client in that particular matter, but were in unrelated matters, but would therefore support. The judge and a member of the court staff had words outside in the hallway and again, the judge wanted to know what happened. The attorney was like, “This person was disrespectful towards me and whatever,” and again there was a lecture, handcuffs were brought out. Attorney was shackled. In that instance, that attorney’s son is also an attorney and came into the court and was like, “My dad needs to get out. He has another court hearing.” Like, “This is ridiculous,” whatever but in neither case did the judge institute any sort of sanctions hearings or anything like that about any of the attorneys’ behavior, which was also kind of a key element here that sort of didn’t raise to that level that they were sanctions or, you know, any of that kind of stuff. Just, you know, why not? Why not lock up an attorney in the jury box?
Joe Patrice: I mean—
Kathryn Rubino: Well, the good news is that this attorney –this judge rather has lost their primary election, so will not be on the ballot to be a judge in the future, but I guess they can run again but, yeah, at least in the near—
Joe Patrice: Lost their primary?
Kathryn Rubino: Lost their primary.
Joe Patrice: I smell Hugo Chavez and his Italian space lasers getting in the way again.
Kathryn Rubino: Basically. That seems right. That seems right.
Joe Patrice: Yeah.
Kathryn Rubino: It was not – Listen. I’m not a judge. I’ve never been a judge. I’ve never had any inclination to become a judge of a courtroom, but here’s the thing. Like you can imagine that there might be some crazy situation where this wear handcuffs, shackling an attorney, might strike you as appropriate, but two within a week? It just seems like you don’t know how to manage your courtroom. You’re just like, “Bailiff, lock them up right here, right now.” That’s just not how we do any of these things.
Joe Patrice: I’m impressed that the bailiff kind of unquestioningly does all this stuff. Now, I understand that’s their job, but I feel like court officers or should have a little bit more latitude to go, “Now, hold on a sec.”
Chris Williams: I could be wrong. I haven’t seen all of the shows but I just feel like Judge Judy has more control over her courtroom than this.
Joe Patrice: Yeah.
Chris Williams: Like, I haven’t seen any Judge Judy episodes of people getting like handcuffed.
Kathryn Rubino: And those aren’t even attorneys.
Joe Patrice: Yeah, that’s fair. Well, okay, I think that brings us to our end. Hey, everybody, you should be subscribed with the show so you get new episodes when they come out. You should give them reviews, stars, write something. It’s always good. You should check out other things that we’re on. Kathryn’s the host of a show called The Jabot, a podcast called The Jabot. I’m a participant in the Legaltech Week Journalists’ roundtable where we talked a lot about clock there too.
You should check out the other shows on the Legal Talk Network. Follow us on our various social medias. I’m @JosephPatrice Twitter. She’s @Kathryn1. Chris is at @rightsforrent. And Above the Above itself is @atlblog. You should be reading Above the Law because that way you can see all of these stories, and more, before we talk about them and recap the week.
[Music]
What else? Thanks to Posh. And—
Kathryn Rubino: Peace.
Joe Patrice: That seemed like you jumped the gun. I was clearly like making sure I’d gone through my checklist.
Kathryn Rubino: Yeah, but I was indicating that you—
Chris Williams: Kathryn’s right. Peace.
Joe Patrice: All right. Bye.
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Above the Law - Thinking Like a Lawyer |
Above the Law's Joe Patrice and Kathryn Rubino examine everyday topics through the prism of a legal framework.