We continue breaking down the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings and the chaos that its new methodology introduced. And we know exactly who to blame for breaking these rankings. Elon Musk recently went in for a deposition defended by Quinn Emanuel's Alex Spiro and earned a motion for sanctions. And a Berkeley Law protest goes viral, but all the "free speech" talk misses the mark.

Haphazard ranking serves as a reminder that service hasn't quite found the right formula after law schools started withdrawing their data.  _______________ The full U.S. News & World Report law school rankings are out and they are... something. Duke is tied with Harvard? NYU nearly drops out of the top 10? Are we just hurling darts at a dartboard here? In a sense, yes. At least ever since law schools started withdrawing their cooperation. Meanwhile, a Biglaw firm tried to promote healthy...

Breaking down the action-packed final week of March. ___________ Special guest Liz Dye joins us to talk about the week that was. First, we delve into the abortion pill oral argument where even most of the conservatives scoffed at the right-wing effort to let an Amarillo courthouse second-guess the FDA on science. Almost as though the Chief Justice just tried to crack down on that practice. But along the way Neil Gorsuch showed off his (lack of) research skills and Alito and Thomas sought to...

Conservative justices can't stop telling on themselves when it comes to forum shopping. __________________ Joe Biden says he got a standing ovation for trying to BS his way through a law school cold call. We call BS on that. Also Cooley Law School finds itself at the bottom of the heap when it comes to bar passage rates again. At some point, the ABA has to step in... right? Finally, the nation's judges did something about politicized forum shopping and right-wingers can't stop help but crying...

Parental leave and a bumbling Supreme Court highlight the week. _____________________________ Are law firms going to get stingy with parental leave? While most firms report solid revenue, sparking resentment over a few weeks of leave seems like a weird strategy, but DLA Piper recently cut back on the leave available to non-birthing parents. It's a first as far as Above the Law can tell, but will it be the last? Also, the Supreme Court screwed up its metadata, committing an error that would...

Bond... unaffordable cash bond. _________________________________ Donald Trump needed to put up some cash before E. Jean Carroll can begin executed the judgment she has against him. Instead, Trump tried to argue that he was simply too rich to put up a bond. The argument was not persuasive, but it did get Above the Law mentioned on Stephen Colbert. We also discuss the Supreme Court taking up the Trump immunity case even though there's not a chance they'll endorse his theory. And when should we...

Another firm begins cracking down on office attendance through punishment. Law firms want lawyers back in the office, but if they don't want associates spending that office time fielding calls from recruiters, it's time to consider incentives that treat lawyers like professionals. A Bush judge questioned Trump's manhood and Amy Wax fights back against the slap on the wrist Penn prepared to give her.

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are living children for the purposes of Alabama law. And while there are a lot of serious implications for the future of family fertility efforts, let's take a second to consider how much this absolutely breaks the state's rule against perpetuities. An attorney in the YSL case faces gang charges herself. She's made some... marketing decisions. Hogan Lovells must ponder whether invoking the wrath of ancient Roman poltergeists are worth a...

Even-keeled professionalism may pay off over time, but being a mercurial lunatic always pays off now. ______________________________ Former Trump aide Stephen Miller used Super Bowl week to launch a stunt employment discrimination complaint against the NFL. The rule in question is the subject of a much better legal challenge that it doesn't do ENOUGH to address anti-Black discrimination, but nothing about Miller's legal moves have much connection to reality -- up to and including the fact...

We're reaching peak Alina saturation. ___________ Last week may have officially been "Legalweek" but it was bad lawyer week at Above the Law, where Alina Habba dominated traffic with her ongoing futility. Her rapid retreat from the very phony "it's actually bias that so many prominent lawyers all worked at Paul Weiss" motion after being informed of the very real sanctions that could result. Robbie Kaplan, one of the Paul Weiss alumni in question, also shared her story of Donald Trump pulling...

Sometimes you can't actually fake being smart. _________________________________________________ Alina Habba may soon be replaced in the Trump legal team constellation, but we'll always have memories of her crackerjack legal analysis and the stupid swimsuit debate. There are four justices who don't seem to care about the Supremacy Clause. And Davis Polk faced -- and successfully beat -- a discrimination suit.

'The only rules are there are no rules' apparently doesn't fly in Judge Kaplan's courtroom. ____________________________________ We don't even talk about Alina Habba's weird swimsuit thing on the show because it broke after we wrapped recording (next week, I guess!), but we have more than enough material discussing Trump's lawyer bumble through basic courtroom procedure and lodge motions for bad court thingies in the proud tradition of the Simpsons' greatest character. We also discuss a...

Who needs a judge's approval to start ranting in court? Every other person ever, you say? ___________________________________________________ Donald Trump's legal team informed Justice Arthur Engoron that their client would deliver closing remarks in violation of basic New York rules, setting off a series of decreasingly coherent emails with the judge over Trump's willingness to abide by the constraints of a closing argument. He was not willing to... but he went ahead and did it anyway....

Maybe GPT-5 will want a free RV? _______________________________________________ The Chief spent his entire annual report on the federal judiciary on the rise of artificial intelligence and how AI cannot possibly replace judges because the judge is so much harder and more nuanced than, say, calling balls and strikes. Not that anyone would be stupid enough to describe being a judge like that. Steven Calabresi has either lost his mind or is engaged in an epic troll with a series of pieces...

The highs and mostly lows from the year that was. __________________________________________ As we turn the page to 2024, we reminisce over the top stories at Above the Law over the past year. Layoffs, salary hikes, ethical quagmires at the Supreme Court, Donald Trump's criminal cases... the legal industry provided a lot of fodder for Above the Law this past year. Join Thinking Like A Lawyer as we discuss all the big stories of the year and ask the question: can it get any worse than this...

Law firms may hem and haw about raises, but they're still doing more than all right for themselves. Rudy's defamation trial did not go well. Before the latest development in the case, we talked about Michael Cohen's fake case brief and the implications of legal technology on criminal justice.

No one wants to admit weakness, but K&L Gates trying to put a smiling face on layoffs left a lot of observers cold. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller is mongering about a conspiracy to make Taylor Swift famous that somehow doesn't revolve around her talent. And Joshua Wright has brought a lawsuit against ASS Law despite still failing to understand that his problems are all in the mirror.

Payable sometime in 2024... of course. ________________________ Milbank got the ball rolling several weeks ago with a round of raises. Cravath has now upped the ante for more senior associates and the Biglaw landscape has finally decided to pile on. Where is all this going and what does it all mean? We've got thoughts. Meanwhile Amy Wax went ahead and invited a white nationalist back to campus and one of her students is disappointed that people weren't nicer about it. Finally, a new lawsuit...

Elon Musk files a facially ludicrous lawsuit and Trump argues that sexual assault doesn't count on airplanes _____________ After promising a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters, Elon Musk showed up to court with a string of claims that would fail under his own recitation of facts. Meanwhile, Donald Trump takes aim at the Federal Rules of Evidence in a bid to undermine the E. Jean Carroll case and Stephen Miller goes after Macy's in a cheap publicity stunt.

Donald Trump sought a mistrial in his New York trial based, in part, on our articles being "humorous, irreverent." The GOP frontrunner did not succeed. Ron DeSantis messed with the rights of professors and now has to pick up the tab for their Biglaw lawyers. Or, more accurately, Florida taxpayers will pick up the tab. But that's just the price Floridians have to pay to help their governor finish third in the primaries! We're still waiting to see if more firms join the Milbank pay scale, but...

It's been over a week and no firm has yet to announce that it will match Milbank's latest series of raises. Or, more accurately, cost of living adjustments. Meanwhile, Cravath took the plunge on income partnerships, becoming the latest firm to abandon the time-honored one-tier partnership model. And the turmoil over Nixon Peabody's effort to sneak Donald Trump onboard as a client sparks calls for leadership change.

For most major law firms, the prospect of representing Donald Trump and stamping the firm's name on his nutty pet arguments is a non-starter. Over at Nixon Peabody, the firm jumped right in, bringing on the former president as a client and filing a brief complete with the zany "Brandenburg means it can't be an insurrection" argument that Trump's been having all his lawyers make. Partners don't seem happy about this turn of events. But, since we recorded, we've learned that firm leadership...

Stroock strikes out. -------------- We thought the end might be near for Stroock & Stroock & Lavan when we recorded this episode. We were right. And with that, the Biglaw world moves to exclusively one or fewer ampersands. A senior lawyer tried to pull a prank on an airplane. It ended badly. And we discuss the last time newly elected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson tried to run something. It was a law school and it failed in epic fashion.

LSAT's decision is not totally... illogical. ----------- The LSAT is ditching logic games from upcoming tests and the Above the Law gang is conflicted over whether or not that's a good thing. There's a good argument that the section disproportionately disadvantaged folks with vision issues. On the other hand that was a deficiency that admissions could address on the back end, but without that score schools no longer have a pattern recognition evaluation -- and what's more "thinking like a...