A judicial clerkship can put a young lawyer on a path to a dream career. But if the judge is abusive or unethical, that dream can very quickly turn into a nightmare. That's what happened to Aliza Shatzman, a former clerk who had a terrible experience working for a judge. Shatzman went on to found the Legal Accountability Project, a group advocating for more workplace protections for clerks and other judicial branch employees. Shatzman joins our On The Merits podcast in the wake of a scandal...

On the Merits is on hiatus for a bit while we create some great new episodes for you. Until then, we're pleased to offer a special presentation of our ABA Silver Gavel award-winning series, UnCommon Law. Generative AI tools are already promising to change the world. Systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT can answer complex questions, write poems and code, and even mimic famous authors with uncanny accuracy. But in using copyrighted materials to train these powerful AI products, are AI companies...

When California's new mental health courts were getting started, the debate centered on whether they had too much power–or too little. Now, roughly six months in, the state is discovering a new flaw: too few people are using them. On this episode of our podcast, On The Merits, Bloomberg Law reporter Maia Spoto talks about why California's Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment, or CARE, Courts, have had such an underwhelming start. Also, what this means for the state's governor,...

Marijuana is now legal in about half of the states, but still maintains its illegal status at the federal level. What does this mean for an employer who wants to, or has to, administer drug tests for its employees? We tackle that question on our podcast, On The Merits, with Sean Mack, a partner and co-chair of the cannabis and hemp law practice at the New Jersey firm Pashman Stein. Mack says testing employees for marijuana–or even firing them for testing positive–is now so fraught with...

Hetal Doshi, the top antitrust litigator at the Department of Justice, says she tries to make the cases her team pursues easy for the average person to understand. "If we are litigating cases inside an echo chamber, or like in a very narrow, technocratic way that only other lawyers can understand, then we're failing to do our jobs," Doshi says on this episode of our podcast, On The Merits. Doshi spoke to reporters Leah Nylen and Danielle Kaye about how this philosophy played into recent cases...

The Commerce Department's disastrous rollout of a new payment system left some National Weather Service employees on the hook for their own business expenses, and even led utility companies to shut off power to some critical weather systems due to unpaid bills. Bloomberg Government reporter Jack Fitzpatrick found that even now, months after this system went online, the Department is still working through a backlog of unpaid invoices. And despite a report from its Inspector General, it's still...

Harvard, NYU, and several other elite universities have been hit with civil rights lawsuits from students who say the schools allow, or at least don't counter, campus antisemitism. Though these suits largely stem from an increase in antisemitic incidents since Oct. 7, attorneys say the groundwork for them was laid with an executive order back in 2019. That's when the Trump administration adopted a broad definition of antisemitism for civil rights claims under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act...

It's becoming more common for investors to chip in money for a lawsuit in exchange for a share of any payout a party wins, a practice known as litigation finance. But, as a recent Bloomberg Law investigation found, the identities of these litigation funders is often shrouded in mystery—and can have national security implications. Bloomberg Law reporters Emily R. Siegel and John Holland learned about a Russian company with close ties to Vladimir Putin that financed the creditors in US and UK...

Insurance companies like The Allstate Corp. and State Farm have experienced one too many devastating wildfire seasons in California. Many are looking to exit the market in impacted communities, but a powerful state lawmaker is trying to keep them. Mike McGuire is a Democrat representing a Northern California district directly affected by wildfires, and he just became the top ranking member of the California State Senate. Many of his constituents say they've gotten non-renewal notices or steep...

Generative AI has the potential to transform the legal profession, and the guest on today's episode of our podcast, On The Merits, believes it will. But the tech also has led some lawyers to make embarrassing and costly mistakes. Lawyers have filed briefs in court that contain citations fabricated by AI tools. And a law firm in New York recently got a dressing down from a judge for using AI to estimate the fees it was entitled to. Katherine Forrest, a former federal judge and current partner...

A quarter of law students surveyed by Bloomberg Law late last year said they self-identify as neurodivergent, an umbrella term for people with ADHD, autism, or another condition that causes their brains to function differently than that of the average person. But the same survey found that more than three times fewer working attorneys identify as neurodivergent. Which means, as more of this upcoming cohort of lawyers enters the workforce, firms may need to change their policies to accommodate...

In a remote part of Nevada, an energy company is trying to build a climate-friendly power plant—but the plant is being blocked by conservationists and a decades old environmental law. A geothermal plant built atop desert hot springs sits half-completed after the discovery of a new toad species in the area, and an environmental review required by the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. Conservation groups are suing, arguing the plant could drive the toad to extinction. But that...

A ruling last month from the Alabama Supreme Court declaring frozen embryos to be legally equivalent to children scared many would-be parents in and out of the state. Late Wednesday night, the state legislature there passed a law meant to ease the worries of both patients receiving in-vitro fertilization services and the doctors who provide those services. But, as Bloomberg Government reporter Alex Ruoff explains in this episode of our podcast, On The Merits, the new law doesn't actually...

During the pandemic, Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, or SPACs, were all the rage in the financial markets. They were seen as a faster, easier way to go public that bypasses the laborious process of a typical IPO. But now that the SPAC boom has gone bust, it's clear that some of the companies that did this weren't ready for the scrutiny that comes with being publicly listed. Bloomberg Tax & Accounting reporter Nicola M. White looked into one of these companies, Lottery.com. What she...

Since a landmark Supreme Court decision against it three years ago, the NCAA has suffered a string of legal losses in its effort to block changes to how, and whether, its athletes are compensated. Now, it's trying to turn this trend around by moving the fight from the courthouse to Capitol Hill. The NCAA has at least two allies in Congress, Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.). The pair have introduced legislation that would roll back many of the NCAA's recent adverse...

Being a white collar defense lawyer requires a special type of soft skill: the ability to effectively counsel a titan of industry more accustomed to giving orders, not taking them. But the guests on today's episode of our podcast, On The Merits, say this type of work has gotten a little harder because many white collar clients now believe the government agencies prosecuting them are acting in bad faith. J. Nicholas Bunch and Kit Addleman, two defense attorneys with the firm Haynes Boone,...

The cost of an attorney is far out of reach for many middle- and low-income Americans. This has serious negative consequences on both society and the rule of law, according to Ray Brescia, a professor at Albany Law School and author of a new book about the future of the legal profession. Increasing the supply of attorneys is one potential solution. But Brescia says another is to turn the legal profession into a commodity with the help of technology—specifically, artificial intelligence. In...

Many have long suspected that the legal profession, and so-called "Big Law" in particular, has a liberal lean. A new study looking at Supreme Court amicus briefs supports this suspicion with some of the strongest empirical evidence yet. The study found that firms overwhelmingly choose liberal clients instead of conservative clients when working on pro bono cases before SCOTUS. Legal journalist and Bloomberg Law columnist David Lat says this finding isn't surprising, but what's interesting is...

Elon Musk was unhappy, to put it mildly, with the ruling last week from a Delaware court that invalidated a $55.8 billion pay package he received from Tesla, his electric car company. Shortly afterward, he threatened to move Tesla's incorporation out of Delaware to a less shareholder-friendly state. But, as we discuss in this episode of our news podcast, On The Merits, doing so will likely just land Musk back in the same Delaware court that's the target of his current ire. Bloomberg Law...

November's general election is still nine months away, but the preliminary battles between Republicans and Democrats that will shape this year's Congressional races are about to begin. States will begin to hold congressional primaries starting in early March. And special elections will continue to play out throughout the year, including next week's contest to replace disgraced former Rep. George Santos (R-NY). Bloomberg Government's Greg Giroux joins us on this episode of our podcast, On The...

The legal industry used to have a stigma against attorneys representing legal malpractice clients who are suing other attorneys. But that stigma, if it still exists, has definitely faded. Data from legal malpractice insurers shows that the dollar amount of these suits has ballooned in recent years. That includes one of the most high profile suits: Elon Musk's claim against the mega-firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz disputing $90 million in fees for work on his Twitter purchase. On this...

The Republican National Committee's release of an AI-generated ad last year turned a lot of heads among professional campaigners, and it led some of them to say this new tech has no place in political races. But is this stance sensible, or is it another instance of "AI panic" sweeping the culture? Jessica Furst Johnson, an election law attorney with the firm Holtzman Vogel who's worked in Republican politics for years, thinks it's closer to the latter. Johnson joins our podcast, On The...

John Lewis, the late Congressman and civil rights hero, authored a law in 2007 that tasked the Justice Department with reopening and reinvestigating racially-motivated killings from the Civil Rights era. More than 15 years later, the Justice Department has failed to bring charges in nearly all of the cold cases it has reopened. On our weekly podcast, On The Merits, Bloomberg Law reporter Ronnie Greene talks about why the DOJ has had such little success prosecuting these cases. Moreover, he...

Rudy Giuliani and Alex Jones are two high profile examples of instances where losing a defamation case at trial leads a defendant directly into bankruptcy. Christopher Hampson, a law professor at the University of Florida, calls this the "defamation-to-bankruptcy pipeline." However, election-denying former mayors and conspiracy-peddling shock jocks aren't the only ones who might find themselves sucked in. Hampson says damages in defamation cases are becoming increasingly enormous because of...

Within the legal industry and beyond, many companies are reining in the flexible work policies they implemented during the pandemic. Though this may be beneficial for these companies, Bloomberg Law survey data shows that it's not what many attorneys want—especially female and minority attorneys. More than 90% of female attorneys who responded to Bloomberg Law's latest Workload and Hours Survey said they want to be able to work remotely at least part of the week, compared with just three...