Donald Trump Got Indicted For Toilet Espionage But We Still Need To Talk About This Bear Cop

Hey, welcome to another edition of Thinking Like a Lawyer, I'm Joe Patrice from Bubba Law. I am joined by Chris Williams, who also is with the Bubba Law. I don't know why I always say where I'm from first, if we're all from the same place, I should probably wait, right? Old habits, I heart. Yeah. So yeah, and we're here as usual to talk about some of the big stories of the week that we've covered at above the law, you know, but we start off as always with a little bit of small talk, which is kind of a cover for another legal story, but maybe a little less exciting one. Chris, have you followed the fourth amendment bear? I did. And for those listening, this isn't a new fancy Twitter account that sends out notifications when other force mimic cases with bears happen, but I wouldn't be surprised if that becomes a thing. I mean, it may well be, if it is, I think I would hope it would have one tweet. I would hope there's not a lot of fourth amendment bear cases, but who knows? I find it interesting. Actually, their libertarians are big on two things. One is being against government tyranny and second being knowing every state's minimum age of consent laws. But I don't know what this one, I found it interesting, they were making the argument that the government functionally turned this bear into a bear nine, you know, and I read your take on it. It was like, no, they just wanted to, I feel like your take was, no, they just wanted to see who's feeding these damn bears. Right. I think that the state has an interest in doing what it did that's besides surveillance. So to lay this out for people first, we got to lay the groundwork here. So this is about a bear in Connecticut that wildlife officials put a camera on and then turn the bear loose. The wildlife officials are now being sued and it's become kind of a cause, celebs and libertarian circles as Chris was saying because they're being sued by property owners of a hundred and seventeen acre property who claim that the government by putting this camera on this bear that they assumed that the government assumed they claim would eventually end up on this family's property. They had really turned it into a reconnaissance, an warrantless reconnaissance of their territory and that it was taking pictures and video of their home and all, and so they're suing and claiming constitutional violations. Okay. With that, the groundwork said, go for it. Yeah. I think, you know, lawyers are apt to, you know, lateral thinking and coming up with bad hypothetical scenarios. I mean, it's why we hate gunner so much, but I just thought about a scenario like, is it really a catch all defense for a governing body to be like, oh no, we're doing this because of some legitimate ecological interest, even if it has the effect of surveilling people. So for example, you know that meme that birds are actually just government drones, right? Well, yes, because that's, yeah, because birds aren't real, they aren't real, you know, when COVID happened, when COVID happened, I'm sure everybody else noticed that there was like a lot of, there was a different government funding and they were like, no birds outside. Anyway, it was weird. Imagine if there was some study, the, I don't know, like the Department of Ecology, let's say that's a thing. They decided to document the breeding habits of pigeons in high crime areas and to do so they just attach small cameras to their feet or to their necks just so they could see what the pigeons are doing. And of course, I had the effect of being able to like give high detailed information about what everybody in their surrounding area was doing. Or understand why somebody was like, hey, this is an intervention and you know, an expectation of privacy. Well, so, so if they're doing it outside, there's not really an expectation of privacy. So it's a, the key to this is that they're trying to say that this bear got close enough to get pictures inside their house. Because even though the, the libertarian argument is, hey, it's our property. It's, you know, so anywhere on our property, they can't go. That's not how the law tends to be. The law tends to say that if you own 117 acres, like you open field doctrine, you don't have an expectation of privacy out there. But it's also true that so, so do you have a, do the, do the government have a reason to do this? So as it turns out, the part of the story that a lot of the coverage was glossing over is that the basis of putting this camera on these bears is these bears are getting closer and closer to residential areas and they want to find out why and they suspect that it's because the bears are being fed by humans, which is luring them into the area. And in particular, it seems as though it might be this couple who is feeding the bears. And so they put a camera on it to find out who's feeding the bear, which seems like that's a pretty reasonable search. Now what happens with the bear if it gets close enough and is taking pictures inside a house, you know, if it would be bad, but I don't think it's anything that isn't curable by just not letting those pictures form the basis of any kind of prosecution, right? Well, we have this situation a lot, that whole fruit of the poisonous tree thing. If, if the government comes upon evidence that they shouldn't have, then they can't use that evidence to pursue claims against somebody and that cures the, the problem. But yes, I think that's, I think that's a little naive. I mean, it's also the case like if prosecutors have evidence that they know could be helpful towards proving somebody's innocence, they're required to let that be known to the other party. But it's not like the Brady rule prevents those things from happening. I mean, it does some degree, but it doesn't like rule it out completely. So like, I don't think it's a save all to be like, well, well, put them for the doctor. Well, yeah. So, right. So, okay, fair enough. A lot of the times this is abused and the police sort of loud to find, they're given court blessing to find all sorts of workarounds to this doctor. That's fair. But it's also true that in, you know, we decide these things in like as a matter of law, we decide them in kind of like a platonic ideal. The court's going to say that would be the cure to the problem because we don't think these, this couple actually has, I mean, who knows, but we don't actually think this couple has anything going on in their house that would give rise to a prosecution. So my assumption is the court will just say, if you did, we would exclude that. Or correct. Oftentimes, there's abuses in that exclusion process. But that's the quote, unquote cure, assuming it is applied correctly. So I, yeah, I think this is a dumb case, but nonetheless, but yeah, no, like it's being typed up as, you know, animal spies, I don't know. Yeah. I do agree that it is dumb, but you know, you know, at that time, we're like the, it's like sometimes, it totally makes a good point. I haven't seen it happen in a while, but maybe I do. So I did the, yes, it just happened. He was on Fox News to talk about how the indictment of Trump was completely nonsense. And he got very like almost like he'd been hit with a newspaper, like a dog hit with a newspaper situation. He was just like, yeah, no, this is, this is real bad. So I feel like I did see it happen. He had a moment where it was a broken clock. But yeah. So like with that in mind, I'm reading it. I'm trying to think of some sort of hypothetical, again, like just some, some possible world in which there would be something that looks like the deputization of animals given pretense of some, it's some some colorable thing, maybe like justified by like police power, like state police power or some shit like that or public safety. Because like, because I can also see how this is being read as like, no, this is a public safety issue. This is not about your privacy, because like sure, I grit, I grit that in this instance, like open field doctrine is relevant, but like I'm trying to think was to, what's the interesting scenario? Like, no, I agree that you certainly could say if you knew this bear went under their property and you assumed that they were, you know, running a meth lab in their house or something. And you said, oh, well, we've just put a camera on a bear and it just happened to catch the meth lab in there. That would be, that would be a warrantless search, right? But I don't think that is a reason why you can't put the camera on the bear for the purpose of figuring out whether or not it's being fed. It's just a reason why the court shouldn't be allowed to use any of that evidence for anything other than is someone feeding the bear. I mean, that's what I think, but you're, I mean, you're right that at what point does the fact that this doctrine gets applied badly all the time, pushed toward the argument that you shouldn't allow this kind of a search to happen in any event, you know, that kind of doctrine can't protect people in their own homes, you know. Right. Still. And just to be clear, like, I'm not trying to defend libertarians. I mean, come on now. Like, they do crossfit. It's nice. They can defend themselves. But it is just interesting to think about the implications of their best arguments. Yeah, I thought this was a very, very stupid case. If I read another thing that is this pun-laden written by you, I'm back in the States, bear threat. Bear threat. Okay. Bear arms. We're going to bear arms. How about that? All right. Well, listen, it wasn't. No, that's the thing. They didn't take away the animal's arms and that's the only interest in any real rights that it has, the right to have its arms. And at this point, everyone is lucky. I do not have access to this soundboard. All right. All right. Let's have a pause on that and, uh, and, uh, small talk there and get to like an actual subject. So, uh, actual subject, was there any big legal news towards the end of last week? I might have missed it. No. No? Yeah. Outside of like, I don't know, like some, some Trump dude. Oh, yes. Some news again. Yes. We have a indictment, a federal indictment of Trump in the classified documents case. It's fairly significant. It's 37 counts. The indictment is, it is a lot worse than I think a lot of folks thought. And I think a lot of folks thought it was going to be pretty bad because mishandling documents and not turning them over and then allegedly lying to the government that you had done a search and turned them over and when you hadn't is real bad. However, the indictment seemed to have a lot more about taken from the attorney notes. It seems though there was some moments where Trump was confronted with this and pitched. Let's just tell them we don't have anything, uh, which would have been a lie. There's some evidence in there that he was aware that these things weren't declassified, which somewhat blows up his argument that he declassified everything and that's why this doesn't really matter. It's, it's a pretty, pretty rough document there for the, for the Trump scare. The next development with this case, of course, was that it then goes to, it's assigned initially to Judge Cannon, who folks might remember as the judge who tried to kill the warrant in the first place by allowing a weird collateral attack civilly of a criminal investigation. It was, it was a bold attempt. It was an attempt that led an arch conservative panel of the 11th Circuit to write a scathing opinion, calling her an idiot. So she's got this case again, we'll see how long that lasts. The indictment, the arrangement is going to be theoretically on Tuesday. We'll see there's some question whether or not Trump can get local council in time. One would expect the Department of Justice will ask Judge Cannon to step aside at that time, given that she's already been, been slapped silly with regard to this case. There's some good legal precedent for a judge to be recused if they've made statements similar to the ones that she made in that earlier action. So one would think she'd recuse, well, that's a question. Do you think she, the law seems to be pretty good that if she were to fight to keep this case, the 11th Circuit would probably tell her no? That said, do you think she goes forward to this, or does she get out of the way? So the thing that I think is interesting about it is this kind of just happened, like just fell into her, fell into her lap time, like she saw this out, the, the process by which it came to be heard one, dealing with it was completely fair game. And she could just decide to be like, hey, I'm, I'm going to, I'm not biased. And I can do that because she already won't know that Trump case, you know, so she does like some basis for being like, oh, this is just another one. Right. So the question of course is, does she, if she does that, I think, so I guess, I guess the, and you're right, this was a random, a wheel assignment. So it was randomly assigned to her. That said, question, there's, there's a deeper philosophical question of just how random it is given their multiple vacancies in that district that are open for longer than Biden has been president and these vacancies are open because the, because Marco Rubio is preventing them from being filled. So there was a, like a one in seven chance that she was going to be the judge when in actuality it should have been a one in 10, if not a one in 11 chance. But it happened. The odds were better for her to get it for political reasons. But so there's that philosophical question. But right. Right. There's a distinction between like issues contextually and issues procedurally, I'm saying procedurally it doesn't seem that there's any fault. Oh, yeah. I mean, they, they spun it. It's random. It's not like they tried to give it to her. Yeah. And early on been some thought and I actually entertained this thought that administratively put aside how that other case ended administratively the court might have said she's already had a case related to some of the underlying facts. And so it's efficient to give it to her. But apparently that wasn't the case. But in any event, yeah, the case law seems pretty good that she would be kicked off this case if she let it, if she let it ride. Now does she want to be a hero and let it ride and let herself get scolded again by the 11th Circuit or does she run and try and avoid getting that career albatross? It's going to be an interesting question. It's going to say a lot about where what she thinks she is. Does she think she's a judge or is she really angling to be a political hack? I felt like the biggest consequence in your article was like, but what about the rule of law? And I don't really think that as a consequence, as much teeth left to it. So like, so what? So what she does, and that's like, would be really bad for historians looking back in this period. We're in this context, we're in this situation because we're in a rule of law crisis. Yeah, no, I mean, that's true, and like a lot of people online are making the point that she's got a lifetime job. Why would she even worry? You know, like, it is a lifetime job, but judges, in some ways, they have to live with this going forward. And they deep down 99% of them, they want to be viewed as professionals. They want to be respected. It's a whole thing. And when the 11th Circuit and when conservatives on the 11th Circuit are writing opinions, mocking your ability to understand basic law, that stings. And it means it's hard for you to get clerks, it's hard for you to get, you know, outside teaching assignments, it's hard for you to potentially transition to practice if you ever wanted to go back. It's hard for you to run for office if you choose to go that route. Like, I don't know, I feel like deep down, she's got to look at this and think, this is not worth it. I'm going to lose anyway. I may as well get out of the way myself, but, or she can try to be a, try to be a Maga hero. And it would fail, but it would be something she could try. I mean, it, people do a lot for the sake of martyrdom, it's like, there's a way of romanticizing even the risk of failure. So like, it's, so like, I think that like, because what I'm here you saying was like, oh, it'll be a blow to ego if, to the, you know, like, certainly blow to ego, yeah. But like, it also depends on like, what, what, what, what hill, what, what hills are willing to die on for you to be able to like, all this person's ego and allow them to do XYZ, you know. I, I don't know, I feel like it's just so hard to keep doing this job day in and day out if you're getting battered like that reputationally, but don't want to cut this short. But I also have a feeling we're going to be talking about this case again, a few times, probably before it's all over. Today's legal news is rarely as straightforward as the headlines that accompany them. On lawyer to lawyer, we provide the legal perspective you need to better understand the current events that shape our society. Join me, Craig Williams, and a wide variety of industry experts as we break down the top stories. Follow lawyer to lawyer on the legal talk network or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. 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 Jud Pierce, and 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, transitioning from the heavy criminal stuff to less criminal stuff, a big law question, Davis Pope joined the four days in an office revolution that scat and started a little bit ago. They're going to transition to requiring everyone to be in the office Monday through Thursday. This is quite the reversal from a firm that had been on a three-day process and had been making statements as far as anyone can tell that this is working. We love our system. We don't need to change. They are now pulling that rug out now that they see another firm having done it. On the table are, well, one, what the hell, and two, is this the beginning of some kind of a cavalcade, or is this slippery slope going to stop with these folks? Is it to be decided? But I'm also like, I wonder how much of this is real estate interest playing it, because it has to be a big part of it. It's like, hey, we're running out of these office spaces and people are only in, let's say, 60% of the time, we need to bump it up to 80, I don't know, because we have, I don't know, whatever contracts. Was there a boom? I'm sure it's a long-term lease, yeah. My thing is, I'm wondering if this is the four-day work week, is a happy medium between real estate costs and a need to have people there in person for mentorship, or if this is just another cut before it's back to five, and then six, and then eight-day weeks, that can make golden days before the air was spicy. Yeah, I mean, like, look, people are, these are big law firms. They're working seven days a week anyway. The question is just where they do it, and we've actually reached a point where, you know, this isn't like the pure working-from-home era of the pandemic. We were on three, and we're talking about four, so it's really not fair to try and compare this to people working-from-home, it's fair to compare it to three. Is adding Monday to the calendar really the thing that makes all the difference in mentorship or whatever? It justifies having the office space, I suppose, but the office space is baked in, whether you're in there or not. You get at least turned the heat off if people aren't there all the time, I suppose. But I mean, the take that I gave in one of my articles about it was that what's really going on here is there's a slice of the partnership that wants friends around. They feel lonely going in the office. They like going in the office, and they feel lonely, and they want the people that they pay a lot of money to pretend to be their friends, to be in the office with them pretending to be their friend. That's why we're in this joint. I'll say I made that comment, and a anonymous, I'll leave them, a partner did write and say, yeah, that's pretty much what my colleagues are thinking. I could go ahead and say that's my interpretation of what my colleagues are thinking, not a partner at Davis-Poker-Scatton, but at another firm saying that in those discussions, that's the takeaway that the partner gets is that it's just, we really want the little sick of fans around, you know? And like, look, it's nice to have sick of fans. I'm sure. I mean, I don't, I don't, because I'm just a blogger, but like, if I, if I were a big law partner, I'm sure it would be nice to have 20, 30 people who feel like I'm the reason they get paid, but whatever. I think that's just a sad situation to be there, not for the associates, but also, but just for the partners. I mean, that has to be the big law equivalent of thinking that the waitress actually likes you, you know? Yeah. Right. That's for the check, right? This isn't, I mean, if you, if you're, if your idea of a social interaction is contractual obligation, then you'll get better friends. Yeah, you don't need, yeah, but that's the thing. When are they going to get better friends that are working a hundred hours a week? They don't have time to go find friends, anyway. They say the best things in life are free, which either means the legal toolkit podcast is pretty awesome, or we're totally committed to the wrong business model. You just have to tune in to find out what it is. I'm Jared Korea, and each episode I run the risk of making a total ass of myself so that you can have a laugh, learn something new, and why not? Maybe even improve your law practice. Stop believing podcasts can't be both fun and helpful. Subscribe now to the legal toolkit. Go ahead. I'll wait. 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 Hours page at legaltalknetwork.com. We'll see you there. So let's talk about the law firm, Barbara Reenan, which no longer is Barbara Reenan. That chuckle was kind of the serious issue, but I just imagine like a prince is somewhere looking down, shaking his head, because I feel like that's the only person that should be formally known as, like for a firm, to go as formally known as, after like, was it even two weeks? No, it was real fast, real fast. So Barbara Reenan was the law firm that was, we talked a little bit about it when it happened. Major defection from Lewis Brissboys, they brought two labor employment lawyers in California who took over around a hundred other of their colleagues to form a new firm. It was a big blow, obviously Lewis Brissboys, big firm, so losing 100 some odd lawyers is not the end of the world, but you know, it forced the founder into retirement, basically from stepping down from managing. So it was a big deal. And then a couple weeks later, the New York Post is given some emails that Barbara Reenan exchanged over the years. I don't know, you know, like, very convenient that the spurned law firm managed handy's over, but we have years worth of racist, sexist, antisemitic emails exchanged by the named partners of the new firm and they have already left. So firm has now changed its name. It's questionable whether or not it's going to keep going. I mean, obviously the named partners are probably the most significant rain makers. So we'll see. Well, you know, it's interesting what might take away from it was and this is, I mean, there's a lot to take away, obviously, but the dumb thing that I took away and I think, I think we all depend on above a lot of come away with kind of the dumb, but significant thing, right? I think that's fair. Why are these emails, how do they, how do they still exist? Like, do you not have a document retention policy? Like, why are there emails with these sorts of things in them from years and years ago still in the system? Like you've got to get rid of that, like put aside the content of the emails, if it's not going in a case file or a matter file, it should be gone within, I don't know, six months, a year or something like that. Like what's going on at Lewis Brisbane? That was my tech takeaway of this story, like above all the substance of it as bad as that was. All I could think is how badly run is that document retention program? My media thought was, so a labor and employment, uh, growth cohort was immediately disbanded because of a labor and employment issue, like you'd think that these are, I'm just thinking about it substantially. These are the people that should know, hey, you don't want to have a paper trail of shit like this. Right? Like, not even like the, I mean, yes, but like, you're, so you're just like the tech avenue with the paper. I'm like, this is your bread and butter. Yeah. This is like, this is like all the stuff. This is like cocking getting caught, cocking getting caught, slurring people while trying on gloves that fit him. It's like, come on. This is you. This is your thing. Why are you doing it? Right. No, that's fair. And obviously, you know, they're, they're a big firm, so they're more on the side of companies than, than, than the folks who are discriminated against. But, you know, like you said, that's more reason for them to be on top of what you don't leave as a paper trail. I mean, like, like, like, mid slur, they should have been like, hey, this reminds me of last week. Any who, you know, I don't like, like, when you are the hypo, you should, you should, the thing. This should be a bell-dinging, you know, I wonder if, you know, and this is like a, this is, I've not really thought this through, but I wonder if as a practice group, it cuts the other way sometimes too. Like, on the one hand, you think they should know better. But on the other hand, because they deal with these sorts of issues so often, these, you know, they, it doesn't even register with them. Sometimes the impact that using the sort of language can have, because they, every matter they have involves it, and they're constantly dealing with people saying this or that or whatever. And so they, it, it's almost like the, they're surrounded by it and it becomes, they become numb to the impact of it. I don't know. Outside of a professional context, I don't know. Maybe it's, it's certainly something that you would think they would view with a lot more sensitivity. But I mean, maybe that is, that's the issue that they, they become numb to it at a certain point. But yeah. So you saying that remind me of one of the scenes of Breaking Bad, where, you know, the agent, he goes, he gets a promotion and then like, he's just straight up being a bigot. And he's like, I thought we were, I thought we were going to get these guys and they're like, Hey, what are you doing, man? We don't, we don't do that here. There are certain like contextual understandings like because really people policing this stuff, we can do this sort of situation going on. Yeah. Exactly. Like that, that's a good analogy. Like the, the you feel you're the police of it, so you think you can get away with it, which I'll just throw a plug in, not that we are covering this topic today, but that was my takeaway on the Alabama maps case in the Supreme Court that John Roberts was less changing to become more open to discrimination in election law and more thinking, wait a minute, I'm the one who gets to decide now. So I don't, like, if I'm the police of this, I don't care anyone. So, so people can read that if they wish. Anyway. Yeah. That's everything unless we have some other, I don't know, animal related constitutional law issue. Well, I will say our small talk was at least medium talk. So just as in case anyone was interested to think about it, visit anchor watt. It's very nice. It's a, um, simreep in Cambodia is like one of the, like it was like a long, just old civilization got found hundreds of years later. It's wild. The things people can make without internet access, like just seeing these buildings. I'm like, who etched that, you know, like with what? Like they had, they were, they were these, there was these massive stone temples that had irrigation systems. Oh, no. Oh, no. Chris is going full ancient aliens on us. No, I'm not less ancient aliens more. What lows did they go to or a home depot that they have back then that we didn't know about? Because I'm like, this, how did you, how did you do that? You know, yeah, it was a spec then. Anyway, all right. So with that said, we will, uh, we'll, we'll close up now. So thanks for listening. You should be subscribed to show to get new episodes when they come out. You should be reading above the law. You should also listen to the jibbo, which is Catherine who's not with us now, but Catherine's podcast. You can listen to the legal tech week journalist round table, which I do, which I'm a panelist on every week. We had a very extended and robust discussion of the bear case there too. You could, you should check out the other offerings of the legal talk network. Be sure to read above a lot of these and other stories before we talk about them. Follow on social media. The publication is at ATL blog. I'm at Joseph Patrice. Chris is at writes for rent as in he's writing things for you to read for rent. So that's that. Yeah. I think that's everything. Do all those things, leave us reviews, stars, write something nice. It always helps the algorithm and with that, we will talk to you next week, peace. 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 round table, 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. 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