LSAT

* For those of you too busy this week to follow Judge Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation hearing, here’s a nice collection of the highlights by Benjamin Wallace-Wells. [New Yorker via How Appealing]

* SCOTUS confirmation hearings are often compared to kabuki theater; law professor cum novelist Jay Wexler reimagines the Gorsuch hearing as, well, actual kabuki theater. [McSweeney’s]

* Insider trading: it’s not entirely about the benjamins, as therapist and executive coach Andrew Snyder explains. [LinkedIn]

* Is the Second Circuit sitting on juicy information about President Trump’s ties to Russia? [WiseLawNY]

* Law school applicants with high LSAT scores: which schools do they favor? [SSRN]

* Speaking of legal education, what are the secrets to law school success? Vanderbilt 3L Niya McCray shares her thoughts. [Amazon (affiliate link)]

* “You have been very much able to avoid any specificity like no one I have seen before. And maybe that’s a virtue, I don’t know. But for us on this side, knowing where you stand on major questions of the day is really important to a vote.” Despite hours of questioning, Senate Democrats were unable to get Judge Neil Gorsuch to commit to any response beyond researched generalities. At this point, his confirmation seems inevitable. [New York Times]

* Sure, Biglaw associates want their firms to be more progressive when it comes to flexible working arrangements, but that doesn’t mean they feel comfortable taking advantage of the programs being offered. Per a survey conducted by the Diversity and Flexibility Alliance, only 8.8 percent of lawyers at firms with reduced hours policies actually work reduced hours. We’ll have more on this later today. [Big Law Business]

* Is this the end of the Swiss verein? While the legal structure has been adopted in almost every major cross-border law firm merger in recent memory, both of the last two transatlantic Biglaw tie-ups opted to use an entity called the company limited by guarantee (CLG). Apparently this legal structure is being favored for new law firm combinations because there are still questions about vereins’ proper use. [Am Law Daily]

* Dean Alex Acosta of Florida International University School of Law, a man who is better known these days as Trump’s nominee to be the Secretary of Labor, not only says the fiduciary rule requiring retirement investment advisers to put their clients’ interest first goes too far, but indicated that he may decline to defend a rule doubling the salary ceiling under which employees would be eligible for overtime pay. Ouch. [Reuters]

* Now that Harvard Law has decided to accept applicants’ GRE scores in lieu of their LSAT scores for admissions purposes, other law schools have decided to try the alternative exam on for size. Suffolk Law, for example, launched a study last week and offered students $100 to take the GRE. Suffolk’s dean says that “the mad dash for the GRE is not being driven by declines in applications.” Bless your heart. [Boston Globe]

* “The Department’s actions violate law and are contrary to basic principles of fairness and deeply damaging to the critical public service missions of these plaintiffs and the ABA.” The American Bar Association has filed suit against the Department of Education, alleging that some public interest lawyers had been indiscriminately dropped from the federal government’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. We may have more on this later. [ABA Journal]

* “The American Bar Association forces this young man to litigate all the way to the United States Supreme Court to prove that a blind person shouldn’t draw a picture.” After suing the ABA for discrimination for forcing him to take the LSAT — a test he can’t pass because he can’t draw the diagrams required for the logic games section — a blind Michigan man is hoping that SCOTUS will grant his petition. [Michigan Radio]

* In what’s being viewed as one of President Obama’s last hurrahs before leaving office, he used the Outer Continental Shelf Act to restrict new oil and gas drilling in federal waters in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. The Trump administration will likely be forced to go to court to reverse the Obama administration’s pro-environment actions. [Reuters]

* “I am proud to have played a part in the substantial progress the firm has made toward gender equality.” After years of litigation, Mintz Levin settled a gender discrimination case filed by former associate Kamee Verdrager, who was allegedly demoted for taking disability leave when she developed pregnancy complications. [Am Law Daily]

* Baker McKenzie’s new chair has been with the firm for 30 years, and now that he’s in leadership, he’s sharing with the world why the firm decided to do away with the ampersand that once resided in the firm’s name. Apparently the ampersand’s untimely death was about “freshening up the brand” to appear “agile.” [Big Law Business]

* Plaintiffs in the Trump University fraud class-action lawsuit are sick and tired of waiting for their claims to be heard. They want the trial to proceed as scheduled, the defendant’s presidential duties be damned, writing, “The court has been more than generous in accommodating defendants’ multiple delay requests, but after 6 1/2 years of waiting, plaintiffs cannot afford any further delays.” [Big Law Business]

* Poor Merrick Garland: After more than 243 days of waiting for a hearing as President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, he’ll return to his seat as the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, the second highest court in the land, in January 2017. The man is a true gentleman, an “example of how to act with dignity and class and character.” [CNN]

* “If president-elect Donald Trump follows through on his campaign promises, people’s rights will be in jeopardy.” Since Donald Trump’s victory in the election, the American Civil Liberties Union has raised a record amount — more than $8.2 million poured in from more than 100,000 donors in the span of less than a week. [WSJ Law Blog]

* Much to LSAC’s chagrin, the LSAT may not be the only admissions testing prerequisite in town for prospective law students anymore. Law schools seem particularly eager to allow would-be students to take the GRE, which is offered throughout the year, as opposed to the LSAT, which is only offered four times a year. [National Law Journal]

* Michael Fine, the Ohio lawyer who was disbarred for hypnotizing his female clients and sexually assaulting them, has been sentenced to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to five counts of kidnapping with sexual motivation and one count of attempted kidnapping. Fine must register as a sex offender. We’ll have more on this later. [Reuters]

* In the event that the election ends in a deadlock, will the Supreme Court be able to resolve the dispute even though the highest court in the land is currently split 4-4 down ideological lines? No one knows, and that’s “[one] hell of a scary thought.” Not to worry, because there’s a “low probability” that the Supreme Court would have to decide the winner of the 2016 election — “[b]ut if it does happen, it surely won’t be good.” How comforting! [POLITICO]

* The Supreme Court refused to step into a legal battle between the Ohio Democratic Party and the Trump campaign over voter harassment with no dissents, save for a comment from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who noted that because she was “mindful” of existing Ohio law prohibiting voter intimidation, she was denying the request. Thanks to the Notorious RBG for the reminder not to participate in illegal activities. [Slate]

* Martin Shkreli thinks he’s going to be able to clear his name by forcing Katten Muchin to turn over three years’ worth of documents from the time the firm represented him, with his new attorneys claiming he acted in good faith because he “sought and received his lawyers’ advice and he followed it.” The firm isn’t thrilled about the prospect of having to hand over hundreds of thousands of pages of documents. [Big Law Business]

* The institution formerly known as the South Texas College of Law has unveiled yet another new name after being enjoined from using the name Houston College of Law. The school will now be known as the South Texas College of Law Houston. Your tuition dollars at work: It seems like the school wasted an incredible amount of money to come up with a name substantially similar to its original name. Congrats? [Houston Chronicle]

* The Law School Admission Council recently published a report on the different methods test-takers used to prepare for the LSAT, and it seems that the biggest ground-breaking takeaway from the data is that those who actually studied scored much better on the exam than those who did not. In addition, those who used official LSAC materials and commercial preparation courses fared better than self-studiers. [U.S. News]

* The LSAT may be “destroy[ing] socioeconomic diversity” in law schools. Will a low score on the Logic Games section of the LSAT keep you from becoming employed as a lawyer? Probably not, but it may keep you from attending a top law school, unless you can afford an expensive LSAT tutor, and many prospective law students are priced out from the get-go. [The Atlantic]

* Darby Dickerson, dean of Texas Tech Law, is resigning to assume the deanship at John Marshall Law-Chicago, a school whose enrollment has faltered over the past several years. She was asked during a job interview why she would leave a ranked law school for an unranked one, and her response may surprise you. [Crain’s Chicago Business]

* The first oral argument of the new SCOTUS term marked one of the first times that complete gender equality was reached at the high court. Five men — all justices — and five women — three of them justices and two of them representing their clients — were all present for Bravo-Fernandez, which is a relative rarity. [Washington Post]

* “I feel that as a result of the experiences I had, I had a lot to offer.” With the assistance of Dewey & LeBoeuf’s former GC, Hinshaw & Culbertson is launching a crisis management and consulting practice. The firm is now in competition with businesses like Zeughauser Group, Altman Weil, and Hildebrandt Consulting. [Big Law Business]

* A class-action suit has been filed over Samsung’s recall of its fiery smartphone, alleging breach of warranty, breach of good faith, and common law fraud. You can expect the size of the proposed nationwide class of plaintiffs in this suit (or at least those in California, Pennsylvania, and Nevada) to explode faster than the Galaxy Note 7. [WSJ Law Blog]