Episodes

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...