AI Takes The Blame, Epstein Takes The Careers

0:11Hello, welcome to another edition of Thinking Like a Lawyer. I'm Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I'm joined by some colleagues. I've got Catherine Rubino and Chris Williams here. Hi, friends. We are here, as we are on a weekly basis, to discuss some of the big stories from the week that was in legal over here at Above the Law, America's finest news source. And we begin as we do. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That title is held by The Onion. Ah, fair, fair, fair. I think, is that actually their tagline? I can't even remember. I think it is. yeah it's either that or you are dumb in latin no yeah no it is it is the america's finest news source all right yeah i think it's both i think it's both america's finest source of legal news uh as as it goes yeah apologies to my friends who write for the onion let's uh take a second to begin our small talk section which we kind of jumped the gun on i suppose with that onion conversation uh so what's up uh i am ill uh i've got a cold i don't know about anybody else ditto man i feel like the world is sick right now but it's real bad you know that's life with a toddler frankly oh well yeah i think it's just life in a in a winter wonderland yeah well i'm not sure about the wonder of the winter at this point we are officially at the part of winter where I'm over it.

1:39We are halfway over it. We're halfway through February. I'm done. I'm done. I'm done. The fact that I still have ice piles higher than my child is not acceptable. I'm ready for some. The fact that 37 degrees feels warm to me is bonkers, not acceptable. And the fact that I'm likely to have snow for at least another month. No, unsubscribe, please. I am ready for spring. Is this small talk or an advertisement for antidepressants? Damn. I had a great weekend, folks. Thanks for asking. There's an exhibit at the Philadelphia Art Museum. And there was this guy, his name was Noah Davis. He passed away, unfortunately, around the age of 32.

2:23But yeah, really cool art. And it was the first time I saw Maury, paintings of Maury stills. And it was so cool. Well, it was so full of just rich cultural references that you had to be in and know to know. Like there was this one painting of a looks like a mother. She was like being a child. I don't know. Maybe he took a cookie from the cookie jar. But the title of the painting was Bad Boys for Life. And I was like, this is hilarious. And I was like, this must be what it feels like to go to a museum and be a wasp. because I just saw all this implicit cultural affirmation and validation of like, yes, the things you see matter and are important.

3:05And one of my favorite things was the whole time I was going through and I was like, you know, those little things next to the paintings and it's like, this painting is a critique of the postmodern conditions of, and it's just like somebody holding up a fish. And my thing is, I'm like, the artist would not talk like this. This installation is not about the artist as much as about some grad student who need to get an A on their like, aesthetics class or some shit right so one of the things i saw on the outside which which and again i was doing this the entire time i was going through the exhibit because that's who i am as a person it looked like there was this assessment of the art given to the artist and all i saw was just lines of blue ink just crossing through the shit that was said and looked like there was some names added in pencil and i was like did no one davis do this did the artist like say their their interpretation is bunk and add in the stuff and make it sound human.

3:57I love this. So it was the first time where my favorite part of the exhibit wasn't even the exhibit proper. It was just a thing outside of it that felt like it had some of the artists, you know, sweating it beside the actual art that they were displaying. And it was a beautiful exhibit. So if you're in Philly or if you have enough money to go to Philly, check out the Noah Davis exhibit at the Art Museum. Nice. Speaking of Philly and being slightly legal, but not one of our big stories for the day, But just because you mentioned the little placards explaining exhibits, we did over the weekend get the decision handed down that the Trump administration cannot, in fact, remove all the references to slavery from all the historical exhibits in Philadelphia.

4:39Yippee! I wrote about that, the original, the hearing. It seemed very obvious if you listened to or read what happened at the hearing that this was going to be the decision. But that particular exhibit was made between the city of Philadelphia and the federal government in a combination. And the federal government was just like, yeah, we're taking it off. And the judge was like, lols, no. Yeah, you can't. There's a lot of power, but it can't really be arbitrary and capricious. So that happened. So more good news for Philadelphia. You get to have something in a year when the Eagles don't win a Super Bowl.

5:18So you still get to have a few good night fights. He said that, not me. He said that, not me. Do not beat my ass. Go birds. There you go. All right. So with all that said, let's transition to our topics. The biggest story of the week traffic wise for us, and it ultimately spawned some follow on knock on stories, was Baker McKenzie, one of the top loss firms by revenue in the country on the AMLA 10, announced massive layoffs. some, I think around 700 staff laid off. It is not impacting lawyers per se, though we did get anonymous tips from folks who said that there have been some corresponding, what they considered stealth layoffs of attorneys, layoffs that are not performance related, or firings that are not performance related.

6:14We call those stealth layoffs. Obviously, we can't confirm that necessarily, but it's out there as a possibility. And it makes some sense within the context of the way Baker described these layoffs of staff, which was there was part of an overall restructuring, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But they specifically cite AI as one of the reasons why they were laying all these people off. I think that that is a super bold move right now in 2026, when a lot of finance reporters and tech reporters are talking about an AI bubble and we don't necessarily know what's about to happen. It seems an interesting moment given that kind of looming uncertainty in the AI market to lay that many people off because of AI.

7:02I'll add to that the most arguably Probably the most aggressive investor in, quote unquote, agentic AI has been Salesforce, who laid off bunches of people because AI was going to handle everything. They have now, toward the end of 2025, they started hiring people back and admitting that they vastly overestimated what AI could accomplish. You have IBM hiring bunches of new people claiming that AI just can't do what people say it can do. So, you know, it's a weird time because you also have all these people playing around with the artist formerly known as Claudebot, then Moltbot, now OpenClaw, talking about how it can accomplish amazing things when it's kind of untethered with no guardrails like that.

7:48We'll see how that plays out. You would certainly think the legal industry would like guardrails. Well, yeah. So, yeah, absolutely. Well, and on the legal front, we have what happened, which we talked about last week with Claude itself. introducing these kind of legal skills, which I did not particularly believe were ready for prime time, but, you know, they're there. Well, yeah. And the other kind of that I that I think is relevant to this particular question is the Judge Rakoff decision out there as well, which is kind of talking explicitly about the dangers of using non-legal AI tools for legal tasks.

8:25In that particular decision, the judge said that because the client used some commercial grade, you know, it's not legal, not kind of protected AI in their community to draft communications that they then said to their lawyers that those were no longer privileged because they used in AI, which is outside of that privileged communication. Yeah, I have some, you know, we're kind of deviating from the Baker McKenzie, but this is a great point. I think I think Judge Rakoff's decision is probably very strictly accurate by the precedent, But it really does violate a lot of the spirit of what we want out of an attorney-client privilege.

9:04In that case, basically the person already knew they were a target of an investigation. They had already contacted Quinn Emanuel and engaged them. And then on their own accord, they prepared some documents that they wanted to brief Quinn Emanuel about their case. Like, here's my timeline of what I was doing. Here's yada yada. And because they used an AI to help compile it, Dracoff said that's a third party and outside of the privilege. Now, that said, part of it is, well, you know, the third parties could get access to that. So whatever. And it's like if that's the standard, if you save your stuff on OneDrive, it's outside, right?

9:42Like if you save your stuff on the cloud, it fits the same. So it's really problematic when you take it to its logical conclusion. Sure. I was only talking about it as it kind of specifically talks about this AI. Oh, sure. How it talks about AI and specific to the Baker McKenzie situation, which is that although AI kind of feels ubiquitous right now and inevitable in a lot of ways, there's still a real difference between those commercial products, which there's at least some precedent now out there saying that commercial products break the privilege, the shield of privilege. And sort of these legal tech products, which theoretically, because they have different guardrails in place, would not do the same thing.

10:22And I think that that is really what people have to think about going forward. And if you're making your hiring, firing decisions based on this big question mark that's looming over the industry, that just seems like a bold move. Well, so, all right, I'm going to belabor this one for a little bit longer. Here's the other problem, and this was raised in the Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable last week when we talked about this issue. Because AI is not generating revenue that its people want it to, the new play is integration with products you already use. In Microsoft, you basically can't get out of using Copilot because it's going to be integrated into all the Office projects.

11:02Now, if you write something in Microsoft Office, you are engaging with an AI, whether you want to or not, probably, unless you take real onerous steps to turn that off. Now, at that point, using Microsoft Office puts you in the position where what you write in it can't be privileged, then we got a real problem. And I don't think that that will long term be the standard. That's the issue, yeah. But again, now is an interesting time to do that. But the other kind of part of this that I think is really important to talk about is that big law has been under a real quandary in terms of its relationship to staff and staff hiring.

11:40Right. In the even in late as the 90s, early 2000s, you know, there was a ton more staff. You know, there were there were partners in the early 2000s that didn't have computers. Right. So they would like dictate stuff and they would have secretarial pools that would take those those oral recordings and change them into documents. There was just a lot more folks that were necessary to do to do big law. And that is changing rapidly for a bunch of reasons. And AI is only the most recent one. And I think that the story for the last 10 or 15 years has been the constant cutting of staff positions in big law.

12:16Yeah. And I think to that extent, I felt like this announcement, we're getting real close to the bone. Sure. Like we already had gotten rid of a lot of the word processing units because lawyers can use their own word processors and stuff like that. We're now getting to the point where we're starting to cut bone. And I'm not sure AI is prepared to fulfill those roles that we're starting to cut. But the bigger issue to transition, not really bigger issue, but bigger picture issue of like, where does it go from here story-wise? Before we transition, there is a thing I wanted to say, just pushing the story at its face.

12:51Do you actually buy the AI as the reason that these layoffs happened? Because as I'm looking at the areas that were cut, I could see a world where if Baker McKenzie just decides to lay off a good amount of their DEI department, that's a story. But if they can say, oh, because of AI, we have to lay off all of DEI, there's nothing there. Or if they decide to lay off the leadership and learning department, it's like, well, what about the incoming attorneys? Who's going to do your training? But since they are able to tie it to an AI story, oh, well, what can you do? I think that's a great point. I think that AI probably motivated a good deal of the layoffs, but you raise a great point.

13:23But there were HR people included in this reportedly, which does make you start to wonder if they were trying to obey and advance and get rid of a bunch of DEI-related staff positions. And by lumping it in with this, they could call everything AI and avoid some heat. Yeah, no, I mean that's definitely a good point. Right. Well, I was going to bigger picture it to just be what happens when they come for the lawyers and are they going to come for the lawyers, what happens to the industry more broadly. And I wrote a piece following up on the announcement that just explored the idea that I think we talk about the impact that AI could have on lawyers and law firms a little too homogeneically and that there are differences.

14:14And I think Baker McKenzie, for instance, fits a business model mold that is distinct from, say, a Cravath mold that makes it more prone to AI getting involved in the size of its headcount. Cravath – these firms that are in the – there are two kinds of firms in the elite of revenue. There are those that are a few hundred lawyers who are generating tons of money by billing a ton, billing a high amount for high quality content. And if you have AI make them more efficient, they're just going to charge more because there's already clear elasticity to their prices. They can charge whatever they want and get it.

14:59But then there's firms like Baker McKenzie and DLA and Denton who are also great firms who provide a great service. But it's a different service because it's based around the idea that they're giant. They're everywhere. They have thousands of lawyers. You can have the same firm handling stuff in far-flung areas of the world. And those firms, when things get more efficient, the amount of revenue per lawyer they're getting is so much smaller that if there's any efficiencies to gain, they're probably going to decrease headcount. And so treating those as separate entities when we talk about what the impact of AI might be, I thought was a worthy exercise.

15:39And we should take some time to probably workshop terms that define these kinds of firms differently. But I think that I don't see there being massive sort of attorney layoffs at these firms. But what they likely, I think, are to do is to start hiring smaller and smaller incoming classes. I think that's true, too. So bad news if you're currently in law school or thinking about law school, but less terrifying if you're currently working there. Yeah. And look, there will always be places for lawyers because, you know, there are some regulatory things we have in our back pocket, not just that only lawyers get to use AI or else it won't be privileged, as we just talked about.

16:21But also, you know, conflicts are real. You can't necessarily, if you're a firm, just take on every matter and that keeps things going. But yeah, no, it's a real issue. I also had a quick story, you know, following up on that about a case study that I read about a boutique firm that just lost an associate and didn't replace them and used AI instead. And, you know, it kind of tracked this issue of like the thing about working in a boutique firm is if you're an associate in a boutique firm, you're your own mid-level and your own junior, basically. And sometimes your own paralegal, too. You're doing kind of everything.

16:57So that's a ripe area for AI to take some of those rote tasks off of your plate. And basically, rather than go through the expense of hiring and training and vetting and the risk involved in bringing in a new person, they just reduced everybody's individual workload that little bit through AI and found themselves more profitable without replacing. So how it impacts different businesses is going to be a new thing for the future. I do wonder how far we are from finding out that all these legal AI is actually just some phenomenal lawyer in India who didn't want to get an LLM. And he's actually just the AI.

17:36It's like, why does the AI keep hallucinating Indian cases? We did hear that, but there was that announcement that Waymo in some of their instances have remote drivers in the Philippines, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I took Waymo's the other day as we talked about on a past episode, I think. I don't think mine was driven by a remote human because it made some weird directional choices that I would not have made if I were a human. Have you been driven by a human, Joe? I have been driven by humans many times. Like humans do that too is what I'm saying. I don't know. All right. So, well, let's take a break and move on to another lengthy topic.

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19:41Well, it would not be 2026 without us talking about Jeffrey Epstein. So deep sigh. Well, the good news for those who care about accountability is that Catherine Rumler is soon to be the ex-general counsel at Goldman Sachs. She submitted her resignation dated into June, which, you know, probably makes sense for financial care calendars and those sorts of reasons. or, you know, we'll see what happens, I guess, in June and what the pressure on her is still like then. But we wrote extensively this past week about all the things that were in the Epstein files that Kathy Rumler was involved in. And it wasn't great.

20:25You missed the opportunity you had on on air called Brad Karp not having to step down before it happened. You missed the opportunity last week to say that, even though privately you had told us that you thought she would not last the week either. And, you know, I can vouch that you did say it, even though you didn't put it on the record. That is, that is all accurate. And even if she does step down, I'm sure that amazing praise from Epstein as being an arch feminist will help her get another position. If she has to step down, at least she has levitons to do it. Here's the thing about the Rumbler situation that really gets under my craw.

21:03and I think takes it... Mixed metaphor probably, but go ahead. It's okay. You all know what I mean. The point remains, listen, there's a lot of people who did a lot of shady things. There's a lot of people who were willfully blind because a powerful person was trying to cultivate their friendship, all of which also is true of Kathy Rumbler. But the thing that really, really got me or just also got me is what some of her spokespeople were out there saying about the revelations in the files A spokesperson told the Financial Times on her behalf that it is, quote, simply despicable to single out and attack a highly respected female professional simply because of her benign interactions with Jeffrey Epstein.

21:46Single out. Interesting choice, because I've seen it seems as though we've been talking about a lot of dudes who. A lot of dudes, a lot of dudes have lost their jobs. That is there's far more men who are under the hot seat or have stepped down, etc. etc. Under the onla. OK, you. All right. You keep going. Anyway, the point is Brad Carp would like a word about being singled out. Right. You know, there's there's a ton of men out there. You also wrote about Ken Starr now passed away, but still, you know, his interactions with Jeffrey Epstein are also continue to be under a microscope. And also to use the word despicable.

22:25Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. What's despicable is the freaking crimes here. Right. Like it is it is wild to say that accountability is despicable in a world where we have these atrocious crimes coming to light and being part of the public discourse. Might might might have wanted to use something, you know, different. Like it's unfortunate. Unfortunate. Yeah. The thing that gets me and this is just going back from I think there was a book on slavery and it was like 40 percent of slave owners were white women. like it is not something new that women can sometimes be major players in upholding patriarchy and abusive relationships i wonder how much is actually the opposite that the role of women in the epstein files is being undercovered uh by what's going on so it's like there should be more coverage of the women that are involved because i think it's just like uh her and jizz lane like where are the other women because we know they're there we know about the the law student that A nice ride.

23:29Yes. Where are the other women? Listen, there are a lot. Listen, Hillary Clinton's also under the spotlight for her relationship with the Epsteins. But and I think that part of the issue is something we talked about last week. Right. Is that I think for some of the people, they had both a role as victim and as perpetrator. And I think that that makes it more complicated to talk about. And we are not great at nuance as a public discourse in America. So I think that that has certainly been part of that problem. But yeah, I think you're right. I'm suspicious of that framing, too, because I'm sure there are a lot of men who are like, well, I was being blackmailed.

24:04So, of course, I had to do some dirt for Jeffrey. Like the victim and perpetrator rhetoric, I feel, gets deployed in a way that defends the innocence of women in a way that men do not benefit from. Not that men should benefit from it, but just speaking discursively, there's dirt on everybody here. No, I think that makes some sense. As far as accountability goes, it just seems like there are these people making desperate attempts to explain away stuff that happened. But that horse has sailed, as they might say. I love that. I love that. Mixing of metaphors, as I might say. Yeah. And the thing that really gets me to about Rumbler is not just that she's doing this in a really problematic way, but also in the files, she explicitly is derisive of diversity.

24:49So when they're talking about one of her job opportunities, she says, I ain't no affirmative action than the notion that somebody might hire her because she's a woman. So she has this big kind of pick me girl energy when she's talking with her, you know, older brother, Jeffrey Epstein, because she does refer to him as her older brother at one point also in the files. but now turning around and using that that as a shield is really problematic. Yeah, Ken Starr also referred to Epstein as a brother. It seems like... It's a real, real problematic family. You know who's in the Epstein files and made no familiar relationship to him?

25:22There you go. All of us. So it's not that hard. It is really not that difficult. I never big broed Epstein at any moment in my life. All right, well, let's take a break and move to another topic to close out the show when we get back. Well, this is a short one, but an important one. And we're going to keep an eye on this to see if more momentum starts. We've talked a few times on the show, and we've definitely written about the increasingly troubling speed at which the law firm hiring process is going with people, with firms making offers before students have first semester grades, with recruiting happening in kind of unorthodox ways with exploding offers being handed out before people are able to talk to other firms, like really putting way too much pressure on people way too early in their careers and kind of making a mess of everything.

26:21And it's not good for the firms either because you're introducing way more risk hiring people without knowing their grades, but nobody seems willing to come together and stop it. this week we did have a story that Cooley LLP has said, you know what, we're out. You know, I think that that's the right kind of move, but I question whether or not it will either gain traction or whether they're going to see some negative results as because of that decision. There'll be fewer people in the market for jobs when they're willing to start interviewing folks presumably the people who had the highest grades well yeah so so they're so they're doing a half measure which i think is kind of smart so they are staying half in this market but they're leaving half of their openings free sure which your point i think makes sense but there's also the possibility that some of these folks whose offers explode on them are going to be in a position where they're gonna gotta look towards somebody hiring later it's also true that even if If somebody's like, oh, I think I made the right decision, you know, three months into my law school career about where I'm going to work after graduation in two and a half years, gets to the firm that they were so excited about their 1L year and finds out, oh, that's not what I thought.

27:39It turns out I'm really interested in this niche of the law that the firm that I have an offer from doesn't really specialize in. I'd love to go to Cooley because they have whatever kind of practice area. I hope it catches on is the best I can say. I hope that we're talking in a year from now saying the great Cooley experiments, giving them all the props in the world for being the first major law firm for making this stance. But yeah. Yeah. And obviously it is a half stance, but I also think that that's the only way that this can start. We need more people to go with the half and then they can maybe all go all the way.

28:11You know, it's it's a start. And the pressure is definitely going to be on the half that gets accepted as part of like the quick rush. because if the other half, the people that like, they actually vetted them for the grades and what have you are doing, just knocking out the park compared to the other half of the associates, then ugh. So if you get on early, put on. All right. Well, thanks everybody for tuning in. We will, you know, be back next week. You should be subscribed to the show so that you get new episodes when they drop. You should be giving reviews, stars, writing things. It, you know, it's an ask that you hear at the end of almost every podcast, but it's so easy to do.