Epstein Fallout Rocks Legal As Admin Tries To Deflect From ICE

15:16Elie Mystal:Yeah, there are gallows humorous jokes that you could make with random friends that are they hit different if that friend has already pleaded guilty to something like that, you know, and that's really the issue. You have a relationship with somebody who has these issues in their past now and they had kind of a working relationship to this is obviously crossing more into personal conversation, whatever. But, you know, you've got to be more conscious. It's worryingly not conscious of the fact that that's, you know, sitting in there in the background. And again, doesn't necessarily mean it's illegal.

15:53Elie Mystal:It could very well not be, but it's skeevy.

15:57Joe Patrice:Yeah. And that phrase kind of your Russians is not just in the Rumler emails in the Epstein files. If you just search for that, you'll find a bunch of other folks referring to talking to Epstein about your Russians. So this was sort of a way that his inner circle talked about the fact that he paid foreign models. You know, there was, I think it was some bank after everything kind of came to light, did an investigation, a financial investigation. And there was, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to foreign models for we don't even know. Right. But the way that that was kind of referred to is something that happened a lot within these emails.

16:35Joe Patrice:On the note of skeeviness, one of the things that in my mind or like I've had suspicions, but like just see it kind of a jaw drop. There's a moment where she's like, I'm no I won't be a DEI hire. So she's she's more comfortable with getting a lift in her career from a pedophile than getting the job because she would help fluff out the firm's diversity statistics because she's a white woman, which would happen either way. like you don't like that that was you know you don't get to avoid it just yeah yeah yeah i mean i i tell all the places i work for that i'm a white man and i still show up on their diversity you know so like that that was just that was jarring to see but it's also like oh this is this is how they actually talk behind closed doors you know yeah and that's how that kind of that's how we kind of even get to the place of trading russians for compensation is you know So Epstein was like, oh, they're interested in a woman.

17:32Joe Patrice:And she's like, I'm not affirmative action hire. And he's like, no, I mean romantically. And she's like, what? You're going to trade one of your Russians for my compensation? And I was like, what? And he was like, no, I mean you. And he's like, you know.

17:44Elie Mystal:Yeah, the context is not great.

17:46Joe Patrice:Yeah.

17:47Elie Mystal:Sex trafficking is fine, but I draw the line at diversity. Classic community line. So transitioning back to Paul Weiss slightly is the last one, which is a Paul Weiss partner who is in the files for passing along some legal insights about, you know, whether or not it's OK to cross state lines to sleep with somebody who like fits their statutory laws, but not in another state, etc., which is obviously very disturbing legal advice, one would think. And that got a lot of people on social media up in arms about this, especially because this connects back to Paul Weiss yet again, a firm that's already had some issues here.

18:27Joe Patrice:But it's a weird stray, actually, that Paul Weiss is catching on this. Paul Weiss is completely catching a stray here.

18:34Elie Mystal:I believe he just graduated, was working postgrad as a research assistant. This is a just out of Harvard research assistant writing these things. And the reason they're writing them is because Alan Dershowitz does not use a computer. And so he's passing along information from his boss, Alan Dershowitz. Now, again, Dershowitz has other connections with Epstein that people, you know, was involved in that original plea deal. And people have reason to criticize that. That said, they're jumping because of some of the awful things in the Epstein files. People want to jump to this idea of, you know, this person who sent this is terrible.

19:11Elie Mystal:Dershowitz is terrible. They were advising him on how to write, you know, how to do sex tourism. There was one email about like figuring out sex tourism laws. I wanted to push back on that because I there may well be other reasons criticize these folks. But these emails aren't it. And the reason why and I understand why people are wound up because of how bad some stuff in there is. But at the time, this is all happening when Epstein's negotiating that original plea deal. He is accused of all of these things, and he is consulting with a criminal law defense lawyer about what to do. That means they're going to do research on whether or not certain things are legal or not.

19:55Elie Mystal:They're going to do research on whether or not people should receive XYZ punishment for this action or that action. And it may seem unsavory, but that does mean you're going to do that research and you're going to respond with, no, it looks like it is legal for one to do that or the other. And, you know, look, is that in some ways giving a loaded rifle to a monkey if you've got like somebody who's actually interested in doing illegal stuff and you do that research for the purposes of that? Like, yeah, like there's no way to put that toothpaste back in the tube, as I write. Like, obviously, that does mean that happens.

20:35Elie Mystal:But at the end of the day, you you do have an obligation as a defense lawyer to try to research the laws that your person is being accused of. So there's nothing there's nothing wrong with these emails. It is obviously you understand. We understand like why that's kind of unfortunate. But like as a system, we rely on defense lawyers being able to do their job. And that does mean they have to do this research. So that was my one takeaway with that, that no matter how awful things are and how much people want to feel righteous anger for some of the things that are happening in these files. There's lots of other places to place it.

21:12Elie Mystal:I don't think this is it, folks.

21:13Joe Patrice:And listen, there's lots to be angry about here.

21:15Elie Mystal:Yeah.

21:16Joe Patrice:Yeah. I was going to say, Joe, this is totally fair to say. And I'm glad you said it. But also, this is why people don't like lawyers. Yeah.

21:25Elie Mystal:I mean, it is why like criminal defense work gets vilified sometimes. And, you know, but it is part of the process. Now, like, look, we've on this show talked a lot over the years of this show about I don't have a particularly rosy view of the idea that everyone everyone deserves to have lawyers. So you can never criticize lawyers for the work they do. I think that I think there's an argument for that in criminal defense cases if you are a criminal defense lawyer. But a becoming a criminal defense lawyer is a choice. If that's not the business that you want to be in, then, you know, don't be in it.

21:59Elie Mystal:Other people are better suited to that. And in the transactional space, for instance, or civil litigation space, no, they don't have the right to you as their lawyer. Like you can say no. There's a kind of a constitutional principle in being a criminal defense lawyer. But if you decide to help out, you know, get your business tied up with a sex pest because you think you're going to make a little bit of money off of it, like that's on you. They don't there's no like higher constitutional principle that you have to do that work and collect those fees. And that's where this comes down for me. Like in this instance, at the time that this was happening, this is absolutely Alan Dershowitz working as a criminal defense lawyer.

22:40Elie Mystal:This is absolutely research that needs to be done for that purpose. I have criticized Dershowitz about a lot of things over the years. And likely will again. And likely will again. But this is absolutely not one of them. He is absolutely correct here, I think. All right. Well, let's take a break. We've gone on this for quite some time. Go take a shower quickly after so we can go on to something besides the Epstein files. 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.

23:16Elie Mystal:And 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, let's transition real quick to the topic that we are all being distracted from because of the Epstein files. I think it's the Epstein files sort of dropped because I think this administration who had been delaying the files for a long time wanted to get some attention off of what's going on on the immigration front. So let's talk about that and not let them distract us from it.

23:54Elie Mystal:This was one story, and it's one slice of life on immigration story, I think, which is that in Minnesota, we had a government attorney in court being taken to task by the judge for the inability of the government to comply with any of the orders that they're being asked to comply or ordered to comply with. And the attorney had a moment of pure candor explaining, you don't know what we're up against. I'm telling ICE and Homeland Security to release people. I have to send three emails and call them and fight them, basically explaining that inside the government, the Justice Department lawyers, if they are being helpful, which many of them probably aren't.

24:40Elie Mystal:In this instance, this was a lawyer who was. If they are trying to be compliant with court orders, they're getting pushed back from internal to the government and explains that that's happening, explains that – and then ultimately says the caseload that they're working with was so bad they welcomed the court, throwing them in jail for contempt because at least they would get some rest.

25:07Joe Patrice:I mean, this is you're right. This is just like a real slice of slice of the times. Right. Like this is what's going on kind of on the ground. We've talked about this last week. We talked about the severe brain drain that's happening at the DOJ, which used to be a super elite job and is just not anymore. They're literally soliciting resumes on Twitter.

25:28Elie Mystal:That also happened this week.

25:29Joe Patrice:Yeah. They solicited resumes on Twitter. They're getting military lawyers to fill in the gap. They literally don't have enough people to deal with the amount of people that they're arresting. Yeah. Right. Like this is and they're under questionable conditions. There's a lot of legal like little proceedings that have to happen as a result. And they are woefully ill-equipped. And even the people who are still there, because, you know, a bunch of people have resigned in protest and will continue to do so. I'm sure even though that's all true, the people that they're left, they are just burning through them.

26:03Joe Patrice:They created these emergency jump teams at the DOJ, which said that every office had to identify one to two attorneys that would just kind of go from hotspot to hotspot as, you know, things get really crazy and they would work there for for a period of time. It sounds like, you know, a CBS TV show rather than an actual staffing strategy.

26:23Elie Mystal:You know, this all goes back to the Steve Bannon is famous, infamously came up with the Trump playbook back in the first term that they should flood the zone. They should do as much as possible at all times, and there's no way people can stop them. What I think we're starting to see here is that the problem with flooding the zone is you spread yourself out. They do not have the resources to keep up with the problems. Everybody else is doing their own thing. The government is the one who's involved in every one of these issues, and they're overburdened.

26:54Joe Patrice:And there are a lot more attorneys that are not working for the government that are working for the government, right? So there's a lot – that workload can be spread out a lot more than the government work can, particularly when it's such a bad job right now and they're not being respected internally. That's what this other part of this thing is that they are telling ICE that you have to do this, you have to do that, and they're not being respected by their other branches, other government employees. They're being saying, this is what you have to do legally, and they're saying, good luck trying to find me.

27:25Joe Patrice:And that's true. So why stay at this job?

27:29Elie Mystal:Yeah, it's real bad.

27:30Joe Patrice:I will say there is something I remember at some point I read a snippet of like an internal FBI document. And it was like it was it was a section on how to infiltrate right. How to infiltrate left wing organizations. And make them basically worse at their job. And one of the things that you do is you you get in and you don't do the little things. And over time that adds up. like yeah like make a make a make a uh write a report and forget to and forget to staple it like goofy shit like that over time it just it just puts um rust in the in the gears so as much as i want to say if you're doing this work you should quit i also want to be like if you're doing this

28:18Elie Mystal:work and you don't like what the administration is doing stay in and do your job poorly the problem The problem is the doing it poorly part means leaving people to languish who need to be let go. Fair. And that's the whole problem. Yeah, it's real rough. But no, I hear you. Having people on the inside you would like to think helps, but it's a tough spot. All right, well, we should move to our last topic because we're running a little long here. So let's take a break and be right back.

28:51Joe Patrice:Hey, Joe.

28:52Elie Mystal:Hey, what?

28:53Joe Patrice:We get to talk about legal tech now. We sure do.

28:57Elie Mystal:One of the biggest stories of last week, and indeed, if you add together the two stories we had about it, arguably the biggest, is Anthropic.

29:07Joe Patrice:It's a hell of an argument, but continue.

29:09Elie Mystal:Anthropic, the people who make Claude, and have therefore been providing technology to legal tech generally. When we talk about AI and legal tech, it's not like any of these companies are necessarily building their own large language models. The derogatory term is wrapper, as in they're just taking OpenAI. They're taking GPT. They're taking Claude. They're taking Gemini and building a wrapper around it. Now, those wrappers are important and involve work. You have to do things.

29:40Joe Patrice:Create some of the guardrails that are really the selling points for a lot of legal technology.

29:44Elie Mystal:And, of course, utilizing them with proprietary data matters, too. If you have the good data on legal that are going to make the models perform better and have a moat around it like your Lexus or Westlaw, then that matters. that said uh so they've all been using these various models and oh and i will also say that another thing that a lot of them do is have some kind of secret sauce games where they have multiple models from multiple providers and they kind of decide and fine-tune like if you if the user if the lawyer asks this question you know send this one to claude sonnet and send this one to gpt4 and like to to balance it out that said that's the legal tech market as it kind of exists right now That is the reality of what's going on out there in legal tech is everyone tries to integrate this.

30:32Elie Mystal:What happened last week was that Anthropic announced that they had built their own tool that was open source that you could use to do a bunch of the work that these other companies are building wrappers to do. What happened immediately after that is the market collapsed.

30:54Joe Patrice:Dipped at the very least.

30:56Elie Mystal:Yeah, TR went down like 15%, RelX 14. I saw like -

31:03Joe Patrice:It was definitely a clear market reaction.

31:04Elie Mystal:Legal Zoom like 20%. Like people got real hit. We, you know, our colleagues, Embry had written a story for us about how he'd been warning about this for a while, that this whole house of cards is based on the idea that these foundational models don't end up getting into legal. And, you know, here it is. It is likely, given the arms race nature of things, that the next shoe to drop is all the other ones, Google and OpenAI, that are going to try to do the same thing, putting more pressure on legal. I personally still think that legal matters. I think that people who are experts in how law works are going to do a better job.

31:46Elie Mystal:I will say –

31:47Joe Patrice:Yeah, I also think that – yeah, there's just a lot more, I think, hesitance too from the legal market, right? You have to be able to talk to lawyers to get them to use it.

31:56Elie Mystal:Well, so here's the weird part of it. It's a smart play in that we do have studies that show that inside these, especially in-house work and stuff like that, people are using these consumer-facing models more than the bespoke legal tools, which is scary as all get out. But that's a thing that's happening. And so it kind of makes sense as a logical move. But, you know, one of the things that I include in this story is after I wrote it, there was a social media post of somebody who works in-house showing a screenshot of their GC using this product. And it was trying to do all its legal research through Wikipedia.

32:35Elie Mystal:And like this is why this stuff's not ready for primetime. But people are overreacting. I actually thought that the biggest and this is a point I made on the tech show that I'm also on, in some ways, the bigger takeaway for me was the investor class is crazy. Like if they overreacted to this product, which is clearly not ready, dropping by wiping out a metric ton of value out of a bunch of legal tech companies, then I don't know as though I trust them driving the nature of innovation, right?

33:15Joe Patrice:Well, that's the entire way the system works. So yes, you're right to be scared, but that is the way it works.

33:21Elie Mystal:We're all screwed. dude we're all going to die and it's not because ai is going to kill us it's going to be the pursuit of ai is going to bankrupt us it's kind of my takeaway all right all right well we should be

33:33Joe Patrice:going that's the note we end on yeah yeah we're all gonna die that's our p2 that's our p2 moment

33:38Elie Mystal:that for those who listen to the other show that's a thing we used to do that's why we didn't win the podcast grammy or whatever it was oh well we didn't even talk about the grammys well that was another story this week, but whatever. So we should, thanks for listening. Subscribe to the show. Get more shows when they drop. We should be, you should be listening to other shows. Catherine's the host of the JBO. I'm guest on the Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable. We're also, there's other shows on the Legal Talk Network. You should read above the law. You should be following on social media, blah, blah.com.

34:10Elie Mystal:I'm at Joe Patrice. She's at Catherine1. Chris is at Rights for Rent. And we will chat next week.

34:16Joe Patrice:Bye.

34:16Elie Mystal:Peace. Thank you.