Joe Patrice is an Editor at Above the Law. For over a decade, he practiced as a...
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021....
Published: | January 29, 2025 |
Podcast: | Above the Law - Thinking Like a Lawyer |
Category: | News & Current Events |
Trump administration slashes jobs for young lawyers months before they officially start sparking a scramble for jobs. The Justice Department followed up that news by terminating career DOJ lawyers for the sin of having worked on Trump’s criminal cases. One Biglaw firm informs its associates that they’re not getting their full bonuses based on office attendance. While we’re at it… should lawyers rely on law firm bonuses anyway? And a professor gets disciplined for political comments raising the debate: what exactly constitutes a violation of academic freedom?
Joe Patrice:
Welcome to another edition of Thinking Like A Lawyer. I’m Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I am joined by Chris Williams, as usual, and we are, it’s just us. This week we are here to talk about the big events in legal news from the week that has transpired. First off, we’ll have a little bit of a small talk to show that we’re people and not one of those AI driven podcasts. So you hear so much about, oh, there, it’s, we can now begin our small talk session. How have you been?
Chris Williams:
I’m pretty good. Good. What was it? Sunday, which feels like a week ago, I saw this movie’s called Soundtrack to a Coup D’etat. Have you heard about it?
Joe Patrice:
I have not.
Chris Williams:
Yeah, so it’s like it’s documentary on, I’d say it’s on the uses of jazz as a technique of soft power during World War Two and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba maybe may not, it wouldn’t be World War II then. I think he got killed later than that. But yeah, it was really good. It was really good. It was two hours and 30 minutes, which feels long for a documentary, but as documentaries go, it was a quick two hours and 30 minutes, if you know what I mean. It was engaging. Didn’t fall asleep during it, which I was surprised about, but it was really good.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah. All right. That’s awesome. I’ve been traveling. I just got back from San Antonio, so I don’t really have a ton to, it was awful in that I was, well, no, I mean, it was, San Antonio was fine, but I was supposed to get back a day earlier and my flight didn’t work out, and so I had to catch the next one in the morning and it just became a slog. But here now and ready to have a conversation about everything, this is immediately post the deep seat crash. So I don’t know if society’s going to survive now that AI can be cheap.
Chris Williams:
Listen, if you had Nvidia stock, sorry, I remember it was a couple months ago. I was talking to a guy who does tech generally. He was like, yo, this shit is so safe. So much is, so much is based on Nvidia being a constant, it is safe to invest your money here. I put all my money in Nvidia and I want to reach out and be like, hope you’re breathing, hope you’re good. But I’m like, I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want to hear that from me. I probably won’t. But it is at the forefront of my thinking.
Joe Patrice:
I mean, it has definitely taken a hit for all of these companies as well as crypto, which I saw one person on social media put it correctly, crypto Bitcoin, which is three tech stocks in a trench coat, and as tech fell, so did Bitcoin. I saw that there’s some venture capital entities investing in tech that they think this might be an existential threat for them. They may now have to go completely under because they put so much money in these American based AI companies, which,
Chris Williams:
And the wild thing is, what is it? Deep seek. It was like $5.5 million and it’s open source. So orders of magnitude’s cheaper and orders of magnitudes easier to access. You got to love it.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah. All right. Well, we can get going on our regularly scheduled conversation, which let’s begin first with the DOJ at the Department of Justice. Things are happening. The actual story from last week that we were going to talk about and will I think bleed into some breaking news as we go with this. The original story we’re going to talk about is the DOJ under this new administration has informed in just like a series of impersonal robotic emails informed all of the graduating law students who were expected to join the DOJ honor program, which is not just, the honors program is not just main justice. It includes the IRS and CFPB, Homeland Security, all these folks who gave up their opportunity to go back to big law firms to take on public service jobs, which the honors program offers some entree to full-time work too. And we also learned that several people who were taking summer associate gigs at the Department of Justice also got messages like this. They were just told, yeah, you’re no longer needed. People. I have heard from people who have moved locations in order to take on these jobs because they were expected to start. But yeah, it’s causing real turmoil for young lawyers who have been let go in the pursuit of government efficiency.
Chris Williams:
That’s what you get for trying to serve your country instead of just cranking out billables at big law firm. But it is a shame. It is a shame for the folks that were
Joe Patrice:
Willing to, yeah, it’s bad and it robs the government pipeline of people with talent, which is what you want to do if your goal is to destroy the government, which I guess is part of this, but in particular losing folks. Look, you understand that the Republicans don’t like the IRS, but to lose folks going into places like Homeland Security and the main justice, it really does. The FDIC got hit. The people who just say, protect your savings account, were getting hit with losses. So begin your bank run as I put it from, it’s a wonderful life. Begin the bank run. Now, I don’t trust that. So we’ve lost a lot of those folks, which is problematic, is causing scrambling amongst law schools. I’ve seen several law schools begin outreach processes trying to find these graduates who they had settled with jobs. They’re trying to get last minute gigs for all of their graduates who’ve been impacted by this.
Chris Williams:
And as a person that thought I had mean, this is more when I was still in school, but I thought I had a summer position, and then basically I got ghosted. It sucks. Like finally, I can stop the search, finally, I can take a breath. I can plan out where I want to live, what I’m going to do, the what mile next few X amount of times going to look like, and I have that crash on you, especially after at a time where there’s now less opportunity to get back in the market. It sucks.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah, no, definitely. It’s real bad. We have now learned also that this is spiraled a little bit more from there. The administration has now fired a bunch of career DOJ employees for the crime of having been assigned to some of Trump’s criminal cases. So they’re, according to the administration, they’re no longer able to be trusted because they Aren’t
Chris Williams:
Aren’t loyalists.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah, they did their, they’re not even people with decision making power necessarily. They’re people who did the job of writing briefs that said, you can’t actually steal America’s nuclear codes and give them to the Saudis, but too bad that they did their job there Anyway, troubled times for the government. We’ll see where folks land. Good luck on the search. Hopefully we can find more places, but it is late in the cycle, which makes it rough.
All right. Not that private sector work is all that rosy, I guess is what we’ll say. We had a story last week about Wilmer Hale law firm who a lot of law firms folks move towards a hybrid work schedule back in the day during Covid and saw record profits while people were working from home. Most firms have moved to a situation where the office is now a place you have to go, but you don’t necessarily go as often as you used to. At Wilmer Hale, we got a tip that a bunch of associates have learned that they will not be getting as much of their bonus as they expected. They will be docked 25% for not being in the office enough. There’s not really a hard and fast rule or anything, and according to our tipster, nobody had informed them beforehand that this could happen, and B, that it would be 25%. Yet here they
Chris Williams:
Are. Yeah, I mean, there was some different wording of what we got in tips. One person was like, oh, we were told earlier in the year that this could happen, but they weren’t told this amount of money that could be docked from their pay. There was some notice, but it wasn’t meaningful enough to where a person could really plan around it. Because granted, there might’ve been some people that are like, you know what? I don’t want to be near Thomas. I’m going to stay home, take the 25%. But they might’ve thought like, oh, some doesn’t mean a quarter.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah, I mean, that’s a great point. Let’s talk about that. A quarter of your bonus is a really brutal amount to lose, especially if we’re talking about people in the middle of the hierarchy and one would assume, I guess you don’t know everything, but we’ve had some limited survey results that suggest that the most junior people actually do going to the office a lot because for the normal reason, they don’t know what their job is. So they like going to the office and figuring it out. The people who are more likely to be taking advantage of these hybrid situations and staying home more are people in that mid to senior associate range who know exactly what they’re doing, can get it done more efficiently from home and just don’t want to waste their time commuting when they can bill the hours they need and get the job done faster and more efficiently. And for those folks, bonuses go up as you get more seniors. So 25% is a brutal amount of money to take away from them.
Chris Williams:
You think it’s still worth it though?
Joe Patrice:
Mean? Well, that’s a great question. Is there a chance, chance,
Chris Williams:
How much of people’s either salary or bonus would they pay for the freedom to work from home? I feel like that’s the capitalist way to frame it. What is the cost you’re willing, what’s the premium willing to place on not having to leave your house to still bill thousands of hours, but you get to choose where you’re confined?
Joe Patrice:
Yeah, that’s the line that a fine just means legal for a price, right?
Chris Williams:
Rich people can park wherever they want. Yeah.
Joe Patrice:
So yeah, no, that’s a great point. Is there, and I’ve heard of some smaller firms engaging in this discussion and having the talk. If you want to be fully remote, we can do that for 80% or whatever, but yeah, what is the price? And it seems like these firms who are exacting this pound of flesh are assuming that it’s a deterrent and going forward people will change, but maybe
Chris Williams:
It may be an incentive to lateral.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah, well, I mean I think it’s definitely an incentive to lateral and look, we’ve talked, there are a lot of boutiques who believe, because boutiques don’t try to train young lawyers, they get people who are laterals who already have experience, and we’ve seen a lot of those firms orient themselves around the, you don’t have to be in the office model, which is very attractive to folks. Now what happens at the big law level, they’re really trying to push getting back into the office. You kind of need it for the training purposes, and I fully respect that. I think the office can be a very good thing. I just don’t think, I don’t necessarily believe that five days is necessary, but something’s necessary and that’s fine, but you need to set clear expectations and you can’t last minute take away 25% of their money. Clark Griswold style, they’ve relied on it. They planned around it.
Chris Williams:
Well, a bonus.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah,
Chris Williams:
I hear you. But it’s like a bonus is it’s functionally expected, but I think it also, it acts as if it is a gratuity. You can’t really feels worth the plan around a bonus. So I’m just pushing against the contractual framing you went for.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah, no, actually that’s a great point, and that is the Christmas vacation plot line is relying on something that’s always happened but is technically a bonus. I had this discussion kind of a disagreement over articles several years ago with another legal commentator about just how much we should think of bonuses as something that’s baked in. And I think the structure of the industry is such, and the expectations are such that I think getting a bonus is built in. Firms use that as that is an expectation that should be considered table stakes, if you will. Now how much that bonus is, that will fluctuate year in, year out, whether or not people match the millbank cravath or whoever it is who moves first that is up in the air. But the idea that you get something and the idea that something is within kind of a range that we’ve seen reflected for the last 30, 40 years, I think is expected. You aren’t necessarily owed the same amount year in and year out, but it’s something,
Chris Williams:
I mean gut check, I don’t like that we’re lawyers. Words mean something. I Feel like what you’re describing is a mandated gratuity, which feels like a contradiction in terms I think it should be, for example, because it’s a tip. The bonuses, when we do bonus announcements and all that, we’re just saying how law firms are tipping their associates, right?
Joe Patrice:
Well, one tipping is bad and should be illegal anyway, but
Chris Williams:
Go on as should bonuses, but whatever it is an unexpected gratuity, but it’s an unexpected thing, great. But if I’m a server and you don’t give me my 20%, which is I say that’s the market matching, I’m looking at you like what’s wrong? But it’s not a thing that I can’t sue you for breach of contract. So if you want to do a thing where you’re like, Hey, there has to be some sort of market thing that is added at the end, don’t call it a bonus. Call it what it is. We can find the new word for it.
Joe Patrice:
So yeah, putting aside the reasons why tipping is awful and its history, which was largely
Chris Williams:
Slavery,
Joe Patrice:
Well, black folks largely the legacy of slavery to give newly freed black folk to get paid less. But putting all that aside, I think the issue with bonuses within the legal industry is that it’s to say you will be compensated, you’re going to be compensated far more than your base, but that there’s an amount that is dependent upon the firm’s results of the year and that we don’t want to lock in case we have a economic collapse that year. And so that bonus, I don’t think of as a tip as much as it is a flex, a flex comp that is supposed to adjust based on how the firms have done and what the year has been like, what profits are like, et cetera.
Chris Williams:
But they’re associates, not equity partners. That’s the way equity partners will get paid.
Joe Patrice:
Well, no equity partners are just going to get paid on what happens generally. But
Chris Williams:
That’s what I’m saying. If you’re saying, oh, there’s a certain amount of money that associates will get, but the bonus will be reflected on how well the firm is doing. That just sounds like a decaf version of how partners are compensated. Depending on how well or how poorly the firm does that year.
Joe Patrice:
Well abstracted out, that’s how everything is, right? Your salary is reflective of the, no,
Chris Williams:
Not necessarily. It could be the case that you are given, let’s say a flat amount, and even if the firm does bad, you’re given a flat amount and it’s on the firm to catch up with their books.
Joe Patrice:
But the issue is in the abstract,
Chris Williams:
If McDonald’s does good or not, I’m still getting paid. What is it? Minimum wage, right?
Joe Patrice:
But the issue is you get fired if they have a bad run. So ultimately all compensation is reflective of how the company involved is doing. In this instance though, I think I consider bonuses within the legal industry to be, we know we owe you more than base the amount more than base. We are going to leave flexible. So rather than laying off a bunch of people when it’s not perfect or whatever, we can adjust what that is for everybody and therefore function like that. So you go in with the expectation that whatever the base pay is, you will be getting something more. And that will be dependent floating depending on the year, which you’re right, maybe the word bonus is a weird term there and there’s some profit sharing or something else needs to be,
Chris Williams:
Which sounds more like partner equity partnering.
Joe Patrice:
Well, no profit sharing sounds like non partner. That’s what you give to people who are not partners. Profit sharing. Well, it is the wording for partners, it’s profits. They get ’em. They’re not sharing, they just get ’em if they own the thing. Right? Well, I mean, I guess income partners, but
Chris Williams:
Shares maybe
Joe Patrice:
Well shares would be what the partners are getting. They own some share of the pool of profits that they get. And then profit sharing is usually
Chris Williams:
No, no, no.
Joe Patrice:
When you give it to somebody else,
Chris Williams:
What if the associates were able to have a share of the company, not as great as that partners would have, but will effectively reflect the same thing that I think you’re trying to get at, right? If the company has a great year, the payout that the associates get would be better than if the company had a bad year, but they still have their base salary.
Joe Patrice:
So there was a firm that did that back in the day that really functioned in that way. Gay had even at the associate level, some tied to numbers directly,
But I think the reason the industry has settled on this is because they also, in addition to their own profitability, they’re also trying to utilize to compete with Keep up with the Joneses days or Cavas. I know, and it’s not Jones Day. They do that black box stuff, but the cavas and all. And so even if the profits and the share wouldn’t necessarily reflect it, they may overpay in order to make sure that they aren’t losing laterals to other places because they want to stay with the market. So I think it’s more complex than just shares. But you’re right. There was definitely a firm, and it’s momentarily escaping me what it was, but that used to do that. I think that firm has since merged and disappeared. But I don’t know,
Chris Williams:
Because thinking about it, and just to push back against what you’re saying, I hear you, but I think you could also do that with shares. You could have an incentive of saying, giving more than what would be expected. So the competing thing would be who would giving a more desirable chunk of the company a point where I worked at Amazon for a bit and they had the option there while we were working at Amazon, we would get our base hourly pay, but we could also either buy shares of the company or shares could be given to us as rewards. I’m not sure if they still do that, but it’s not. But I say that to say it’s not like it isn’t that much of an institutional anomaly maybe with law, big law firms, but I think that could do it, and it would get away from this notion of like, oh, here you go, when you get the Christmas card and there’s money in there, but you have to play the dance. Yeah, this bonus release is just everybody playing the dance while they’re making base pay of six figures. And it’s goofy. And I think if more people will acknowledge that it was goofy, there might be a more stable way of talking about it rather than just waiting.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah, fair. I mean, it is interesting. And again, a lot of things in law, it’s this way just because tradition cravat decided it was this way at one point, and this is what we do now. It may not necessarily be the most efficient, but it’s how everybody acts as a way of keeping the lateral market stable. All right. So you had a story this last week about goings on down south.
Chris Williams:
You could have used a different introduction. That sounds inappropriate. Anyway, so there was a firm, oh, that was school, sorry, I think it was LSU and there was a
Joe Patrice:
In the South Mind channel.
Chris Williams:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was very itchy down there. There was a professor, a law professor, that basically got taken away from teaching their classes over sharing political comments. It’s not exactly sure what was said, but is short, is that this is a tenured professor, and the idea of tenure was that, I don’t know, you’d be able to speak your mind, share your political thoughts without worry of being either censored or punished by the administration. It’s a weird step. Still don’t know what he said, but it’s newsworthy regardless. And it could have been, I mean, me and Joe had conversations about this privately. He could have been like, fascism is cool and great. That’s still a political opinion as long as it’s backed up or what have you. If there’s, it might be some argument relying on eugenics or I don’t know, some other way of prioritizing life might not like it, might think it’s abhorrent, but it’s still a take that should be able to be discussed in the class, at least with folks that have tenure. Right. And this isn’t the first time this happened. There was a professor, I want to say back in May, who was tenured or fired over sharing a post on Instagram that criticized the state of Israel. That’s fair game. This has been fair game for decades. It looks like it’s being a weird signal for the strengths and reliability of tenure as a way of protecting faculty and campus speech.
Joe Patrice:
So I’m less of a fan of tenure as a protection for speech, largely because I think the role of tenure and academic freedom is to allow scholars to engage in research that might not be popular. If you wanted to put together back to the fascism is great example. If you wanted to spend your time and energy writing a defense of your ode to Carl Schmidt, right, this defense of fascism and get it peer reviewed and published, you should have the ability to do that. I think that version of academic freedom, I think is different than saying I’m an academic, so I have freedom. You have freedom to do the academic work, not that because you’re an academic, you have freedom. And I bring this up because I think we have to have some sort of way of dealing with, we’ve had and reported on professors who use racial slurs in class. We’ve talked about Amy Wax and the various things she’s done. What is that distinction? Because Amy Wax is a good example. Somebody who has publicly spoken derogatorily of her students who has had these incidents in class where she said things that are problematic, brought white supremacists to campus, which certainly was what really ultimately got the administration to punish her despite her tenure. How do we finesse these distinctions? And I think you are allowed to say certain things. What?
Chris Williams:
Well, I feel like you’re branching, so I want to
Joe Patrice:
Oh, yeah.
Chris Williams:
So the first thing you said where you see tenure as being a protection for academic research more so than a protection to speak about. So I don’t see how that would work out in practice. So here’s the example. Let’s say I’m Joe Schmo, Patrice, and I am a, you don’t even need
Joe Patrice:
The schmo then You could have just said it.
Chris Williams:
It was a bonus, Joe.
Joe Patrice:
Oh yeah.
Chris Williams:
Okay. I’m Joe Amo, Patrice, and I’m a professor and I write heavily on rhetoric. My research is on rhetoric. My tenure protects the things I say about rhetoric as a researcher, but I’m also an instructor. I instruct on the thing I am the lead expert in. Right? Sure. So the speech about the things researched or I could be researching should also be protected. It would be weird if I was a professor and I was like, oh, read my stuff. Can you talk about it? Nah.
Joe Patrice:
Right. So that’s a great point. And that opens I think, two issues. I think one is, yeah, it depends on what’s being taught. If we’re having a contracts class and this guy’s saying a bunch of stuff that doesn’t relate to that, then that isn’t that. But let’s use your example, which I think is a good one about you should be able to talk about the things you study, which I agree with. What about the Eugene Valic situation where he says, I teach free speech, so that means I can use racial slurs whenever I want. How do we embrace that situation? I think you do have to have some sort of a gap.
Chris Williams:
Well, I’m not concretely aware with that example, but as you framed it, I think that does make sense. I would understand why a free speech professor would be talking about the use of slurs in class. The practice of that doesn’t necess say that they use them.
Joe Patrice:
Well, that’s what I say.
Chris Williams:
I can talk about. I can be in a class on gender and talk about the prevalence of sexism without calling somebody a B. Its not that because it’s more than just a freedom of expression issue. Also, and here’s the high theory term, don’t be a dick. There’s no need to be a dick or an asshole. We’re inclusive here while you’re teaching in front of people. So I think that particular example of blah, blah, blah, but I wanted to be able to say the N word in front of my crowd. That’s different. And that’s getting shoehorned into the free speech discussion. But what the article I was talking about is a squarely, this appears to be facially a campus free speech tenure issue. So I think that the conversation about like, well, what about when it’s not? That is interesting, but it’s also not the thing at the forefront.
Joe Patrice:
Well see. But that’s the issue. If you get to the point where you say tenure protects them from being able to say whatever, or even if you limit,
Chris Williams:
Which is not what I’m saying. I’m saying tenure,
Joe Patrice:
Hold on, slow down, I’m going point by point, say whatever that, and then you go, well, no, they can say about the subject matter. They’re an expert in You add that caveat to it, which I think makes sense. But then now you’ve got how do you police within that they’re an expert in because you’ve got somebody saying, well, I’m an expert in free speech, which means I can do this. There’s constant points of failure.
Chris Williams:
I hear that. I’d also want to say, I think the example where I gave this completely fictional character, Joe Smoke, Patrice as an expert, and he’s talking about his areas of expertise. That was an example, but not like the categorical one. So for example,
Joe Patrice:
I also don’t understand why your example is not Chris Schmo Williams. You could have just used you. Oh,
Chris Williams:
Because I’m not some shmo Joe, and it rhymes. If it rhymes. It’s right.
Joe Patrice:
Fair.
Chris Williams:
But no, also, I do think that, I think just obviously the case academia is interdisciplinary. So if there is an expert on free speech who was talking about, say there was, I think it was a Louisiana governor, was to say something about, oh, this person that is not tenured, that spoke out against Trump, he should be punished. That person who’s having a conversation on free speech may also be, who is a free speech expert, could also say something meaningful about say something that comes from the political science department who was talking about like, oh, is this a separation of powers issue, blah, blah, blah. There is cross fertilization of ideas. Tenure should be, and I think historically has been broader than just the subject expert speaking on their area of subject expertise. And sometimes that looks like Slavoj talking about psychoanalysis and string theory. Sure. Is that always great? Maybe, maybe not. But if you can’t have those kinds of conversations in the academy, where can you have them?
Joe Patrice:
Well, right. So that’s the thing
Chris Williams:
Without fearing government or state censorship or censorship,
Joe Patrice:
I guess. So it’s important to note, I ultimately agree with you on this guy shouldn’t lose their job. The question is just how do we justify it? And I worry, I’ve always been reticent to extend academic freedom and tenure to cover these situations where I think is more of a general, it’s retaliatory for their employer to go after them for expressing political opinions. It’s more where I want to go. I feel once you go down the road of trying to justify everything as academic, you open the door to the Amy Waxes of the world to exploit that in a way that I think if you keep that out of it, it’s interesting and I think it probably is a conversation longer than this show. I think it’s a conversation that academia is having right now even, Because That’s the thing, what happens when you start extending a shield like that? What mischief comes along with it?
Chris Williams:
I do. I would say this is obviously the case, but given our current political climate, probably not
Joe Patrice:
Sure.
Chris Williams:
I think McCarthyism is bad. I feel like if there are being some professors being blackballed for having thoughts about communism or fascism or what have you, that is a bad place to be in for the sake of people being able to take cafeteria bits of ideas what universities are for. So I think that that should be the thing that when we think about the importance of tenure or if not tenure, if something comes in its place to protect the type of discussions that people want to have or be able to have. I think that’s, that should be the bedrock. We don’t want to be in a position where it is book burning for speech.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah, the issue is just, you got to remember that Amy wax straight up calls, I think she’s used the term McCarthyism. She straight up thinks that telling her she can’t bring white supremacists to class is the woke McCarthyism trying to slow her down. So that’s the world. That’s the mindset she has. And so anyway, we’ve been going on for a long time. We will inevitably have more opportunity to talk about this. I think as your article notes, this is probably something that’s going to keep coming up. So thanks everybody for listening. You should be listening to the show. Well, you are listening to the show. You should be subscribed to the show so you get new episodes when they come out. Reviews,
Chris Williams:
You should be telling your friends
Joe Patrice:
Yes,
Chris Williams:
If you enjoy this show. Word of mouth.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah, tell your friends, make sure that that’s happening. Write reviews, stars, all of that helps. Get more notice of this. Also check out the ot. Another podcast, Catherine host. You should check out I’m a guest on the Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable. If you’re into legal Tech, you should check out other shows by the Legal Talk Network. You can read these and other stories before we talk about ’em here on Above the Law. You can follow on social media Above the Law dot com. On Blue Sky, I’m at Joe Patrice, Chris is at Writes for Rent,
Chris Williams:
And you can send us tips@tipsatbuffalo.com.
Joe Patrice:
That is correct. You can send us tips via the emails at that location, which is useful. We really rely on your tips. Unlike some media organizations that have like 150 reporters, which they probably don’t anymore because they’re laying everybody off because media’s in a tough spot. We are very lean and that’s how we get to keep doing what we do. But that means we really rely on you all tipping us when news is happening.
Chris Williams:
And personal plug, if you or someone knows what that professor said, can you tell us the That would be nice because that way it could flesh out the conversation between me and Schmo over here. I like the nature of censorship.
Joe Patrice:
Absolutely. Alright, I think that’s it. We’ll talk to you all later.
Chris Williams:
Peace.
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Above the Law - Thinking Like a Lawyer |
Above the Law's Joe Patrice, Kathryn Rubino and Chris Williams examine everyday topics through the prism of a legal framework.