Law School Reform Gets Some Unlikely Support

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

Joe Patrice: Hello. 

Kathryn Rubino: Hey. 

Joe Patrice: Yeah see, I was even going to try, I’ve given up on trying it actually.

Kathryn Rubino: I enjoy when you say you’d given up.

Joe Patrice: Yeah, welcome to Thinking Like a Lawyer, I’m Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I’m joined by Kathryn Rubino and Chris Williams. We’re here to give a quick rundown on some of the big legal stories of last week. But first, we should talk about other things.

Kathryn Rubino: If you want — 

Joe Patrice: In our small talk segment, sorry, you jumped the gun there, I was trying — 

Kathryn Rubino: Did I jump the gun or was it the gun only going to go off if once I started? 

Joe Patrice: I bristle at the accusation. 

Kathryn Rubino: Bristle? Interesting. Is that mean admitted true? Does it have a new meaning? 

Joe Patrice: It does not. That is not what that word means. 

Kathryn Rubino: I think it might in this instance. Context clues give me a lot of information. 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, so we are having our little small talk segment. I will kick off quite literally and say that I managed to win all of my fantasy games this weekend. 

Kathryn Rubino: Well la-li-da to you. 

Joe Patrice: So you didn’t. 

Kathryn Rubino: I lost them all. 

Joe Patrice: That’s a shame. 

Kathryn Rubino: Including too you, by the way. 

Joe Patrice: That is true, we do have a fantasy league. But yeah, you know, hey, maybe I can teach you some pointer sometime. 

Kathryn Rubino: Seriously, stop it. Just stop. But on the upside is the New York Giants actually managed to win a game. 

Joe Patrice: That was the opposite of an upside for those of us who had money on the opposite result. 

Kathryn Rubino: So not everything is coming up Joe Patrice. 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, that was bad. I did think that the number one seed from last year’s playoffs would manage to beat one of the worst teams in football but it turns out that didn’t work. 

Kathryn Rubino: Listen, I am a Giants fan, I did not even watch the end of the game because I was like “oh, it’s not going to end well.” 

Joe Patrice: It looked like it would.

Chris Williams: I would just not going to acknowledge the queen died? 

Joe Patrice: Who? 

Kathryn Rubino: I mean it’s a real shock that a 96-year-old woman in poor health died that somebody should launch an investigation. 

Chris Williams: The real shock is that Americans were this torn about the monarchy like I thought we all agreed like democracy was the new wave. 

Joe Patrice: I mean I didn’t watch — 

Kathryn Rubino: I mean I don’t know, I’ve seen the Supreme Court, I’m not sure they’re onboard with democracy so.

Joe Patrice: I didn’t watch my buddy died faced down in a muck in 1776 for this. 

Kathryn Rubino: I don’t know, I feel like a lot of my FYP is people being like we hate the queen, she was mean to Diana route. I don’t know, I see a lot of that. 

Joe Patrice: I thought we all come around on that, I thought Diana was the key. 

Chris Williams: I feel like they should be a Clarence Thomas straight up Texan who’s responsible he’s like “ha-ha, bozo”, you know, with Founding Fathers would have said you know, rest in peace. You know, where all these Scalia fans, this should be a reason for enjoyment, you know? I’m pretty sure the Founding Fathers would’ve been sad about this. 

Kathryn Rubino: Yeah, did you see the professor got rebuked by her university for saying something similar? 

Chris Williams: Really? 

Kathryn Rubino: Yeah, it was a Carnegie Mellon Professor who said that she hoped that the queen’s death was excruciating, I think.

Joe Patrice: Well, I mean that’s kind of mean. 

Kathryn Rubino: Sure, but got rebuked by her university which you know, free speech and all that. 

Chris Williams: That is the take. If we want to you know, be consistent with the law writers at the time. I don’t think Jefferson would have been like, “well, I’m so glad she died peacefully.” No, he would like turn up, come here slave. That would’ve been the response.

Joe Patrice: Okay. Well, this conversation took a turn. 

Kathryn Rubino: I mean listen, football and a dead queen, we got it all here.

Chris Williams: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what y’all did on Twitter this weekend but that Twitter this weekend and it was hilarious.

Kathryn Rubino: There was also sports Twitter. 

Joe Patrice: Yeah. I saw none of that. 

Kathryn Rubino: It was a brutal college football Saturday. There were a lot of top teams that lost and I really enjoyed that. 

Joe Patrice: I mean, they paid — I saw somewhere that Sun Belt teams got paid something like 4.1 million dollars to show up and whoop a bunch of power five teams. 

(00:05:00)

Kathryn Rubino: Love it. Love to see it, love to see it. Yeah, Notre Dame lost, Texas, Anaheim lost. 

Joe Patrice: Right. Texas also lost but that was — 

Kathryn Rubino: That was — okay, they were an undergo and also I watched an entire game, Alabama deserve to lose. 

Joe Patrice: They did. 

Kathryn Rubino: Besides the fact that their top quarterback was injured probably for four to six weeks with like a sprained clavicle. Besides that, even with their backup quarterback, who wound up getting injured as well, he was like hobbling around the field, I really thought that Texas was still going to pull it out and they did not and I thought it was a travesty but it does seem like Alabama’s road to the playoffs will be a little bit harder, I mean it’s probably still going to happen but seems like it might be a little bit harder than it is every year.

Joe Patrice: Yeah, you know, to give this something of a legal flare, we also had interesting employment issue this weekend.  

Kathryn Rubino: Did we?  

Joe Patrice: Yeah, well Nebraska fired its head coach. 

Kathryn Rubino: Scott Frost, former UCF National Championship coach.

Joe Patrice: That’s true, that’s true. 

Kathryn Rubino: Yeah, got fired this week — I mean listen, Nebraska had a terrible, terrible set of performances the last two games.  

Joe Patrice: But where is this becomes a legal question?  

Kathryn Rubino: I know, I was giving background Joe. Not everyone may be following all of college football. I’m giving background and colors so people can really understand. 

Joe Patrice: Okay.

Chris Williams: Fight, fight. 

Kathryn Rubino: Anyway, you’re saying? 

Joe Patrice: Yes, so well, this is a legal issue is like a lot of these contracts for football coaches, there’s a buyout clause. He had a 15 million dollar buyout meaning if they fired him for you know, unless it was for something really bad luck of cause. But if they fired him for not winning enough, they have to pay him 15 million dollars, he has not been winning enough so they restructured his contract to only pay him 7.5 million. But that restructuring doesn’t take effect until October 1 and they fired him anyway. So they could have just waited.

Kathryn Rubino: Two weeks. 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, two to three weeks. 

Kathryn Rubino: These teams probably weren’t going to win anyway.

Joe Patrice: Right, and they could’ve saved the athletic department and by extension possibly the public, who knows, I’m sure Nebraska gets its money elsewhere than taxpayer dollars ultimately because they seem like the sort of organization that has big pocketed donors. But they blew an extra 7.5 million on this guy. 

Kathryn Rubino: Yes, if they just waited. 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, they could’ve waited. 

Kathryn Rubino: If they waited a couple of weeks, they would’ve saved almost 8 million dollars. But I guess firing him at the moment was more important. 

Joe Patrice: Yeah. So, too bad for those brilliant lawyers who must have thought they’ve done some really good work in restructuring the contract to save the university money — 

Kathryn Rubino: Listen, this is real, right? Like those lawyers did do a good job. October 1st is not particularly long into the season. It’s very reasonable to assume that the athletic department can wait till October 1st to fire someone if do they want to fire someone. Certainly more than two games in, it’s fairly unusual to fire someone two games into a season. 

Joe Patrice: Three, but yeah. They did win. They lost Week Zero to North Western. 

Kathryn Rubino: Regardless, particularly since it’s not like this is unknown, Scott Frost has been working there for a couple of years, never had a particularly great record. So you have to imagine some Ls are built-in and you’re going to fire him a few weeks early and cost yourself 7.5 million dollars, I mean, okay, bolt, bolt.

Chris Williams: A quick aside to all our listeners who are not involved in this sports ball. This is a reason to get involved because when they were talking about legal issues and firing, I totally thought they were going to mention the police deputy who got caught involved in sex trafficking. But of course — 

Joe Patrice: I mean that’s just normal. 

Kathryn Rubino: That was not nearly as surprising. 

Joe Patrice: Yeah. 

Chris Williams: Well, you know, maybe I’m naive but I thought that police have been involved with stopping crime but, you know, I’m just kidding. 

Kathryn Rubino: Where do you live? 

Joe Patrice: Maybe this is why he cares about the queen, all right. And I think with that — in a very legal sounding, fanfare, we will put a stop to small talk and begin talking about our actual topic. 

Kathryn Rubino: We even talk about Irish Twitter by the way. 

Joe Patrice: We did not. 

Chris Williams: Oh that was wrapped up in but no, no, no, let’s talk about the sports. 

Joe Patrice: Ehem-ehem. Small talk is over, officially. 

Chris Williams: Coming from the guy that talked about legal issues during small talk but whatever. 

Joe Patrice: That’s true. So now we’re going to talk about law schools. In particular, we’re going to talk about reforming them or at least putting on the table the idea of reforming them.

Kathryn Rubino: Yeah, I mean Neil Gorsuch gave us talk last week. I talked about a bunch of things. I think the biggest headlines were actually stuff that you wrote about Joe about the investigation into the Dobbs leak. 

(00:10:01)

And whatever he said exactly what you imagine a Republican on the Supreme Court would say about that but he also kind of took on law school saying that he didn’t think that it was necessary that it takes seven years if you count four years of undergrad, to get a JD degree to be able to practice and he also thought that it was silly that someone who wants to be a criminal defender has to take securities law, I guess. White collar crime is not a thing though, right? Well, you probably actually — that’s not a great example. That’s not a good one. 

Joe Patrice: Neil Gorsuch was a bad example? No kidding. 

Kathryn Rubino: I mean you’re not wrong but he also talked about how so many people graduated, 150 dollars’ worth of debt which I think actually, average law school debt is a little bit more than that. But we’ll see how much he actually cares about student debt when Biden’s debt relief plan, inevitably comes before the Supreme Court.

Joe Patrice: Yeah. 

Chris Williams: I think this all revolve as everybody who owns debt just registers for an LLC because we have no issue with corporations getting these sort of payments. 

Joe Patrice: Bailouts? Yeah, so we got — 

Chris Williams: That’s a joke by the way, don’t do that.

Joe Patrice: Yeah, this is an interesting question. Now, the question of whether or not we still need a three-year law school curriculum has been out there for a while. I know Obama talked about — 

Kathryn Rubino: In 2013. It was a big story because Obama was like, I’m pretty sure law school should be two years.

Joe Patrice: Yeah, so you got that two-year contingent. I think what Gorsuch, who did you know, do some of his higher education in England I think he was talking more about the idea of having more European style education, where if you want to be a lawyer that’s wrapped, that’s your major basically. And that’s wrapped into four years. I don’t know as though anybody has the right answer but it is great that this is at least being talked about by Supreme Court Justices. It’s introducing — 

Kathryn Rubino: Pity(ph) remarks at best, I would say. But because I don’t think there’s any sort of — there’s certainly not an analysis in this remarks has given so far about, you know, what would happen to law schools, the money that universities taken, as a result of getting JD’s, what happened to that? Wow, that would impact the cost of undergrad as a result because it would absolutely go through the roof, right? 

Joe Patrice: I mean, would it though — see, I understand that law schools are the cash cow of major universities, but it doesn’t look like universities are being all that chill about tuition now. They’re making all this money off of law schools and there’s still jacking up prices. It’s unclear to me if it really makes that much difference or if this is just more money they’re mining their pockets with. 

Kathryn Rubino: I guarantee having to close their law school would result whether it had to you in terms of bottom line or not but would in fact result in an increase in the cost of undergraduate education, zero doubt in my mind.

Joe Patrice: Maybe, that strikes me is weirdly fatalistic, right? Like that strikes me as though you’re basically saying that it’s almost like the hostage negotiation. It’s like we have to keep law schools or else everybody else suffers.

Kathryn Rubino: Well, I mean I also think that it’s important — well I think it’s — I don’t know about important but it’s certainly useful. I mean, we’d have to revamp the entirety of our education system starting from about eighth grade on if this is going to actually change, right? Because people right now as opposed to somewhere like England or and other places in Europe, right? A lot of people treat the four years or less or more of undergrad as an opportunity to explore things that were not available in their limited high school curriculum, decide what’s of interest to them and then decide whether or not they need a postgraduate degree like a JD. I don’t think the way our education system is not any disrespect to teachers at all. I think it’s a fun. It’s a systemic issue. I don’t think it’s teachers’ fault, but we have a whole system of testing that is built up around the notion that you’re not going to figure out that you want to be a lawyer. Now, most people will not know at 17 when they’re applying to undergraduate what they want to do for the rest of their life.

Joe Patrice: Yeah. No. I mean — so I’ve actually never been on the shortening law school side. I actually like law school at the three years. I just think that what should happen is it should go hand in hand with getting rid of the bar exam, I think that we should not have people spend three years’ worth of tuition and then have another disconnected from everything to use Gorsuch’ whole criminal defense and securities law bad example. You shouldn’t have to be testing out of all these practice areas you aren’t going to go into and I just think that we need to utilize the end of the bar exam to make the third second and third years more robust and just create a system where you get out of those three years and you are prepared to go out and be licensed as a lawyer. 

Kathryn Rubino: Many other reason why I think this changing radically altering the system has very little chance of actually happening in this country, is because I think as a profession, lawyers are very invested in elitism and it’s a lot easier to be a gatekeeper when there are law schools and there are fewer law schools and there are undergraduate schools and all these other things and it would be shocking to me if the profession would change in that way.

(00:15:21)

Chris Williams: Maybe be done in two. I mean there’s like — what’s the general thing everybody tells all else, one they’ll scare you, second year, they work you to death and third year they bore you, like there’s not a general — I haven’t heard from many people to be fair I haven’t asked this question, but haven’t heard from many people they’re like, yeah, the third year really did it for me. In my personal experience — 

Kathryn Rubino: I mean, it was a lot of fun. I really liked my third year. 

Chris Williams: Yeah. But there’s a difference between fun and utility. In my personal experience, my third year was the year that I took the classes I was actually interested in. Not necessarily, I took that, it’s those years things that make me a better lawyer. I mean, if they were structured a way where it was two years, maybe I could have took up the class I was interested in earlier on or I could’ve been on a track where I took classes that actually were align with what I wanted to do. I don’t think by doing the three year because of tradition or something isn’t used or there’s a reason to have on — 

Kathryn Rubino: Well, the part it’s also because you need — if Joe’s wrong about them restructuring the bar exam, right? Let’s put the bar exam to bid for a moment and say that they are a lot more classes than just sort of the required ones that you’re good and you need to take, if you want to pass the bar exam, right? People take trusts and estates not because they are interested in writing Grandma Betty’s will, they take it because they want to be able to pass the bar exam. So, if they’ll sprinkle in those classes in between the stuff that they want to take and/or clinics that are available, a lot of schools, it’s because the bar exam are generalist exam.  

Joe Patrice: Yeah, I feel like if you’re going to shorten law schools, you need to lean in to the bar exam.  Since I don’t like the bar exam, I would prefer three years and no bar exam but you know, it’s one or the other but that’s the philosophical question is where do you — do you think the licensing needs to be an additional thing on top of your diploma and if you do, then I think you probably can shorten law school and if you don’t, I think you probably need to crack, you know, make law school higher standards and so on. But again, it’s interesting not so much that he has the right answers about anything except maybe in getting policy. But it’s that he’s at least putting this out there on the table like when Obama did it, I think it’s while Obama was a law professor, I think it’s very important when the actual Supreme Court Justices are starting to raise the hey, maybe this is a broken system. I think it just creates a conversation it’s worth having.

Kathryn Rubino: Sure, I agree with that.

Joe Patrice: Well, the sound effects aren’t working. 

Kathryn Rubino: We can pretend. 

Joe Patrice: We could pretend. 

Kathryn Rubino: Bring-bring, bring-bring.

Joe Patrice: You know — 

Kathryn Rubino: Have you heard about the whole thing about how like kids nowadays don’t use their hand to stimulate a telephone the same way like gen X used to? You know, like for gen X, you should use your pointer fingers and your pinky to be like that’s the telephone. Now, they just hold it because like a phone is a brick in their minds.

Joe Patrice: That’s actually fascinating.

Kathryn Rubino: Yeah. 

Joe Patrice: And it makes sense.

Kathryn Rubino: Yeah. Well, you know, if you’ve stopped thinking about telephones in general, it might be because you need a service for someone to take care of the — 

Joe Patrice: Oh, like a virtual receptionist?

Kathryn Rubino: That’s what I was going with.

Joe Patrice: All right, so let’s hear from our friends from Posh.

Female 2: As a lawyer, ever wished you could be in two places at once? You can take a call when you’re in court, capturing lead during a meeting, that’s where Posh comes in. We’re live virtual receptionist who answer and transfer your calls so you never miss an opportunity. And the Posh app lets you control when your receptionist steps in. So if you can’t answer, Posh can, and if you’ve got it, Posh is just a tap away. With Posh, you can save as much as 40% off your current service providers’ rates. Start your free trial today at posh.com. 

Craig Williams: Today’s legal news is rarely a straightforward as the headlines that a company know. On Lawyer 2 Lawyer, we provide legal perspective you need to better understand the current event that shape our society. Join me Craig Williams at a wide variety of industry experts as we break down the top stories. Follow Lawyer 2 Lawyer on a Legal Talk Network or wherever you subscribe to podcasts.

Joe Patrice: All right. So lawyering with families, that’s — 

Kathryn Rubino: Not a great week for it. 

Joe Patrice: It is not a great week for it. Not that it’s necessarily easy to do for people anyway but what all happened here? 

Kathryn Rubino: Well, there were two stories, do you want the one with a happy ending first or the one with the sad ending or less great ending? 

Joe Patrice: It doesn’t matter to me.

Kathryn Rubino: So there was an attorney in Florida who asked for a continuance because his wife was having a child and it will be his paternity leave, so he asked for a delay. 

(00:20:04)

And despite the fact that in Florida there’s a model rule saying that unless would cause some undue burden for some reason or if it’s done too suddenly or something like that. Courts should presumptively grant these, the judge said no three times. And said in fact if you file another motion for a continuance because you’re going on paternity leave I’m going to sanction you. Fortunately, the legal media took up the cause as did a number of other advocacy organizations and the judge changed their mind. And that dad was able to file, you know, paperwork to get a continuance to get his paternity leave. The other one is less of a good ending mostly because I don’t think anybody knew about it until after it sort of had happened. But it was a Seventh Circuit Federal Appeals case and they asked for a continuance because there are two attorneys on the case. One of them was going to trial on another matter during the oral argument when it was scheduled and the one remaining had just suffered, his wife had suffered a miscarriage. So felt that it was did not have the adequate time to prepare and also wanted to take the time for personal reasons, which seems very, very reasonable. The other side agreed — 

Joe Patrice: And that’s the part that gets me. 

Kathryn Rubino: Yeah, it’s unopposed. The unopposed motion is denied, denied. Seventh Circuit is like no way, no, we only heard about it the day that the oral argument happened so the attorney had to sort of and it just reeks of the worst kind of sort of toxic masculinity, like what men aren’t supposed to be upset or have emotional baggage when their family suffers a miscarriage. No, it should only be — you should just have a stiff upper lip and go about your day as if nothing happened that seems weird and awful.

Joe Patrice: And put aside whether or not you personally are supposed to have emotions, like you’re supposed to be supportive too and it just, yeah. 

Kathryn Rubino: It seems unnecessarily cruel. 

Joe Patrice: It strikes me having done this for a long time that I can count on maybe one hand a situation where an unopposed motion should be denied. Like it strikes me as though if both sides agreed to something — 

Kathryn Rubino: Particularly scheduling. 

Joe Patrice: I mean, well, I would say scheduling is one of the few places where I might disagree, but only if the two sides are trying to bleak house something and just refuse to have to come to an end and drag it out and, you know, that sort of thing. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about like putting stuff off.

Kathryn Rubino: I mean the other dates that he suggested for like a week later, right? It was just he was in the middle of it, right? He was in the shit and he was just like can I get a damn breather and Seventh Circuit is like no. 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, it just reinforces every terrible thing about courts.

Kathryn Rubino: Every terrible thought and it’s bullshit, right? Appellate work is hard enough. You don’t need to add this kind of bullshit layer on top of it, just to prove that you’re tough enough to actually handle it. And it I think it does a detriment to the entire profession. As people see these stores and are like, this is nothing like a profession for me. 

Joe Patrice: Yeah.

Chris Williams: Maybe the courts were just trying to through this example prepare students for what it’s like to work big law. 

Kathryn Rubino: I honestly think big laws kinder about it. 

Joe Patrice: Better than that, yeah. 

Kathryn Rubino: 100%. I don’t think I worked at two different big law firms. I don’t think for a second this kind of a request to be not taken very seriously and absolutely 100% granted. 

Joe Patrice: You’d absolutely be told that you know, go home, deal with that and respond to my Blackberry — 

Kathryn Rubino: You just aged yourself with your Blackberry reference. 

Joe Patrice: I know. But still, yes, you probably would still have to do some stuff but yeah. 

Kathryn Rubino: Yeah, but there’s a lot I think and maybe it’s also because you’d worked them on a day to day basis as opposed to a judge that you rarely see to actually to deal with you on a day to day basis but like I can’t imagine and maybe I was lucky although it didn’t feel it at the time but I can’t imagine a situation where they wouldn’t show a little bit more grace than this. 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Williams: It just makes me think of those dystopian horror stories that get shown off as being like a great worker like oh, some Harvard law school graduate gives birth while also answering emails like you know, no, why are you doing this, that’s not good, don’t celebrate this. 

Joe Patrice: Gave birth while taking the bar exam — 

Kathryn Rubino: I mean, that was a real story that was written. 

Joe Patrice: And yeah, my take away there was wait a minute, maybe this is a bad thing. 

Chris Williams: Yeah. 

Joe Patrice: Yes, your clients are expecting you to know a lot of things about a lot of things, even topics like domain names.

Kathryn Rubino: Domains which heavily not covered in my law school classes.

Joe Patrice: Worse yet, your client might want a domain name to protect their brand or support a product launch that’s already taken. 

(00:25:05)

Kathryn Rubino: Fortunately, GoDaddy’s domain broker service can help. Expert brokers will help you securely and confidentially get that perfect domain. 

Joe Patrice: To learn more, visit godaddy.com/DBS. 

All right. So what’s our, what’s our last subject?

Kathryn Rubino: Well it’s back to school time and I think for a lot of places it means back to the office. 

Joe Patrice: Okay. 

Kathryn Rubino: You know, there’s been a lot of talk and we’ve mentioned it several times on the podcast about what is it going to take for people to go back to the office, not necessarily full time. I don’t think most places realistically expect five days a week anymore, but probably do expect two to three. 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, we’re getting some interesting experimentation. Lots of people are pushing for some kind of a hybrid model, whether it’s four days or three days, we have people who say, hey, come in three days a week, we have other firms saying come in Tuesday through Thursday. You know, the whether it’s better to have the flexible model or everybody’s here on these days, like everyone’s kind of playing around trying to figure out what to do and we have heard some of these stories where big firms are complaining that we have this hybrid system and you haven’t been coming in, so. 

Kathryn Rubino: Right. And they’re about to make it not voluntary. 

Joe Patrice: Right. Which, you know is unfortunate but how do you make people come in and why are you. 

Kathryn Rubino: And built culture. 

Joe Patrice: Right, and that’s the thing, and the argument that people make is that at some part of culture you need to be around your colleagues for some reason. And look, I’ve defended the idea that there’s soft learning that happens in law, like a lot of it is and you have to be around people to see some of the stuff. That’s how the younger generation figures this out, but the answer to getting coaxing people back into the office might be by having a cooler office, which brings me to kind of a story we had last week which a fellow would in Texas, and I think they also have an office in California, they have a long tradition of being very pro travel. They want their employees to travel the world. They think it’s valuable and have always been very flexible about making sure people are able to do that. They’ve had a program for a long time about people being able to work for a month at a time from anywhere. This summer they got their culture in the fun way to get to get that firm culture, they rented office space in Lisbon, Portugal, and invited everybody to come on out and about half the firm did and stayed there for a couple of weeks, they paid a stipend to bring people over, lot of people brought over their families and all, and had a couple of two to four weeks over there, it doubled as business development, they met with some clients, some perspective clients and all while they were over there.

Kathryn Rubino: That’s pretty cool. I’m sorry. Okay, I’m in.

Joe Patrice: Yeah, like what gets me about it is there’s something about and, I don’t know if there’s a more like works place psychologist way of doing this, of saying this, but it strikes me as though you’re going to be — that culture is going to be built better by virtue of everybody having you know, working in an unfamiliar location.

Kathryn Rubino: Sure. Every, you’re learning together. It’s what was it called like when people bond together, not trauma bonding but, you know. 

Chris Williams: I heard this is bonding, it’s just bonding Kathryn. Surprise the lawyers, there are four of bonding outside of suffering together. Some people even called some things friendship and camaraderie. There’s a world outside of blue booking, trust me. 

Joe Patrice: I’m skeptical. Yeah, it does strike me though like these folks are going to build a tighter unit by being in unfamiliar surroundings and I’ll say it from personal experience, you know, kind of an unfortunate story given our proximity to this anniversary here but so I was at (00:29:09) offices, very much downtown Manhattan. We had to as a legal — as a litigation group. We had to relocate into temporary office space and work four months or so I think in a different location and everybody was in a different location and everybody was trying to figure out what they were doing and I mean I can’t compare it to how that group feels normally, but I certainly felt more — 

Kathryn Rubino: Comrades and arms, yeah. 

Joe Patrice: As pretty décor with the rest of the litigation group then I think I would have otherwise because we were all crammed into a tiny place, together nobody was like in their throne room that they call associates into, but they were catch-as-catch-can of whatever they — 

Kathryn Rubino: Yeah, and everybody was kind of — everything was thrown into chaos then. 

(00:30:02)

Joe Patrice: Yeah. And so yeah obviously I think it would be a lot nicer to be in Lisbon, Portugal than in an unused floor of Paul Weiss’ building. 

Kathryn Rubino: Yeah, after a terrorist attack. 

Joe Patrice: Yeah, so this is a better option. 

Kathryn Rubino: A better, better all the way around.

Joe Patrice: Yeah, but good on them with coming up with a creative way of getting people to want to come back into an office environment and just for the purpose of building that culture because if culture is what you’re after and not face time for no reason — 

Kathryn Rubino: This is the way to do it. 

Joe Patrice: This is the kind of way to do it and you know, whether it’s bringing the whole firm out or you know, you don’t have to go to Portugal, it could be other trips and locations and smaller groups and teams or departments but however you do it.  If you care about the culture like make people work together in kind of fun surroundings. 

Kathryn Rubino: Yeah, let’s have an office on the beach for a couple weeks and see how much I like you then. 

Joe Patrice: Yeah.

Chris Williams: You know they’re really going to do, what they really going to do is just add real estate stock to people’s compensation packages. That’s the only people actually care about actually coming in person because they didn’t want to make sure buildings are actually thinking in the future. 

Joe Patrice: I mean, there are definitely — there’s stake and I’ve said this before, but you can definitely tell based on firm stances on hybrid working, who signed their 10-year lease recently and who’s about to have it come up. There’s a trend line there that you cannot escape. Anyway, so I think that’s everything for this week. And so, thanks everybody for listening. You know, be sure to check out that survey that I think is attached. That is attached to this episode if you’re listening to this episode and if you aren’t well, then it’s probably over. Anyway, the point is, take that, you should be listening to the show, obviously. Subscribe, so can get all the episodes when they come out, you should give reviews, stars, write something, you know the drill. You should read Above the Law because you can see these and other stories before they’re talked about here, you should be following us on social media. I’m @josephpatrice, she’s @kathyrn1, Chris is @rightsforrent, abovethelaws@atlblog. You should be listening to The Jabo, her other show. I also a panelist in the Legal Tech Week journalist roundtable, you should check out the Legal Talk Network’s other panoply of shows that we aren’t necessarily on but you know, sometimes we’re guests on some other things. So check those out and with all of that said, I think we’re good. 

Kathryn Rubino: Thanks.

Chris Williams: See you next week. 

Continue Reading