Department of Justice

* Proskauer tells the EEOC that there’s nothing “sinister” about employers demanding that sexual harassment victims sign away their legal rights to be railroaded through employer-chosen kangaroo courts and then forcibly silenced. Welcome to 2018. [National Law Journal]

* In emoluments news, Judge Peter Messitte asked the Justice Department if, based on their chosen defense, “Wouldn’t that be bribery?” which he seemed to think would be a bad thing as if the Supreme Court hadn’t legalized bribery in McDonnell. [US News]

* Chris Christie is starting his own law firm and somehow Rudy Giuliani has already managed to lie about that. [NJ.com]

* Betsy DeVos succeeded in keeping fraud victims indebted to the government. She was also ordered to stop pursuing collection actions against the victims, but she still gets to destroy their credit ratings, which is still a great day for kleptocracy. [Courthouse News Service]

* Nelson Mullins merging with Broad and Cassel as part of the growing trend of super-regional firms designed to keep the Am Law elite at bay. [Daily Report]

* In a lesson on putting carts ahead of horses, the former general counsel for Portland, Oregon’s public school district was just admitted to the bar… after the state bar lodged ethics violations against him for serving in that role without a law license in the state. [Portland Tribune]

* Guess which law school is on the verge of losing its accreditation? We’ll have more on this unsurprising news later today. [Arizona Republic]

* When it comes to Milbank’s new $190K salary scale for associates, some general counsel and in-house leaders don’t seem to really care, and others are none too thrilled about it, but absolutely NONE of them want to pay for it. [Corporate Counsel]

* How much does President Donald Trump detest AG Jeff Sessions? This much! The president says he’ll probably support legislation protecting marijuana activities in states where the drug has been legalized. [NBC News]

* Pointing out numerous dueling injunctions in a Friday night filing, the Trump administration’s Justice Department is paving the way for a SCOTUS showdown over DACA — possibly as soon as sometime this summer. [BuzzFeed]

* If you’re planning to someday become a Supreme Court clerk, you better make sure that your law school is following the new law clerk hiring plan. Justice Sonia Sotomayor is now the fourth justice to offer her support, following in the footsteps of Justices Kagan, Ginsburg, and Breyer. [National Law Journal]

* Simpson Thacher isn’t increasing associate salaries to the $190K scale (yet), but it is partnering with Columbia Business School to launch a new associate training program. We bet your incoming associates are “STBReady” … for higher salaries. Click here to see all the firms that have raised salaries thus far . [New York Law Journal]

* President Trump is appealing the decision that says he can’t block people on Twitter based on their political views to the Second Circuit (because of course he is). He already had to unblock the seven plaintiffs in the case, and he likely wasn’t very happy about it because of glorious follow-up tweets like this. [BuzzFeed]

* After reportedly being rejected by several candidates for the associate attorney general position — one that would oversee the Mueller investigation if Rod Rosenstein were to suddenly depart — the Trump Administration is giving up on trying to fill the job for the moment, and focusing on other vacancies. [Wall Street Journal]

* In the wake of allegations of sexual harassment against former Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski, the federal judiciary’s working group on sexual harassment has released 24 recommendations, specifying three areas that need change to make circuit courts an “exemplary workplace.” [Big Law Business]

* The American Bar Association wants out of this whistleblower suit, ASAP. ABA officials claim that former Charlotte Law professor Barbara Bernier only added the law school regulatory group to her suit against the defunct law school and its owner, InfiLaw, as a “last-ditch effort” to keep her action kicking in court. [Law.com]

* Guess which Biglaw firm has decided to bring back on-campus recruiting for its summer associate program? Here’s a hint: You’re going to need a pair of flip flops. We’ll have more on this later today. [American Lawyer]

* With an estimated $11 million annual salary, Sandra Goldstein, who recently left Cravath for Kirkland & Ellis, may be the highest paid female partner in all of Biglaw. You go, girl! [The Careerist]

* Speaking of female Biglaw partners, Bracewell partner Barbara Jones’s $700 per hour rate as special master in the review of materials seized from Michael Cohen’s office has added up to a pretty YUGE bill for just one week’s worth of work: $47,390. [New York Law Journal]

* The Justice Department approved a merger between Bayer and Monsanto, but only after the companies agreed to dump $9 billion in business assets. “Today’s news makes it clear that our antimonopoly laws are completely worthless,” said one farm group that’s just thrilled by the news. [Washington Post]

* Eduardo M. Peñalver, the first Latino dean of an Ivy League law school, has been reappointed to a second five-year term as dean of Cornell Law after achieving quite a few milestones for employment and bar pass rates at the school. [Cornell Chronicle]

* Briana Williams, a single mother who requested an epidural while she was in labor so her contractions wouldn’t interfere with her completion of a final exam, recently graduated from Harvard Law School. Much respect from one law mama to another. Congratulations and best of luck in all that you do! [Yahoo!]

* Harvey Weinstein has turned himself in to the NYPD. [Vox]

* Happy GDPR Day! [Wall Street Journal]

* Emmet Flood attended the DOJ’s briefing for congressional leaders because defense attorneys are always allowed to attend internal conversations about law enforcement tactics in ongoing investigations. [Talking Points Memo]

* Elon Musk may want to put away the Twitter machine for a bit now that he’s stepped into possible labor law violations. [Engadget]

* The Samsung-Apple war continues with a jury awarding Apple $539 million for IP infringement. [Law360]

* Professor Steven Calabresi is arguing that Robert Mueller’s whole job is unconstitutional. We’ve really come a long way from conservatives hailing the appointment of a no-nonsense lifelong Republican, haven’t we? [The Hill]

* Also, Calabresi is completely wrong. [Legal Skills Prof Blog]

* A full 85 percent of companies aren’t ready for the GDPR implementation deadline later this week, meaning… well probably nothing, but let’s freak out about it anyway. [Corporate Counsel]

* Jones Day’s Dana Baiocco tabbed by Trump administration to the Consumer Product Safety Commission to end Democratic leadership on that board. So get ready for exploding bottles and nails just sticking out of stuffed animals… because “freedom.” [National Law Journal]

* DOJ tests new investigative tactic of just telling suspected criminals everything before interviewing them. [Huffington Post]

* We’re deregulating banks again because that’s historically worked out so well. [Wall Street Journal]

* South Carolina has repealed its “disturbing school” law, which was really just a vague catch-all provision to allow cops to harass and imprison black kids. [ACLU]

* Paul Manafort looks to suppress more evidence. Hey it’s worth a shot. [Courthouse News Service]

* In sad news, groundbreaking attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree has passed away at 104. [Washington Post]

* According to Rudy Giuliani, special counsel Robert Mueller is planning to have the Russian election interference probe wrapped up by September 1 — but that end date is apparently contingent on President Trump agreeing to be interviewed. Ooooh, stay tuned, this might get good soon! [New York Times]

* Yesterday, President Trump demanded via Twitter that the Justice Department look into whether his campaign was “infiltrated or surveilled” by the FBI or DOJ for political purposes. Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein said he’d be happy to “take appropriate action,” and promptly kicked the can to the Inspector General. [Axios]

* In the meantime, never mind the fact that he’s never once been contacted by Robert Mueller’s team, but Roger Stone says he’s “prepared” to be indicted as part of the Mueller investigation after they “conjure up some extraneous crime pertaining to my business.” The Trump ally doth protest too much, methinks. [NBC News]

* NO-NO-NO-NOTORIOUS: Elena Kagan isn’t the only Supreme Court justice who’s shown support for the new law clerk hiring plan. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reportedly spoke highly about the plan during a recent meeting of the Federal Judges Association. Good luck to all future clerkship applicants! [National Law Journal]

* The millennials are here and make up 43 percent of all attorneys (psssstttt, they’ve been here for a while already), but the legal profession is just getting around to making the changes that this generation prioritizes. Law firms better hurry up and start providing all of the warm and fuzzy things they want. [American Lawyer]

* “This isn’t some game. You are screwing with the work of the president of the United States.” This is what John Dowd reportedly said in response to special counsel Robert Mueller when the possibility of issuing a subpoena for President Trump to appear before a grand jury was raised during a meeting with the president’s legal team. [Washington Post]

* Unnamed Republican lawmakers have drafted articles of impeachment against Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, and he seems pretty pissed. Not only did he refuse to comment on documents that “nobody has the courage to put their name on,” but he countered that “the Department of Justice is not going to be extorted.” [USA Today]

* Per ex-White House aides, Ivanka Trump is “involved in everything,” so why hasn’t she been called in for questioning by Robert Mueller yet? Not only would the president “go nuclear,” but Mueller knows that “trying to interview Ivanka Trump would be like lighting a match to the highly combustible Donald Trump.” [Politico]

* For what it’s worth, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein isn’t a fan of the fact that the Senate has been taking its sweet time to confirm his would-be colleagues at the Justice Department. The Criminal, Civil, Civil Rights, and Environment and Natural Resources Divisions have leaders in vote-pending purgatory. [National Law Journal]

* Before he had clients like Donald Trump and Sean Hannity, Michael Cohen was a personal injury attorney, and some of his clients allegedly staged their car “accidents” in an effort to commit insurance fraud. Some of Cohen’s clients are alleged to have not even been in the vehicle that was in the “accident” being litigated. [Rolling Stone]

* Michael Cohen has until 2 p.m. this afternoon to produce the names of his clients with proof of their relationship, lest his attorneys’ temporary restraining order over the alleged privilege of the “thousands, if not millions of documents” that were taken in the FBI raid upon his office get tossed. [New York Law Journal]

* In other news, President Trump wants to review all of the material that was seized by the FBI from his lawyer Michael Cohen before federal investigators are able to take a look at it — after all, as the president says, attorney-client privilege “is dead.” [Washington Post]

* Many partners at Allen & Overy are “dead against” the firm’s reportedly proposed merger with O’Melveny & Myers, which is probably just fine, considering the fact that O’Melveny “[has] no plans to merge [with A&O] and never [has].” [Legal Week]

* Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is supposed to make his debut at the Supreme Court later this month on April 23 to argue a case regarding sentencing guildelines on behalf of the United States government. We’ll see how things go if he’s already been fired by President Trump by the time oral arguments roll around. [CNN]

* According to Senate Republican Cory Gardner of Colorado, now that he’s struck a deal with President Trump that will undercut Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recission of the Cole memo, he’ll be happy to puff-puff-pass votes on all of the Department of Justice nominees he’s been holding up. [Washington Post]

* “[T]op tier firms [must] take a more ‘people-centric’ approach, and break the tyranny of the billable unit as the overriding priority.” This managing partner says that work/life balance and mental health for lawyers will never improve unless the legal profession addresses “onerous billable hour targets.” [Lawyers Weekly]

* What’s behind the Supreme Court’s sluggish pace, and does Justice Gorsuch have anything to do with it? Only 18 rulings have been sloooooowly handed down so far this Term, and the world is still waiting for decisions to be made in some of the high court’s most contentious cases. [Reuters]

* House Republicans are so pissed the DOJ failed to comply with a subpoena deadline to turn over more than a million documents related to investigations of Hillary Clinton’s emails, alleged FISA abuses, and Andrew McCabe’s firing that there’s a “growing consensus” Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein could be held in contempt of Congress — or even impeached. [Washington Examiner]

* There may be a law school brain drain when it comes to a lack of applications from students at top undergraduate institutions, but the Law School Admission Council is reporting that the number of applicants with LSAT scores of 160 or higher is up by 21 percent since last year. We’ll have more on this interesting news later. [Law.com]

* In case you missed it, with an average deal size was $3.7 billion and a market share of about 24 percent, Skadden came out on top of Bloomberg’s law firm league table for global M&A deal volume in 2018’s first quarter. Congratulations! [Big Law Business]

* According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the legal services industry added 400 jobs between February and March. The entire profession now ranges from 1.2 to 1.3 million jobs, down from pre-recession highs of 1.8 million jobs. Sorry, but after about a decade, it’s looking like those jobs may be lost forever. [American Lawyer]