Texas

* The Incredible Shrinking Biglaw Partnership: Who’d have thought the idea of making more money by sharing it with fewer people would be so popular? [Law360]

* Mayer Brown has a new managing partner. [American Lawyer]

* In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the president just fired 256 judges for, by and large, not having law degrees. That’s so weird, over here our judging problem are all the unfit hacks with law degrees. [Al Jazeera]

* How do you expeditiously sort through millions of pages of documents in a wide-ranging criminal investigation? That’s a question Robert Mueller’s team has, and one that legal technology can actually answer. [Legaltech News]

* Merely threatening frivolous defamation claims can be big business. Charles Harder made $93,000 off Trump’s fear of Fire and Fury. [CNBC]

* Neil Gorsuch seems to understand diversity in practice better than his colleagues. [Slate]

* Sheppard Mullin sets up a new lateral-fueled Dallas office. [Texas Lawyer]

* Just in time for the State of the Union, the Ninth Circuit ruled that immigrant children can be railroaded out of the country without access to a lawyer. Maybe they’ll avoid Trump’s ire tonight. [The Hill]

* Have you read about the Presidents Club dinner? If not, then you can read here, but it’s basically Tailhook for rich people. Now read about the law firm partners who may or may not have shown up including a Fried Frank partner who “did not attend the dinner and left shortly after arriving” which is an Escher painting of a statement. [Legal Cheek]

* New study from ALM Intelligence and Harvard Law School suggests part of the reason women are underrepresented at the partnership level is a propensity to selecting lower risk paths earlier in their career, locking them out of greater opportunities. Of course, this fails to answer what happens in the law that tends to encourage women to step off the path, but it’s valuable for diagnosing the problem. [American Lawyer]

* Money laundering with the Russians… yeah, lawyers aren’t supposed to do that. [Daily Business Review]

* Texas judge blocks law requiring respect for unborn children, provoking a fierce outcry from politicians worried about the sanctity of life. Texas has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, but who really cares about that? I mean, once they get past negative 8-and-a-half months they stop being cute. [Dallas Morning News]

* Sad news, the former shadow attorney general of the UK, media lawyer Arthur Davidson, has passed at 91. [The Guardian]

* Is SCOTUS walking back its landmark commitment to equal rights for the LGBTQ community? Considering what could happen in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case and the high court’s refusal to grant cert in Pidgeon, it seems like it. It’s not as if this hasn’t happened before. ::coughBrownvBoardcough:: [New Republic]

* A federal judge ruled that an American ISIS suspect who’s been detained as a “enemy combatant” in Iraq for the last three months is, in fact, entitled to a lawyer, and called the Trump administration’s quest to deny counsel in this case “both remarkable and troubling.” [New York Times]

* Everything really is bigger in Texas: According to the ABA, there are just 0.8 percent more first-year law students this year than last year, but entering classes at law schools in the Lone Star State were 4 percent larger than they were last year. Hopefully all these students will be able to lasso themselves jobs. [Texas Lawyer]

* Lawsuits have been rolling out ever since Apple admitted that it was slowing down iPhones with older batteries, and one of them was filed by two students who currently attend USC Law and hope to get the suit certified as a class-action. This is an absolutely awesome use of winter break. [RT]

* Which states are likely to legalize marijuana in the new year? Vermont, New Jersey, and Michigan may soon end their prohibitions on cannabis, either through legislative means or by puff-puff-passing a voter referendum. [Forbes]

* If you’re a journalist with three years of experience and cover the legal profession in your reporting, consider applying to be a fellow at Loyola Law School’s annual Journalist Law School. There is no cost to attend. The application deadline is February 9, 2018. [Journalist Law School]

* Judge Thomas Griesa, the Southern District of New York jurist who oversaw the Argentine debt battle in federal court, RIP. [New York Law Journal]