Bold Proposal: Let's Just Convict People Of Crimes We Can Prove They Committed

Welcome to another edition of Thinking Like a Lawyer. I'm Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I am joined by the interrupting sound you heard, which is Captain Rubino. I am also joined by Chris Williams. How you doing there, Joe? You were out last week. I don't think you understand how this process works when I say I'm also joined by Chris Williams. He's supposed to talk. Well, I waited a beat. I mean, yeah. Well, that was... You don't want dead air? Are you feeling you're with the podcasting biz? Yeah, I think you've got a different definition of beat. I'm on Joe's side with this interrupting voice as apropos, this podcast. Right. You see how she does this all the time? I'm glad you did. I'm coming around to my side. Yeah, you know what? And? Yeah. And fuck the sounds. Yeah. Well, I mean, on that front... Well, wait, we should begin this show as we weren't able to last week because I was ill, we will begin with some small talk. Small talk. All right. Yeah, so I wasn't here last week. I can make that a bit of my small talk. I felt terrible. That's no good. Yeah. I actually don't think I've gotten that sick in a really long time. You know, just an illness like cold level sick. I don't think I've had anything like that in a while. Like I was just like... Do you have a two-week crock pot egg? Like 18 hours. What? What a two-week crock pot egg? No. I remember one time you make an egg nog and like you were talking about like having a thing in a crock pot for like two weeks, an egg. Oh no. It was a deep-cut call back. That is... Yeah, that's not how that works. It's that you sous vide the eggs for like 20 minutes or something like that and that will pasteurize them so that you don't have to worry about raw egg having any salmon on it. That's a whole different issue. Yeah, no. I felt very ill and thankfully it wasn't COVID or anything, but yeah. Like slept for 18 hours in a row at one point. It's real bad. No way. Anyone else. But you're back now with all of your sound effects as we've heard. I am. So it's exciting for the listeners I'm sure and hopefully for all of you. Is there any other small topics that strike any of your fanciest? Right before the show we were talking about the joys of whiskey beers? Yeah, I don't know. I've had that before. It just seems like two great tastes that taste worse together. Well, for me it's different. It's a great taste and a thing that gets sold as a... I don't like beer. I think there are... I just have strong, fat associations with it. Not so much that it both looks and tastes like piss unless you like IPAs, which is just like decaf weed tasting in your beer. And I'm like, oh, why don't you do that? If you want to just hop over. It tastes like piss also. It's not. Naddy Lighten Buttweiser. I don't know how much piss you've been drinking, but... I've dabbled in many a drink. It has not been that particular brine. Right, yeah. I enjoy a nice light beer and if they're going to be derogatory compared to anything, it's water, which is fair, but also refreshing. Also speaking of refreshing, completely different because the viewers can't see this. Nice orange nails, it's a cool touch. Well, yes, I have orange nails because, as I mentioned, a couple of weeks ago, I've recently had my baby shower and it matched the theme of the baby shower. I'm sorry to tell the listeners, but Joe is not wearing a matching set. Really drop the bottle. Yeah, no, I do not have nails. If you have nails, you don't have nails. I do not, yes, no. There's a distinction there. Yeah, that's fair. Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh, yeah, beers. Yeah, IPA, the fixation the world has on IPAs, it needs to stop. Yeah, it's just too much. I feel like it has come down a bit in the last maybe three or four years. Not quite the height that it was in the mid teens. Yeah. Anyway, it was like Starbucks for mid-2030 something men. Yeah, yes, that's exactly what it was. They were jealous that white women had their Starbucks culture, so they created their own. I think there is a pumpkin spice IPA somewhere. There's multiple, not just one. Let's be very clear. All right. Okay, well, with all of that done, I think we can move on to real topics. Oh, yeah, so we had a few stories of the last week worth discussing. Let's jump into the first one. Chris, this is one that you covered. There was a recent Supreme Court determination and only three justices dissented from this, but it dealt with, well, explain this case. Yeah, so it was a felony murder case. The dissenting justices were Sotomayor, Justice Kagan and Justice Kintaji. And the rest of them were cool with the outcome. So what happened was there was a guy, he got hit with a felony murder charge. One of the good things about felony murder that makes it different from actual murders, like there's no defenses to it or have you. It's like a described it as the transitive property gone crazy. He was involved with a period to be a shooting. Like him and like five other men, there was no story that made it more likely that he pulled the trigger and kill or did the shooting that make it more likely than any of the other five. This evidence was not introduced to trial. There was no evidence of a smoking gun in his hand at the time. And he's like, hey, they're about to kill me for this. This is probably a bad thing, right? The justices were like, nope, it's cool. That's not how felony murder works. The jury was probably considering that he might not have been the person who actually shot the gun that killed the people. It doesn't matter. And so tomorrow it was like the fuck? She said it in a much more legalistic way, but that was the general sentiment. Right. So to abstract out a little bit, so the way felony murder works is essentially it's a provision of the law that operates as kind of like a disincentive. Functionally, if you take part in a criminal enterprise that results in a murder, the government is allowed to charge you as responsible for that murder because you engaged in the criminal activity that ended in that murder. So if you and your accomplice go perform an armed robbery or something like that and your accomplice murders the teller, you are liable for murder because that murder wouldn't have happened but for your involvement in the enterprise essentially. This obviously goes further than most crimes do, right? Most crimes we have a real bent towards proving you did the actual act before we can drop the hammer of the government on you. In this instance, the society has largely come around to the idea that we can have some vicarious liability. Shall we say for people who are involved in this as a disincentive to getting yourself mixed up in potentially deadly criminal activity. And the thing worth mentioning about involvement is that it's loose. It doesn't. It's not just limited to your party. So for example, if there's a police officer that shoots a gun and murder someone under normal standards, the police officers, the person that committed the murder, like they mean they might even it might even have even been like unnecessary. They might have been in need for them to do any shooting in the interaction. But the guilt and responsibility of that is applied to the people who committed the felony. And it's had strange effects. I thought even times where a person involved with a felony murder charge was charged with say poaching or something because I think a cop from an airplane shot wild game or something and he tagged that on to somebody committing a crime had nothing to do with killing wild game. So it really stresses the limits of responsibility. So there are two categories I think it's fair to say of problems with felony murder both dealing with proximity. And the two examples you just gave deal with the attenuation of liability for the murder part or the killing part of it. So if you're dealing with a situation where you have engaged in a criminal activity that results in the cops chasing you and the cops haphazardly shooting guns at you and that ends up killing somebody, the idea that that be pinned on you is a situation where your proximity to the death is attenuated. You didn't do anything or your criminal enterprise didn't really do anything that led to that death. It was something that was being done on, you know, by the police. The other flip side, the other side of it is a question of the proximity of liability it to to the person. So this is a situation where if you go on an armed robbery and your associate kills somebody, then you know, it's right in front of you. They actually did it. You're a part of this criminal enterprise. But to what extent are you liable if you rolled into an armed robbery, probably much more liable if you rolled into a shoplifting situation and didn't know that your accomplice had a gun. Now you're not really proximately involved as far as your, you know, men's ray to the to commit any kind of violent act. Those are two different problems with the felony murder rule. And I think it's important to distinguish between them because the problem with focusing on ones where the death is the attenuated part is that they're far too easily solved by minor reform fixes. You could fix that by saying, well, police misconduct or police acting unreasonably in pursuit of folks, that shouldn't count. But that still leaves the bulk of the actual problem with felony murder, which are the legions of people who didn't do anything wrong and didn't think they were doing anything wrong that end up being tagged with life sentences because they were all lookout on something they didn't think was going to involve any weapons. And it turns out that they had a bad faith co-conspirator. In this instance, it's more like that former situation. Someone of the people involved in this armed robbery actually went ahead and hauled off and murdered somebody. The question was just they couldn't figure out which one of them did it and therefore felony murder kicked in. And the prosecutor said it doesn't matter which one of them did it. They all are equally liable. That wouldn't make it more like a letter? No, more like the former because they don't know which of them did it. Somebody shot somebody in the face. It's not like a situation where a cop, five levels of attenuation further along while unreasonably performing a car chase, crashed the car into a pedestrian. That's where the death is not attenuated. One of the people in this case actually murdered somebody but which of them it is and whether or not you can tag all of them just willy-nilly without proving it is the question at hand here. But it is a real issue focusing on the former side of it because there are a lot of people who get tagged with this who probably are bad folks who just as easily would have committed the murder if they'd given the opportunity. And then there are a bunch of folks who don't know what's happening, who don't understand that somebody's going to commit a crime or going to commit a murder. And they end up getting tagged with it based on not having complete information in a way that is not how the justice system is supposed to work. But yeah, it's a really important issue. I still think even this instance where they were six men and without knowing who did what there was a decision to smear liability equally without regard for the facts of the case outside just like a set of... Well, I don't think it's outside of the facts of the case, right? Because felony murder rules specifically anticipates this exact situation. You can have problems with the rule, but it's not some prosecutorial problem. It's the way the law is right. Yeah, in some ways this is the paradigmatic case, right? You don't want a situation where five people go in. And all point to the other one. They kill somebody and they all point to each other, Spiderman style pretending, well, you can't put me in jail because I didn't... I didn't pull the trigger. Because I didn't pull the trigger. And then when you do that, you end up in the situation where nobody gets charged, you know? Or no one's guilty or responsible. No one gets convicted. And again, that's not necessarily a justification for the rule. Absolutely not. But it is absolutely the way the rule is intended to work. Right. And yeah, and that's not particularly a good way of having liability in the criminal. Especially now when you're talking about life in prison, death penalty, sorts of impacts for sure. But there's a certain way of what it's called. But it is how it's intended to work. Yeah. My thing is, when we think about a murder trial, there are things like mental states or potential defenses that the person accused can have. They just need to prove that they actually did the thing. And when we think of the death penalty as being one of the highest or even a life sentence or in applying states as being one of the highest things we can met out as far as punishment, the notion is that this particular person did this thing that we know. And the idea that... So in this case, where it's like the person would be like, I did not shoot, I did not shoot this person, I did not have the gun, I might not even know the person that did it. It doesn't matter, because that person will be given a treat as if they committed a murder. I think it's just like an anomaly. And I know that the idea is that there should be some form of, we don't want people to get away with things, but I'm like, they didn't do the murders, you didn't prove they did the murder. Like a death happened, but let's not... I think the thing about the Feli D murder rule is it's called a murder, but it's not that. That's not how we treat murders in the legal system. Well, and that's the thing. And that goes to that proximity of the death versus the liability of the individual. Talking about both, I think it applies to both. This is definitely murder. This was a hundred percent of murder, right? It's just they don't know which of them did it. Yes, and if you don't have the grounds of pinning liability to a specific person, I don't think that specific person should be charged with a crime that is generally applied to a specific person as a specific set of actions. Yeah, sure. But like, if it was torqued, if it was torqued, okay, I guess. But this is the death penalty. Like you're really gonna kill a guy because somebody else shot somebody else, get him. Right, you know. Yeah, that is a problem. But that's where this is one of those bad cases and bad law situation, right? The law is potentially problematic. The situation of an innocent lookout is going to jail forever is far more common than this one, which is very much, you don't, like the reason this rule exists is to avoid a situation like the mafia where four guys show up, execution style somebody and then turn around and go, yeah, you can't tell which of us to actually pull the trigger. So I guess we all get to walk. And you don't want that situation to develop. And that's why rules like this exist. That said, like this seems like an agree. By the way, this is the only place I will exist. Like what? It's also worth noting that's only because this rule exists. For example, Canada outlawed in like 1990, because they said it was like, they said it was like unconstitutional. The level of abuse that happens under it is just ridiculously high. Like the logic of it makes total sense, but like the amount of abuse, both on the examples you were giving of the extenuated killings and those situations where the killing is very proximate, but people with low, low involvement and culpability are getting tagged with it are just so, so egregious that, yeah, no, there's, there's many, many good reasons to get rid of this on both ends of that. And the wild thing is, it's like even if there's a scenario where there's a, let's say a felony happens there, persons A, B and C, person B and C, say to A, don't do this, do not do this, it is not part of the plan, stop, even if they try to stop, well, there's some arguments of like, well, I don't know, actually, I don't think there's any differences to the murder, but like let's say hypothetically, this was the wrong case, even if B and C try to stop a, a shoot someone, B and C are still liable. Yes. Like that is absurd. Yes. So even in instances where, like, so I guess that's what I was getting earlier when it was like, you just look at the, the fat pattern with all of these, like the, what, what may have been considered intervening circumstances if we treated, you know, this like, basically any other thing, you know. Yeah. No, and that's a great point too. You don't have access to, and this is what makes the Spiderman meme scenario of this egregious is no one could even present a defense of, yeah, I was the one saying don't do it because they, they utilize this rule to skip over all of that. Yeah. Right. So yeah, it's a huge issue. Felony murder continues to be a problem. There are some justices who seem concerned about it. Unfortunately, not enough. Very many. If you're a lawyer running a solo or small firm and you're looking for other lawyers to talk through issues you're currently facing in your practice, join the unbillable hours community roundtable, a free virtual event on the third Thursday of every month. Lawyers from all over the country come together and meet with me, lawyer and law firm management consultant Christopher T. Anderson, to discuss best practices on topics such as marketing, client acquisition, hiring and firing and time management. The conversation is free to join, but requires a simple reservation. The link to RSVP can be found on the unbillable hour page at legaltalknetwork.com. We'll see you there. Are you looking for a podcast that was created for new solos? Then join me, Adriana Lanares, each month on the new solo podcast. We talked to lawyers who have built their own successful practices and shared their insights to help you grow yours. You can find new solo on the Legal Talk Network or anywhere you get your podcasts. Okay, Catherine, talk to us about billing. So as part of the MLa 100 data that ALM collects every year, they also put out a chart that just like fun stats that they collected as part of ranking every firm. Every year they also find out the firm that has the individual who build the most hours. And this past year, that person built 3,737 hours. Those are a lot of hours. There's a lot of hours. That's over 10 hours a day, every day, 365 days. Right? That sounds like a lyric to rent. Like how many hours you work? Like 300 in 75 hours? It's being like 70 hours a week, right? A little bit more than 70 hours a week every week. And by the way, this individual was at McDermott, which, you know, I guess shout out to that firm. But we've gotten a lot of feedback about this little stat saying, how is this possible? This seems like a lot. It certainly is a lot. What we don't know is if this was an atypical year for the attorney involved, perhaps. I hope so. To trial. Dear God. This is... This is... Perhaps they went from trial to trial. And you know, I think that if you're in a trial or some other situation where your entire day is pretty much billable because everything falls under the auspices of trial prep in some way, this is a lot more feasible benchmark to hit than if you're working on five or six different matters, you know, constantly throughout the year. And you know, there's that whole transition period between one to the other. There's always downtime in between, you know, you might be in the office for 12 hours, but your chances of actually billing 12 hours is unlikely when you're going back and forth between multiple matters, that makes this a much harder number. Yeah, it's a pretty hard number even with that. Like you... Sure. It's totally reasonable. Like I... As I said, it's a little over 10 hours a day, 365 days, right? But if you're in a trial or in the middle of a major deal, it is not unheard of to be billing 18, 19 hours a day for six weeks on end. But even if you front load the numbers this way, they're still getting absolutely slammed throughout the rest of the year, which is brutal. It is absolutely brutal. I don't envy this person at all. Yeah. I feel like the only way... I mean, I know they won't be sleeping at night, but I feel like the only thing I could sleep peacefully at night is if this was either a clerical error or a cry for help. Those are the only reasonable options. Yeah. I mean, we talk about lifestyle issues with law firms a lot and in particular how there's a bravado culture that says, oh, we all went through this working this hard. But the issue, the reality is that's not really true, right? Because AMLAW collects this data, we can look back and find that the average attorney and big law attorney was billing something like $1,600 an hour in 1986 or something along those lines. 60 hours, yeah. I think that this year, the average was in the 1900 hours. I think that's where it was in the late 90s. I believe that's what it is this year. Oh, okay. I'm saying. So again, that's on average, that's the people who are underperforming, the people who are overperforming combined together the way that works. It's egregious and a sign that the firm probably needs to give this person some mandatory time off. You know, that is definitely a much more popular solution than it ever was historically. And I think that that's the good thing. Listen, this could be once in a lifetime kind of year for this attorney and it's just the way they were. I hope so. I think it tends to be people who bill a lot, bill a lot. But I think that it's certainly possible that when you see someone at the end of a year who's billed this many hours, you should be like, let's talk about a sabbatical. Let's make sure you're okay. Yeah. So the stat that I was referring to though is that the highest billable hours per lawyer at a firm was at fish and that was 1,918. So every other firm falls below that number. So that is the most billable hours per lawyer at any mlaw 100 firm. So also remember that if you're a law student or you're thinking about laterally and there's a 2,000 hour billable hour requirement that doesn't. Oh sure. That's not terrible. I'm sure I can do 2,000 hours. Maybe but the highest billable hours per lawyer in the mlaw 100 is 19. Yeah. Although I think I feel as though there's probably write offs that might count towards me. There may well be write offs there that and also I feel as though that associates make that 2,000. I feel as though partners generally speaking are billing higher rates and utilizing fewer individual hours, especially because they're not that they aren't working hard, but there's business development work happening, firm admin work happening that isn't captured in this. I think the average partner is probably bringing that down quite a bit. I think you're probably right. But I think the other thing is that everyone, listen, lawyers are generally type A sorts of personalities. And things they are going to be the one that hits their hours. Right. And yet they have these requirements because not everyone does. True. As a lawyer, keeping up with developments in information security, cyber threats and e-discovery is a never ending process. Fortunately, the Digital Detectives podcast does the hard work for you. I'm Sharon Nelson and together with John Simick, we bring on industry experts to discuss the latest tech developments that help keep your data secure, only on the Digital Detectives podcast. Workers Comp Matters is a podcast dedicated to exploring the laws, the landmark cases, and the true stories that define our Workers' Compensation System. I'm Judd Pearson, together with Alan Pierce. We host a different guest each month as we bring to life this diverse area of the law. Join us on Workers' Comp Matters on the Legal Talk Network. Okay. So, the final little story that we covered that generated a lot of interest out there is the latest in Disney's ongoing battle with Ron DeSantis. DeSantis decided after the last time we discussed all this, it was when Disney's lawyers were way smarter than DeSantis's and had successfully penned a number of deals between the really Greek improvement district, whatever the actual acronym is, the quasi-governmental organization that runs the government over a lot of Disney property holdings, Disney executed under all of the public requirements. They executed a series of deals with Reedy Creek that gave them a lot of the authority over the land that they themselves own. This was a problem for DeSantis, who was trying to replace the board as a matter of retaliation. He has now had that new board vote to say that all of the deals that the old board did are invalid. This was met within hours by a lengthy complaint that was already prepared by Disney's lawyers for this exact eventual election. It was like they were good lawyers for a reason. Immediately filed in the Northern District of Florida that challenged the new board's ability to do this on a number of grounds, some of them being the First Amendment grounds. Those are going to get a lot of the attention because that's the first of them. I think the mainstream press for sure, that First Amendment plays pretty well. They understand what it means. Yeah. In this instance, we have a lot of reason to believe that this was retaliatory, given because of everything that he said. Because of everything that he said. Because of substantial evidence like him actually saying I'm doing this as an act of retaliation, multiple members of the state legislature who passed the bill allowing this new board to do this, saying this bill is designed to retaliate against Disney, things like that. Subtle, little things that really take a long time. So a real problem for them. Obviously, there are First Amendment claims there. There are takings clause claims there because this is obviously property interests that they are trying to take away without compensation. There are due process claims given that this was retaliatory. There's also the claim that I think we would argue is the most slam dunk claim, though a new article by Mark Joseph Stern from Slate argues that this is probably an ill advised argument. I agree with that, but it's certainly an interesting take. A contracts clause claim for those who aren't familiar with the United States Constitution. One of the things, there's a lot of things that people imagine the Constitution says. As it turns out, one thing it actually very directly says is that states do not have the power to invalidate contracts. So if you have an existing contract between, say, really Creek and Disney, you do not get to as a state government roll in and say, we've decided to nix that. Yeah. And I think the argument that Mark Joseph Stern is making and others is that this has a potential to be abused because, listen, the contracts clause and the Constitution is not something that's litigated frequently. I think the most recent case is 1902. That is correct. Right? So this isn't something that comes up a ton. And it's worrying. It's potentially worrying for sort of our corporate overlords, although as our government overlords are doing a poor job, who's to say that it's actually worse? So I understand the sort of fear that. Stern's argument is that this develops kind of from the battle days, the Lochner era days where businesses utilized and invoked this clause as a reason to prevent, say, municipalities from cleaning the water and stuff like that. A municipality might say, oh, I want to build a reservoir and have, you know, publicly available city water and businesses would say, oh, no, we have a deal to supply water. So you aren't allowed to get in our way. These sorts of stretches of what this is supposed to do are argue, he argues if Disney successfully brings this claim and it starts going up the ladder, it's going to become a new hook for bad actors in the judiciary to hang a neo-Lachner worldview upon, which I think it can do that. I'm not disputing that that's a possibility. Sure. I also think that it puts a lot on a litigant to say, don't make the most direct good faith argument because there's a risk that a future bad faith judge would exploit it. Yeah. I don't think he was an advocate cannot make that argument. I think that, you know, the big law attorneys at, I think it's O'Meltony and Wilmer and Hal have to make this argument. It's right there. It's in the Constitution. It's not far. It's far. Yeah. And this is, I mean, what DeSantis is doing is wild, right? Like he's running roughshod over an entire body of law, something the most, and I think making this constitutional argument is the most basic of things to argue. Would you say what he's doing is goofy? No. No. There was that onion. The onions. The onion did a great headline, goofy beats Ron DeSantis to death with crowbar. I've seen that everywhere now. Yeah. So I think that the lawyers involved here are doing a great job. Unsurprisingly, Disney's lawyers continue to be better than anybody working for DeSantis. And in this instance, they are zealously pursuing the most effective path of least resistance argument. And I don't think you can call them for that. And like I get to, I get the argument that it can be exploited by people, but that's true of almost everything, right? Like you can't, you can't make a First Amendment argument without it becoming twisted into some kind of bad faith, first amendment argument. We see this all the time with, with, with this like campus free speech, quote unquote crisis where people are utilizing First Amendment precedent as an argument why protesting is bad, which one would think is the point of the First Amendment, but you know, bad faith actors going to bad faith. The contracts clause exists for a reason. It's like it can be used to help robber barons continue to exploit people, but in a lot of ways it was built to prevent, you know, in the kind of sepia-toned how the framers thought of things. They worried that the state government would be populated by people more willing to bend with the winds of political, uh, sure political expediency and that states would disrupt the national economy by screwing around and, uh, seizing popular things to be popular. And this is, this is what we have here. We have kind of a mob mentality that DeSantis is leaning into and he's trying to utilize state power to screw up a multinational corporation for that reason. And that's, that's what, that's why this is here. This is what, what exactly, like if you, you know, a lot of times people kind of use the imagine if you asked the founding fathers, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's like, you know, they would be wowed by just the sort of all the modern inventions. But if you literally were able to pose this particular scenario to a founding father, they'd be like, yes, I have thought about that exact scenario. This is exactly why this is. This is not what we wanted. This is not what we wanted. Yeah, like it, I don't know. I think it though, it is a very valuable point to raise. And I think it's important to flag it for the purposes of the appellate advocacy and the future judges and clerks who are going to work on it that whatever result comes out of this be cabined as best one can to prevent this kind of slippery slope into robber baron territory. But yeah, this, this seems like a pretty good argument to be making here for me. I, yeah, I'd have to agree. Well, before we close off, I just wanted to say out there, we know we have listeners among the law student ranks. The ABA Law Student Division is looking for student hosts for its law student podcast. So if you're a law student want to get in front of an audience and connect with some industry leaders, do some interviews with important folks. You can find a link to the application for this gig in the show notes for this episode. So there you go. And and I actually been on that podcast in the past a long time ago. So, you know, good show with that said, you should be subscribed to this show. So you get new episodes when they come out, give reviews, stars, write something. It helps the algorithm know that we're here. You should be reading above the law so that you read these and other stories before they come out. You can check out other shows. Catherine's on the Jibo. I'm on the Legal Tech Week, journalist roundup. You can check out a bunch of different offerings, including the law student podcast at Legal Talk Network. You should follow us on social media. We remain vigilantly without our blue check marks on Twitter. You can check out at ATL blog at Joseph Patrice at Catherine1, the numeral one and at rights for rent. That's rights with a W like writing something and not rights like the right to invalidate a contract. And with all of that said, I think we're done and we will check in with you all next week. Bye. If you're a lawyer running a solo or small firm and you're looking for other lawyers to talk through issues you're currently facing in your practice, join the Unbillable Hours Community Roundtable, a free virtual event on the third Thursday of every month. Lawyers from all over the country come together and meet with me, lawyer and law firm management consultant Christopher T. Anderson, to discuss best practices on topics such as marketing, client acquisition, hiring and firing and time management. The conversation is free to join but requires a simple reservation. The link to RSVP can be found on the Unbillable Hour page at LegalTalkNetwork.com. We'll see you there.