Dispatches From The Collapse Of The Rule Of Law

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Patrice:

Once again we have returned. It is Thinking Like A Lawyer.

Chris Williams:

What is this? Mass?

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, no, I wanted to make sure I could disrupt the way in which you all disrupt my opening, so I did something out of the peace

Kathryn Rubino:

Also with you.

Joe Patrice:

Oh, isn’t that not what you say now?

Kathryn Rubino:

No. It used to be peace be with you. Now I think it’s, I dunno, I haven’t been to Catholic church in a minute, but

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, fair enough.

Kathryn Rubino:

I believe it’s now And peace also with you.

Joe Patrice:

No, it said also with your spirit.

Kathryn Rubino:

With your spirit.

Joe Patrice:

Welcome to our thinking. Like a Catholic segment, which is now replaced small talk

Chris Williams:

Where we don’t necessarily go over our sins or anything, but we do a series of squats, hair

Kathryn Rubino:

Shirts

Chris Williams:

Will

Joe Patrice:

All let me hit the Gregorian chant. Sound effect here. No, no. We will stick with small talk. How’s everybody doing?

Kathryn Rubino:

I don’t want to brag you guys.

Joe Patrice:

Yes you do.

Chris Williams:

That’s what you say before you want to brag. Let’s be frank here.

Kathryn Rubino:

I know, I know. I killed trunk or treat this weekend.

Joe Patrice:

Oh,

Kathryn Rubino:

My daughter’s preschool had a trunk or treat and I signed up to be one of the cars that hands out treats and is decorated to the nines and I did a Sesame Street theme. The car looked like Cookie Monster obviously tell you fur. It had big googly eyes. I mean, I don’t want to say I was the best decorated car there. You do. I mean I felt like I really killed It. I felt very proud of myself. All of the late nights trying to construct Sid Cookie Monster felt very worth it. I would also say that the costumes that my daughter and family also wore were Sesame Street related. So we had a bunch of sesame characters. My daughter carried her little Elmo doll rounds. It was maximum theme moment and I felt pretty good about that.

Chris Williams:

That is beautiful. I will say I just immediately got sad from hearing that like these fuckers really cut funding to PBS.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, that is sad.

Chris Williams:

I think the way the thought chain went was you were like obviously Cookie Monster and I was like, well, doesn’t he not even eat cookies anymore? Maybe it could have been. Okay,

Kathryn Rubino:

So he does eat cookies. I’ve watched a lot of Sesame Street recently, as you might’ve guessed. He does, but he also does healthy snacks as well. He and Goer who is a newish character that you may not be familiar with, but Goer is a chef and he and Cookie Monster create healthy treats is, I have a whole problem with this entire segment in Sesame Street that I really won’t bore you with, but it is a little bit problematic in my mind. But Cookie does eat healthy treats as well, and cookies are a sometimes treat, but it’s still part of his personality that he really loves cookies.

Chris Williams:

So he is like a recovering Pillsbury addict or

Kathryn Rubino:

There’s no recovery talk. It is low on the AA vibes, but he always, when they’re trying to make their healthy snacks, he will eat all the raisins and then they have to go to a raisin farm to get more and they drive to the Raisin farm in a food truck, which they drive there, but then they use an iPad or to communicate with the farmers. Joe

Chris Williams:

Is loving this, by the way, for everyone who can’t see this

Kathryn Rubino:

Though, they’ve driven there. They’ve already driven there, but instead of talking to the farmers in person, they’re using their iPad, but they’ve driven there.

Joe Patrice:

So what I heard there was she has a lot of problems with this that she’s not going to bore us with and then immediately began to bore us

Kathryn Rubino:

With No, I did not. It was followable questions and I felt like it was appropriate.

Chris Williams:

Well actually what it was was it was an interruption of Chris. I was explaining how I got to the funding being cut because you were like, obviously Cookie were like, no, it could have been the Grouch. And I was like, well crap, the Grouch is homeless, you know who else is homeless? Sesame Street. So that was the thought ring, but

Joe Patrice:

I

Chris Williams:

Also sign that Sesame Street was not nearly as woke as everybody made it out to be. If it was really that woke, he would’ve been cookie person.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah,

Chris Williams:

There would’ve been a critique on Monster Ness and all that or cookie them, but that’s beside the point.

Kathryn Rubino:

Monsters are not a binary gender necessarily. That’s true. Right,

Joe Patrice:

Because there’s female monsters too.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah,

Joe Patrice:

No,

Chris Williams:

But

Kathryn Rubino:

Monsters.

Chris Williams:

It is a stigmatizing title though.

Kathryn Rubino:

I think they own it. I think they’ve reclaimed the word. Yeah.

Joe Patrice:

I think monsters seem to enjoy pretty much all the same rights in the Sesame Street ecosphere as their human cousins. I

Chris Williams:

Think that’s true. I dunno that R was a little hard. I think it’s Monster or you really have to be a member of the community to get that off. I’m just

Joe Patrice:

Saying. Yeah, no, I don’t think that there’s that distinction. It does not seem like there’s a legacy of discrimination against the Yeah,

Kathryn Rubino:

No. Within

Joe Patrice:

Sesame

Kathryn Rubino:

Sesame Street world within that alternate universe, but

Joe Patrice:

That always confuses me. The one who stigmatized at all is Oscar, who actively wants to be

Kathryn Rubino:

Correct and he wants to be, he makes him happy to be stigmatized.

Chris Williams:

Yeah,

Kathryn Rubino:

But here’s the thing that always

Joe Patrice:

Confused is me.

Chris Williams:

I mean, there is still a class war. You can’t that you got to have little

Joe Patrice:

See, but I don’t think Oscar, Oscar’s not homeless or anything. Oscar has a home. It is just a messy one. Ly

Kathryn Rubino:

There tunnels underneath that garbage. Oh

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. He can pop up into any garbage can because it’s almost like the Super Mario Brothers pipes. It just pops up everywhere.

Kathryn Rubino:

That is the lore. Yeah.

Chris Williams:

Oh, so maybe he’s actually over homed. Maybe he’s hoarding. He’s a hoarder. Okay. He’s a garbage Lord.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yes. I think that is accurate.

Chris Williams:

Accurate. That is absolutely what that

Joe Patrice:

Character is.

Kathryn Rubino:

I think that’s what they’re trying to tell us. Damn it. Damn it. Grouch.

Joe Patrice:

I just have never understood the PBS cuts at all are very troubling and sad, and the relationship with HB was awful at all, but I hold out hope. I’ve got to think the merchandising rights are worth something. Right. They should be able to finance themselves by selling a few more of those Elmo dolls,

Kathryn Rubino:

Lemme

Joe Patrice:

Tell you, which seem to be everywhere.

Kathryn Rubino:

If they make it, we will buy it. That is very clear in my household for sure.

Chris Williams:

I would buy a vial of Elmo themed balsamic vinegar, just sort of memes of it. Oh no, there was a big thing. Oh, y’all might not know this since we’re giving lore, apparently Elmo also has a New York accent. So he was listing off things and he was like, balsamic vinegar, that’s a hard word for Elmo and it just sound like he was from Brooklyn. It’s a thing I can,

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, I mean Sesame Street definitely takes place in New York. They’re all New Yorkers, I would

Chris Williams:

Say. So now whenever I hear Elmo’s voice to Tim’s are implied,

Joe Patrice:

So it’s Sesame Street. All right, so we have now gone very, very deep into this. Let us move on to actual topics. Good news. I did not go to a legal tech conference last week. I did not travel for the first time in weeks. I did not travel to a tech conference, so of course I went to a different conference. This one though was the Society for the Rule of Law, which is an organization that George Conway’s famously involved with. It’s a group of, I don’t think they would love the characterization, but it’s a possibly fair characterization. It’s kind of an anti-federalists society. It is a group of conservative lawyers who have looked out at the world and gone, no,

Kathryn Rubino:

No, this is wrong.

Joe Patrice:

This is not what we meant at all,

Kathryn Rubino:

Except low key.

Joe Patrice:

I mean query whether or not that they have been betrayed or that they are the Dr. Frankenstein of the situation and the thing that they advocated for years has come to pass and they are horrified to stare into the abyss of it. But one way or the other, there are a bunch of conservative and libertarian lawyers who are not pleased with the way the Trump administration operates and they had their annual conference and it was really interesting. A bunches of panels. Too many almost just scheduling wise. It was back to back to back back.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, in their defense there’s a lot to say about the state of the rule of law in 2025.

Joe Patrice:

There is, I will say from where I was sitting that I’m chatting with the people around me who were largely some non-lawyers, but largely former government lawyers and stuff. Everybody’s one criticism was can we get a five minute break to stand? Because it was just back to back panels, but very interesting stuff.

Chris Williams:

Any panels on that whole Second Amendment fighting tyranny thing or no?

Joe Patrice:

No, nobody got into that. We did have a talk about the unitary executive theory and whether or not that was a,

Kathryn Rubino:

Are they fo?

Joe Patrice:

Were we the baddies question, was

Kathryn Rubino:

I the problem?

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. But also we talked about district judges and the role they’ve been playing, largely holding the line and preventing some of the worst abuses with very little help from the Supreme Court.

Kathryn Rubino:

I think it’s really interesting. I think a LM did a story not too long ago about how some of the most vocal district court judges have been Reagan appointees, sort of the older but sort of conservatives. I think the exact sort of people that were probably at this conference are the ones that are sounding the alarm the

Joe Patrice:

Loudest. You defined in a lot of ways you defined the audience that this group spoke to. Lots of Reagan era, either literally or spiritually lawyers who are not pleased with where things are going. There was obviously a lot of animosity towards the tariffs moves, which speaks to this Reagan thing, which obviously that’s the other thing that’s going on right now. We just added more tariffs to Canada because Canada ran an ad pointing out that Ronald Reagan was opposed to tariffs and that has angered Donald Trump, who’s kind of pretending it’s like a deepfake rather than literally Ronald Reagan’s entire purpose to be a free trader. He

Kathryn Rubino:

Was pretty free

Chris Williams:

Trade.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, pretty clear.

Chris Williams:

It’s really an opportune when reality gets in the way of theory

Joe Patrice:

And we are kind of in this post-truth universe where we’re doing that. But yeah, so we’re going after Canada again because they actually played Reagan quotes verbatim, but also as far as things Trump is mad at. We also saw, I don’t know if anybody noticed, he just messaged out in all caps that he’s investigating Major league baseball because the Democrats and the mafia fix the World Series don’t really know what that was all about, especially to the extent the mafia is doing anything. It sounds like the NBA

Kathryn Rubino:

That is what What’s here.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, well, we’ve gotten into multiple legal stories of the week and gotten a field of the one we were actually talking about, which was this conference. Very interesting conference though. I think that you’re right. There is this old school principled conservative group who are not pleased with the way things are going, and I don’t think it was something they grapple with because as nonprofit rules go and all, it’s not that they’re actually partisan against Trump or anything, it’s just reality is that’s the person doing these things right now. I think they would be opposed and still be a conservative group if a Democrat started doing some of the same stuff, but here they are. Well, I was just going to get to what I called the cognitive dissonance part of the conference because there were a lot of folks who were very committed to, Hey, we got to fight back against the excesses of this administration, especially on the tariffs and so on.

But there were definitely people there who from my perspective, had not quite come to grips with the role they played. I mean, in my article about it, I made the connection to the hotdog costume and we’re all looking for the guys who did this. There were some people who just couldn’t let go of the ghost that well Trump’s doing this, but it’s really because some Democrat backbencher said something in 2000 that I didn’t like or it really is because Al Gore’s fault or Joe Biden’s fault or something like that, and just the blame, the victim kind of style. And there were also hangups over things that were just entirely false complaining about student loan. This is just like when Biden tried to overturn to forgive student loans and put aside that those statutory postures were completely different. When Biden lost that case, he dropped that argument and then he did continue trying to relieve student loans, but that’s not the same as he ignored it. He found a different statute that allowed him to do slightly different things.

Kathryn Rubino:

He tried a different tactic

Joe Patrice:

And

Kathryn Rubino:

Those are not the same

Joe Patrice:

People complaining about, oh, when the IRS investigated the tea party, which is incorrect assessment of what happened there, even the FBI looked into it and found there was no evidence of that, but these

Kathryn Rubino:

Kind

Joe Patrice:

Of

Kathryn Rubino:

Concerted shipt. Yeah, notably the president did not say, I expect these people, my enemies to have charges against them and why haven’t them be done faster?

Joe Patrice:

Right? Yeah, exactly. This Trump says, I want more charges against my enemies and somehow comparing this to this IRS story that isn’t really accurately described. And yes, the FBI looked at that under James Comey who is still a Republican and he found there was no real evidence for those claims, but they persist as kind of this conservative shi that some of the folks there haven’t quite gotten over. And I felt like that’s the thing holding back this group as a movement is that there’s

Kathryn Rubino:

Struggling, that the party that is so much of their identity, they probably feel very much that defines who they are to a certain extent. And it is those words no longer mean what they think they mean

Joe Patrice:

Republican

Kathryn Rubino:

No longer identifies the same type of person that they thought.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Well, if I can transition a little bit within this, one of the panels, one of the more powerful panels was the judges, some former judges talking about what’s going on. I’ll tell you Mike Looted right now, that guy run through a wall for that guy right. Now, And I want to be clear, when I started this job at Above Law 13 years ago, I would’ve said that he was probably in a handful of maybe two or three judges that I would’ve said were the craziest judges, the worst, the wildest, craziest right-wing judges and the way in which the world has changed and he’s stuck to his guns in a principled way and he delivered kind of the moral grounding.

Kathryn Rubino:

So what was the moral grounding? What was his sort of thesis?

Joe Patrice:

Just like the Supreme Courts out of hand, they are acting illegitimately and there was a lot of dancing around like, oh, things aren’t going well. He would cut to the chase like No, they are illegitimate. Everything they’re doing is wrong and undermining Democracy. They need to be stopped. There were a lot of people kind of talking, and I think this was a theme that was being grappled with at the conference of are we here to push back against these excesses and kind of be in opposition that brings us back from the brink versus we’re over the brink. It is now time to build the civil society that in a very velvet revolution sort of way exists after the fall and are we now at that point a building? And Norm Eisen was there who was the ambassador to the Czech Republic at one point. And so even though he didn’t talk about this, those ties did come the whole concept of civil society, which is the basis of the Czech Post Cold War transition, it really came through. Is this really about building how we, a group that will not really push back against this totalitarianism.

There’s no way to do it. It’s here. Are we what transitions after the fact? And that is the fight that I think is still racking them. Where are they? Are they the one or the other? Looted clearly seems to feel like they’re the latter, really interesting rough stuff talking about some of the threats that the judges are receiving, which is out of hand and the Supreme Court is doing nothing to help them if not actively exacerbating the conditions that lead to these violent threats. One judge, they talked about how one judge has had to move out of their home because the marshal service said there was no way to secure their home where they were, so they had to move.

Kathryn Rubino:

That’s pretty horrifying stuff. Judges are as an institution, the judiciary especially because of the way the Supreme Court currently is, are not doing a ton of stuff to really stop the Trump agenda and even still the sort of speed that some judges are able to put in the way are being met with such vile hatred and violence that it’s truly noteworthy

Chris Williams:

Until the judge is not stopping the Trump agenda. One point, I mean obviously we all know this, but I do think it’s worth saying now, Trump’s appointing record is out of this world, so part of the reason why some of that pushback isn’t happening is because they were put there by him.

Joe Patrice:

And frankly at the district court level, and this is a point that was made at this panel, at the district court level, even Trump judges are pushing back against this. Everybody seems to be universally doing this. It’s the higher courts where you start seeing some of this more partisan stuff, which in part is due to the fact that district judges tend to be closer to the issues and more professional and not the political hacks that tend to operate at the appellate level and also where these things are happening. The administration is not abusing people, is actively talking about how they’re going after big blue cities and stuff like that. So the abuses are happening not in Amarillo or

Kathryn Rubino:

Palm

Joe Patrice:

Beach for instance. So that has changed a bit of it, the dynamic too.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, I think that that’s certainly true. And the other part of that I think is also that the district courts are more involved in the fact finding. So the specifics matter a lot and what we’re seeing increasingly, especially on the Supreme Court level, is that they are making their own findings a fact, and the actual, what’s really happening is getting papered over in favor of these broad policy statements that just kind of give a thumbs up to whatever the Trumpian policy

Joe Patrice:

Is. They kind of talked about, and obviously the biggest version of this is Judge Nan’s thing a few weeks ago, but there are district judges who, with only a couple of clerks are working at 2:00 AM to issue 80 page opinions to stop administrative action. That is wildly illegal and the Supreme Court is tossing out two paragraphs, two vague paragraphs to basically freeze as ludic put it, 5,000 pages of opinions that actually are reasoned by lower court judges. It’s a real problem. The threats are real. Unfortunately, the marshal service is run by the Department of Justice, not by the courts, which is another aspect risk factor because one of the things that was kind of unsaid but implied throughout this conversation was what happens when this administration just decides they don’t care about protecting judges they don’t like, which is something theoretically within their power, real worrying.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah.

Joe Patrice:

Anyway, I guess we’ve been on this for quite some time, so we should take a break and talk about at least something else, right?

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. Well let’s talk about the fixes in for baseball.

Joe Patrice:

Oh,

Kathryn Rubino:

Okay. That was something we touched on in the last segment, and it was one of our top stories of the week. Something that happened during game two of the National League championship. It was the Dodgers versus the Brewers. Shannon Larky was the former associate general counsel at a staffing agency has learned the hard way that when you act wildly inappropriately at a ball game, it’ll budge you in the ass.

Joe Patrice:

Ooh, okay.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. There was a viral video where this attorney can be seen responding, so there was a home run. The Dodgers take a three one league. LAR is a Brewers fan, kind of annoyed by that, which to me is very typical. There are wins, there are losses, there are good plays, there are bad plays, but she responded by telling a vocal, admittedly vocal Dodgers fan, you know what? Let’s call ice. And the Dodgers fan in question was a US citizen war veteran as he made very clear in the video and the video ends with the attorney seemingly taking a swing at the camera.

Joe Patrice:

Alright,

Kathryn Rubino:

Not the kind of stuff you necessarily want your staffing agency to be associated

Joe Patrice:

With, but took a swing and hit the camera or

Kathryn Rubino:

Just it kind of cuts off there. It doesn’t seem like she actually made contact but sort of lunged her hand out in a way that seemed like she was trying to get the camera away or something like that.

Joe Patrice:

Well, if they swung and missed, that kind of sums up the problem for the brewers in that whole series.

Kathryn Rubino:

Okay, fair, true and fair. But as I kind of said, she was fired from her job. They’re no longer associated with her, but it’s more than that. She was also on the board of some charities that make a wish foundation for Wisconsin that no longer wants to be associated with her. She’s no longer on that board. She voluntarily resigned that position and also she’s been banned for life from the stadium.

Joe Patrice:

Nice. Wow.

Kathryn Rubino:

The interesting thing is that based on things that were not part of this incident, the Dodgers fan was also banned from the stadium for drunken disorderly conduct unrelated to this incident, but just kind of give you a vibe of what the stands were like that day.

Joe Patrice:

Wow. Yeah. Well, okay, just don’t be a bad

Kathryn Rubino:

Person. Cold as ice Karen. Yeah, something like that. You got to say these things.

Chris Williams:

I think that this is going to be an ongoing thing, that feeling you get whenever you’re near October and you’re like, oh, somebody’s going to do blackface, or Oh, somebody’s going to be, or now they’re a little more savvy now they’re just dressed up as an SS members, but hey,

Joe Patrice:

I saw

Chris Williams:

That that face does not go out of style. We could still be getting that. I would be surprised I would put money on it that there’s going to be some attorney that decides to wear an ice costume. I think that as white Christian supremacy ramps up even more, we’re going to start seeing people push what’s the edge of edgy and we’re going to start seeing more things like this. She had to be very comfortable to be like, Hey, I’m going to get the secret police on you because of me not being happy with you at how you’re acting at a sports game. And this isn’t that new. I remember I was just looking up times where people threatened ice and I saw videos from 2018, so this isn’t something that is a new phenomenon, but I do think that people are getting a lot more comfortable with calling in the Secret Army to enforce

Kathryn Rubino:

Their will. But I also think that the threat is different. In 2018, the threat certainly existed, but it was not quite as nasty, not quite as vile considering. I think that the way that ICE has been ramping up its behavior, I think that it makes it a much uglier thing to say,

Chris Williams:

Oh, no question. While it was still happening at that point, it’s not like I had permission to racially profile from the Supreme Court, but what I’m saying is as we are seeing the slide towards white being writer, not that that’s never not been the case in American’s history, but we’re seeing the brightness go up and we’re going to see more things like this. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are people that came to her defense and was like, well, was the person in illegal and just bypassing the racial profiling that had to be there for her to think that that was an appropriate response to what was effectively her being salty over a leisure activity.

Kathryn Rubino:

And I think you’re right though that this is the Supreme Court’s fault in a really fundamental way because

Joe Patrice:

Calling for a Kavanaugh stop,

Kathryn Rubino:

You mean? Yeah. Why she’s an attorney who’s calling for a Kavanaugh stop maybe. But I think that seeing the ugliness through it, I think is really a good thing that we’re still able to do in these companies and organizations that no longer want to be associated with her. I think that’s a good thing.

Joe Patrice:

So let’s take an aside here. I don’t know if anybody’s been really tracking the social media universe, but the meltdown that the non rule of law Republicans, like the ones we were talking about earlier are having over Kavanaugh stop is

Chris Williams:

Wild. The fascists. The fascists, you mean? Not rule law Republican is too kind.

Joe Patrice:

They are in absolute temper tantrum over the idea that these are called Kavanaugh stops. They’re like, how dare you call them this?

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, first of all, that means it’s the only thing we’re about to call ’em.

Joe Patrice:

Well, right, well that was my transition. Yeah,

Kathryn Rubino:

Well,

Chris Williams:

They’d rather call it justice or the work of God, but that’s neither here nor there. Well, it is here. Did you see there was some pastor that was basically saying that it was you can do the work of God with a pistol by joining ice and deporting illegals. We were like are in a point of, I think we are at the point of crusades, speak to where I’d personally rather not. I think the way you used it last podcast, sane Wash, I think to say the anti rule of law Republicans is a sane washing of it. The fascists are doing this. Yes. The people who openly refer to themselves as Nazis are doing this. Yeah.

Joe Patrice:

Now finally, ed Waller, the oldest law firm in the country, has had a rough go of it lately, has seen a few defections

Kathryn Rubino:

For more than a few for sure.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. For a lot of reasons. Don’t want to necessarily speculate that it’s all due to capitulating, but that’s certainly

Kathryn Rubino:

Some of that. Sure. I think they were already seeing, I think a few notable departures from the firm before they were one of the nine firms that in to deal with the Trump administration. But doing that certainly accelerated. Certainly some folks leaving a couple of high profile white collar litigators have left, some other folks have left and now looks like they’re looking for merger partner.

Joe Patrice:

It seemed like this was going to happen when they announced a new leadership change, which they blew off as, no, this is just kind of routine that we’re bringing in another managing partner, but a lot of us speculated that this might be to begin the process of finding a merger partner and now seems like they’re willing to admit that they are having conversations with folks. We’ll see what makes sense as a merger partner for CAD Waller. I mean, I have some thoughts. I don’t know if anyone else does.

Kathryn Rubino:

I don’t know. My initial sense is maybe a firm that is large but doesn’t have a tremendously big New York presence that is looking to really establish itself in the largest legal market. Maybe like a Midwest based kind of firm.

Joe Patrice:

See, I’ve been leaning towards the UK firms.

Kathryn Rubino:

Okay. Yeah, similar theory.

Joe Patrice:

I think there might be a push, and at this point all the UK firms that are interested in the US are already in the us but I still feel like the work that a UK firm does out of its us office is usually slightly different than the matter mix of a firm based here because you’re always looking to minimize conflicts and redundancies. So I don’t know what we saw with a and o and Sherman, something along those lines. Now I don’t know what that would mean, whether that’s like a link later Freshfields sort of situation. But yeah, it’s at a point where I just don’t know if they even want to take on a big firm merger. I always thought that CAD Waller was sort of firm that kind of was insulated from a lot of this and that if it ever merged, it would merge with more of a small specialized firm looking to do kind of a transition. For instance, I have historically thought that Ken Waller, and we are not at this point yet, but whatever a post and chill boys chiller might be that those might be complimentary. Where Boy Schiller continues doing its litigation heavy stuff and CAD Waller brings the other half Of The transaction, whatever. I thought that was a possibility, but now, yeah, no, I think they need an influx fast.

Kathryn Rubino:

And to your point about a UK firm potentially being a merger partner, this kind of has an a and o Shearman kind of a feeling. Sherman and Sterling obviously was another old New York based firm similar to Waller in that way and found a partner in a magic circle firm

Joe Patrice:

Who they apparently all hate the word magic circle now, which is why we’re going to use it even more.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah.

Joe Patrice:

Do you hear that?

Kathryn Rubino:

No.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, no. All of that.

Kathryn Rubino:

But why it makes it seem magical and also a little bit fairy like because a circle and you don’t want to get into a fairy circle kind of situation. I don’t know. I wouldn’t be upset about that word.

Joe Patrice:

I don’t know. But they are all very anti that description. Every time we write it, we get a nasty Graham from one of the firms being like, oppose we object to this term.

Kathryn Rubino:

I mean, do big law firms also object to be calling white shoe? It is what it is.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. I think that’s more objection. I think the argument is that they are, you see

Kathryn Rubino:

This, we’re bigger than the magic circle.

Joe Patrice:

Well, you see this with some of the one particular Boston based firm I can think of where they have grown up to be national in scope or in this case, global in scope. And they objective continuing to be tied to their original location. I think the Magic Circle firms are mad that they’re being called Magic Circle and not part of the global on par with everyone

Kathryn Rubino:

Else. Well come up with a cute term for global firms and we’ll use that.

Chris Williams:

I think they need to just ramp up their T dosage. It’s not that big of a deal. You got some stain and you’re like, oh, I prefer a different nickname. Shut up. Make your millions, leave us alone.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, you don’t get to make your own nickname. It’s like that episode aside from where he tried to go by T-Bone. Well,

Kathryn Rubino:

More accurately it’s like how when Amy Coney Barrett was being put up for the Supreme Court and there was all these notorious A CB shirts and I was like, get Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s name out your mouth. Listen, she wasn’t perfect, but you are not the

Chris Williams:

Same at this point. Get Biggie’s name out Charles Miles. I’m still mad over RBG. She wouldn’t even, wouldn’t have had him as a clerk. She didn’t like that. Let’s be real. But also this is for the scape nerds. So the very niche population. Whenever people say a B for Amy Coney Barrett, I think of a armadillo crossbow, which gets abbreviated as acb. It’s like a weapon in the game. So that’s just a little bit of tidbit knowledge.

Joe Patrice:

I still call her Amy COVID Barrett because

Chris Williams:

Yes, I’ve never heard that one. Really?

Joe Patrice:

Oh yeah, we pushed that one for a while because remember the thing that’s kind of lost to history is when Trump and all the other Republican people got COVID when it was real bad and we all had that point, where is Trump going to die of this? That was all because they held a nom mask party for Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination because they were all trying to prove that Lysol works or whatever the hell they were doing, and that led to all of them getting COVID. So she was kind of the typhoid Mary of the Republican COVID outbreak, but oh well. Alright, we should wrap this up. Thanks everybody for listening. You should give us reviews, give us stars. Our star count still lags from some stuff that happened years and years ago when we were switching formats. So anything you could do totally helps us out.

It’s the most minor of asks. You should be subscribing so you get new episodes when they come out. Check out other shows. Catherine’s the host of the Jabot. I’m the guest on the Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable. You should listen to other shows on the Legal Talk network. You should be reading Above the Law, so you read these and other stories before we talk about them here. Social [email protected] on bluesky, at ATL blog on Twitter. We’re also active over on the sky. I’m at Joe Patrice Catherine’s Kathryn one. Chris’ Writes for Rent. And with all that we’re moving on. Oh yeah.

Chris Williams:

Speaking of those interesting ways to contact us. If you happen to be an in-house attorney working at Spotify and don’t like that your company’s running ads for ice, let us know about that in case there might be a story there.

Joe Patrice:

And same thing, Kathryn’s working on a thing through vis-a-vis Reddit. So if you ever get reached out to us by us on Reddit, hit us up if we’re researching stuff. Yeah, it always helps. People generally think, and I hear this all the time, people email us with a tip, well after the stories fizzled out and say, I’m surprised you didn’t cover this. And we are like, I’m surprised you didn’t

Chris Williams:

Tell us.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. But everybody has a collective action problem where they assume someone else is telling us we would rather get 30 tips about something than zero and miss out on it. So all right. Thanks everybody. Peace. Bye.

Chris Williams:

See you next Week.

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