* Meet the superstar team who have to convince the Supreme Court that the word “tariffs” does not appear in the IEEPA, which for some reason is an uphill battle. [National Law Journal] * Ninth Circuit will convene en banc to reconsider giving Trump the power to send troops to assassinate costumed frogs. [CNN] * […]
* Kirkland provides communications training for lawyers after earning reputation as uncooperative. Weird, because the firm was super cooperative when Donald Trump asked them to roll over and give him free legal work. [Financial Times]
* Federal lawyers admit they falsely stated the number of agents sent to Portland -- a key claim in the government's claim that protests met the statutory threshold for deploying troops. You see, they told the court that conditions required 115 agents when the most they ever had was 31. Oops! [Oregon Live]
* Anthropic settlement puts four Supreme Court justices in line for checks. [Bloomberg Law News]
* Exonerated former trader launches suit against UBS alleging the company set him up as a fall guy for the Libor scandal. [Reuters]
* An interview with Anil Kalhan, the professor who coined the term Kavanaugh Stop. [Law Dork]
* OpenAI must face infringement claims from authors whose works were used to train the model. [Law360]
* Hogan Lovells counsels Miami in securing Lionel Messi contract extension. [Law.com International]
A new proposal would let wealthy foreign nationals secure an opportunity for a U.S. green card with a $1 million 'gift' to the government, sparking legal and ethical debate.
* More confirmation that Biglaw cowardice goes beyond the firms that made deals. [Washington Post]
* Biglaw lawyer discusses exit strategy with Dave Ramsey bringing meme to life. [Yahoo Finance]
* First Circuit raises prospect of running water as a constitutional right. [Courthouse News Service]
* Seyfarth immigration folks join PwC immigration consultancy. [Bloomberg Law News]
* Gordon Rees apologies for AI hallucinations in filing. [Reuters]
* McDermott Will & Schulte promotes new partners. [Law360]
* Charleston School of Law student sues the law school and Baker Donelson alleging retaliation after he reported sexual harassment. [Law.com]
* Elon Musk loses effort to claim he relied on attorney advice in Twitter investor case. Funny how famously leaking that you overruled key attorney advice during the deal can come back to bite somebody. [Law360]
* Jack Smith wants his testimony to be public. [CBS News]
* Kannon Shanmugam discusses -- generally anyway -- the process that led to his firm's Trump deal. [Bloomberg Law News]
* Meanwhile, a Columbia University group is suing for records behind those deals. [Reuters]
* "Judges Stress Coordination as Mass-Tort Litigation Expands Across Courts." Might be a good time to brush up on your MDL knowledge! [Legal Intelligencer]
* Diversity issues continue to plague Biglaw Brussels office. At least this one was awkwardly well-intentioned. Progress! [Roll on Friday]
* TaxProf Blog finds a new home. [ABA Journal]
* AI is speeding up M&A deals by harnessing the power of algorithms to rewrite the same sentence 50 times only to arrive back at the same boilerplate. [The Information]
* Reddit sues Perplexity over scraped data claims. [Law360]
* David Lat advises young Biglaw lawyers to treat it as a long-term career, even if they're already eyeing the exit. [Bloomberg Law News]
* Law firm works to get Halloween costumes for kids who can't afford them. [ABA Journal]
* UVA makes deal with Trump administration. Just the sort of coerced compliance with the federal government that founder Thomas Jefferson would've wanted! [Prawfsblawg]
* Kim Davis thinks Thomas opinions and Barrett book support her chances to overturn Obergefell... which is not wrong, but we're going to keep being told not to worry anyway. [MSNBC]
* Michael Wolff sues Melania Trump after her lawyers threatened to sue him. [Courthouse News Service]
* In honor of the 80th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials, the Smithsonian profiles Justice Robert Jackson. Catch it now, before the administration tells the Smithsonian to stop focusing on "how bad Nazis were." [Smithsonian]
* Trump wants the taxpayers to pay him $230 million to compensate him for the federal criminal investigations he endured just because of... all those things he got indicted over. [CNN]
* AI as a trial prep tool has divided lawyers with critics arguing that its efforts to be perfect make it suboptimal for predicting the other side. [Texas Lawyer]
* Administration asks the Supreme Court to stretch Trump's power to arbitrarily deploy troops to American cities just a bit further. Surely this will be the last request, right? [National Law Journal]
* NXIVM leader pulls out the "I was railroaded by the feds" playbook that seems to have a receptive audience with America's most powerful Jeffrey Epstein birthday well-wisher. [Courthouse News Service]
* Judge says law school can be taught with just baseball cases. [ABA Journal]
* CFTC moving quickly to approve more fake money speculation now that the White House has a meme coin. [Law360]
* Special Counsel nominee withdraws over all the Nazi stuff. [Bloomberg Law News]
Those who’ve adopted legal-specific systems are seeing big benefits.
* Divided Ninth Circuit panel greenlights Trump's military occupation plan for Portland. [CNN]
* ...And the Circuit might well revisit that en banc soon enough. [Bloomberg Law News]
* Anna Bower had a lengthy text exchange with Lindsey Halligan and the interim prosecutor never remembered to say anything about being off the record. [Lawfare]
* Suspended judge attempted to change his first name to "Judge." The court was not amused. [ABA Journal]
* Jack Nicklaus wins $50 million in defamation suit over false claims tying him to Saudi-owned and Trump hyped LIV Golf league. [ESPN]
* Ropes holds the line on single-tier partnership while it fades away across Biglaw. [American Lawyer]
* Zuckerberg ordered to testify. Unlikely to be allowed to send his Meta avatar. [Law360]
* Class action accuses banks of conspiring to set prime rate. [National Law Journal]
* Federal judiciary begins shuttering some operations as funds dry up. [National Law Journal]
* George Santos has sentence commuted. [Reuters]
* What does a future associate even look like? [Law.com]
* USPTO director taking direct control of patent reviews. There's no way this ends in a series of gifts bestowed on an elected official in exchange for greased wheels on patent review, right? [Law360]
* DOJ lawyer fired over Abrego Garcia case speaks to 60 Minutes. [CBS News]
* Tracing the Supreme Court's journey toward immunizing federal goon squad tactics. [Vox]
* Goodwin Procter brings home massive M&A and litigation haul. [Bloomberg Law News]
* The government doesn't keep track of its "Kavanaugh stops." Pro Publica decided to do it for them. [Pro Publica]
* John Bolton got indicted. So that happened. [National Law Journal]
* Supreme Court's next assault on voting rights is definitely happening. [The Nation]
* Steve Bannon throws lawyer under the bus in effort to get out of the whole "breaking the law" thing. [Law360]
* Bipartisan judges agree that Trump can't randomly send troops into Chicago. [Reuters]
* Little League suspension goes to court. [ABA Journal]
* Law school applications up 33 percent. Or "nearly half" as some lawyers would say. [Reuters]
* Supreme Court's voting rights argument reveals justices more than willing to roll back the law to 1950s. [Bloomberg Law News]
* Michigan State Title IX investigators may have collaborated with university lawyers. [State News]
* The lawyer-to-blacksmith pipeline is alive and well. [CBS News]
* Trump DOJ wastes tons of taxpayer money on frivolous cases, but the costs to the accused matter almost as much winning. [NPR]
* Billboard lawyer drops a partner "adds new one with familiar sounding name." [Houston Chronicle]
* Administration plans to close CFPB in 2-3 months. This comes on the heels of the administration announcing a settlement to drop case over company fleecing our troops. [Law360]
This Pro Bono Week, get inspired to give back with PLI’s Pursuing Justice: The Pro Bono Files, a one-of-a-kind podcast hosted by Alicia Aiken.
* Supreme Court refuses to bail out Alex Jones. [NPR]
* Musk's effort to skim $56 billion off his meme stock's willing shareholders continues. [Reuters]
* Pete Hegseth's personal lawyer -- who represented him through sexual assault accusation -- behind floundering effort to make media organizations promise to only print happy Defense Department news. [ed. note: Above the Law's sibling publication Breaking Defense has joined other media outlets in rejecting the policy] [Washington Post]
* SCOTUS considers full return to Jim Crow era districting. [Bloomberg Law News]
* Ballot measure seeks to remove state bar from judge discipline process. [Austin American Statesman]
* Charting the AI-Privacy landscape. [Law.com]
* What are the essential functions of the Supreme Court? [Dorf on Law]
* Barack Obama weighs in on capitulating law firms. [The Hill]
* A look at the lawyers giving up big money to challenge the administration. [The New Republic]
* Lawyers discover AI produces little time savings. [Bloomberg Law News]
* Totally serious and not-at-all frivolous lawsuit against Michigan Law Review... dropped. [Reuters]
* Donna Adelson gets life sentence. [CNN]
* AI artist asks Supreme Court for copyright protection. [Law.com]
* Trump business partner liable in money laundering scheme. [Law360]
* Drake loses suit over Kendrick diss. [Law360]
* Capitulating firms dodge NY ethics complaint. [Bloomberg Law News]
* Illinois troop deployment temporarily blocked. [Reuters]
* Erwin Chemerinsky discusses how this Supreme Court will redefine the presidency. [Law.com]
* Lawyer learns the importance of making sure the hearing is over first. [ABA Journal]
* A conversation following Spellbook's new funding round. [Artificial Lawyer]
* Woman who defrauded JP Morgan used her indemnification clause to make JP Morgan pay almost as much in legal bills as the whole scam was worth. [NY Post]
* Following D.C.'s lead, Chicago grand juries are declining to indict people rounded up by the Trump administration. [MSNBC]
* Baldoni and Lively fight spills out into malpractice claim. [Hollywood Reporter]
* Former Overstock.com CEO defaults in defamation case brought by Hunter Biden. [Courthouse News Service]
* Ninth Circuit allows Trump to federalize Oregon National Guard but keeps a temporary ban on deployment. [Bloomberg Law News]
* LBR acquires Legal Geek. [Law.com]
* Clarence Thomas may have created a loophole to resuscitate affirmative action. Too bad he explicitly doesn't think the Court should be bound by any prior decision. [Slate]
* Attorney General Pam Bondi spent the day on Capitol Hill making snide remarks and trying to deflect from her boss's appearances in the Epstein files and Tom Homan's missing $50,000. [CNN]
* Chinese hackers target major law firm. [NY Times]
* The government is required to pay furloughed employees back pay after a shutdown... so the OMB just deleted all mention of that law. [Government Executive]
* Supreme Court kickoff suggests the justices will strike down laws against conversion therapy as "viewpoint discrimination." Because child abuse is technically a viewpoint. [Bloomberg Law News]
* Speaking of the Supreme Court, here's a preview. As Clubber Lang put it: "My prediction? Pain." [The Nation]
* SEC Chair hopes to deregulate quickly to prevent future administrations from undoing the financial meltdown he's preparing to cause. [Law360]
* EvenUp announces $150 million funding round. [Law.com]
* Tom Girardi's son-in-law sentenced. [LA Times]