AI Takes The Blame, Epstein Takes The Careers

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Patrice:

Hello, welcome to another edition of Thank You, like a Lawyer. I’m Joe Patrice from Bubba Law. I’m joined by some colleagues. I’ve got Kathryn Rubino and Chris Williams here.

Kathryn Rubino:

Hi friends.

Joe Patrice:

We are here as we are on a weekly basis to discuss some of the big stories from the week that was in legal over here at Above the Law, America’s Finest News Source. And we begin as we

Chris Williams:

Do, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That title is held by the onion.

Joe Patrice:

Fair, fair, fair. I think, is that actually their tagline? I can’t even remember.

Chris Williams:

I think it is. Yeah,

Joe Patrice:

That’s

Chris Williams:

Either that or you are dumb in Latin.

Joe Patrice:

No, yeah, no, it is. It is The America’s finest news source. All right,

Chris Williams:

So we are, I think it’s both. It’s both

Joe Patrice:

America’s finest source of legal news as it goes. Yeah. Apologies to my friends who write for the Onion. Let’s take a second to begin small talk, our small talk section, which we kind of jumped the gun on, I suppose, with that onion conversation. So what’s up? I am Ill. I’ve got a cold. I don’t know about anybody else.

Kathryn Rubino:

Ditto man. I feel like the world is sick right now, but it’s real bad. That’s life with a toddler, frankly.

Joe Patrice:

Oh, well, yeah. I think it’s just life in a winter wonderland.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. Well, I’m not sure about the wonder of the winter at this point. We are officially at the part of winter where I’m over it. We’re halfway over it. We’re halfway through February. I’m done, I’m done. I’m done. The fact that I still have ice piles higher than my child is not acceptable. I’m ready for some. The fact that 37 degrees feels warm to me is bonkers, not acceptable, and the fact that I’m likely to have snow for at least another month. No unsubscribe please. I am ready for spring.

Chris Williams:

Is this small talk or an advertisement for antidepressants? Damn, I had a great weekend folks. Thanks for asking. There’s an exhibit at the Philadelphia Art Museum

And there was this guy, his name was Noah Davis. He passed away unfortunately around the age of 32, but he had really cool art and it was the first time I saw Maury paintings of Moria Stills and it was so cool. It was so full of just rich cultural references that she had to be in the know to know. There was this one painting of a, looks like a mother. She was like beating her child. I dunno, maybe he took a cookie from the cookie jar, but the title of the painting was Bad Boys for Life. And I was like, this is hilarious. And I was like, this must be what it feels like to go to a museum and be a wasp, because I just saw all this implicit cultural affirmation and validation of like, yes, the things you see matter and are important. And one of my favorite things of the whole time I was going through and I was like those little things next to the paintings and just like this painting is a critique of the postmodern conditions and it was just like somebody holding up a fish. And my thing is, I’m like the artist would not talk. This

Installation is not about the artist as much as it’s about some grad student who need to get on their aesthetics class or some shit. So one of the things I saw on the outside, and again, I was just doing this the entire time I was going through the exhibit, who I’m as a person, it looked like there was this assessment of the art given to the artist, and all I saw was just lines of blue ink just crossing through the shit that was said and looked like there was some names added in pencil. And I was like, did what Davis do this? Did the artist say their interpretation is bunk and add in this stuff and make it sound human? I love this. So it was the first time where my favorite part of the exhibit wasn’t even the exhibit proper. It was just a thing outside of it that felt like it had some of the artists sweat in it beside the actual art that they were displaying. And it was a beautiful exhibit. So if you’re in Philly or if you have enough money to go to Philly, check out the Noah Davis exhibit at the art museum. Nice.

Joe Patrice:

Speaking of Philly and being slightly legal, but not one of our big stories for the day, but just because you mentioned the little placards explaining exhibits we did over the weekend get the decision handed down that the Trump administration cannot in fact remove all the references to slavery from all the historical exhibits in Philadelphia.

Kathryn Rubino:

Ypi, I wrote about that, the original, the hearing, it seemed very obvious if you listened to or read what happened at the hearing that this was going to be the decision, but that particular exhibit was made between the city of Philadelphia and the federal government in a combination, and the federal government was just like, yeah, we’re taking it off. And the judge was like, Lowes, no.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, yeah, you can’t there. There’s a lot of power, but it can’t really be arbitrary and capricious. So that happened. So more good news for Philadelphia, you get to have something in a year when the Eagles don’t win a Super Bowl, so you still get to have a few good nights.

Chris Williams:

He said that, not me. He said that not me. Do not beat my ass. Go birds.

Joe Patrice:

There you go. Alright, so with all that said, let’s transition to our topics. The biggest story of the week traffic wise for us, and it ultimately spawned some knock on stories, was Baker McKenzie, one of the top loss firms by revenue in the country on the Amwa 10 announced massive layoffs. Some I think around 700 staff laid off. It is not impacting lawyers per se though we did get anonymous tips from folks who said that there have been some corresponding what they considered stealth layoffs of attorneys layoffs that are not performance related or firings that are not performance related. We call those stealth layoffs. Obviously we can’t confirm that necessarily, but it’s out there as a possibility and it makes some sense within the context of the way Baker described these layoffs of staff, which was there was part of an overall restructuring blah, blah, blah, blah, but they specifically cite AI as one of the reasons why they were laying all these people off.

Kathryn Rubino:

I think that that is a super bold move right now in 2026 when a lot of finance reporters and tech reporters are talking about an AI bubble and we don’t necessarily know what’s about to happen. It seems an interesting moment given that kind of looming uncertainty in the AI market to lay that many people off because of ai.

Joe Patrice:

I’ll add to that, arguably the most aggressive investor in unquote agentic AI has been Salesforce who laid off bunches of people because AI was going to handle everything they have now toward the end of 2025, they started hiring people back and admitting that they vastly overestimated what AI could accomplish. You have IBM hiring bunches of new people claiming that AI just can’t do what people say it can do. It’s a weird time because you also have all these people playing around with the artist formerly known as Claude Bot, then Molt Bot now Open Claw, talking about how it can accomplish amazing things when it’s kind of untethered with no guardrails like that. We’ll see how that plays out.

Kathryn Rubino:

You would certainly think the legal industry would like guardrails.

Joe Patrice:

Well, so yeah, absolutely. Well, and on the legal front, we have what happened, which we talked about last week with Claude itself introducing these kind of legal skills, which I did not particularly believe were ready for prime time, but they’re there.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, yeah, and the other that I think is relevant to this particular question is the judge Roff a decision out there as well, which is talking explicitly about the dangers of using non-legal AI tools for legal tasks. In that particular decision. The judge said that because the client used some commercial grade, it’s not legal, not kind of protected AI to draft communications that they then sent to their lawyers that those were no longer privileged because they used in ai, which is outside of that privileged communication.

Joe Patrice:

We’re kind of deviating from the Baker McKenzie, but this is a great point. I think Judge KO’s decision is probably very strictly accurate by the precedent, but it really does violate a lot of the spirit of what we want out of an attorney-client privilege in that case, basically the person already knew they were a target of an investigation. They had already contacted Quinn Emanuel and engaged them and then on their own accord, they prepared some documents that they wanted to brief Quinn Emanuel about their case. Here’s my timeline of what I was doing, here’s yada yada. And because they used an AI to help compile it, judge Drako said that’s a third party and outside of the privilege. Now that said, part of it is, well, third parties could get access to that, so whatever, and it’s like if that’s the standard, if you save your stuff on OneDrive, it’s outside. If you save your stuff on the cloud, it fits the same. So it’s really problematic when you take it to its logical conclusions.

Kathryn Rubino:

Sure. I was only talking about it as it specifically talks about this ai

Joe Patrice:

Oh sure.

Kathryn Rubino:

How it talks about AI and specific to the Baker McKenzie situation, which is that although AI kind of feels ubiquitous right now and inevitable in a lot of ways, there’s still a real difference between those commercial products, which we have. There’s at least some precedent now out there saying that commercial products break the shields of privilege and these legal tech products, which theoretically because they have different guardrails in place would not do the same thing. And I think that that is really what people have to think about going forward. And if you’re making your hiring firing decisions based on this big question mark that’s looming over the industry, that just seems like a bold move.

Joe Patrice:

Well, so alright, I am going to belabor this one for a little bit longer. Here’s the other problem, and this was raised in the Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable last week when we talked about this issue because AI is not generating the revenue that its people want it to. The new play is integration with products you already use in Microsoft. You basically can’t get out of using copilot. It’s going to be integrated into all the office projects. Now if you write something in Microsoft Office, you are engaging with an AI whether you want to or not probably, unless you take real onerous steps to turn that off. Now at that point, using Microsoft Office puts you in the position where what you write in it can’t be privileged that we got a real problem,

Kathryn Rubino:

And I don’t think that that will long-term be the standard that’s the issue,

But again, now is an interesting time to do that. But the other kind of part of this that I think is really important to talk about is that big law has been under a real quandary in terms of its relationship to staff and staff hiring. Even in late as the nineties, early two thousands, there was a ton more staff. There were partners in the early two thousands that didn’t have computers, so they would dictate stuff and they would have secretarial pools that would take those oral recordings and change them into documents. There was just a lot more folks that were necessary to do big law, and that is changing rapidly for a bunch of reasons, and AI is only the most recent one, and I think that the story for the last 10 or 15 years has been the constant cutting of staff positions in big law,

Joe Patrice:

And I think to that extent, I felt like this announcement we’re getting real close to the bone.

Kathryn Rubino:

Sure.

Joe Patrice:

We already had gotten rid of a lot of the word processing units because lawyers can use their own word processors and stuff like that. We’re now getting to the point where we’re starting to cut bone and I’m not sure AI’s prepared to fulfill those roles that we’re starting to cut, but the bigger issue to transition, not really bigger issue, but bigger picture issue of where does it go from here.

Chris Williams:

Before we transition, there’s a thing I wanted to say. Just approaching this story at its face, do you actually buy the AI as the reason that these layoffs happened? As I’m looking at the areas that were cut, I could see a world where if Baker McKinsey just decides to lay off a good amount of their DEI department, that’s a story, but if they can say, oh, because of ai we have to lay off all of DEI, there’s nothing there. Or if they decide to lay off the leadership and learning department, it’s like, well, what about the incoming attorneys who’s going to do your training? But since they’re able to tie it to an AI story, oh, well, what can you

Joe Patrice:

Do? I think that’s a great point. I think that AI probably motivated a good deal of the layoffs, but you raised a great point, but there were HR people included in this reportedly, which does make you start to wonder if they were trying to obey in advance and get rid of a bunch of DEI related staff positions and by lumping it in with this, they could call everything AI and avoid some heat. Yeah, no, I mean that’s definitely a good point. Well, I was going to bigger picture it to just be what happens when they come for the lawyers and are they going to come for the lawyers? What happens to the industry more broadly? And I wrote a piece following up on the announcement that just explored the idea that I think we talk about the impact that AI could have on lawyers and law firms a little too homogeneously and that there are differences, and I think Baker McKinsey for instance, fits a business model mold that is distinct from say a cravath mold that makes it more prone to AI getting involved in the size of its

Headcount.

These firms that there are two kinds of firms in the elite of top

Kathryn Rubino:

Tier revenue.

Joe Patrice:

There are those that are a few hundred lawyers who are generating tons of money by billing a ton, billing a high amount for high quality content and how AI make them more efficient. They’re just going to charge more because there’s already clear elasticity to their prices. They can charge whatever they want and get it. Then there’s firms like Baker McKenzie and DLA and Denton who are also great firms who provide a great service, but it’s a different service because it’s based around the idea that they’re giant, they’re everywhere. They have thousands of lawyers. You can have the same firm handling stuff in far flung areas of the world, and those firms, when things get more efficient, the amount of revenue per lawyer they’re getting is so much smaller that if there’s any efficiencies to gain, they’re probably going to decrease headcount. And so treating those as separate entities when we talk about what the impact of AI might be, I thought was a

Kathryn Rubino:

Worthy exercise, and we should take some time to probably workshop terms that define these kinds of firms differently. But I think that, I don’t see there being massive sort of attorney layoffs at these firms, but what they likely, I think are to do is to start hiring smaller and smaller incoming

Joe Patrice:

Classes. I think that’s true too.

Kathryn Rubino:

So bad news if you’re currently in law school or thinking about law school, but less terrifying if you’re currently working there.

Joe Patrice:

And look, there will always be places for lawyers because there are some regulatory things we have in our back pocket, not just that only lawyers get to use AI or also won’t be privileged as we just talked about, but also conflicts are real. You can’t necessarily, if you’re a firm, just take on every matter and that openly keeps things going. But yeah, no, it’s a real issue. I also had a quick story following up on that about a case study that I read about a boutique firm that just lost an associate and didn’t replace them and used AI instead, and it kind of tracked this issue of, the thing about working in a boutique firm is if you’re an associate in a boutique firm, you’re your own mid-level and your own junior basically, and sometimes your own paralegal too. You’re doing kind of everything. So that’s a ripe area for AI to take some of those rote tasks off of your plate and basically rather than go through the expense of hiring and training and vetting and the risk involved in bringing in a new person, they just reduced everybody’s individual workload of that little bit through AI and did found themselves more profitable without replacing. So how it impacts different businesses is going to be a new thing for the future.

Chris Williams:

I do wonder how far we are from finding out that all these legal AI is actually just some phenomenal lawyer in India who didn’t want to get an LLM, and he’s actually just the ai. It’s like, why does the AI keep hallucinating Indian cases?

Joe Patrice:

We did hear, but there was that announcement that Waymo in some of their instances have remote drivers in the Philippines, right? Yeah,

Chris Williams:

Yeah.

Joe Patrice:

I took Waymo’s the other day as we talked about on a past episode. I don’t think mine was driven by a remote human because it made some weird directional choices that I would not have made if I were a human. Have you been driven by a human show? I’ve driven by humans many times. Like humans do that too, is what I’m saying. I dunno. All right, so well, let’s take a break and move on to another lengthy topic. Well, it would not be 2026 without us talking about Jeffrey Epstein, so

Kathryn Rubino:

Let’s deep sigh. Well, the good news for those who care about accountability is that Kathryn Rumer is soon to be the ex general counsel at Goldman Sachs. She submitted her resignation dated into June, which probably makes sense for financial care calendars and those sorts of reasons, or we will see what happens I guess in June and what the pressure on her is still like then. But we wrote extensively this past week about all the things that were in the Epstein files that Kathy Rumer was involved in, and it wasn’t great.

Joe Patrice:

You missed the opportunity you had on air called Brad Karp having to step down before it happened. You missed the opportunity last week to say that even though privately you had told us that you thought she’s not, she would not last the week either.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, I mean

Joe Patrice:

I can vouch that you did say it though you didn’t

Chris Williams:

Put it on the record.

Kathryn Rubino:

That is all accurate

Chris Williams:

And even if she does step down, I’m sure that amazing praise some Epstein ness as being an arch feminist will help her get another position

Joe Patrice:

If she has to step down, at least she has levitons to do it in.

Kathryn Rubino:

Here’s the thing about the rumbler situation that really gets under my craw and I think takes it

Joe Patrice:

Mixed metaphor probably, but go ahead. It’s

Kathryn Rubino:

Okay. You all know what I mean? The point remains, listen, there’s a lot of people who did a lot of shady things. There’s a lot of people who were willfully blind because a powerful person was trying to cultivate their friendship, all of which also is true of Kathy Ruber. But the thing that really, really got me or just also got me is what some of her spokespeople were out there saying about the revelations in the files. A spokesperson told the financial times on her behalf that it is simply despicable to single out and attack a highly respected female professional simply because of her benign interactions with Jeffrey Epstein.

Joe Patrice:

Single out, interesting choice. Seen it seems as though we’ve been talking about a lot of dudes who,

Kathryn Rubino:

A lot of dudes, a lot of dudes have lost their jobs. That is, there’s far more men who are under the hot seat or have stepped down, et cetera, under the on the,

Joe Patrice:

All right, you’ll keep going.

Kathryn Rubino:

Mix it up. Anyway, the point is, Brad Karp would like a word about being singled out. There’s a ton of men out there. You also wrote about Ken Starr now passed away, but still his interactions with Jeffrey Epstein are also continued to be under a microscope and also to use the word despicable. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. What’s despicable is the freaking crimes here. Right? It is wild to say that accountability is despicable. In a world where we have these atrocious crimes coming to light and being part of the public discourse

Joe Patrice:

Might’ve wanted to use something different. It’s

Kathryn Rubino:

Unfortunate.

Joe Patrice:

Unfortunate, yeah.

Chris Williams:

The thing that gets me, and this is just going back from I think there was a book on slavery and it was like 40% of slave owners were white women. It is not something new that women can sometimes be major players in upholding patriarchy and abusive relationships. I wonder how much is actually the opposite that the role of women in the Epstein files is being undercovered by what’s going on. So it’s like there should be more coverage of the women that are involved. I think it’s just like her and just laying where are the other women? We know they’re there. We know about the law student that ended up a nice ride at a yes. Where are the other women?

Kathryn Rubino:

I mean, listen, there were a lot. Listen, Hillary Clinton’s also under the spotlight for her relationship with the Epstein’s, and I think that part of the issue is something we talked about last week is that I think for some of the people, they had both a role as victim and as perpetrator. And I think that that makes it more complicated to talk about. And we are not great at nuance as a public discourse in America. So I think that that has certainly been part of that problem. But yeah, I think you’re right.

Chris Williams:

I’m suspicious of that framing too, because I’m sure there are a lot of men who are like, well, I was being blackmailed, so of course I had to do some dirt for Jeffrey. Free the victim and perpetrator rhetoric. I feel it gets deployed in a way that defends the innocence of women in a way that men do not benefit from. Not that men should benefit from it, but just speaking discursively dirt on everybody

Joe Patrice:

Here. No, I think that makes some sense. As far as accountability goes, it just seems like there are these people making desperate attempts to explain away stuff that happened, but that horse has sailed, as they might say.

Kathryn Rubino:

I love that. I love that mixing of metaphors as I might say. And the thing that really gets me too about Rumbler is not just that she’s doing this in a really problematic way, but also in the files she explicitly is jive of diversity. When they’re talking about one of her job opportunities, she says, I ain’t no affirmative action that the notion that somebody might hire her a woman. So she has this big kind of pick me girl energy when she’s talking with her older brother, Jeffrey Epstein. She does refer to him as her older brother at one point also in the files, and now turning around and using that as a shield is really problematic.

Joe Patrice:

Ken Starr also referred to Epstein as a brother. It seems like

Kathryn Rubino:

It’s a real problematic family

Chris Williams:

Who’s in the Epstein files. It made no familiar relationship to him, all of

Kathryn Rubino:

Us.

Chris Williams:

So it’s not that hard. It is really not that difficult. I never big bro Epstein at any moment in my life.

Joe Patrice:

Alright, well let’s take a break and move to another topic to close out the show when we get back. Well, this is a short one, but an important one, and we’re going to keep an eye on this to see if more momentum starts. We’ve talked a few times on the show and we’ve definitely written about the increasingly troubling speed at which the law firm hiring process is going with people, with firms making offers before students have first semester grades with recruiting happening in kind of unorthodox ways with exploding authors being handed out before people are able to talk to other firms, really putting way too much pressure on people way too early in their careers and kind of making a mess of everything. And it is not good for the firms either because you’re introducing way more risk hiring people without knowing their grades, but nobody seems willing to come together and stop it. This week we did have a story that Cooley, LLP has said, you know what? We’re out.

Kathryn Rubino:

I think that that’s the right kind of move, but I question whether or not it will either gain traction or whether they’re going to see some negative results as because of that decision. There’ll be fewer people in the market for jobs when they’re willing to start interviewing folks. Presumably the people who had the highest grades.

Joe Patrice:

So they’re doing a half measure, which I think is kind of smart. So they are staying half in this market, but they’re leaving half of their openings

Kathryn Rubino:

Free.

Joe Patrice:

Which to your point, I think makes sense. But there’s also the possibility that some of these folks whose offers explode on them are going to be in a position where they’re going to got to look towards somebody hiring

Kathryn Rubino:

Later. And it’s also true that even if somebody is like, oh, I think I made the right decision three months into my law school career about where I’m going to work after graduation in two and a half years, gets to the firm that they were so excited about their one L year and finds out, oh, that’s not what I thought that I turns out I’m really interested in this niche of the law that the firm that I have an offer from doesn’t really specialize in. I’d love to go to Cooley because they have whatever kind of practice area I hope it catches on is the best I can say. I hope that we’re talking in a year from now saying the great Cooley experiments, giving them all the props in the world for being the first major law firm for making this stance. But yeah,

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, and obviously it’s a half stance, but I also think that that’s the only way that this can start. We need more people to go with the half and then can maybe all go all the way. It’s a start

Chris Williams:

And the pressure is definitely going to be on the half that gets accepted as part of the quick rush because if the other half of the people that they actually vetted them for the grades and what have you are doing, just knocking out the park compared to the other half of the associates, then so if you get on early, put on. All right.

Joe Patrice:

Well thanks everybody for tuning in. We will be back next week. You should be subscribed to the show so that you get new episodes when they drop. You should be giving reviews, stars, writing things. It’s an ask that you hear at the end of almost every podcast, but it’s so easy to do just yeah, no one does it, but do you do it? Yeah. You just got

Chris Williams:

No one

Joe Patrice:

Does it. I have done it before, largely because I started doing this and I started realizing how important it was. But yeah, no, people should do that.

Take the 10 seconds out of your day and do that. You should be listening to other shows. Kathryn’s the host of the Jabot. I’m the guest on the aforementioned Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable where there’s other shows from the Legal Talk Network out there. You should be reading Above the Law, so you read these in other stories before we talk about them here, you should be following on social media above law.com. I’m Matt, Joe Patrice, she’s at Kathryn one. Chris is at Writes for Rent all over, mostly at the blue sky, but still some residual Twitter presence I suppose. And with all that, I think we’re done.

Kathryn Rubino:

Peace. Bye.

Joe Patrice:

Peace.

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