A Look Back At The 2025 Dumpster Fire

0:15It's the end of the year. Yeah, so yeah, we made it everybody. And as the end of the year, we decided we should do a look back at what happened this year. And yeah, and so we have a, you know, kind of a retrospective episode for you of the biggest stories and trends of the year. I am Joe Patrice and this is Thinking Like a Lawyer. I am joined, as I usually am, by Catherine Rubino and Chris Williams. And we are going to talk about, usually we talk about the big stories from the week that was in legal over and above the law. But now we're going to do the year that was. Yay. Yay. And what a year it was, you know.

1:01It was a hell of a year. Just a real exciting. A humdinger, if you will. Nothing but good nonstop good news kind of a year, huh? 529 ,600 minutes of just joy. Yeah, just nonstop. Rapturous. Yeah. Oh, no. It was that. I'm really having fun with this today. Yeah, no, it was bad. So we should talk about that, right? Yeah, yeah. That's probably fair. I mean, do we want to do a little small talky personal year in reflection moment too? I didn't, but if you... Do you ever? Do you ever, Joe? I mean, it's my idea, the small talky thing. I thought we were just going into the format, but I did hear a trumpet, so I guess I've been overruled.

1:57That you personally hit. A little behind-the-scenes action for our listeners. But Joe is in charge of the soundboard. so yeah that's a dirty lie and you can't prove that okay we are now an officially a post-truth moment and uh do you have anything to say this we started the small talk thing for you like for me i just was asking i wasn't necessarily saying you wanted some personal reflections how about how about uh uh new year's resolutions that's it oh i'm sorry i think we're done now Oh, wow. You just can't help yourself, can you? Yeah. No. That's terrible. We got to do at least a little something.

2:38Did you do anything of interest over the last year, Joe? Just a little something. Wow, that's bad. I got to see my mom a couple of times. That was really nice. She lives out of state, so I traveled down to see her. So when I see her, it's a nice occasion. We're going to have a nice Christmas dinner. I'm looking forward to that. So do you have any New Year's resolutions as we're about to head to 2026? Or how about this? How about predictions for what the biggest stories of 2026 might be? Well, that's the format of the next episode. Okay, so never mind. So I didn't think that maybe we would do that.

3:12It's a good idea also. Yeah, because the next episode we record, we won't have written for a week. So we will need to talk about something. So good news, y 'all. You get a little bit of a preview in knowing what next week's episode is even going to be about. Great. Glad everybody reads the memos that I send out. Okay. All right. I feel like this counts as small talk. It does. It seems like a... So the biggest story from the year that was... Oh, okay. Has to be a 100%. Other years, I might wonder what it might be, but I am 1 ,000 % positive that the biggest story this year is the capitulating law firms.

3:54Nine big law firms signed deals with Donald Trump after he either threatened or actually issued largely unconstitutional executive orders, targeting them with the expressed intent of making some financial penalty or financial hurt on these firms. And nine firms refused to fight the unconstitutional orders and instead signed deals promising nearly, in total nearly a billion dollars in pro bono payola, meaning that they are for causes or clients that Donald Trump personally is in favor of, which is really super wild. Yeah. So let's let's break this down because there's a lot of pieces to this. So there are, as Catherine says, there are the firm.

4:42So there were threats made against law firms to make them comply and help out the administration. There's one tier of law firm who signed deals to perform free legal services on behalf of Trump-esque causes. Now, query whether that's just various charities that conservatives like or whether it's direct work for the administration. The administration certainly has taken the stance that it should be the latter. The firms seem to not believe that, but that's one tier. Interruption. First one being Paul Weiss, shame upon their name right so paul weiss kicks this off uh with their agreement to give 40 million which uh you know in in some sense though they did get the best deal they they walked away having only committed 40 million to it and others uh went as far up as 125 million it's true but uh so that that's tier one uh then there's another tier of firms who got threatened and did not sign deals and instead went to court.

5:39Those folks have successfully, largely successfully beaten the administration. Right, you say largely successfully just because it's still in the process. Correct. But the four firms that have actually fought against these executive orders have not gotten a single loss, right? There's never been a judge or an appeals court so far or anyone that has said, no, this is a totally cool executive order. They have been uniformly rejected by every court that has evaluated them thus far. Right. So, okay, so in the first batch, we had the Paul Weiss, Skedden, Milbank, Wilkie, Kirkland, Latham, A &O, Simpson Thatcher, and Cadwallader, soon to be Cadwallader, Hogan-Levels.

6:22They were in that tier. Then we have that Perkins, Cooey, I'm trying to think, who all's in there? Wilmer, Hale, Jenner, Block. And Sussman. And Sussman, Godfrey, yeah. So they are in the tier that have fought back. Then there is a third tier of folks who neither got threatened, who haven't gotten threatened at all, and who didn't sign preemptive deals, but who have taken steps that can only be interpreted as obey and advance, as we sometimes use the term. And some of these were named in an EEOC probe, whatever, but these are the folks who started deleting DEI references from their websites, firing HR staff who have been brought on to deal with diversity issues, eliminating references to pro bono work that they did that the administration might not like, such as work for immigrants.

7:17And then, indeed, we've seen firms just back away from pro bono work for causes that seems to run afoul of the administration. I know there's a statistic. I can't remember the exact stat, but that in the first administration, big law did tons of work on fighting immigration abuses by the system. And in this administration, it's gone down to like 0.5 percent or something like that. So I this tier, I think, is certainly the most insidious of all the reactions to the attack on the rule of law, because at least for the nine firms that capitulated, we know who they are, what they are. they are getting a ton of scrutiny.

8:00We've written a bajillion stories about them over the course of 2025, deservedly, like completely deservedly. But so much of the latter group where they're just kind of backing away from work or just hiding or renaming their diversity programs, it's so much harder to find, to identify, and to talk about. They're still doing pro bono work. I'm sure they can still point to things that they have done, but all of a sudden it is not the sort of work that needs the most attention this year. But I will say we all we didn't include in this conversation, but we probably should Sullivan and Cromwell, who did not sign a deal, but who, by all accounts, was the mastermind behind all of these deals.

8:42They were at least involved in the Paul and facilitating the initial Paul Weiss deal. Yeah. You know, I think that there's you're right. I think there are sort of tiers and there are levels. It is deeply disturbing that that has been the overall sort of reaction to a full-faced attack on the rule of law. Yeah. Look, so I guess a little bit more of the conversation to have about this. So originally, the people who made deals thought they were making them for very limited purposes. The administration has taken the stance that they're broader than that. Nothing's really happened. But this seems like a showdown that could metastasize.

9:25I wrote an article making a reference to, and actually another writer independently came to this point after me, that this is kind of the Lando Calrissian problem, as we called it, from The Empire Strikes Back, where you make a deal that gets worse all the time. And that's what happens when you make deals with authoritarians. So we have this issue where they're still kind of in the limbo as to what could go wrong with them. They faced a lot of backlash, a lot of lateral movement out, including people – including very rainmaker sorts of folks spinning out and creating new firms, moving to other firms.

10:04That has been an issue now. This happens largely on the litigation front because I think a lot of people feel that the deals were motivated in great part by the corporate transactional work because that was what they were kind of trying to save by making these deals. But the litigators have been moving. We have some new boutiques because of that. We have Rainmakers moving to firms that fight for that reason. That's a spillout. We had a mid-year, like in the middle of the year, we had the survey results from the associates that said that everybody's just kind of sickened to their stomachs by these firms that made deals.

10:42And above the law also did one of our most popular surveys ever that revealed an astonishingly uniform perspective on the deals. Over 90 percent of respondents said that these were deeply problematic, that they should be ashamed, that people instead should follow the lead of the four big law firms that are fighting. I mean, you get protests. You've got people getting – Brad Karp getting heckled at an event over it. But yeah, it's been the biggest story. OK, let's also put a little bit of a pin in the Brad Karp being heckled because because this also is not just, oh, you did this thing. But he got heckled because his firm was being awarded for pro bono work in a year where they promised millions in pro bono work.

11:32In fairness, it was like a public justice thing that was about Lurah Lynch. But yes. And also Latham, right? Right. Latham did get an award for pro bono work in a year where they committed pro bono work to the administration. Yeah, I mean, it's just wild, wild stuff when you think about it. And it's almost like the firms that sign these deals want that in their past and are looking forward to a 2026 and forward where they are not branded by that moniker. and that is not on my watch for as long as I am at above the law and or writing about the legal industry or talking about the legal industry.

12:10I'm going to call them one of the firms that capitulated to Donald Trump because I think it is a mark of shame that they should always have. Yeah. And of course, the New York Times wrote an article, a really good article about people who talk about this. Yeah. If you haven't checked it out, they profiled some writers who have been covering this. Wonderful, wonderful work. Yeah, they're just wonderful people, as far as I can tell. I don't want to throw dirt on our New York Times showcase. But question, what about firms that merge out of the shame that you want to keep on them? Because there is one that comes to mind.

12:44Yeah, are we going to hold Hogan levels to Cadwallader's mistakes? Good question. Probably. And we'll see. Honestly, we'll see how they react if another request comes. And that's really the back to the Lando problem. Right. Like what happens when the administration says, as they've hinted that they might, no, we take the stance that you owe us legal work for X, Y, Z, other cause. I mean explicitly, right? Donald Trump signed an executive order in 2025 talking about police brutality and saying in the executive order that he expected the firms that had promised pro bono work to defend law enforcement that have been accused of brutality.

13:25Right. Now, the firms have not said that they will do any of this work, but Donald Trump certainly thinks and wrote down in an executive order that they will be doing this. And what happens when a request like that happens? And what do they do then? And I think that is currently happening. We don't even know. I mean, yeah, we we don't. There was the story that has come out that some of these firms have been doing work for the Commerce Department on on tariff stuff. Now, I have heard that all of those engagements were for money, which means they weren't part of the pro bono deal, which is also good because it would be illegal to give the services for free.

14:01Not illegal for the firms, but the federal government. It is a violation of them, of their statutory framework to take free services outside of emergency situations. It's a provision that exists for a lot of good corruption and budgeting reasons. You might think, why would they turn down free stuff? But that's why. Who knows if there's any way to enforce it, especially with this court. But anyway. Certainly not under this court. So that was the biggest story of the year. Yeah, and I think what's interesting is that it's almost impossible thinking back to a year ago in the sort of end of 2024 that this would be the big story.

14:41Like I could not have imagined that nine firms would sign these deals. It shocked me when it happened. Even the executive orders that were issued were shocking because they were so blatantly unconstitutional. But the fact that nine more firms, more than twice as many firms would capitulate than fight would have been shocking to me in 2024. I can't even imagine what horrors wait for me in 2026. Yeah. And we may see some more about how these went down. There is a lawsuit, a FOIA request to get some documents about this. So we'll see. Oh, and the coverage has been largely over covering big law in response to the executive orders because, of course, we're above the law.

15:21But we've also seen similar attacks happening at schools. Namely, Harvard was willing to fight back. Columbia did no such thing. What is it? Northwestern's deal is even worse. Yeah. Yeah, even worse. So it's one of those things where the institutional attacks that are happening aren't just in big law. It's a bunch of places. All right. Well, let's take a break and then review another story. Let's face it. You didn't become a lawyer to stress over summaries and analysis. You could hand it off, but you need an assistant you can trust. Co-counsel handles those important but tedious tasks that keep you from being a lawyer.

15:59And because it's trained only on expert legal content from Thomson Reuters, it's as precise as you are, which means less stress and more confidence to focus on what matters. Head to tr.com slash co-counsel to discover AI that lawyers swear by. All right, well, similarly related, we also have some, the second big story I think of the year was the kind of dispatches from the constitutional crisis, which is a phrase that you used to use about other countries or maybe deeply hypothetically. But I think we probably can say that we're here. We have documented instances of the Department of Justice lying to federal judges, which is, to be clear, not spinning or exaggerating.

16:45We have them actually lying to federal judges on the record, which is unheard of. We have seen judges arrested for their actions in Wisconsin. We have seen the deputy attorney general give a speech where he said that the administration's position is that we should all go to war with federal judges. It is a serious uptick in threats being lodged against federal judges over this. And to be clear, this is not particularly partisan at the district, at least at the district court level. Like judges from Reagan appointees on have been siding against the administration, given how lawless a lot of these things are.

17:31We one of the few courts that doesn't side against the administration all the time is the Supreme Court, who has used its shadow docket power to largely shrug about everything that is going on. I mean, it's definitely been super chilling. And I actually recently learned a detail about some of the threats against judges that I was unaware of as somebody who covers this industry. So maybe no one else has heard about this, but we have covered the notion of people sending pizzas to judges because they don't like what they say. But I did not know that some of them at least have been in the name of Esther Salas' son's name.

18:10Oh, yeah. I didn't. Yeah. Oh, no. That was a new detail that I found that literally I'm getting chills even talking about it now. Oh, no, it's horrifying. Because for those maybe who don't remember, but Judge Esther Salas's son was murdered at her house when a disgruntled litigant that was in her court came to her house with a gun and her son was murdered. And that, you know, people have been I've seen plenty of jokes. Oh, it's just a pizza. It's not that big a deal. But I think that that additional detail makes it I mean, it was always chilling to me, but that really takes it to an additional horrifying level.

18:45Yeah, we do have a problem. It is a situation where we it has gotten so bad that we had multiple district judges anonymously call upon the Supreme Court to take action to prevent these threats from getting so out of hand. the way in which they would recommend that happening is the Supreme Court, you know, either actually have their back when they issue rulings that protect the rule of law, or at least have the decency to write an opinion explaining why they have decided not to follow that ruling, or to point out that we're making a shadow docket opinion that means we aren't actually saying that it's wrong, We're just like staying the proceedings.

19:26You know, the sorts of moves that a court could make that would send a signal to folks that they aren't dismissing lower court judges as though they're activists doing crazy things. The Supreme Court has chosen to do no such thing. The Supreme Court has increased its security and not there is no increase for me, but not for the no increase in security coming for the district courts. It is really problematic, and there seems to be no stop to this. The only possible stop to it appears to be at the Federal Reserve level where the Supreme Court has – the conservatives on the court seem to be signaling that, well, giving him full power – Trump full power over the Federal Reserve might hurt the stock portfolios of people that we like.

20:14Therefore, we will make a rule that says he has control over every executive agency except that one because reasons. But otherwise, that's where we are. Look, one of the events that I covered this year was the Society for the Rule of Laws Convention. And at that, a bunch of district court judges, former district court judges, as well as Judge Ludig talked, formerly of the Fourth Circuit. And the message was that the district courts have largely acquitted themselves very well trying to hold the line regardless of partisan lean. You know, there's always outliers, but regardless of partisan lean, people have been holding the line.

20:52The appellate courts, less great and the Supreme Court, failing grade, because if they don't do something to stand up for the way in which the laws have been written, then it's going to then all bets are off. And, you know, you see the way the laws have been written. We talk about we I phrase it that way because one of the insane things that happened this year is that these shadow docket opinions are intended to be interim orders while things progress and that maintain the status quo while things progress. They are not actual rulings. They are just say on the merits. They just say, oh, we're holding things.

21:31But we had the justices first kind of quietly and then Gorsuch in an opinion very loudly say we aren't actually making a decision, but we expect the district courts to stop defying us by continuing to rule on what the law is. And they should just kind of guess what we might do, which I think is – well, one is not how this is supposed to work. It is bad. District court judges should not be guessing what the law is if the Supreme Court is too cowardly to do anything about it. But on top of it, I think this is an intentional act on the court's part to avoid being locked into a ruling because I think they want the flexibility to give Trump everything he wants now and turn around at a future Democratic president and go, well, technically we never ruled.

22:16The future, LOL. But the other part of this that I also want to talk about is Justice Kavanaugh's attempt to rebrand the status, the shadow docket as the interim docket, which is awful. Technically what it historically is. But not at all how Justice Kavanaugh is comporting himself. Sure. Steve Ladek has a great post about this on his sub stack one first. But it is really the most linguistically shady shit you've ever heard. Because especially when you have the thing that you just talked about where Gorsuch explicitly says, well, you should be trying to guess what we meant by it. because it is not, in fact, an interim docket, but what we think is the law.

23:00Shouts out to SCOTUSblog. Yeah, well, and that's what I was just going to transition to, which is Vladek specifically shots fired at SCOTUSblog, which has taken the stance of calling it the interim and kind of cover it, which... They cover the quote-unquote interim docket, which is the shadow docket. Which he's like, now why are you doing that? Are you like trying to hide? Don't believe the lie. Like, call it what it is. Call it what we've all come to refer to it as. And your sort of the belief that we should call it the interim docket, I think, is really problematic. Justice Breyer, who I saw receive an award recently and was able to chat with, he calls it the windowsill docket because historically that was that was the way it was treated.

23:45It was kind of like people coming to the windowsill to ask like a quick interim favor. And they like we thought of it very informally like that. That is not how it has been used. Yeah, and again, in some court that is not the Roberts Court, call it historically whatever it was, that's fine. You're talking about historically, you want to call it the interim docket? Okay, but the Roberts Court has treated it as a backdoor, shadowy, shady mechanism for right-wing causes to get what they want, and you should call it what it is, and it is absolutely shadowy. And I'll say that the – we talk a lot about the courts for obvious reasons here, but this kind of breakdown in the rule of law is happening broadly.

24:31We have several U.S. attorneys who were squatting on their jobs illegally and – Four, right? Yeah, who have continued to try and act like they're in those positions. We've had, in the last segment we talked about, executive orders being utilized to make policy, which they are not capable of doing constitutionally. But there's no sense that anybody is going to do anything about that. Literally, we have an administration saying, who's going to stop me? And we have the majority in the Roberts court saying, not us. Yeah. If it was up to me, they'd be called covert opinions. Yeah. I think that's a nice ring to it.

25:07All right. Well, let's take a break here and be back with our last topic of the year. I feel like you should take the lead on this last topic here, Joe. It's kind of your hobby horse. I do write about this a lot. I reject the idea that it's like my hobby horse. It is the most significant thing happening in law right now, in real law, because the other two things we talked about were people being lawless. The most significant thing happening in law right now for good and mostly, well, I won't say mostly bad, for both good and bad is the adoption of artificial intelligence within the legal workflow.

25:50We have seen adoption going crazy. We have giant billion-dollar valuations of companies that promise to give legal AI. We have chat GPT still being used in kind of a shadow IT way by lots of firms with potentially exposing client confidences right and left, which is not great. We have big companies like the traditional players in legal tech going all in on trying to build AI. We've got adoption happening. You know we have adoption happening because we've got hallucinations happening everywhere. Judges as well as. I was going to transition to we not only have small firms, which is where the hallucination game kind of started, who just didn't know any better necessarily about the new technology.

26:39But now we have large law firms being involved in this, too. You know, like K &L Gates got smacked around on this. Gordon Reese got smacked around on this. I know Butler Snow got kicked off of a case because of some hallucinations. We have judges getting involved. We had a court opinion in Georgia that it integrated fake cases. The appellate court figured that one out. And then we had two federal judges put out decisions and then immediately withdraw them because they had a bunch of made up stuff in them. That became a bigger deal with Chuck Grassley writing letters about it that I was quoted in.

27:16The background to all of this, I think it's really important to kind of give the lay of the land as you just did there, Joe. I think one of the most interesting points that you made in your extensive coverage on AI in legal is about the speed of things happening. You cite, you know, Virilio in it. And like there's a lot of risk for things happening that is that is bad when you use AI. There's lots of risk for efficiencies and good things, too. But the inability or the decreasing chances for people to stop and think about sort of where they are in the process I thought was one of the most interesting things to really contextualize our conversations going forward on AI and legal.

28:05All right. Thanks. I'll speak to that a little bit. So I will say generally speaking, generative AI is a very good thing in legal. It is impossible to review every document with humans at this point. so you need something, you know. There are lots of tasks that are automatable and that AI can help with. That said, that does not absolve humans of needing to check things. Just like, I mean, I said at a few conferences this year that you should think of generative AI as your dumbest summer associate, right? Like, yes, they wrote a memo. Some of the stuff's good in there, but you aren't going to just say, looks great and send it out, right?