Channeling her inner Gen Z, Judge Thompson put out a lengthy bankruptcy opinion that took a sledgehammer to the air of formality that’s surrounded legal opinions since… well, forever. The effect is jarring to anyone familiar with federal judicial opinions. To call it unorthodox undersells it.

And yet, read in full, the opinion untangles a complicated, multiyear bankruptcy saga in a readable — dare I say, pleasant — 40-page account. Honestly, I expected to find myself more critical of this opinion. I’ve been quite critical of judges exploiting the inherent power imbalance to score laughs at the expense of litigants. That said, this isn’t a criminal defendant or fraud victim watching their world become a judicial plaything — it’s a gnarly corporate bankruptcy dispute. In that context, this all… kind of works?

Anyway, it’s safe to say that I’m the minority opinion on this one:

To the Hon. Members of the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary: We, the undersigned, respectfully request the commencement of impeachment proceedings into the Hon. O. Rogeriee Thompson, U.S. Circuit Judge, for high crimes and misdemeanors, evidence of which is attached:… pic.twitter.com/GElQL7QfVx

— Legal Style Blog (@legalstyleblog) September 9, 2026

Instituto Médico del Norte v. Greengift Capital does, in fact, fill in the deets, but the opening actually does accomplish the time-honored role of SparkNotes by letting us know the main characters, their motivations, and the source of their dispute with the exact same approach that helped us avoid reading The Scarlet Letter.

Who am I kidding? It was Cliff’s Notes then. And I did read The Scarlett Letter. The Mayor of Casterbridge on the other hand….

We’ll start at the beginning, of course. Back in 1984, Instituto obtained a loan to the tune of $10,683,230 from Ponce Bank to build a hospital in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico.

But Instituto and Ponce quickly fell into a dispute. The dispute’s details are admittedly complicated and not well-documented in the record before us, but here’s what we can glean from the parties’ materials….

This reads like a conversation with your good friend Judge Thompson giving you all the gossip she’s heard about these companies. That’s not how opinions are usually written, but it’s so much more engaging.

But admittedly — and with no disrespect intended towards the bankruptcy court — we struggle to make sense of several key determinations in its dispositive order. We know that bankruptcy courts are quite busy, and they also don’t have an obligation to make specific findings of fact or to elaborate on their decisions when resolving motions for summary judgment.

Given the byzantine nature of this dispute, the bankruptcy court probably couldn’t lay it all out without taking the sort of narrative approach employed here.

While Instituto’s bankruptcy plan was being worked out, Instituto and Oriental got into it about how much Oriental should be paid. But they worked it out.

Standard legal writing? No. But, likely a far better picture of what happened than any formal language could convey. The whole dispute drips with the pettiness of a middle school cafeteria incident and would “Instituto and Oriental arrived at an impasse over the proper treatment of the allowed secured claim before reaching a temporary resolution” followed by three paragraphs nobody cares about send the reader that same context?

Not for nothing, if we want to stop AI from training itself to replace human legal writers, Judge Thompson is doing the Lord’s work in messing up the algorithm.

Oh, and then there are the defined terms:

The final plan (which we uncreatively christen “The Plan”) approved by the bankruptcy court incorporated most of the above-reproduced language, but not all.

That’s how all the definitions play out. To all the 1Ls out there: do this, watch your legal writing instructor’s head explode, and then say “sorry, I guess I just care more about modeling my work on a distinguished federal appellate judge than you do.”

Other moments over the following pages: “And then things began to go off the rails,” “Thus spawned more motions,” and, referring to a bankruptcy court determination “(whatever that means).”

With those five sentences, the litigation before the bankruptcy court came to an end.

This line actually stood out the most. The bankruptcy opinion was plenty formal, gathering 1,000 exhibits and proceeding with the cadence of authority before delivering its curt conclusion. The First Circuit opinion is saying — both in substance and with this style — that stiff legalese isn’t always rigor. Sometimes it functions as camouflage for decisions that don’t stand up to the elevator pitch test. To that end, the unanimous First Circuit panel isn’t disrespecting a fellow judge — which is a much more disturbing trend in legal writing than using “deets” — but explaining that formality can become a cage that leads to the wrong result.

Ultimately, the holding here is that litigants were owed an explanation, and the court delivered it in plain (perhaps too plain for many) terms.

Just imagine the legitimacy crisis that could result if a court ran around issuing deeply significant rulings while stubbornly refusing to provide its reasoning! I mean, that wouldn’t be as serious as a judge using the word “deets,” but I’m sure it would be pretty bad.

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.

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The octogenarian former federal prosecutor thought he was being recruited to run the mother of all conspiracy cases and take out every dirty, stinkin’ Democrat at once. He and his wife Victoria Toensing laid it all out in April on Rudy Giuliani’s Scotch and Dentures Variety Hour. (h/t CNN)

“She was a queen bee and she screwed President Trump to a fair thee well,” diGenova snorted about the recently fired Attorney General Pam Bondi. “What it is she is dumb as a post.”

Toensing agreed that it was a massive error to charge former FBI director and Bridgewater Associates general counsel James Comey for making false statements to Congress in Virginia, i.e., where those statements actually took place.

“That should have been part of a conspiracy in Fort Pierce, Florida, which she did not have the sophistication to understand. I never as attorney general would have allowed the one count against Comey in Virginia. I would have saved it for the vast conspiracy,” she huffed.

“You do the same thing with You do the same thing with Letitia James,” diGenova broke in. “You don’t charge her in Virginia on mortgage fraud. you include her on a massive conspiracy account down in Miami with a bunch of people beginning in 2017, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Brennan, James Clapper, and Susan Rice.”

Creative theories of venue aside, the interview shows exactly what diGenova and Toensing expected when they joined the ongoing investigation in the Southern District of Florida. The plan was to round up all of Trump’s enemies, including Jack Smith, Tish James, Jim Comey, and even Barack Obama, and charge them with being part of a “grand conspiracy.” They could defeat the statute of limitations by saying that the crime was ongoing. Or they could call it deprivation of rights, which has no expiration date. With a grand jury supervised by Judge Aileen Cannon, the sky’s the limit!

Except that it wasn’t.

Because, when you’re tasked with using the legal system to go after one of Donald Trump’s enemies, the point is not to build a case. You’re not trying to establish probable cause and prove the elements of a crime. Conviction is more or less irrelevant.

The only thing that matters is getting an indictment so Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel can hold a press conference patting themselves on the back for their great service to the Republic and the Old Man — although you do get extra points for a perp walk that can be played endlessly on conservative media and turned into a meme.

It doesn’t matter if the case falls apart in a few months, bringing the U.S. Attorney’s office into disgrace or even contempt. Charge it, go on Fox, take the “W” — you’ve got prosecutorial immunity anyway, right?

U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, tapped to indict all the antifa protesters in Chicago, knew the deal. He didn’t care about dragging his entire office into the middle of a scandal over prosecutorial misconduct before the grand jury. He indicted the “Broadview 6” and a handful of other dissidents, watched the cases fall apart, and then took his promotion.

U.S. Attorney Ellis Boyle in North Carolina could care less that the Comey seashells case will wash away with the tide.

But diGenova and Toensing were never in on the joke. They’ve been mainlining stringboard-level conspiracy theories since the first Trump administration, when they were getting paid by Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash and huddling up with Rudy and Devin Nunes to undermine the Mueller investigation. They thought this was finally their big moment. And according to CNN, diGenova was pissed to find that he was expected to spend a few weeks securing a piddly indictment of former CIA Director John Brennan and declare “mission accomplished.” And so on Thursday he stomped off in a huff, resigning his role as a special government employee.

DiGenova, who once had to apologize for saying that the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency should be “taken out at dawn and shot” after the 2020 election, had a moment of indiscretion when talking to the New York Post’s Josh Christenson.

“If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” he snapped.

Later he regained his composure, telling the AP, “There’s plenty of evidence in all of these cases to prove the theories of prosecution. It just takes time to get there, and some people want to get there a little faster than others — and you can’t do that.”

Well, of course you can — and if you want to get ahead in Trumpland, you absolutely will. But every cloud has a silver lining. Before you know it, those two crazy kids will back on air with Rudy explaining how everyone but them is too stupid to understand civil procedure.

Trump admin pick to oversee a conspiracy investigation into president’s foes resigns after DOJ clashes [CNN]

Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast.

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By any measure, that is a big loss. Aiello is one of the most sought-after dealmakers in the country, and losing your corporate chair and a chunk of his practice group in a single raid is the kind of thing that reshuffles a firm’s internal power structure whether it admits it or not.

Which brings us to the statements.

Cravath’s is a model of gracious recruiting. “I’ve known Mike Aiello for many years, and he and his team are extraordinarily talented M&A advisors and a unique fit within our culture,” presiding partner Faiza Saeed said, going on to praise their belief in collaboration, client service, and “the values that have long defined Cravath.”

Weil’s statement is… well, let’s take a look.

“Mike Aiello and his team have informed us that they are leaving the firm for a smaller platform,” the firm said. “Weil has long believed that an ambitious growth strategy is in the firm’s best interest and intends to accelerate execution of that strategy going forward. We thank Mike and his team for their contributions.”

Describing Cravath as a smaller platform is a choice.

Sure, Cravath has fewer lawyers than Weil… but it’s still fucking Cravath. Cravath is the white-shoe standard-bearer, the firm so central to Biglaw that the industry’s associate pay benchmark is literally called the Cravath scale (despite Milbank’s best efforts on that front) — the scale Weil’s own associates are paid on. Shading them as a lesser platform is wild.

Weil has an aggressive lateral strategy, the firm added 51 lateral partners since the start of last year. In a market where firms are dangling multi-year guarantees to chase $40 million rainmakers, Weil is on a genuinely ambitious growth path. And perhaps the rapid expansion is part of the relevant backdrop that helped motivate the departure — I don’t know. But I definitely know snark when I read it.

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

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Tech Stocks Shudder in Response to Calls to Slow A.I. Progress [NYT]
“A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute,” [Anthropic CEO Dario] Amodei said. As one remedy, he said he would bring on third-party “evaluators” who would “verify adherence to safety practices and commitments.”
The post was endorsed by Elon Musk, who runs Space X, which also houses his A.I platform, x.AI; Sam Altman, who co-founded OpenAI; and Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of Google DeepMind.

JPMorgan Curbed Lending to Situational Awareness After AI Losses, Source Says [U.S. News via Reuters]
JPMorgan, one of the fund's key lenders, notified Situational that it would ​end its lending relationship after the losses….
Other Wall Street banks, including ⁠Goldman ⁠Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of ⁠America, remain ​active brokers for the company. It has also recently started working with Clear Street, ​a New York-based brokerage ⁠firm.

Crispin Odey Loses Bid to Overturn UK Financial Services Ban [Bloomberg]
“During the hearing he reinvented history, painted himself as a victim and displayed no contrition. That arrogant entitlement and the resulting complete disregard for proper governance means Mr. Odey is unfit to work in financial services.”

Did a Crypto Bro Pay $4.5 Million to Marry a Movie Star? A Scandal Grips China [WSJ]
In the rambling essay, he said he had a crush on the actress since college, rented out a theater to watch “Zootopia 2” for a date and wired her family $4.5 million for a so-called bride fee, a traditional Chinese gift from a groom’s family to the bride’s family before marriage. He also detailed an intimate encounter involving fingernails…. He said as the couple prepared for medical procedures to have a child in the U.S., the “other party”—whom he didn’t name directly—demanded $50 million. When he refused to pay, he added, the other side cut off contact. “The engagement could no longer proceed,” he said.

How Bill Ackman’s journey into tennis left him stranded on one of its most famous courts [The Athletic]
Lots of wealthy people write big checks to gain access to world-class athletes and professional sports. But almost none of them would ever dare to step onto a playing field with those athletes in an official event…. “A lot of people think just because they’re very good at one thing that it naturally transfers to the next,” [former professional tennis player and member of the Goldman Sachs private equity team Milos] Raonic said, speaking generally about high performers in every realm.

Health Wildcatters co-founder and CEO Dr. Hubert Zajicek will moderate a panel discussion at INVEST Digital Health on how convenience is reshaping clinical strategy. The panel will explore how providers are offering patients the level of consumer-
centric convenience they’ve become accustomed to in other areas of their life — and how this shift can lead to
improved loyalty, adherence and outcomes. Among the panelists for the session are: Angeline Chen, Novellia Founding Director of Product, Arpan Parikh, Kin Health CEO, Travis Rush, Reperio Health CEO.

Commenting on the new cohort, Zajicek said:

“We are thrilled to welcome 10 innovative healthcare startups to Dallas and the rapidly growing North Texas healthcare ecosystem. In the years ahead, the innovation driven by these 10 startups has the potential to address some of healthcare’s most complex challenges and shape the future of care.”

To view the full agenda and register, click here.

This week, Health Wildcatters unveiled its 14th cohort of healthcare startups. The 2026 cohort brings together 10 innovative startups representing the U.S., Canada, and Israel, with 1/3 of the companies female-founded or female-led, according to an emailed press release.

They include:

Atomistic Insights develops physics-guided AI for protein dynamics and drug discovery. Its proprietary DeepPath platform reveals biologically relevant protein conformations and hidden drug-binding opportunities, helping discovery teams identify new pockets, prioritize compounds, and accelerate therapeutic development.

Co-founders: Katie Kuo and Shiyao Bao

Calaris Diagnostics is developing novel saliva-based diagnostic technologies for the early detection of chronic diseases, beginning with fatty liver disease (MASLD/MASH).

Founder: Dr. Jim Chen

DISCHARGEpath is an agentic AI platform automating hospital discharge coordination, including eligibility, prior authorization, post-acute placement, durable medical equipment, transportation, and remote patient monitoring.

Founder: Sean Elwell

EquiShift is a U.S.-based health IT company developing an AI-powered demand forecasting platform that predicts patient demand and generates shift-specific staffing recommendations. It also helps hospitals optimize workforce allocation, reduce staffing costs, and combat clinician burnout.

CEO: Snehita Sana

Full Time Nurse Staffing Inc. is addressing the U.S. nursing shortage by recruiting, training, licensing, and employing registered nurses from Mexico to strengthen the healthcare workforce.

Founder: Brett McDonald

MG Health Tech Inc.is a deep-tech company combining AI, healthcare, and connected-device engineering to enable real-time, data-driven care through AI/ML technology, proprietary sensor hardware, and advanced connectivity infrastructure.

Founder and CEO: Ganesh Natesan, MG Health Tech

PatientX, Inc. is an independent patient experience benchmarking platform that captures real-time feedback from clinical trial participants and uses AI-powered analytics to help pharmaceutical sponsors and research sites identify barriers to retention and improve the patient experience.

Co-Founders: Farah Ahmad and Jodie Huddleston

SanaOculis is a U.S.-based medical device company developing a non-invasive neurostimulation device designed to stop the progression of vision-affecting glaucoma.

CEO: Soumendu Bhattacharya

Sub-Q Bionics is developing a fully implantable bionic lymphatic drainage system designed to treat lymphedema, a chronic and progressive condition that particularly impacts cancer survivors who have undergone lymph node removal.

CEO: Jordan Pollack

Venom Biologics is developing non-opioid treatments for chronic pain, including an engineered peptide derived from scorpion venom that targets NaV1.8, a sodium channel in pain-sensing neurons.

CEO and co-founder: Neil Luhar

To register for INVEST Digital Health, view the agenda, and apply to speak at the conference, click here.

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Eric Holder, who served as AG under Barack Obama and who has not been shy about this administration, had some thoughts. “Attorneys general don’t talk about political things,” Holder told NewsNation’s Joe Khalil. “He shouldn’t be there.” He called the appearance “unprecedented” and “disgraceful.”

House Democrats on the Judiciary panel were equally pointed:

In our history, no sitting U.S. Attorney General, Democrat or Republican, has ever appeared to speak at a political party convention. Until now. Tomorrow Todd Blanche will appear and speak at the national Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas where the party’s working desperately to mobilize a demoralized MAGA to go vote for a party which has no plans for America. In other words, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer will be violating federal law on national TV in front of the entire country. It’s dumbfounding and unprecedented. Amazing how far the DOJ has fallen. We’ll be watching.

The DOJ’s response, posted from its official X account, was a swipe at Jack Smith: “While Jack Smith may agree with you about violating federal law, the Hatch Act is available for everyone to read, and Todd Blanche’s appearance this evening in his personal capacity is legal (and has been approved by ethics).”

Approved by ethics! Great! Except… the DOJ’s top ethics official was fired last year. Joseph Tirrell, who served as the senior ethics attorney responsible for advising the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General directly on their ethical obligations, was terminated by Pam Bondi in July 2025. So, the ethics office that “approved” Blanche’s convention appearance is the same ethics office that was purged, and rebuilt under an administration that has fired employees for refusing to lie in court and lost 16,000 employees in the process. Pardon me if that assurance isn’t worth much.

Despite its unprecedented nature, none of this is surprising, exactly. Blanche spent months performing for an audience of one to secure the AG job, who introduced himself as Trump’s lawyer at his own confirmation hearing, and has former DOJ staff coming out of the woodwork saying he’s not upholding his oath of office. The convention speech is simply the next data point in a very consistent pattern: Blanche has hitched his wagon to Trump’s political star — at least he’s stopped pretending otherwise.

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

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Scott Bessent fails to break ‘fever’ in US bond market [FT]
Scott Bessent's bid to steady the $32tn US government debt market has backfired….

Bridgewater’s Jensen Says AI Will Kill People Before It’s Curbed [Bloomberg]
“Unfortunately, this is what it was like in February 2020,” [Greg] Jensen said, likening AI to the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic. “Until the AI starts killing people, unfortunately, history would suggest we’re not going to do anything, but we are going to face that. That’s going to happen, and it’d be much better if we started dealing with it before then.”

OpenAI targets work of Wall Street junior bankers with new ChatGPT for Financial Services [CNBC]
“We’re effectively teaching ChatGPT to research like an analyst and back up its conclusions like an analyst as well,” [OpenAI vice president of product Nick] Turley said during a briefing announcing the new product….
What separates this version from the product it’s based on, ChatGPT Work, is native data access from LSEG, Daloopa and PitchBook that furnishes the system with things like financial statements and earnings transcripts as well as automated access to users’ existing data subscriptions.

Former crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried appeals conviction to Supreme Court [CNN]
The Supreme Court appeal, which was reviewed by CNN, raises a technical question about evidence that was submitted at his trial, and whether Bankman-Fried should have been permitted to demonstrate that his investments were ultimately sound and would have covered any losses by FTX customers.
He also argues that the $11 billion forfeiture violates the 8th Amendment’s prohibition on excessive fines.

Sept. 11 Changed the World Order. But Not for the Reason We May Think. [WSJ]
Consumed by the War on Terror, the U.S. had less capacity to address other global priorities such as the pivotal rise of China and an increasingly hostile Russia. That inattention to shifting global forces was what really changed the world….
America’s failure to address the dislocation resulting from China’s rise fed another post-9/11 fracture in the world order: anger in America toward globalization…. This discontent contributed to an undercurrent of isolationism and nativism, helping fuel the rise of Donald Trump’s America First movement.

Though Nolan took the ancient Greek adherence to Zeus’s law in his own direction for the film, it had powerful historical implications in real life. Ancient Greeks’ religion told them that gods regularly walked among humans incognito, dressed as travelers or beggars. Kindness could be handsomely rewarded. On the other hand, nastiness might be brutally punished.

The benefits of adhering to Zeus’s law were not limited to matters of divine judgment. A good host could expect human guests to be respectful, to not take advantage of the host’s hospitality or overstay their welcome, and to reciprocate the generosity they were shown in the future.

Tons of major religions have their own version of Zeus’s law. It’s not so dissimilar from Jesus Christ’s admonition (ye olde fancy edition), “[a]nd as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.” The idea that gods disguise themselves to test humanity is not unique to the ancient Greeks either, though I must say that the Norsemen of myth really seemed a bit thick in figuring out that all those cloaked, one-eyed old men were really Odin.

Unfortunately, nobody fears divine retribution today. Obviously, modern access to objective, provable reality cuts pretty strongly against the proposition that a god or gods directly intervene to punish or reward humans here on earth, yet I don’t really even think that’s at the bottom of it. For instance, it seems that many of the people who claim to be the strongest believers in Jesus are quite certain that they will not be punished for simply ignoring everything he actually taught.

The practical consequences of being a total dick are not what they once were, either. Upward social mobility has nearly ground to a halt in the U.S. Someone who is gratuitously nasty to a poor person can be pretty confident that the victim isn’t going to unexpectedly rise to power and then settle some scores. Likewise, the message has been crystal clear for at least the past decade that nobody’s going to repay kindness in the future if you yourself fall on hard times. In Trump’s America, you are on your own.

Is there any hope of reversing this sad decline? Well, I suppose we can all try in our own little ways to reignite the rapidly cooling coals of kindness in the world, but only one group of people could easily bring back the fear of godlike justice being meted out in everyday circumstances: billionaire oligarchs.

Think about it: What if instead of spending so much time watching the rocket scientists they hired fire giant phalluses into the sky, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk threw on disguises and wandered skid row for a few weeks? Without even noticing a tiny difference in their net worth, almost like magic, they could bestow such marvels as healthcare, decent housing, and quality sustenance on the dozens they’d surely encounter who offered even a modest kindness.

Those who denied undercover billionaires basic human decency might find themselves facing a frivolous lawsuit (as opposed to the journalists and critics billionaires normally weaponize the justice system against). Hey, these rich douchebags might even themselves undergo a Scrooge-like transformation in the course of interacting with some of the struggling people they seem to have forgotten they share the world with.

Sadly, I think the billionaires are going to remain above us rather than among us for the time being. Neither powerful men nor clandestine gods are here to incentivize decent behavior. So, whether you call it Zeus’s law, the Golden Rule, or something else, I guess it’s up to all of us to try to follow it simply because we want to.

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.

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The next question is what happens to the relationship with outside counsel. Corporations increasingly have access to many of the same AI capabilities as law firms, making general legal knowledge more readily available to both clients and firms.

Businesses pay the bills for Biglaw. As they reengineer their legal departments around AI, the ripple effects may be profound.

Corporations will continue to rely on firms for specialist knowledge, credibility, capacity, and judgment. Work that is a distraction or where the organization lacks experience will still be sourced to firms.

Firms will continue to be trusted for bet-the-company litigation, strategic work, and important M&A activity. Political air cover and the “insurance” of outside experts will remain standard practice. Saving fees doesn’t matter if litigation is lost or a deal falls through.

Think of a seesaw. On one side is the specialized expertise and judgment of a law firm, and on the other side are clients rethinking their law departments.

Here are three likely power shifts that tilt the seesaw toward clients.

The Battle Over Context

Corporations are notorious for losing institutional memory amid organizational changes and employee turnover, but AI can change that. A corporation with mastery of its information can develop context for its business and decision-making.

Additionally, the same AI can understand the law, spot legal issues, develop alternatives, and even provide what amounts to legal advice. Clients may no longer need to engage a firm for many of the basics. They can have AI informed by their data.

As general legal knowledge becomes more readily available through AI, proprietary context becomes more valuable for both the client and the firm.

A company may now know why it accepted a particular clause two years ago and how the decision was made, eliminating the need to seek counsel when negotiating the same clause again.

When outside counsel is engaged, expertise and judgment can be scoped more narrowly. Issue identification for an employment dispute over executive compensation might be drafted in-house. The advice from an employment law partner could be framed to review the identified issues and alternatives, and then draw on their experience and judgment from similar situations. The client might complete the work traditionally done by an associate.

From OCGs To Harnesses

Law firms are governed by Outside Counsel Guidelines (OCGs). In addition to billing guidance, OCGs increasingly focus on how work gets done and when automation is expected. What if clients directed more of the systems that law firms use?

What if firms were required to perform certain work within a client-controlled research environment, perhaps by leveraging a client instance of a legal research service? The client could gain additional insights into how the work was done, including search strategies and the AI prompts used to approach the matter. That information could help with risk assessment and decision-making. It would also become part of the client’s institutional knowledge so future matters have greater context.

The same could hold true for workflows defined by the client using its preferred AI platform, or legal operating system, as some vendors call their platforms. Think Claude for Enterprise, Harvey, Eudia, or other solutions.

In the future, panel participants might be required to use a “legal operating system” to complete work.

In AI, a harness is the surrounding infrastructure that constrains and directs a model’s operation. Perhaps OCGs evolve into something resembling Outside Counsel Harnesses (OCHs), defining not just billing rules but the technology and processes that firms must use to perform the work.

Matter information already travels with a lateral between firms to put the client first. Wouldn’t it make more sense for the matter information to just stay with the client in the first place?

This may be jolting for law firms, and to be fair, there would be much to think through. There will be situations where a firm has proprietary know-how and shouldn’t expect to give it up. Complicated situations, such as multiparty litigation, would pose challenges too. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that all work becomes controlled by the client, but the seesaw may tilt more in that direction.

The very expertise that clients rely upon may atrophy if firms can’t benefit from the knowledge gained on a matter, too. That’s not good for anyone. It’s also in clients’ interest for firms to retain their ability to specialize.

In the future, clients will require firms to conform even more closely to their preferences regarding how work is completed.

Legal Operating Systems As Marketplaces

Amazon’s retail business collects information about what products flow through it. As a result, Amazon-branded products, from batteries and ibuprofen to sofas and golf balls, can be purchased alongside brand names. Amazon knows which private-label items it can deliver profitably and which to leave to others.

Vendors that pursue legal operating systems may have a similar opportunity. The first step is straightforward. What if legal operating systems incorporate features for RFPs and panel management? Clients might bid their work out to panel firms through those platforms.

The second step is more interesting. The platform could see which categories of work are being purchased, how much they cost, and potentially how efficiently they are completed. Then comes the Amazon question. If the platform can identify legal services that can be delivered predictably and profitably, why merely facilitate the transaction? A vendor might eventually offer its own or affiliated legal services. Depending on the jurisdiction and regulatory structure, that could involve an MSO, affiliated legal provider, or other structure.

That would raise significant questions about professional independence, fee-sharing, conflicts of interest, and regulation.

The Limits Of Client-Directed Work

If legal operating systems and marketplace features take hold, there would be a practical limit to how many can serve the market. It would be impractical for law firms to learn a dozen different production environments for their clients. Client confidentiality, portability of work, conflict checks, and safeguarding the law firm’s intellectual property are just a few of the broader implications, not to mention the ethical considerations. Interoperability may be needed between platforms.

The most consequential impact of the reimagined law department may ultimately be control over institutional memory. Organizing internal data for AI means that each request, exception, negotiation, and outcome can inform the next one.

That creates more than efficiency. It creates buying power. The future law department won’t do everything itself. It will still need exceptional outside lawyers. But increasingly, the client may own the environment, the context, and the institutional intelligence through which legal work gets done. The firms will continue to provide expertise, while the client increasingly owns the system.

AI was used in the creation of this article.

Ken Crutchfield has over forty years of experience in legal, tax, and other industries. Throughout his career, he has focused on growth, innovation, and business transformation. His consulting practice advises investors, legal tech startups and others. As a strategic thinker who understands markets and creating products to meet customer needs, he has worked in start-ups and large enterprises. He has served in General Management capacities in six businesses. Ken has a pulse on the trends affecting the market. Whether it was the Internet in the 1980s or Generative AI, he understands technology and how it can impact business. Crutchfield started his career as an intern with LexisNexis and has worked at Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, Dun & Bradstreet, and Wolters Kluwer. Ken has an MBA and holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from The Ohio State University.

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Oil surges 5%, Brent and US crude both over $100 on more tanker attacks [Reuters via Yahoo!]
"With prospects for a definitive resolution to the Iran conflict dimmed and Brent crude prices recently topping $100 for the first time since July, crude oil markets are now settling into a prolonged new normal where disruption risk is persistent, not episodic," a new analysis by S&P Global Energy showed.

The IPO That Asks You to Buy AI Hype Today and Get Paid Years Later [WSJ]
“The earnings pattern sucks for a typical developer,” said Ted Brandt, chief executive of Marathon Capital, a clean-energy-focused investment bank. Development can take years and requires a lot of upfront expenses, meaning a company can post years of losses before the asset starts generating cash, he said…. The long development timelines mean the company could be burning cash and reporting losses for some time.

Energy Transfer Switches Listing to Texas From NYSE [Bloomberg]
It would be the biggest company to swap its primary listing location to Texas from New York…. Energy Transfer… has an approximately $75 billion market capitalization….

Nasdaq invests $100 million in Kraken parent, eyeing 2027 launch of ‘tokenized’ stock trading [CNBC]
[Kraken parent] Payward will also adopt Nasdaq’s market-surveillance technology across its trading venues, including crypto and tokenized equities, as the Kraken exchange looks beyond cryptocurrencies to move into stocks, derivatives and other traditional financial products in an attempt to turn its crypto exchange into a broader, multi-asset trading platform.

Foldable Phones Are Unpopular. Why Is Apple Selling One? [NYT]
“Whenever something is exclusive, limited and luxurious, automatically consumer psychology wants it,” said Nabila Popal, a director at IDC, a market research firm. “It’s like handbags. Why is someone buying a Chanel versus that? It’s not because of the leathers. It’s to show that they have a Chanel and they can afford it.”

“Generally resist this provision.”

“Accept if commercially reasonable.”

“Escalate material deviations.”

“Use judgment.”

A human lawyer can often work with that language. An AI agent cannot, at least not reliably. “Use judgment” is not an executable instruction.

As B2B agents begin participating in contract negotiations, companies will need playbooks designed for machines as well as people. That does not mean converting a Word document into a database. It means making the company’s actual contracting logic explicit enough that an agent can follow it, recognize its limits, and know when to stop.

Consider a familiar negotiation issue: limitation of liability. A conventional playbook might identify the company’s preferred cap, offer one or two fallback positions, and instruct the negotiator to escalate anything materially less favorable.

But what counts as material? Does the answer change based on transaction value, data sensitivity, the type of service, or the counterparty’s importance? Can the negotiator trade a higher cap for stronger insurance obligations? Who may approve the exception? Does an uncapped obligation require escalation in every case, or are there recognized exceptions?

Experienced lawyers often know the answers, even when the playbook does not contain them. They have negotiated similar deals, understand the company’s risk tolerance, and know which exceptions have been approved before. They also recognize when the business context makes an otherwise acceptable term dangerous.

An agent needs those connections stated.

A machine-usable playbook requires structured positions, fallbacks, limits, and approval requirements. It should identify the company’s preferred position, the range an agent may negotiate independently, the factors that change that range, and the point at which human approval becomes necessary.

It must also capture relationships among terms. Contract provisions rarely operate in isolation. A company might accept a different indemnity position if the liability cap changes, or permit broader data use if the data is sufficiently deidentified. An agent following clause-by-clause instructions could produce an agreement in which every individual term appears acceptable while the combined risk is not.

The harder challenge is capturing tacit exceptions. Many legal teams rely on unwritten rules that sound like this: “We normally accept that language, except for strategic vendors,” or “Legal approves these provisions, unless Security has concerns.” Those rules may work because the same experienced people apply them repeatedly.

Agents will expose how fragile that arrangement is.

This is not necessarily bad news. Preparing playbooks for agents may finally force companies to improve playbooks for everyone. Vague standards, conflicting policies, missing approval paths, and undocumented exceptions already create inconsistent negotiations. Human lawyers compensate for those weaknesses through experience, memory, and internal relationships. New team members, outside counsel, and business partners may struggle with them too.

The goal should not be to encode every possible negotiation outcome. Contracts are too contextual, and genuine judgment cannot be reduced to a very large decision tree. The better objective is to define where the organization has made a repeatable decision and where it has not.

That distinction matters. Agents can handle repeatable decisions when the company has established clear boundaries. Novel, consequential, or highly contextual decisions should remain visible as such and move to a person with the appropriate authority.

In-house teams can begin by examining their most frequently used playbooks. Look for words such as “reasonable,” “material,” “standard,” “significant,” and “generally.” Each may conceal a decision that humans understand differently. Ask what facts determine the answer, what range is acceptable, and what triggers escalation.

The exercise is not really about teaching agents how to negotiate. It is about discovering whether the company understands its own negotiating positions well enough to teach anyone.

B2B agents will need contracting playbooks. Creating them may reveal that many legal teams have been operating without complete playbooks all along.

Olga V. Mack is the CEO of TermScout, where she builds legal systems that make contracts faster to understand, easier to operate, and more trustworthy in real business conditions. Her work focuses on how legal rules allocate power, manage risk, and shape decisions under uncertainty. A serial CEO and former General Counsel, Olga previously led a legal technology company through acquisition by LexisNexis. She teaches at Berkeley Law and is a Fellow at CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.She has authored several books on legal innovation and technology, delivered six TEDx talks, and her insights regularly appear in Forbes, Bloomberg Law, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and Above the Law. Her work treats law as essential infrastructure, designed for how organizations actually operate.

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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.

“Forus is becoming how new medicine reaches people in America,” said Kevin Zhang, general partner at Bain Capital Ventures, in a statement. “We have backed the company since its seed, and in that time the largest companies in medicine have turned to it to bring their newest medicines to patients. The next era of medicine will run on the AI-powered network Forus is building.”

With the financing, Forus is investing in three primary areas: deepening the platform with more AI agents and clinical models, expanding to all medical specialties and sites of care, and growing its technical and go-to-market teams, according to Sahir Jaggi, CEO of Forus.

Currently, one-third of patients prescribed medications for high-cost or complex conditions never receive their first dose, forcing providers to rely on older, more accessible treatments rather than newer therapies that may offer better outcomes and fewer side effects, Jaggi said.

“A single prescription can take up to 15 steps across insurance approvals, financial assistance, specialty pharmacy routing, and fulfillment,” Jaggi stated. “Forus consolidates all of it into one system. The process differs for every patient, drug, payer, and pharmacy, leaving clinical teams to coordinate fragmented organizations and systems while patients wait without knowing what is happening. For providers and clinical staff, Forus closes that gap by giving every prescription an AI agent that reasons through the patient’s clinical, insurance, and financial circumstances and takes the actions required to move the patient from prescription through treatment.”

Ultimately, the company aims to put the Forus platform in every doctor’s office across the U.S.

“Making the development, launch, and delivery of each medicine faster, less expensive, and more predictable should allow biopharma companies to invest in more medicines and more indications,” Jaggi said. “The larger opportunity is not simply helping today’s treatments reach more people; it is helping more of the science being discovered become treatment in the first place.”

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Shein’s Value Down $5 Billion, Among HK’s Worst Post-IPO Weeks [Bloomberg]

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Trump Media Launches MAGA-Friendly Investment Funds [NYT]
Steve Neamtz, chief executive of Yorkville America… said the Truth Social funds were focused on companies in sectors critical to the American economy, like energy and security, while avoiding stocks of companies that are seen as promoting social causes at the expense of profits. “We don’t want activism,” he said….
The five newly launched funds have names like Truth Social American Icons, Truth Social American Security & Defense and Truth Social American Energy Security. Companies that the funds own shares in include Home Depot, Uber, Lockheed Martin, CrowdStrike, Exxon Mobil, Walmart and Chevron./Yorkville recently acquired two older E.T.F.s with a strong conservative bent and rebranded them as Truth Social funds.

Blackstone’s Head of Real Estate Is Leaving the Firm [WSJ]
Nadeem Meghji is stepping down from his position, Blackstone confirmed, less than a year after taking sole control of Blackstone’s real-estate business. Previously, Meghji was co-head of global real estate with Kathleen McCarthy, who left in 2025 after 15 years at Blackstone.
About a dozen senior managing directors have departed Blackstone’s real-estate group over the past three years or so.

Block Applies to Establish Builders Bank & Trust [WSJ]
It said the bank would provide custody and fiduciary services, including for stablecoins and bitcoin, but wouldn’t accept deposits or make loans…. The move from Block comes as many financial technology and payment companies are eyeing entrances into banking.

'I am the house now': Bessent warns currency traders not to bet against yen [FT via Yahoo!]
"When we intervene with the Japanese yen, I have pretty good insight into what the Bank of Japan is going to do, what Japanese policymakers are going to do," Bessent said in an event at Southern Methodist University in Texas on Tuesday.
"I have asymmetric information. I am the house now," Bessent said. "You can bet against me if you want."

Senate Republicans say crypto bill likely to fail [Semafor]
"Does not look good right now," said Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D.
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., added that "if there's no interest in the White House in trying to bridge the gap on the ethics language, it is going to fail."

Key Takeaways

* Legal expertise is table stakes, not a differentiator. Every lawyer in the building is technically proficient. What sets a GC apart is emotional intelligence, executive presence, and the ability to translate legal ideas for a non-lawyer audience.
* A crisis is never just a legal problem. When the stock drops or an activist investor sends a letter, the GC has to think PR, markets, employee communications, and legal all at once, not wait for someone else to own the rest.
* The GC is the quarterback, not a specialist with “their piece.” New in-house lawyers often assume the CFO owns markets and comms owns PR. In reality, the general counsel is expected to coordinate all of it, holistically.
* The biggest mistake new GCs make is treating themselves as the final word on legal issues, and treating business colleagues the way they treated outside clients, or worse, the way they treated targets in government work.
* Turnover in the GC seat is steep, over 40% within five years, because “last call” lawyers who just dispense legal advice get replaced. *’First call’ lawyers, the ones the CEO trusts as an advisor on everything, tend to stay.

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However, the COVID-19 pandemic changed many of the assumptions lawyers had about office space. Attorneys learned that they could perform much of their work remotely, and clients became accustomed to meeting lawyers over Zoom rather than traveling to an office. Nevertheless, plenty of law firms still spend substantial sums on office space, and I am increasingly unsure why firms want to commit so much money to overhead that can be difficult to reduce when circumstances change.

We recently moved our own law firm into a smaller office. Our prior space was not enormous by law firm standards, but we simply did not need all of the room we had. Like many firms, my law partner and I spend some of our time working remotely, and there were plenty of occasions when significant portions of our office were empty. Maintaining space simply because we already had it did not seem like a particularly compelling reason to keep paying for it.

Since moving, the smaller office has had essentially no impact on our operations. We still have enough space to accomplish everything we need to do in person, and we can work remotely when that makes more sense. Clients rarely visit our office, and when they do, we have perfectly adequate facilities to meet with them. The biggest difference is simply that the firm spends less money each month on rent.

Some law firms have legitimate reasons to maintain substantial office space. Certain practices involve frequent in-person meetings, and some firms may believe that having lawyers physically together improves collaboration and training. Larger firms may also need considerable space simply because hundreds or thousands of people work for them. And there is presumably still some marketing value in having an impressive address and office, particularly for firms serving certain types of clients.

Still, law firms should probably think much harder about whether those benefits justify the expense. Rent is different from many of the other costs involved in running a law firm because it is relatively difficult to adjust quickly. A law firm that signs a lengthy lease for far more space than it needs might be stuck paying for that decision for years.

This inflexibility seems especially strange in the post-COVID world. One of the biggest lessons of the pandemic was that circumstances can change remarkably quickly. Firms that thought they needed enormous offices suddenly discovered that nearly everyone could work from home. Even after offices reopened, many lawyers did not return five days a week, and hybrid work became a permanent feature of the legal profession.

The amount of space a firm needs can also change for reasons that have nothing to do with a pandemic. A firm might lose a major client and need fewer attorneys. Several lawyers might leave together. Alternatively, a firm might grow quickly and discover that the office it committed to several years earlier no longer fits its needs. In each situation, a long-term commitment to expensive real estate can make adapting more difficult.

Perhaps part of this is cultural. Lawyers are accustomed to seeing successful law firms occupy impressive offices, and partners who spent their careers working in such spaces might associate a large office with professional success. There can also be a certain satisfaction in showing up every morning to an office with an impressive view and a prestigious address. None of those considerations are necessarily irrational, but law firm leaders should at least recognize that they are making a choice rather than paying an unavoidable expense.

I am not suggesting that law firms eliminate physical offices altogether. I like having an office, and there are plenty of situations in which working together in person is useful. But there is a substantial difference between having enough space to operate effectively and maintaining far more space than a firm actually needs.

Moving into a smaller office reinforced this point for me. Our work continues exactly as it did before, clients still receive the same service, and we still have a physical place to work when we want or need one. We simply have less unnecessary overhead.

The legal profession learned during the pandemic that law firms can be far more flexible than many lawyers previously believed. It therefore seems odd that some law firms make extremely inflexible decisions about office space.

Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothman.law.

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ŌURA Files Registration Statement for Proposed Initial Public Offering [press release]

Canada’s retaliatory tariffs take effect as Trump threatens to ban Bombardier jet sales in US [CNN]
Canadian Minister of Industry Mélanie Joly said the government is specifically tailoring its countermeasures to “put political pressure” on the Trump administration to reconsider its actions…. Beyond Trump’s Bombardier threat, he’s likely to unveil counterduties, prompting yet another response from Carney. This next tit-for-tat could hit closer to home.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has said that his province could put restrictions on electricity exports to the border states it supplies, such as New York and Michigan.

Robinhood Wins a New Role in the Oura IPO: Underwriter [WSJ]
It is the first official underwriting gig for Robinhood…. Working as an underwriter should give Robinhood more influence over the number of shares ultimately set aside for its customers. In recent years, retail traders have clamored for more access to newly public companies—but the number of shares allocated to brokerages in popular offerings often fall well short of demand.

For Many Individual Traders, Prediction Markets Are Hot—and Crypto Is Not [WSJ]
Many of the same traders who fueled crypto’s past rallies are now spending more time and money on event-based contracts. These contracts offer yes-or-no wagers on everything from the outcome of state elections to the Federal Reserve’s next interest-rate move to who will be the next James Bond—and are easier to trade than trying to make sense of crypto’s boom-and-bust cycles, some traders say.

Millennium Nears $100 Billion in New Era for Giant Hedge Funds [Bloomberg via Yahoo!]
Its assets have hit $97 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, more than double what Millennium oversaw six years ago…. It's a golden age for the industry's top players. The largest, AQR Capital Management, surpassed $140 billion of hedge fund assets this year, and DE Shaw & Co. now oversees about $90 billion. A half-dozen other firms have exceeded $75 billion, the most ever to eclipse that threshold.

Hunter Biden (and His Laptop) Enter the Cryptosphere With New Meme Coin [WSJ]
Biden’s token will trade under the ticker, $LAPTOP, and launch Sept. 9 on Base, a digital ledger built by Coinbase Global…. In recent X posts, Biden called decentralized digital currencies the “inevitable future,” and weighed in on the dispute between the Trump family’s flagship crypto venture World Liberty Financial and Chinese-born entrepreneur Justin Sun.

I want to build on that idea.

There is a specific moment in practice where patience matters most, and it is the moment when the other side walks into the room angry.

Resist The Urge To Respond In Kind

You know the feeling. The email lands and the tone is aggressive. They question your motives. They accuse your organization of acting in bad faith. Your instinct is to match their energy and tone. You want to fire back. You want to show them you will not be pushed around. Here is what I have learned. When you match someone’s energy you are playing on their field. If they come in hot, they are telling you something about their position and not yours. Anger often signals fear or uncertainty. Your job is to hear the signal underneath the noise.

If you match the heat, you do nothing but stoke a raging fire. When you take the heat out of it and respond calmly and factually, you change the dynamic entirely.

Give Them The Floor

One of the most powerful de-escalation moves is counterintuitive. You give the other side more time to talk than you take. When people feel heard they start to shift. It does not always happen right away, but the act of being listened to changes the posture of a conversation. It moves people from adversarial to collaborative and sometimes they do not even notice it happening.

This means structuring the conversation so they get most of the time. You prepare your remarks. You keep them tight and then you listen. You will learn more from their 45 minutes than they will learn from your five. I have been in rooms where the turning point was not something I said. It was the space I created for the other side to say what they needed to say. Once they said it, we could start working.

Build On Their Work

When the other side puts a proposal on the table the temptation is to tear it down and start over. You want to show them how it should have been done. I would encourage you to resist that.

Take their framework. Preserve their language where you can and add what is missing. When someone sees their own words with your additions layered in they are psychologically closer to yes than if you hand them a completely new document. I have found that the fastest path to agreement is to treat the other side’s draft as the starting point even when it is not where it needs to be. You build on it. You let them see that you took their work seriously. You then have a conversation about the gaps.

Frame Your Ask As Their Interest

Every request you make should be something the other side can explain to their client without feeling like they lost. There is a difference between “we need this” and “this protects both of us.” There is a difference between “your draft is inadequate” and “we think adding this clarity prevents a dispute down the road.” The substance can be the same. The framing determines whether you get a yes or a fight.

One reframing I have used goes like this. “We are not asking for something new. We are asking that this agreement not take away something that already exists.” That single sentence changed the trajectory of a negotiation. The other side stops defending and starts problem-solving.

Structure Creates Calm

When a situation is volatile, structure is your best tool. You set an agenda. You define who speaks and when. You put time limits on the conversation. These are not bureaucratic exercises. It is scaffolding that keeps a difficult conversation from becoming an unproductive one.

People behave differently when they know the rules of the room. An agenda tells everyone what to expect. A defined speaking order prevents the loudest voice from dominating. A time limit creates urgency without panic. I have watched disorganized meetings spiral into personal attacks. That rarely happens in a well-structured meeting.

The Long Game

De-escalation is not about being soft. It is about being deliberate. You can be firm on substance and measured in tone. You can hold the line on what matters and still make the other side feel respected. Those two things are not in conflict.

The agreement you reach today is not the last agreement. The opposing counsel you work with this month may be across the table again next year. The way you conduct yourself in the hard moments determines whether the next conversation starts from trust or from suspicion. You can get the right result and still leave the relationship intact. You can protect your organization and still treat the other side like professionals. That is the long game. The lawyers who play it are the ones who keep getting called back into the room.

The temperature in the room is your responsibility. Lower it, and you will be surprised at how much gets done.

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/).

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Why would a law firm agree to sell off a stake to private equity? The elephant squatting in that room is artificial intelligence, a costly investment in any case, and even more so if it’s the sort of firm interested in building its own bespoke AI model. Private equity can inject a lot of cash for big capital investments, and that industry sees legal as a lucrative business to enter.

The problem for private equity is that we have ethical rules preventing non-lawyers from owning law firms. When entities unbound by the professional rules of lawyers take financial stakes in the success of a law firm, it gives at least the appearance of the firm as a business having obligations beyond those owed to the client and the profession.

Undeterred, private equity has a workaround. Instead of buying a direct stake in the firm as is, the business would bifurcate and the lawyers would sit in a wholly lawyer-owned practice of law entity, while all the administrative and back-office work would become a spinoff entity owned by private equity. This “managed services organization” (MSO) would then collect fees for providing all the business of law services to the law firm while taking all those expenses off the law firm’s direct books in exchange for a big payday. It’s how private equity took over dentistry.

And, depending on the terms, it may not be the worst thing in the world! There are efficiencies to be gained in back office operations and lawyers might not be the optimal people to manage that. On the other hand, bifurcating businesses and paying fees to transfer wealth from Peter to Paul is what hastened the destruction of Red Lobster 1.0. All this is to say that I’m not entirely opposed to private equity investment, as long as lawyers approach it cautiously and with a clear eyed understanding of ethical obligations.

But yesterday, I read about another proposed advantage for private equity that made me say, out loud, “oh, hell no” even though absolutely no one else was in the room.

Infodash CEO Ted Theodoropoulos — always a great resource on legal tech and the industry by the way — posted an interesting conversation on his blog with a pair of Holland & Knight attorneys who have become the experts on law firm MSO deals. In his LinkedIn post describing the episode, he included one nugget that threw me:

I repeat: oh, hell no.

For clarity, this is the exact quote: “It can help with retention. If an equity partner at a law firm has equity in the law firm, they can leave whenever they want. If they have equity in the MSO, the MSO has more latitude around, for example, non-competes, and tying lawyers up that way.” On the podcast, both lawyers explain that every deal they work on complies with ethical rules and there’s no reason to doubt that. But if you’re inventing whole new business structures to get around the letter of an ethical rule, then you’re very much in breach of the spirit.

This was an off-the-cuff conversation, so maybe there’s more nuance to this. But on the four corners of the podcast — we’ll stick with that analogy — this would seem to be a selling point that at least some firms are getting from private equity, and of all the reasons to go down that road, it’s a troubling one.

Non-competition agreements are a vile employment practice designed to trap workers in undesirable arrangements. For lawyers, the consequences are worse. A lawyer who can’t freely port their client to the most advantageous platform is at least potentially constrained from doing right by their client. Conflicts can block clients from having the lawyer of their choice. It’s just bad news all around.

Rule 5.6 could not be more clear on this:

A lawyer shall not participate in offering or making:

(a) a partnership, shareholders, operating, employment, or other similar type of agreement that restricts the right of a lawyer to practice after termination of the relationship, except an agreement concerning benefits upon retirement; or

(b) an agreement in which a restriction on the lawyer’s right to practice is part of the settlement of a client controversy.

Law firms can already employ shady tactics to steal away books of business by building institutional ties designed to entangle clients even if the original relationship partner departs. But making them sign non-compete agreements, otherwise barred by Rule 5.6, by putting on a different hat takes it to a new level.

And, frankly, if the MSO non-compete functionally prevents a lawyer from enjoying their freedom to move their legal business, it should be a violation of Rule 5.6 anyway. “Restricts” is, one could argue, intentionally broad.

It would be one thing to say — as proponents of MSOs would — that lawyers with stakes in the MSO would be incentivized to stay in ways that pure firm equity couldn’t match. MSOs can use the business side of a firm to open new revenue streams that might be sufficiently attractive to a lawyer to keep them on with a firm they might otherwise not love. There are perfectly fine reasons to adopt an MSO model.

But to raise the spectre of non-competes for lawyers? As a selling point for a firm to gain asymmetrical power over your flow of lateral talent?

That’s worrying no matter what caveats come with it.

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.

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Below are the seven most notable hospital M&A deals that were announced or completed this summer.

—WVU Medicine signed an agreement in June to acquire Independence Health System. WVU currently owns 25 hospitals, and adding Independence’s five will bring the combined system to 30 hospitals total, with more than $8 billion in annual operating revenue once complete. Under the deal, WVU will invest $800 million in western Pennsylvania-based Independence, which has about 7,000 employees and 1,000 physicians.

—In June, Community Health Systems completed the sale of its four-hospital Northwest Health subsidiary to Freeman Health System for $112 million. The deal doubled Missouri-based Freeman’s hospital count and marked its first expansion into Arkansas, adding roughly 2,200 employees and 1,500 physicians across the four hospitals.

—Hackensack Meridian Health signed a letter of intent in June to explore acquiring Hunterdon Health in central New Jersey. Hackensack Meridian currently operates 18 hospitals with about 40,000 employees. Hunterdon’s network includes its flagship hospital and more than 30 medical practices.

—Lifepoint Health completed its acquisition of eight community hospitals from ScionHealth in June. The hospitals span six states — Idaho, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin. ScionHealth said the sale lets it concentrate its operations on specialty and long-term acute care hospital services.

—In July, Erlanger Health System in Chattanooga, Tennessee signed a non-binding letter of intent to join South-Carolina-based Prisma Health. The deal seeks to create a 27-hospital nonprofit system with $9 billion in operating revenue across Tennessee and North Carolina. As part of the pending agreement, Prisma would invest $2 billion to bolster care in the Chattanooga area, including protecting Erlanger’s Level 1 trauma center and other safety net programs.

—Allegheny Health Network finalized an affiliation agreement in July to acquire Heritage Valley Health System in Pennsylvania. The deal brings AHN’s footprint to 16 hospitals, adding Heritage Valley’s two hospitals, 36 physician offices, seven outpatient facilities and about 3,000 employees.

—Sanford Health and North Memorial Health finalized their merger this week. The deal formed a combined nonprofit system with 61,000 employees serving about 2.5 million patients across the Upper Midwest. As part of the deal, Sanford is committing to $600 million in investments in North Memorial — $500 million to expand Maple Grove Hospital and $100 million to modernize Robbinsdale Hospital — while also preserving key services like its Level I trauma center.

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KKR-Backed Beauty Firm Wella Files for IPO Showing Sales Growth [Bloomberg]

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US added 162,000 jobs in August, smashing expectations: jobs report [Yahoo! Finance]
The unemployment rate held steady at 4.1%. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had been expecting a more modest gain of 55,000 jobs and a flat unemployment rate…. "Markets may edge up their expectations for a September hike following today's release, but next week's CPI report is still likely to be the key swing factor for policy," Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management, said in a statement Friday.

Anthropic Nears Finalizing $15 Billion Pre-IPO Credit Facility [Bloomberg via Yahoo!]
Morgan Stanley is leading the process, the people said. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. also have prominent roles on the facility, along with Citigroup Inc., they said. The four lenders are also leading the IPO…. The Claude chatbot maker is seeking to raise as much as SpaceX or more in the initial public offering….

Oura’s IPO Reveals High Growth for Smart-Ring Maker [WSJ]
The San Francisco-based company is aiming to list on the Nasdaq as soon as this month. It is expected to fetch a valuation well above the $11 billion mark achieved in a funding round last year…. For the nine months ended June 30, Oura posted revenue of $1.21 billion, up 74% from the same period last year. The company said it recently turned profitable and earned $60.8 million in the period, up from $1.6 million in the same period last year.

Exclusive-Hedge fund giant Citadel seeking to buy US shale oil production assets, sources say [Reuters via AOL]
The firm founded by Ken Griffin was among the bidders for WildFire Energy, which was put up for sale earlier this year by buyout firms Warburg Pincus and Kayne Anderson…. Magnolia Oil & Gas ultimately won the auction….
For Citadel, buying a platform such as WildFire would offer not just producing assets but also an existing management team to operate them and any future acquisitions.
That would mirror the approach which Citadel took when it entered the U.S. natural gas production space last year.

Fox News abruptly parts ways with scandal-tarred star Maria Bartiromo [NPR]
Bartiromo initially brought credibility and flair to Fox Business Network as a financial markets journalist when she arrived in 2014…. She later provided an insider's line to President Trump….
Those close ties ultimately helped to enmesh Fox News in a spectacular scandal, however, after she embraced and promoted Trump's lies about being cheated of victory in the 2020 race for the White House….
In July, Trump sought to return to the question of election security in a speech he wanted covered by the television networks. A Fox Business executive texted the executive producers atop several major network shows to say the speech would not be carried live - given the network's history, and Trump's, on the subject.
The executive producer of Bartiromo's morning business show forwarded the text to Bartiromo - who sent a screengrab to a Trump associate.

G-III Apparel Group Completes Acquisition of Marc Jacobs [press release]

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This event was a spectacular failure from the start, as almost every musical act pulled out in advance and literally dozens of attendees showed up for such wild entertainment as close to 200 baptisms over the course of 16 days. A spokesperson affiliated with Trump’s partisan group that planned the event claimed about 150,000 people showed up over the course of the first three days of the Great American State Fair, but this administration lies about everything (especially crowd sizes), and anyone with eyes could see that far fewer people than that actually attended. Trump’s propagandists have declined to release more detailed attendance data and haven’t described how they came up with the numbers they did release.

Even if you believe the Trump administration’s lies, though, in contrast, the first few days of the Minnesota State Fair easily made Trump’s Great American State Fair look like the pathetic failure that it was. The opening day of the Minnesota State Fair, Thursday, August 27, smashed a previous first-day record with 155,185 people coming through the gates.

Unlike Trump event organizers, the Minnesota State Fair’s number crunchers don’t make up attendance numbers, and instead record them very precisely by simply keeping track of how many entry tickets are scanned each day. Then accurate data is released publicly.

The second day of the Minnesota State Fair, a Friday, set another attendance record at 204,065 entries. The first Saturday and Sunday of the fair were down a bit from previous record highs for those days, but still saw 198,842 and 171,054 people, respectively, come out for some fair food and good times.

So, even if you believe Trump’s imaginary numbers (and you shouldn’t), far more people came to the Minnesota State Fair on every single one of its first four days than came to the Great American State Fair total during its first three days combined. Plus the Minnesota State Fair didn’t have a bunch of pullouts from either its grandstand shows or free musical performances.

Moreover, prices at the Minnesota State Fair largely held steady year-over-year, whereas every day was $13.75 Budweiser day at the Great American State Fair. While I’m not going to claim that everything at the Minnesota State Fair is exactly cheap, at least for what you’re paying you get an extreme variety of old favorites and novel delights to choose from, a few unique gems that you can’t even find anywhere else, and the occasional true bargain (my favorite is the all you can drink milk stand, your choice white or chocolate, where my personal record for a single visit is 108 ounces).

Of course, the question remains: great state fair, or the greatest state fair? The State Fair of Texas gets more total attendees than the Minnesota State Fair, but it needs 24 days to do it, and the Minnesota State Fair has a higher daily attendance average over its mere 12 days. Compared to Minnesota, Texas also has more than five times the population to draw on, giving some perspective to its somewhat higher overall attendance totals.

Still, while Minnesota has a little something extra special going on with its state fair, no one can dispute that Texas also has a pretty dang great state fair. So do many other states. In fact, the daily average attendance for each of the top 15 state fairs in the U.S. beats the claimed daily average attendance of 50,000 for the first three days of Trump’s Great American State Fair.

What makes all these state fairs special is that they are each about a place, the people who call that place home, and the many out-of-state visitors they welcome right along with the locals. A state gets to show off a little of what it has to offer at its state fair. On the other hand, a good state fair is not about cramming religion down anyone’s throat or polishing one man’s tremendous ego.

If you didn’t make it to the Great American State Fair, join the club, almost nobody did. But it’s not too late to make it to an original, far better, far more authentic state fair in Minnesota. The Great Minnesota Get-Together runs through Labor Day, and until then, it’s going to continue to show up any and all pathetic, partisan imitators.

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.

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Larry Parres led the bankruptcy practice at Lewis Rice LLC. That we’re writing in the past tense is a bit of a spoiler for where this story is going. Parres worked on the Chapter 11 of DCA Outdoor, Inc., a Kansas City-based collection of roughly 20 nursery, tree farm, and garden retail entities that filed in February 2025 owing Frontier Farm Credit around $95 million. Every entity was owned and controlled by founder Tory Schwope and none of them had any independent directors.

According to an adversary complaint the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors filed in May, Lewis Rice spent the next seven months representing Schwope rather than the estates that the firm technically represented. That case was just voluntarily dismissed without prejudice on August 20 and Parres is suddenly no longer at Lewis Rice. Perform whatever math you need on that one.

The complaint cites Parres’s own emails, running through the bankruptcy from even before filing, when Frontier conditioned debtor-in-possession financing on installing a chief restructuring officer:

DEAL BREAKER—WE ARE NOT GOING TO PUT A CRO IN PLACE—NOT HAPPENING SO REMOVE IT COMPLETELY.

A CRO is the mechanism by which a lender keeps financing a borrower it no longer trusts to run itself. Opposing one on behalf of the estate is a defensible litigation position — CROs are expensive, and sometimes the incumbent management genuinely is the cheapest competent option. That didn’t seem to be the firm’s motivation here, because the court appointed a CRO anyway. The next day, according to the complaint, Parres emailed his colleagues to tell them that “Tory remains our client so please make sure he agrees with all Juanita decisions before we act” — Juanita being Juanita Schwartzkopf, the court-appointed CRO whose entire function was to make decisions that didn’t route through Schwope.

The complaint claims Parres bcc’d Schwope on this email.

Schwope allegedly wrote back: “Thanks, pal.” Parres, per the complaint, responded that he had Schwope’s back, that Lewis Rice would “continue to bust our ass for you.”

“For you” is sort of the whole sticking point.

The Committee claims that 64.2 percent of Lewis Rice’s billed time went to matters primarily benefiting Schwope as opposed to the various estates paying Lewis Rice for representation — specifically, the Committee alleges that Lewis Rice acted to aid Schwope in a plan to buy back the estates at a discount after shedding debt. Only about 3.4 percent went to anything resembling maximizing estate value. Of that, asset disposition — the mechanism by which the estates would generate recovery for creditors — got less than one hour across the entire engagement.

In March 2025, per the filing, Parres congratulated his team: “Great work guys and know you client appreciates your efforts not to mention Lewis rice appreciates the revenues.”

Parres’s Lewis Rice bio still comes up in preview when you Google him, but heading to the website delivers a “Page Not Found.” The firm informed the St. Louis Business Journal last week that Parres is “no longer a member.”

Last year, Winston & Strawn faced similar allegations. When long-time clients go bankrupt, one would think that might trigger heightened guardrails given how easy it will be for the creditors to point the finger if anything looks fishy.

On the other hand… firms appreciate the revenues.

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.

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Nashville, Tenn.-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.

“People living with cancer have traditionally been left to coordinate care themselves and pay more along the way. Thyme Care is changing that experience and making it possible to improve cancer care while lowering costs,” said Dan Mendelson, CEO of Morgan Health, in a statement. “We’re continuing to invest in Thyme Care because we’re confident they can continue to deliver value to patients and payers – as they make the next wave of cancer care innovation easier to access and navigate.”

Thyme Care also announced the creation of Thyme Companies, a new parent entity that will build a portfolio of independent oncology businesses. These businesses aim to accelerate the adoption of lower-cost biosimilars and increase clinical trial enrollment. The first business is anticipated to launch later this year.

Thyme Care Co-Founder Robin Shah will become executive chairman of Thyme Companies, leading strategy and new business development. Thyme Care will continue under CEO Dr. Brad Diephuis, with Co-Founder Dr. Bobby Green as president and chief medical officer.

The funding will drive Thyme Care’s value-based care business while supporting the growth of Thyme Companies, Diephuis told MedCity News.

“Our top priority is delivering for the members and partners we already serve, maintaining the high-value experience our members count on, and continuing to expand, including further into the commercial market,” Diephuis said. “Our core business is profitable and growing, and this capital lets us keep scaling it while pushing into more parts of the oncology journey than we touch today.”

Other companies that provide cancer care support include OncoveryCare and Maia Oncology. 

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Recent reports of cyberattacks on some of the world’s largest law firms offer a sobering reminder of that reality. WilmerHale reportedly paid at least $18 million to the cyber extortion group Luna Moth after an attack, while Goodwin reportedly paid about $10 million. Weil reportedly paid between $18 million and $20 million after a separate incident. Combined, the ransom payments alone approach $50 million.

Those figures are staggering, but the ransom amounts aren’t the most important part of the story.

The Attack Wasn’t Necessarily Sophisticated

Goodwin said its incident began when a single employee was deceived into providing credentials to an unauthorized person. In another recent incident, Mayer Brown said an employee mistakenly sent documents to someone who had misrepresented their identity. The firm said the third party never gained access to its systems.

Different incidents, but each has the same underlying lesson. Sometimes the easiest way to bypass sophisticated cybersecurity defenses is to simply convince someone to help you.

Social engineering has existed for decades, but attackers continue to refine it. Today’s attacks may involve someone impersonating an IT technician, calling an employee directly to request remote access, or creating enough urgency and credibility that the victim believes the request is legitimate.

That poses a particularly difficult challenge for law firms because attorneys and staff are trained to be responsive. Clients expect quick answers, and partners want problems solved. Attackers understand these workplace dynamics and exploit them to their advantage.

Technology Can’t Fix Everything

None of this means firms should stop investing in cybersecurity technology. Strong technical controls remain essential and can limit damage even after a mistake occurs. But technology has limits.

An employee who voluntarily provides credentials may circumvent protections designed to prevent unauthorized access. Someone who approves a multifactor authentication request they didn’t initiate can defeat one of the industry’s most important security controls. An employee who grants remote access to someone they believe is from IT may effectively escort an attacker past a layer of expensive security technology.

That’s why cybersecurity awareness training can’t be an annual video employees click through while answering email. Employees need to understand how attacks happen and how to independently verify whether someone claiming to be from their IT department or technology provider is legitimate. Most importantly, they need permission to slow things down when something doesn’t feel right.

Make Verification Normal

Law firms can make social engineering significantly harder by establishing simple verification procedures.

If someone claiming to be from IT unexpectedly contacts an employee, the employee should know how to verify that person’s identity using a trusted phone number, an internal messaging system, or an established help desk process. Requests involving passwords, remote access, financial transactions, sensitive documents, or multifactor authentication should automatically trigger additional scrutiny.

The goal isn’t to make employees suspicious of everyone. It’s to make verification part of the firm’s culture. Attackers thrive on urgency. They want employees to act before thinking, whether the request supposedly comes from the managing partner, the accounting department, an IT provider, or an important client.

A culture that encourages employees to pause and verify unusual requests removes one of the attacker’s greatest advantages.

The Human Element Still Matters

Another lesson buried in these enormous ransom figures is that cybersecurity isn’t only a problem for firms without adequate resources.

The firms being targeted are among the largest and most sophisticated legal organizations in the world. They have substantial technology budgets, experienced security professionals, and access to virtually every cybersecurity tool available. Attackers are successfully targeting people all the same.

That’s something every law firm should consider, regardless of size. You can spend a fortune making the locks on your doors stronger. But if someone can convince an employee to hand over the key, those locks suddenly matter a lot less. The answer isn’t more fear. It’s better preparation, better training, and a workplace where verifying an unusual request isn’t treated as an inconvenience.

Sometimes the most important cybersecurity question an employee can ask is also the simplest, “How do I know you are who you say you are?”

Michael C. Maschke is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Sensei Enterprises, Inc. Mr. Maschke is an EnCase Certified Examiner (EnCE), a Certified Computer Examiner (CCE #744), an AccessData Certified Examiner (ACE), a Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), and a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP). He is a frequent speaker on IT, cybersecurity, and digital forensics, and he has co-authored 14 books published by the American Bar Association. He can be reached at mmaschke@senseient.com.

Sharon D. Nelson is the co-founder of and consultant to Sensei Enterprises, Inc. She is a past president of the Virginia State Bar, the Fairfax Bar Association, and the Fairfax Law Foundation. She is a co-author of 18 books published by the ABA. She can be reached at snelson@senseient.com.

John W. Simek is the co-founder of and consultant to Sensei Enterprises, Inc. He holds multiple technical certifications and is a nationally known digital forensics expert. He is a co-author of 18 books published by the American Bar Association. He can be reached at jsimek@senseient.com.

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But a new report from an IRS oversight agency states that collection and enforcement revenue is down due to staff reductions.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), reported that tax revenue from enforcement was reduced from $98.7 billion in 2024 to $93.8 billion in 2025. Of that amount, revenue collected at the conclusion of tax audits dropped from $10 billion in 2024 to $6.5 billion in 2025.

So what caused the revenue decline? Immediately after President Donald Trump took office for the second time, he along with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) implemented a hiring freeze on all executive departments, including the IRS. The freeze did not apply to military and public safety personnel and immigration enforcement.

Collection and audit staff was reduced from 27,217 employees in 2024 to 17,517 in January 2026. Some employees took early retirements, and all probationary employees were terminated. This has resulted in a pause in some audits.

In addition to staff reduction, enforcement policies changed. For example, under the Biden administration, there was a policy to increase audits of taxpayers earning more than $400,000 per year. In fiscal year 2024, there were 58,000 audits of such taxpayers. In 2025, the number of audits was reduced to 43,000.

In another restructuring move, the Large Business and International Division redirected their audit staff to process the large number of Employee Retention Credit claims which was claimed during the COVID pandemic.

So what is to make of all of this? As mentioned above, IRS enforcement revenue decreased by $4.9 billion from 2024 to 2025. During that time, the IRS cut 7,605 employees; assuming a very high but plausible estimate of a $100,000 per year salary per employee, that would mean payroll savings of $760.5 million, perhaps more if benefits are also counted. As a matter of optics, losing $4.9 billion to save $760.5 million makes no financial sense. The TIGTA report warned that the downstream effects of these reductions are likely to become more apparent over time.

While the decrease in enforcement revenue is concerning, it is a small portion of overall tax revenue. Taxpayers paid $5.3 trillion in taxes in fiscal year 2025 which is a 13.2% increase from 2023.

Similarly, the decrease in audit revenue from $10 billion in 2024 to $6.5 billion in 2025 is also notable. But most people generally do not have money available to pay a post-audit tax immediately. So they wait until the case goes to collections where taxpayers set up an installment agreement or in some cases settle through an offer in compromise where they settle their tax debt for less than they owe.

So does this mean that regular taxpayers can play fast and loose with tax law? Absolutely not. Ignore the social media tax “advice” where they tell you not to worry about being audited. While the audit rate is relatively small, the chances go way up if you claim unusually large deductions. The IRS has seen enough of these suspicious returns to flag them. Just be honest with the reporting, and have documentation to back up any expenses if necessary.

If you cannot pay the tax due, work with the IRS and set up an installment agreement. If you are really in financial straits, you can ask the IRS collection staff to put you on currently noncollectible status, which may require an examination of your finances. If you ignore the letters, penalties and interest will increase and, eventually, the IRS may resort to painful actions like bank levies and wage garnishments.

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.

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Leon Black sues House Oversight over Epstein probe subpoenas, won’t appear Thursday [CNBC]
Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., said if it were up to him, “I would hold him in contempt right now.” But Comer added that he wanted to discuss the issue with the panel’s lawyers…. Black’s attorneys say the NDAs sought by the committee have nothing to do with his dealings with Epstein, and that Black had no knowledge of crimes that led to the financial advisor’s arrest on federal child sex trafficking charges in 2019.

Fed’s Williams Says Inflation Continuing to Trend Down [Bloomberg]
“The data recently has been encouraging,” Williams said Wednesday in an interview with CNBC. “I am actually seeing the trend in inflation moving slowly down as some of the effects of the tariffs move into the rearview mirror.”

Founder of Private-Company Investment Firm Charged With Defrauding Investors [WSJ]
Linqto founder William Sarris is accused of manufacturing false scarcity of private company shares to drive up prices. Prosecutors allege he pushed markups beyond what his own lawyers warned him was lawful to boost his company’s revenue…. Another former Linqto executive, Joseph Endoso, pleaded guilty in connection with his participation in the scheme at Linqto and is cooperating with the government….

Highlights From the Messy Divorce Trial of a Hedge-Fund Titan [WSJ]
Laura Overdeck’s lawyer clarified this week that her client isn’t angling for influence over Two Sigma, but rather wants a cash payout. John Overdeck said his primary concern with regard to the firm was maintaining voting parity with his co-founder David Siegel, with whom he is locked in a bitter feud.
“But if there were an award in this case that caused me to liquidate that interest, the value that the firm would give me would not be anywhere near the fair value of that interest,” Overdeck said Tuesday….
[Laura Overdeck’s lawyer Theresa] Lyons… questioned how John Overdeck could be unaware of the terms of a trust that “holds $8 billion.”
That figure apparently wasn’t supposed to be public, and prompted an objection from John Overdeck’s lawyer.

Harry and Meghan Markle’s UK move secretly helped by hedge fund billionaire — with emotional connection to prince [N.Y. Post]
[Marshall Wace founder Ian] Wace is helping finance and is offering friendly support to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s UK move…. It is not believed that he is funding their entire stay in the UK…. The Wace-royal family bond is so strong that the father of Saffron’s eldest son, Milo, is Simon Astaire, who coincidentally is also the spokesman for Prince and Princess Michael of Kent.

The former Hogan & Lovells partner, who left Biglaw to serve as special counsel in the first Trump White House, has since made it his apparent life’s mission to say out loud what everyone outside of MAGAland is thinking. This is a man who has not exactly been stingy with alarm bells. Cobb has warned there are no “guardrails” left around Trump, called the president’s crypto self-dealing the greatest onslaught of corruption in the history of mankind, and gone on cable to flatly describe a useless Congress and an “evil” President.

Anyway, the extremely opinionated Cobb turned up on CNN last night to react to the East Wing being turned into a monument to gold leaf. And his objection wasn’t only about the law.

Asked about Chief Justice John Roberts’s dissent, the one that noted the ballroom’s plain illegality before the majority shrugged and decided no one had standing to say so, Cobb got a little sentimental.

“I mean, it certainly touched me because, as somebody who had spent a lot of time in the White House and in or about the grounds, it was a beautiful setting and a historic setting,” Cobb said.

Emphasis on the past tense, before delivering the bon mot: “It’s turning into, you know, some combination of a whorehouse and Las Vegas at this stage of the game with all the gold and paving of it,” he said. “So, it’s tragic what’s going on. But sadly, it’s going to continue, at least for the time being.”

Say what you want about a whorehouse, at least it’s honest about the transaction. Here the majority dressed political favoritism in a poor imitation of standing doctrine and called it a day.

Watch the full appearance below.

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

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Members voted 370-48 to pass the continuing resolution yesterdat, easily obtaining the two-thirds majority necessary to fast track the bill under a suspension of the rules.

The bill originated in the Senate through a bipartisan deal, with the upper chamber passing it in August. It now goes to the desk of President Donald Trump, who is expected to sign it into law.

For the Defense Department, the CR ensures that current weapons programs can be funded at fiscal 2026 levels, and prevents a situation where civilians are furloughed and troops must work without pay.

“This clean, short-term continuing resolution simply keeps the government open, protects the progress we’ve made, and preserves the path to full-year appropriations,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., said today during a speech on the House floor.

“The bill protects our national security, providing funding for our armed forces and security agencies, as well as crucial authorities for core research and development programs to ensure our military remains the best armed and equipped services in the world,” he added.

During a press conference this morning, Rep. Pete Aguilar, the House Democratic Caucus chair, said he projected “broad bipartisan support” for the bill. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, encouraged members to vote yes on the CR during a caucus meeting that morning, he said.

Rep. Betty McCollum, ranking member of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, praised the bill for its exclusion of Iran war funding.

“I am very proud that this bill for the CR does not have funding that the president requested in his supplemental for the war in Iran, which was his war of choice,” she said on the House floor ahead of passage.

The bill also does not include most of the anomalies — or special funding exemptions — requested by the White House on behalf of the Pentagon. That list of unfunded anomalies includes:

• $1 billion for the Trump-class battleship, which was needed to begin advanced procurement of the nuclear propulsion system, the White House said in a list of anomalies provided to Congress.
• A request for language that would have allowed the Pentagon to obligate funding for five key munitions programs: the Patriot system’s PAC-3 interceptor, Tomahawk cruise missile, AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, and two different Standard Missile-3 variants. The White House had warned the department “may incur cancellation liabilities on multi-year procurement contracts if it does not order the negotiated production quantities.”
• A request for language that would have exempted funding granted in last year’s reconciliation bill from sequestration, or automatic spending cuts. Without the exemption, the White House said about 8 percent of the unobligated reconciliation funds would be made unavailable when the new fiscal year starts on Oct. 1.

Instead, the bill includes boilerplate language common in most CRs that prohibits using funding to start new programs or multiyear contracts.

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Yadda yadda yadda, he lost.

Has anything happened in the intervening months to make financial institutions trust turning over their legal future to AI? No. But they’re asking for it anyway. The next recession is going to be wild, y’all.

Just last week, at ILTACON, the message from clients was that they wanted outcomes at any price. Now Wall Street, the people who brought you the Great Recession, wants its law firms to turn over legal review to the robots.

Absolutely not.

The entire point of AI is for a first-year to finish the assignment in 3 hours, sit on it for another 7, and bill 10.

I’m beginning to think these banks don’t understand innovation. https://t.co/wO66OeYy8n

— Bill Moore, Esq. (@lawyer_memes) September 1, 2026

This is funny, but there’s actually a lot of truth here.

The monied interests shoveling cash onto the AI bonfire, clucking their tongues knowingly that OF COURSE an industry that’s burned almost a trillion and a half in expenses to generate around $200 billion is a sound investment! The only way that bet works is if you accept the deeply misanthropic worldview of Silicon Valley investors who believe AI will become a digital messiah — a robot Jesus, except with less “healing the sick,” and more “shoving poor people into the human battery farms from the Matrix.” For these people, AI makes sense because it can replace human labor at every level (except, for some reason, their own ability to invest).

The finance bros believe the robot is infallible because it’s a necessary article of faith when they’ve loaded up their books with a money black hole. They don’t have time to worry themselves with hallucinations. Or boilerplate drawn from wholly unrelated deals. Or suboptimal research. Just press the “Easy” button and turn in whatever the hell comes out!

But that’s not how law works. Without human legal judgment, mistakes get made. After a couple years of “human-in-the-loop” — an empty phrase that presumes a senior partner will read 200 pages of agentic logs on the backend — legal tech is starting to realize that the process needs to optimized to give the AI more break points for humans to interject, course correct, and reflect.

AI keeps getting faster, but the human brain doesn’t. Those hours and days spent turning the document included epiphanies and strategic rethinks. Compressing the time from start to finish robs humans of that time to really think about whether they’ve forged the right output. This matters because AI delivers the median acceptable answer by design. It’s taking prior results and spitting out smoothed over mediocrity. That may give a lawyer a good head start, but it’s not an endpoint. And bringing the output up to snuff requires more than a once-over with a red pen. It’s going to require real time.

At ILTACON, one analogy I made after the panel I spoke on is that the investors want AI to be a robot, but the law needs it to produce a cyborg. From this industry’s perspective it has to work in conjunction with humans. Indeed, we’ve already seen some early indications that AI isn’t reducing lawyer hours but increasing them. AI can surface research rabbit holes that humans might never have found before, and the humans are chasing them down to deliver better work product.

Not that AI won’t change billing. To the extent it saves time in some places, that is time that lawyers can’t bill. In the past, people mused about the $10,000 billable hour to reflect the value of senior judgment. The banks, it seems, aren’t buying it. A flat fee for relatively repeatable tasks could give the client cost predictability without firms sacrificing revenue. That makes the most sense, but it requires clients to believe they’re getting value.

If this is the stance they want to take, they’ll discover the value in a year or so when the litigation gets going. Because they’re playing a risky game with bet-the-company propositions. Of course, considering that they’re continuing to hand hundreds of billions of dollars to OpenAI in 2026, their betting judgment may leave a lot to be desired anyway.

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.

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Shein makes lacklustre Hong Kong debut as investors fret about growth and regulatory risks [Reuters]

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Piacenti, who lived in Chester, N.J., was one of two people stabbed near 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue at around 4:30 p.m., in what the NYPD described as an unprovoked attack. She was stabbed in the abdomen and pronounced dead at a hospital a short time later.

Police identified the assailant as Pamela Cisneros, a 49-year-old Queens woman with what officials described as a documented history of mental illness. According to the account NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch gave reporters, Cisneros pulled two kitchen knives from a Target bag and first stabbed a 68-year-old man who had just come up from the subway with his wife at West 41st Street. She then moved a block north and attacked Piacenti. The two stabbings happened roughly 20 seconds apart. The man is expected to survive.

Officers surrounded Cisneros and, police said, spent several minutes trying to talk to her while she was still armed; when she charged at them with the knives, officers opened fire. She was later pronounced dead at a hospital.

Piacenti earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016 and her J.D. from Fordham Law in 2021, and she had built a career at the intersection of law and finance — serving, according to her LinkedIn profile, as Bank of America’s Vice President of Business Selection and Conflicts.

She had celebrated her second wedding anniversary on Aug. 10, just three weeks before she died. Our thoughts are with her family, her husband, her colleagues, and the Fordham Law community.

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

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A War That Won’t End Is Complicating the Fed’s Next Move [WSJ]
“It is my belief that we’ve seen a supply shock,” [Bessent] said on CNBC. “Traditionally, you don’t raise [rates] into a supply shock unless you see second- or third-order effects, and we are seeing the core inflation has remained very, very restrained.”

Goldman Sachs, BofA and others plan to issue dollar stablecoin together in 2027 [Reuters]
The group will compete with a separate consortium of 37 financial institutions which formed ‌a ⁠company called Qivalis and said they plan to launch a euro-pegged stablecoin later this year…. Still, there are few signs of ​demand for stablecoins issued ​by banks.

The private sector added 38,000 jobs last month, missing expectations, ADP says [Yahoo!]
Economists polled by Bloomberg had been expecting a gain of 47,000 jobs. July's job gains were revised up slightly to 46,000…. On Friday, the Labor Department will release its own August jobs data gathered from surveys of public and private sector employers. ADP's data is based on payroll data from millions of private-sector employers. Economists expect the government data to show that the US added 55,000 jobs.

Trump Crypto Ally David Bailey Rebuilds After 99% Stock Collapse [Bloomberg]
“It’s been a very rough year for us,” Bailey said in an interview at this year’s Bitcoin Asia conference. “We bought Bitcoin at the top, and then Bitcoin performed very poorly….”
Nakamoto now trades well below the value of its Bitcoin holdings, making it far harder to issue stock to buy more of the cryptocurrency. Bailey is instead turning to a more conventional source of firepower: businesses that generate cash.

UBS Faces Protracted Capital Battle as Minister Hits Back [Bloomberg]
“This is a solution in favor of the bank and against taxpayers,” [Karin] Keller-Sutter said Tuesday in Basel.
Her comments come after a committee of the Swiss parliament on Monday endorsed a proposal that would allow the country’s largest bank to use a type of hybrid debt known as AT1 bonds to meet half of the new capital requirements.

Manhattan firms have been locked in a space race, and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett’s 916,000-square-foot relocation — the single largest legal deal of the quarter, according to Savills — is the kind of number that would have been unthinkable in 2020, back when landlords were quietly pricing out condo conversions.

Since 2023, Biglaw has been tightening its in-office mandates with the enthusiasm of a firm that has somewhere very expensive to put everyone, despite associates making it clear they’ll trade prestige for flexibility. Four days a week is increasingly the new floor across Biglaw, with Duane Morris the latest to jump from three to four just last week. And Sullivan & Cromwell is leading the pack with five days required in the office. The leasing figures make a statement: the work-from-home heyday is behind us — you don’t ink these deals for a hybrid workforce that turns up when it feels like it.

It’s been trending for a while now that firms lease reckless amounts of premium space and then, having done so, discover a sudden and urgent need for everyone to come justify it in person. Three years later, the mandate and the lease have stopped being cause and effect and started being the same gesture. The work-from-home glory days are not coming back.

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

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New York City-based Cityblock offers clinical care, behavioral health care and social care in patients’ homes, virtually and in community-based clinics. It primarily serves Medicaid and dual-eligible populations. The company’s AI-powered operating system aggregates physical, behavioral and social health data to provide care teams with predictive insights into members.

The $116 million round supported Cityblock’s acquisition of Homeward Health, a rural healthcare provider. The funding will be used to invest in the combined platform, including optimizing operations, the care model, technology and data infrastructure.

Happy Health secures $75 million in funding

Happy Health offers an FDA-cleared smart ring for at-home diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea. It also provides treatment management and daily sleep health measurements. Happy Health’s platform uses continuous health data and AI to create a personalized baseline for each patient, helping doctors identify meaningful changes in their health. Sleep is the company’s first focus area, but it plans to expand into other areas in the future.

The $75 million round was from ARCH Venture Partners and OpenLoop. The financing will help Happy Health accelerate the clinical validation of its tech, as well as build the infrastructure to expand beyond sleep.

Flagler Health raises $50 million in Series B funding

New York City-based Flagler Health is an AI-native operating system for musculoskeletal care. It helps MSK practices run more efficiently and better manage patients between visits. The company supports thousands of providers across 36 states.

The Series B round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from SignalFire, Alumni Ventures, Streamlined, 186 Ventures, Proof VC, Tribeca Venture Partners and Offscript. In total, Flagler Health has raised $63 million. The financing will help Flagler scale across the country, according to the announcement.

Network Bio launches with $50 million in funding

Palo Alto, California-based Network Bio is a biotechnology company building disease-specific AI models based on human biological data. It collaborates with academic medical centers and leverages its technology to accelerate diagnostics, biomarker discovery and drug development.

The $50 million raise was from Section 32, Thiel Bio, Founders Fund, Breyer Capital, Blue Venture Fund and JSL Health Capital. The funding will be used to expand Network Bio’s life science platform, according to the announcement.

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Federal judges can take up to 90 extra days to perform the barest of minimum acts of transparency, and Alito takes advantage of that almost every year. His eight colleagues filed on time and the Administrative Office posted their forms on June 29, Bad Bunny tickets and seven-figure book advances and all. Alito extended his clock to run into late September.

Now, here’s the scheduling rub. On October 5, the first argument day of the new term, the justices will hear Suncor Energy (U.S.A.) Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, where the oil and gas industry will beseech the Court to ban local governments from suing polluters over climate damage. Since May, watchdog groups have been asking the Senate Judiciary Committee to look at why Alito hasn’t recused, given that, based on past disclosures, he’s the only justice holding oil and gas stock directly. A late-September filing would have answered that question a few days the oral argument.

And that filing reveals that he hasn’t divested from any of it. ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, AES, BHP Billiton, Black Hills, OGE Energy, Woodside Energy, all at the same value ranges as last year with no sales recorded, plus a mineral interest in Grady County, Oklahoma, reported at $100,001 to $250,000.

Given that Alito has shown no sign of recusing in the face of an obvious conflict of interest, could he have sped up his disclosure hoping that the story has time to cool down before he sits down to make sure the Earth never will?

That’s a deeply cynical read, but we’re also talking about a deeply cynical actor.

As a reminder, Alito recused from the 2023 cert petition in this very case. He recused from a 2025 petition raising the same question with different companies. In January he stepped out of Chevron U.S.A. v. Plaquemines Parish days before argument over his ConocoPhillips shares. Then in February he voted to grant cert in Suncor. Back in May, a spokeswoman told NBC News that Alito “does not have a financial interest in any party” in the case and that Court lawyers advised him “his recusal is not required.”

It’s a neat trick for an industry seeking a particular outcome. Just continue to play musical litigants until you strike on a combination that the judge doesn’t own. The fact that the case implicates the stocks he owns and he will profit off the decision he makes doesn’t matter because he doesn’t have a current stake in either of these parties.

The recusal statute, 28 U.S.C. § 455(b)(4), disqualifies a judge who has a financial interest “in the subject matter in controversy or in a party to the proceeding, or any other interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.” But, of course, the Supreme Court does not consider itself bound by any ethical rules so… “shrug emoji” it is.

The spokeswoman also explained that the earlier 2023 recusal was “inadvertent.”

Yeah, it’s hard keeping track when you’re betting on oil and gas stocks like DraftKings on the first weekend of football. Did I put $50 on the Bills outright or just to cover? Is it Exxon or Chevron? It’s all so confusing.

The Revolving Door Project pointed out that the oil companies themselves have treated these cases as linked in their own filings. In fact, they told the justices back in 2022 that the Colorado suit was “less likely” than the others to present recusal problems. The petitioners were apparently tracking Alito’s conflicts more carefully than Alito was.

Remember Paul Singer? The guy who flew Alito to Alaska on his private jet for a trip before Alito ended up hearing Singer’s case. In another stroke of convenient inadvertence, Alito claimed he never realized Singer was involved in that matter when he refused to recuse from that one too. Anyway… Singer’s Elliott Investment Management holds more than 52 million shares of Suncor.

Scolds may say, even if the rules applied to justices, that § 455(b)(4) doesn’t reach a justice’s stock in nonparty companies that merely operate in the same industry. Reading the statute that broadly, they might say, would require recusal every time any outcome moves a sector. But… justices don’t have to own stocks. Would we be comfortable with a judge landing a case impacting a specific sector and then instantly buying every other player in that sector before deciding? Because that’s the logical extension of this reading.

Anyway, congratulations to Alito on all his financial success.

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.

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Suppose Iran feels desperate by late September. The regime is beginning to wobble.

Do you really think the Iranians would admit defeat and come to the negotiating table with their tail between their legs?

I personally doubt it.

Surely there are folks in Iran ginning up an October surprise that would devastate the Republicans (and Donald Trump) in the midterm elections. I’m a bit concerned about those possible Iranian ideas.

The Iranians don’t have to be able to hit the U.S. mainland with a nuclear weapon to cause a ton of trouble for us. Chemical or biological agents could be smuggled into the U.S. (or manufactured here) and then released by Iranian operatives in a few strategic locations.

The attack need not be that sophisticated. Even a few well-placed conventional weapons (or, for instance, airplanes; or, perhaps, this time around, trucks or trains) could do a lot of damage and affect the midterms.

Or a large-scale cyberattack would be quite an October surprise and quite a lasting disaster.

But my imagination is pretty limited. Be more creative!

Couldn’t the Iranians do something that would make the Strait of Hormuz unnavigable for the foreseeable future? Couldn’t they release some radiation, or blast a hole in an oil tanker to cause a large oil spill, or sink a couple of large ships in the relatively narrow navigable shipping lanes?

If we really do manage to back the Iranians into a corner, I sure hope someone’s thinking about what the Iranians might do to wiggle their way out of that nook — or simply to exact revenge on Donald Trump, the guy who started it all.

The more you think about this, the more depressed you’ll become.

If Iran launches an October surprise, what will Trump do (possibly with broad public support at that point) in the days after Election Day? If the Iranians have killed a bunch of Americans, or put a real dent in our way of life, America might be mad. And Trump, of course, doesn’t like to lose. That could be a nasty combination.

Trump doesn’t have conventional weapons to spare, but might he nuke Pickaxe Mountain, the underground Iranian nuclear facility that can’t be reached with conventional weapons? Nuke Fordow, the other underground facility? Nuke ’em both? Add Tehran to the mix?

My imagination isn’t sufficiently expansive to predict what the future might hold.

But I can sense the timing, and the direction, of what might happen shortly, and I don’t like the picture my crystal ball portends.

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.

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Shein’s Lackluster Debut Shows a Fast-Fashion Model Left Behind [NYT]
Shares in Shein fell 10 percent at one point before clawing back to close near its offering price, a humbling debut for a company once valued at $100 billion but now worth about a quarter of that. Its offering came after a wave of Chinese A.I. companies went public in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and years after Shein tried, and failed, twice in its efforts to list in New York and London amid opposition from officials and activists over working conditions at its facilities.

SEC Presses Investment Firms to Prove They Have Access to Shares in Hot Startups [WSJ]
SEC examiners have been asking registered investment advisers for proof that their SPVs own or have exposure to the shares in private companies that they claim to…. SPVs operate under few regulations, and the SEC has the authority to check the funds that are held by registered investment advisers. Some SPVs are offered by firms that are technically outside of the SEC’s purview, though if there is an issue of fraud, the SEC has authority to investigate and take action.

Hedge Fund Disclosure Deadline Delayed Again by SEC, CFTC [Bloomberg]
The disclosures are meant to inform officials about the market conditions that could lead to systemic financial risk, such as counterparty risk, sudden margin calls or any significant adverse event impacting private funds…. The latest delay comes after hedge fund Situational Awareness saw its highly-leveraged equities trades go sideways in July. During that time, the artificial intelligence-focused fund went from $45 billion in assets under management to about $10 billion.

Citadel Says Marshall Wace ‘Stonewalling’ in Spat Over Shatz [Bloomberg]
A New York judge ruled in June that Citadel could subpoena records from Marshall Wace as part of a dispute in arbitration with [Daniel] Shatz, who claims he was denied deferred compensation from Ken Griffin’s firm. Citadel claims Shatz stole confidential information in preparation for his 2024 move to Marshall Wace…. On Tuesday, Citadel advised the judge of an email it received from the panel arbitrating the dispute with Shatz. The panel was “extremely frustrated by the delay in resolving the issues related to the Marshall Wace subpoenas” and “expects compliance with those subpoenas,” which may uncover “relevant evidence….”

Ex-BlackRock employee sues for $12M in case that could unveil firm’s secretive pay structure [N.Y. Post]
Neal Dignum, a former director in BlackRock’s Long Term Private Capital fund, is accusing BlackRock of failing to pay a single cent of the carried interest it promised him as part of his pay package…. To keep the complaint permanently sealed from the public, BlackRock would need to argue that it contains “trade secrets, confidential business information, or proprietary information,” the filing said – and if it fails to do so, its compensation structure could be revealed in court.

The lawsuit began inauspiciously, when Judge Stephen Merryday struck the original complaint sua sponte for standing “unmistakably and inexcusably athwart the requirements of Rule 8.” Trump’s sparklemagic lawyer Alejandro Brito really put his back into that first draft, which clocked in at a whopping 85 pages and included Trump’s entire CV, including cameos on Wrestlemania V, All My Children, and The Nanny. But it was not meant to be, and so Brito had to cut more than half of his delicious prose lauding “President Trump’s transcendent ability to defy wrongful conventions.”

Now he’s got to do real law … sort of.

The new complaint purports to establish actual malice by pointing to the source of Trump’s leaked tax returns: former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn. Trump insists that Times reporters Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner “purposefully avoided the truth by failing to independently verify whether the documents that Charles Littlejohn provided them with, and upon which they relied on for the challenged statements in the Book, were legitimate, accurate copies of President Trump’s tax returns.”

This suggests but does not state as fact that the leaked returns were fakes. This is somewhat in tension with the assertion that “Littlejohn was charged with unlawfully stealing and disclosing President Trump’s tax returns on September 29, 2023” and thus the reporters “had reason to doubt the accuracy” of his documents. And it’s deeply in tension with Trump’s own claims in the lawsuit he filed against the IRS seeking billions of dollars in recompense for Littlejohn’s unlawful disclosure.

Either the returns were real, in which case the Times had every reason to rely on them. Or they weren’t, and Trump and Brito just filed a fraudulent lawsuit against the IRS that led to the creation of the January 6 slush fund and blanket immunity for past tax crimes for Trump and his family. If the documents were fake, then the settlement must be invalid, right?

This is obviously the least of the problem with this dumpster fire of a defamation suit. This is a document which argues that it’s defamatory to report that “Trump’s desk showed no signs of real work—no computer, contracts, or files. It was just smothered by newspaper and magazine articles focused on one subject: himself.” But it is yet another sign of the deeply unserious lawyering by the president as he bleeds journalists with endless rounds of pointless litigation.

Pity poor Judge Merryday and his clerks!

Trump v. NY Times [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast.

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It never made much sense. For most of that time, Oracle was busy trying to build itself into a leading cloud service provider — and cloud services rely on the exact same Section 230 protections Oracle was paying people to attack. But it’s not like Oracle is known for being particularly successful in its ability to think things out long term.

While Trump’s first attempt to hand TikTok to Oracle flopped, the second attempt (helped along by Democrats succumbing to a bogus moral panic about TikTok’s alleged dangers) resulted in Oracle ending up with a 15% stake in TikTok (as well as a lucrative hosting deal). In fact, Oracle’s long-term top lobbying exec, Ken Glueck (who was the architect of Oracle’s funding of a bunch of dark money groups that attacked Section 230) actually ended up with a seat on TikTok’s board.

And TikTok is already suffering from the attacks on Section 230. Remember, the wacky Anderson v. TikTok ruling that bizarrely said TikTok didn’t qualify for Section 230? That kind of ruling doesn’t happen without the widespread drumbeat of “Section 230 has gone too far” that Oracle spent years helping to push. TikTok is in a way worse position legally because of Ken Glueck’s advocacy. And now he’s on their board.

Meanwhile, Oracle, while not in the top tier of cloud providers — AWS, Microsoft, and Google together account for around 63% of enterprise cloud spending — is solidly at the top of the second tier. And while there aren’t that many Section 230 cases targeting the underlying cloud hosting providers, they’re not totally unheard of.

So, Section 230 protects both Oracle, and its large investment in TikTok. Yet Oracle spent years funding attacks on Section 230 (mainly just to piss off Google) and the main architect of that strategy is now on TikTok’s board.

Which puts us right back where we were six years ago, wondering if Oracle will ever change its tune. The company’s disclosures offer a partial answer. Section 230 is still under attack in DC, but the courts have been dismantling the law via judicial decisions that it’s not even clear what’s left for Congress to do. Looking at Oracle’s “Political Activity Reports” we see that while back in 2019 it was funding anti-tech groups which promoted attacks on Section 230 (like the Internet Accountability Project, the Free and Fair Markets Initiative, and the Copyright Alliance), these days it only funds the Copyright Alliance whose remit is larger than just attacking tech (though it still does that too).

Indeed, the IAP and FFMI, who were these huge fake grassroots non-profits designed to hold Google and Amazon to account, barely seem to exist any more. FFMI’s website stopped updating in 2023 and IAP’s in 2024. It’s almost as if they were astroturfed operations that suddenly became unnecessary once Ellison could get what he wanted directly, having spent $45 million to work his way deeper into Trump’s circle.

It looks like a large segment of the “grassroots” movement against Section 230 was conjured into existence with Oracle’s quiet backing, and seems to have evaporated once Oracle no longer needed it to exist.

Of course, there’s also the separate issue of the ongoing attempt by Ellison to also buy up half of Hollywood. Hollywood itself has probably been the second biggest force, behind Oracle, in the anti-Section 230 lobbying effort over the past decade. Ellison already owns Paramount, and may still end up with Warner Bros., as well, which might pull Oracle’s efforts back towards hating the open internet rather than defending the thing its own business runs on.

The simple fact, though, is that if you want a dynamic, competitive open internet, you need a strong Section 230. Gutting it won’t hurt the internet giants. They have buildings full of lawyers and can survive the onslaught of misguided lawsuits (most of which they’ll end up winning in the end). However, it will hurt all the small sites, the forums, the upstarts, the blogs that can’t afford to find out whether a case would get dismissed after a couple years and a million dollars of discovery. Who knows… perhaps that’s Ellison’s strategy all along: make the open internet weaker, so the companies he controls have way more power.

The next time Section 230 lands on the chopping block — and it will — Oracle (and, for that matter, TikTok) will have to pick a side. The smart move would be to defend it. But, then again, the smart move all along would have been for Oracle to defend it, and it chose the opposite for many years. The real question is whether Oracle’s years-long campaign against Section 230 comes back to bite it: devaluing the TikTok stake it worked so hard to get, and eating away at the legal protections its entire cloud business sits on top of.

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.

Aon CEO says insurance broker seeks to build ‘premiere middle market platform’ with purchase of rival USI [CNBC]
Insurance broker Aon announced on Monday it will purchase rival USI Insurance Services from private equity firm KKR…. The acquisition for Aon builds on the company’s purchase of NFP in 2024, another insurance broker focused on the U.S. middle market….
Shares of Aon tumbled 7% in response on Monday.

States can regulate prediction markets as gambling, federal appeals court rules [CNN]
The 3-0 ruling came from a panel of three Trump-appointed judges. The case originated from Nevada, where regulators tried to shut down the Kalshi prediction site…. With the backing of the Trump administration, prediction markets have been operating as federally regulated financial exchanges….
The ruling Friday creates a circuit split, with dueling rulings on the same question, teeing up the issue for potential Supreme Court review.

Former White House teleprompter operator ordered to turn over profits, pay fine over insider trading [AP]
The settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, announced Friday, also dealt Gabriel Perez a three-year trading ban. Perez was placed on unpaid leave from his job at the White House after reports emerged that he used his position to make bets on what President Donald Trump would say in speeches…. Perez was ordered to repay his profits in full, along with the $65,000 civil penalty, which the commission said was a reduction because of his “exemplary cooperation.”

Ex-Congressman George Santos Receives Kalshi’s First-Ever Lifetime Ban [WSJ]
In addition to the ban, Kalshi said its compliance department had imposed a penalty of $71,356…. Kalshi announced several other disciplinary actions on Monday, including a three-year ban for a Republican congressional candidate in North Carolina….
The CFTC alleged that in February 2026, Santos made a series of misleading statements on social media about whether he would attend Trump’s State of the Union speech, while placing lucrative bets on Kalshi on the matter.

Power, Betrayal and the Fall of Leon Black [WSJ]
Black said he didn’t realize he had spent that much because after an initial written contract with [Jeffrey] Epstein, all subsequent payments had been agreed to by handshakes between the two men.
I was incredulous that he would have such a loosey-goosey fee arrangement with Epstein, especially considering Black’s Wall Street reputation as a tough negotiator. In response, Black quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson to me: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

The Rise of the Influencer-Investor [Vogue Business]

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But the money on the page is not the same as money in the bank.

Standard billing rates rose double digits again, yet realized rate growth came in at just 7.3 percent, down from 9 percent this time last year. A little of that gap is discounting. Most of it is inventory: work that’s been done but not billed, or billed but not paid. Inventories grew 17.7 percent across the Am Law 200 — faster than revenue itself — and grew fastest at the very top, up 19 percent for the Am Law 50. The collection cycle, the number of days it takes to actually get paid, slowed by 8.5 days. Clients, Wells Fargo notes, are eyeballing their invoices harder and cutting the checks slower.

None of which should surprise anyone who read the Q1 report. Back in April, the same collection cycle had already slowed 6.5 days, Am Law 50 inventory was already up 19 percent, and Wells Fargo’s own consultant pinned the lag on the AI gold rush — all those data center deals and pre-IPO scrambles that hadn’t been collected on yet. Three months later, the inventory is bigger and the cash is slower. Wells Fargo credits the AI capital-spending frenzy for much of the activity, and that part is real. But getting the deal done still isn’t the same as getting paid for it.

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 Says It’ll Pay Up to $18 Billion in Social Media Claims [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.

Companies Can Tell Investors Less Under Proposed S.E.C. Rules [NYT]
“What is the big problem that we need to solve?” said Rebecca Patterson, a former chief investment officer of Bridgewater, a hedge fund.
“U.S. firms today are highly profitable overall, and they are still able to make longer-term strategic business decisions,” she added. “They are nicely walking and chewing gum at the same time.”

In Trump’s Washington, Ballooning National Debt Stirs Little Action [NYT]
Mr. Trump, who was such a prolific borrower as a private businessman that he termed himself “the king of debt,” has never seemed to care much about deficit spending. During his 2016 campaign, he almost offhandedly boasted that he could eliminate not just the deficit but the entire cumulative national debt in eight years as president. Instead, the debt has doubled since then under him and Mr. Biden.

The U.S. Created 79,000 Fewer Jobs Than Previously Reported, New Revisions Suggest [WSJ]
The private sector likely had 178,000 fewer jobs in March than the still-official data shows, with the slide concentrated in retail and in wholesale trade.

Two Sigma’s Feuding Founders Head to Arbitration in Fresh Battle [Bloomberg]
Entities associated with the Siegel family claim co-founder John Overdeck improperly handled an earlier dispute, in which an ex-employee sought severance and deferred compensation two years after their exit…. The other fight is an escalation of a conflict that’s been brewing for months, after Siegel’s first pick to share the CEO role resigned. Siegel replaced him on the firm’s two-person management committee with Seth Platt, but whether Platt then automatically becomes co-CEO alongside Lyons remains in dispute.

Hedge-fund titan’s $6.2B divorce could be third-biggest of all time: Truth behind bitter court battle [N.Y. Post]
If Laura Overdeck successfully wins the astronomical sum, the couple’s divorce would only fall behind those of Bill and Melinda Gates and Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott as the most expensive in US history…. Laura Overdeck is seeking a 35% piece of John’s stake in Two Sigma — which her lawyer pegs at $6.2 billion.

Suleiman Sami was working full-time as an IT employee. But he also had three side hustles: A transportation service, event ticket sales, and social media influencing.

His social media influencer work involved videos of athletes and celebrities. Sometimes he was in the videos and other times he was behind the camera.

Sami paid large sums of money during the tax years at issue (2019-21) to get in contact with celebrities. He paid thousands of dollars to attend events like the Grammy and Emmy award ceremonies and charity events like the Tiger Jam hosted by Tiger Woods. He also paid to meet movie stars like Benedict Cumberbatch, Matt Damon, and Mark Ruffalo. He also paid for a personalized video message from Chris Evans.

He paid to catch a pass from Tom Brady, which he fumbled (he later testified that he is not a Brady fan.) He also paid to catch a pass from Drew Brees that he caught.

Whenever Sami posted pictures of himself with celebrities, it generally garnered more attention on his social media feeds and gathered more views. The increased views can lead to shared advertising revenue. But during the years at issue, Sami did not generate income from his influencer activities although in later years he did.

Sami deducted these celebrity-related payments as marketing expenses on his tax returns. The IRS disagreed with the deductions, and his matter went before the U.S. Tax Court.

In the decision, the judge disallowed the celebrity-related deductions because she believed that the primary motive for the celebrity interaction were for personal purposes and charitable intent and not for business marketing. But she also noted that Sami did not initially claim or view the expenses as marketing ones and it is likely that he derived considerable personal status (i.e., “clout”) from being seen with famous people. Taking all of this into consideration, it was not enough to show that Sami’s expenditures were made with a business purpose.

To understand where the IRS objections and the court decision are coming from, note that both groups see a common situation where a full-time W-2 employee tries to reduce their taxable income by claiming what are seen (by the IRS and the court) as suspicious deductions. Usually this involves so-called independent distributors in multilevel-marketing operations.

Several other factors hurt Sami’s case. He did not keep good records despite having two accounting degrees. And his social media influencer business did not generate any income during the years at issue. This may make one wonder whether, but for the tax benefits, a reasonable person would spend three years investing his money this way.

Despite these shortcomings, the judge’s opinion seems to be overly restrictive. She acknowledged that there is a pay-to-play system to gain prominence in social media platforms. Influencers like Sami pay to be seen with celebrities, and they can later post their pictures and videos on social media platforms which can lead to more attention which can later turn into shared advertising revenue. Also, some of his marketing expenses include paying other people to promote his social media platforms and to sites where you pay to increase the number of followers on social media.

It appears that a number of people do this, and it seems to work. One recent infamous example involves the Tate brothers, who were arrested in Miami in July for sex offenses allegedly committed in the United Kingdom. British police are seeking to extradite the brothers, who hold citizenship in both the United States and the United Kingdom. The Tate brothers branded themselves as rich influencers who offered courses on how to become rich. They were routinely seen in luxury yachts, supercars, and expensive watches.

But the brothers’ lawyers say that their clients are not as rich as they claim to be. They said images of luxury yachts, supercars and expensive watches shared by the brothers online should not be taken as evidence of their wealth. “The outrageousness of the posts by them and about them is the point,” their lawyers said in court filings. “The more hyperbolic and outlandish the post, the more likely it will generate views and likes, which in turn generates income. In short, they are playing a role.”

While it seems deceptive, that’s how the social media monetization game works. If someone’s social media analytics shows being seen with celebrities increases their view and follower count which later turns into advertising revenue, then there is a business purpose for paying to be seen with celebrities, even if you enjoy the experience.

For those who plan to make money as an influencer, do not rely solely on social media posts for tax advice, even those from tax professionals. In most cases, the advice is not tailored specifically for you but for a large audience. Some of the outlandish “advice” given could get you into trouble. Instead, meet with a tax professional in person and discuss your plans, especially if you plan to claim an unusually large deduction on your tax return.

Second, keep good records. Use your phone to take photos of receipts or have them emailed to you. In addition to payment receipts, keep a copy of promotional and any other related materials that can show business purpose. This case is going to be the first of many where influencers or aspiring influencers will deduct costs of attending celebrity-related events and photo opportunities.

This is likely the first of many cases where federal and state tax agencies will challenge unusual deductions claimed by social media influencers. It would be prudent for the IRS to post guidance on social media sites although they won’t get many likes or constructive comments.

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.

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“The President has proven himself unfit for office, and a reckless and wanton threat to the Constitution that he pledged to preserve, protect, and defend,” the firms wrote.

Strong words. Principled, even.

But that was then, and that principled view of the rule of law has given way to the pursuit of cold, hard cash.

Because today, as Bloomberg Law reports, DLA Piper is defending Trump in the Jan. 6 cases — cases arising from the very attack the firm once described as a reckless and wanton threat to the Constitution. Partners Caryn Schechtman and Mike Walsh entered appearances last month as part of the Trump team fighting a lawsuit brought by Capitol police officers injured in the riot, along with a separate suit filed by members of Congress. Both cases allege Trump bears responsibility for his false election-rigging claims and agitating his supporters on the day of the attack… which is, more or less, exactly what DLA Piper itself said in 2021.

The firm, naturally, has a statement, and it is a piece of work.

“DLA Piper’s clients rely on our lawyers to help them navigate many of the world’s most complex legal matters,” it reads. “Providing exceptional legal counsel to clients that span the political spectrum is central to who we are as a global law firm.”

Ah, the political spectrum. On one end, the client whose worse fomented an attack on the Capitol. On the other end, the firm’s own 2021 letter demanding that same client be removed from office for those exact actions. Truly, DLA Piper contains multitudes.

The academics were less charitable. Scott Cummings, a UCLA law professor, put the sharpest point on it. DLA Piper’s turn toward Trump is “at best deeply hypocritical,” he said. “At worst, it suggests that these expressions of professional integrity in these critical moments may be not seriously grounded in commitments by the firms but rather a performance that’s consumed by the public.”

“It’s striking that a firm that had been so critical of Trump with regard to Jan. 6 would represent him,” Yale Law professor John Morley told Bloomberg, before getting to the part everyone is thinking. “There’s obviously a close connection between the president’s personal interests and political priorities. Firms that wish to gain sway with administration can potentially gain a lot from advising Trump personally.”

There it is — this isn’t a firm rediscovering its commitment to zealous advocacy for the unpopular client. Trump is the most powerful man in the country, and personally handling his lawsuits is a very direct way of getting on his good side, a good side that has spent the last year and a half handing out and withholding favors to Biglaw based on loyalty. The pro bono deals, the executive orders, the whole ecosystem of capitulation. Defending the man himself is just the premium tier.

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

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