Above The Law - Thinking Like A Lawyer

Joe speaks with David Ackert, host of The Market Leaders Podcast about the role of business development in the legal profession. Lawyers may not love the hustle, but it's the basis of a service industry and lawyers at every level have a role to play in building their future opportunities. And it's not just a challenge for attorneys -- firms need to build a culture that maximizes respect for attorney business development too. Special thanks to our sponsor, Logikcull.

Things are still closed down, which means we've not had an opportunity to haunt the halls of an event center with the usual legal community suspects for a while, so let's see what's going on out there. It's time to catch up with Keith Lee, founder of LawyerSmack, about the private community of lawyers he's built up over the years and the trends he's observed participating in these conversations with lawyers from all sectors coming together to connect. Special thanks to our sponsor, Logikcull.

Joe chats with Johnnie Nguyen, the National Chair of the ABA Law Student Division about the wide-ranging issues facing law students in the midst of the pandemic and how the ABA is addressing those concerns. Special thanks to our sponsor, Logikcull.

With mass gatherings off the table for the time being, how can the profession continue to network in large numbers? When legal technology trade shows were canceled, Rocket Matter CEO Larry Port put together a two-day virtual conference offering COVID-centric practice insights and CLE for over 300 registrants -- with proceeds going to charity. Joe and Larry talk about the process of putting together the Rocket Aid show and the dos and don'ts of running a large online event that Larry's learned from this experience. Special thanks to our sponsor, Logikcull.

For all the deserved guff we give PACER and its archaic nickel and diming (mostly diming), the federal system has always been much easier to navigate thanks to its orderly filing system. State courts can get messy fast. This week, we chat with Nicole Clark, the Founder and CEO of Trellis, who is taking state court documents and turning them into the sort of structured data that can easily yield intel on the wild system of state courts. Special thanks to our sponsor, Logikcull.

The Above the Law staff continues to track daily changes to the legal industry landscape from law firm layoffs to law school grading changes. Now that we're roughly a month into the lockdown era, Joe and Kathryn discuss the state of play. The merits of law firm layoffs, furloughs, and salary cuts, law school grading changes, and whether there's a future for the bar exam. Special thanks to our sponsor, Logikcull.

Getting paid is the bane of most lawyers' existence, but clients have good reasons to stay on the ball too. Joe chats with Aaron Pierce, GM of CounselLink about why clients benefit from staying on top of the billing process. In a nutshell, with CounselLink, clients generate a wealth of knowledge from their billing data -- efficiencies revealed, new payment models considered, and, yes, the relationship with outside counsel strengthened. Special thanks to our sponsor, Logikcull.

Joe chats with Joey Seeber and Leigh Vickery of Level 2 Legal Solutions about taking a small, boutique approach to large legal department and Biglaw problems. Legal work goes on during a lockdown, and Level 2 is busy assisting its long-term partners in getting stuff done. It takes creative problem solving and a nimble business culture to thrive in times like these. Special thanks to our sponsor, Logikcull.

Joe and Kathryn check in from the Above the Law bunker to discuss law schools and the virus. While many schools quickly adopted pass/fail grading options others have held out, hoping to maintain some sense of normalcy. Are there really employers who will look back at Spring 2020 grades and think they're informative? Special thanks to our sponsor, Logikcull.

Five years ago, when we started this podcast, our first guest was Ryan Morrison aka Video Game Attorney. At the time he was just starting out so we brought him back on to talk about where he is now. His firm, Morrison Rothman, provides trusted expertise in digital entertainment, intellectual property, and brand protection. If you're wondering what you're about to become way too into during the lockdown, it's eSports. And maybe he was the second guest... it depends on whether or not you count Above the Law columnists as guests. I'm going ahead and counting them as "contributors" and not guests, so there you go. Special thanks to our sponsor, Logikcull.

Joe chats with Adam Balinski, founder of Crushendo, a test prep program focused on maximizing human memory. Auditory courses with a strong emphasis on tried and true memory hacks like location association and mnemonic devices, all worked into short, repeatable episodes you can listen to while going about your day. Special thanks to Logikcull and Crushendo, for sponsoring this episode.

Joe welcomes back Jason Cruz from our earlier "Step Inside The Octagon" episode to discuss his new book "Mixed Martial Arts and the Law". From antitrust to labor law to performance enhancing drugs, there's a lot more law going into this sport than you might expect for a cage match where people kick each other in the face. Special thanks to our sponsor, Logikcull.

Joe and Kathryn chat with Lisa Prowse, Senior Vice President of Legal Services and Document Review at BIA about the document review process and how its evolved over the years. From physically flipping through thousands of documents just to keep your job to developing a culture of attorneys that can provide results that help eDiscovery tools succeed, there's a lot of psychology that goes into the discovery review process. Special thanks to our sponsor, Logikcull.

Professor Rick Hasen is synonymous with election law, and in his new book, Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy sounds the alarm about the growing threat of Americans losing faith in the electoral process. A combination of incompetence and bad faith has worn away at public trust in the system and cynical actors have taken advantage to exploit this for their own gain. Plus we get a chance to talk about the Iowa Caucuses. Special thanks to our sponsor, Logikcull.

Harvard Law's Alan Dershowitz has never shied from the spotlight, but with his latest role in the Donald Trump impeachment trial, many are wondering what happened to bring this once respected legal mind to the point of arguing that everything politicians do is definitionally in the public interest. Maybe nothing happened at all, and this is just the logical conclusion of trends we should've seen in Dershowitz's work all along. Perhaps an aggressive disciple of the church of zealous advocacy was always cruising for a moment like this.

Checking in on Elie after a solid week of watching wall to wall impeachment coverage and the wear of the marathon coverage is starting to show. There's not much "legal" about this trial, but we're going to parse through what we can. We also talk a little about Tulsi Gabbard's high stakes defamation suit against Hillary Clinton for calling the Hawaii representative a Russian asset. As a lawsuit it may not come together, but does Gabbard have a moral point? Special thanks to our sponsor, Logikcull.

When it comes to litigation, law schools generally funnel students into larger, defense-oriented firms. These firms offer steady paychecks -- all the better to pay your monthly debt bill, my dear -- and a tried and true path. But there is another side to the "v" and it often involves better opportunities and more rewarding work. Joe and Elie chat with Edelson PC about the tech-oriented plaintiff and class action firm's work from protecting biometric privacy rights to addressing sexual misconduct in youth sports with partner Chris Dore and associates Aaron Lawson and Sydney Janzen. Special thanks to our sponsor, Logikcull.

More and more firms are adopting a non-equity partner tier, delaying equity consideration while extracting maximum value from high billing but relatively lowly paid senior attorneys tied to the job by the dangling hope of a future promotion that may never arrive. Special thanks to our sponsor, Logikcull.

With the 2010s wrapping up, Joe and Kathryn focus on all the law firms we've lost over the last decade. Industry pressures, bad strategies, and fraud allegations managed to put several former mainstays to rest over the last 10 years. What lessons can we take from the demise of these once-proud firms? Where is this whole profession heading? Will this next recession finish off what 2009 started? Special thanks to our sponsor, Logikcull.

To close out the year, Joe runs down the top 10 stories of the year at Above the Law. Are there key insights or interesting trends to be gained from reviewing the site’s traffic figures? Probably not, but here we are. Special thanks to our sponsor, Logikcull.