New Law Order

What happens when the chair of one of the world's most successful law firms walks away from BigLaw to join a venture-backed AI law company? Mike Schmidtberger led Sidley Austin's Executive Committee for more than seven years. Now he's Chairman of Norm Law, an AI-native law firm built alongside Norm Ai, the legal and compliance AI company founded by John Nay and valued at more than $1 billion. Schmidtberger says he “failed retirement after 11 days.” We talk about out what they're building. Nay a

Weil, Gotshal & Manges wasn't losing money. Its profits per partner were still going up when, on October 28, the 95-year-old firm told its partners it would wind down. Delta and General Motors went through bankruptcy and kept flying planes and building cars. No partner-owned law firm has ever done that. In this episode, recorded the day Weil made its announcement, Joel turns the tables and puts co-host John Morley in the guest chair. Years ago John wrote Why Law Firms Collapse, a study of three

Big Law has spent decades and a fortune on diversity, and the numbers barely moved at the partnership level. The usual explanation is that somewhere in the building (or somewhere in your head) there's racism and misogyny. David Wilkins, Harvard Law professor and possibly the most important scholar on the legal profession, has a less satisfying answer: you don't need bigots to get this result. You just need busy partners. In this conversation, Wilkins joins Joel and John to explain how a firm fu

In this episode of New Law Order, Joel Cohen and Yale Law Professor John Morley speak with CJ Mahoney, Chief Legal Officer of Meta, about one of the hardest legal questions facing modern technology companies: when a product becomes deeply woven into daily life, how should the law think about harm, responsibility, and regulation? Drawing on a career that has taken him from Williams & Connolly to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Microsoft, and now Meta, Mahoney offers an unusually cand

Richard Sander, UCLA law professor and economist, has spent decades advancing one of the most controversial arguments in legal education: that large racial preferences in law school admissions may frequently harm the students they are intended to help. In this episode of New Law Order, Joel Cohen and Yale Law Professor John Morley speak with Sander about affirmative action, the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, and what new data may reveal about the future of law school a

Michael A. Gerstenzang, the longtime managing partner and now senior partner of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, explains how he positioned one of the world's most established law firms to lead in AI adoption — not by outsourcing innovation, but by building it from the inside. The conversation traces a series of structural bets that began before generative AI entered the mainstream, starting with ClearyX, a wholly owned technology subsidiary launched in 2021 to reinvent M&A due diligence. Gerst