Morning Docket

* Yale Law School has decided to build the best robot lawyers too. [Yale News]

* Visa Mastercard need to up their limit. [Bloomberg Law News]

* It’s all happening. [NY Times]

* There’s something especially sad about Ron DeSantis enacting wildly unconstitutional laws when it stands no chance of helping him run for president. [Reuters]

* Fully online law schools get mass approval. [Law.com]

* Apparently realization rates are falling across Biglaw. Must be nice to have money to burn. [American Lawyer]

* Can we take a second to revel in the utter cowardice of the Democratic Party? [Balls & Strikes]

* “Boeing Files Trade Secrets Suit Against Virgin Galactic.” I didn’t know “door falling off in flight” was a trade secret. [Law.com]

* Illinois judges dump diversity policies for advocates because conservative white dudes have hurt feelings. [Reuters]

* Orrick closes Taipei and Shanghai offices. [Law.com International]

* Justice Stephen Breyer discusses his new book titled “if you didn’t think I needed to retire before, check out how out of touch I am now.” [ABA Journal]

* Law student decides she can’t date anymore. Everyone else came to the same conclusion in school but didn’t get a glossy write-up. [People]

* Tennessee passes first law protecting musicians from AI. Now Nashville doesn’t have to compete with some robot going “I love trucks and drink beer and hate migrants” all played over the same stupid chord progression. [Reuters]

* Remember: it’s NOT improper forum shopping to file cases in one-judge districts so you can 100% choose a judge with zero contacts to the underlying dispute but it IS sanctionable to embrace random assignment but modify your claims. [NBC]

* Lewis Brisbois sued for bias. How could something like that have happened at… oh wait. [ABA Journal]

* Look who finally turned themselves in. [Detroit News]

* Republican donors might be the top litigation financiers in the country. [Yahoo]

* Joe Manchin announces that he’s a feckless bigot and somehow this is treated as “news.” I know he fancies himself a high priced lobbyist but… why? One side doesn’t trust him and the other side played him as a rube. A lobbying firm that hands him a penny after he retires is just wildly mismanaged. [Bloomberg Law News]

* How is Biglaw laying people off when these MoFos are making money?!?! [American Lawyer]

* After all the cynical gamesplaying over the precise limits of when a stay becomes a stay, the Fifth Circuit dissolved the phony stay and decided to hear argument on a real stay. Got all that? [Reuters]

* Law.com names the dealmakers of the year. Which one negotiated the idea of opening Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same day? [Law.com]

* Law360 editorial staff walks off job amid ongoing labor issues. [LinkedIn]

* Chasing the White House, Republicans call for raising the Social Security retirement age. Way to put your finger on the pulse of America. [Bloomberg Law News]

* Why are public lawyers defending a private civil suit against Eric Adams? It’s like the Trump administration yet somehow more bumbling. [The City]

* Firms with expiring leases more likely to relocate. Which makes sense in a hyrbid world. What made less sense is how many expanded their footprint (read: “overhead”) anyway. [American Lawyer]

* Julian Assange negotiating guilty plea with DOJ. I wonder who leaked this one? [WSJ]

* Trump claims meeting bond requirement would require selling off real estate at “fire sale prices.” In other words, “at the values he reported to tax authorities. [Yahoo]

* Supreme Court can’t figure out which stay is a stay and so now some people can’t stay. [Slate]

* Remember the Arizona lawmaker who said an anonymous Supreme Court justice told a bunch of law students that Justice O’Connor was “the worst thing to happen to the Supreme Court”? Here’s the deep dive investigation into which indecorous justice might’ve said that. [Balls and Strikes]

* Biglaw partner would like the IRS to please tell him how it plans to catch tax cheats going forward. And the mob would also like to know in advance which phones the FBI might be interested in tapping. [American Lawyer]

* Subway franchisees want you to eat fresh… less excited about fresh decor. Brings on lawyers to push back. [Corporate Counsel]

* Trump asks Supreme Court for absolute immunity because it’s impossible to be president without a little overt criminal activity. [Bloomberg Law News]

* Conservatives beg courts to save the whales (as long as saving those whales blocks renewable energy projects). [Law360]

* Dartmouth is refusing to negotiate with its newly unionized basketball team in most on-brand Ivy League move ever. [Bloomberg Law News]

* Practicing without a license? Check. Sexual harassment? Check. Wrongful termination? Check. Florida? CHECK CHECK CHECK! [ABA Journal]

* DOJ plans to target companies making fraudulent AI claims in advance of lucrative IPOs. [Reuters]

* In flicker of rationality, Supreme Court seems unwilling to accept that the government can’t talk to social media companies. [Law360]

* Partner bonuses? Law firms coming up with creative solutions to stave off lateral departures. [American Lawyer]

* Antitrust settlement changes the home buying process. That should teach them that only lawyers deserve to be paid based on how much the client makes! [Law.com]

* Indiana law threatens to fire tenured professors for objecting to racism. Meanwhile at Penn Law… [Truthout]

* A Kirkland associate is Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade Queen. [Law360]

* Meanwhile, Kirkland hauls in over $7 billion. It would’ve been more but SOMEBODY had to go be a parade queen. [American Lawyer]

* Supreme Court lets college keep its ban on drag shows. So we’ve finally found the limit of the shadow docket and it’s “where it might help actual people whose rights are being taken away.” [Reuters]

* KPMG hoping to crowd out Biglaw in the AI race. [Bloomberg Law News]

* Conservatives continue to tell on themselves by complaining that new rule against forum shopping is unfair to them. [ABA Journal]

* Washington introduces alternative path to law license. [Law.com]

* Lawyers already getting giddy about embarrassing the government in court if TikTok ban passes. [WSJ]

* Lawyer trapped in courthouse elevator for almost an hour. What’s the billing code for this? [Roll on Friday]

* Congratulations to ASSLaw for getting back in compliance with the ABA. You’ve done the bare minimum and we salute you. [Law.com]

* Lawyers get scrappy after “tissue-box toss.” [ABA Journal]

* For a change of pace, here’s a judge who’s happy about attorneys using AI. [Law360]

* Senators seem less enthusiastic about following the House’s crusade against TikTok. [Reuters]

* Professor Ludwig Von Drake enters Disney proxy fight. [Bloomberg Law News]

* Burford Capital revenues top $1.1B. [American Lawyer]

* That guy who used his Biglaw girlfriend’s work papers to make an insider trade sentenced to 15 months. [Law360]

* The eternal question: is Alina Habba stupid or does she just act this way? [Yahoo]

* Judge deciding cases before trial didn’t mean anything bad by it says disciplinary court. [ABA Journal]

* Epic accuses Apple of violating app store order. [Reuters]

* A dive into Quinn Emanuel’s insurance on the fee award it won against insurance. [Bloomberg Law News]

* Minor update to the tale of the law school dean who left a paper trail of retaliation: the university finds that she… left a paper trail of retaliation. [Lawyers, Guns, Money]

* “The fate of billable hours is in the hands of artificial intelligence.” I thought the intelligence behind the billable hour has been artificial for years! Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week. [ABA Journal]

* Lawyer seeks to overturn Ghislaine Maxwell conviction based on Jeffrey Epstein’s non-pros because she was a third-party beneficiary. How many mob bosses which they’d thought of that one! [New York Law Journal]

* Lawmakers unwilling to pass useful legislation in an election year are going to posture about a constitutionally doomed TikTok ban instead. America! [Law360]

* Elon Musk hires Trump’s old tax firm to represent him in executive pay suit.[Bloomberg Law News]

* Donald Trump isn’t going to blame his lawyers in hush money suit. How nice of him. [Reuters]

* Former U.S. Attorney loses law license. [NBC]

* After a career spanning Biglaw, the White House, and leading in-house legal, this lawyer has transitioned to music. [PBS]

* Robert Hur set to testify about why his report was roughly 1 page of “no crime” and 50 pages of “Joe Biden is so old (How old is he?) He’s so old that he remembers the first Lochner era” [CNN]

* WilmerHale’s Harvard ties subject to ethics complaint though there’s no apparent ethical problem but we all have to talk about it because outlets like the New York Post are going to bleat about it. [Bloomberg Law News]

* Ranchers tried tampering with government equipment to get more subsidies… and somehow there’s a prison break and a dead body involved. [CBS News]

* Freshfields standardizes offices to one-size fits all. That ought to get the partners on board with working from home. [American Lawyer]

* Miami Law burning through deans like Apprentice contestants. [Daily Business Review]

* Final client who refused identifying themselves as victim of the Covington hack has caved. [Law360]

* First time bar passage rates are up. It’s still a stupid test. [Reuters]

* Legal industry adds 2700 jobs last month. And all of them are already regretting it. [Law360]

* Federal Circuit says their pocket impeachment of Judge Pauline Newman is totally constitutional. It’s apparently written right next to the part where the drafters wrote “just kidding” after the insurrection clause [Reuters]

* Companies rethinking deals based on “head spinning changes to antitrust enforcement.” And be “head spinning” we mean “actually occasionally enforcing the law.” [Corporate Counsel]

* Polygraph tests… still bad. [ABA Journal]

* Pentagon says it finds no evidence of alien technology. But they WOULD say that wouldn’t they? [Courthouse News Service]

* Legal-minded AI vendor Harvey hiring “all sorts” of lawyers. [Bloomberg Law News]

* Joe Biden stares down Supreme Court while ripping nonsense jurisprudence. Brett Kavanaugh probably too many beers in to even notice. [HuffPo]

* Firm leaders want lawyers to spend more time in the office but with less space. Please be in your office 4 days a week and also your office is now this stack of milk crates in the corner. [American Lawyer]

* Banks leaning into cartoon villain role and sue government over capping how many imaginary fees they can charge. [Law360]

* Corporate boards hate lawyers. Because corporate boards like taking part in a company’s successes and not its responsibilities. [Bloomberg Law News]

* Trump tries to bring immunity claim into classified documents case and prosecutors tell Aileen Cannon to kick it to the curb. She won’t. [Reuters]

* Who amongst us lawyers hasn’t gotten drunk and punched a referee? [Roll on Friday]

* Wells Fargo’s cavalier attitude blamed for lawyer fraud. [ABA Journal]

* Law firm growth for the sake of growth might be good… Dewey know where we’ve heard that before? [American Lawyer]

* Supreme Court pushes Trump immunity case to the last possible moment — a move that makes sense if the Court has no interest in the substance and is solely concerned with delay. [Reuters]

* Newly leaked details reveal Penn also wanted Amy Wax courses to be videoed and taught off campus. Literally anything to avoid just firing her. [Inquirer]

* Lawyer says Blank Rome is trying to financially ruin her. [ABA Journal]

* Dartmouth athletes unionize, prompting Senator Tuberville to angrily blast the students because they are not “employees” moments before he told the interviewer that “It’s a full-time job being an athlete.” Tommy Tuberville is not what we would call “smart.” [Bloomberg Law News]

* Another bias suit for the companies run by Elon Musk. [Law360]

* The Supreme Court majority tried to micromanage the insurrection clause and only succeeded in sowing more confusion. [Slate]

* Biden launches bid to crack down on profiteering by setting up a brand new strike force that sounds… exactly like the FTC. [Law360]

* Amidst alienating return to office policies, some firms have decided to take advantage of the hybrid life to lower overhead. [New York Law Journal]

* RNC couldn’t muster enough support to get a ban on Trump using party funds to pay legal bills. [The Hill]

* Attorney forfeits license amid allegations of spying on Muslim co-workers. [ABA Journal]

* Hot on the heels of clowning the New York Times in a motion to dismiss, OpenAI announced that it will move to dismiss Elon Musk’s lawsuit claiming that OpenAI violated its own mission by creating a for-profit wing. [Reuters]

* EU imposing measures to govern AI uses, presumably dragging the US to follow suit. [Bloomberg Law News]

* Supreme Court seeks funds to beef up security around the justices. This would be an excellent opportunity for the Senate and President to ask for an enforceable ethics code. [Reuters]

* Boeing hiring number of law firms after string of negative stories really sucked the air out of the room. [National Law Journal]

* The NY Times claims ChatGPT pilfers its articles. And while that could just be because the NY Times writes vapid, banal takes, OpenAI and its lawyers also say some shenanigans went on — up to and including the Times may having loaded articles in first. [Coingeek]

* Former Twitter executives sue Elon for their contractual severance packages. [Guardian]

* Biden administration finalizing rule capping extra credit card late fees at $8. [Bloomberg Law News]

* Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito are mad that the Supreme Court won’t make a moot, advisory decision about a university anti-discrimination policy that the school disbanded a year ago. [Law360]

* The justices did a lot of reaching to get Trump back on the ballot. [Dorf on Law]

* New trend: board directors resigning and throwing public fits over “wokeness” to bolster their profile. [Corporate Counsel]

* Supreme Court planning to phone in rulings today and while there’s no hint as to what it is, the Colorado primary is tomorrow and they’d probably like to know who’s on that ballot. [CNN]

* Attorneys in Elon Musk executive compensation suit want to be paid in Tesla stock. On the one hand, the company is stronger for their work, on the other hand… after all they’ve learned about Musk’s management, how do they think this is a good deal for them? [Law360]

* Teens fulfill associates’ lifelong dream and set law firm on fire. [Memphis Action News]

* Canadian judge orders attorney to pay opposing fees after citing hallucinated cases. I assume they realized the cases were fake because they didn’t misspell a bunch of words by adding unnecessary “u”s. [Law.com]

* A deep dive into a massive — and potentially civilly or criminally punishable — business flop. [Bloomberg Law News]

* A third of Brits would quit their jobs to become lawyers proving that society has failed to properly convey the life of a lawyer. [LegalCheek]

* Law firm was told two years ago to disclose that its partner was sleeping with a bankruptcy judge while still taking cases into that courtroom. [Reuters]

* Lawyer fired after complaining about kittens. [Roll on Friday]

* REAGAN judge shuts down Texas border law as a reminder that conservative jurists used to understand the Constitution. Don’t worry, the inevitable Fifth Circuit appeal will return our opinion of judges to normalcy. [Law360]

* Law firms discover natural light. Not the beverage, the architectural design element. [ABA Journal]

* Regional markets are all the rage in Biglaw. [American Lawyer]

* Trump seeks trial delay arguing that he can’t answer why he stole all those highly classified documents while he’s busy phoning in a presidential campaign. [Reuters]

* Elon Musk sues Sam Altman for hanging out with Microsoft too much. I presume someone from Irell has looked into Rule 11, right? Because that’s a good first step before getting into a case for Elon. [Bloomberg Law News]

* Yale Law School’s Heather Gerken explains how delightfully welcomed she is as a leader in academia in an interview kicking off Women’s History Month. Liz Magill and Claudine Gay both unavailable for comment. [Law.com]

* Harvard seeking new GC to deal with ever worsening hellstorm surrounding higher education in 2024. Good luck! [Corporate Counsel]

* Kasowitz Benson is on a run of suing clients over unpaid fees. Having previously represented a client notorious for not paying legal bills, maybe the firm has learned a lesson about taking chances with collection? [American Lawyer]

* “The Dopest Lawyer in town” is admittedly a great marketing move for a marijuana attorney. [San Antonio-Express News]

* Don’t write threatening letters to judges. [Law360]

* Republicans begin internecine war over allowing RNC funds to pay Trump’s legal bills. [Time]

* Elon Musk is suing hate speech groups for pointing out that hate speech happens on X. [Reuters]

* Judges transitioning to Biglaw life have to “start at the beginning.” As much as it’s “starting at the beginning” to jump immediately into earning several million dollars a year. [Bloomberg Law News]

* Congressional Republicans are rushing to SAY they support IVF in light of the Alabama Supreme Court ruling… so why are they actively trying to block a bill to protect IVF? [Slate]

* SBF wants prison term under 6.5 years while prosecutors are asking for 100 years. The source of the difference is the amount of the loss in the fake money case. [Law360]

* “Senator Kennedy’s Judicial Pop Quizzes Trip Up Nervous Nominees.” True, but they’re also mostly BS questions asked by a senator in way over his head with this job. [Bloomberg Law News]

* Trump judge declares federal spending unconstitutional based on parliamentary procedure. But he doesn’t understand basic parliamentary procedure so… it’s mostly gibberish. Too bad Senator Kennedy didn’t ask him about that! [Reuters]

* Litigation in high demand for West Coast Biglaw. [American Lawyer]

* Private equity coming for law firms? [Forbes]

* Kenneth Chesebro had a secret Twitter account despite telling authorities he didn’t? Look, it’s embarrassing for all of us to still be on “X” but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. [Daily Beast]