The highs and mostly lows from the year that was.

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As we turn the page to 2024, we reminisce over the top stories at Above the Law over the past year. Layoffs, salary hikes, ethical quagmires at the Supreme Court, Donald Trump's criminal cases... the legal industry provided a lot of fodder for Above the Law this past year. Join Thinking Like A Lawyer as we discuss all the big stories of the year and ask the question: can it get any worse than this year? (Hint: it can).

Law firms may hem and haw about raises, but they're still doing more than all right for themselves. Rudy's defamation trial did not go well. Before the latest development in the case, we talked about Michael Cohen's fake case brief and the implications of legal technology on criminal justice.

No one wants to admit weakness, but K&L Gates trying to put a smiling face on layoffs left a lot of observers cold. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller is mongering about a conspiracy to make Taylor Swift famous that somehow doesn't revolve around her talent. And Joshua Wright has brought a lawsuit against ASS Law despite still failing to understand that his problems are all in the mirror.

Payable sometime in 2024... of course.

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Milbank got the ball rolling several weeks ago with a round of raises. Cravath has now upped the ante for more senior associates and the Biglaw landscape has finally decided to pile on. Where is all this going and what does it all mean? We've got thoughts. Meanwhile Amy Wax went ahead and invited a white nationalist back to campus and one of her students is disappointed that people weren't nicer about it. Finally, a new lawsuit presents an ethics issue spotter involving Trump lawyer Alina Habba.

Elon Musk files a facially ludicrous lawsuit and Trump argues that sexual assault doesn't count on airplanes

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After promising a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters, Elon Musk showed up to court with a string of claims that would fail under his own recitation of facts. Meanwhile, Donald Trump takes aim at the Federal Rules of Evidence in a bid to undermine the E. Jean Carroll case and Stephen Miller goes after Macy's in a cheap publicity stunt.

Donald Trump sought a mistrial in his New York trial based, in part, on our articles being "humorous, irreverent." The GOP frontrunner did not succeed. Ron DeSantis messed with the rights of professors and now has to pick up the tab for their Biglaw lawyers. Or, more accurately, Florida taxpayers will pick up the tab. But that's just the price Floridians have to pay to help their governor finish third in the primaries! We're still waiting to see if more firms join the Milbank pay scale, but in the meantime a host of anonymous naysayers are mouthing off to the press in a pathetic effort to dissuade the market from following suit.

It's been over a week and no firm has yet to announce that it will match Milbank's latest series of raises. Or, more accurately, cost of living adjustments. Meanwhile, Cravath took the plunge on income partnerships, becoming the latest firm to abandon the time-honored one-tier partnership model. And the turmoil over Nixon Peabody's effort to sneak Donald Trump onboard as a client sparks calls for leadership change.

For most major law firms, the prospect of representing Donald Trump and stamping the firm's name on his nutty pet arguments is a non-starter. Over at Nixon Peabody, the firm jumped right in, bringing on the former president as a client and filing a brief complete with the zany "Brandenburg means it can't be an insurrection" argument that Trump's been having all his lawyers make. Partners don't seem happy about this turn of events. But, since we recorded, we've learned that firm leadership doesn't really care that partners are concerned. We also discuss Sam Bankman-Fried's absurd courtroom sketch and the aesthetic brilliance of Jane Rosenberg's dark and brooding courtroom sketches. Finally, a number of Biglaw firms sent an open letter castigating law school deans for campus antisemitism.

Stroock strikes out.

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We thought the end might be near for Stroock & Stroock & Lavan when we recorded this episode. We were right. And with that, the Biglaw world moves to exclusively one or fewer ampersands. A senior lawyer tried to pull a prank on an airplane. It ended badly. And we discuss the last time newly elected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson tried to run something. It was a law school and it failed in epic fashion.

LSAT's decision is not totally... illogical.

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The LSAT is ditching logic games from upcoming tests and the Above the Law gang is conflicted over whether or not that's a good thing. There's a good argument that the section disproportionately disadvantaged folks with vision issues. On the other hand that was a deficiency that admissions could address on the back end, but without that score schools no longer have a pattern recognition evaluation -- and what's more "thinking like a lawyer" than pattern recognition? We also discuss NYU Law Review getting sued by Stephen Miller and a lawyer citing Hitler approvingly.