All The Cool Kids Are Passing The Bar, All The Cooley Kids… Not As Much

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Patrice:

Hey, and welcome back to another edition of Thinking Like A Lawyer. I’m Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I’m joined by some Above Luck colleagues. I’ve got Kathryn here.

Kathryn Rubino:

Hey,

Joe Patrice:

And Chris Williams is here too. Hello. And we’re doing the thing that we do every week where we talk about the big stories from the week that was, but we as always are going to begin with a little bit of small talk. Small talk. Yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

So I’d like to start of course, by wishing everyone a happy life of a showgirl week for those who celebrate.

Joe Patrice:

Oh my God.

Kathryn Rubino:

I dunno if you all are aware, but I did put it on our editorial calendar so that you can make sure that you have Friday kind of blocked off in your mind as a life

Joe Patrice:

Of a show show. I did see that it was on the editorial calendar and I wondered

Kathryn Rubino:

You did not wonder who did that.

Joe Patrice:

Correct. I did not wonder who

Chris Williams:

We all knew it was me because yesterday I went to go see Demon Slayer, infinity Castle, which was great. It felt like six to eight anime episodes back to back to back to back to back. But anyway, other than that it was nice. But as I’m waiting on the bus, I see this giant banner in front of me that’s basically like Kathryn’s going to be out from the third to the fifth, so it’s like, okay, well thank you for telling me Billboard. But yeah, it looked nice. It’s giving more cabaret than I was expecting from Taylor Swift.

Kathryn Rubino:

I think it’s definitely a big vibe shift for sure, especially coming off of the torture poets department, which is a very long, I think it has some real gems on it, but it much more of a meandering kind of word vomit kind of vibe to it. This one is much shorter. It’s going to clock in at under 43 minutes. They just on Spotify, put out the length of the album and it’s going to be a lot more poppy from everything we know a lot tighter as an album. And the best part is I was already taking Friday off like months ago. I have a girls trip planned, some college friends, so I was already going to be out Friday and now I’m like, well, now we have something else to do as we explore Charleston is to delve deeply into the album.

Chris Williams:

Yeah, I was going to say, oh, this might upend the girls trip, but because priorities, priorities people.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, there’s also the Life of Showgirl movie that’s being released in a MC theaters, and as soon as I heard it, I waited on a 45 minute online line in order to get tickets for the entire group of us that are going out. And then I found out that there are no A MC feeders in Charleston. There you go. Which was very sad for me and it’s only going to be released for that weekend, so I can’t actually watch it. I mean hopefully it eventually it’ll be released on something like Disney Plus, or which we can watch now again. So hopefully it’ll be released. I will be able to watch it at some point. But it was a little shocking to me that you can’t go to an A MC theater in Charleston.

Chris Williams:

Wait, it sounds like you were putting the cart before the show. Girl. How did you buy the tickets for the movie without, so you

Kathryn Rubino:

Wait and then I went to go buy them and they were like, what theater do you want? And I was like, Charleston, South Carolina, and nothing came up and I was like, that can’t be right.

Chris Williams:

Got, so you waited in line to discover

Kathryn Rubino:

That you couldn’t buy the tickets? I waited it and then I figured it out. I thought you just had, listen, my faith in antitrust law at this point is so low that I just assumed everyone had an A MC theater. Amazing.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, good job making it legal.

Kathryn Rubino:

You’re welcome, Joe. I did that just for you.

Joe Patrice:

Well, again,

Kathryn Rubino:

Small talk is a

Joe Patrice:

Reminder,

Chris Williams:

Joe supposed small talk doesn’t have to be legal.

Joe Patrice:

In fairness, the original theory behind it was given that the name of the show is Thinking Like A Lawyer, a lot of the logic was that we would inject legal into our day-to-day lives and that was,

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, that is a real injection of legal into our day-to-day lives, which is that apparently it a MC is not nearly as ubiquitous as someone living on the east coast of this country would think.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Well, alright, cool. Oh, that sounds means that we’re done with small talk and we can move on. What is our biggest story of the week? I guess the biggest story of the week? This is one that for those of you who haven’t been long time Above the Law readers, you might not understand why this is the biggest story of the week, but it is definitely digging into kind of the old school Above the Law lore. Cooley Law School in Michigan has now gotten in trouble with the A BA.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. Their bar passage rate over the last few years is below the threshold that the A sets for compliance with their accreditation standards, so they are on probation while they hopefully work to improve their bar passage rate.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. So yeah, the a b requires in those states where the A BA credits law schools, which is supposed to be all of them, but currently there is a right wing push in states like Florida and now in Tennessee to kick the, and I think Texas is also looking at it to kick the A BA out of that job in those states because the A BA is woke monsters or whatever the current,

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, they care a lot about the rule of law.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, all of that. So they’re on the outs, so they require you, your graduates to be accredited. Your graduates have to eventually pass theBar within a certain window, a certain percent. They’re below it. Now here’s how this plays into the old school lore now, years ago, there was a ranking of law schools that ranked Harvard as the best law school in the country, which

Kathryn Rubino:

Sure, that checks out. I mean, it’s on a short list of options. I think that Harvard, Yale, Stanford, all valid options as the top law school.

Joe Patrice:

That sounds right. Yeah. So then in second place in this ranking was Cooley. Yeah. So it’s interesting when you dig into

Chris Williams:

As the joke vote at the time,

Joe Patrice:

No. So they very sincerely said that Cooley was the number two law school. Now, this ranking was commissioned by Cooley, which I do love that they had the restraint to not put themselves as one in the pole that they created themselves, but it was just sort of ridiculous given where they were coming from. If they’d placed themselves 15, it would’ve been a ridiculous coup for them, but they couldn’t help themselves made themselves two, they received quite a bit of a burn from us here, and then it kind of just continued from there. Even after this ranking went away Above the Law kept on this law school and its suspicious efforts to promote itself, it constantly was getting pushback from the A, B, A. This is not the first time they’ve had run-ins with the A BA. They sued the A BA at one point to prevent the A BA from punishing them for some of their failings. They tried to merge, they did some sort of a merger with Western Michigan in order to help their reputation. This is an ongoing situation with Cooley. They have been like this for a really long time, and it’s kind of sad because there was a day where Cooley was a perfectly acceptable regional law school, and it’s almost like right around with that ranking, they decided to reach for the stars and it just started a hole crumbling. But just to

Chris Williams:

Be clear, just to be clear, you said that they sued the A BA, they lost that suit. Presumably.

Kathryn Rubino:

They settled though.

Joe Patrice:

I think they, I think gave up. They hired Paul Clement, a bunch of failing law schools hired Paul Clement to make the argument that it was illegal for the A BA to tell law schools that they aren’t good enough. Yeah.

Chris Williams:

Well, that’s not a win, but it’s win adjacent.

Kathryn Rubino:

There was a whole issue because A BA doesn’t necessarily have the coffers in order to do a lot of protracted litigation. That’s not sort of the way that its funding was set up, and I think we actually wrote about it at the time too, that that is the problem, that the accreditation is not set up in order to defend itself, and that’s a real problem. And part of the other reason why I think Cooley became a punching bag for Above the Law is that it really was that kind of self-motivated aggrandizement, but really had a blind eye to the sort of other side of it. They’re asking students to pay a lot of money to go into a lot of debt in order to get their degree, and the point of it is to be able to practice, to be able to pay off your loans at some point so that you’re not constantly in this debt, and if you can’t pass theBar,

Joe Patrice:

It makes it really hard.

Kathryn Rubino:

You can’t get a job that allows you to service those loans. That is just the real problem

Joe Patrice:

There. It makes it real hard

Kathryn Rubino:

And turning a blind eye to that hardship that too many of their students were put in a position at the end of it and still are based on the numbers and why they’re currently suspended, I think is a real problem.

Joe Patrice:

So they’re in trouble. Again, who knows what’s going to happen given the knocks that the A BA is taking from the federal government right now. I assume Cooley will appeal to them. Cooley’s most famous graduate, by the way, was Michael Cohen, the former Trump fixer. So

Kathryn Rubino:

Maybe they won’t be able to appeal to the Trump

Joe Patrice:

Administration. Well, that’s certainly not, they can’t use their most famous graduate to do it at this point. They would have

Kathryn Rubino:

To. Wasn’t there also a very famous Cooley law grad who is an NHL coach?

Joe Patrice:

Yes, that is correct. Actually. They’re arguably more famous in subways, but not certainly for practicing law. But the Tampa Bay Lightnings coach is a Cooley Law grad who

Chris Williams:

Also just a quick intervention for any practicing folks listening who happen to be Indian. It is C-O-O-L-E-Y because it’s just weird to hear Cooley knowing that that’s a slur. Like No, no, no. Not that Cooley. Not that Cooley just

Joe Patrice:

Mean, but I would think there is also an unrelated law firm with that name, and this is the law school. The law firm is not related. Gotcha, gotcha.

Anyway, that was a thing that I did wonder. At one point, I was like, not that I figured they were financially related, but you thought maybe they’re named after the same people or whatever, but I don’t believe that they are. Okay, so we have a new update in the Surrender Gate discussion, Paul Weiss and Kirkland in particular. So among the nine firms who settled with the federal government to give them pro bono payola to get out of their retaliatory executive orders, the two of them, Paul Weiss and Kirkland, both in the initial request by legislators to explain why this was not a breach of a bunch of professional obligation rules and then an initial conversation with legislators. They took the position that they’re just working with some charities and it’s no big deal, and they have total control of what’s going on and it’s fine. We then later learned that two firms in particular, Paul Weiss and Kirkland were working with the Commerce Department for free, doing tariff work for free for the government, which certainly complies with some of the stuff the Trump administration had been saying that they believed that these deals comprised their ability to deputize these firms to do legal work.

But in their initial letters to Congress, they said that wasn’t what they were going to do, but now they are doing it. The new shoe that has dropped is those legislators have come back and been, well now, if that’s the case, why don’t you explain how you’re not breaking the law here? Not so much that the firms are breaking the law to be clear. They’re violating the statute, but the penalty runs to the government. The government is forbidden by statute from taking free legal services. They’re forbidden from taking any free services unless there is a life-threatening situation. So in the event of FEMA or something like that, that you need to immediately respond to an emergency, they can take free services, but otherwise they’re not allowed to do that. There’s a lot of reasons for that. It undermines budgeting. It opens the door to lots of quid pro quo corruption stuff. There’s a reason we have this law that said, no one seems to have bothered to look up this law before they started giving free legal

Kathryn Rubino:

Services. Yeah, it’s not a great look for the firms involved. It’s not a great look for the government, not surprising, perhaps given the entire way that those deals got negotiated and went down. It also makes you wonder what exactly they think that pro bono slush fund is going to be used for.

Joe Patrice:

Right. Well, I mean, originally they said, we think it’ll be fulfilled by us doing this charitable work for veterans organizations and stuff like that. And there was a little bit of, we had crossed a threshold where after a bunches of defections had already happened, where we’d started to see these people respond to these stories percolate, which whenever a story like this comes out, they’re not the source of it, but you kind of think, are they the source of about who, the source of this, some stories percolate that, oh, all these firms aren’t really doing anything. They don’t really consider this deal to be serious, so it’s okay, we’re fine. We’re not really working for the administration, which query whether or not that was disingenuous, but that was what they were doing until this Commerce Department stuff came out.

Kathryn Rubino:

The whole thing is a little shady. Exactly how these hours or dollar amounts are going to be fulfilled, whether they’ll be fulfilled, whether just hoping to wait it out, whether or not what work they think they’re doing that satisfies, this will be accepted by the Trump administration as actually fulfilling it. Whether or not the Trump administration can or will try to call on specific firms to do certain legal work. Certainly the Trump administration thinks that they can do that when

Joe Patrice:

They and has written as such in executive order. Yes,

Kathryn Rubino:

Exactly. They said that they expected that some of these hours would be taken up by firms defending police, brutal police officers accused of violence. So they certainly think that that’s how it’ll be used. Firms who have signed these deals haven’t said what they think necessarily, and I mean certainly I can’t imagine they would say what they think because that just opens them up to all sorts of retribution again, from the federal government, and the whole purpose of these deals was to avoid said retribution. So I think they’re going to keep their mouths well in good shut let’s forced to by Congress

Joe Patrice:

And again, they won’t be forced to because as you might imagine when I say the legislators are asking, it’s only the Democrats on the various justice committees, judiciary committees asking. They’re not getting any help from the actual majority.

Chris Williams:

The thing that struck me was just imagining somebody who came out of retirement to tell their prior firm, Hey, you can’t do this because the person that took them off was retired but used to work at one of the firms.

Joe Patrice:

Well, no, no, no. I think you’re talking about in my thing, a person who reached out to us was a retired attorney, not from necessarily one of the firms, but

Chris Williams:

Oh, still.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. But he reached out to Above the Law as soon as the story about the commerce department happened. He said, I haven’t practiced in a long time, but are you aware of this statute? I had had never heard of that statute before. But yeah, he pointed it out to me and I looked it up, and then I started reaching out to various academics in the administrative law space and going, have you heard of this? And ultimately, apparently some people in Congress learned about it too.

Chris Williams:

So shout out to his ball knowledge. It is one of those things where really if he knew, you knew it wasn’t like the Sherman Act. Not everybody knew that

Joe Patrice:

This Exactly, exactly. Have we concluded this topic?

Kathryn Rubino:

I think that this is more than anything a pin in this topic.

Joe Patrice:

Oh, good

Kathryn Rubino:

Point.

Joe Patrice:

Temporarily.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, because whether or not anything actually happens with this particular instance of them fulfilling their pro bono hours for the administration, I think that we’re going to be talking about this for a lot of frankly years to come, and I think that there’s a long-term reputational hit that these firms have taken, and I’ve talked about that a lot. But I think that doing work that potentially violates a statute also really reflects poorly on them. Not just that they sign these deals, which we’ve talked about as an act of carrots and yada, yada yada, but doing something that potentially pretty obviously I think violates a statute without be seemingly being aware of that fact also doesn’t look good as an attorney.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, I haven’t seen a response to these letters yet. I’m intrigued to see what their take is going to be. It’ll be interesting. All right. Well, this one’s still in a bit of flux, but we had some drama in the Eastern District of Virginia,

So we had a Trump person in the US attorney’s office there. Trump asked that the Department of Justice and this particular US attorney to indict James Comey, this US attorney acting or interim or whatever, US attorney did not do that because there was not any evidence of any crime that Comey had committed. So Trump had that person removed, replaced with Lindsay Halligan, who is an insurance lawyer and former beauty pageant contestant who Trump has brought into the White House because she was one of the people who was willing to in Florida, who was willing to sign off on his idea that him having nuclear codes in his toilet was okay. So she is now in that job. She has never done any criminal law whatsoever. They have secured two out of three count indictment that managed to get from a grand jury. That said, the judge is still trying to untangle it because it appears as though halligan signed the wrong forms. Just what you would expect from somebody who doesn’t know what they’re doing.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a lot going on here. First of all, the career prosecutor that got drummed out because he refused to sign off on these charges against Comey, was not just because of the Comey thing. He was also asked to find charges against Tisch James, the New York Attorney General, another sort of perpetual thorn in the side of Donald Trump, and also said that there isn’t stuff there part of the reason why he was forced out. So there’s that kind of going on as well, that it’s not just this kind of singular instance, but a fines charges against my enemy’s vibe going on, which I think is super problematic. It would be less troubling if it was a single sort of political enemy than we are going after political enemies generally. But it does feel like there is a real rush here at the end, and I think part of that is that the statute of limitations is close to running on some of the charges that they are potentially getting the indictment on is making false statements to Congress based on some Comey testimony, and that the statute on that charges is set to expire.

So they needed to get it in under the wire before they couldn’t anymore.

Joe Patrice:

Right. Yeah, no, and it’s just the level of incompetent. That’s really what’s striking about this runaround in the previous administration. They staffed largely with people who were competent. You say what you will about Bill Barr’s worldview. He knows how to lawyer knew how to lawyer, he knows how to, this is now just turn things over to people who barely understand what they’re doing. And it shows,

Kathryn Rubino:

I mean, the transcript that was released from the initial Comey hearing is embarrassing, right. It’s stuff like the judge saying, well, I have one form here that has three charges, but there’s only two on this other form charges in this other form. What’s going on with this first form with three charges? Lindsay saying, I’ve never seen that before in my life. And the judge responding, well, your signature is on it.

Joe Patrice:

Right?

Kathryn Rubino:

Right. Really embarrassing it kinds of stuff that for any competent attorney who cared about their professional reputation in the law as opposed to just as a political operative would be devastating. Regardless of whatever kind of punishment a court can or cannot dull out would be personally devastating to them. If a judge was able to call you out that plainly it open recorded court, but they don’t seem to care.

Chris Williams:

Remember when they were draining the swamp and getting rid of, and getting rid of DEI, because Jesse listening, Kaji Brown Jackson wasn’t qualified enough in stuff like this. Now, this is still a government person in government, but is a little different. I think it was someone involved in, I think, appointed to a position in ICE and she was asked what her qualifications were. Oh

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. The deputy. And

Chris Williams:

She was like, and her answer was, well, who’s really qualified for anything?

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. The 28-year-old or whatever, who’s got that deputy job over at Homeland,

Chris Williams:

Homeland Security

Joe Patrice:

Responded that, well, what does it really mean to be qualified at all? What

Chris Williams:

Is

Kathryn Rubino:

Qualifications?

Chris Williams:

So it feels wholesome and also old timey to imagine shame over not being competent. We’ve moved far past that. Once Big balls was in the government, we moved past shame.

Kathryn Rubino:

I hear what you’re saying, and I do think you’re not wrong, Chris, but I think that there’s another sort of bridge further when it’s, listen, I don’t want to necessarily idolize the legal profession, but there is sort of a professional obligation that we’re meant to have their oaths that lawyers take that is supposed to make it a little bit harder to be a pure political operative, completely divorced from the rule of law.

Joe Patrice:

Well, this also all began, the Justice Department has long enjoyed a degree of independence from the rest of the Executive branch. You see it despite right wingers complaining about, well, this is just what Biden did. All the reports are that Biden privately complained that Garland wasn’t moving faster on any of these cases. But you know what? He didn’t do call Garland and say, do this now, or I’m going to fire you because whatever, say posting a truth, social DM accidentally to everybody telling your Attorney General to start

Kathryn Rubino:

Laying,

Joe Patrice:

Pressing hammer, pressing charges, hammer, which is another thing that happened and then got deleted. So it’s an incompetence, it’s an inevitable result of the breaking down of that wall between the Justice Department and the rest of the executive branch is something that we could tell was on its way when the department was described initially by Bondi as Trump’s personal legal department, which was a sign of where we were going,

Kathryn Rubino:

And this is just sort of the latest and perhaps most egregious, but it didn’t. Right. I think you’re right. It doesn’t come from zero. There’s the Bondy statements about it being Trump’s personal law firm, but also the way that they dealt with the Eric Adams situation in New York, functionally forcing career prosecutors out of the office because they wouldn’t do what the administration wanted, which is to drop the charges against somebody they saw as a political ally. This is not going to end with, this is not like we have so much shame where this is it. This is the end of the road. I think that they’re going to continue. I don’t think that tis James is necessarily safe, even though charges haven’t currently been brought against her. I think that anybody who catches Trump’s ire should have an attorney on speed dial.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Well, alright, with that all said then I think we’re done. This Comey thing is still rapidly developing. I think the statute of limitation is going to happen real quick and we’ll see what happens. Obviously they’ve got an indictment maybe depending on all this signature stuff, so we’ll see. Thanks everybody for listening. You check out, you should subscribe the show to get episodes as they come out. You should leave reviews and all. You should be listening to other shows. The Jabot is Kathryn’s other podcast. I’m a guest on the Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable. You should be listening to other shows on the Legal Talk Network. You should be reading Above the Law so the read these and other stories before they reach this conversation. Social media, it’s above law.com. Over at Blue Sky, I’m at Joe Patrice. She’s at Kathryn one, Chris at writes for Rent and yeah, peace. Bye. Peace.

Continue Reading