On The Merits

Kirkland & Ellis, the largest law firm in the world by revenue, has mastered the art of forum shopping for the many bankruptcy cases it handles.That's the takeaway from a Bloomberg Law analysis of how the firm chooses which courts to file its bankruptcy cases. James Nani and Ronnie Greene, two of the reporters behind that analysis, talk about it on this episode of our podcast, On The Merits.They say Kirkland has shown it will stop filing in a particular court if it encounters any resistance to its clients or its proposed fee structure. And, because of Kirkland's enormous size, they say, this has ripple effects throughout the world of bankruptcy law.Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Just the idea of litigation finance makes some people uncomfortable. To them, it's a distortion of the justice system when wealthy people or businesses profit by bankrolling a lawsuit.But the truth of how litigation finance actually works on a day-to-day basis is much more mundane, according to Bloomberg Law reporter Emily Siegel. She says most litigation financiers get involved in mass torts, not in cases where the defendants are individuals or small businesses.Siegel joins our podcast, On The Merits, along with her colleague Beth Wang, who's reporting on new proposed rules in New York that would regulate litigation finance disclosures. Wang says these rules are so narrowly tailored they would only apply in a very small number of situations.Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Attorneys, especially those at the country's largest firms, have long tended to favor Democratic candidates. But lawyers are especially enthusiastic about the nascent presidential campaign of Kamala Harris.That's according to reporting from the guests on today's episode of our On The Merits podcast, reporters Tatyana Monnay and Brian Baxter. They talk about why Big Law attorneys are so strongly backing Harris and what this might mean for Big Law's influence on her administration next year if she wins in November.Monnay and Baxter also talk about Donald Trump's avoidance of Big Law after go-to Republican firm Jones Day decided to cut its relationship with him.Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Kirkland & Ellis is shaking up recruiting with aggressive new strategies to attract young talent. They've doubled referral bonuses to $50,000, reflecting a competitive hiring landscape. Meanwhile, the firm is balancing seasoned attorneys' retention with year-end payhold policies. As the legal market recovers from its slump, the ripple effects on compensation strategies are noteworthy. The discussion reveals the challenges of navigating hiring post-layoffs and whether Kirkland's tactics are setting new industry standards.

A judicial clerkship can put a young lawyer on a path to a dream career. But if the judge is abusive or unethical, that dream can very quickly turn into a nightmare.That's what happened to Aliza Shatzman, a former clerk who had a terrible experience working for a judge. Shatzman went on to found the Legal Accountability Project, a group advocating for more workplace protections for clerks and other judicial branch employees.Shatzman joins our On The Merits podcast in the wake of a scandal involving an Alaska federal judge who resigned amid allegations of pervasive harassment and abuse of his clerks. We also hear from Bloomberg Law reporter Jacqueline Thomsen about why courts have their own system for handling employee disputes and why they don't want Congress to interfere with it.Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

On the Merits is on hiatus for a bit while we create some great new episodes for you. Until then, we're pleased to offer a special presentation of our ABA Silver Gavel award-winning series, UnCommon Law.Generative AI tools are already promising to change the world. Systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT can answer complex questions, write poems and code, and even mimic famous authors with uncanny accuracy. But in using copyrighted materials to train these powerful AI products, are AI companies infringing the rights of untold creators?This season on UnCommon Law, we'll explore the intersection between artificial intelligence and the law. Episode one examines how large language models actually ingest and learn from billions of online data points, including copyrighted works. And we explore the lawsuits filed by creators who claim their copyrights were exploited without permission to feed the data-hungry algorithms powering tools like ChatGPT.If you like this episode and want to hear part 2, visit news.bloomberglaw.com/podcasts, or search for UnCommon Law in your podcast app.Guests: Matthew Butterick, founder at Butterick Law, and co-counsel with the Joseph Saveri Law Firm on class-action lawsuits against OpenAI and others Isaiah Poritz, technology reporter for Bloomberg Law James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School

When California's new mental health courts were getting started, the debate centered on whether they had too much power–or too little.Now, roughly six months in, the state is discovering a new flaw: too few people are using them.On this episode of our podcast, On The Merits, Bloomberg Law reporter Maia Spoto talks about why California's Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment, or CARE, Courts, have had such an underwhelming start. Also, what this means for the state's governor, Gavin Newsom (D), who invested a large amount of political capital into them. We also hear from one of the judges helping to set up a CARE Court in Orange County, who talks about the large amount of manpower needed to adjudicate these special types of cases.Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Marijuana is now legal in about half of the states, but still maintains its illegal status at the federal level. What does this mean for an employer who wants to, or has to, administer drug tests for its employees?We tackle that question on our podcast, On The Merits, with Sean Mack, a partner and co-chair of the cannabis and hemp law practice at the New Jersey firm Pashman Stein. Mack says testing employees for marijuana–or even firing them for testing positive–is now so fraught with employment law issues that it may no longer be worth the hassle.Mack also talks about a case out of Ohio, Fisher v. Airgas, in which an employee who was fired for a false positive marijuana test result won at the federal appellate level. Mack says it's a sign that, in employment law cases, even federal judges are able to look beyond pot's controlled substance status.Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Hetal Doshi, the top antitrust litigator at the Department of Justice, says she tries to make the cases her team pursues easy for the average person to understand."If we are litigating cases inside an echo chamber, or like in a very narrow, technocratic way that only other lawyers can understand, then we're failing to do our jobs," Doshi says on this episode of our podcast, On The Merits.Doshi spoke to reporters Leah Nylen and Danielle Kaye about how this philosophy played into recent cases that blocked mergers in the airline and publishing industries. Doshi also talks about the idea that antitrust laws are meant to protect not only consumers from higher prices, but also to protect workers from lower wages.Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

The Commerce Department's disastrous rollout of a new payment system left some National Weather Service employees on the hook for their own business expenses, and even led utility companies to shut off power to some critical weather systems due to unpaid bills.Bloomberg Government reporter Jack Fitzpatrick found that even now, months after this system went online, the Department is still working through a backlog of unpaid invoices. And despite a report from its Inspector General, it's still not clear what exactly went wrong and who at the Department is to blame.On this episode of our podcast, On The Merits, Fitzpatrick explains what happens when a federal agency can't pay its bills on time and what might happen when the Department expands this troubled payment system in the years to come.Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.