Rankings Drama Hits Law Schools, Law Firms

0:11Welcome to another edition of Thinking Like a Lawyer. I'm Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I'm joined by some above-the-law colleagues. I've got Catherine Vino here. Hey. And Chris Williams here. Merry Christmas. Yeah, right. That's going to be great because people are going to hear this, and they're going to wonder if they've gotten the latest episode. And yeah. But no, this is – it was not Christmas. We did just finish, I guess, Eastern Orthodox Easter. I think that's accurate. Yeah. I like to think Christmas is a state of mind. Sure. I'm always in the gift of giving spirit. Yeah. Well, you know it was just Easter because Donald Trump just sent out the picture of himself as Jesus healing people.

0:52Yeah, that really happened. Yeah. And like there was one thing. Oh, by the way, at this point, we're veering to small talk. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that'll do it. I remember during the first Trump takeover, well, Trump presidency, when people were flaring the alarm because there was a mention in Revelation about trumpets. And they were like, Trump and Pence is a little too on the nose. But him now shaming the pope and posting himself as Christ is straight up antichrist behavior. This is in the book that people haven't read. Not to give any spoilers. also I won't say what happens at the end of The Passion of the Christ but if you've read the book if you're an actual member of the book club that has done the reading you should know that these are the signals and I say this as an atheist I don't even think my soul hinges on this but I've read a couple of the chapters and I'm like hey even J.K.

1:50Rowling isn't this on the nose when it comes to character performance I'd be like Jesus Christ but Trump would be like huh well yeah so anyway it had just been Easter. That was all we were really trying to get at there. But yeah, no, so yeah. Wild times, wild times around here. Potentially the end of them. Yeah, yeah. Well, anyway, so that's pretty good small talk for us right there. Unless anybody has anything else to add. No, I mean, end of the world is pretty, it's the end of small talk, I think. Oh, no, there they are. I didn't hit the sound effect. Those are the trumpets. You know, you that's why you wanted to end small talk there because you wanted it to make sense.

2:36I didn't want to. I'm like, I was pretty short, I think, actually, for a small talk. But yeah, you thought that the joke might not make sense. Yeah. Right. Yeah. See what you did there or hear it. So let's begin today with the biggest story from last week. One of the big stories every year, the U.S. News and World Reports law school rankings came out. U.S. News and World Report is what used to be a news rep magazine but is now a rankings magazine since that's most of what anybody remembers them doing anymore. I'm pretty sure that's how they make all their money. I think so too. Anyway, so they have ranked law schools as they have done for decades now.

3:16And I mean, I'm sure it was boring and usual and nothing crazy happened, right? Well, there's some pretty big news. Yes, Yale Law School has fallen out of the top spot. Oh, hold on. I have a... There we go. Yes, Yale has fallen to a tie for second with the University of Chicago, and Stanford stands alone as the number one law school, according to U.S. News. and we've known for a while, we've talked extensively on this podcast that the U.S. news rankings are, to coin a phrase, bullshit, but nothing makes it as clear as this fact because if you get into Yale, you should go to Yale. I think that's true.

4:09I feel as though for a long time, Stanford has been creeping up kind of parallel. Listen, if you get into Yale and Stanford, whatever, your life is going to be fine. I don't care what your options are. But if you're like, hey, maybe I should go to Chicago over Yale. I'm like, you're wrong. You're wrong. But no, you will. No, you should go to Yale. And Harvard is way pulling up the rear here and like a tie for fifth or something. We'll get to Harvard. Chris, you had something to say? I was going to say, if it's between Yale and Chicago, the food's probably better in Chicago. I don't know. Well, yeah.

4:43So there are arguments to make. they might not be good ones but they're still there you have a Yale you have Yale on your resume for the rest of your life whatever food you need to eat for three years that line is never going away you will always be called a lawyer from blank law school yeah just looking at this list I feel like New Haven's not where you want to eat compared to San Francisco and Chicago But yeah, no, you'll be fine. You'll be sure. Yeah. And we kind of lampshaded the Harvard situation. It is actually I'm sorry. It is not tied for fifth. It is alone in sixth. Right. So that means both Penn and UVA have moved into a tie for fourth.

5:34If you get into Harvard and UVA, go to Harvard. Yeah. Unless I mean, unless there is a monetary reason not to. I agree. There's yeah. It's going to be a pretty big one, too. Yeah, I think that's right. Of course, all of these rankings went haywire when Yale started a trend of people not sharing – schools not sharing their proprietary data to make the rankings more accurate. Yeah, we're kind of living with the fallout of that. People used to joke about our above the law school rankings, which have not come out yet because we wait for more data than U.S. News does. But they will come out, and you should consider them when they do come out.

6:13They've always had a different order, our own rankings, but that's because we very transparently say that we focus a lot more on financial return on investment. And so Yale, while probably still where you should go, we're focused more on, hey, who gets you into a job easier and so on and so forth. And Yale often gets people into jobs that are harder to quantify, like president of some country. That's the kind of thing that you get with a Yale degree. So ours have always been a little different, but the U.S. news ones being this wild is crazy. So after Harvard, there's a tie between Duke and NYU.

6:56I am, as an NYU grad, aghast at the idea that we're tied with Duke, but whatever. Not that Duke's not a great law school. I mean, it's, you know. Wait, the many school? I don't know. Nixon went there. uh so so you got that on your resume i suppose i was gonna say the mayonnaise but no no not the mayonnaise that's a strong regionalism i guess yeah no this is the uh this is the basketball team has a law school yeah gotcha gotcha then there is a three-way tie between northwestern michigan and columbia at nine how you feel about that there's lots of reasons that are not i'm not personally attached to as a Columbia law grad that point to the rankings being bullshit, that is just more.

7:42Listen, for years, like decades, the order was Yale, Harvard, Stanford, YSL, like YHS. Those and then it was. CCN. CCN, Columbia, Chicago, NYU. Right. Those are the top. That's the very top tier is those three schools. The second tier is the next three schools. Michigan, horseshit. Horseshit. I mean, yeah. Horseshit. And well, so far, all the ones that we have named are at least schools that have T14 pedigrees. Sure. Which the T14 being what we used to call the 14 law schools that were always the top 14 in some various order. Now we have kind of broken that ceiling because coming in at 12 is Vanderbilt for some reason.

8:28Yeah. Like, look, it's also a perfectly fine school in that kind of tiered down, I would say, that not T14 group. But this kind of – It's a top 20 law school for sure. This one really reads to me as folks are trying to figure out ways that they can take advantage of the algorithm that U.S. News is utilizing. then you have cornell in at a tie at 13 along with ucla another school that is usually in that kind of discussion but not quite in there and chris you want to announce the last one in the t4 in the new quasi t14 well yes and i want to say something else uh washu go bears blah blah blah but also as i'm hearing this i'm wondering to what degree are we actually just not arguing about the number of angels that can dance on a pin, you know, like, yes, if you go to Yale Law, of course, you're going to end up being a politician somewhere.

9:27If you go to Stanford, if you go to these places, you're going to get a good job. Like you're going to be able to, you're still going to be graduating from a very prestigious thing that test making companies spend millions of dollars in advertising on just to like sell the dream of just landing in these spots. Like if you get in, you're fine, whether it's the second school, which appears to be Yale now or harvard and i think it's a little funny that like part of the even if there are changes that go into like the waiting that plays out with where these schools plays there's a strong it feels like there's a strong um nostalgia ranking like the like the idea that the things that have been the same for 20 years have to be the same for 20 years like there couldn't be enough things that change over the span of 20 years to where your old number one school could drop to number two like maybe there have been some substantive enough changes between like grades changes or some other factors that have that have actual consequences for what the ranking is and somebody's like well you know the school i went to 20 years ago isn't four anymore like come on now like why does this really matter um and like part of the like why does this matter is like from the schools themselves being like well we don't actually really give a damn um so like on some level Well, this kind of feels like a dick measuring contest where it's like, oh, my fourth ranking school back in 1980 is better than your fourth ranking school now in 2016.

10:48What's when 26? So they say they don't care. They absolutely do. Like deep down, you know that they all really do care. I think there's something to that that obviously things can change over time. I feel also, though, that when it comes to law schools, so a lot of what's being being registered is, you know, what the value of your degree is out in a professional landscape. And, you know, if you have an NYU degree where a lot of people who are prominent in the legal industry went to NYU, know folks, still have ties to the school, still know the professors and the administration and were involved, potentially involved in alumni activities to know what that school looks like.

11:32There's professional signals being sent by the fact that you went to that. And that does matter over time. And I think that that reputation, even there are movements that happen, obviously, within these rankings. But kind of a universal sea change is hard to get because this profession is a longstanding one. People who went to these schools in the 60s are still out there practicing, right? Yeah, and of the professions, law is one of the slowest to change generally. And it's not like these schools are charging up the rankings because, oh, look, they're teaching their kids about AI and that's going to be really cool.

12:16Yes, some are now mentioning the notion that AI exists, and that's great, I guess. But it's not like things are changing and they're doing it. It's that the U.S. news system has broken down and people are gamifying how they do that. employment counts a lot. And now all of a sudden you have a lot of school sponsored jobs that the people who couldn't get jobs before are getting right. There are things that these schools are doing in order to make these changes in the rankings that have actually nothing to do with how your degree is perceived in the industry. And this ranking used to be how it was perceived in the industry.

12:54And it really correlated very strongly to that, which is why it had such a profound impact for so long, this ranking, it no longer corresponds to what people think in the industry. And therefore, it is no longer as valuable a tool. Yeah, because there are other, again, as we said about our above the law rankings, you can measure other things. And you should take those things into account if you're a prospective law student. That said, what is the value of the U.S. News ranking? Its value, it's in like the above the law one was an input on financial return. The U.S. News one was an was an input on prestige.

13:29Now that that's kind of tossed up, like what is the value of the U.S. news ranking anymore? Should it be a thing that's allowed to change? Like factoring in Catherine's point, I see what you're saying. Like if there was a point where the U.S. ranking is, if they're more explicit about it and they were like, legacy, we were a prestiging ranking system. But as time goes on, there are things we're more concerned with. We no longer will be that, but our ranking still matters. Would they be allowed to do that? Or if they were to do that, Would that be an immediate pivot from to some other thing? I think it would definitely be a pivot, but also I don't think that they wanted it to change.

14:03They got Yale was like, we're noping out of the rankings. We're not giving you this data. A bunch of other schools piled on and now they're floundering. Yeah. This is not a deliberate pivot because other things besides prestige matter. This is a how do we stay relevant even though schools don't want to participate? Yeah. And like there was – there's always been movement within these rankings, like marginal movement. Like in the initial rankings, like NYU was always good but was like in the top ten. Right. And it moved up to four by the time I went because of major investments that were being done by the dean to lure faculty and make changes.

14:45And those were perceived. Yeah, and things like, you know, giving money to or, you know, throwing money out to get better academics to get more, you know, all, you know, things that we actually invest in the student body and make them have a better experience. That all makes sense. And it used to be that the difference between six and five was giant in everyone's head. And now, like, I don't I don't care. I don't care that, you know, NYU is seven. I think this is a silly list. I know how and how good NYU is. You know, so Stanford currently number one in the initial rankings way, way back in the day.

15:22They were they were in a tie for fourth. Do you know who was third back in the day? Yale, Harvard were. Yeah, they were one and two back in the day. Northwestern? Michigan. OK. Yeah. All right. So welcome back to form maybe a little bit for Michigan here. Yeah, they never left the T-14. Of course not. But yeah, and I think that that kind of thing mattered. And I think that it's fair to say that this is not even U.S. News's perfect form of the rankings. All right. Well, we should take a break and we'll be back in a moment. Well, it is rankings day here at Above the Law because we have another set of rankings to talk about.

16:06This time we're going to shift and talk about law firms. vault has put out its ranking of the most prestigious law firms in the country and they also they also do rankings of by region and by practice area but it's it's a big prestige fest for law firms themselves uh with the vault 100 uh what you know what are takeaways from the new ranking of o law firms yeah so cravath came in number one walktells number two shocking Yeah, not shocking. The opposite of that word. One of the bigger takeaways is that this ranking came out last year right after the big law firms started inking deals with the Trump administration.

16:52So they were very much out of step and in a way that is no fault of the vault. But just that that rhymed. Good job. But it was it's not their fault. The survey had ended before any of these deals were announced. No one. It was shocking. Don't forget when it actually happened. Oh, yeah. And there was no way to predict that this would have happened. So the rankings did not reflect any of this. These are the first rankings that reflect the nine big law firms that inked deals and had a major, I think, hit to their prestige. Most of those firms saw a dip in their rankings. And if not, what number they place the scores that put them in that place, right?

17:33Scadham, Latham, Kirkland, Milbank, Simpson, Thatcher, so their average scores drop overall. And Paul Weiss took a hit in the rankings, a pretty big one, I think, as well. They are taking, I think, the biggest reputational hit as it applies in the vault rankings. And I don't know how we think about that, because they're certainly not the only ones. Yeah. And just to be clear for the listeners who haven't read the list, biggest reputational risk hit means they're number 13 now. So still still very high. Oh, no, there's not that T14 matters for big law firms, but they're there. Fair, fair, fair.

18:10Yeah. No, it's not like they've completely fallen off or anything. But, you know, nor should they. They have multiple lines of business. It's a full-service law firm with a lot of elite clients. That said, it feels as though Paul Weiss is getting more of a hit for these deals than anyone else is. Now, granted, they were first, which made them more visible as the face of it. Well, I think it's more than just that they were visible because they were first. I wonder, and listen, I can't have a counterfactual here, but if the first one doesn't fall, do any of them fall, right? I think that the reality is Paul Weiss had a tremendous reputational hit as a result, and everyone knew that that was going to happen.

18:59If there wasn't, oh, kind of this follow-on, I'm not sure a lot of these firms would have inked these deals. I don't know. I feel weird about like the tarnishing effects that bad business decisions have as far as like history. Because the thing in my mind is like IBM is still in business. Like if being a part of the Holocaust wasn't enough to tank IBM, like Paul Weiss making a shitty decision with Trump in a couple in a generation or two, this will be a blip. Maybe, but the other part of it is that it has something to do with their ability to do their job as well. Right. The whole notion of how can you defend clients and potentially against the government when you won't stand up for yourself against the government?

19:43I think that there's a reason why a lot of litigators in particular have left these firms, because there's a real you have. How can you how can you defend me? You can't defend yourself, I think, really has has a reflection on their ability to lawyer. Well, and I think there's a good that's a good point. And I think that actually may speak to why Paul Weiss is getting more of a hit than some of the others. And it may, you know, obviously being first is one thing. Who knows, like to your counterfactual, the fact that Sullivan Cromwell was involved in pressuring them to take that deal. It's according to reports that suggests that maybe they somebody was going to be first.

20:20But there is something to be said for Paul Weiss historically. Like when I was coming up, Paul Weiss was known for litigation. That was their bag. They were a full service firm, but that's the litigation place. You go to Wachtell if you want to make a bazillion dollars on transactions, and you went to Paul Weiss if you were a committed litigator. And that's where being able to stand up for yourself matters in ways that transactional work, less so to the extent that you're trying to make deals that are for the best. And I think there's an argument that when a firm like Kirkland, which is known for a lot more transactional stuff, when they make a decision like this, does it hurt their transactional prestige?

21:01Not as much. Whereas Paul Weiss is taking much more of a hit because of the fact that it had so much vested in the litigation side of things. For sure. And you can see that with the change now that Karp has stepped aside, which had more to do with the Epstein stuff, I suppose. But yeah, we definitely did, because the person who replaced Brad Carp is Scott Barche, who absolutely was internally pushing for the deal. Correct. But you look at that now, Barche comes from the transactional side. It seems those the firm is trying to almost rejigger itself into maybe we have you know, we aren't so heavily dependent on litigation.

21:39Yeah, but I also think it's interesting because, again, if Paul Weiss hadn't fallen, what would have happened? Because places that are really corporate heavy, like the Kirklands, like the Skaddins that eventually inked deals, they didn't actually have executive orders issued against them. There was like, oh, maybe we will. But it's even unclear why they were being targeted as just because they had a lot of money and Donald Trump knew who they were. I think that might be the only reason they were even in these conversations. And if he hadn't gotten that victory of being able to being of having some firms fall to him, would he even expanded that way?

22:13I don't know, because there's no reason on paper why Kirkland would have been targeted. Right. It's not like they were active in the first administration against Trump or they had some partner that was probably that the Trump administration thinks is problematic. They just were deep pockets that were targeted, I think, for that reason. All right. Well, let's take a break. We'll be right back. Well, we can finally not talk about billing for a few minutes and we can have a quick chat about. Oh, no. I did that backwards. I was like, I think we are going to talk about billing. We can not talk about rankings for a second.

22:47And we can talk about billing, the other half. Damn it. Joe, you should have said we're not going to talk about rankings. We're going to talk about relativity. Oh, yeah. Well, and now by relativity, we are not talking about relativity, the legal technology company. But we are talking about relativity as in Einstein's theories of time. Space time. Yeah, just how space time operates. so that a lawyer is in some trouble in Australia for billing a 36-hour day. That's too many hours. It is too many hours. It's too many hours. Yeah. The lawyer, who used to be a big law partner, now works on his own, was representing a fairly rural town in New South Wales, and they managed to successfully get$1.5 million Australian dollars in a settlement, which is about 4.6 and 4.6 million in legal fees.

23:45But that also like Monopoly money. I can't even lie to you. Right. I know. Right. But the bill came due and it was 10 million Australian dollars that he billed, which included several uplift fees, changing rates based on the success of the case, yada, yada. And, you know, billing 103 hours over the course of a 72 hour period at one point. The judge did not find this to be a good thing and has compelling ruled against. Look, billing things like this happen a lot and they're funny. You know, not a lot, but they do come up every few years and they are funny. Now, usually they're usually a mistake due to just bad record keeping.

24:28The time got done. It just probably got done over the course of a week and somebody accidentally put it all in the same day. That's bad. You aren't supposed to do that. It raises suspicions. Also, what billing software are you using that allows this to happen? If you have good software, this won't happen. Let's bring it back to legal technology. That said, in this instance, it seems a little more, especially with all of the extra nickel and diming that was going on towards the end that the judge found, it seems like this might have been more of an intentional effort to procure more money from the client than was due.

25:06For his part, the lawyer said that he remembers being sick that day. He remembers that his dog had died. He basically blacked out and yada, yada, yada. Here's my bill. He said his dog had died and maybe he was billing in dog time. I don't know. For real? Yeah. What? For real? Well, his dog had died. I made the joke about dog time. Yeah, like he didn't make that joke. Just to be clear, this is not what happened. But I do wonder if at some point they'll be like, well, we only worked on this matter for 18 hours or so. But when you factor in the amount of time that AI saved us, it is as if we worked for 42 hours.

25:46So we're billing you for the 42. Right. Well, and so that's been long my argument for why I think the billable hour is finally on its last legs. and I've written about this a couple of times, the ethical rules prevent you from doing that. You can't say, hey, this should have taken 42 hours, so we're billing for 42 hours. You can only bill ethically the time that actually happened. That said, you can value bill. You can say, I'm not billing you for time. I'm billing you for this motion to dismiss. A motion to dismiss is generally worth$50 ,000, so I'm billing you$50 ,000. and however much time it took to get there, that's not a factor.

26:27It's just that's what it is. Ultimately, I think the ways in which AI can accelerate work, it is going to get to a point where either, and I talked on a recent NPR interview about this, either lawyers are going to say it was 42 hours, but now it's 10, so we're just going to accept less money. Unlikely. Unlikely. Or they're going to have to start saying this used to take 42 hours. The value of 42 hours was for us was 50 grand, whatever. So we're just going to bill 50 grand for every motion to dismiss. And yeah, sometimes that means they're going to put in more time than they wanted. Sometimes it means they're going to put in less time and get a windfall out of it.

27:06But I think that's where it goes. And I think the counter argument are people who say, well, they're just going to raise their rates to like$10 ,000 an hour to make up for this. That's a lot harder, I think, for clients to swallow. Yeah, I think if I'm a client, you tell me you build five hours at$10 ,000 an hour, I'm going to go, bullshit, you could have been done in three. If you told me, hey, the value of this is 50 grand, take it or leave it, I can justify that. And it's also more predictable for in-house clients so that they meet their budgets a lot easier because they kind of – that's a figure that they can really predict, I think, in a more substantive way.

27:44But listen, this is these are not this is not the only billing kind of snafu that got our attention this week. Wilmer Hill's thirty five million dollar bill came under fire. It's a British case, but New York or rather American lawyers involved. But Alberto Safra was their client heir to the billionaire who I have litigation ties to. Yeah. Well, there you go. So he's contesting the$35 million bill, and we got quite a bit of details as a result, including a partner, a D.C. partner that billed 19.3 hours in a single day. I see less than 24, so it doesn't have that space-time issue. Yeah. And a total of nine timekeepers that racked up 130.2 hours over a single 24-hour period.

28:37And listen, the judge involved, and we don't actually know what will happen. The judge really just ordered further inquiry into the bill. And some of what they did is commensurate with the work that was performed. It was high stakes litigation. It was, you know, really intense. A lot of that kind of stuff. But the numbers are, you know, eye popping. Yeah. The thing that caught my eye, in addition to just like the number of hours, it seems like there were partners that decided to just give themselves a pay raise during the thing. So like there was a point where they made their hourly rates like two hundred sixty five dollars more than what they agreed.