One could focus on all the absurd numbers Posner racked up throughout his career. As one of the leading lights of the Law and Economics philosophy, he’d probably find it amusing to see tributes casting his legacy into something fixed and quantifiable. Yet, as the legal community honors Posner’s memory, the outpour of personal and professional anecdotes highlights the limits of a philosophy seeking to turn the world into a series of ticks on a ledger.

Above the Law's founding editor, David Lat, put it simply:

I am so, so sorry to learn of the death of Judge Richard Posner. I was honored to call him a friend.

Above the Law and Judge Posner enjoyed a long and delightful relationship. Lat once asked, not entirely joking, whether Posner was the Beyoncé of the federal bench. Posner responded to the suggestion that “I am so pleased to be classified as a mono-monikered visionary.” He gave us interviews, benchslaps to write up, and a cat to run for president. Not sure that last one was constitutional. On the other hand, neither is running for a third term, and no one seems prepared to put a stop to that right now.

I never spoke with Judge Posner myself, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t hear from him from time to time. Over the years, word would filter back to me through people relaying what Posner had thought about some story or other that I’d written. Thankfully, it was mostly positive because there’s a certain nightmarish stress in knowing you’re getting graded by Richard Posner for a seminar you didn’t know you’d enrolled in.

Posner didn’t invent the idea of marrying economics and the law, but he did more than anyone else to shape the philosophy and put it into practice. His Economic Analysis of Law came out in 1973, and law students have been forced to grapple with numbers ever since. The Anglo-American legal tradition ran on vibes for centuries until Posner literally wrote the book (books?) pointing out that every doctrine had a price, every rule was an incentive, and every 1L who went law school because they were bad at math hit a brick wall in Torts.

As a scholar, Posner found a way to explain all manner of legal issues as rooted in economics. He and Elisabeth Landes wrote The Economics of the Baby Shortage, arguing that adoption regulation created a troubling black market by keeping a free market from balancing supply and demand. In Sex and Reason, he outlined a rational-choice account of human sexuality. He wrote economic analyses of Good Samaritans, aging, and the market for federal law clerks.

The baby paper alone has launched a thousand faculty lounge arguments about whether it was brilliant or monstrous. Posner embraced the “monster” label, because he thought the two descriptors tend, historically, to be a package deal.

For better or worse, Law and Economics is everywhere now. From antitrust to contracts to regulatory review, the language of efficiency dominates the conversation. Unfortunately, like any philosophy, it has gone in some disturbing directions. Everyone paying 1000 percent service charges on tickets has reason to be annoyed by the shift in antitrust law toward efficiency at all costs. Even more diabolical is the punitive-minded hijacking of Law and Economics to argue that throwing a lookout in prison and throwing away the key is good actually.

Posner didn’t take a zealot’s approach to the philosophy, though. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, he wrote a book called A Failure of Capitalism. Getting locked into dogma would betray his fundamentally scholarly approach.

He carried that approach to the bench, where he also refused to stay in whatever box anyone built for him.

Ronald Reagan put him on the Seventh Circuit in 1981. As the conservative legal movement began its decades-long takeover of the federal judiciary, Posner embraced heterodoxy. He tore apart Indiana and Wisconsin’s same-sex marriage bans, first at oral argument and then in an opinion that Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern described as “a witty, deeply moral masterpiece.” Posner penned a scathing takedown of the Supreme Court’s conservatives and feuded publicly with Justice Scalia, in a fight that got ugly enough that Scalia accused him of lying.

Posner told an interviewer in 2013 that he had no desire to join a Supreme Court that “isn’t a real court.” Looking at the bench right now, Posner seems downright prophetic.

Gus Hurwitz, Senior Fellow and Academic Director of the UPenn Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition, offered another humanizing tribute:

Lots to be said. He was a giant. A generous giant. A giant in whose shadow many of us toil and on whose shoulders we all stand.

But I’ll never forget the Greenberg Seminar I took with him at Chicago, on Utopias and Dystopias. For one class we watched the Matrix and Brazil (and read some Baudrillard). The class turned into a bit of a debate between me and [Posner] over whether Brazil or The Matrix is the better film — he loved The Matrix and I love Brazil. I was really just trying to defend Brazil, not to argue its superiority to The Matrix. At least some people came away from that class thinking I had won the day.

In any event, that was the highlight of my Chicago Law career, bar none.

Not only was the man a legend. He was a goofball. And fun.

Never forgotten, but, now, missed. RIP.

That’s a prophet of Chicago School economics and a Reagan appointee, assigning Terry Gilliam, the Wachowskis, and Jean Baudrillard. Compare that to what passes for Republican intellectual life in 2026. Just this week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went on a rant about banning continental philosophy from the military. Another mile marker in the Pentagon’s war on intellectualism that has already barred service members from attending Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and other elite schools and purged books from the service academies. Meanwhile, the leading Reagan-era conservative mind was reading Baudrillard in his spare time.

Posner’s unwillingness to accept a dogmatic worldview also made him one of the most eloquent critics of originalism.

In Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College, the Seventh Circuit held that Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination covers discrimination based on sexual orientation, Posner joined the en banc majority, but wrote separately to lay out a more honest and moral philosophy of judicial interpretation. Objecting to the semantic games the majority required to get to its result, Posner admitted that the “original meaning” of the statute in 1964 would not have contemplated protecting LGBTQ rights:

Had I been asked then whether I had ever met a male homosexual, I would have answered: probably not; had I been asked whether I had ever met a lesbian I would have answered “only in the pages of A la recherche du temps perdu.”

But then he explained why no one should want a legal system that cares about that. His concurrence lays out a theory of interpretation that gives an old text “a meaning that infuses the statement with vitality and significance today.” He dubbed it “judicial interpretive updating,” and pointed out that everyone already does it — including the originalists who swear they don’t — and said the judiciary would be better off embracing this unspoken approach. He included a jab at Heller along the way:

Or how the Second Amendment, which as originally conceived and enacted was about arming the members of the state militias (now the National Guard), is today interpreted to confer gun rights on private citizens as well.

The right largely won the public relations war against the “living Constitution.” Most of the left ran from it because they couldn’t muster much of a defense beyond “because we like the result.” It took this Reagan-appointed judge to lay out an intellectual case for interpreting text — constitutionally or statutorily — as expressing values with meaning informed by the present.

an interpretation that cannot be imputed to the framers of the statute but that we are entitled to adopt in light of (to quote Holmes) “what this country has become,” or, in Blackstonian terminology, to embrace as a sensible deviation from the literal or original meaning of the statutory language.

Words may express value judgments and meanings that the framers couldn’t have put in words themselves? Sounds like the sort of guy who reads continental philosophy. Understanding what a text means to the people living under it today isn’t a corruption of the judicial role, it’s the point of the judicial role:

I would prefer to see us acknowledge openly that today we, who are judges rather than members of Congress, are imposing on a half-century-old statute a meaning of “sex discrimination” that the Congress that enacted it would not have accepted… We should not leave the impression that we are merely the obedient servants of the 88th Congress (1963-1965), carrying out their wishes. We are not. We are taking advantage of what the last half century has taught.

Three years later, the Supreme Court reached the same result in Bostock v. Clayton County, though Justice Gorsuch got there insisting he just reads the dictionary better than everyone else — precisely the pretense Posner refused to indulge. Ironically, the dissenters cited Posner’s concurrence to call the majority opinion “a pirate ship” that “sails under a textualist flag.” That sort of misses the point of Posner’s concurrence, but then again, Posner once estimated that the test of the smartest person in the world would include, “estimating the IQs of the Supreme Court Justices in the range 80 to 89.“

When Posner retired abruptly in September 2017, he explained that the principal reason was the federal courts’ treatment of pro se litigants. Most judges retire to golf. Posner retired to pick a fight on behalf of the people with the least power in the building.

“Posner was a great intellect and a great judge,” David Boies told me. “He cared about the law, and he cared about justice. We always needed judges like him, but now more than ever.”

Posner took on the case of William Bond, a pro se litigant whose claim had been dismissed with hardly an explanation, and when the Fourth Circuit demanded that Posner and co-counsel Matthew Dowd sign their names to the brief, they did. When the Fourth Circuit kicked the case (in a remarkably lazy opinion), Boies joined the team to take it to the Supreme Court. A guy who started out representing himself ended up with the former chief judge of the Seventh Circuit and one of the most famous litigators in America on his cert petition. Unfortunately, that luck didn’t materialize into a grant.

To Hurwitz’s other observation, Posner was a goofball.

By his own admission, Posner was “a very big cat person.” Back in 2001, he posed for The New Yorker with his cat Dinah and announced that he had exactly the same personality as his cat, which he described as, among other things, “playful, but with a streak of cruelty.” Dinah’s successor, Pixie, was a Maine Coon who became arguably the legal world’s most famous pet and a frequent commenter on @Posner_Thoughts — a hilarious account back when Twitter was good.

In 2017’s Eike v. Allergan, a case about glaucoma eye drops, the longest paragraph was about cats:

cats prefer to drink out of a fountain (where gravity works for them) rather than out of a bowl (where gravity works against them)

Cats… true believers in seeking out economic efficiencies.

Above the Law, via LawProfBlog and Professor Eric Segall, once floated Pixie for President. When asked after his retirement whether Pixie might make a good Supreme Court pick, Posner shot that down: “No. Pixie is going to be president.”

Sadly, Posner’s bout with Alzheimer’s had already taken him off the public stage before his death. Professor Orin Kerr wrote a poignant thread back when Posner’s diagnosis first came to light:

A good reminder not to hold back kindness until it’s too late.

“More importantly, he was decent and loving and gentle,” Professor Larry Lessig, who clerked for Posner, wrote of his old boss. “He did not deserve the quiet humility that he carried, always.” Lessig included another personal story about the judge’s humor and grace. After writing some harsh critiques of an early draft of Sex and Reason, Lessig faxed Posner to apologize for his tone. Posner swiftly replied, “Please. I am surrounded by sycophants. The last thing I need is one more.”

But Professor Jamal Greene of Columbia might have the most fitting encapsulation of Posner’s career:

It is perhaps the ultimate tribute that everyone in the legal academy, no matter their views, has strenuously disagreed with something Richard Posner has written, and still they read the next thing. May he rest in peace.

Dick Posner took big intellectual swings and made himself impossible to ignore. And he did it a lot. Not that he can be reduced to a pile of numbers. In fact, this post is approaching 2300 words and it still seems inadequate, but it’s time to hit publish so it’ll have to do its best to stand in for all that could be said. Presumably, Posner would’ve passed along some edits.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Finally, after years, in fact, decades of elder statespeople clinging to their seats, clueless about the state of their constituents’ worlds, many of them received well deserved boots back to their home states. Instead of retiring with dignity, they suffered ignominious defeats. The Hill called it a “youth quake.” Whatever you choose to call it, it was long overdue.

More than 40 nonincumbent millennials won seats. Gen Z representation tripled. As a dinosaur lawyer (and voter), I am delighted to see that new ways of thinking, creating, and innovating may help how we are governed going forward. While there is certainly value in institutional memory, that memory dims with time’s passage.

A headline in one of the post-slaughter articles of the midterms read (and I am paraphrasing here), that 47 didn’t learn anything. Really? I disagree. 47 did learn something and that is to double down in his final two years in office. He ousted Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, and replaced her with Stephen Miller, a Trump mini-me, and the architect of Trump’s immigration enforcement policies. So those who think the final two years of a lame duck presidency will be better than the first two years are in for a rude surprise. It will be an unpleasant Mr. Toad’s wild ride.

What about all those Biglaw firms that bent a knee or otherwise twisted themselves into pretzels resulting from 47’s second-term flurry of executive orders? Will they now have a change of heart? Will those firms still engage in kissing the ring? Will they unbend those knees that only four of the Biglaw firms never bent? Or will those firms, at least some of them, start to kiss 47 good-bye, and advise him to not let the door hit him on the way out? Lawyers are professional
chameleons, and so it will be fun to see groveling go from red to blue. ATL will have a front-row seat to all of these acrobatics. Break out the popcorn.

So, questions that have no answers, at least not now. What do you think will happen to DEI during the next two years? Will the Mansfield Rule rise from the dead? Do you think that Biglaw and Big Corporate Law will peek out from beyond the curtains that they have been hiding behind over the past two years and resume that which needs to be encouraged, not discouraged? What about a return to, ahem, civility? Will the mud-wrestling language of the past decade, not just by 47 but his minions, diminish over time? Perhaps there will be less bullying and more civility, less nastiness and more courtesy, not just in Washington but across the country. We still have to endure two more years of the Name Caller in Chief.

Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for over 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

The cash will come from Blackstone Life Sciences. In exchange for the financing, the deal announced after Wednesday’s market close makes the investment firm eligible for milestone payments tied to the regulatory progress and potential commercialization of the drug, berobenatide. Financial details about the milestones were not disclosed, but given the size of the cardiometabolic disease market, those payments could be substantial.

Berobenatide was the lead obesity drug candidate of Metsera, where it was known by the code name MET-097i. This long-acting injectable GLP-1 drug was designed for monthly dosing, making it attractive to Novo, which has been looking for a successor to its weekly injectable GLP-1 obesity drug, Wegovy. Pfizer’s internal research in oral GLP-1 drugs had fallen short, sparking its own search for external assets. About a year ago, Pfizer beat out Novo with a $10 billion offer for Metsera that now gives the pharma company another opportunity in metabolic medicines.

Pfizer is evaluating berobenatide in a broad clinical program that the company says could grow to more than 20 trials in obesity and related comorbidities, such as knee osteoarthritis and obstructive sleep apnea. Pfizer also says the growing body of evidence supports advancing development of the peptide a monotherapy and in combination with various nutrient-stimulated hormone (NuSH) peptides, including analogs for amylin, a hormone in the body that plays a role in regulating blood sugar and appetite. The Pfizer cardiometabolic pipeline also includes an oral GLP-1 drug acquired last year from Shanghai-based YaoPharma.

In the announcement of the Blackstone deal, Pfizer Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President Cecile Guegan said the company is taking “a disciplined approach that pairs internal research investments with targeted investment from capital partners.”

“Today’s announcement helps us advance our comprehensive obesity program and maintain the financial capacity and flexibility to invest in our broader pipeline across all therapeutic areas,” Guegan said.

Novo and Eli Lilly, currently the leaders in peptide drugs for obesity, have gone on to secure regulatory approvals in related indications. Novo’s Wegovy can be used to treat the fatty liver disease MASH; Wegovy pill’s approval for weight management includes use of the drug as way to reduce the risk of major cardiovascular events. Meanwhile, Lilly’s Zepbound has added obstructive sleep apnea to its label.

While Pfizer touts less burdensome monthly dosing of berobenatide, Lilly’s approach to next-generation metabolic medications aims for better efficacy. Retatrutide, a Lilly peptide engineered to activate the GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon receptors, is in a broad clinical trial program evaluating the drug in both obesity and type 2 diabetes along with related disorders.

Blackstone has reached financing deals with other biopharmaceutical companies. Earlier this year, the firm agreed to provide Apogee Therapeutics with up to $1.3 billion to support late-stage clinical development of its long-acting antibody drug for atopic dermatitis. In exchange, Blackstone would be entitled to royalties from sales of an approved product. Apogee was subsequently acquired by AbbVie for about $11 billion. Blackstone’s agreements with Moderna and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals put the investment firm in line for milestone payments and royalties.

Under the terms of the Pfizer/Blackstone deal, funds managed by Blackstone’s perpetual private equity strategy will invest alongside funds managed by Blackstone Life Sciences. If berobenatide achieves milestones, milestone payments will be paid out over a multi-year period. The investment firm does not gain any rights to the drug; Pfizer maintains full control of the asset and all decisions about the clinical program.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

The acquisition, announced Tuesday, represents an expansion for the Israeli defense giant into underwater autonomous systems.

“ISE’s underwater technologies will further strengthen our position as a global provider of comprehensive, integrated maritime solutions,” Elbit President and CEO Bezhalel Machlis said in a company statement.

ISE was founded in 1974 and has worked on underwater robotics as well as autonomous and remotely operated systems.Elbit noted that the Canadian company has “delivered over 250 underwater vehicles to customers in more than 20 countries worldwide.”

Machlis, according to the statement, noted that the acquisition would build on the company’s “existing capabilities in naval electronic warfare, autonomous systems, naval precision munitions and maritime mission systems.”

Saar Koursh, Elbit’s senior vice president and general manager of Elbit Naval Systems said in a statement to Breaking Defense that “the maritime domain is an important growth area for Elbit Systems, and we continue to expand our capabilities to meet evolving operational needs.”

The addition of autonomous underwater capabilities through the acquisition complements Elbit’s existing Seagull unmanned surface vessel (USV), Koursh said. He added that the acquisition of ISE will enable Elbit to provide “naval forces with a complete multi-domain autonomous ecosystem, integrating UAVs, USVs and AUVs into a single mission framework.”

Elbit’s maritime systems also include “integrated command-and-control (C2) suites, electro-optical and sonar systems, communications and electronic warfare technologies,” Tuesday’s statement said.

Koursh explained that “this enables customers to deploy coordinated air, surface and underwater autonomous assets as part of one end-to-end operational solution, while also offering standalone systems tailored to specific customer needs.”

The Israeli company did not disclose the cost of the acquisition but noted it was “completed for a purchase price that is not material to Elbit Systems.”

The announcement comes as Elbit — along with Israel’s other defense giants — has seen record sales in recent years. In its second quarter financial report, released in August, it said it had revenues of $2.3 billion and a record order backlog of $32 billion.

Elbit has also been focused in recent years on expanding its naval systems in the autonomous and unmanned realm. The company foresees the acquisition of ISE expanding its capabilities in underwater intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) as well as mine counter measures and anti-submarine warfare.

The Israeli defense giant has been developing unmanned surface vessels over the last decade, developing a 12-meter and 20-meter version of its Seagull USV. Seagull has been outfitted to conduct mine clearance and anti-submarine warfare capabilities. In 2022 Seagull was sent to US Central Command’s Digital Horizon event in the Persian Gulf as part of a CENTCOM initiative to showcase the use of new unmanned systems. In a recent video, Elbit showcased the development of the USVs to conduct scanning and strikes at sea.

“One of Elbit’s important milestones has been the successful deployment of unmanned vessels in active military operations. Today, dozens of its USVs are in service worldwide with additional currently under production,” Elbit said in a 2025 statement. “These real-world deployments showcase how autonomous systems aim to safeguard maritime security while keeping personnel out of harm’s way.”

Elbit has expanded its work on naval solutions to other countries besides Canada. In February, Elbit and Germany’s TKMS said they had inaugurated a new production line in Israel for submarine components. In May, they signed an MOU for a “strategic framework agreement to explore opportunities for cooperation in the development, integration and commercialization of advanced naval defense solutions.”

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

EliseAI raises $350 million in funding

EliseAI, based in New York, is a company working to automate housing and healthcare systems. Its AI agents automate leasing, maintenance, renewals, billing, patient scheduling, intake and front-desk workflows.

The financing round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Sapphire Ventures and Navitas Capital. The company is now valued at $4 billion.

Rightway rakes in $155 million in Series E funding

New York City-based Rightway is a pharmacy benefit management and care navigation company. It serves both employers and health systems, including 45 Fortune 500 companies. It offers a 100% pass-through PBM model, in which all rebates and discounts negotiated with pharmacies and drug manufacturers are passed back to employers.

The Series E round was led by Francisco Partners, with participation from Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures. The financing will be used to expand its AI capabilities and technology, according to the announcement.

Forus raises $150 million in Series C funding

Forus, previously known as Tandem, offers a platform that connects doctors, pharmacies, payers and biopharma. The company uses AI agents to handle the administrative work between a provider prescribing a medication and a patient starting treatment, including navigating insurance, financial assistance and pharmacy logistics. Providers in all 50 states use the platform to treat patients in 85% of U.S. residential zip codes, according to the announcement.

The $150 million Series C round was led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Accel, Redpoint, BoxGroup, Pear VC, Avra, Human Capital, Neo, Vast Ventures and SV Angel. In total, Forus has raised more than $300 million.

Thyme Care secures $125 million in Series E funding

Nashville, Tennessee-based Thyme Care, founded in 2020, partners with health plans, employers and risk-bearing providers to support patients battling cancer. It offers care navigation services, technology and data insights and therapeutic interventions. The company helps patients understand their diagnosis, find a cancer doctor and receive clinical care between appointments. Patients also gain access to a team of providers, nurses and resource specialists. Its services are available to 10.5 million people across all 50 states.

The Series E round was led by Morgan Health and included participation from Humana, CVS Health Ventures, AlleyCorp, HealthQuest Capital, Foresite Capital, Concord Health Partners, Frist Cressey Ventures, Town Hall Ventures and a16z Bio + Health. The company is now valued at more than $2 billion.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

At Logan International Airport, I saw a few cameras while walking from the gate to the exit. When I entered a taxi going to my hotel, I saw a sign that said a camera would be recording the ride to protect everyone inside the car. While driving to the hotel, I noticed that some of the cars next to me had dashcams. We drove through a toll booth that had a license plate camera.

When I arrived at my hotel, I saw a few cameras in the lobby, the front desk, and the hallway near my room. A few hours later, a friend picked me up to go to someone’s house for dinner.

While driving in traffic, we saw three people loudly arguing with each other. Several people around them were recording the argument with their phones. As we approached the friend’s house, I saw a Ring camera on the front door while their next-door neighbor had three cameras surrounding their house.

Inside the home, we had interesting and provocative conversations over food and wine. I think one of the guests might have been wearing those smart glasses I’ve been hearing about. Or maybe not.

Those are the cameras I actually saw. Who knows how many others I didn’t see.

All of this made me wonder whether how much privacy we have left.

The use of video recording has increased sharply over the years. The cost of home security systems has decreased, which allows more homes and businesses to have them. Smartphones with cameras are ubiquitous.

In some places (like airports and hotels), seeing cameras in the premises is not unusual and probably expected for security purposes. On the other hand, people may be surprised and possibly feel uncomfortable seeing cameras in their taxis or in a homeowner’s dining room.

Video recordings have also done wonders for dispute resolution. Those who have dashcams have objective proof of what happened.

Also, video cameras provide security. An elaborate security system could deter low-level wannabe thieves. Indoor cameras can keep tabs on a babysitter to make sure she doesn’t let the five year old play Mortal Kombat before bedtime.

But increased video cameras also have their cons. Videos can be taken out of context. Most smartphone videos of people fighting or arguing seldom record the very beginning of the chain of events that started everything. While dashcams could eliminate he said/she said situations in a car accident, if the person at fault has a dashcam, he or she may not disclose its existence, particularly if it could result in a huge increase in their insurance premium.

Also, videos are permanent, and digital copies can be stored relatively cheaply and could last for a very long time with no degradation of quality. There are countless cases where someone was filmed doing something childish when they were a child and it came back to haunt them years, or even decades later, usually with the video being kept by a then friend or family member.

There have been calls to remove certain video cameras, with the most famous being Flock cameras. Flock is a company that produces automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras, usually placed near roads. Reasons for removal are due to potential misuse by law enforcement and hacking. Several isolated incidents have been reported, including multiple police officers disciplined or charged for using Flock data to stalk romantic partners/exes.

But during any discussion involving removing Flock or similar cameras, the sides should also consider Chesterton’s Fence which warns against tearing down a fence until they first understand why it was erected. So why were Flock’s ALPR cameras installed in the first place? Mainly for two reasons. First, to track cars that are involved in criminal activity. Second, to collect fees from drivers using toll roads.

Some people will eventually quote Benjamin Franklin where he basically says that those who give up essential liberties to purchase a little temporary security deserve neither. It should be noted that when Franklin said this, it was not in the context of individual privacy. Instead, it centered on a tax dispute involving paying for military defense of the frontier. Also, while Franklin’s words make some sense, he also did not live in a time where almost everyone had a portable video camera.

The cameras I encountered in Boston are not anomalies. I am sure that many large cities have a similar setup. The government and its citizens are at least armed with a smartphone with a digital camera.

Don’t expect laws or norms that provides universal guidelines for the optimal use of cameras that respect personal privacy. Every country, state, province, city, neighborhood, and block have individual needs.

People will act differently if they know they are being recorded. Sometimes it is for professional reasons. Lawyers will have to be careful when talking about what they do. Health care professionals must also be similarly careful, or they could violate HIPAA rules. But it is mainly to avoid being in a compromising position while being recorded as it may be used against them at the most inopportune time.

The cameras are not going away. They were put up to deter crime, collect toll fees, protect taxi drivers and passengers, and resolve car accidents. Otherwise, there will be more he said/she said situations, which could be unsolvable. To minimize future misuse, camera owners will instead place strict controls, such as logging in with IDs and documenting use.

Privacy in open spaces is not what it once was. But at least our thoughts are still private.

Steven Chung is a tax attorney in Los Angeles, California. He helps people with basic tax planning and resolve tax disputes. He is also sympathetic to people with large student loans. He can be reached via email at stevenchungatl@gmail.com. Or you can connect with him on Twitter (@stevenchung) and connect with him on LinkedIn.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

There it was, at the end: “Paid for by the U.S. government.”

I looked to my left. I looked to my right. It wasn’t so long ago, in the grand scheme of things, when Americans dumped a boatload of tea into Boston Harbor because they were infuriated about their tax dollars being wasted in ways they were given no say in.

Alas, my fellow bargoers were not so inflamed with the spirit of 1776. As far as I could tell, nobody else seemed to notice or care about the Trump ad they’d helped pay for.

The White House denied wrongdoing in paying for these ads with government funds, in the same way that a blood-soaked person standing over a corpse clutching a still-dripping butcher knife might deny wrongdoing. To anyone with even a passable knowledge of the law, however, there is no question that running these ads — this propaganda — on taxpayers’ dime is illegal. Yet, Trump has gotten away with doing so many illegal things, even getting out of serving any sentence whatsoever for the 34 felony counts that he was convicted of, that I certainly didn’t expect the mere fact of its illegality to ruffle more feathers than have already been ruffled.

But the sheer, brazen shamelessness of it shocked me. Ten years into Trump being a presidential candidate, president, ex-president, or some combination thereof, it’s not that easy for something he does to shock me.

Since paying for these political advertisements with tax dollars is so obviously, facially illegal, at first I was confused as to why Trump bothered to adhere to the part of the law that requires someone to disclose who paid for a campaign ad within the ad itself. I could only conclude that not telling everyone up front that he was seemingly stealing tax money would inevitably result in a future exposé, and the disclosure was in keeping with this administration’s philosophy that voters don’t care about a crime, they only care about the coverup.

For Trump’s base of rural support, I’m starting to wonder whether they care about coverups or anything else. There is no doubt that Trump’s economic policies have disproportionately impacted rural areas. Diesel fuel is more commonly used in rural America, and diesel prices sit at record highs thanks to the unnecessary war Trump launched in the Middle East. His healthcare and food assistance cuts primarily hurt rural communities. The Trump tariffs have been more of a detriment to lower-income households, which are more common in rural counties. Trump is trying to force small communities to welcome data centers their residents don’t want.

Still, knowing about all that requires just a slight detour outside of a rightwing media bubble, and the tiniest amount of critical thought. Also, all such things could be dismissed as, perhaps, the results of bad, though not ill-intentioned, policy. On the other hand, in these new ads, Trump is almost bragging: “Hey, FYI, I stole from all of you to pay for this.”

About half of rural voters still approve of Trump’s job performance — this is much higher than his approval among U.S. adults overall. More rural Americans are starting to voice frustrations about Trump’s handling of the economy, but, for the most part, those who voted for him are not frustrated enough to consider something as dramatic as voting for a Democrat.

I am from rural America. I still spend a lot of time in rural America (in the country, people in rural America would actually say). It really does break my heart to see Trump and the Republican Party he has now fully commandeered repeatedly pummel rural America in the kidneys, only to witness each time a nearly unified collective response of, “Please, sir, we’d like another.”

Well, I guess the Trump ads are at least misusing both country and city tax dollars alike. Not much more to be done about it before the midterms, I suppose, other than sit back, sip my beer, and keep watching.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Stride Consumer Partners Closes $550M Second Fund For Its Next Consumer Deals [Beauty Independent]

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Signing alongside Trump were Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, xAI’s Elon Musk, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. The voluntary pact promises four layers of safeguards for frontier models: internal monitoring, dedicated oversight teams, independent external audits, and board-level scrutiny.

Very serious stuff. Oversight on top of oversight.

Which is why it’s worth looking directly beneath the president’s signature on the document he posted to Truth Social, where his title reads “President of the Unites States.”

And a day later — it’s still up on Truth Social!

The one-page document was signed by a head of state and six men who collectively control a meaningful chunk of the world’s computing power, and not one of them (nor a single White House staffer) noticed that the name of the country was wrong… or was willing to mention it. Proofreading is for cucks, I guess.

The attention to detail for these folks is really in the toilet. And it’s hardly a one-off. This is the same administration whose DOJ cited “Title II of the Constitution” when firing employees, whose executive order purporting to block state AI regulation hallucinated its own fake law, and whose lawyers keep filing briefs that read like Truth Social posts.

They’re promising independent audits of a technology its own creators warn could be catastrophic, and they can’t even audit a signature line.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Oura Postpones Initial Public Offering [press release]
Oura Delays IPO Given Wall Street Jitters [WWD]

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Wall Street’s Trading Desks Come Down From a Record High [WSJ]
Markets saw a turbulent summer: the AI trade stumbled as semiconductor stocks fell, hedge fund Situational Awareness suffered a bruising decline and leveraged investors unwound their riskiest positions. Stocks subsequently recovered, and the S&P 500 ended the quarter with a gain.
The end result for banks is likely to be of the best third quarters they’ve had, better than a year ago, but not as strong as that second-quarter bonanza.

Wall Street’s Hopes for a Blockbuster IPO Season Are Fading [WSJ]
Investors had been lining up for a parade of IPOs this fall, expected to be headlined by a gigantic and record-setting offering from Anthropic. But volatility in oil prices and rising bond yields, as well as an intensifying debate around AI safety, have dented investor enthusiasm and prompted many of the companies to revisit their listing plans….
The string of delayed offerings illustrates how quickly investors’ enthusiasm for shares of risky new companies can cool. Investors were clamoring for newly issued shares when SpaceX raised $86 billion in its seemingly goldilocks debut in June—and getting rewarded for it until recently.

UBS Should Quit Switzerland Over Capital Rule, Investor Says [Bloomberg]
“The simple fact is that Switzerland is no longer an attractive or desirable location for UBS,” Artisan Partners portfolio managers including Daniel O’Keefe wrote in a letter to UBS’s board on Wednesday…. Artisan Partners estimated that the move could amount to around $36 billion of forgone market capitalization….

Fed watchdog finds no crimes in $2.4B building renovation, only mismanagement [AP]
[Jerome] Powell’s term as chair ended in May, but he took the highly unusual step of remaining on the board as one of seven governors. His term as a governor lasts until January 2028. Powell said earlier this year he would remain on the board at least until he is convinced that Pirro’s investigation is done. By keeping his seat, Powell has also prevented the Trump administration from filling another spot on the board.
Trump on Wednesday afternoon seized on the report to renew his call for Powell to resign from the Fed.

Sydney Sweeney’s racy ads help sports betting platform quadruple valuation to $2B [N.Y. Post]
Most of the new capital for Novig came from existing investors…. The platform’s earlier investors include venture-capital firms Pantera Capital, Multicoin Capital and NFX.

Eric Schmitt is a dolt. This isn’t really news. He was a drooling idiot as Missouri’s attorney general where he proved incapable of contending with the plain text of a statute and succeeded mostly in wasting taxpayer resources pursuing a facially frivolous challenge to void Joe Biden’s electoral votes. He’s since taken his talents to Capitol Hill where he’s been a dangerous, irresponsible malignancy as a senator.

Yesterday, he put his crackerjack lawyering skills to the cause of nailing Jack Smith, accusing the former special prosecutor of conspiring — somehow — with Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis based on smoking gun texts placing Smith in Atlanta.

Except, you know, none of that is true.

After Smith testified that he did not meet with Willis and doesn’t recall being in Atlanta, Schmitt sprung a perjury trap that Wile E. Coyote would’ve sniffed out as an obvious loser.

“What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warriors-Hawks game on February 3rd, 2024?”

A staffer hoisted a poster board before immediately taking it down. Schmitt offered to give Smith “a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself.” Smith asked if he could actually look at the board and Schmitt announced that Smith had already perjured himself. He wrapped up by calling Smith “a total dirtbag.”

Except Smith was NOT in Atlanta. He was, however, in Maryland watching the Iowa Hawkeyes (occasionally referred to as “Hawks”) defeat the Terps on the back of a 38-point effort from then-Hawkeye Caitlin Clark.

This was bizarre. I have never seen “evidence” introduced so quickly and then hidden.

Senator Eric Schmitt accuses Jack Smith of perjury for denying he went to an Atlanta Hawks game in February 2024. As it turns out, he went to an Iowa Hawkeyes game (in Maryland). pic.twitter.com/h0kYmNGejH

— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) September 29, 2026

Missouri borders Iowa.

This is dumb, yes. But that’s par for the course with Republican officials. But what’s really damning is that a former state AG represented that he had texts that said, “in Atlanta at a Warrior-Hawks game” which they absolutely did not. At best they say “Hawks” and at no point in the process did a supposed lawyer perform even cursory research before accusing a much more respected lawyer of perjury. Work this shoddy is shocking even for a conservative lawyer, which says a lot because the bar for bare competence among red state AGs is already low.

Indeed, it was a Republican AG who once infamously misspelled “Louisiana” in a brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of Louisiana. Oh wait, that was ERIC SCHMITT.

Speaking of Louisiana…

I don’t think we’re adequately appreciating that Sen. John Kennedy was so eager to get in on Eric Schmitt’s gotcha moment that he helped hold up the posterboard.

He even stares down Klobuchar with that look of “check and mate!” pic.twitter.com/HiAnWV8yRe

— Matt Fuller (@MEPFuller) September 29, 2026

Kennedy tried to glom onto Schmitt’s moment of triumph and only managed to bask in the reflected glow of humiliation. Honestly, this is the worst thing to ever happen to a John Kennedy in American history. Unlike Schmitt, Kennedy actually is smart deep down, having gotten degrees from a T14 law school and Oxford. But along the way his elite pedigree became an albatross and he’s adopted the cadence and mannerisms of Foghorn Leghorn. These days he’s largely traded his intellect for a caricature of what a dumb person imagines a smart person to be. For example, the Kennedy relentless yet inane bar exam pub quiz the senator makes judicial nominees endure. Obscure book knowledge? Sure. Practical relevance? No, but it looks “smart” if you don’t know any better.

Anyway, Kennedy ultimately realized he’d put his money on the wrong horse here. Because he’d actually put his money on a jackass.

Is this the first surrender cobra during a senate hearing? pic.twitter.com/cH3rwc8vgh

— Noble Prize in Sarcasm (@rewegreatyet) September 29, 2026

The Surrender Cobra: a sports phenomenon that — along with getting punked by Iowa — enjoys deep ties to Michigan football.

Senator Katie Britt, a United States Senator whose only claim to fame is getting dragged to hell and back by Scarlett Johansson, realized how badly Schmitt had embarrassed the Republican strategy and allowed us to watch in real-time.

The moment Sen. Katie Britt realized Schmitt’s mistake.

pic.twitter.com/9Fb1CHyBE8 pic.twitter.com/4DVJBhS2lz

— Adam Wren (@adamwren) September 29, 2026

Hang. It. In. The. Louvre.

Even the staffers managed to register high enough on the basic cognitive scale to understand:

Two Schmitt staffers realizing this might be their last day. pic.twitter.com/387Dm3bHc5

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 29, 2026

There’s a narrative going around that this is a staffer mistake, and let’s put that to bed right now. Obviously the staff failed to flag the problem before Schmitt went out with his pants down, but “accusing DOJ officials of perjury” is not a responsibility that gets farmed out. Schmitt owns this from top to bottom.

While his colleagues at all levels have figured out how badly this went, Schmitt is — it seems — refusing to back down:

After the hearing, Schmitt insisted he’d gotten nothing wrong, but he seemed less sure Smith had committed perjury.

“I don’t know if Jack Smith’s lying or not. It was the only game ― Atlanta was the only NBA game or men’s college basketball game that night at 7:30,” Schmitt told HuffPost.

Look, it’s not anti-Trans bigotry, it’s that Republicans just care so much about protecting women’s sports. So much that they can’t even fathom the possibility that someone might go watch a women’s college basketball game starring the best player in the country that year.

Psst… gang, I’m starting to think that it might just be anti-Trans bigotry.

What even is this? You are — ostensibly — a professional. For all the times that conservatives invoke the Framers, I’d just once like to hear how they think the authors of the Constitution would feel knowing that the congressional record is filled with comic sans visual aids.

At the end of the day, it was Senator Amy Klobuchar who got the board back in front of the witness, who then remembered the college hoops contest at Maryland.

But Klobuchar had an unfair advantage since, you know, her state also borders Iowa.

From Raw Story:

“That might be the confusion over the names of the team, but perhaps you should have looked at it more carefully,” Klobuchar told Schmitt.

Schmitt aggressively fired back.

“Whose questioning is this by the way, are you using your time, senator? Is this what this is, are we just having like an open session here? I’m glad you’re trying to rehabilitate the witness, but it’s not your time,” Schmitt said, raising his voice.

“You had the teams wrong, sir!” Klobuchar would eventually explain. It’s cliche at this point, but the fact that liberals managed to get custody of “sports” in the national divorce is an all-timer of a plot twist.

[Note: A number of additions have been made since the original publishing because this story keeps getting funnier]

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

The last of U.S. forces and equipment departed from Erbil Air Base, completing the withdrawal agreed to by Washington and Baghdad in 2024, U.S. Central Command announced yesterday in a statement.

“The primary responsibility for addressing Iraq’s remaining security challenges, including ISIS remnants and Iran-aligned militias that undermine Iraqi sovereignty and regional stability, now rests with the Government of Iraq,” Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell said in a separate statement.

“The United States remains committed to counterterrorism and will continue to work with Iraq and our partners to ensure ISIS can never reconstitute from Iraqi territory,” he added.

In 2003, the Bush administration sent military forces storming into Iraq and towards Baghdad with unproven claims that Saddam Hussein’s government possessed weapons of mass destruction. While it only took three weeks for U.S. forces to topple the Iraqi government, decades of sectarian violence and extremist uprisings ensued. The conflict also produced a series of scandals involving US forces, including abuses of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.

While U.S. forces did withdraw from the country in late 2011, they returned in 2014 to help fight against the Islamic State. U.S. troops have maintained a smaller presence in Iraq since then.

“As we step back and hand full primary responsibility for Iraq’s security to the Government of Iraq and the brave people of Iraq, US and Coalition forces stationed across the region will remain ready to respond to any ISIS threats that arise,” Adm. Brad Cooper, CENTCOM commander, said in a press release.

Parnell added that the U.S. expects Iraqi Security Forces “to lead the continuing effort to secure Iraq and keep ISIS remnants suppressed,” while the Defense Department will continue providing “targeted” training and intelligence support.

The withdrawal comes as Washington and Tehran remain at an impasse over a ceasefire to end their seven-month war, while Iran’s political interests and influence in Iraq remain strong.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

There was no reason given, which is just like always. Not that anyone needed one spelled out: Alito owns stock in other energy companies that, while not named parties in the case, have plenty riding on how it comes out, and ethics groups have spent months calling on him to step aside.

The case opens the Court’s new term next Monday, so Alito’s conscience kicked in with about a week to spare. Which I guess is an improvement since back in January, he stepped out of Chevron U.S.A. v. Plaquemines Parish days before oral argument because of those ConocoPhillips shares.

But nothing about Alito’s finances changed between February, when he voted to grant cert in Suncor, and Monday. His long-delayed financial disclosure confirmed he was still holding ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66 — the same holdings behind his recusal from the 2023 cert petition in this very case, and from a 2025 petition raising the same question against different oil companies. Back in May, a Court spokeswoman told NBC News that Alito “does not have a financial interest in any party” and that “his recusal is not required.” The Court also explained that the 2023 recusal had been “inadvertent.”

So he inadvertently got it right once, then deliberately got it wrong, and now he’s back to right. Progress!

What did change is how hard the conflict got to ignore. As Politico notes, Consumer Watchdog has pointed out that both ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66 have repeatedly warned their shareholders about the potential financial consequences of the case. It’s tough to claim you have no stake in the outcome when the companies you own keep telling you, in writing, that you do. The group also found that every climate case currently stayed pending the outcome of Suncor names ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, or both as defendants.

Consumer Watchdog called the recusal the “right decision, and one he should have made from the start.”

“The public should not have to wonder whether a justice’s personal investments could benefit from a ruling that shields the fossil-fuel industry from liability,” said Organizing Director Alexandra Nagy.

The public shouldn’t have to wonder, but under an ethics code where the only enforcement mechanism is the justice’s own judgment, wondering is all the public gets. And for too long Alito’s judgment was that everything was fine, but better late than never, I guess.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

In a letter to the National Defense Industrial Association, Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), told the defense trade group on Monday to remind its member companies “of their obligation to be responsive to congressional oversight.”

“Specifically, I am concerned that the current Administration has departed from decades of precedent in favor of unethical or even nakedly corrupt dealings with the private sector,” he said in the letter to NDIA President David Norquist.

“At times, the Administration has appeared to inappropriately fuse the government contracting process with the attempted extraction of political or private favors,” Himes added.

Himes said the committee could seek documentation, communications, testimony and other information to understand how donations to the ballroom were solicited “and whether contributions were related in any way to the goal of obtaining or maintaining government contracts, access to the President or Administration officials, or other benefits.”

The committee may also weigh whether dealings constituted a conflict of interest or a national security risks, and whether to propose legislation that would mandate further disclosure requirements or safeguards, he wrote.

NDIA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Himes is likely to take over to take over HPSCI in the event that Democrats win the House during midterm elections this November — a prospect that seems likely, according to recent polling data.

Trump announced plans to rebuild the White House ballroom last year, pledging that private donations would pay for the project instead of taxpayer money. Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton and Palantir are among the government contractors who have donated to the White House ballroom project, according to CNN and other news outlets who cited a list provided by the White House.

Himes did not name any individual contractor in his letter or raise any specific conflict of interest concern, stating only that “[s]ome of the companies publicly identified as having contributed funding to this effort are members of the NDIA.”

But Himes also suggested that the committee could investigate defense industry matters beyond the ballroom project, stating in the letter that HPSCI “may seek documents and other information to understand other unusual dealings between the White House, senior Administration officials, and NDIA members.”

Himes’ letter may foreshadow the kind of scrutiny defense contractors can expect if Democrats take the gavel of key defense and intelligence congressional committees. In August, The Washington Sun reported that defense lobbyists were already bracing for increased oversight if Democrats take one or both chambers of Congress during the midterms, with lobbyists expecting potential investigations into the Qatari-gifted Air Force One jet and the Pentagon’s equity stakes in defense and critical minerals companies.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Hedge funds hold a record share of the $30 trillion Treasury market. What could go wrong? [CNBC]
The shift is helping the government find buyers as its pile of debt grows, but it may also be making the world’s largest bond market more vulnerable…. “When forced deleveraging happens due to extreme situations or crisis scenarios, it may result in broader liquidity and financial stability event.”

Paramount Faces Up to $500 Million a Year in Costlier Debt [Bloomberg]
Borrowing this week instead of three months ago will cost it hundreds of millions of dollars a year in extra interest, now that growing fears about global inflation have lifted borrowing rates…. That’s a problem for a company that will wind up carrying a huge debt load….
It will rank as one of the biggest borrowers in Bloomberg’s junk bond universe.

SpaceX Just Got a Little Closer to a Tesla Merger [Barron’s]
Many investors and analysts believe a Tesla-SpaceX merger is inevitable. Most also see an all-stock deal with SpaceX paying a premium.

We need ‘right to intervene’ in AI amid growing threat, says Bank of England boss [Guardian]|
The governor stopped short of calling for a regulatory clampdown. “Regulation is not, in my view, the right place to start. In the excitement surrounding AI development, there is a risk that we move too quickly to debates about regulatory architecture before establishing where the failure exists in the first place.”

Ken Griffin Is Making the Largest Donation to Higher Education in U.S. History [WSJ]
The Pittsburgh-based university, known for its expertise in computer science, artificial intelligence and robotics, will open a 35-acre campus in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood that will focus on technology and innovation.

In February 2020, Trump predicted that COVID would go away — “like a miracle” — very quickly.

Mm-hmm.

In fact, the country would be “opened up” by Easter 2020.

Mm-hmm.

He predicted that the war in Iran would end four or five weeks after it started.

Mm-hmm.

He predicted that Mexico would pay for the wall.

Mm-hmm.

He predicted that the new White House ballroom would cost $200 million.

Mm-hmm.

He predicted that it would take two weeks to renovate the reflecting pool on the National Mall.

Mm-hmm.

He predicted that China would pay the cost of tariffs.

Mm-hmm.

In 2016, he predicted that he would eliminate the national debt in eight years.

Mm-hmm.

In 2024, he predicted that he would be “slashing energy and electricity prices by half within 12 months, at a maximum 18 months.”

Mm-hmm.

He predicted that he would end the war between Ukraine and Russia within 24 hours of his taking office.

Mm-hmm.

And now — remarkably, just before the midterm elections — Trump has a few predictions about problems that will disappear — right after the elections!

He predicts that energy costs and gas prices will drop — right after the elections!

He predicts that he’ll negotiate an end to the war with Iran — right after the elections!

He predicts that his superior mind is sufficient to control the dangers of artificial intelligence.

Mm-hmm.

Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and later oversaw litigation, compliance and employment matters at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Vyrao Acquired by Brand Platform Tresalis [Business of Fashion]

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Richard Painter, George W. Bush’s chief White House ethics lawyer, so not a guy who arrived at the resistance by birth, did not mince words, writing on X, “this could be an impeachable offense. @POTUS has no right to use taxpayer money for campaign ads. Congress has expressly prohibited government sponsored political propaganda, which is dangerous for democracy.”

Painter is not alone in his assessment. “The president and his administration have gone from breaking the law to trampling it,” Norm Eisen, who did the ethics job in Barack Obama’s White House and has sued the Trump administration several times, told the New York Times. “The prior ad was bad enough, but this one openly repurposes prior political conduct.” Margaret Dylus-Yukins, senior legal counsel for ethics at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, was just as blunt, “A divisive campaign commercial paid for by the U.S. government defies the Hatch Act’s very purpose.”

So what does the White House have to say for itself? On Friday, it published a defense with the extremely confident title “Presidential Public Service Announcements Are Nothing New.” The argument goes like this: these can’t be campaign ads because Trump isn’t on the ballot and there’s no call to action, and anyway, Bush did it, Obama did it, Biden did it, and so did Woodrow Wilson and FDR.

Let’s take those in order. Trump isn’t on the ballot, except that he’s told voters to “pretend” he is. There’s no call to action, except that the new ad asks viewers to join his fight. And Wilson and FDR were selling world wars, which is a different vibe from a midterm cycle.

To use the technical term, the defense is weak-ass shit.

The White House leads with the Bush administration’s campaign selling the 2003 Medicare prescription drug law to seniors. Well… about that. In 2004, the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) found the Bush administration violated the federal appropriations law against propaganda with that very Medicare push. Painter told the Times:

“They really shouldn’t have done it the way they did,” Mr. Painter said, referring to the Bush administration ad, which aired before he joined the White House. “Even though it’s nowhere near as bad as this. Nowhere near.”

So the White House’s leading example of how normal all this is turns out to be a campaign the government’s auditors called illegal. Cool, great, very airtight.

This administration treats the Hatch Act as a suggestion. Earlier this month, the Attorney General spoke at a Republican midterm rally, and the DOJ waved it off. It has also shown it’s perfectly comfortable treating taxpayer money as a fund for Trump’s friends. The Times, citing AdImpact, estimates the government has spent more than $1 million on pro-Trump ads in just the last several days. Trump has a super PAC sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars, but why spend his money when he can spend yours?

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

That boundary is now eroding. Since January 2025, the US government has announced $27.7 billion across 39 transactions involving direct ownership or equity-like stakes, according to the Council on Foreign Relations’ US Government Deal Trackers. The investments span critical minerals, semiconductors, manufacturing, infrastructure and other strategic sectors.

The rationale is not difficult to understand. Economic security and national security increasingly overlap, and China dominates important parts of critical-mineral processing and other strategic supply chains. Governments around the world are using subsidies, state-owned companies, export restrictions and other forms of intervention to secure industrial advantage. In that environment, there are circumstances in which the US government putting capital at risk alongside private investors can help unlock a strategically important project.

But not every strategic problem needs the federal government on the share register. Government is poorly equipped to behave like a conventional investment manager, and public capital should not substitute for private investment where markets can reasonably deliver the same outcome.

If Washington is going to assume equity risk, the case for doing so should be clear, exceptional and subject to consistent rules.

Any government equity play should follow a disciplined assessment of whether alternative support mechanisms, such as a loan, guarantee, offtake agreement, procurement contract, or conventional subsidy, could achieve the objective more effectively. If government capital is deemed necessary to bridge the gap where private capital returns may be unmet, this intervention requires rigorous due diligence on company selection and valuation, alongside a clear understanding of the strategic benefit to the government.

Crucially, to address what happens when private capital is eventually ready and willing to take over, the government must establish a clear exit strategy for itself. Such rigor in planning the eventual off-ramp for government capital is especially important where Washington is simultaneously acting as a shareholder, regulator, customer, or policymaker.

Recent critical-minerals deals show how quickly the boundaries are shifting. The Pentagon’s $400 million investment in MP Materials combined equity with loans, price support and an offtake agreement, while the Department of Energy took warrants in Lithium Americas and its Thacker Pass joint venture as part of a restructuring intended to reduce taxpayer risk. Equity is becoming another tool of US industrial policy, often layered onto other forms of public support. That makes rigorous investment and governance standards more important, not less.

The issue becomes particularly acute when Washington invests in foreign companies, in some cases, repeatedly. If the federal government is going to invest taxpayer money abroad, it should establish governance expectations comparable to those it would expect when investing in an American public company. That means appropriate independent oversight, credible audit arrangements, scrutiny of related-party transactions, protections against inappropriate dilution, transparent financial reporting and meaningful remedies when agreed governance standards are breached.

It does not mean that American investment should automatically subject a foreign company to the full reach of American corporate or securities law. Different jurisdictions have different corporate structures, and credible governance systems need not be American per se. But American public investment should carry credible investor protections, just as any sophisticated institutional investor would consider before committing substantial capital.

Washington already negotiates such protections in some deals. When it invested in Canada-based Trilogy Metals, the US government negotiated the right to designate an independent third-party director and, subject to its continuing shareholding, a non-voting board observer. It also obtained a consent right over certain very large increases in indebtedness.

The question is why such protections should be reinvented transaction by transaction. As federal equity investment becomes more common, agencies should establish a baseline set of governance principles for investments in foreign companies. Those principles should be adaptable to the circumstances of a transaction rather than mechanically exporting US securities regulation overseas. But at minimum, federal equity investments in foreign companies should carry a baseline set of governance protections covering independent board and audit oversight, related-party transactions, dilution, disclosure and the government’s rights when governance standards deteriorate.

Robust protections are better for taxpayers, but also fairer to American companies. A US company raising capital on an American exchange operates within a demanding framework of disclosure, audit and corporate-governance requirements. It would be an odd form of industrial policy if a foreign competitor could receive preferential US taxpayer capital while facing materially weaker safeguards over how that capital and the company itself are governed.

Clear rules also benefit the recipients of government investment by reducing uncertainty. They make it easier for companies to understand what accepting federal capital entails and harder for individual transactions to become exercises in political bargaining.

More importantly, they could make strategic industrial policy more durable. An investment whose purpose, valuation and protections are transparent is easier to defend to Congress, auditors, future administrations and taxpayers. One negotiated hurriedly behind closed doors is easier to characterize as favoritism for a subsequent administration to unwind.

There is a danger in allowing the debate over governance to obscure the more fundamental question of when the US government should own companies at all. The test should be whether government ownership solves a specific problem that less intrusive instruments cannot, and whether the prospective public return adequately compensates taxpayers for the additional risk.

The Trump administration has clearly rediscovered equity as an instrument of economic statecraft, and the US government is already a shareholder in companies beyond its borders. The practical challenge is therefore to make it a more disciplined one. That starts with due diligence before the investment, clarity about what public ownership is supposed to achieve, transparent criteria for choosing recipients, a credible route eventually to exit and governance protections appropriate to the risks taxpayers are being asked to bear.

Washington should not behave like a political patron dispensing capital to favored companies. Nor should it be a passive shareholder willing to accept protections that a sophisticated private investor would reject. If the US government is going to invest like an institutional investor, it should govern its investments like one too.

Phillip Cornell is managing director of ASIO Energy LTD, senior energy advisor at the Economist, and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He was previously senior advisor to the chairman and CEO of Saudi Aramco and to the head of the International Energy Agency.

Stephen Rodriguez is a defense investor at DCVC. He is also founder of One Defense and a senior advisor at the Atlantic Council.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

This lateral merry-go-round is getting dizzying.

Three weeks ago, corporate chair Michael Aiello left Weil for Cravath with five M&A partners, a move Weil pointedly described as a jump to “a smaller platform.” Last week, Paul Weiss helped itself to Weil’s private equity co-head and three more lawyers. Weil has now filled that hole with the man running private equity at Cravath, who used to run a piece of it at Weil.

Executive partner Barry Wolf called Feist “an exceptional private equity lawyer” and a “longtime friend and colleague to many of us at Weil.” Ramona Nee, who succeeds Wolf as executive partner, leaned into it harder — Feist “has chosen to come home to Weil,” and his return “reflects the scale of our ambitions and our commitment to investing in the best talent.”

Cravath in a statement said, “We wish Peter well in his future endeavors.”

That’s the standard-issue Biglaw goodbye that wishes the defector well and says absolutely nothing, which is precisely what Weil couldn’t bring itself to do when Aiello walked out the door. Turns out there was a graceful option available the entire time.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

And while venture capital funding for defense has increased by 10 times since 2019, other funding pools like private equity remain relatively untapped by defense companies

“Defense does not face a shortage of capital. It faces barriers that make expanded investment, particularly in critical bottleneck areas, more difficult,” states the study.

“The challenge is creating the conditions that allow capital to flow to the facilities, technologies, workforce, and production capacity needed to strengthen the defense industrial base and deliver for the warfighter,” it said.

AIA commissioned the study, which was performed by Bain, in the hopes of explaining to federal decisionmakers how to incentivize more private investment in defense companies, AIA President Eric Fanning told Breaking Defense in an interview.

“There’s a misunderstanding of how much private capital is in defense, how you incentivize it, move it towards defense, and things that you do that inadvertently create barriers to that type of investment,” he said. “Venture capital, private equity, retirement funds — they’re all looking for different things, and you want to create that mix of investment return possibilities to attract that diversity of investment.”

Bain conducted 50 interviews with large primes, startups, investors, banks and others throughout the Pentagon and industry. AIA also provided results from a member survey and data analysis.

“Investment in aerospace and defense stocks has grown,” the study states,“However, private capital is distributed unevenly, and there are often ‘unseen’ gaps.”

One of those gaps is domestic refining of critical minerals like gallium and germanium, which are used in defense products ranging from missiles to radar to magnets.

Mining critical minerals is “capital-intensive and subject to global commodity price fluctuations, while some important machinery is produced abroad,” the study said. “These dynamics give investors pause. Recent policies have increased focus on critical input challenges, but projects remain long-cycle and high risk.”

The Defense Department has taken the unusual step of taking stakes in US-based critical minerals companies, such as a $400 million direct equity investment in MP Materials last year.

While the study did not directly address whether those equity stakes are likely lead to greater private investment, Fanning said government funding was pivotal for ensuring that the US retains access to critical minerals.

“This is a place where there needs to be some government investment,” he said. “If that is considered a national security priority, which I think everybody agrees on, being able to reshore some of this critical mineral availability, there isn’t enough of a demand from the defense industrial base to justify fully private investment to reshore that capability.

Another key gap is sub-tier manufacturing of critical components like castings and forgings, advanced semiconductors, energetics, sensors and solid rocket motors, the study stated. These items are typically made by second- or third-tier suppliers who may be privately held, or may choose to use the majority of their production capacity for more lucrative commercial contacts.

“Smaller suppliers can find rapid increases in demand particularly challenging. Their access to capital is lower given their size, especially without a firm order or signed contract,” the study said. “They often also lack the infrastructure to rapidly hire and train employees, especially when located in less densely populated geographies.”

The study did not lay out specific ways to shore up the second and third tiers of the supply chain. However, suppliers told AIA-Bain that the demand signal from the Pentagon was critical for being able to obtain and make investments. One recommendation from the report stated that long-term contracts would “drive supplier investment and productivity.”

Big Gains In VC funding, But Private Equity Lags

Despite the attention on venture capital money flowing into the defense tech space, the “overwhelming majority” of investment dollars continues to come from the stock market, particularly retirement funds and other investors who are seeking stable, predictable cash flows, the study said. (This can be a double-edged sword, the study stated, with defense not seen as a sector where an investment will generate a large return.)

However, venture capital investment in the defense sector remains a good news story. Investments in defense have shot up from $1 billion in 2019 to about $10 billion in 2025, with successes like Palantir and SpaceX leading to a growth in venture capital dollars to other defense tech startups, particularly in areas such as space, AI, drones and software, according to the AIA-Bain report.

At the same time, “US venture capital investment in defense is low relative to the technology sector and overall venture investment,” with only about 5–6 percent of global venture capital funds heading toward defense companies.

Another key constraint pointed to “overwhelmingly” by venture capital investors and defense tech startups is the funding gap that exists when a firm is transitioning to production.

Companies in their research and development stage “attract private venture investment because their high risk profile, with the potential for a large exit multiple, matches VC investment models,” while a company in a mature production stage attracts investment because of the low risk involved, AIA-Bain stated.

“There is no ‘fit-for-purpose’ investment model for the space in between—when a promising technology has not yet been demonstrated and produced,” the study said.

rivate equity participation in defense is still relatively small at around $1 billion to $3 billion annually, with most private equity dollars streaming toward companies that do significant business in commercial sectors like aerospace or industrials.

“Private equity focuses on established businesses with predictable cash flows, operational improvement potential, and clear exit paths. The most attractive investments therefore have predictable future volumes that can be forecast with confidence using rich and reliable data,” the AIA-Bain study states.

“Historically, defense opportunities have often not met these criteria,” it continued. “But many private-equity leaders interviewed suggest that is changing because of market growth and acquisition reforms.”

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Anthropic ‘warns of existential AI risks to humanity’ in IPO document [Guardian]
The prospectus – a document outlining a company’s finances, growth plans and risk profile ahead of a share listing – is said to warn that AI models could exhibit “self-preserving behaviours”, including attempts to “resist shutdown”, to “conceal or manipulate information” and behaviour “resembling blackmail”…. Anthropic is reportedly seeking a valuation of more than $2tn, compared with the $1.8tn achieved by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Smart ring maker Oura puts off initial public offering due to market ‘uncertainty’ [AP]
The IPO market had a solid start to the year but tailed off in the third quarter, according to research firm Renaissance Capital. Concerns about a possible slowdown in spending on artificial intelligence, the Federal Reserve’s resumption of rate hikes and a surge in bond yields — making borrowing more expensive — all played a factor, Renaissance said.

Piper Sandler Holds Talks to Buy Perella Weinberg [WSJ]
Piper Sandler was formed through the 2020 merger of Piper Jaffray and Sandler O’Neill & Partners, two investment banks known for advising smaller and midsize companies on deals…. Perella Weinberg was founded in 2006 by Wall Street veterans Joseph Perella, Peter Weinberg and Terry Meguid. It went public in 2021 via a blank-check firm when such vehicles were all the rage. Weinberg stepped down as CEO in January 2023 and was replaced by Andrew Bednar.

Apollo’s Slok Says Financial System Risks an ‘Agentic Bank Run’ [Bloomberg]
“If every household used AI agents to optimize the return on their cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system,”[chief economist Torsten] Slok said in a note on Sunday…. AI assistants may soon move cash into accounts paying 3.3% to 5.0%, instead of the 0.1% national average on checking accounts, Slok said. He also cited several fintech companies offering higher rates on deposits than banks, including SoFi Technologies Inc., which offers 4.5% on deposits, as well as LendingClub, now known as Happen Inc.

IRS Threatens Crackdown on Array of Wall Street Tax Dodges [Bloomberg]
These include hedge-fund strategies that use swaps and currency derivatives to generate ordinary losses that can offset income tax — transactions which are at the heart of products such as AQR Capital Management’s Delphi Plus fund.
Also on the list were so-called box spread ETFs, which use options to turn interest income into capital gains….
“Treasury is saying, ‘We see you and we’re going to start taking a closer look at this stuff,’” Brent Sullivan, who runs the popular Tax Alpha Insider blog, said of Monday’s notice and ruling. “They are still trying to understand exactly what’s happening in the industry. So it seems like the 351 post-transaction stuff is the most concrete and the rest of it is just like, ‘Okay, we’re still gathering information.’”

Some background, for those just tuning in. The White House banned the three outlets last Saturday, with Trump explaining that “Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES.” The outlets sued, and brought in Gibson Dunn, which has won this fight before. The White House answered with a whole lot of talking points and not a lot of case law. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, who handled the Jim Acosta press-pass case in 2018, was not impressed. He issued a 14-day temporary restraining order and noted that the administration “provided no support for its assertion that any of the disputed stories contained classified information or damaged national security.” Some of the reporting Trump was so mad about was, per the judge, “months or years old.”

Then came the dinner, and the White House’s explanation: “This is a pre-credentialed event. Contrary to what the Fake News wants you to believe, they don’t just get to have free rein into every part of the White House.”

Well, nobody asked for free rein, just for the same access Chinese state media received.

That’s when Laurence Tribe — the Harvard constitutional law professor emeritus, and someone who has spent a career weighing presidential power — went on “OutFront” and told Erin Burnett that he’d looked for historical parallels and came up empty, “This president does not recognize that he is subject to the law. I was trying to think of parallels in history, but there really are none.”

So Tribe went looking among the monarchs. King George III, the guy the entire American experiment was built to reject? He “didn’t have this kind of power,” according to Tribe. George “tried to control coverage, but he was responsible to a parliament,” Tribe explained. “This Congress basically does, because of the MAGA element, what the president wants.”

Yup, the guy the entire American Revolution is about? Less bad than our current president.

But Tribe goes harder. He moved on to Louis XIV, the Sun King, the man who is remembered for building Versailles and saying “L’état, c’est moi.” Louis, per Tribe, also “didn’t go this far.” The Sun King said he was answerable to no earthly authority and didn’t push it as far as Trump.

The constitutional scholar went looking for historical parallels and ran out of monarchs.

“We can’t have this in this country. That’s dictatorship,” Tribe said. “He would like basically to be not just King Trump, but Emperor Trump… and I don’t think that the American people are having it…”

The country was literally founded to get away from King George. Now a Harvard constitutional law professor says George had more limits on him than our president does. That should be a wake-up call for anyone who cares about the American experiment. It won’t be, but it should be.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Thursday evening, ADARx priced its IPO of more than 26 million shares at $17 each, raising $446.3 million. That tops the 21.9 million shares the San Diego-based company initially planned to offer in the range of $15 to $17 per share. Concurrent with the IPO, ADARx partner AbbVie purchased additional shares in a private placement that raised $89 million, bringing the biotech’s total haul to $535.3 million. Shares of ADARx began trading on the Nasdaq Friday under the stock symbol “ADRX.”

ADARx is working in a class of genetic medicines that employ small-interfering RNA (siRNA) to target and degrade the messenger RNA for a protein that causes disease. This knockdown of a gene’s expression of a protein is also known as RNA interference or gene silencing. Some disease-driving proteins are already drugged by large and small molecule medicines. But these modalities still leave many other proteins unaddressed, an unmet that could be filled by siRNA therapies.

“Many proteins are undruggable by small molecules or [monoclonal antibodies] due to the lack of accessible binding sites, intracellular localization or structural complexity,” ADARx said in the IPO filing. “siRNA directly addresses these challenges through the sequence-based rational design and the selective silencing of target mRNA, inhibiting the target at its source, making it a powerful technology with the potential to overcome the limitations of traditional therapeutic modalities.”

FDA-approved drugs from companies such as Alnylam Pharmaceuticals and Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals validated siRNA medicines, but they still have limitations. The available siRNA drugs only go after liver targets. The frequent dosing of these medicines can also be a burden to patients.

ADARx’s drugs come from two technology platforms, one that designs siRNAs for better potency, precision, and durability, and the other that enables delivery to organs and tissues beyond the liver. The most advanced program is onvuzosiran, an experimental treatment for hereditary angioedema (HAE), a rare inherited disorder that leads to swelling attacks throughout the body. These attacks come without warning and can become fatal when they close off the airway. Onvuzosiran is designed to interfere with mRNA for pre-kallikrein, a protein in the pathway that leads to HAE swelling attacks.

The available HAE drugs span oral small molecules and biologics that are injected or infused. The only RNA-targeted therapy is Ionis Pharmaceuticals’ Dawnzera, which the FDA approved last year for preventing HAE attacks. This antisense oligonucleotide, designed to target pre-kallikrein mRNA, is dosed by subcutaneous injection every four or eight weeks.

In addition to better efficacy, ADARx aims to ease the dosing burden. In Phase 1/2 testing, onvuzosiran led to “robust reduction” in blood levels of pre-kallikrein and kallikrein, along with durability that supports dosing every three or six months, according to the filing. A 90-patient placebo-controlled Phase 3 study is ongoing with preliminary data expected by the end of 2027. If those data are positive, ADARx expects to file an FDA submission in 2028.

ADARx is also enrolling patients in mid-stage tests of agazisiran, a siRNA designed to block factor B, a protein in the complement system. Three Phase 2 studies are underway spanning rare kidney diseases, the rare blood disorder paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, and the eye disease geography atrophy secondary to age-related macular degeneration. ADARx expects preliminary data will start coming out in the second half of next year.

The third clinical-stage program is ADX-626, a siRNA designed to target a protein called Factor XI for secondary stroke prevention. A Phase 1 test in healthy volunteers is ongoing. ADARx plans to start a Phase 2a/b clinical trial in 2027 with preliminary data expected by the end of that year. ADARx’s preclinical programs aim to demonstrate siRNA delivery beyond the liver. ADX-077 is designed to target adipose tissue for potential applications in obesity. ADX-199 targets neurons for the potential treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

In its history as a private company, ADARx raised $352.5 million, according to the filing. Its last financing was a $200 million Series C round in 2023 led by Bain Capital Life Sciences and TCGX. The filing shows OrbiMed is ADARx’s largest shareholder with a 22.7% post-IPO stake. The company also has money from AbbVie, which last year paid ADARx $335 million up front to begin a partnership on siRNA drugs in neuroscience, immunology, and oncology. When the private placement closes, AbbVie will own about 4.9% of ADARx’s outstanding shares, the biotech said.

As of the end of June, ADARx reported its cash position was $427.3 million. That capital and the IPO proceeds will support the pipeline. About $65 million is planned for completion of onvuzosiran’s pivotal trial in HAE as well as pre-commercialization activities. Another $180 million is budgeted for completing the Phase 2 test of agazisiran and advancing that program to Phase 3.

ADARx has budgeted $80 million for ADC-626’s Phase 1 test in healthy volunteers and the start of Phase 2 testing in secondary stroke prevention. The company also plans an exploratory trial of this siRNA for stroke prevention in atrial fibrillation. Another $25 million will go toward ADX-077’s Phase 1 trial. ADARx estimates its capital will last into 2030.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

However, today’s ruling does not impact in the Northern District of California, Judge Rita Lin ruled last month against the Trump administration’s attempt to ban Anthropic from all federal contracts. The DC court ruling, by contrast, only covers the Defense Department ban.

Pentagon CTO Emil Michael, who has led the charge against Anthropic, took to social media to declare that “the hammer of justice has smashed AnthropicAI[’s] arguments. They are a Supply Chain Risk to the defense industrial base [and] warfighters will sleep better knowing that no private company will insert their opinions in the chain of command.”

Anthropic, for its part, released a statement that kept its options open. “We respectfully disagree with the court’s decision. Another federal court has already held the government’s parallel designation unlawful,” the statement said, referring to the California case. “We remain confident in our position and are considering all options, including further review.”

“The Department had ample support for its conclusion that the continued integration of Claude into the Department’s information systems, by the Department or its contractors, presented a statutorily covered national-security risk,” Judge Gregory Katsas wrote for himself and Judge Naomi Rao, both Trump appointees. “As Anthropic admits, the company encodes restrictions into Claude that prevent the model from performing tasks that Anthropic wishes to prevent. On more than one occasion, these restrictions have stopped Claude from performing tasks requested by government users.”

“I cannot agree that this is the scenario the Congress had in mind when it enacted FASCSA,” the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018, dissented Judge Karen Henderson, an appointee of George H.W. Bush. That Act was explicitly passed to protect against sabotage by malignant foreign powers, she wrote, not a US company openly building safety and ethics guardrails into its products.

“Because of the law that was used to declare them a supply chain risk, the case went straight to the DC Circuit, which is an appellate court,” Charlie Bullock of the Institute for Law & AI explained to Breaking Defense in an exchange on X.com. “The only appeal from there is to the Supreme Court (which doesn’t have to accept appeals; it exercises discretion and generally grants only a small percentage of appeal requests) or to an en banc panel of the D.C. Circuit (also discretionary, also not granted super often).”

However, “if a full panel is granted, all bets are off,” said Sean Timmons, a former JAG Corps officer now at law firm Tully Rinckey.

The reason, Timmons said, is that the full DC Circuit Court of Appeals has a mix of Trump, Biden, Obama, and Bush appointees. That makes it much more diverse and unpredictable than the randomly selected three-judge panel that issued today’s ruling, which happened to include two Trump appointees.

“You’ve got two people appointed by Trump [saying] we’re not going to step in and undo a decision based on national security parameters, because national security is the sole prerogative of the chief executive,” Timmons told Breaking Defense. “It’s pretty egregious… but when you invoke national security, the courts are kind of like Pontius Pilate: They just want to wash their hands and walk away.”

However, he went on, the Anthropic case is so high profile and so controversial in the legal community that the full court might feel compelled, not only to grant an appeal, but to overturn the panel’s 2-1 ruling. And if any legal team can make that happen, he added, it’s the one Anthropic has assembled.

Bullock independently arrived at a similar conclusion in his analysis online of the 2-1 panel ruling and further prospects. “This was the expected outcome, given the terrible luck Anthropic had with the panel draw,” he posted. “I would expect Anthropic to win before an en banc DC Circuit and likely even before SCOTUS, but they’re not guaranteed any appeal at all.”

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hires Wall Street economist David Zervos [CNBC]
Zervos will add intellectual firepower to the Treasury after a series of staff departures that have drawn some attention. Seven of the department’s 16 Senate-confirmed appointees had left the department as of mid-August…. Bessent is on his third chief of staff since becoming Treasury secretary in January 2025….
Zervos was considered by Trump to run the Federal Reserve, though the president ultimately chose Kevin Warsh for the job in January.

Citi Expands Digital-Assets Footprint With Coinbase Partnership [WSJ via Yahoo!]
It is the latest sign that efforts to connect traditional banking and the alternative financial system that powers cryptocurrencies are pushing ahead despite a recent setback for the crypto industry in Washington…. Citi's institutional clients, including large multinational corporations, will be able to accept stablecoin payments from their customers at checkout through Citi's merchant-processing services.

Nvidia announces jaw-dropping $150 billion stock buyback, largest single authorization in history [Yahoo!]
It brings the company's total buyback authorization to $235 billion…. [CEO Jensen] Huang likely sees a great moment to buy back Nvidia shares on the cheap, ahead of further acceleration in AI development.

Blackstone’s Top Private-Equity Executive Is Preparing to Leave Firm [WSJ]
[Joseph] Baratta, who has been with Blackstone for nearly three decades, has been the firm’s global head of private equity since 2012 and is one of its most senior executives…. Senior executives at Blackstone have long faced the reality that Jonathan Gray, the firm’s 56-year-old president, is expected to succeed CEO Stephen Schwarzman. Schwarzman, 79 years old, co-founded Blackstone in 1985. That leaves few paths for growth for someone as senior as Baratta, 55.

Elizabeth Holmes Posts Cryptic Message From Prison Ahead of ‘You Can See Everything’ Release: ‘I Was Silenced for a Long Time’ [Variety via Yahoo!]
"I was silenced for a long time. And then imprisoned. I am fighting to prove my innocence and come home to my babies and the love of my life. I have now been imprisoned for 1,216 endless days and nights. During that time, as we fight for freedom, my loved ones have helped manage my account. Billy is one of the people carrying that responsibility for me. He fights fiercely for me and our family. I love him beyond space and time. Starting now, all posts in my own words will be marked -EAH. Posts without that signature are from the team managing this account…." Holmes' post also comes on the heels of her announced move to a halfway house next summer.

I think that’s a loss. There was probably a time when you read because you wanted to know what happened next. You had a favorite author. You looked forward to visiting the library or walking through a bookstore. Nobody had to explain the benefits of reading to you. You enjoyed it. And if you want to develop a habit that lasts, I would start there. Find something you enjoy enough to pick up again tomorrow. You can figure out the rest as you go.

Read What Interests You

We have a way of making things harder than they need to be. We decide we’re going to read more, and then we choose a book because someone says we should read it. It’s an important book. Successful people read it. We think it will make us better lawyers or better leaders. That may all be true. But if you have to talk yourself into opening it every night, it’s probably not the book that’s going to get you reading again. Start with something you’re curious about. If you like mysteries, read mysteries. If you love baseball, read about baseball. There’s no reason to apologize for enjoying what you enjoy.

You can try something different once you’ve gotten started. Follow whatever catches your attention. A novel takes place in a city you want to visit, so you pick up a book about that city. You read about someone in a history book and decide to learn more about that person’s life. One book leads to another. That’s a good way to keep going because the next book answers a question you already have. Keep a list if it helps, but leave room to walk into a library and come home with something you didn’t know existed.

Start With the Time You Have

If you’re waiting until you have more time, you may be waiting a while. There will always be another deadline. There will always be something around the house that needs attention. Even when work slows down, we tend to find something else to fill the time. I would suggest starting with 10 minutes. Read with your morning coffee. Read after lunch. Read before bed if you can stay awake. Choose a time that makes sense for you and give it a try. If it doesn’t work, choose another time. This doesn’t have to become a complicated project.

Ten minutes may not sound like much. But think about how often we spend 10 minutes doing something we don’t even remember afterward. We pick up our phones to check one thing and keep scrolling. We finish and couldn’t tell you what we were looking for in the first place. Some of that time could belong to a book. You don’t have to rearrange your entire evening. Put the book where you sit down. Open it before you open an app. Read a few pages. If you have time for more, keep going. If you don’t, you can pick up where you left off tomorrow.

Make It Easy to Keep Going

Keep a book with you. It can be a paperback in your bag or an e-book on your phone. There are little stretches of waiting throughout the day when you might read a few pages if you had something available. And when you finish a book, have some idea of what you want to read next. Otherwise, a few days can pass while you decide, and those days can turn into weeks. Ask a friend what they’re reading. Browse the shelves. Read the opening pages before committing. Give yourself a reason to look forward to the next book.

Use whatever format works. If you enjoy audiobooks, listen to them. If larger type makes reading easier, use an e-book and enlarge the type. If you like holding a book and turning the pages, do that. I don’t see the point of making someone feel that their way of enjoying a book doesn’t count. What matters is spending time with it. Pay attention. Go back if you missed something. You may prefer different formats at different times. Let your reading fit your life, including the parts of your life that change.

When you sit down to read, give yourself a chance to pay attention. Put the phone across the room. If you’re reading on it, silence the notifications. It can take a little time to settle into a book when you’re used to checking messages every few minutes. You may find yourself reading the same paragraph twice. That’s okay. Slow down and stay with it. You don’t have to finish a chapter every time you sit down. Spend a few minutes actually following the story each day.

You Can Put a Book Down

Lawyers finish things. We finish the brief even when we’re tired. We finish reviewing the records even when they’re repetitive. Someone is relying on us, and the work needs to get done. It’s easy to bring that same approach to a book we chose for ourselves. We started it, so we’re going to finish it. Meanwhile, we avoid reading because we don’t want to spend another evening with that particular book. I would put it down. Give it a fair chance, but if it isn’t holding your interest, read something else. You can come back to it later. You can also decide you’re done with it.

The same goes for setting a number of books to finish each year. If a goal helps, use it. If it turns reading into another thing you’re behind on, let it go. Nobody is asking you to submit a reading report. Some books take longer. Some deserve another pass. You may want to read a favorite again even though you already know how it ends. Enjoy that. There’s no need to rush through a book you like so you can add another title to a list.

Read About Something Other Than Work

We spend enough time thinking about our practices. Read something that takes you somewhere else. A novel about a family. A biography of an artist. A book about how a neighborhood changed over time. You don’t have to explain how any of it will help you bring in clients or try your next case. You can learn about something simply because it interests you. I think we sometimes forget that. We get so used to accounting for our time that even our interests start needing a business purpose.

And some of what you read may help your work anyway. Lawyers deal with people. We ask why someone made a decision, why someone stayed quiet, or why two people remember the same conversation differently. Books give us other lives to think about. They can make us reconsider an assumption or notice something we might have missed. Read people you disagree with, too. Take the time to understand what they’re saying before deciding where they’re wrong. We spend enough of our days preparing a response. Sometimes it’s useful to keep listening.

Talk About What You Read

Ask someone about a book they enjoyed. Tell a friend about one you think they would like. If a passage stays with you, write down a few words about why. Keep this simple. You don’t need to outline every chapter or remember every detail. You may finish a book and remember one conversation between two characters months later. That conversation may be what mattered to you. Let yourself think about it without turning the experience into an assignment.

Sharing a book also gives you something to discuss beyond work. You find out what another person noticed, what bothered them, or why a character reminded them of someone they knew. A book you thought was about one thing meant something different to them. That can be a good conversation. And it gives both of you another reason to keep reading.

Keep Coming Back

You’ll miss days. You may miss weeks. A trial takes over, a family member needs you, or you’re simply worn out. That happens. When you have the time and energy, pick up a book again. You don’t have to start over with a new plan or make up for the books you haven’t read. Just read the next page.

Developing a lifelong habit means finding something you can return to as your life changes. The books you enjoy at 50 may be different from the ones you enjoyed at 20. Your pace may change, too. That’s fine. What I would hate to see is someone who once loved reading spend years saying they want to get back to it. Take the book off the nightstand. Give it 10 minutes tonight. See if you still want to know what happens next.

Frank Ramos is a partner at Goldberg Segalla in Miami, where he practices commercial litigation, products, and catastrophic personal injury. You can follow him on LinkedIn, where he has about 80,000 followers.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

There is no question we should. The best in-house lawyers do all of those things.

There is a tension baked into that advice, though, that nobody talks about enough. The closer you get to the business, the harder it becomes to see where the boundaries are. Not the company’s boundaries. Your ethical boundaries as a lawyer.

When do you stay quiet? When do you speak up?

The Moment That Lands Wrong

Every in-house lawyer has been in a meeting when something lands wrong. Maybe it is a business decision that brushes up against a compliance issue. Maybe it is a direction that is not clearly illegal and not clearly right, either. You weigh the room. You weigh the relationship. You weigh whether this is the moment to raise your hand or let it pass. That calculus is one of the hardest parts of the job, and no one hands you a formula for it.

The rules of professional conduct do give you a floor, though. Rule 2.1 requires every lawyer to exercise independent professional judgment and render candid advice. The comments make clear that a lawyer should not be deterred from giving that advice simply because it will be unpalatable to the client. “When do I speak up?” has an ethical answer, not just a strategic one. When your independent judgment tells you the client needs to hear it, you are obligated to say it.

Knowing What Hill To Die On

Not every issue is worth the fight. Part of being effective in-house is understanding proportionality — picking the battles that matter most and finding pragmatic solutions for the rest.

Proportionality, however, has limits. Some issues are not negotiable. Recognizing the difference between “I can live with this” and “I cannot put my name on this” is a skill that develops over time — sometimes painfully so.

Knowing When Walking Away Is Not An Option

This is where in-house practice diverges sharply from outside counsel. If an outside lawyer faces a client bent on a course of action the lawyer cannot support, withdrawal is available. For in-house lawyers, the calculus is fundamentally different. You cannot fire your only client. And even if you resign, your ethical obligations do not end when you leave the building.

Rule 1.13 recognizes this reality. The organization is your client, not the individuals directing its day-to-day operations. When an in-house lawyer knows that someone within the organization is engaged in conduct that violates a legal obligation and is likely to result in substantial injury to the organization, the lawyer is required to act. The obligation is to report up, escalating within the organization to the highest authority necessary. If the highest authority still fails to address a clear violation of law, the rules contemplate that the lawyer may, in limited circumstances, disclose information outside the organization to prevent substantial injury.

That reporting structure exists because walking away alone does not resolve the obligation. Even a lawyer who is discharged for raising these issues is required to take steps to ensure the organization’s highest authority knows what happened and why. The duty follows you.

I will not go deeper into the mechanics here. Every in-house lawyer should understand that framework and know when it applies. It is one of the most consequential aspects of our role, and one that the “business partner” model tends to obscure.

Knowing When You Have To Draw The Line

This is where the “business partner” framing can become a trap. The more embedded you are, the harder it is to step back and say, “I am not advising on this as a colleague. I am telling you as your lawyer that we cannot do this.” That shift in posture is uncomfortable. It can change the dynamic in a room. It exists for a reason.

Because at the end of the day, this is not just about your job. It is not just about your duty to the organization. It is about your license. The one thing that is entirely yours, that no employer granted you and no employer can protect for you.

The Blind Spot

The business partner model is valuable. It also has a blind spot.

When the lines between business advisor and legal counselor blur too much, the lawyer is the one who bears the professional risk. The company moves on. You carry the consequence.

So, it is worth asking yourself, regularly. What is in my lane? Where does my advice end and my obligation begin? And am I being honest with myself about the difference?

I will be exploring these questions in more depth at my session at the National Association of College and University Attorneys’s Fall 2026 CLE Workshop on Sponsored Research and Technology Transfer, November 18-20, 2026, at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. If you are an in-house lawyer for a college or university, I hope to see you there!

Lisa Lang is an accomplished in-house lawyer and thought leader dedicated to empowering fellow legal professionals. She offers insights and resources tailored for in-house counsel through her website and blog, Why This, Not That™ (www.lawyerlisalang.com). Lisa actively engages with the legal community via LinkedIn, sharing her expertise and fostering meaningful connections. You can reach her at lisa@lawyerlisalang.com, connect on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lawyerlisalang/).

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Arnault Tightens Grip on LVMH With Simpler Holding Structure [Bloomberg]

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

But how can you ensure that you’ve picked the right firm? BTI Consulting Group just made it a little easier with the release of its annual ranking of the firms most likely to trigger dread in opposing counsel, as determined by a poll of in-house counsel. Per BTI’s Michael Rynowecer, “The right opposing counsel makes other lawyers – and their clients – reconsider how long they want to fight, how much they want to spend, how certain they really are – and what losing might look like. This is fear as a litigation asset. And the really good part? The reputation starts working before the lawyers do.”

The “Fearsome Foursome” are the most-feared litigation firms in the country. These are the firms you do not want to see on the other side, the firms that give GCs nightmares. So, which firms are being honored this year for their ability to strike fear in their opponents’ hearts and minds?

• Quinn Emanuel (this is the firm’s fifth year in the top spot)
• Kirkland & Ellis
• Skadden
• Gibson Dunn

The BTI report also named 12 firms as “Feared Opponents” — firms with lawyers corporate counsel would prefer to steer clear of in litigation (in alphabetical order):

• Boies Schiller Flexner
• Cravath
• Greenberg Traurig
• Husch Blackwell
• Jones Day
• Latham & Watkins
• Susman Godfrey
• Troutman Pepper Locke
• Wachtell Lipton
• Weil
• Williams & Connolly
• WilmerHale

BTI has also introduced an additional 28 law firms as “Awesome Opponents” and 38 firms as “Intimidating Opponents” (i.e., firms clients would “rather not see” in litigation). Click here to see the full lists.

Congratulations to all of these hardworking firms, and good luck to those who oppose them in court — it certainly sounds like you’ll need it.

Clients Single Out the Most Feared Law Firms in Litigation [Mad Clientist / BTI Consulting Group]

Staci Zaretsky is the managing editor of Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or connect with her on LinkedIn.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

As reported by Reuters, someone impersonating a member of Seyfarth’s IT help desk “deceived” an employee into emailing “a limited number of client documents to an unauthorized outside account.” The compromised information included names and Social Security numbers.

The firm says the incident was isolated to a single employee and that its security controls prevented the attacker from gaining access to its network or systems. Seyfarth has reported the breach to officials in Texas and California.

Cyber incidents involving law firms are piling up at an alarming rate. Seyfarth now joins Greenberg Traurig, Quinn Emanuel, McDermott, Goodwin Procter, and HSF Kramer among the major firms to disclose breaches in recent weeks.

At this point, hackers don’t need to break into a law firm’s computer systems when they can simply convince an employee to send the confidential documents themselves. Unfortunately, sometimes the easiest system to hack is a human being’s trust.

Law firm Seyfarth says breach exposed client documents [Reuters]

Staci Zaretsky is the managing editor of Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or connect with her on LinkedIn.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Everlaw looked at this landscape and realized the same tool lawyers use to pick apart terabytes worth of emails and spreadsheets to guarantee that Globocorp defeats Worldwide Widgets could also help reporters sort through the same categories of documents to uncover the next Watergate.

This morning, Everlaw announced that newsroom investigations supported through its Everlaw for Good program have more than tripled year over year. The company’s free-and-discounted program now supplies more than 50 newsrooms and journalist organizations deploying the technology across more than 175 investigations, including USA TODAY, Le Monde, and WIRED. The broader program, which also serves legal aid groups, nonprofits, pro bono teams, and CJA panel attorneys, has passed 1,000 matters and $8 million in donated technology since 2017.

“Investigative journalists face many of the same challenges as litigators,” the company’s statement notes, “finding the key facts, patterns, quotes, and inconsistencies buried across thousands or millions of documents, often under tight deadlines and with limited staff.”

The big asterisk there is that many of those litigators have clients to pay for the platform with enough left over to pay another round of bonuses (though most of them aren’t doing that… for some reason). A newsroom handed a few hundred thousand records traditionally has a shared drive and Ctrl+F.

The Everlaw platform helps reporting teams securely review sensitive documents, search large collections, use citation-backed AI analysis, and collaborate across newsrooms while maintaining control over what information is shared. By helping journalists move more quickly from raw documents to verified facts, Everlaw supports the public-interest reporting that exposes wrongdoing, strengthens accountability, and advances the search for truth.

When Woodward and Bernstein set out to “follow the money” sifting through years of library pull requests, the cards are dumped on the table to give the impression of an impossibly tedious search. That stack looks positively quaint in the world of digital evidence.

The pace of growth for this program is wild. The company announced it had passed $6 million in donated technology in March. It’s at $8 million now.

“Investigative reporting is essential to a healthy civil society,” notes Joanne Sprague, head of the Everlaw for Good initiative. “But the newsrooms doing this work are often contending with mountains of documents, tight deadlines, and limited resources. Everlaw for Good helps journalists find the evidence that matters and collaborate securely, so access to truth does not depend on the size of a newsroom or its technology budget.”

And the last bit matters a lot these days when deeper pocketed media outlets are stepping back. Paramount paid $16 million to make Trump’s meritless 60 Minutes lawsuit go away and then got its merger approved. Bari Weiss took over CBS News and spiked a finished CECOT investigation. When Scott Pelley told the new executive producer that Weiss “is murdering ’60 Minutes,'” CBS resolved the issue by firing Scott Pelley.

Which is all to say that Paramount spent twice Everlaw for Good’s giving total to make one presidential grievance disappear so they could then NOT tell important stories.

“As an investigative journalist, I now consider Everlaw an indispensable tool,” said former Fast Company reporter Burt Helm. “It’s like a high-powered magnet, finding the shining needles of truth hidden in colossal haystacks of documents.”

While that sounds like a Wile E. Coyote scheme about to go horribly wrong, it’s worth remembering that the Coyote would’ve dined on Road Runner long ago if it weren’t for ACME’s negligence. Putting buckshot in birdseed and pulling out the comically large horseshoe magnet should have worked, dammit! So replace ACME with a trusted legal technology vendor and the magnet succeeds.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Even rivals stood by the banned media outlets. NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and yes, even Fox News released a joint statement: “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

Major television networks have refused to replace CNN’s White House pool crew. Trump’s first live event with no TV press pool took place on Monday. It was a ribbon-cutting ceremony for his new helipad, and it was live-streamed via the White House website, which the White House tried to brand as “Trump TV.” But nobody could hear a word Trump said throughout the shoddily produced video in the absence of TV press pool coverage.

And, you know, isn’t that a good thing? I fully agree that CNN, MS NOW, and Politico should all have the same right to be present at the White House as any other outlets. But maybe no news organizations should bother going to this particular White House. I can’t imagine that Trump actually had anything important to say during his helipad ribbon-cutting ceremony, and no doubt we’d all be dumber as a result if we had been able to hear whatever nonsense he was spouting.

During his first term, attempts were made to tally up all of Trump’s lies, and they easily reached into the tens of thousands. It’s kind of a pointless exercise at this stage. You might as well add up how many sentences he utters, which would be pretty close to the same number.

Press listening to what Trump says at the White House and then reporting on it, even if the substance of what they are reporting is to point out the inaccuracy of his statements, necessarily repeat the lies. The research is abundantly clear that the more people hear the same false information repeated, the more likely they are to believe it is true, even when they initially know of its falsity. It’s called “the illusory truth effect,” and it’s a big part of how Trump got elected in the first place.

White House reporters who are critical of Trump are, I suppose, better than those who fawn over him. Still, anyone amplifying anything he says for any reason is inevitably spreading disinformation.

For most of American history, we didn’t hear from our presidents every single day. We mostly got along better than we have been these past couple years. One time Woodrow Wilson had a stroke, and the public didn’t really hear from him for the remaining 18 months of his term. Is it truly that important to have a bunch of reporters posted at the White House at all times just waiting for Trump or one of his flunkies to pass them misinformation?

Constant White House press coverage, under this president anyway, is a lot like social media use. It feels entertaining, maybe even important. But it’s bad for us, and we’re not actually learning anything.

Reporters have a right to report. The Trump administration most certainly needs to be reported upon, particularly when it comes to investigative reporting. But Trump uses the press corps that follows him around like his own personal public relations firm. I don’t think we’re getting much useful out of that, even when he did allow in CNN, MS NOW, and Politico.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

But the recent release of the draft 2026 Form 1040, one question on the return piqued the interest of some tax professionals and taxpayers, particularly in the immigrant community. On the middle of the form, it asks: “At the time you file your return, are you, and your spouse if filing jointly, a U.S. citizen, U.S. national, or an alien lawfully authorized to work in the U.S.?” Each spouse had to answer separately. Back in May, the Department of the Treasury considered asking this question in a future tax return.

If this draft was released more than 10 years ago, few people would care. Even someone who is not a U.S. citizen or legally admitted into the U.S. would have to file a U.S. tax return if that person earned U.S. source income or has lived in the U.S. for a prescribed period of time (known as the substantial presence test).

But the current president has attempted to use the IRS and its taxpayer data to look for immigrants who could be deportable. Just recently the D.C. Court of Appeals upheld a lower court order blocking the administration’s attempt to use the IRS to obtain taxpayer data due to very strict privacy laws. So people will likely be on alert to see how the president and his staff plan to use the citizenship information on the tax returns.

Another new draft tax form that asks about citizenship is the Schedule 3-A (Federal Public Benefit). This form calculates your refundable tax credits, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit to name a few. But on the bottom, it also wants confirmation that you are a U.S. citizen, U.S. national, or a qualified alien. If you are not, then those credits will be disallowed. “Qualified alien” is a specific term under federal benefits law (8 U.S.C. § 1641) that is narrower than merely being lawfully authorized to work.

For those who practice immigration law, the term Federal Public Benefit sounds similar to Public Charge. Basically, a public charge is a person who an immigration officer believes will be dependent on government benefits to survive. Being a public charge is grounds for inadmissibility into the United States and granting of permanent resident status or citizenship.

The rules for the use of tax benefits to determine public charge status have changed. In 2022, the USCIS’s final rule specifically prohibited the use of tax credits or deductions when considering public charge status. But in July 2026, the USCIS adopted the totality of the circumstances test for determining public charge status and explicitly stated that the use of tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credits (which most helped low income families with children) and the Child Tax Credit can be used as one of many factors to determine whether an alien is likely to be a public charge.

The most recent memorandum from USCIS discussing this topic is unclear about the use of tax benefits in determining public charge status. But it states that they will review all relevant evidence in an alien’s record and make case-by-case decisions in the totality of the alien’s circumstance.

An alien seeking permanent resident status can have a sponsor complete an affidavit of support if he or she is at risk of being considered a public charge. An affidavit of support serves as an enforceable contract where the sponsor agrees to repay public benefits if used by the alien.

Some have speculated that given the citizenship question and President Donald Trump’s hostility toward illegal immigrants, some living in the shadows may not want to file their tax returns because they think it could lead to deportation proceedings. In most cases this would be a bad idea because it will negatively affect their chances of becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen (a lack of good moral character). Similarly, if they are in removal or deportation proceedings, not filing tax returns and paying taxes could put into question an alien’s moral character and can weigh against a favorable exercise of discretion by an immigration judge.

This draft tax return could be changed and the citizenship question may be removed in the final form. Comments can be submitted to the IRS. But it seems to suggest that the Trump administration still wants to use tax records to enforce immigration law.

Steven Chung is a tax attorney in Los Angeles, California. He helps people with basic tax planning and resolve tax disputes. He is also sympathetic to people with large student loans. He can be reached via email at stevenchungatl@gmail.com. Or you can connect with him on Twitter (@stevenchung) and connect with him on LinkedIn.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

One of the sources, a Space Force official, told Breaking Defense a “contractual agreement” has been signed between SpaceX and the Space Force’s Joint Commercial Operations Cell (JCO), trading company access to US Space Command’s (SPACECOM) most detailed version of its High Accuracy Catalog (HAC) of on-orbit objects in exchange for SpaceX giving the JCO data from its Stargaze star-tracking cameras.

Barbara Golf, head of JCO, referred a question from Breaking Defense to Space Force Space Systems Command, which oversees JCO acquisition. Neither the Space Force nor SpaceX responded to multiple inquiries about the deal.

Jon Herman, SpaceX senior director for Starlink constellation engineering, was asked directly about the purported deal,the data’s value to the company, and its terms of useduring a panel at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) Conference in Hawaii last week.In response, he did not address the deal specifically,

SpaceX’sStarlink satellites, he said, are “bad at seeing the small stuff,” and therefore “radar data is an extremely valuable tool to supplement Stargaze.”

The Purpose Of Stargazing

Star trackers like those used by Stargaze can provide valuable capabilities as theyare used to determine a spacecraft’s orientation in three-dimensional space (known as attitude), and are especially important for precisely aiming on-board cameras and intersatellite laser links.

But they also can be used to detect and characterize satellites and space debris,

Stargaze currently uses about 30,000 star-tracking cameras mounted on Starlink satellites — SpaceX’s broadband communications network— to keep tabs on the heavens in low Earth orbit (LEO), according to Herman.

“We detect objects that are down to about a meter/half a meter in size, which means that we can see more than 80 percent of the Space Force catalog that is below 600 kilometers (about 373 miles),” he told the AMOS conference on Sept. 17.

Most current military and commercial radar and telescopes based on the ground, meanwhile, can see and routinely track objects down to about 10 centimeters in LEO. But while Stargaze’s resolution is not as good for small things as that offered by other providers of LEO space tracking information, Herman said the advantage is in the fact that the cameras can take “tens to hundreds” of pictures of an object in a given period of time — which allows better tracking over time of an object’s orbital path.

The star-tracker observations are entered into a database that catalogs objects seen, and then to create a picture of what is in space where and when. For SpaceX, this allows it to keep its roughly 11,000 Starlink and Starshield satellites safe from collisions.

That Stargaze catalog of space objects itself is not shared publicly, or with other operators who agree to share the whereabouts of their own satellites in exchange for services, Herman said. Rather, he said, those participating operators will receive products and services, such as information about potential collisions — known in space industry parlance as conjunctions — derived from it.

“The way this works is you send us your [emphemeris], and then we screen you against every Starlink trajectory as well as the entire Stargate catalog,” he said. “You’ll see all these scary things that we see in Stargaze.”

There are about 100 operators currently “onboarded” with Stargaze, Herman added.

For JCO, access to the Stargaze tracking data could improve the fidelity of fused commercial space surveillance data available via the Unified Data Library.

Competitors Wary

They do this by generating three types of space object database reports, each with a varying level of accuracy, for plotting the trajectories of on-orbit objects, according to public information and industry sources The catalogs use observational data about satellites and space debris gleaned by the Space Surveillance Network (SSN) of radars and telescopes around the world, but are created using different methodologies.

The public version, contained on the Space-Track.org website with explanatory information accessible to anyone, includes what are known as two-line elements (TLEs) showing a snapshot of a space object’s position and velocity at a certain time. How often those snapshots are provided varies from object to object, and this is the least precise of the three report types.

A second version is called the Special Perturbations-High Accuracy Catalog (SP-HAC), which uses a higher fidelity mathematical model to predict a space object’s trajectory. It is not public, but industry officials explained thataccess is provided to those companies and foreign governments that sign a sharing agreement with SPACECOM. SPACECOM also bases the Conjunction Data Messages it provides for free to US and foreign satellite operators warning them of potential close approaches to other space objects on the SP-HAC, according to explanatory information on the Space-Track.org website.

The third and most precise version of the HAC is embodied in what are called Vector Covariance Messages (VCMs), industry sources said,which in addition to being based on SP-HAC’s high-fidelity mathematical model also include volumetric margin of error bubbles, called covariances, that allow more precise plotting of potential collisions. In the past, those error bubbles have been classified and largely kept for internal military use, in order to ensure against reverse engineering of the SSN sensors’ capabilities.

According to the industry sources, while some commercial entities have been given limited access to VCM data in the past, no other firm besides SpaceX has been given routine access to VCM and the error bubbles for non-government uses.(After a long negotiation, the Pentagon also shares the covariances with the Commerce Department for its troubled program.)

The JCO-SpaceX agreement, the Space Force official said, does contain certain restrictions on use of the data.

“We do have stipulations on it that they’re not allowed to use that for any sort of commercial gain or benefit. It’s only for their internal use,” the official said on the condition of anonymity.

This implies that SpaceX is permitted to integrate the VCM-type tracking and covariance data into its Stargaze catalog to plot safe maneuvers for its own satellites.

Herman said the Starlink satellites perform “20,000 maneuvers every single day.” He added that 1,000 of those daily maneuvers are to avoid collisions, “so the majority is either station keeping or orbit transfer.” The “collision avoidance burns are overwhelmingly for non-Starlink objects,” he added.

Several industry analysts said that if SpaceX is using the covariance data only for ensuring the safety of Starlink/Starshield satellites, that is to be welcomed for space safety reasons since the SpaceX satellites make up more than half of the traffic in LEO.

However, industry sources said, since SpaceX provides Stargaze services to others for free, there’s lingering concern over what restrictions based on terms like “commercial benefit” might mean practically and whether the “internal use”-only data could influence the Stargaze services.In other words,industry officials said they are worried that if Stargaze is using an integrated catalog, SpaceX may well siphon off customers from other space tracking providers who cannot provide the same level of accuracy about LEO space traffic even for a price.

Sincethe terms of the agreement with the JCO have so far been kept secret, there is widespread worst-case speculation.

And of course, the more satellite operators provide their data to Stargaze, the more accurate its tracking capabilities become — further undermining for-profit providers.

No sources were able to point to evidence the deal has influenced Stargaze products, but industry reps fret that if it did, it could lead to a feedback loop: Stargaze, a free service owned by the world’s richest man and armed with the covariance data, becomes the killer app for LEO tracking that everyone signs up to, driving competitors out of business while continuously improving its own data set. And, in a doomsday scenario envisioned by several sources, once the competitors are out of business, Stargaze could in theory then turn around and start charging once it is a monopoly.

“It’s very very hard to compete with free when you have costs,” Audrey Schaffer, senior vice president for global policy and government strategy at Slingshot Aerospace, told the AMOS conference on Sept. 17. This applies, she said, whether it’s data provided by government agencies or by free private services like Stargaze.

Some industry and government sources also fretted that Stargacould become viewed as a private substitute for TraCSS, which would wipe out another potential source of revenue for current space tracking firms. (However, Stargaze currently only looks at LEO, while TraCCS covers other orbits as well.)

“It absolutely is gives SpaceX an unfair market advantage,” one industry analyst alleged.

Perhaps adding fuel to industry concerns is an in-depth analysis by Quilty Space published Aug. 28 that shows that the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) provided $107.7 million in contracts to SpaceX for work leading to Stargaze under a program called Space-WATCH.

DARPA launched Space-WATCH, for Space-domain Wide Area Tracking and Characterization, in 2023, and Quilty said that as of now, “SpaceX is the only known supplier.”

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

The release does not say where they were before. All six were Weil’s.

Machera, for his part, offered a line that reads a little differently if you happen to work in Weil’s corporate department. “The Paul, Weiss private equity platform speaks for itself,” he said, “and the response from our clients has been literally overwhelming since I arrived.”

There’s that word again. When Weil announced that corporate chair Michael Aiello was leaving, it went out of its way to note he was decamping for “a smaller platform,” the platform in question being Cravath. And again they echoed the “platform” terminology when responding to those pesky merger rumors.

The departure of Machera’s group is the back half of a very long year. Since 2026, Weil has lost London finance partners Chris McLaughlin, Alastair McVeigh, and Jenny Choi to Sullivan & Cromwell; its London restructuring trio of Neil Devaney, Lois Deasey, and Matt Benson to Akin; Murray Cox to Simpson Thacher, with private funds partners Simon Saitowitz, Stephanie Epstein Srulowitz, Brian Parness, and Andrew Nichol following him there; white-collar co-chair Daniel Stein to Freshfields; London M&A leader David Avery-Gee and Sarah Flaherty to Sullivan & Cromwell, again; and Sachin Kohli (the longtime deputy Aiello reportedly called “disloyal” for wanting to build a West Coast practice) to Wilson Sonsini. Then Aiello took Matthew Gilroy, Eoghan Keenan, Amanda Fenster, Michelle Sargent, and Megan Pendleton with him to Cravath.

That’s a lot of partners taking to the exits. Weil’s own partners have been happy to explain it — Aiello was territorial, skeptical of growth, a roadblock to recruiting, and his exit was going to be “a great opportunity to let Weil be Weil.” And the lateral market is white hot right now, and the eight-figure deals floating around are enough to get even the most loyal partner looking at the door.

It’s also not as though Weil has been standing still and taking it. The firm picked off private equity partners from Dechert and Kirkland to build out San Francisco, took a private funds partner and a Houston energy partner off Simpson Thacher, welcomed back Freshfields’ private credit co-leader, elected a new partner class, and made eight more partners across London, Munich, and Paris. A firm in retreat doesn’t open a West Coast office and staff it with other people’s rainmakers.

Weil insists it is not currently in merger discussions with anyone, and that management “continually evaluates ways to strengthen its platform.” Which is Biglaw for: keep your eyes peeled.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Meta launches AI gadget Charm as race for post-smartphone hardware heats up [Reuters]

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Barry Diller Withdraws Bid for MGM Resorts [WSJ]
Diller’s People Inc. offered in June to buy the remaining stake of the casino company it didn’t already own, in a deal valuing the company at around $12.4 billion. People holds a roughly 27% stake in MGM…. “There are lots of ingredients that go into a proposal of this kind on its way to completion,” Diller said Wednesday. “We didn’t feel the mix was coming together in the way we had hoped and have decided not to pursue taking the company private at this time,” Diller said. He added that the company remains “open to and interested in” a strategic transaction with MGM Resorts.

Hedge funds sour on basis trade as Treasury selloff continues [Reuters]
Funds locked up in leveraged basis trades are down 20% this year to $1.2 trillion, Morgan ​Stanley estimates…. "The basis position in the market has been declining because the opportunity set is lower," said Meghan Swiber, US rates strategist at Bank ​of America. "The other part of this is that asset manager demand for Treasury futures has also been moderating.”

New York Sues Polymarket in Escalating Crackdown on Prediction Markets [WSJ]
The crackdown in New York is among the highest-profile legal challenges prediction market operators are facing around the country, with states accusing them of running unlicensed operations that eat into their tax revenue from gambling. Conflicting rulings around the country have set up the fight to head to the Supreme Court.

Trump bought and sold shares in Musk's SpaceX in July, financial disclosure shows [Reuters]
The latest trades add a new ​financial link between the president and Musk's rocket company at a time ​when the administration is making decisions that could affect the firm's fortunes…. The purchase and sale were among more than 1,000 trades the president ​made in July.

Citadel's latest weapon in the hedge fund talent war is a big boomerang hire [BI]
Matt Giannini, a well-known recruiter in the hedge fund industry, is returning to Ken Griffin's $76 billion Citadel for his third stint…. Giannini is joining from Walleye Capital….

Arey Secures Series A Funding Led by Unilever Ventures [WWD]

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

We all knew that this day would come. We’ve known it for six years, and then we’ve known it for the past 19 or 20 months. Right now, today, the walls are closing in on Donald Trump, the president of the United States.

And while you might have thought that was true of Donald Trump in the past, given, you know, the two impeachments, four indictments, and felony conviction, Luttig is here to say it’s gotten even worse. Trump “is feeling trapped,” Luttig said. “It’s like a wild animal that’s trapped,” one who is “desperate today, this week” and “will be desperate between now and the midterm elections and then the certification of the new Congress in January.” He said it again, in case anyone was drifting: “Desperate like a trapped animal.”

Then he went bigger, arguing that Trump’s actual problem “is that he’s being entrapped by America itself and all that America has always been.”

America has been the envy of the world and the beacon of freedom and liberty to the world for 250 years, until Donald Trump assumed the presidency and America is no longer that at all. … But now America is slowly fighting back. The walls are closing in on him, and he is desperate at this point. That should worry all of us. And it should worry the world.

And that’s the legitimately scary part, because Luttig’s argument is that the more the system does its job, the more dangerous the guy in the middle of it becomes.

Luttig has earned the benefit of the doubt on this stuff in a way approximately few cable-news guests have. Despite his conservative bona fides, he warned that Trump losing in 2024 would bring the country to the brink of civil war. He went all in on Colorado’s attempt to bar Trump from the ballot under Section 3, and when the Supreme Court gutted it, he called for a constitutional amendment to clean up the mess. He has spent the second term declining to pull punches about where the rule of law is headed while district judges hold the line largely alone.

Pay attention to the deadline Luttig identifies, “the certification of the new Congress in January.” Earlier this month, Luttig published an essay in The New Republic laying out the mechanism for a MAGA coup in detail: a loyal House clerk simply declines to put Democratic representatives-elect on the roll that determines who gets to organize the new Congress, and January 3, 2027 becomes the date American democracy ends — not with tanks, but with a list. It’s a stark warning that feels all too real in the year of our lord 2026.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

On Enters Next Chapter: Unveils Strategy to Redefine What a Sportswear Brand Can Be Alongside 2029 Financial Targets [press release]
On Targets High-Teens Growth Through 2029 [Business of Fashion]

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

“The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence,” Trump said. “[I’m] changing the name, in that the use of the word ‘artificial’ … makes it sound fake, and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing, but we have to be careful.

“From this point forward, all of United States documents, and hopefully the world, will be changed to use the much more accurate term ‘super,’ as opposed to ‘artificial’, so it’s ‘super intelligence,’” the president continued. “In other words, welcome to the new world of super intelligence.”

As of yet, there is no official announcement from the White House on how this is to be implemented, but Trump appointees in the past have proved eager to adapt new terminology like Department of War for Department of Defense. (Department of Defense is still the term that is enshrined in law.)

Replacing the term artificial intelligence with super intelligence does not create any such legal complications, but it does create potential for confusion. For years, AI experts, practitioners, and visionaries have consistently used “super intelligence” or “artificial super intelligence” (ASI) to refer to a specific kind of AI, one that does not yet exist: An artificial intelligence smarter than the smartest human. It’s not entirely clear whether Trump is now endorsing superhuman machine minds, or simply saying AI as it exists today is already “super.”

Trump has publicly embraced the AI industry from the first days of his second term and overseen a massive expansion of AI usage at the Pentagon in particular. He’s also tried to punish frontier lab Anthropic for its attempts to limit military use of its Claude AI — leading to an ongoing legal battle. In recent weeks, he’s denounced Anthropic CEO Daario Amodei’s call for greater caution in AI development after incidents of autonomous AI agents breaking containment and spontaneous staging cyberattacks.

Much of what the president said about AI at the UN echoed, near-verbatim, recent posts he’s made on Truth Social, arguing that those warning about out-of-control AI are the same “globalist” enemies who sounded the alarm about climate change and Trump’s complex links to Russia. He earlier used the “super intelligence” term in a Sept. 21 post promising “I will only encourage AI or, SI (SUPER INTELLIGENCE)!”

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

The law bars business entities from interfering with or attempting to “influence the professional judgment of a licensed attorney or litigant regarding any substantive litigation decision.” That means which cases a firm takes, which clients it signs, and when it settles. Violators, including the attorneys on the receiving end of the outside money, face statutory damages of $10,000 per violation, or three times whatever the client actually lost, whichever is greater, plus fees and costs. It covers contracts entered starting January 1, 2027. Consumer Attorneys of California, the trade group that pushed the bill, said Monday that the state is “setting the standard for the rest of the country to follow.”

Colorado and Illinois already have similar measures. California is just the largest legal market to do it, and it lands at the moment the richest firms in the country started taking the meetings.

Trisha Rich, a Holland & Knight partner whose team has closed more than 30 legal industry MSO deals this year, told Reuters the new law does not “change a single thing,” because the attorney professional conduct rules already guard against outside influence on legal decision-making. She noted that the Illinois and Colorado versions haven’t slowed MSO dealmaking in those states, and that no one has brought an enforcement action under those provisions.

All of that is accurate, but pardon me if I am just the teeniest bit skeptical that MSO advocates aren’t touting a system that exerts indirect, but meaningful control. Earlier this month, we covered Holland & Knight attorneys — Rich among them — pitching the MSO as a workaround for the ethics rules that bind law firms. In that specific example Rich, et al., were arguing that an MSO could allow firms to circumvent the ethical bar on non-competes. Rich may not think that this is a “legal control” issue, but the reason we have that rule is — in part — to allow a lawyer to move to a different firm if it’s in the best interests of a client. That feels at least “legal decision adjacent.”

Plus there’s still an optics issue when on one hand you’re saying ethics rules are a sufficient safeguard against outside money influencing legal judgment but also that the MSO structure can get be a workaround for other ethics rules.

There’s also a gap AB 2305 was written to close. The professional conduct rules bind lawyers, and the entity writing the checks is, by design, not a lawyer. California’s law skips the argument about which hat anyone is wearing and attaches a number to the conduct itself.

Rich is right that Illinois and Colorado haven’t produced an enforcement action yet, but PE’s infestation of legal is still young.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Smart Ring Maker Oura, Backers Seek $2.2 Billion in US IPO [Bloomberg]

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Fed's Barr says more rate hikes are needed to bring down inflation [Yahoo!]
"Inflation is above our 2% target and not clearly trending toward target in a timely way. Moreover, risks to achieving our inflation target have increased, while risks to the labor market have receded."

Trump’s Diesel Dilemma [DealBook]
Trump said on Tuesday that he was open to [a diesel export ban]. “I’ve called for it,” the president told reporters.
That said, the oil industry and some analysts warn that such a ban could backfire and worsen the global energy crisis. It’s also driving a wedge inside the Republican Party.

Bessent ‘inadvertently’ failed to report at least $100K of JPMorgan stock [Politico]
Treasury’s inspector general has “reviewed the situation and determined that there was no knowing violation” of federal ethics laws, Treasury’s top ethics official, Mark Vetter, a career employee, wrote…. Bessent “inadvertently” reported the JPMorgan Chase stock as cash held in a deposit account at an unidentified U.S. bank during his Senate confirmation process…. Bessent also paid a $200 late filing fee because he did not report the sale of the stock within the required time frame to file a transaction report.

Federal Prosecutors Open Probe Into Jeffrey Epstein’s Executors [WSJ]
Justice Department officials have previously said they didn’t find evidence to charge anyone beyond Ghislaine Maxwell in connection with Epstein’s activities…. People interviewed by prosecutors described Kahn’s and Indyke’s roles in legal entities that allegedly helped conceal Epstein’s activities and the two men’s handling of financial and legal matters involving young women….

Hedge fund talent war set to push analyst pay above $10m [FN]
Former Millennium portfolio manager Ryan Walsh says analysts are significantly under-pricing themselves….

Pence was a relatively successful guy. He’d served in the House of Representatives for more than a decade. He’d been the governor of Indiana. He had a reputation for being a devout Christian.

Pence served Trump loyally. Pence played a key role in the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. Pence gave Trump — now a convicted felon and, in the usual sense of the words, a rapist — credibility with the religious right. Pence became known on the left for being Trump’s lickspittle vice president.

Pence then made the mistake of standing up for the Constitution on January 6, 2021. Trump castigated Pence for lacking courage and stood idly by while rioters threatened to hang Pence. Pence became known on the right as being a traitor to Trump.

In the end, Pence had no support on the left and no support on the right. That’s a bad place to be.

Pence made a mistake: He trusted Donald Trump.

Rex Tillerson gave up a fair amount for Donald Trump.

Tillerson was the chairman and chief executive officer of ExxonMobil when Trump nominated Tillerson to be secretary of state in December 2016. That’s walking away from a pretty fancy job. Tillerson implemented the administration’s foreign policy agenda in 2017 and 2018.

But Tillerson made the mistake of disagreeing with Trump about a few policies. Tillerson thought that the U.S. should remain in the Iran nuclear deal. (That’s called advice, Don. You really should have listened.) Tillerson took a hard line against Russia for destabilizing American politics. (I bet that went over well.) Tillerson pushed back on proposals that he thought violated laws or treaties.

So Trump fired Tillerson (by tweet, of course).

Tillerson made a mistake: He trusted Donald Trump.

John Kelly gave up a fair amount for Donald Trump.

Kelly was a retired four-star general in the Marine Corps who was serving as secretary of homeland security in July 2017. Kelly agreed to serve as Trump’s chief of staff. Kelly tried to impose order on the White House and to protect Trump’s presidency from chaos.

So Trump eroded Kelly’s authority, mocked him publicly and privately, and pushed him out of office in about a year.

Kelly made a mistake: He trusted Donald Trump.

Canada gave up a fair amount for Donald Trump.

It agreed to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that replaced NAFTA, expanding trade with the United States. Canada deepened trade relationships between the countries.

So Trump announced that he wanted Canada to be the 51st American state, referred to the prime minister as “governor,” and treated Canadian sovereignty as a bargaining issue. Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on the country.

Canada made a mistake: It trusted Donald Trump.

The Kurds gave up a fair amount for Donald Trump.

The Kurds fought alongside the United States against ISIS, losing roughly 11,000 fighters. But Trump chatted with the Turkish president in October 2019 and then chose to withdraw troops from areas controlled by the Kurds, allowing a Turkish offensive.

The Kurds made a mistake: They trusted Donald Trump.

Ukraine gave up a fair amount for Donald Trump.

But then he withdrew military support.

Afghanistan trusted Donald Trump.

But then Trump negotiated directly with the Taliban and negotiated a withdrawal without meaningfully involving the Afghan government.

Saudi Arabia gave up a fair amount for Donald Trump. They supplied an awful lot of U.S. military bases.

But now, when the United States attacked Iran, prompting Iran and the Houthis to attack Saudi Arabia, Trump couldn’t be bothered to provide military support to the Saudis.

NATO trusted the United States.

You know the drill.

And I’m tired.

Sane folks are nodding their heads in agreement with everything I’ve written.

But Trump supporters violently disagree with me.

Why? Because they trust Donald Trump.

Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and later oversaw litigation, compliance and employment matters at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Trump warned Friday that “Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America,” and promised more bans were coming. Asked about the First Amendment in the Oval Office, he said there’s “something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories,” before adding, “Now, if they want to write them, that’s fine, but I don’t have to let them into my, into the people’s house.”

And, after being informed of the plan to sue the administration, Trump again ranted on Truth Social, writing:

The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

How convenient, the defendant publicly establishing motive like that.

“This ban on the free press harms the American people, who are entitled to rigorous, fact-based coverage of the President of the United States,” Boutrous said in a statement. “The law is on our side across the board, and we look forward to presenting our arguments to the court as soon as possible.”

He has reason to be confident, seeing as he built some of that law himself. The Secret Service confiscated Jim Acosta’s hard pass on November 7, 2018, after a combative exchange at a press conference, and Boutrous took the case for CNN and Acosta, pleading the First Amendment and due process. The complaint and the TRO motion went in on November 13, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly granted the TRO from the bench on November 16, and by November 19 the pass was permanently restored and CNN had voluntarily dismissed the case.

The press corps also declined to make the ban painless. ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and Fox News all refused to supply a replacement camera crew for CNN’s pool duty, saying in a joint statement that “no administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.” Fox backed CNN in 2018 too, which should tell the White House something about how narrow its constituency is here.

This is the latest fight this administration has picked with the First Amendment, not the last one, and taking up the mantle are three of the lawyers in the country who are most prepared to fight this battle.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.

Turns out that was not a figure of speech.

Bloomberg Law reports that Weil is now considering a merger with a competitor, with firm leadership warming to a combination and holding informal talks to gauge interest:

Weil has been canvassing its partners in recent days as it seeks to stem the tide of defections, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. It has also been studying other ways to shore up its business through strategic hires and promotions, and it could still remain independent, the people said.

Weil is pretty tight-lipped about what is actually happening. “Weil is not engaged in merger discussions with any firm,” a spokesperson said. “Like every leading firm, we continually evaluate opportunities to strengthen our platform.”

Weil’s comms team just can’t quit the word “platform.”

The tide in question is real. Aiello, the chair of Weil’s roughly 600-lawyer corporate department and a member of its management committee, is taking M&A co-head Matt Gilroy and four other partners to Cravath. London co-managing partner David Avery-Gee and corporate partner Sarah Flaherty just went to Sullivan & Cromwell. Listen, the firm has breathing room — Weil billed $2 billion last year and is not a firm on the ropes — but, no matter the friction he brought to the table, it’s wise to evaluate what’s next when your biggest rainmaker walks out the door.

And, remember per Bloomberg Law’s reporting, Aiello was an obstacle to growth, territorial about his practice, skeptical of expansion, and a drag on recruiting. He reportedly called it “disloyal” when his own longtime deputy Sachin Kohli wanted to go build a West Coast M&A practice; Kohli left for Wilson Sonsini. Insiders framed Aiello’s exit as “a great opportunity to let Weil be Weil; to be entrepreneurial and grow.” A week later, the entrepreneurial growth under consideration is a merger.

Aiello didn’t travel light, either. Cravath presiding partner Faiza Saeed welcomed him as “a unique fit within our culture” who shares “the values that have long defined Cravath” — a line that reads differently once you remember that Aiello is the Weil partner who advised the CBS board through the Les Moonves mess, which cast a troubling MeToo spotlight on the firm after critics picked apart Aiello for downplaying the Moonves allegations to the board. So, the rainmaker came with an asterisk, and Cravath took him anyway to restock their ranks. For its part, Cravath has seen partners depart at a healthy clip, and the takeaway is that no firm is untouchable anymore.

None of this happens in a market with functioning lockstep. When partner pay tracks seniority, a rainmaker’s outside options are capped by whatever rung another lockstep firm will slot him onto. The death of pure lockstep — at Davis Polk, Cravath, and nearly everywhere else — means every partner has a number, every practice group has a number, and $20 million is just the price of admission. This merry-go-round of top talent shows no signs of stopping, and the firms that can’t afford another ticket are the ones taking merger calls.

Weil says it isn’t currently in merger talks with any specific firm, we’ll see how long that stays true.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.