Epstein Fallout Rocks Legal As Admin Tries To Deflect From ICE

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Patrice:

Hello, welcome to another addition to Thanking Like a Lawyer. I’m Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I am here with a couple of other Above the Law notable names. I have Kathryn Rubino.

Kathryn Rubino:

Hey, hey.

Joe Patrice:

And Chris Williams here. Merry Christmas. Yeah. As we’ve already discussed, fresh from being in the Epstein files, we’re here to talk to you about the big stories in the week that was in legal, which it will not surprise you will also involve said files probably.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. I said last week that I think that this is going to be an ongoing theme for the winter.

Joe Patrice:

But first we’ll take a quick break to have some small talk. It’s really cold.

Chris Williams:

Before we get to talking about the weather, as all interesting people do, I did want to say my little bit about the being in the Epstein files, because I did listen to last week’s podcast since I wasn’t on it because-

Joe Patrice:

Right, right, right. We could schedule it. Yeah.

Chris Williams:

There’s a timing era where I didn’t pay attention to Kathryn being a good employee and friend. So yes, we’re in the Epstein Files. Turns out, and it was because of the sea also, which at the time I was writing. So I felt like I was telling people my article got in the Epstein files. And I was joking with my friends who are also broken people. And one of them had the same thought that I had. I was like, “Yo, you need to put this in your dating profile.” And so there’s a section where you can do two truths and a lie. And I was like, okay, one, I’m a former boat builder. Two, I don’t like honey mustard. Three, I am in the Epstein files. And I didn’t do it because I figured the type of people I’d attract who are okay with me being in the Epstein files, I’m not into Republicans.

But the thought was hilarious and I just wanted to share that. Yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

It will be the permanent icebreaker kind of factoid about us.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Yeah, maybe not for a dated profile, but I think it is going to serve us all well.

Chris Williams:

Yeah. And the line of the sea also was something along the lines of the judiciary is doing so bad the other branches are getting flagged for it. So it’s like for all the reasons to be in the Epstein files, I told my mom, she was like, “I’m so proud of you, son.” And I was like, “I know I am the only person that has received this message.” So that’s my part. I just wanted to share.

Joe Patrice:

That is perfect. That’s been our life for the last week. But yeah, no. So we’re in there. It’s cold. I was just going to say. I didn’t really have anything else to say about it other than that being a literal icebreaker. It’s

Kathryn Rubino:

So cold that the air- How

Joe Patrice:

Cold is it?

Kathryn Rubino:

The air tastes like freezer burn.

Joe Patrice:

Did you brush your teeth?

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, yeah. So I was just outside. I was in Manhattan over the weekend and had to go out in some of the lowest of those temperatures. And it tasted like burning. The air tasted like burning. That’s how cold it was. It was unpleasant. It was very unpleasant.

Chris Williams:

Well, I wonder if that has more to do with the cold or new workings at the EPA because I’ve never … I’ve had ice on my tongue many a time and I’ve never thought, burning. One thing that was hot this weekend was the SuperBowl performance.

Joe Patrice:

Ooh.

Chris Williams:

Yeah. So I was a little-

Joe Patrice:

Oh, Kid Rock and … Yeah.

Chris Williams:

Let’s get … We don’t say Kid Rock anymore. We say the full name, Epstein Island. But I was in a privileged position because I was in a gaming chat room. I got to experience one of those times where you’re around white folks and they don’t know you’re a minority in the room. So it was like, “Oh, great, this is the double consciousness thing. I’m experiencing it. ” And they were like, “Oh my God, none of this is in English. Let’s go watch Kid Rock.” And in my mind, I’m like, “You mean the bonded theBang de bang digging?” He is not speaking English either.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. I saw somebody make a point like that too. I’ve heard it referred to as Klan Cella, which I can’t unhear.

Kathryn Rubino:

What I think is particularly funny and kind of makes it a pseudo legal story is that the halftime show was originally supposed to stream on X, but somebody did not file their compliance paperwork correctly and had to move it over to YouTube because they couldn’t, they didn’t have the license.

Joe Patrice:

They didn’t have the rights to stream it. Yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. I mean, you got to appreciate the shearing confidence.

Chris Williams:

Yeah. It’s funny how draining the swamp has just led to so much of people not being able to do their jobs. It’s almost as if it was alive from the start.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. All right. Well, we have an action packed day, so we should move on. To the aforementioned Epstein files. So we kind of previewed what was going on last week. Now we have a lot more that has happened.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. As predicted, Brad Carp is no longer the chair of Paul Weiss. He’s still an attorney there. He will resume sort of servicing clients as per typical, but he’s no longer in charge of the firm. His appearance in the Epstein files is a quote distraction, and he has moved from that role. Scott Barshay is now the new chair. And according, I believe it was the Wall Street Journal, was the one who actually had to break the news to Carp that he was out like so much old trout. Apparently he was surprised by that revolution. I don’t know why, because I saw those files and I was not surprised that he would eventually have to take a backseat. And the new era of Paul Weiss is upon us.

Chris Williams:

And just to be clear, the backseat is still one of the highest ranked positions you can have at Paul Weiss. Sure.

Kathryn Rubino:

Sure. Yeah. And I think that, again, it was the Wall Street Journal that said that Paul Weice is planning to move to new location within the next two years and Karp’s office will be right next to Barshay’s. So very, very close on hand for all those leadership questions that may arise. But I think it’s interesting. I know some people were a little bit taken aback that Karp was able to sort of navigate the last big scandal, which was Paul Weiss being the first firm to capitulate to Donald Trump and to sign one of those pro bono payola deals and that he was able to survive, but this was too much, which is not super, super surprising. There’s no business case for appearing in the Epstein files being like, “You’re amazing. I can’t wait to hang out with you again more,” to one of the most notorious pedophiles in recent memory that there’s no business case for that.

There is at least a business case for the capitulation.

Joe Patrice:

I was going to go a different direction, which is it really does kind of show the mindset of big law that these kind of conversations, which were not like, and we will get into people who had way worse conversations with him, were not the worst conversations anybody had with this guy, that this is what the firm decides as a distraction, not becoming the literal symbol of capitulation and cowardice and big Law.That move, which everybody, we obviously panned it, but it broke contain. It made it to the mainstream media, calling out Paul Weiss for capitulating, bending a knee. These are the phrases that were used in mainstream media for it.

Kathryn Rubino:

Not just us. Yeah.

Joe Patrice:

That strikes me as though that should have been the bigger obstacle to overcome, but that wasn’t it. It was that he’d done some friendly legal advice that technically wasn’t representing, I guess.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. I mean, some of the documents that are out there are definitely him commenting on the plea agreement and defense of the previous agreement when it was kind of in the media and people were trying to get that undone. So there’s definitely stuff in there that reads like legal advice, even if he wasn’t sort of hired by Epstein. And to your point, Joe, not only was that the sort of capitulation, not the thing that did it in for CARP, but Barshay is reportedly one of the stronger voices for the deal internally at Paul Weiss. He was apparently one of the big … And makes sense. He’s a corporate side guy. M&A is his background. And we’ve talked about how the corporate side was much more in favor of the deals because they need to sort of make things smooth in this administration or to make their nut.

But whereas litigators are of the sort that want to fight it because you fight it in court and they understand that battle. And it shows that we’re willing to fight the government and we’ll fight it on our behalf and on your behalf kind of thing. And those are very different mindsets. But yeah, so the new era of Paul Weiss will be led by an M&A attorney that was very much in favor of the deal with the Trump administration.

Joe Patrice:

Okay. So who do we want to talk about next in the Epstein situation? Would we like to talk about people who had worse emails or would we like to talk about people who are also high ranking who were

Kathryn Rubino:

Involved? There’s a lot of them here, so

Joe Patrice:

Dealerships. We have four things here to talk about.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. Okay. We could talk about the Clifford Chance- So

Joe Patrice:

Worse emails.

Kathryn Rubino:

The worst emails. So there was a Clifford Chance trainee attorney in one of their European offices that had an ongoing relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. These emails are pretty disturbing. The former big law associate is represented by Boy Schiller and they say that she was a victim of Epstein’s and certainly the initial emails talk about them developing a sexual relationship. While she was at Clifford Chance, Jeffrey Epstein had her write a sex contract.

Joe Patrice:

As one does.

Kathryn Rubino:

As one does. And then it gets worse from there. She eventually descends into recruiting other women for Epstein. She talks about that extensively in the emails. “Oh, noted, 24 is too old. Won’t do that again. “Sending videos of folks. “Oh, I know you like … What do you want me to bring you back from Switzerland besides more girls?” Deeply disturbing stuff. And Epstein also paid for her LLM at Berkeley Law. So very involved in her legal career as well. So just some deeply disturbing stuff all

Joe Patrice:

Over. I will say of the sex contract, one of the email exchanges appears to be him criticizing the first draft that it doesn’t have some of the standard boilerplate language that you would expect in a contract. So Jeffrey Epstein would’ve been fully prepared to become a contracts professor, I guess.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, I mean, if you’ve read the feedback, it was typo laden, barely comprehensible, but he certainly, I’m sure, fancied himself that way.

Chris Williams:

Also, who’s to say that the real contract advice came for him? Maybe he forwarded it to Dershowitz and then he repeated what Dershowan said.

Joe Patrice:

Well, he probably would’ve sent it to a transactional lawyer in this instance.

Chris Williams:

Fairfax. But I feel like everybody knows. Everybody knows contract.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah.

Chris Williams:

My thing with this story, which I think is an important discussion to have as important as is uncomfortable, to what line do we think of this person as a victim and what line we think of him as a well-compensated employee?

Kathryn Rubino:

I mean, I think that both things can be true. Somebody can be a victim and then in turn, victimize other people. I think that that’s both true. And listen, the documents we have are inherently an incomplete picture. We don’t know any of their interpersonal kind of face-to-face interactions, what those were like, any sort of phone conversations. We don’t know what those were like. We also don’t know that these was the extent of their written communications either or there’s more documents that exist out there. So we don’t know what the full extent of it is. We’re only getting kind of snippets, but I definitely think the line between victim and then recruiting other women to be part of Epstein’s orbit, I think is super problematic, but I don’t think that it means she wasn’t initially victimized. I think that both things can be true.

Joe Patrice:

So I want to jump now to Goldman Sachs. This is another instance where somebody had casual conversations with Epstein in a way where you would think, probably ill-advised to be having these conversations. This is also one of your stories.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. Kathy Rumler, the current top attorney at Goldman Sachs, had an ongoing friendly relationship with Epstein, and we’ve written a couple stories about that fact, but she appears to have turned to Epstein for a lot of career advice. She was a Latham partner for a lot of years, and she at some point decided that she wanted to leave Latham or she considered other options outside of Latham. And there was a lot of communications between her and Epstein as she was going through that process. One of them included, she was talking to folks from Citadel hedge fund there about whether or not she would go in- house there. And when Epstein and Rumler were talking about potential negotiations between when she’s getting that job, she responded to Epstein that, “Oh, are you going to trade one of your Russians for my comp?”

Joe Patrice:

Yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

Seemingly a joke, but deeply uncomfortable and problematic. Well,

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, because to be clear, that doesn’t necessarily mean that she knows anything about what he’s doing right there as far as child trafficking stuff, which we know is going on. The phrase Russians doesn’t imply that, but it does suggest a certain level of scheviness if you’re in a position where you’re talking about trading what’s seemingly attractive assistance for money. And it’s also one of those situations where you don’t … That’s a joke that I might tell somebody randomly if I didn’t know that they’d previously made a nonprofit agreement over human trafficking stuff.

Kathryn Rubino:

Sure. Yeah. This email exchange happens in 2016, and obviously in 2008, Ebseen served time for state crimes related to his activities and entered into a non-prosecution agreement for federal crimes.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. There are gallows humorish jokes that you could make with random friends that are … They hit different if that friend has already pleaded guilty to something like that. And that’s really the issue. You have a relationship with somebody who has these issues in their past, and they’ve had kind of a working relationship too. This is obviously crossing more into personal conversation, whatever, but you’ve got to be more … It’s worryingly not conscious of the fact that that’s sitting in there in the background. And again, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s illegal. It could very well not be, but it’s skivy.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. And that phrase kind of your Russians is not just in the rumor emails, in the Epstein files. If you just search for that, you’ll find a bunch of other folks referring to talking to Epstein about your Russians. So this was sort of a way that his inner circle talked about the fact that he paid foreign models. There was, I think it was some bank after everything kind of came to light, did an investigation, a financial investigation, and there was hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to foreign models for … We don’t even know, right? But the way that that was kind of referred to is something that happened a lot within these emails.

Chris Williams:

On the note of scheviness, one of the things that in my mind, I’ve had suspicions, but to just see it, kind of a jaw drop, there’s a moment where she’s like, “I won’t be a DEI hire.” So she’s more comfortable with getting a lift in her career from a pedophile than getting the job because she would help fluff out the firm’s diversity statistics because she’s a white woman, which would happen either way.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, you have to avoid it.

Chris Williams:

Yeah. I mean, I tell all the places I work for that I’m a white man and I still show up on their diversity. So that was jarring to see, but it’s also like, oh, this is how they actually talk behind closed doors.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. And that’s how we kind of even get to the place of trading Russians for compensation is Epstein was like, “Oh, they’re interested in a woman.” And she’s like, “I’m not an affirmative action hire.” And he’s like, “No, I mean romantically.” And she’s like, “What? You’re going to trade one of your Russians for my compensation?” And I was like, and he was like, “No, I mean you. ” And he’s like- Yeah,

Joe Patrice:

The context is not great.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah.

Joe Patrice:

Sex trafficking is fine, but I draw the line of diversity. Classic community line. So transitioning back to Paul Weiss slightly is the last one, which is a Paul Weiss partner who is in the files for passing along some legal insights about whether or not it’s okay to cross state lines to sleep with somebody who fits their statutory laws, but not in another states, et cetera, which is obviously very disturbing legal advice one would think. And that got a lot of people on social media up in arms about this, especially because this connects back to Paul Weiss yet again, a firm that’s already had some issues here.

Kathryn Rubino:

It’s a weird stray actually that Paul Weiss is catching on this. Just because he was a law student at the time.

Joe Patrice:

Yes, completely catching astray here. I believe he just graduated, but was working post-grad as a research assistant. This is just out of Harvard research assistant writing these things. And the reason they’re writing them is because Alan Dershowitz does not use a computer. And so he’s passing along information from his boss, Alan Dershowitz. Now, again, Dershowitz has other connections with Epstein that people was involved in that original plea deal and people have reason to criticize that. That said, they’re jumping because of some of the awful things in the Epstein files. People want to jump to this idea of this person who sent this is terrible, Dershowitz is terrible. They were advising him on how to write and how to do sex tourism. There was one email about figuring out sex tourism laws. I Wanted to push back on that because there may well be other reasons to criticize these folks, but these emails aren’t it. And the reason why, and I understand why people are wound up because of how bad some of the stuff in there is, but at the time, this is all happening when Epstein’s negotiating that original plea deal, he is accused of all of these things and he is consulting with a criminal defense lawyer about what to do. That means they’re going to do research on whether or not certain things are legal or not.

Kathryn Rubino:

Sure.

Joe Patrice:

They’re going to do research on whether or not people should receive X, Y, Z punishment for this action or that action. And it may seem unsavory, but that does mean you’re going to do that research and you’re going to respond with, “No, it looks like it is legal for one to do that or the other.” And look, is that in some ways giving a loaded rifle to a monkey, if you’ve got somebody who’s actually interested in doing illegal stuff and you do that research for purposes of- This is how you can get a wafer. Yeah. There’s no way to put that toothpaste back in the tube as I write. Obviously that does mean that happens, but at the end of the day, you do have an obligation as a defense lawyer to try to research the laws that your person is being accused of. So there’s nothing wrong with these emails.

It is obviously, we understand why that’s kind of unfortunate, but as a system, we rely on defense lawyers being able to do their job, and that does mean they have to do this research. So that was my one takeaway with that, that no matter how awful things are and how much people want to feel righteous anger for some of the things that are happening in these files-

Kathryn Rubino:

There’s lots of other places

Joe Patrice:

To place it. I don’t think this is it, folks.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. And listen, there’s lots to be angry about here.

Chris Williams:

Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say, Joe, this is totally fair to say, and I’m glad you said it, but also this is why people don’t like lawyers right here.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. I mean, it is why criminal defense work gets vilified sometimes, but it is part of the process. Now, look, we’ve on this show talked a lot over the years of this show about … I don’t have a particularly rosy view of the idea that everyone deserves to have lawyers, so you could never criticize lawyers for the work they do. I think there’s an argument for that in criminal defense cases if you are a criminal defense lawyer. But A, becoming a criminal defense lawyer is a choice. If that’s not the business that you want to be in, then don’t be in it. Other people are better suited to that. And in the transactional space, for instance, or civil litigation space, no, they don’t have the right to you as their lawyer. You can say no. There’s a kind of a constitutional principle in being a criminal defense lawyer, but if you decide to help out, get your business tied up with a sex pest because you think you’re going to make a little bit of money off of it, that’s on you.

There’s no higher constitutional principle that you have to do that work and collect those fees. And that’s where this comes in down for me. In this instance, at the time that this was happening, this is absolutely Alan Dershowitz working as a criminal defense lawyer. This is absolutely research that needs to be done for that purpose. I have criticized Dershowitz about a lot of things over the years. This is not- And likely

Kathryn Rubino:

Will again,

Joe Patrice:

But- And likely will again, but this is absolutely not one of them. He is absolutely correct here, I think. All right. Well, let’s take a break. We’ve gone on this for quite

Kathryn Rubino:

A time. Go take a shower quickly after so we can go onto something besides the Epstein files.

Joe Patrice:

All right. Well, let’s transition real quick to the topic that we are all being distracted from because of the Epstein files. I think the Epstein files sort of dropped because I think this administration who had been delaying the files for a long time wanted to get some attention off of what’s going on on the immigration front.

So let’s talk about that and not let them distract us from it. This was one story, and it’s one slice of life on immigration story, I think, which is that in Minnesota, we had a government attorney in court being taken to task by the judge for their inability of the government to comply with any of the orders that they’re being ordered to comply with. And the attorney had a moment of pure candor explaining, you don’t know what we’re up against. I’m telling iCE and Homeland Security to release people. I have to send three emails and call them and fight them, basically explaining that inside the government, the Justice Department lawyers, if they are being helpful, which many of them probably aren’t, in this instance, this was a lawyer who was. If they are trying to be compliant with court orders, they’re getting pushback from internal to the government and explains that that’s happening, explains that, and then ultimately says the caseload that they’re working with was so bad, they welcomed the court throwing them in jail for contempt because at least they would get some rest.

Yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

I mean, you’re right. This is just a real slice of the times, right? Like this is what’s going on kind of on the ground. And we’ve talked about this last week where we talked about the severe brain drain that’s happening at the DoJ, which used to be a super elite job and is just not anymore. They’re literally soliciting resumes on Twitter. That

Joe Patrice:

Also happened this week.

Kathryn Rubino:

They’re soliciting resumes on Twitter. They’re getting military lawyers to fill in the gap. They literally don’t have enough people to deal with the amount of people that they’re arresting.

And they’re under questionable conditions. There’s a lot of legal proceedings that have to happen as a result, and they are woefully ill-equipped. And even the people who are still there, because a bunch of people have resigned in protest and will continue to do so, I’m sure. Even though that’s all true, the people that they’re left, they are just burning through them. They created these emergency jump teams at the DOJ, which said that every office had to identify one to two attorneys that would just kind of go from hotspot to hotspot as things get really crazy and they would work there for a period of time. It sounds like a CBS TV show rather than an actual staffing strategy.

Joe Patrice:

This all goes back to the … Steve Bannon is famous, infamously came up with the Trump playbook back in the first term that they should flood the zone. They should do as much as possible at all times, and there’s no way people can stop them. What I think we’re starting to see here is that the problem with flooding the zone is- Hurts you. … you spread yourself Out. They do not have the resources to keep up with the problems. Everybody else is doing their own thing. The government is the one who’s involved in every one of these issues and they’re overburdened.

Kathryn Rubino:

There are a lot more attorneys that are not working for the government that are working for the government. So there’s a lot that workload can be spread out a lot more than the government work can, particularly when it’s such a bad job right now and they’re not being respected internally. That’s what this other part of this thing is that they are telling ICE that you have to do this, you have to do that. And they’re not being respected by their other branches, other government employees. They’re being saying, “This is what you have to do legally.” And they’re saying, “Good luck trying to find me. ” And that’s true. So why stay at this job?

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, it’s real bad.

Chris Williams:

I will say there is other … I remember at some point I read a snippet of an internal FBI document and it was a section on how to infiltrate or how to infiltrate left wing organizations and make them basically works at their job. And one of the things that you do is you get in and you don’t do the little things and over time that adds up. Write a report and forget to staple it, like goofy shit like that over time. It just puts rust in the gears. So as much as I want to say, if you’re doing this work, you should quit. I also want to be like, “If you’re doing this work and you don’t like what the administration is doing, stay in and do your job poorly.”

Joe Patrice:

The problem is the doing it poorly part means leaving people to languish who need to be let go. Fair. And that’s the whole problem. Yeah. It’s real rough. But no, I hear you. Having people on the inside you would like to think helps, but it’s a tough spot. All right. Well, we should move to our last topic because we’re running a little long here. So let’s take a break and be right back.

Kathryn Rubino:

Hey, Joe.

Joe Patrice:

Hey, what?

Kathryn Rubino:

We get to talk about legal tech now. We sure do.

Joe Patrice:

One of the biggest stories of last week, and indeed, if you add together the two stories we had about it, arguably the biggest, is anthropic.

Kathryn Rubino:

It’s a hell of an argument, but continue.

Joe Patrice:

Anthropic, the people who make Claude and have therefore been providing technology to legal tech generally. When we talk about AI and legal tech, it’s not like any of these companies are necessarily building their own large language models. The derogatory term is wrapper, as in they’re just taking OpenAI. They’re taking GPT, they’re taking Claude, they’re taking Gemini and building a wrapper around it. Now, those wrappers are important and involve work. You have to do things.

Kathryn Rubino:

Create some of the guardrails that are really the selling points for a lot of legal technology.

Joe Patrice:

And of course, utilizing them with proprietary data matters too. If you have the good data on legal that are going to make the models perform better and have a moat around it like your Lexus or Westlaw, then that matters. That said, so they’ve all been using these various models. And I will also say that another thing that a lot of them do is have some kind of secret sauce games where they have multiple models from multiple providers and they kind of decide and fine tune. If the lawyer asks this question, send this one to Claude Sonnet and send this one to GPT4 and like to balance it out. That said, that’s the legal tech market as it kind of exists right now. That is the Reality of what’s going on out there in legal tech is everyone tries to integrate this. What happened last week was that Anthropic announced that they had built their own tool that was open source that you could use to do a bunch of the work that these other companies are building wrappers to do.

What happened immediately after that is the market collapsed.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, dipped at the very least.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. TR went down like 15%. ReLx 14. I saw- It

Kathryn Rubino:

Was definitely a clear market reaction to this.

Joe Patrice:

LegalZoom, like 20%. People got real hit. Our colleagues, Embry had written a story for us about how he’d been warning about this for a while, that this whole house of cards is based on the idea that these foundational models don’t end up getting into legal and here it is. It is likely, given the arms race nature of things that the next shoe to drop is all the other ones, Google and OpenAI are going to try to do the same thing, putting more pressure on legal. I personally still think that legal matters. I think that people who are experts in how law works are going to do a better job. I will say-

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. I also think that there’s just a lot more, I think, hesitance too from the legal market. You have to be able to talk to lawyers to get them to use it.

Joe Patrice:

Well, so here’s the weird part of it. It’s a smart play in that we do have studies that show that inside these, especially in- house work and stuff like that, people are using these consumer facing models more than the bespoke legal tools, which is scary as I’ll get out, but that’s the thing that’s happening. And so it kind of makes sense as a logical move. But one of the things that I include in this story is after I wrote it, there was a social media post of somebody who works in- house showing a screenshot of their GC using this product and it was trying to do all its legal research through Wikipedia. And this is why this stuff’s not ready for PrimeTime, but people are overreacting. I actually thought that the biggest, and this is a point I made on the tech show that I’m also on, in some ways the bigger takeaway for me was the investor class is crazy.

If they overreacted to this product, which is clearly not ready dropping by wiping out a metric ton of value out of a bunch of legal tech companies, then I don’t know as though I trust them driving the nature of innovation, right?

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, that’s the entire way the system works. So

Joe Patrice:

Yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yes, you’re right to be scared, but that is the way it works.

Joe Patrice:

We’re all screwed. We’re all going to die and it’s not because AI is going to kill us. It’s going to be the pursuit of AI is going to bankrupt us is kind of my

Kathryn Rubino:

Takeaway. All right. All

Joe Patrice:

Right. Well, we should be going- That’s the note we

Chris Williams:

End on?

Joe Patrice:

Yeah.

Chris Williams:

Yeah. We’re

Kathryn Rubino:

All

Joe Patrice:

Going to die.That’s our P-Doo moment for those who listen to the other show, that’s a thing we used to do.

Chris Williams:

That’s why we didn’t win the podcast Grammy or whatever it was.

Joe Patrice:

Oh, well, we didn’t even talk about the Grammys. Well, that was another story this week, but whatever.

Chris Williams:

Whatever.

Joe Patrice:

So thanks for listening. Subscribe to the show, get more shows when they drop. You should be listening to other shows. Kathryn’s the host of the Jabo. I’m guest on the Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable. There’s other shows on the Legal Talk Network. You should read above the law. You should be following on social mediaboBlaw.com. I’m at Joe Patrice. She’s at Kathryn one. Chris is a writes for Rent, and we will chat next week. Bye. Peace.