US News Rankings Continue Slide Into Bonkerstown

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Patrice:

Hey. Hey,

Kathryn Rubino:

How are you?

Joe Patrice:

This is another edition of Thinking Like A Lawyer. I’m Joe Patrice.

Kathryn Rubino:

Hi, Joe Patrice.

Joe Patrice:

That was Kathryn Rubino. We’re editors here at Above the Law, and we meet every week to give you, we have a little conversation about the A

Kathryn Rubino:

Little tete.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Big stories of the week that was in legal, but of course we begin as always with a little bit of humanizing small talk. Let’s have some small talk, so, hey.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. How have you been?

Joe Patrice:

Good. I took some time to go see the total Eclipse

Kathryn Rubino:

Of the heart

Joe Patrice:

No, of the actual one. Yeah, though we did listen to that song on the way to the eclipse.

Kathryn Rubino:

I would’ve been disappointed. Had you? Not

Joe Patrice:

In fairness, we didn’t listen to the original version. We listened to the version by the Dan Band,

Kathryn Rubino:

Is actually a fantastic version, I have to be honest

Joe Patrice:

So yeah, so I went to do that. I saw a total eclipse a few years ago. Actually. You were along on that trip. I was. You were not along on this trip. Saw it a few years ago, and I mean, I think you and

Kathryn Rubino:

I seven at this point, it’s not.

Joe Patrice:

Sure. I think you would agree with me that as a phenomenon, it’s impossible to describe really. I

Kathryn Rubino:

Think what my takeaway, having witnessed the one seven years ago in person was, oh, this is why you believe in a God in the sky and all this kind of stuff. This is why you believe in all the things, because it seems otherworldly, like their power is beyond you. It is truly a cosmic event.

Joe Patrice:

It’s one of those things that’s really impossible to capture on film. I’d seen pictures of eclipses before, and I remember the first one I went to. Oh, well, I’m sure it’ll be, it just isn’t like, you can’t really describe the kind of awesome feeling of it as it happens, and so did it again this time. It was here in New York state, though a long way from where I am, but I took a trip up toward the Canadian border and got a chance to see it, and it was nice.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, that’s good. I made a trip since we’ve last spoke, but it was not nearly as good. I went down to West Virginia to visit some friends, and my daughter had diarrhea the entire time, so I became very, very familiar with the bathrooms along the route. And I mean, I think it was an overnight trip and we went through, I think eight different outfits. So not just because she’s a fashionista like me, but because there was poop on all of it.

Joe Patrice:

And now all of our listeners have to know about that

Kathryn Rubino:

Too. I mean, everybody poops, Joe.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. That is that book. That was an early family guy joke, which God, how Long’s family guy been on the air at this point?

Kathryn Rubino:

Is it still on the air?

Joe Patrice:

Oh yeah. I think it think it’s like 20 years. Yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

No Family guy is not still on the air. Yeah,

Joe Patrice:

I think

Kathryn Rubino:

So. Is it? I don’t know. I have not watched it in like 10.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, 22 seasons

Kathryn Rubino:

And counting. Yeah, I don’t believe it.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. No. Anyway, there was a joke about that book in the early seasons that, anyway, so yeah. No, that’s cool.

Kathryn Rubino:

No, no, it was not cool, but it was something I survived.

Joe Patrice:

Well, there’s that. I had something to say I can’t

Kathryn Rubino:

Even remember about poop.

Joe Patrice:

No,

Kathryn Rubino:

I didn’t realize this is going to make you so uncomfortable. I feel like I need to make more poop jokes.

Joe Patrice:

Well, I mean,

Kathryn Rubino:

It’s not even a joke. It’s just like the reality of an infant.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. So fair enough. I had some other thing. Oh, I was going to talk about loyal listeners. Watchers might’ve seen me on CNN last week.

Kathryn Rubino:

Oh, that’s right. Quote. I did happen to catch you on, told you Abby Phillip show.

Joe Patrice:

I did tell you I was doing it, so yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, I also follow your Twitter accounts. Fair enough. And you did mention it on X.

Joe Patrice:

That’s a good point. Yeah. If you follow me on the various social medias, you would’ve had a heads up that it was coming. Yeah, just to talk about some of these legal cases. I haven’t done TV in so many years. I had gotten into a routine as being the kind of regular Supreme Court news person that they would bring on Al Jazeera America to talk about new Supreme Court cases. And then Al Jazeera America went out of business about a month and a half after I started being that guy. So I haven’t really done much since. So yeah. Well, that’s nice. It was nice to flex that muscle again.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, that’s a good time.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, so maybe stay tuned. Maybe there’ll be more of those. We’ll see. Anything else? Good,

Kathryn Rubino:

That’s all. I got lots of poop. I do love how uncomfortable it makes you

Joe Patrice:

Just, I’m trying to class up the joints. I’m classing up the joint too. Yeah,

Kathryn Rubino:

I knew you were going to say that. You’re wildly predictable.

Joe Patrice:

What is also full of a bunch of poop. The US News and World Report Rankings that law schools came out this week and we got insights into where they think law schools are ranked and what do you think?

Kathryn Rubino:

It’s been a rough couple of years for US News Rankings. I am not particularly impressed by the Rankings this year or last year since they’ve sort of had to rejigger their formula. If you’ll recall, I think it was the end of 2022 when Yale pulled out of the Rankings, which led a cascade of other loft schools pulling out, I think it’s about 25% now that don’t provide information to US News. And there’s another small percentage that only provides information that’s otherwise publicly available. So they don’t do anything special for us News and the results are not inspiring. I don’t think there was. There’s some movement, I guess in this year’s Rankings, but they have Duke tied with Harvard Law at number four. And if there’s anything I think of when I think of Harvard Law School, fourth is not it.

Joe Patrice:

So let’s go through, so they’re in a tie, I believe with Penn and Virginia. All of them are tied. Let’s go through things that Duke is better than or tied with Harvard at. No, no, that’s not too tied. Let’s think of things that Duke should be considered better than Harvard at.

Kathryn Rubino:

I got one. Okay, basketball. Okay,

Joe Patrice:

So this ends the list.

Kathryn Rubino:

There’s That’s not fair. Duke’s football team is pretty okay,

Joe Patrice:

I guess. That’s fair. Sure. I mean compared to Harvard.

Kathryn Rubino:

Harvard, that’s what we are literally comparing it to.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. I’ve heard that their football team could actually win women’s basketball games too. Did she?

Kathryn Rubino:

Yes. Oh my gosh. You were

Joe Patrice:

Telling me about

Kathryn Rubino:

This. Yeah, really. I’ve never seen a piece of social media that was meant to promote a team that has made me hate Deim Moore. But the Duke football TikTok account had a thing where when they go and they interview players about the same question. There was a while and it was like, what’s your favorite Taylor Swift song for various different, but they asked everybody or not a bunch of people on the Duke football team, if you were playing one-on-one with Caitlin Clark who would win, and only one person admitted that Caitlyn Clark would win. And he was like 21, 20. Yeah. Everyone else was like 21 to nothing, 21 to 10. She can’t score on me. She can’t get past me in the paint. And I was like, she doesn’t have to. She can take it from the logo.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. So anyway, so maybe we’ll pump the brakes on Duke’s football team being better, but basketball team. Sure. That’s about it. This is a train wreck of Rankings and not just because NYU fell below Columbia for the first time in a while, which is weird.

Kathryn Rubino:

That’s not the weird part.

Joe Patrice:

Well, we’re going to say that that’s a pretty weird part, but clear down, tied for ninth NYU with Northwestern Michigan. So a lot of this does stem back to the Ill-advised decision that Yale made and that everyone followed of not providing information to US news, the information they were providing. A lot of it was the US News’s Rankings we never really loved in a lot of ways. We had a lot of criticisms of them, but they did fulfill a pretty useful niche of giving generally trustworthy senses of categories that schools are in.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yes. I think that that’s true, and I think it did a pretty good job of sorting law schools by how they’re perceived within the industry, which is very valuable because the truth is law students or prospective law students, they don’t have that information necessarily. Most of them don’t necessarily have family in it or are just unaware of the nuances of the industry. So having a ranking that says, this is how the industry that you want to be a part of thinks of the places that you’re thinking about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at is incredibly valuable.

Joe Patrice:

And if your position as a prospective student is, well, I’ve decided to go to Duke because it is so many places better than going to Columbia

Kathryn Rubino:

Or That’s a bad decision,

Joe Patrice:

You made a bad decision. It’s just a real arbitrary mess. It’s driven a lot by the Ill-advised decision not to give that data. And when that decision came out, it was, we never wrote huge fans of the US News Rankings in a lot of ways, but they did have these benefits. The argument for not giving this data was complete gibberish. It was this idea that, oh, well, we’re going to, it’s important for helping out students to not give this information. Part of the argument was that some of the financial information that they gave, they argued was unfairly benefiting rich students over poor students. Didn’t make any sense because it was basically trying to say that getting into questions of how much debt the school leaves you in are bad because rich students don’t have debt. So it gets a weird, but put aside the small number of super rich people in the world, the debt load is arguably the most important financial part of this decision.

Now, whether or not the industry cares about that, which frankly is why we have a different ranking, the Above, the Law Rankings have always existed and they always have schools like Penn and Duke much higher than some of these power schools. But there’s a reason because we specifically say our Rankings aren’t about which school is better in some sort of an objective way, but it’s about trying to evaluate how much debt you’re going to be in vis-a-vis what jobs you’re going to be able to get on the backend. And these are good deals for that. And you can take it for

Kathryn Rubino:

That purpose. For

Joe Patrice:

That purpose. I don’t think if you get told, I can go to Yale and they’re going to pay for it, you would not look at the Above, the Law Rankings and say, well, no, I think I’ll go to Penn instead. You wouldn’t do that. We wouldn’t encourage that. And that’s okay. The US news Rankings though purport to be the sort of thing where you would just look at whether you should or not, you would just look and say, well, this one’s higher, so I should go there and this is gibberish.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, I think that that’s true. I can remember a bunch of years ago now when someone asked, I’m deciding between these kind of elite schools, if the money’s about the same, what should I do? And I said, you should look at the US news ranking. And I think that you’re right that there used to be a really clear sort of lines in the Rankings. There was the very, very top Yale, Stanford, Harvard, that very, very top tier. Then there was the Columbia Chicago NYU line, which maybe they changed positions within those places, but those were sort of the next tier before you kind of hit the rest of the top 14 law schools. And then you kind of had the top 25 line and then you had sort of more of the tiers after that. And that was very, very true for a lot of years. And I think that it was a generational thing as well because somebody could have graduated from law schools 15 years before you, but those general lines were so well entrenched that maybe some law schools went up or some went down. But it was small enough differences and meaningful enough. It was a giant deal when somebody got into the top 14 because the top 14 had been the top

Joe Patrice:

14. Well, they didn’t do it for years

Kathryn Rubino:

And years. They had literally been since the creation of the, but now they are such gibberish that who yet there’s no longer a T 14. Yes, they have seeded that bit of branding US News has in order to try to recapture what they once had.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, I mean I guess technically there’s only one newcomer to the T 14 here, but

Kathryn Rubino:

Still, but my point is that that was the story for years and now this whole thing is such a mess. You have NYU at nine. What? Okay. LOL. You have Duke at four. Okay. Okay, sure. So

Joe Patrice:

I want to go back a little bit to, I’ve now refreshed myself on some of the incredibly terrible arguments that were made for not giving data to US news. One of the arguments was they wanted to get rid of some of the employment data because their concern was, well, US news counts as unemployed if somebody is working in a school funded job or something like that. And I was like, yeah, because unemployed, that’s why they do that. And the reason is, this dates back to the old days predating our time at Above, the Law, this was a huge problem, was that schools were attempting to game the system by throwing money at Unemployable graduates so that they would meet the 10 months, nine months after graduation are they employed, tick that off and then they cut them astray and they have nowhere to go and can’t work, but they appear to be working at that juncture and boost the Rankings. So that’s why US News stopped caring about it. Now we got Yale out here going like, well, we don’t want to participate in that. It’s just ridiculous.

Kathryn Rubino:

And the thing of it is that it really wasn’t a problem for the top lost schools. If you’re doing some school funded job, you’re probably doing some public interest work and you probably have a different career path, and that’s okay. And you’re probably fine. If you graduated from Yale and you have a school funded job for 10 months or a year or whatever it is, you’re probably fine. The problem was not at that tier. The problem was that the lower tiers, and these are people, these were schools that were pretending like there employment rate after graduation was palatable numbers in the sixties because they had tranches of students in funded jobs by the law school. And that is unfair to prospective law

Joe Patrice:

Students. So you’ve got these elite schools who’ve now ruined these Rankings by playing games with it so that they could take a moral stance about people working for the school. And all they’ve done is legitimized all of the diploma mill action that’s happening below it just really egregious. People should be more mad about these schools and their ridiculous, I’m not going to cooperate with US news stance anyway on that. Yeah, we’ve ranted for a bit. We have,

Anyway, those Rankings are out. The above law ones will be out in due course. McDermott will and Emery is Vault’s number one law firm for associate satisfaction three years running. Why? Because they’re doing big law. Better McDermott is about achieving excellence together. Their culture is collaborative and inclusive. McDermott is a place where you can build your dream legal career. Their focus on mentorship, training, and wellness supports you throughout your journey. In 20 23, 70 3% of our associates earned at or above Cravath bonus scale and 65% of those associates earned above the Cravath scale in 2023, all with a lower hour threshold. Want to see how your life could be better at McDermott head to careers.mwe.com/ Above, the Law. So we’re back law firm Sleepy time.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. Holidays that I didn’t know were a thing, but there’s apparently a World Sleep day.

Joe Patrice:

Oh

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. Well, Simpson Thatcher decided to celebrate it by giving their associates a package of sleep themed gifts, essential oils, sleep masks, pamphlets, and books about how to get good sleep and why sleep is so important. Unfortunately, it did not go over super well with the rank and file at the firm because it is in fact their jobs at Simpson Thacher that is causing them to have terrible sleep.

Joe Patrice:

So did they give a new billing code for sleep time? Because if that’s not what they’re doing, yeah,

Kathryn Rubino:

Then all this rings pretty hollow. Yeah, I think this story was first broke by our friends across the ponds role on Friday, and one of the quotes from an associate there is like, yeah, but it’s the corporate team that makes me stay up till three o’clock in the morning doing this, so what am I supposed to do then? And it made me think, I remember when I was an associate there, it was Ill you get sick occasionally. And I went home maybe like 10 or 11 o’clock at night and I fell asleep and had my phone. My Blackberry was next to me. That’s how old it was. It was a Blackberry and not an iPhone. I had it next to me and I just didn’t hear it buzz. And I got in trouble at six o’clock the next morning because they couldn’t find me at 2:00 AM and I was like, I am so sorry I was asleep.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, no, I mean I certainly entered the office on Thursday and left on Saturday as a fairly routine matter. Sometimes

Kathryn Rubino:

I used to have a blanket and pillow in my office that I could go to sleep underneath my desk.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, a full on Costanza there. Yeah, it

Kathryn Rubino:

Was a great idea.

Joe Patrice:

Especially

Kathryn Rubino:

If you have one of those L-shaped desks, that corner was deeper than you think it’s going to be.

Joe Patrice:

See, and that’s why, look, I’m a fan of revolutionizing the office as a place because we now live in a world where hybrid work is doable and probably preferable. That said, everyone gets their own office with a closing door was very critical for that sleep issue. I remember I was on a trial team at one point and the senior associate told me to just go to sleep in the office so that they could get me later. And I was like, I can’t really, because there’s also a deal happening and I have an office mate right now, so I can’t sleep in my office.

Kathryn Rubino:

And maybe it’s also true that as hybrid becomes more accepted, that expectation that you are there is less. But I think it also supercharges the whole, I missed the call because I was sleeping and for me it was two o’clock in the morning, but maybe it’s you’ve been working for a lot of hours and it’s two o’clock in the afternoon because you’ve been working for 15 hours and you fall asleep when you fall asleep. But if you’re not in the office and sort of able to deal with the blowback immediately, like, oh no, I’m here. You just couldn’t find me, I’m here. I think that not being able to immediately get ahold of somebody at two o’clock in the afternoon or whenever you happen to be able to catch your five minutes of sleep seems worse when you’re not physically in the office. Right.

Joe Patrice:

Well anyway, so nice try Simpson Thatcher, but

Kathryn Rubino:

So we going to a miss. Not all of ’em are going to be winners.

Joe Patrice:

Alright, so we talked last week. We had Liz Dion. We talked about a lot of various Trumpy related things among them. Trump had managed to get a bond from a place out west, a billionaire who apparently made their money, subprime car loans agreed to put up the 170 or whatever million that it had been reduced to. That was immediately returned by the court for having a series of clerical errors. That has now metastasized into even more. I think when we last spoke about it, there were some concerns about this. They have gotten way worse. It seems as though the financial documents for this company, it doesn’t even have enough assets to cover this. Well, it’s not great. There’s a requirement in New York anyway, if you’re posting one of these sorts of appeal bonds that you agree as the surety company that you are going to be liable for this.

And basically it’s a shifting of responsibility. If the person loses their appeal, you’re on the hook. You have to go after that person. You got to send dog the bounty hunter or whatever out to get that person and get the money from them. And that exists for a lot of good reasons to protect the money available to execute the judgment on behalf of the victims. And it takes the state out of the job of having to go chase people down. You’ve agreed to cover somebody so you agree that you’re the one who has to get the money back from them if you’re ever going to get the money back from them. This agreement apparently has as a condition that if Trump loses his appeal, trump’s on the hook for it, which is the opposite of what New York requires. That seems like a problem it seems from the finances that the company doesn’t have enough reserves to cover any of this sort of stuff.

In response to that, Liz wrote an article about this. In response to that, the representatives of this company said, well, we are not a New York company, so we are not bound by those except they’re underwriting a New York. But that was the first problem was that they weren’t registered. That was the first thing the court sent back. It seems like a real mess. And then the folks at ProPublica, it was ProPublica, right? I can’t remember. Probably, yeah, who’ve been took a break from finding every time Saam Alito and Clarence Thomas do something wrong, they found that it seems as though this company was willing to, and in negotiations with Trump about producing a bond like this to cover the full amount, the full half billion, which since it doesn’t appear as though they have enough money to do the reduced amount is weird. But also it raises the issue that the only reason it got reduced was that Trump’s folks, the legal team, went into the court and said they couldn’t find anybody willing to even entertain giving the half billion. Which whether or not these people actually have a serious ability to cover that they were willing to try, you have at

Kathryn Rubino:

Least an obligation to your filing when that becomes true. So

Joe Patrice:

That does seem as though the Trump legal team just ignored that when they made the request based on the idea that nobody was willing to do it, which certainly seems like you’re not being candid. It is also true that the Trump legal team may not have been involved in all the right hand, left hand, what the left hand’s doing kind of conversations. But it certainly raises some concerns if you’re in the Trump orbit and worried about sanctions or anything like that.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yes, yes. I imagine that would be a concern if I was doing that.

Joe Patrice:

This hearing on the issue is going to get

Kathryn Rubino:

Ugly, I think fast.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. I did see though that the New York Post has taken the bold stance. The New York Post editorial board though, took the opposite. I mean,

Kathryn Rubino:

That’s where I always go for,

Joe Patrice:

It’s weird because everybody else is, this is incomprehensible, this makes no sense. This is gibberish. These are real concerns with this bond. And they took the stance that it’s more nitpicking about irrelevant nonsense that we’re questioning it. And their reason being that, I mean of course they’re going to have the money, right? So why should we worry about this?

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, I mean that seems wildly

Joe Patrice:

Naive. Well, I was thinking about it and I wonder if to some extent it fits their theory of the case as a whole. Right? Because the theory of the case as a whole from Trump’s perspective is it doesn’t matter that they tried to defraud lenders by giving false valuations because at the end of the day, Trump paid these loans off and so therefore there was no put aside that the banks could very easily have gotten more money by charging higher rates if they thought there was a increased risk. So that would be a victim, but also the lack of a victim in certain civil cases matters. There has to be a harm when you’re talking about some of these regulations. The reason these regulations exist is because there are certain behaviors that are bad regardless of whether or not they cause harm. Whenever I hear somebody make this argument, I respond with, the example of that would be like saying that a Ponzi scheme is totally cool so long you stay ahead of it.

Ponzi scheme being like what Madoff did where you’re taking in money and pretending there’s more money and you’re just stealing it from new clients to pay out old ones. If you stay ahead of it and you keep bringing in more new clients than you have old clients cashing out, you can keep that in the air forever and it would technically have no victims getting paid off, but it would still be wildly illegal. And that’s really the better corollary to what Trump’s situation is when they say there were no victims. It’s like, no, the fact that he paid all this off doesn’t change. He engaged the court found engaged in this risky behavior that opened up financial institutions to major harms that we have laws to prevent them from having to be exposed to. Yeah, sure. Anyway, sorry that was just

Kathryn Rubino:

Not about the bonds, but certainly plays into it.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, but if you’re the New York Post and your whole vision of this case is there are no victims, then your take is why does anybody care about this bond? It’ll eventually get paid, I’m sure of it. That’s the whole mentality of all of this

Kathryn Rubino:

Remains to be seen what will eventually be done about this suspicious looking bond situation.

Joe Patrice:

So the hearing on that, I believe is scheduled for April 22nd. So we got a little bit more time,

Kathryn Rubino:

Got a little bit of time wondering what’ll happen. And theoretically by that time, the jury selection will have already begun in the Trump hush money case, which is currently scheduled for April 15th.

Joe Patrice:

A lot of things going on. Alright, well I think that’s it. There we go. Thanks everybody for listening. You should subscribe to the show, leave reviews, write things, give stars. It all helps. You should be reading Above the Law obviously. So you read these and other stories before we chat about them here. You can follow the social medias. It’s at ATL blog. I’m at Joseph Patrice, she’s at Kathryn one, the Numer one, number one over at Blue Sky. The only difference is that I’m Joe Patrice over there. You should be checking out other shows. She’s the host of the jabot. I’m a guest of the Legal Tech Week journalist Round table. There is a panoply of other shows from the Legal Talk Network. Oh wait, wait, isn’t Panoply like a podcast company or something like that? Is that a thing? Maybe I shouldn’t say panoply. A wide variety of a myriad there. You Gogo,

Kathryn Rubino:

Something like that. You’ve got vocabulary words, you just use them all.

Joe Patrice:

I don’t think that was all of them, but

Kathryn Rubino:

Several of them.

Joe Patrice:

Fair. And so with all that said, we will check back in with you next week.

Kathryn Rubino:

Peace.

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