Second!

BARK BARK

What's that Lassie? Legal Rebels are for faggots?

I lied, grandma died.

I'm Barack Obama?

Zzzzzzzzzzz. Remember when this blog actually was worth reading?

The mean MBE score in Arizona was 146. It was 145 in Missouri. What does that mean for those of us who are still waiting?

-sleepless in Chicago

7

It means that BarBri and Kaplan has apparently done a better job of teaching this year.

It means I had a 182 Scaled MBE

- Early Release State Stud

Didn't Contentville, Brill's last paid-content experiment, go down in flames?

We need to bomb typical white people back to the stoneage!

-DOJ Secure

Nice ink. I heart David Lat.
A DC fan

This is a very sad commentary on what passes for "rebellion" in this profession.

If you charge for this blog, no one will put up with Elie.

He was so smug with you Lat....and I myself would have dropped him right there and pounded his fat head into the ground.

But seriously, he is clearly so jealous of your work and took it out on you with all of the underhanded compliments. He can't figure out how to do what you are doing because he is too much of a dinosaur and doesn;t understand the interwebs. Besides, for all the talk about the virtue of the free press, it sounds like he is just obsessed with the bottom line and how to run his business. He has some good war stories and should be given some props for what he did in the 70's and 80's, but seems like a Grade A D-Bag now for sure.

Has American Lawyer, NLJ, Law.com, Legal Times, NYLJ, or any of the other ALM pubs ever made a dime? I mean, I know they pissed away tons of venture money, and have huge debt loads. Split up, recombined, got sold, split up again? Tres successful, Mr. Brill!

Steve Brill is an evil genius. My hat is off to him for the brilliance of his ideas, but I also believe he has done much harm.

I became a lawyer roughly three decades ago -- about the same time Steve Brill launched The American Lawyer. I believe that no single person is more responsible than Steve Brill for converting the private practice of law from a profession with business aspects into a business with very limited professionalism.

Before The American Lawyer, "PPP" was an unknown metric. Indeed, the whole idea of metrics by which firms would compare themselves to one another was, if not wholly unknown, at least an extremely minor aspect of the practice of law.

Steve Brill set law firms in competition with one another over (among other things) money. He could not have done so, of course, without the willing participation of lawyers in the firms. But he played to the basest aspects of lawyers' nature: hyper-competitive attitudes, a report-card mentality left over from school days, and greed. Now almost the whole private bar thinks of itself in terms that Steve Brill practically invented. His effect on the terms of debate cannot be overstated -- and that effect has not been a positive one, as I see it.

During my almost 20 years in BIGLAW -- a world I have voluntarily abandoned, despite achieving partnership and various other badges of success -- I saw entire law firms base their most important decisions on PPP and on how they would look in The American Lawyer. I saw what I considered to be many downright irrational decisions, but even more than that I saw heartless, statistic-driven decisions in which people sacrificed their more noble instincts to their baser instincts and justified taking the low road -- to their colleagues and, more important, to themselves -- by explicitly citing the impact their decisions would have on statistics reported either by The American Lawyer or by like publications essentially spawned by The American Lawyer. I sat in many meetings with partners who, acting individually, would behave rationally and nobly but who, having bought into the PPP/report-card mentality, instead argued passionately for relatively ignoble and sometimes irrational decisions based on what effects they believed the decisions would have on how the firm looked to the outside world. It never even occurred to most of these partners that there was an alternative way to look at things. Views like mine, which emphasized professionalism and humanity over numbers and other economic measures over PPP, were dismissed summarily as idiosyncratic, old fashioned, or economically "irrational" (even though my education and my professional activities depended far more on a deep understanding of economics than most of my colleagues').

It is not only because of what he helped do to the legal profession that I believe a special place in Purgatory is reserved for Steve Brill. After The American Lawyer, he founded and aggressively marketed Clear, a system for bypassing security lines at airports. Among other things, Clear aggressively marketed five-year memberships, which I bought for every member of my family. Then, in the first year of my five-year membership, he abruptly shut Clear down, with no prior notice and no refunds. I suspect he put some fine print in somewhere that protects him from legal liability (I haven't bothered to check). But there is a moral as well as a legal dimension to activities like this. For a second time, Steve Brill has taken ingenious actions that have inflicted harm, I believe, on the public interest as well as on me and my family personally. I will survive all this, with plenty of money in the bank, and I don't ask for any sympathy. But I do want people to know of things Steve Brill has done, and their consequences.

I wonder whether Brill is always such a prick or whether he is simply jealous of Lat. I imagine the LATter. At the end, Lat was saying so nice to meet you and Brill basically saying go fuck yourself.