Will We Never Learn Our Lesson About The Bar Exam?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Patrice:
Hello. Welcome to another edition of Thinking Like a Lawyer. I’m Joe Patrice from Above the Law.

Kathryn Rubino:
Hey, Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I’m Kathryn Rubino weirdly also of Above the Law.

Joe Patrice:
I don’t know how weird it is, but thanks for sharing. We are here to discuss, as we always do, the big stories in the legal industry from the Week that Was, and we begin by having a little bit of small talk as people. You got to do that now because these podcasts that are AI generated are starting to sound so good. I don’t know if you saw, but Sam Altman is saying that that’s what you should do with your children’s. You should put your children’s Google Calendars into it because children have Google Calendars so that you can have a podcast that explains their soccer game or their upcoming birthday party while you’re riding in the car with them.

Kathryn Rubino:
That is exactly what a robot would suggest.

Joe Patrice:
You could also talk to your children, but –

Kathryn Rubino:
Yeah, correct. Correct. That is more dystopian than I think he thought it was going to come out. It does not seem time saving. It seems like you are disengaged and maybe have a touch at the tism.

Joe Patrice:
Yeah. It really is. With every passing day, it seems the Silicon Valley, the TV show was less a comedy than a documentary. I don’t know.

Kathryn Rubino:
I did not watch it, although you do quote it a fair amount. So there’s a certain amount that I’ve become familiar with.

Joe Patrice:
I actually haven’t watched. I never really watched it in first run, so I haven’t seen it all the way through, but I’ve seen several clips

Kathryn Rubino:
Over the

Joe Patrice:
Years.

Kathryn Rubino:
That have stuck with you and you’ve decided to integrate it to your lexicon.

Joe Patrice:
One of their funders in the show has a child, but he also has a AI home assistant that he calls upon whenever he has to discipline the child. It’s like the kid’s like, “I want this.” And he’ll hit a button and the robot will be like, “No, Timmy, blah, blah, blah.” And he’s like, “It’s out of my hands.”

Kathryn Rubino:
Timmy said, yeah. I will say that I also spent the better part of the weekend thinking about childcare. I don’t know what your FYP looks like, but I’ve been getting served a lot of information and clips of kindergarten teachers complaining about some schools have already started in other parts of the country about how ill-prepared. This is your COVID generation of kindergartners, how ill-prepared kindergartners are, how they can’t cut with scissors, how they can’t take off their own backpacks, how they don’t know how to put on their own shoes. And I am taking this and really spiraling because I have a little kid. My kid can’t do these things. My kid can’t cut. My kid can’t put on their own shoes. My kid can’t turn off the water correctly, all this kind of stuff. And I’m kind of spiraling. And then I needed to take a pause and say, “Oh, but my kid’s three, not five.
My kid is two years to come up with these skills, but that’s what anxiety will do for you.” All of a sudden I spent hours on all these sort of teacher TikToks being like, “This is how to prepare your kid for kindergarten.” And I’m like, “That’s what I have to do over the next two years. Now I have a list in my head of all the things that need to be accomplished over the next two years, not two weeks.” I mean,

Joe Patrice:
If you think your kid not being ahead of the curve is fine, that’s fine. I mean,

Kathryn Rubino:
Too bad. I like that you’re trying to amp up my anxiety. Always. Is that what you just said?

Joe Patrice:
I mean, I feel –

Kathryn Rubino:
You can write the hell off. I

Joe Patrice:
Don’t know. I just feel like as a coworker, it’s always best when people are on edge. So no, I don’t think any of that. But I am describing. I worked at big law. When people live in a constant state of terror, they put out their best work.

Kathryn Rubino:
In fairness, this would terror about my personal life, not my job, but sure, sure, sure. I’m sure that generalized anxiety disorder does not discriminate.

Joe Patrice:
That’s

Kathryn Rubino:
Why it’s generalized.

Joe Patrice:
As we discussed last week, sometimes your personal life is your work life. That’s

Kathryn Rubino:
True.

Joe Patrice:
Anyway. Yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:
Yeah. Still feeling the anxiety of my kid not knowing how to cut. And every time I try to correct them, I’m cutting a scissor because you got to have your thumb up. And she’s also a lefty too, and I am not a lefty. So trying to teach a kid whose dominant hand is the opposite of the one that you have, I feel like has another kind of layer. And I was asking a friend of mine whose kid is also a lefty. I was like, “What did you do differently?” She’s like, “Oh, nothing. I have kids who are righties, lefties, and taught them all the same.” And then she paused and went, “Of course, my left-handed kid still can’t really cut with a sissor and they’re eight.” And I was like, “Okay, so I really focus on that.” So don’t do that. She’s like, “She’s not really good at cutting with a sissor.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.”

Joe Patrice:
So a precautionary

Kathryn Rubino:
Example. But my kid screams every time he try to tell her to hold the scissor the right way and thumbs up. And I have a friend who’s a preschool teacher who’s glue googly eyes on the thumb hole so that she knows what her thumb goes. And make your eyes match the eyes. Look at the eyes with your eyes kind of thing. And kind of working on that, but man. Maybe.

Joe Patrice:
Yeah, that sounds like a great idea actually.

Kathryn Rubino:
Well, that is what somebody who’s a professional in the industry. Yeah, that’s why people are professionals. Yeah. All

Joe Patrice:
Right. Well, let’s end our small talk there.

Kathryn Rubino:
The smallest of talk with the little estimate. Yeah.

Joe Patrice:
It was very small. And we will move on to slightly bigger people, but not quite full grownups. We’ll talk about the bar exam.

Kathryn Rubino:
Oh, okay.

Joe Patrice:
So last week was the bar exam. If you are one of the people who took the bar exam, congratulations on getting through it. And we’re very, very sorry that we continue to fail you as a profession. But –

Kathryn Rubino:
Yes, it says Joe Patrice, the patron saint of diploma privilege.

Joe Patrice:
Yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:
Fair enough. I don’t think that’s a bad descriptor of your position in the legal commentary sphere. You are a big proponent of diploma privilege.

Joe Patrice:
I am. I think that if you go to law school and you graduate law school, you should be able to practice with the character and fitnessy kind of stuff. All of that is still valuable. But doctrinally, you should not have to finish law school and then take another doctrinal test to find out if you understand all the subject matters that you just spent three years of iterative testing.

Kathryn Rubino:
And I will say, I think you are aggressive, I think about it, but I will say the notion that a closed book cram everything you’ve learned across three years into a two-day test is the right way when you should not be practicing law without references. That’s malpractice, arguably, to never research and to go back to the books and to look at the case law.That’s the actual skill.

Joe Patrice:
Right. So that has been a critique for a while. I also, just as an aside, just to close the loop, another reason I’m very big in diploma privilege is I think that for too long, there’s a tier of law schools that rip people off, that collect their tuition money and send people out who are not capable of passing the bar exam and practicing. And I think a world of diploma privilege would come along with a world in which we would have tighter standards on law schools such that people actually
Got what they needed. And I think that would be better for everyone and leave a lot of fewer people with huge debt and nowhere to work. So that’s a whole other thing. But let’s go back to your point about closed book. So for a long time, that’s been a concern that it doesn’t teach what we would consider good legal practice because you wouldn’t want to have answers off the top of your head. You would want to do research. And so the NCBE has tried. The people who write the bar exam for most states at this point, we’ll talk a little bit about that in a second. They have created a new version of the exam that includes some packets of material that people have to reference and in an attempt to get at the idea of you do research. How did the NextGen exam, this new exam

Kathryn Rubino:
They created

Joe Patrice:
Go?

Kathryn Rubino:
Not great, Bob. Not great, Bob.

Joe Patrice:
Really?

Kathryn Rubino:
Yeah. So NextGen bar exam was rolled out in a number of jurisdictions. And unlike some of the other bar exams, it requires constant wifi for all of the test takers. And that proved to be a real problem in a number of jurisdictions, but most epically, I think is the right word, in Washington state. Washington State’s bar exam took place in Yakima.

Joe Patrice:
Did it take place in Yakima?

Kathryn Rubino:
It did not. It did not take place in Yakima. It intended to take place in Yakima, which if my understanding of Washington geography is correct, which it probably isn’t, is roughly in the center of the three main law schools that are in the state of Washington. But not necessarily the bustling metropolis that some of the other cities you’ve probably heard of in Washington are and was wildly unprepared for approximately 700 people trying to log on to the conference center’s Wi-Fi. And so the test failed. They were sent home the first day, unable to complete a single question, which a tiny little asterisk here. Folks who had special accommodations were in smaller rooms and locations and they were able to take the exam. But the majority of the test takers were not able to log on, sent home day one and be like, “Come back tomorrow,” which is the Wednesday and we’ll make the test we think Wednesday and Thursday.
And then Tuesday night as they got home to their hotel rooms that they’ve sold out everything in Yakima trying to extend their trips and everything, got an email from the WSB, Washington State Bar Association saying, “Actually, we have no confidence that they’ll be able to support the wifi needs on Wednesday or Thursday. Therefore, we are canceling the entirety of the bar exam. They are currently reportedly trying to schedule a makeup bar exam in September.
What questions will be on it? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know what they’re planning to do there. And or the people could either take it in September, they’re still working on a date. They could transfer their materials to go take the February bar or they can withdraw entirely and get a refund. Which by the way, that’s the refund that the Washington State Bar is responsible for, but the licensing fees and stuff that they paid to NCBE have to be handled separately. And of course, this does not cover the travel expenses because again, the majority of the applicants do not actually live in Yakima. And hotels and all that stuff, still money that the applicants are out and will have to be out again when they have to retake the bar exam. Although I will note that both the makeup in September as well as the February date are not going to be in Yakima.
Those are in Tacoma, which is a place you’ve probably heard of if you’re not from the Pacific Northwest where assumedly the wifi is significantly better. Yeah,

Joe Patrice:
It would be. This is horrible. And this is what happens when we have stupid tests get you win stupid prizes. It was –

Kathryn Rubino:
And I’ll say the tipsters from Washington State report that the IT folks there were, what do you mean there’s 700 people are going to be on Wi-Fi? That the conference center was not at all, the IT there was not at all prepared for the scope of what was about to land on them. And that seems like knowledge that you had ahead of time. You certainly knew the number of people who were planning to take the exam. You certainly knew the technical requirements in order to successfully take the exam. And it does not feel like the right hand told the left hand what was going on in any meaningful way. And

Joe Patrice:
While Washington is pinning a lot of the blame on the location and the wifi, that doesn’t get you out of the problems that were taking place in Missouri in particular and also a little bit in Maryland. It was just poorly done. And what my article about what you wrote about Washington, I wrote about Missouri.

Kathryn Rubino:
And our colleague took Maryland. We really divided and conquered it on night one of the bar exam.

Joe Patrice:
But what happened in Missouri was that the – It’s

Kathryn Rubino:
A big cold, cold day.

Joe Patrice:
No, but my article about what happened there really focused on the earlier issue with California. California tried because the NCB was bleeding them dry, they were running in the red with the costs of trying to run the test according to the NCBE’s imposed standards. So they took it upon themselves to write a new exam. They waited too long, rushed the exam into service without thinking through all of the issues, and it was a disaster. And for months and months afterward, all we heard was snide remarks from, not from the official organization, but from supporters of the NCBE about how, oh, California screwed this up because they didn’t let the professionals, blah, blah, blah. And the entire time I kept pointing out NCBE is actually pretty terrible at this. They just have a monopoly that allows them to shrug when stuff goes wrong and say, well, I guess that’s how it is.
And here we have it again. They who have all the resources in the universe to be on top of this can’t get it right.
And it’s because it’s a more fundamental problem. The exam itself is stupid and shouldn’t be done. And we need to, as a profession, figure out a better way of doing that. And unfortunately, a few years ago, I thought there was some opening for that. COVID was creating situations where we needed to start thinking outside the box. Now, not only is that pressure gone, but horrifyingly, what you see going on in the South in particular, these Republican-led states that are saying, “We don’t want the ABA to be accrediting our law schools anymore.” You’re pushing away from the idea of a national high bar for what a law school education is, opening the door to more diploma mill kind of operations, which is the opposite of what you need if you want to move forward.

Kathryn Rubino:
Yeah. And I think that in a world where the ABA accreditation means very little or is not prevalent in any given state, I think that your overall argument for diploma privilege falls apart. I don’t think that’s a criticism of your argument. I think it’s criticism of what’s going on in world. Yeah. And I have a context obviously in a lot of these industries, and I think that the bar exam prep people hearing what happens and comparing it to California. There’s a real sense of irony and California wasn’t so stupid now, were they? Kind of going on there, which I think you’re right. I think that is really interesting. And I also want to talk a little bit, your last answer, you kind of foregrounded the hubris, if you will, of the NCBE. And I really wanted to talk also about the –

Joe Patrice:
About the Odyssey still?

Kathryn Rubino:
No. I think

Joe Patrice:
You

Kathryn Rubino:
Busted

Joe Patrice:
Out the word hubris.

Kathryn Rubino:
I think we’re now. I did hear. No, but in the Washington State Bar Association’s communications with the test takers have been very, “We’re so sorry. This is a terrible thing that happened, blah, blah, blah.” Whereas the NCBE’s statement is, “This was a historic test that pretty much went great if you discount the places where it didn’t.” But their comments are about this year’s bar exam. And again, I guess they are in more states than Washington State is, but it’s very much like, “This was a historic event. Good job, us.”

Joe Patrice:
Yeah. Sometimes there’s a genre of social media account that whenever some big event happens, shows CNN’s coverage, MSNBCs or MSNMS Now and Bloomberg, all of the major networks coverage. And then Fox will have some like, “Are double cheeseburgers healthy? They’ll be running something completely else is completely unrelated so that they don’t have to talk about the bad thing that just happened.” That hit the legal industry when it came to this test because we had our bar exam disaster headline and Bloomberg had its headline about that and Reuters had its headline about that. And law.com was like, “Smooth rollout.”

Kathryn Rubino:
Yeah, really just kind of quoting the NCBE’s

Joe Patrice:
Position.

Kathryn Rubino:
I

Joe Patrice:
Sent it around with the meme of the anchor from North Korean State News

Kathryn Rubino:
Because

Joe Patrice:
That’s

Kathryn Rubino:
What

Joe Patrice:
It really felt like.

Kathryn Rubino:
Yeah. And to close the loop on diploma privilege, I will say that the deans of the law schools in Washington State have called on the Washington State Supreme Court to issue diploma privilege for this year’s test graduates and law school graduates in order to ameliorate the harm that’s happened to these folks. They have to spend more money, as we kind of talked about already, more time, more money, more reservations, et cetera, in order to pass the bar exam through no fault of their own. And Washington State Supreme Court has issued diploma privilege in the past, as you were saying earlier, in the COVID era, they did diploma privilege and then rescinded it once the pandemic was over. But the whole concern always about diploma privilege is that you’re getting these people who may not be good lawyers, and there has been no sort of increase in incompetence as a result of the COVID diploma privilege.
And they could probably pretty easily do it for the test takers of the 2026 July bar exam, but we’ll see if they actually do anything about it.

Joe Patrice:
Yeah. You raised that and then a completely unrelated story we weren’t going to talk about, but whatever while we’re here. In Louisiana this last week, the state Supreme Court’s justices, associate justices all voted together to forcibly recuse the chief justice from a case because the chief was refusing to step aside on a case where he was launching personal attacks at the lawyer involved in the case up to and including sending them by threatening legally letters, like demand letters like, “You will do this or else drop this case and apologize or

Kathryn Rubino:
Else.”

Joe Patrice:
Which the reason I bring this up, of course, is that the entirety of this dispute apparently arose from them having different takes in 2020 on whether or not the Louisiana Bar should give diploma privilege in the middle of a pandemic. But that was the source of the animosity between them. So it wrankles some people. Anyway, all right, well, let’s take a break and we will be back in a moment. All right, it’s bonus time.

Kathryn Rubino:
Yeah.
More fanfare. Milbank, the law firm that has brought you the big law raises, which have not been adopted across the board, I imagine they will be at the end of the year at a minimum and may or may not be backward looking to the July 1st date, which is when the Millbank raises went into effect. But Millbank has also issued summer bonuses like they did last year up to $25,000, same scale as last year. Nothing crazy in that respect. But the fact that they are doubling down on being firm leaders or industry leaders in terms of compensation is really what is noteworthy. They’ve done that for a while. The fact that Big Law gets paid what they get paid right now is entirely thanks to Millbank and their decision to really take a stand and to be the leaders here. Whether or not they will always be is Cravath has not announced a new scale.
In the past, what Crevath has done is matched for junior associates and come over the top for more senior folks. So that’s always a possibility, again, as we’re waiting for Crevath to do anything about it. But the fact that they’re also giving out these special bonuses is noteworthy. What we saw in last year for a number of big law firms who didn’t want to be overall behind, but were not interested in necessarily giving money in the middle of the year to their hardworking associates was at end of year bonus time, they announced special bonuses as well as year-end bonuses. Whereas – Which those

Joe Patrice:
Specials then tracked the summer

Kathryn Rubino:
Ones that

Joe Patrice:
Millbank and those following Millbank had given.

Kathryn Rubino:
Correct, correct. I think a couple things. I think that first of all, it puts a real exclamation point on the rest of Big Law’s inability or unwillingness at the very least to not follow quickly to Milbank. And I don’t think that they won’t by the end of the year, but it really speaks to their lack of respect for associates in the moments because the chances that somebody leaves mid-year as a result of this is small because they can probably wait till they get their year-end bonuses at this point in the year. That’s probably true. So the money is not going to necessarily cost them any talent directly, at least not immediately. But they’re just saying, oh, we’d rather have the money in the short term. The sort of value of money means more to us than it could possibly mean for you an individual who has student loans and who knows what other personal responsibilities you have.
And I think that it’s really condescending and problematic, I think, long-term for those firms.

Joe Patrice:
We’ve seen this a bit the last few years where Millbank moves and not everybody immediately jumps. It is a curious. I don’t quite get the strategy whether or not. I think your point that they’re not concerned about people leaving mid-year might be part of it. I don’t know. So that’s a fair assumption, especially if you are an associate with a talent that is hot right now. People will match bonuses and stuff like that if you move mid-year. So there’s not really a reason to hold out. It just is every day that it happens just solidifies the, this is Milbank’s world and you’re just living in it, which for years was what Cravath wanted that mantle. It’s not a great look to constantly let Millbank push you around like this. I don’t know what the strategy is. I don’t think it works out because it’s one thing if at the end of the year you say Milbank was wrong and we’re breaking with it, but you know you’re not going to do that.
You can’t afford to do that.

Kathryn Rubino:
Yeah. I also wonder if the 2026 of it all is impacting the. Because this is slower even than the slowest years on matching. I think it is kind of unique in that way. If there’s not sort of this latent fear in the industry that there’s going to be a real bubble pop in terms of AI or in terms of the market in general, we’re maybe at war at any given moment that it might affect the financials of the firm in ways that they’re not willing to bet on quite yet.

Joe Patrice:
Yeah. I mean, obviously we read last week about trouble with AI stocks being a large part of how that poor guy’s wedding fell apart when his fund lost all its money.

Kathryn Rubino:
Yeah, you did tell me about that. It’s not something I would necessarily follow in and of myself, but you can tell the story.

Joe Patrice:
Yeah. Well, we had a large fund that was heavily invested in the new frontier of tech. And as his wedding was about to start, the portfolio started crashing largely. Granted that wedding. And by about to start, I don’t know if it was the wedding proper or the pre-wedding festivities because the pre-wedding festivities were a series of panels and breakout sessions to discuss business because Silicon Valley, I want to remind you, was a documentary, not TV show comedy.

Kathryn Rubino:
Yeah. I felt really bad. Could you even imagine how terrible it would be? In my head, I’m thinking your wedding day, you’re really trying to put aside your kind of work, put it in a box and really focus on this moment for yourself and for your life and for your future partner and all this kind of stuff. And then I heard that, oh, and by that I mean he had these AI VC breakout sessions that were part of his wedding. And I was like, “Well, maybe this is just desserts.”

Joe Patrice:
Well, anyway, let’s take a break and we’ll be back in a moment to close this thing out. All right. Real quick, we’ve already talked a lot about making out on park benches and the reasons why you don’t necessarily do that if you’re a partner with an associate. But there was more follow-up to that since our last recording. What we learned since that last recording is I think in our last show I made mention that there were a couple of Wachtel stories going on at once. There was this and they had lost six high profile partners to

Kathryn Rubino:
Gibson

Joe Patrice:
Dunn, which Wachtel never loses partners.

Kathryn Rubino:
Yeah, this is the second time I think of this year that they’ve had a pretty substantial group go-to competitors, which is unusual. But

Joe Patrice:
Paying somebody $100 million will get you there. But the additional factoid there, of course, was that it seems that the partner involved on the park bench was one of the intended people to move, but that deal got kind of shut down by.

Kathryn Rubino:
Yeah. I believe he’s also on leave from Wachtel as well.

Joe Patrice:
I think we may have mentioned all that. The new aspect to this, to add to all of this though, is that at the end of the week, because the New York Post, once they decide they’re going to go in for some salacious stuff, they just don’t give up. They just ride it forever. And so they decided to keep going after Wachtel and discovered that two of the partners who went to Gibson Dunn have apparently been hooking up in the past.

Kathryn Rubino:
Yeah. A couple of, I think, key differences, which is why their deal was not quashed. First of all, it was amongst the partners. So there was no sort of power imbalance that is, I think, inherent in a partner and an associate who work in the same group have. So that’s part of it. There’s nothing in the firm’s partnership agreement, apparently, according to the post’s reporting, that would prevent that kind of relationship. It doesn’t say you can’t fraternize, et cetera, et cetera. Also, they were not cheating on their spouses. One I think was in the middle of a separation, but had been separated for three years at the time that it happened. So it’s just a different dynamic.

Joe Patrice:
I’m trying to think back. The bar exam, it’s been a while since the bar exam. As I recall, in New York, you had to be separated for a year before you could actually go and have a divorce, right? Isn’t that a thing? The point

Kathryn Rubino:
Is they separated. Yeah, they would –

Joe Patrice:
Proof the bar exam’s useless,

Kathryn Rubino:
Right? I

Joe Patrice:
Don’t remember.

Kathryn Rubino:
Well, right. Also, never a thing that we practiced. But yeah, so I think that was another key difference to it. And it’s not currently going on anymore. It’s in the past. But it’s also really weird that a big law partner’s love life is news for the New York Post. I mean, listen, Above the Law has always occupied a kind of weird space. We became popular during the blogging era when Gawker Stalker was the whole thing and whatnot. But for the New York Post to print a story, there’s nothing wrong with these folks having a relationship. Cool. They’re just a private person who makes a lot of money who had a relationship in the past.This is not a story.

Joe Patrice:
Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe not for them. I though it was a story for us on a different level. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it necessarily, but I think it does relate to what we saw on the park bench too, in that Wachtel famously is, you don’t want to use the word sweats up when they’re being compensated that well, but notoriously hardworking firm. And as I put it, when you say work-life balance, life will find a way like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. I got the reference. If you don’t give people the opportunity to go have a life, that life is going to intrude on work. It’ll

Kathryn Rubino:
Happen in your conference rooms.

Joe Patrice:
Yes. And whether it’s a relationship that raises no ethical issues or one that does, it is going to happen when you make people work like that. And that is an undiscussed reason why you should probably concern yourself with making sure folks have a life. Because as I put it, if Wachtel doesn’t want to run a freshman dorm for seven-figure professionals – I was going

Kathryn Rubino:
To say Love Islands, but sure. Yeah.

Joe Patrice:
Oh man, now I’m trying to envision lawyers on Love Island because I don’t know if you’ve ever watched an episode of it. I have watched one and they’re not attorney material. The contestants on that show, let’s put it that way.

Kathryn Rubino:
Generally speaking, there might have been one or two over the course of the franchise, but yeah, sure. It’s not typical.

Joe Patrice:
But not Abe Maria Law School or something like

Kathryn Rubino:
That. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow,

Joe Patrice:
Wow. Somebody way at the bottom.

Kathryn Rubino:
I mean, listen, I will say that I am currently watching or at least tracking what’s going on in Big Brother. And the season’s first showmance was absolutely between one of the folks who’s an attorney in the house, Lyric, who I think is in some real trouble this week on the block, folks who pay attention to Big Brother. Anyway, not the point. I was going to say something else though. Oh good. Okay. Okay, Joe. But it’s kind of tracking back to how Wachtel is a notorious sweatshop. Not that we want to necessarily use that word or whatever, whatever. But also because, and why it’s been so noteworthy that they’ve had these lateral moves is that Wachtel is actually, as a former trivia question of the day that I posted, is the last remaining pure lockstep compensation model in Big Law. And so they now have kind of modified version that includes some bonus pools, but the way that their compensation works with their partners is not that they have this $100 million to throw at X person or Y By person, and that is the way that the industry is really going.
And they have had a number of noteworthy exits for Wachtel this year, which frankly wouldn’t be noteworthy for any other law firm to lose that many partners. It’s not like an exorbitant amount. They’re not about to collapse or something like that. It’s just that Wachtel, because they are so revered as one of the real gold star in the industry, never lost partners. If they had one partner lateral, it was a big deal. And the fact that they’ve had two major groups leave this year is noteworthy. And I think it’s because they’re a little bit more on the back foot because they still have this kind of lockstead partnership versus having the literal hundreds of million dollars to throw around.

Joe Patrice:
Well, thanks everybody for listening. Subscribe to the show, get new episodes when they come out, leave reviews, stars, all of that helps. Also check out the Jabo, Katherine’s other podcast. I’m a guest on Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable, and for the next few weeks, I’m often a guest on the Legal AF podcast too, I guess. So I should let people know about that. You should be listening to other shows on the Legal Talk Network. You should be reading Above the Law, so read these and other stories before we talk about them here. Social mediabovelaw.com. I’m at Joe Patrice. She’s a Kathryn one, the numeral one we like to point out. And we’ll talk to you later. Peace.

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