Pulpachair
2yr ago
Current ethics rules in most jurisdictions state that lawyers cannot be managed by non-lawyers. This extends to ownership of law firms - they can’t be owned by corporations or other non-lawyer entities.
In 2021, Arizona broke with the majority and made it so that non-lawyers can hold an equity stake in a law firm. It has been piquing interest from legal-adjacent entities.
Biglaw took a major hit in 2008 that it never really recovered from and will take another one when tight belts force companies to get creative in how they deal with legal needs.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
Lay doomer take.
I’ve been expecting a recession since late 2020 and was surprised that it took until q1 2022 to actually arrive. You think the fundamentals aren’t as bad as 2008 - I disagree. The 2008 financial crisis was a US-created speculative bubble that had knock-on effects in other countries. The EU was stronger then. China was ascending. Russia was not engaged in self-immolation. There were limits for how much damage US housing speculation could inflict.
Right now, all I see are dominoes. Europe is facing a major energy crisis. Russia’s economy is being strangled. China was always a house of cards. The current US administration does not appear capable of recognizing things that have already happened, let alone accurately predicting coming events. We ate a lot of seed corn during COVID, and have continued feasting afterwards too. What possible backstop is there against a major downturn?
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I think your evaluation of legal hiring is a bit optimistic, though your identification of “safe” areas of law is apt.
Since 2008, the big 4 consulting firms have been building larger legal services departments. It has really only been large corporate legal departments, which are almost entirely composed of biglaw alumni, that has kept corporate finance from moving the largest part of legal work to cheaper legal services providers. Recession-type hits to the bottom line should be enough to force gc’s to look for ways to trim the legal budgets, which will mean moving significant amounts of money away from biglaw. Cut off those revenue streams from biglaw firms, and I think you will see hiring freezes generally while law schools continue to churn out new grads. If and when the law firm hiring picks up again (expect a lag behind the end of the recession) you’ll have double or triple the number of applicants looking for the same number of jobs.
I predict the major earthquake for law to be ABA permitting Arizona-style changes to rules about who can own a law firm, meaning Deloitte can have its own subsidiary law firm covered by MSAs that already exist with most fortune 500 companies. If that happens, biglaw is going to take more than a haircut.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
This deepfake youtube series of Gandalf commenting on The Rings of Power seems particularly tuned to the interests of a significant number of users here.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
I would venture that he's denying victim status to the two people Rittenhouse killed and the third he wounded - Rittenhouse being the victim. From the conservative perspective, they were aggressors who happened to aggress someone holding a loaded weapon.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
Also, generally speaking, a community less likely to weigh in on subjects where they have no knowledge base. I appreciate Stefferi’s Finnish culture war entries, but never comment on them as my knowledge of Finnish politics could be contained in a matchbook, with plenty of room to spare.
Pulpachair
2yr ago
Say your roommate brings in a homeless guy from the street and tells you he needs to sleep on the couch you just bought. Maybe you put your foot down; maybe you decide to be a good Christian. If you're feeling really charitable you might even try to offer aid of your own.
The calculus changes if your roommate calls your friends, coworkers, and pastor and hints that you're going to lose your shit. Might you feel a little...constrained? A little incentivized to prove him wrong in front of your social circles?
Either way, it's not ambiguous who's to blame.
Let me help tie your analogy to the view of the right. Every night for the last 40 years, you've been inviting homeless people to stay in your roommate's room. Whenever he objects, you loudly and publicly denounce him as a bigot who hates the less fortunate, and correspondingly congratulate yourself on your depth of character. Sure he's been stabbed a few times, his belongings have been stolen, and his room is used as a stash house for a drug trafficking ring, but, as you are constantly reminding him, that's a small price to pay to make the world a better place.
On the night in question, you greet the homeless person graciously, tell them how much you appreciate them being there and the struggle they are going through, offer them a few jelly beans and then, as soon as the pastor leaves, you have the police escort them from the premises. You then post to facebook that your roommate is history's greatest monster for using a human being as a prop in your little domestic spat.
When election corruption was a little more blatant in Chicago in the second half of the twentieth century, it wasn’t all of Cook county that engaged in corruption. It was a dozen polling locations where the entire polling apparatus was safely within the Daley machine. Still enough to shore up mayoral and statewide Democrat vote totals, but narrow and focused enough that it wouldn’t disrupt all of the races.
Widespread, persistent election fraud is almost certainly not an actual occurrence. To the extent fraud is occurring, I would guess that it is following the Chicago model and focused on small partisan strongholds with the objective of keeping the graft dollars flowing.
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