Judge Ross’s Sorry Apologies Have No Consequence: Chief Judge Pryor says the low-effort response is good enough for the judiciary.

4 Attorneys Disqualified Over Poor Work Product: Yes, this is an AI story.

Ariana Grande Joins The DO NOT PLAY AT Rally Playlist: She described the White House’s actions as ‘heinous nonsense.’

According to Vault’s most recent Associate Survey, which Biglaw firm gets the best marks for associate hours?

Hint: This firm repeats in the top spot for hours.

See the answer on the next page.

Answer: O’Melveny & Myers. Read more here.

What Digital PR Is and Is Not (for Law Firms)

Digital PR is obviously related to digital marketing. A desire to grow your law firm as a business by reaching more people so that you can sign more clients is probably the driving motivation behind your law firm’s PR strategy. However, public relations has to mean something more than the sales-centric approach to communications many people associate with marketing (that isn’t a great way to think about marketing, either, but we can save that conversation for another day).

PR has to cover a lot of activity, like building a history of thought leadership, that creates a presence people (a.k.a, potential clients) can find, recognize, and appreciate, when they are ready. Effective digital PR means showing up online in ways that demonstrate your value, instead of selling your services. There is a fine distinction that is easy to miss here. It’s the difference between making an attractive offer and becoming someone whose offer is attractive. Any offer you make is going to be more persuasive if the person considering it has already come to regard you as someone worth listening to.

Why Guest Posting?

Guest posting is obviously not the only way to establish that sense of connection online, but it can be one of the most effective (it also typically costs nothing, which sets guest posting up to achieve an exceptionally high ROI). Guest posting gives you the chance to not only “show off” (demonstrate your value), but to do so in front of people (public relations) you were not reaching through your own established networks and channels.

With assistance from your digital marketing team (yes, PR and marketing go hand-in-hand), you can also take advantage of guest posting opportunities to generate high-quality backlinks, which are absolutely golden for your law firm website’s SEO (search engine optimization). In other words, a well-placed guest post can:

• Reach a “new” (to you) audience
• With content that showcases your legal expertise
• In a way that makes it easier for even more potential clients to find you

We love to see it!

Making the Most of Guest Posting for Digital PR: Choosing a Website

To get the greatest benefit from guest posting as a lynchpin of your digital PR strategy, you will need to start by getting permission, or better yet an invitation, to create a guest post for someone else’s website, and you will need that website to have an authoritative reputation, both with people who could reasonably become your clients and with search engines. The typical content of this website should be relevant to your practice area and client base.

“Relevant” here might be defined in terms of topic: An estate planning attorney might write a guest post for a digital magazine aimed at seniors, or a divorce lawyer might write a guest post for a parenting website addressing when to seek child custody modifications. You could also think of relevance geographically: A new local rule or a change to state law might be of interest to readers of a website focused on local or community news, for instance. Either way, the goal is to choose a website that has some consistent, logical interest value for the people who would be most likely to hire your law firm, and to also make sure that this website is one those same people will trust and that search engines will recognize as an authoritative source of information to return in their results pages.

Making the Most of Guest Posting for Digital PR: Picking a Topic

Part of choosing a topic is always going to be collaboration with the party owning or managing the website where your guest post is going to be published. Some of the back-and-forth involved in this kind of development is likely to be about what the website needs to offer their visitors in relation to what you would like to offer to showcase your expertise. If your goals are actually opposed, then this particular collaboration may just not be a good fit; what happens more often is that you and the website manager or publisher are likely to be thinking about topics and approaches from different angles.

For best results, start with a general topic and aim to get a sense of how much the website’s regular audience already knows about that topic. Then “narrow down” by identifying an aspect of that topic that:

• The website’s audience likely will not be familiar with
• You can write about from a basis of professional authority
• Is not exhaustively explained by many of your competitors

A narrowly defined topic to which you can bring a depth of expertise not readily found elsewhere is guest posting gold.

Making the Most of Guest Posting for Digital PR: Writing for Readers

The way you go about crafting the actual test of your guest post will depend on the length of the post, the nature of the website and audience, and your own comfort level with writing outside the context of legal briefs and pleadings. If you generally enjoy writing and appreciate the chance to explain concepts important to your practice area for the benefit of an audience not yet familiar with them, then have at it! If writing a guest post feels less like an interesting change of pace and more like getting a root canal, then you may want to take a different approach.

Strategies for Drafting the Guest Post

One option is to work with a “ghostwriter”: Give this person your key points to make, and some idea of the style in which you would like to make them, and then add your own touches to the completed draft, as needed. This approach can be especially useful if the website for which you are writing has strict style and formatting requirements of its own, since people who are used to balancing these kinds of very specific guidelines with clarity and the authorial voice and tone of the person for whom they are preparing their text have usually developed a skill base that enables them to tackle this type of challenge with finesse.

Obviously these days many people also write with the assistance of AI tools, rather than human writers; AI writing assistance can be a good option for attorneys who enjoy writing overall and are drafting their articles for a website that gives guest bloggers “free rein” in creating their content. On the other hand, if the idea of writing 1,000 works for an unfamiliar audience makes you wince, or the website that will publish your guest post has a detailed style guide, an experienced writer who can take the points you wish to convey and compose them into an article with the tone and panache you want to achieve, while meeting the style sheet requirements of the host site, may actually save you more time and create a product that better fits your needs. Your digital marketing agency may be able to recommend someone, or they may even have a writer with the right kind of experience already on their staff.

Centering the Goal

Regardless of the method (or methods) you use to achieve it, the goal is always to create an article for your guest post that is clear, thorough, authoritative, and conscious of its audience. Considering the age and interests of the host website’s typical audience, as well as their likely familiarity with the concepts your guest post will discuss, can make the difference between a byline that does nothing for your bottom line and a guest post that contributes meaningfully to your law firm’s digital PR.

Making the Most of Guest Posts: Seizing the Moment for Self-Promotion

You will want to set your guest post up to integrate with the rest of your digital PR strategy in two ways. The first way is encapsulated in the attorney bio you provide to the content manager or other contact person behind the website that will be hosting your article. Take the time to review your bio on your law firm’s website and your own LinkedIn page, update these as needed, and then make sure that the bio you send is current and in alignment with these two other places where individuals who read the blog post can find biographical information about you. If the content management team at the host website allows, you may also want to incorporate a link to your (own) website bio, and perhaps to a relevant blog post on your law firm website.

Once the guest post is “live” on the host site, the second stage of self-promotion activates. Here you want to promote the guest post widely across all of your own digital surfaces: your law firm website, of course, but also your LinkedIn, your law firm’s social media accounts, and any newsletters your law firm sends. To get even more benefit from the guest post, make it a point to have your digital marketing team add the page on the host website to the “Same as” property associated with your “Person” tag in your website’s schema markup. This small adjustment helps to confirm for search engines the breadth of your reach and cement your association with authoritative content across the web.

Next Steps

The backlinks and impression of authority created by a single guest post can be valuable. However, one of the characteristics of digital PR is that each element deployed to enhance your online presence is more effective when it is integrated within a cohesive strategy. To truly capitalize on the opportunity a guest post affords, work with your digital marketing team to “connect the dots” by ensuring you showcase your authority on closely related topics across multiple digital surfaces: podcasts, webinars, and of course your own law firm blog. This kind of integration has a cumulative effect, building an authoritative presence that is more than the sum of its parts.

Guest posting and digital PR are not one-time tactics. They are long-term investments in your law firm’s credibility, visibility, and authority. By consistently contributing valuable insights to reputable publications, building relationships within your community and industry, and amplifying those efforts across your own digital channels, you can strengthen both your brand and your search presence over time. Whether you manage these initiatives internally or partner with an experienced legal marketing agency, a strategic approach to guest posting and digital PR can help position your firm as a trusted authority while creating lasting opportunities to attract and convert new clients.

Annette Choti, Esq., has over two decades of legal experience and is the Founder & CEO of Law Quill, a concierge legal marketing agency for law firms.  Annette authored the bestselling book Click Magnet: The Ultimate Guide To Digital Marketing For Law Firms, hosts the popular Legal Marketing Lounge podcast, and founded Click Magnet Academy where she teaches professionals to leverage the powerful LinkedIn platform. As a sought after speaker for Bar Associations, Legal Associations, and Marketing Conferences, Annette provides legal marketing insight along with an entertaining twist. Annette used to do theatre and professional comedy, which is not so different from the legal field if we are all being honest. Annette can be found on LinkedIn or directly through email at Annette@LawQuill.com 

I have witnessed a few situations in my career in which judges and court officers seemed more favorable to local lawyers rather than out-of-town counsel. I was once litigating a matter, and a party had their attorney from Texas appear in the case. This lawyer had a thick southern accent which stood out in the New York courtroom in which we were conferencing a matter. The judge inquired about this out-of-town lawyer’s accent and asked where this lawyer had come from. The judge mentioned offhand that it might be easier to use local counsel for this case, although to be fair, the judge might have just been thinking about the cost associated with flying that lawyer to court appearances.

At another time in my career, I was tasked with traveling about 250 miles away to attend a lunch for lawyers that handle certain types of matters in a city distant from where I lived. The judge who handled such cases was present at the lunch, and lawyers from all over the state (and surrounding states) were at the lunch since they handled this type of case in that city. The judge remarked at one point that the legal community in that local city was excellent and that parties might consider using local counsel rather than out-of-town lawyers for matters in that area.

At another point in my career, I encountered court staff who seemed hostile to out-of-town parties and counsel. The court staff said that local juries and judges would not take kindly to an out-of-state party that allegedly caused harm to a local. If I remember correctly, the court staff mentioned that due to my accent, it would be easy for stakeholders to the legal process to see I was not from that area, and this would be a disadvantage if that case went the distance. Maybe the court staffer was embellishing our disadvantages to try to force a settlement, but there was a clear message that out-of-town lawyers would have a disadvantage.

One time, earlier in my career, we handled a matter on the east coast for a company that was based in fly-over country. We worked closely with that company’s regular counsel, who was also based in the middle of the country. When it came time to argue an important motion, my boss asked this company’s regular counsel if he wanted to pro hac into the case to argue the matter. The lawyer said that because of his thick accent, he though it would be better to have us as locals argue the matter. Knowing what I now know about legal practice, I can understand why this lawyer tasked us with handling the matter since we were local to the region in which this case was venued.

Of course, most judges and court staff value all lawyers equally, and in some situations, it might be difficult to tell if a lawyer is local to an area. However, I have also seen some judges and court staff show preference for local lawyers, and the judiciary should be vigilant to prevent this whenever possible.

Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothman.law.

Ed. Note: A weekly roundup of just a few items from Howard Bashman’s How Appealing blog, the Web’s first blog devoted to appellate litigation. Check out these stories and more at How Appealing.

“Axed activist-investor takeover leaves Supreme Court at loggerheads over legislative intent; A disagreement over judicial interpretation led to riffs from the bench on judges’ preferences supplanting the will of the people”: Kelsey Reichmann of Courthouse News Service has this report.

“Florida Reinstates Trump Lawyer Chesebro Despite Guilty Plea”: Alex Ebert of Bloomberg Law has this report.

“Arkansas asks Eighth Circuit to revive law targeting librarians over ‘harmful’ books; The state argues the law protects children and regulates government speech, but librarians and booksellers claim it criminalizes availability and enables viewpoint discrimination”: Gabriel Tynes of Courthouse News Service has this report.

“Solo dissents are uncommon. Justice Kagan just made her first. Justice Elena Kagan’s first solo dissent came nearly 16 years after she joined the Supreme Court bench.” Law professors Grant Christensen and Anne Mullins have this essay online at The Washington Post.

“Penn & Teller call out ‘flim-flam’ in Supreme Court death penalty case; The master manipulators of perception said they have an obligation to expose the type of junk science they said was used to convict a man of murder”: Maureen Groppe of USA Today has this report.

Here’s some great news: Ariana Grande joins the ranks. Reuters has coverage:

American pop star Ariana Grande told President Donald Trump‘s administration on ​Thursday to stop using her music to promote its ‌policies. The comment came after the White House shared a video on TikTok earlier this week highlighting its immigration policy. The video, which depicts federal ​agents arresting and handcuffing people, features the Grammy Award-winning ​singer’s 2024 song “Bye.”

“Please do not ever use my music ⁠in relation to this barbaric, inhumane, heinous nonsense,” Grande ​wrote in a comment posted on the White House video on ​TikTok on Thursday. A source close to the singer said her team is looking into how to remove the music from the video as soon as possible.

If she turns that cease and desist letter into a song, it’ll go right next to “Thank U, Next” on my personal playlist. Speaking of playlists, ATL compiled a list of the songs artists have expressly told the administration not to play — and it’s full of bangers. Give it a listen as you rack up those billables:

On it you’ll find Grande’s “Bye,” along with The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” and The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” The star-studded cast of pop artists who’ve told the administration to lay off their tunes remains void of any Taylor Swift tracks. Not for lack of opportunity or anything; perhaps she’s still busy celebrating the most recent Knicks win? Either way, there are a bunch of artists with backbone and we’re happy to make listening to them a little easier.

Ariana Grande To White House: Don’t Use My Music For ‘Heinous Nonsense’ [Reuters]

Earlier: You Could Make A Playlist Of All The Musicians Who Sued Trump For Playing Their Music

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s .  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boat builder who is learning to swim and is interested in rhetoric, Spinozists and humor. Getting back in to cycling wouldn’t hurt either. You can reach him by email at christopherrashadwilliams@gmail.com and by Tweet/Bluesky at @WritesForRent.

They are not.

What the court actually did was remind lawyers of something that predates computers, the internet, and probably most of the courthouses we practice in today: if you put your name on a filing, you are responsible for what is in it.

That is the story here.

The rule change comes after courts around the country have been dealing with a growing number of filings containing fake cases, fake quotations, and citations that look perfectly legitimate until someone tries to find them. Many of those problems trace back to lawyers relying too heavily on generative AI tools without checking the output carefully enough before filing papers.

And to be honest, some of the examples have been astonishing.

Not because the technology made mistakes. Anybody who has spent time around these systems understands they can produce errors. The surprising part is how many lawyers apparently trusted the output enough to file it in court without independently verifying it.

That is the part judges are reacting to.

The new Florida rule amends Rule 2.515 to require attorneys signing court filings to certify that cited legal authorities actually exist and are accurately represented. Courts are also expressly authorized to impose sanctions for violations.

In practical terms, that means lawyers now have even less room to argue, “the software gave me the wrong information.”

But I suspect most judges already felt that way.

What the Florida Supreme Court really seems to be doing here is standardizing expectations across the state. Different circuits had started issuing their own administrative orders about AI use, disclosures, certifications, and verification requirements. If you practiced in multiple jurisdictions, the rules could feel inconsistent depending on where your case was pending.

Now there is at least one statewide standard.

Frankly, that probably helps everybody.

The larger issue, though, is not really about whether lawyers use AI. Most lawyers already use technology constantly. Legal research platforms themselves have incorporated AI-driven tools for years. Younger attorneys, especially, are naturally experimenting with newer systems because they are fast, efficient, and often genuinely helpful.

The problem starts when efficiency quietly replaces judgment.

That is where things can go sideways.

One thing nonlawyers may not fully appreciate is how believable AI hallucinations can look inside legal writing. These systems do not usually spit out nonsense that immediately sounds ridiculous. They generate citations that resemble real cases. They produce quotations written in convincing judicial language. Sometimes the formatting is flawless.

Until somebody checks the source.

That “until somebody checks” part matters more than ever now.

Judges should not have to spend time figuring out whether cited authority exists. Opposing counsel should not have to waste billable hours tracking down phantom cases. Courts already move slowly enough without adding forensic citation review to motion practice.

And credibility, once damaged in front of a judge, is difficult to repair.

Every experienced litigator knows that.

You can lose an argument and recover. You can lose a motion and recover. But once a court starts questioning whether your filings can be trusted, the problem becomes much bigger than one bad brief.

That is why I do not see this rule as anti-technology. I also do not think it means courts are trying to ban AI from legal practice. That ship sailed a long time ago.

The better comparison is probably GPS.

GPS is extremely useful. Almost everybody relies on it. But if your GPS tells you to drive into a lake, at some point you are still responsible for looking through the windshield.

AI works the same way.

Used carefully, it can save time and help lawyers organize information faster. Used carelessly, it can create a mess in a hurry.

And the legal profession is probably still early in figuring out where those boundaries are.

A couple years ago, a lot of lawyers dismissed concerns about hallucinated citations as overblown. At the time, some of this felt more theoretical than real. That has changed. Courts around the country are now dealing with these issues regularly enough that judges clearly feel the need to send a stronger message.

Florida is hardly alone there.

What may ultimately matter most about this rule is not the language itself, but what it signals about the direction courts are moving. Judges are becoming less patient with the idea that AI mistakes are somehow different from other professional failures.

From the court’s perspective, a nonexistent case citation is still a nonexistent case citation regardless of whether a lawyer invented it personally or copied it from a chatbot.

And honestly, that is probably the correct approach.

Technology changes. Professional responsibility does not.

At the end of the day, no software program signs the filing. No algorithm stands before the judge at a hearing. No chatbot gets sanctioned by the court.

The lawyer does.

That part has not changed at all.

Matthew T. Christ is a partner at Rafferty Domnick Cunningham & Yaffa, a preeminent Florida law firm based in Palm Beach Gardena, West Palm Beach, Pensacola, and Jacksonville.

Alas, those plans to conceal Judge Ross’s identity fell apart quickly. Eleventh Circuit Chief Judge William Pryor once described me as “one of the great journalists of our time at a venerable institution for investigative journalism,” so it was always foolish of him to think we wouldn’t crack this code within an hour.

After Judge Ross’s three-sentence letters went public, she faced renewed furor over violating the spirit of her already meager punishment. This prompted Chief Judge William Pryor, who signed off on the original punishment, to write Judge Ross to determine if her letters amounted to a separate violation. After Ross penned new, more detailed letters, Pryor has decided there’s no harm, no foul.

Sort of like how the original inquiry decided she lied to investigators, but told the truth after it didn’t matter. By the time Ross got honest, the investigation team had reviewed the security footage, interviewed clerks, held simulations to see what could be heard from inside chambers, and already sent her furniture over state lines for laboratory testing. There was hardly anything left to confess at that point. Nobody is as forgiving of “too little, too late,” as a federal judge investigating one of their own.

This is why the emerging impeachment push against Judge Ross doesn’t go far enough. If you think Ross’s conduct should result in her removal, then the judges who decided she should stay on the bench AND shielded from public scrutiny also warrant investigation. The fact that having sex in chambers is both salacious and objectively funny obscures the serious extortion risk. Ross was having an extramarital affair with a high-ranking Atlanta cop while presiding over federal criminal cases, which is a textbook example of the kind of information someone could use against a judge.

The other judges saw the facts that we now agree crossed the line and they decided the right answer was to flip over the cushion and pretend it didn’t happen.

Honestly, this is why Ross shouldn’t resign. Congress needs to make the rest of the judiciary confront its ethical complacency.

Earlier: You Will Not Believe The ‘Apology’ Letter Judge Eleanor Ross Wrote Her Clerks
Judge Eleanor Ross Impeachment Arrives Right On Schedule, Managing To Yet Again Botch The Standard
Federal Judge Had Sex In Chambers Bringing New Meaning To Gavel Bang
Judiciary Tried To Hide ‘Sex In Chambers’ Judge’s Name. It Left A Roadmap To Identify Eleanor Ross Instead.
Federal Judge Weeps For Poor Defenseless Federalist Society, Ruthlessly Bullied By Legal Bloggers

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

On May 29, the court issued partial summary judgment in favor of Rep. Joyce Beatty, an ex officio member of the Center’s board, who sued to block the name change and to prevent the planned two-year shutdown. The Center had 14 days to effectuate the name change, and on June 4, the general counsel sent a memo to the remaining staff instructing them to “immediately change email signatures, letterhead, and other documents to reflect the name as ‘The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,’ or ‘Kennedy Center.’”

But at the eleventh hour, the Center’s board — packed with such luminaries as Maria Bartiromo, Lee Greenwood, and Dan Scavino, Trump’s caddy-turned-deputy chief of staff — had a change of heart. They noticed an appeal to the DC Circuit and filed a motion to stay the judge’s ruling.

“Absent a stay, Defendants will be forced to squander time and money—by both removing the signage and then potentially returning it after appeal—that cannot be recovered when Defendants prevail on the merits,” they argued. “That is the very definition of irreparable harm.”

This might be more credible if they hadn’t spent the past 18 months arguing that burning down entire federal agencies, such as the US Institute for Peace and the US African Development Foundation, was not the type of irreparable harm that could be enjoined.

“Additionally, removal of the name threatens to impede the Center’s fundraising efforts and contribute to the financial decline of the Center,” the continued. “This loss of fundraising time and potential is also definitionally irreparable, and the public interest weighs in favor of an economically viable Center.”

This rests on the implicit assumption that having Trump’s name on it will bring in donor money, which, as Rep. Beatty points out in her opposition to the stay, contradicts Judge Cooper’s own finding that there “is no proof that current or future donations hinge on President Trump’s name being on the building.”

That fundraising may take something of a hit thanks to the Center’s own actions, according to a breach of contract complaint filed this morning by the Washington National Opera. WNO has been affiliated with the Center for 15 years and most of the opera’s development is handled by the Center — or it was until 2025, when Trump fired the old board, installed himself as chair, and made professional shitposter Ric Grenell the executive director. According to the complaint, the Center fired all of the employees running development for WNO as per their affiliation agreement and more or less ceased processing donations for the opera. Grenell removed the agreed-upon subsidies and support for WNO, and then, when the parties agreed to sever their relationship, abruptly cut them off from their own records.

Later that day, the Kennedy Center cut off WNO’s access to its electronic data stored on the Kennedy Center’s systems, including WNO’s emails, donor information, meeting minutes, and Board of Trustees records dating back to 2011. The Kennedy Center also locked WNO out of its workplace locations and, soon after, sent termination letters to WNO employees.

Worse still, the Center refused to return WNO’s endowment funds, totaling an alleged $17 million.

“Five months have now passed since the termination of the affiliation, and the Kennedy Center still has not returned the funds to WNO,” they argue. “To the contrary, according to the Kennedy Center’s Chief Financial Officer, the Kennedy Center has put a significant portion of WNO’s money at risk by using it to collateralize the Kennedy Center’s line of credit.”

This will likely make it more difficult for the Center to raise money, particularly since the suit alleges that the organization couldn’t even be bothered to process donations, resulting in the loss of a $50,000 gift when the Center failed to run a donor’s credit card.

And BREAKING, Judge Cooper denied the motion for stay, “given both the de minimis resources that would be required to restore the Center’s current name in the event of a successful appeal and the lack of record evidence linking increased donations to the current name.”

Let the chiseling begin!

Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast. You can subscribe by clicking the logo:

Because while I’ve been obsessing over hilarious Knicks social media takes (the internet has been killing it), Front Office Sports went and found the best possible peripheral story of this entire run: the New York Knicks have apparently done what no associate satisfaction survey, wellness stipend, or HR initiative has ever managed to accomplish. They’re making Biglaw partners human.

The run — first round over Atlanta, a sweep of the 76ers, a sweep of the Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference Finals, and now a 3-1 Finals lead over San Antonio — has apparently thawed something in the chests of the deal lawyers who, until recently, presumably had the billable hour where their hearts should be. The blue-and-orange Grinch effect is real and Front Office Sports has the receipts.

Exhibit A: Charles Baker, co-chair of the entertainment, sports, and media group at Sidley Austin, confirmed that “texts and emails don’t get returned as quickly during the games, and almost no one calls.” During a Finals game, in New York… sounds about right, Charles.

But the real treasure in this piece is the anonymous second-year private equity associate who shared a message they received from a partner the night of Game 2, the Knicks’ 105-104 gut-punch thriller over the Spurs:

“This doesn’t need to be done tonight, enjoy the game.”

The associate’s response tells you everything you need to know about the psychological state of a junior Biglaw attorney: “We barely see that kind of leniency for federal holidays. … It’s gotten to the point where [coworkers and I] are sending emails back and forth just to make sure our WiFi is working.”

Associates cannot emotionally process the concept of an evening off, and the conditioning runs so deep that an unexpected act of managerial kindness produces not relaxation, but a WiFi diagnostic. Turns out Biglaw partners are actually in associates’ heads the way Wemby only thinks he’s in Mitchell Robinson’s.

If you listen closely you can hear the associate ranks chanting:

My mayor’s Muslim;

My bagel’s Jewish;

Biglaw let me thrive;

Knicks in five!

Stan Gregor, CEO of wealth-management firm Summit Financial, went full philosopher king on the whole thing, telling Front Office Sports the Knicks’ run has shifted the “cadence and tone” of business interactions — “more relaxed, more human” — thanks to what he called a “shared point of connection.” He added, “At the end of the day, moments like this remind you that business doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Culture drives attention, and attention drives relationships, and that’s ultimately what this business is built on.”

Sure it took Jalen Brunson getting buckets in June to unlock this revelation for some of you, but, hey, we’ll take it!

The anonymous associate also offered a comparison that I feel in my soul. “I remember during the Yankees’ 2024 World Series, I would go to bars to watch the games and still feel like I needed to have my laptop out and be working a little bit,” they said. “Now, it’s almost like I can leave my computer at home.” Baseball hasn’t been America’s pastime for a while, whatever the PR says.

Though, per our anonymous associate, the championship part does matter , at least for the continued operation of this miraculous vibe. “I can see a lot of offices hosting celebrations or letting employees step out to take in the championship parade,” they said. “But if we lose, it’s just going to be back to work.”

Game 5 is tomorrow night in San Antonio, 8:30 p.m. ET, with the Knicks closing in on a title and Biglaw partners’ newly discovered humanity hanging delicately in the balance. But we’re up 3-1. The blue-and-orange Grinch’s heart has grown three sizes and the laptop is at home!

Knicks in five.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1