Biglaw Surrender Fallout Continues

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Patrice:

Well, it’s another addition to Thinking Like A Lawyer.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yes, it is. That is factually accurate.

Joe Patrice:

I’m Joe Patrice from Above the Law, joined by Kathryn Rubino and Chris Williams.

Chris Williams:

Why do you sound so sad?

Joe Patrice:

Because that’s every episode now we’ve actually been talked to by our producers. Be like, do you have to be so dismal all the time? And I tried. I really tried to come up with something fun.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, it’s 2025. Did you?

Joe Patrice:

I tried. I really looked. But here we are.

Kathryn Rubino:

We’re sad songs.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, no, it is. Yet another week. At

Chris Williams:

Least half the listeners just shut off the episode. You know that, right? So for the rest of you here, thank you. We appreciate your endurance.

Joe Patrice:

See, do you think that’s true? See, I weirdly think that our audience is based on a lot of people who enjoy kind of the masochistic level of

Kathryn Rubino:

To doom scrolling. But for your

Joe Patrice:

Ears. Yeah. We’re audio doom scrolling.

Chris Williams:

Look, they work in doom. Well, they’re doing enough self-harm. They’re working anyway. Y’all know the drill legal. We can review. He’s Joe, I’m Chris. That’s Kathryn. We start with small talk.

Joe Patrice:

Wait, wait, what do we start with? Small talk. See, that’s fun. That provides our dose of fun.

Kathryn Rubino:

I did something out of the ordinary. I was in Spokane, Washington, which is a delightful place to be. I was on the campus of Gonzaga for the National Debated Tournament and wow, what a delightful little campus.

Joe Patrice:

Oh, that’s nice.

Kathryn Rubino:

It was so cute. A little chilly in the morning when we walked around, but warmed right on up. But cold in the jean jacket, deja kind of weather. Beautiful trees. There was a river right outside our hotel window. Man. I felt very naturey from a distance.

Joe Patrice:

I was in Chicago for the 40th anniversary of the a BA tech show.

Kathryn Rubino:

See that’s work related.

Joe Patrice:

Oh, that’s so much fun. So much fun. There was a lake right outside Lake Michigan, I think, and by, I think I know for a fact it was called Lake Michigan at one point, but I don’t know if it’s been changed to

Kathryn Rubino:

Lake of America. Lake of America.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. So I don’t know, but at one point was Lake Michigan.

Kathryn Rubino:

Amazing. Amazing. Well, did you travel anywhere fun, Chris?

Chris Williams:

I think all my journeys were mental. I mostly stayed in the house. I cleaned up the house a little bit. There’s a lot of morbid that needs to maybe be clean, but I did that a little bit, went on a walk, which was nice. I decided that it’s feeling cycling outside. It’s warm enough to where I want to get back on my bike and wear those goofy booty shorts that all the cyclists who are serious wear. Nice. So if you see some dreads and some legs outside, why are you near me? I’m assuming most listeners aren’t where I am. Actually,

Joe Patrice:

Please stop stalking me.

Kathryn Rubino:

I want to pick up on this cleaning thing because it is spring cleaning season. And man, what I wouldn’t give for 12 hours alone in my house to just clean everything without my baby being right behind me, undoing it all. Even though I know that even if I had said 12 hours, it would take her about 26 minutes to undo all those hours of work. But man, it would feel really good for the first seven of those minutes.

Chris Williams:

Yeah, that’s fair. Whenever people describe the joys of being a parent, I’m just like, I’ve had enough joy in my life. This is good. I mean,

Kathryn Rubino:

Okay, chapel Rowan over there. But no, there are obviously highs and lows to any journey and that includes parenthood. But I’ll tell you, I was traveling this weekend without my kid for the first time really? Where I’ve been away from her for an extended amount of time and I really missed her. I got home at two o’clock in the morning. I was like, where’s my baby? Oh, she’s asleep. I can’t wake her up. I have to be responsible. But I really wanted to just cuddle her, but I was like, oh, I’m not going to disturb her. That’s selfish.

Chris Williams:

That’s adorable. Hopefully that positivity will warm up the listeners for the next 25 to three hours. It feels like we’re discovering what’s going on in big law.

Joe Patrice:

Yep. There we go. Alright. Actually on that note at one of the things they have at tech show is there’s a booth at the entrance

Chris Williams:

Booth. Oh no. Got to go now.

Joe Patrice:

There’s a booth at the opening of Exhibit hall with just a bunch of therapy. Puppies always like the local A SPC or whoever brings in a bunch of therapy dogs that people get to hang out with. And I feel like it’s always a popular booth, but I did kind of think it was more well trafficked this time around than it normally is to follow on whether or not people are feeling great about the world Right now. It seems like a lot more people were heading by there.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. I mean it’s not great. Right.

Joe Patrice:

Well, all right, let’s begin. Find yourself a baby or therapy puppy and we’re going to start the rest of the

Kathryn Rubino:

Show. Steal it though. I want to be clear. We’re not trying to induce you to crime.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, no, no. Don’t just whisk away a baby and steal it. You’re the US.

Kathryn Rubino:

It’s definitely a crime.

Joe Patrice:

You’re the US government or something.

Kathryn Rubino:

Oh, that is also depressing.

Joe Patrice:

So yeah, so we’ve talked the last few weeks a lot about these big law firms who are making either fighting back against the administration’s, attempts to crack down on them or have caved quite gutless to them. And Kathryn undertook a project that we’re still in the process of refining and we hope that listeners and readers will help us keep refining. But why don’t you talk about your project here

Kathryn Rubino:

We are calling it the big Law Spine index, and I took a list of the 200 largest law firms, AKA, the AM law 200, put it in a little tracker and included a column that is what has the firm’s responses to the attacks on big law been? Have they been silent? Spoiler alert, most of them have done absolutely nothing one way or the other. Have they capitulated to the administration? Are they fighting the administration, including the relevant links to stories where appropriate and I color coded it, so capitulating firms are red, yellow are silent, green are those that are fighting. And it’s been really interesting also because as I was in literally about to hit publish on this, the amicus brief in the Perkins Cooey case came out, we had been aware ahead of time that Munger Tolls was organizing this amicus brief, but we didn’t know who was going to sign. And I think also they didn’t know if they were going to sign. It came out 500 law firms signed. I think it’s 11 or 12 of them are big laws.

Joe Patrice:

I was going to say it’s real bad. 500 firms, many of them are not on our index because we are limited to the biggest firms.

Chris Williams:

One design point. I think it would’ve been fun for the capitulating firms to be marked in yellow because that’s the color historically associated with cowardice. Yeah,

Kathryn Rubino:

I guess that’s fair.

Chris Williams:

Yeah,

Kathryn Rubino:

I just feel like stoplight red, green, yellow just is too visceral to pass up. Well,

Chris Williams:

If they’re red, they have the blood on their hands. There’s still themes you could go with.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, no, and we’re working on this, we’re working on this also in the law school context and I think we’re debating now ways to introduce even more stepped nuance to it to provide readers with a more full picture. There are mixed bag firms, firms that are

With one hand silent, but on another hand taking on some pro bono cases that are good and stuff like that. So we want to try to get, the goal is, and this is where the call to action is, because we rely on all of you out there to keep us informed of what’s going on with these firms. So to the extent you see on this list something and say, you know what? Firm XI work there, we’ve not signed on to anything. We did a bunch of stuff from our website talking about diversity, but we’re also give us that mixed bag picture want to, the goal ideally is to provide law students, laterals, partners looking to move their business, clients looking to move their business a better sense of where firms are.

Kathryn Rubino:

And I think that this whole industry wide phenomenon that’s going on, good, bad or indifferent has produced the most feedback that above law has received in years in a while and

Joe Patrice:

At least outside of compensation.

Kathryn Rubino:

Sure, yes. I think that that’s definitely true and it makes sense I think because every firm, every attorney is in some way probably has an opinion about this, right? Because it impacts their career, it impacts their industry in really big and profound ways. So a lot of people have thoughts and keep them coming. 200 law firms is a lot to keep track of, especially when you’re talking about who’s making DEI changes that they aren’t necessarily announcing. It’s sort of things that you have to know what existed previously and what is currently on the website, stuff like that. So very much we depend on the kindness of strangers to keep us up to date, but I do think that this has been incredibly helpful and useful way to have a quick gut check what’s going on.

Chris Williams:

It’s hard to take away from how good Stylist Index is, but if that wasn’t the name, this should be the boneless season. Just to piggyback on Joe’s point earlier, how professional people with jobs talk. It’s very easy to get caught up in the binary of who has a spine, who doesn’t have a spine, but there’s a much more interesting element of people that just have bad posture if we’re going to keep going, extending the metaphor. So if your firm is clearly maintaining wiggle room or if they’re facially capitulating but not doing so well, maybe don’t tell us that. Maybe let them continue doing the good work. But if they’re like in that in between, let us know and that’ll be worth adding to the index and maybe even color coding in a particular way.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, absolutely. And to Joe’s kind of point too about how there are some folks are a mixed bag and also because these are giant law firms and they have lots of people in them. We reported that Wilkee is one of the firms that bent to knee, and yet Doug Emh was a recent hire, former second gentleman, and he’s been critical of that decision still as far as we are aware, works there, unlike some associates that kind of stood up and got out when the firm made that move. But there’s a lot of people who have a lot of thoughts out there and we’re covering all that.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, no, it’s an interesting time and it’s a dynamic time. I think there’s a high likelihood that we’re going to see people who are currently in the mixed bag group called upon to make a fight or flight choice because I think a lot of the mixed bag are people who are hoping to hedge their bets and not get in the middle of a problem. And that is not,

Kathryn Rubino:

Maybe they won’t notice me over here with my PE business.

Joe Patrice:

That is not how bullies work and they are more likely to be forced into a situation where they have to make a call eventually and we’ll see what happens.

Chris Williams:

A quick addition to the not how bullies work thing, what I don’t think I hear people talking about, but I don’t see it not being the case. There’s no end game for this. So right now it’s like, oh, now it’s a hundred million dollars pro bono payola, but what happens once that a hundred million dollars is up? Do they think they’re off the hook? I feel like there’s going to be some point where these firms that got tapped on the shoulder and folded easily trump’s not going to just lay off them. What’s next?

Joe Patrice:

Well, right, and that’s an excellent point. That leads into another, I don’t know, as though we wrote it as a story. I know I put it in the link roundup, but last week while I was busy at the conference and one of the things I noted is the deals, these deals themselves say a hundred million dollars toward conservative pro bono causes, but the firms have usually, they’ve usually found a way to say like, oh, it’s like for veterans issues or stuff, try to find more socially palatable, conservative leaning. And that one’s not even conservative leaning, but ones that the administration likes to claim causes. But what happened last week is the Heritage Foundation, the folks behind Project 2025 immediately reached out to these firms and said, now under this settlement, you’ve got to defend us pro bono, which was the other shoe inevitably falling because that was obviously what was going to happen once people made this commitment. And what’s obviously going to happen is when these firms say, no, we aren’t providing you pro bono legal help, the hammer is going to come down on them. Again,

Kathryn Rubino:

It’s also disturbing just sort of the war chest that these conservative groups or conservative causes broadly are amassing. Trump referred to it as his posse of big law firms and it’s just getting bigger and bigger and hundreds of millions of dollars have been committed to putting wherever Trump wants it to go at this point. That’s as far as we can tell. Yeah.

Joe Patrice:

All right. So you teased people have left some of these firms and spoken out and made a fight. So this section, we’re going to talk about a couple of stories within this one section, but let’s start with that one because that’s a good segue. People making public stands against this.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, last week we reported on the third Skadden associate to leave the firm because of the firm’s deal with the Trump administration. And I think there’s a lot of finger pointing and trying to figure out, Paul Weiss has very much become a punching bag in a lot of way. Even Jim Cramer is making fun of the firm.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, you’re getting dunked on CNBC.

Kathryn Rubino:

I mean that’s not a good place for the firm

Joe Patrice:

To clarify what happened is in talking about tariffs. So one would also think, I’m just going to intervene here for these law firms. I’m sure they thought that the entire global economy melting was going to take them off of the front page. And to some extent it did. Unfortunately it took ’em off the front page up to the point where CNBC has Jim Cramer going. I mean, I think the administration thinks they can make China rollover as easily as Paul Weiss and it’s like, well you now you’ve now transcend it’s gotten worse

Kathryn Rubino:

For sure. But for my money, I think that scattered might be the real turning point in a bad way because that was the first firm that reached out and proactively struck a deal with the administration before there was an executive order issued. And that has very much been a trend with some of the larger law firms. As we mentioned, Wilke Millbank, Kirkland is reportedly still in talks, although no deal has been finalized. And those are all folks that had not already been subjected to an eo. And I think that that was a real turning point. I don’t think, coincidentally, that is also the firm where we have the most reports of folks publicly quitting because of the deal that they struck. So we got our third one. But I think what was interesting about this was apparently some partners were having as a tipster called a kind of temperature check kind of meetings with large groups of associates be like, how are y’all? It’s going on. How are we feeling? And during one of those meetings, a second year associate got up and gave a rousing speech. One tipster said that it was not standing, but kind of big applause moment and use that as kind of their springboard to leave the firm because at Skadden, as we’ve also reported, you can’t send firm-wide emails anymore.

Joe Patrice:

Right. Because cracked down on that to prevent people from voicing their concerns about their late Weimar role. So let’s transition from the associates who are speaking up about this to law students. So Chris, you talked about a student group at Georgetown in particular.

Chris Williams:

And one quick framing thing I’d like to say before I get into this. I know we joked about it earlier about this all being of the bad news podcast. This is the bright part of the show because the reason we’re saying these things, because this, they did not obey an advanced section, which is great if there’s a section in this history shows history that deserves some fanfare. This is the resistance part. It’s great. So in that vein, another group of people that are fighting the good fighter are students at Georgetown. I’m not exactly sure what they’re ranked at the moment given the recent ranking debacle that you’ll probably be reading about on the Above the Law soon. But yeah, Skadden famous firm, you may have heard of them, was going to do a recruiting event there. And then the Georgetown Energy Law Group basically said, save your time. So they reached out to the firm, said, no thanks.

Yeah, now you good. And it’s just nice to see that the way that I think that the consequences of the kissing the ring is talked about in terms of what will clients think? Will they still see us as being capable of zealously representing them? But another angle is will people want to work here? And we’re seeing that from one, the associates are already there, but we’re also seeing it from the potential pools of new associates. So the fact that the resistance is coming from the clients, the employees and the future employees is great before you even get into, I mean you talk about golden handcuffs in terms of associates working at big long firms, but the golden handcuffs on terms of that connected to the firms now with the bad PR they’re getting and who knows what’s the next ratcheting up that the administration is going to have for them. The bright side is they’re not having a good time of any, I lead enough. The only firm I feel like is that is kind not been dragged through the mud as much as time has going on. As Paul Wise, they got a better deal than the other folks. But even still

Kathryn Rubino:

Bit hard to their 60 million. But I also think it’s interesting that of the closer to law school, the stronger the response has kind of been, at least the ones that we publicly know about so far as of this recording, we have not been made aware of any partner who has publicly left a law firm because of these deals. Even though we’ve heard at some law firms partners were not informed of the deals before they happened.

Joe Patrice:

There’s grumble, there’s grumbling, but not public moving.

Kathryn Rubino:

Correct. And there are three associates, two of them are on the junior side at Skadden and there are even more at other law firms. And now we’re hearing this at law schools being a giant issue. And listen, we give Gen Z plenty of shit on this podcast, but they, they’ve gotten the memo on this one.

Joe Patrice:

And I think on the partner point, you’re not going to see a lot of public partner moves. There are two things. One, you’re not going to see quick partner moves and they’re not going to be as public, but that doesn’t mean they won’t happen. You aren’t going to see quick ones because a partner with a book of business moving is turning the Titanic. You can’t do that instantly. Clients depend on some, they depend on some consistency and some warning. I would predict to the extent we see partner moves, it’s going to be over a long tail towards the end of the next quarter.

On the next point, I think you’re going to see not a lot of public ones because what happens if you say, I’m leaving Skadden because of this awful thing and I’m going to name for no other reason than it’s top of mind Debevoise, well then Debevoise becomes the next one they go after, this administration is going to track that public move. So what you’re going to see is probably, I would predict towards the end of the next quarter and maybe even the one after that, you’re going to start seeing an uptick in move outflows from these firms of partners. But there’s not going to be any statements about them. They’re going to be talked about, it was a pure business decision,

Kathryn Rubino:

Great opportunity for me and my clients,

Joe Patrice:

But wink and nod, you’re going to know that these are people who probably would not be leaving, but for being forced to represent the Heritage Foundation in some pro bono work.

Kathryn Rubino:

And towards that note, I know we’ve kind of already made the pitch for tips, but if you start noticing any of these red coded firms having a decrease in partners without public statements even that is definitely something we’re going to be interested in.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, I mean look, we also off the record, would love to talk to partners who are in the middle of this process. Absolutely. Or considering the process even

Chris Williams:

This is a potentially tangential point, but I do wonder what will be the case with mid-level firms, whether it be some sort of proxy support or say people saying, honestly, you shouldn’t work here, but I know a guy that works is at this other mid firm that still does great work, blah, blah blah, and start seeing funneling going that way.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, no, I think that’s a great point. I think because like I said, if you publicly make that jump to a Debevoise or Latham or whatever, they could become the next target. If you publicly make that move to somebody in the eighties and nineties, so long as your clients aren’t going to abandon you for going to that firm, that might be the easiest way because head’s a little bit further down over there. But yeah, I mean obviously you’re not going to see somebody with 10 million book of business head there necessarily, but more people who are in that three to four range, I could see them going to a place they normally wouldn’t if they were above the one to two range. But they might head there because they can do their job in peace. So let’s talk about theBar exam. theBar exam scores are at the lowest that they’ve been in February. Again, this is a recurring trend for them to go down in February, but is there anything interesting that you’re seeing about the fact that the professions doing worse on bar exams?

Kathryn Rubino:

I mean, there’s a lot of changes that have been going on in theBar exams. Generally speaking, there’s a move that’s going to happen over the next couple of years. More and more jurisdictions are moving to the next gen bar exam, which I think, I dunno, I dunno what the overall impact of that’s going to be, but there’s certainly a lot of tumult involved. And obviously we’ve covered the extensive issues with the California Bar exam, which is another very, a very large jurisdiction that administers a bar exam. And they have had some repeated issues, but I don’t know if there’s a clear reason why we’re seeing this dip.

Joe Patrice:

I mean, one issue is California has dropped out. I mean I definitely think that can’t be undersold. That is they perform a little bit better than some of the other jurisdictions. But it is interesting. Now is this issue of people are coming out less prepared for this exam? Is it that this exam is stupid and it continues to be, I dunno, I do know that this is going to be something probably gets a lot worse as we are seeing an uptick in people going to school.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, we are tracking that kind of second round of Trump bump. More people deciding to wait out this economy in law school or deciding they have an interest in the law because of, we’re talking about it all the time, not just kind of on legal podcasts, but it is kind of crossed into the mainstream as well. And so there’s an uptick in people who are applying to law schools and I think it kind of depends what the law schools’ response is. If it’s just that more competitive because they have more applicants, I don’t think that necessarily will hurt overall theBar exam passage rates. But if it’s, oh, we’re going to add more seats, then obviously yes.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, great time to get into it, right as artificial intelligence threatens to take away all of the entry level jobs in this field. So good job everybody. It’s not great. And if you are considering law school at this juncture, you should definitely think about the AI issue and what you should think about the AI issue and what it’s going to do and make sure you’re on the happy side of it. There will still be need for lawyers, but you’re going to want to be prepared to deal with it. Alright, I think that’s it for us. Thanks everybody for listening. You should be checking out the show on your podcast server of choice. You should be filling out reviews, stars, writing things, all of that helps and matters. You should be reading Above the Law so that you read these and other stories before we get to them, check out other shows. The Jabot is a show Kathryn’s the host of I’m a guest on Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable. There’s also more shows from the Legal Talk Network to listen to and social media at Above the Law dot com at Joe Patrice at W Rights for Rent at Kathryn one. Those are all our blue sky homes. And that’s it for now. Talk to you later. Bye. Peace.

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