Justice Alito Doth Protest Too Much

Hello, welcome to another episode of thinking like a lawyer on Joe Patrice. I am joined by Chris Williams. We're from above the law. So you're reading from the script today? I always am. I just thought you were going to jump in there at any point. So that's why there was that sort of pause. But yeah, no. When we're here, as usual, to talk about the top legal stories of the week that was, that sort of thing. But first, we have a little small talk. How are you doing? You've been deposed by one of your friends running a private military army lately or not. I'm not legally allowed to discuss that information. Okay. Outside of that, I'm doing pretty good. Outside of the existential risk of being in the United States, I'm going to go ahead and I'm heading back there soon. So for the folks listening, you got a couple more days in Cambodia. By time this is out, I'll probably be headed to, if not in the United States. So everyone has been waiting to hand me their fan mail, finally have the opportunity, because I'll be in the same country. But there you go. That's basically my weekend, I'm really looking forward to it. I miss my bed, man. No, yeah. Yeah, no, man, I get that. Yeah. If you're going to invest in something outside of stocks, you have to try to insider info one. You get a good pair of shoes, you get a good bed. You spend like a 30-year life sleeping and you're always walking around. So if you got a good bed and some good shoes, at least for the most of the time of your life, you got some comfort back then. Yeah, I do not particularly enjoy my bed, which is why I enjoy traveling because normally the hotel beds are better. The thing is, I used to do, I used to have this fantastic bed when I was an attorney of practicing attorney, and it just doesn't quite work for me right now. It's more of a guest bed these days, but I spent way too much I felt on it at the time, but I mean, I was a lawyer making big law of money. So I was like, well, the same thing you said, like third of my life sleeping, I should invest in this. And I did, and I felt guilty instantly after doing it. And then I have not felt guilty since for years and years that was the single most comfortable part of my life. So I will echo that you should buy. The only thing I'm saying here, Joe, is maybe you should be a little bit more religious, because if you do it the right way, the guilt is actually part of the fun. Fair enough. I will echo this advice, though, for anybody out there who is about to get their nice lawyer check, splurging when it comes to a mattress is not a bad idea. And I know that there's all of these perfectly wonderful mattress companies that are advertising everywhere that they can send it to you in a box, and it'll be fine. And those are fine. But the people who really build real mattresses with springs and everything, those are still more comfortable. So anyway, we've talked about mattresses. That was not something I had on my notes for today. I'm impressed. I didn't have time. Obviously, not on my notes, because I don't do, we don't practice small talk, but it wasn't on my bingo card for the day, I guess I should say. Well, you know me always start with what mattresses? Hmm. Well, I'm trying to think. Speaking of being taken to the mattresses, no, I don't really have any time for a transition. Why don't you sleep on it? Oh, I don't want to sleep on it. That's a good one. No, speaking of traveling and sleeping in luxury hotels, I guess that's the obvious transition to the news about Samolito that has come out since the last time we recorded. There's a lot to untangle with this story. So pro-publica, the folks who have been in the news a lot with Clarence Thomas revelations, had some Samolito ones of their own, Alito has received stuff from rich people, including this Paul Singer individual who was on a trip with him a resort trip to a remote area of Alaska, where they went fishing and were apparently cornered by bears. And they hung out with Leonard Leo, and you know, so it was just like a nice little love-in for a bunch of right-wing ideologues to have a Supreme Court justice with them while they went on vacation. Turns out Scalia went on the same trip in his day, and Samolito took a trip there on a private jet, which he failed to disclose and then never recused himself in cases that involved this guy. Totally normal stuff. So that's a thing. This could have been like the Clarence Thomas revelations, a really, you know, another black eye for the court and its ethics and another opportunity for the court to pretend that it doesn't have an ethics problem when it clearly does, but then it got weirder, didn't it? Always does. So we got weirder in that we actually didn't hear this story from pro-publica at first. The story was originally brought to light by Samolito publishing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal complaining pre-rebutting basically the pro-publica article that was going to happen. Pro-publica had asked him for comment on their story rather than respond to that comment or just ignore it. He intentionally published a response to it ahead of the deadline that pro-publica had given him. He was trying to scoop their own story with his narrative. What do we have to say about this? Well, my thing is there's a dumb story for when I was in high school. So I had a bunch of friends and I was like sitting in a window as one does and they threatened to push me out of it. So I was like at least a second away. Were you, were you actually friends with Vladimir Putin back in the day? I'm not legally allowed to discuss this, right? But yeah, so I'm on the window and I'm going to get pushed out of the window. So I'm like, hmm, I could just leave the window myself. So I get out the window. I'm going to start meditating on the roof because I'm like, if this is going to hit the fan, at least I'm the one that's like starting it is the way I can have some sort of taking control of my narrative. So I'm generally a big fan of when people are like, I'm about to get exposed. Let me say what's happening first is damage control, but the thing with that is you don't want to make the way that you're trying to take control of the narrative worse off for you. Well, that is, that is an excellent point and that is certainly what Alito managed to do here. Putting aside that he, well, actually we won't put this side, we'll start here. So it's fair to say that the ProPublica report was out there and being written and Sam Alito leaked it, which might be a trend for this guy. So he goes to the Wall Street Journal and writes this, let's start with the leaking issue. One of the, you know, there's a lot wrong with his response, but one aspect of it that folks have zeroed in on is did he just kind of admit that he's the one who leaked the Dobbs decision, which is of course what he's, he and Ginny Thomas are like the most likely people to have done it. So this has been kind of assumed, but the decision to go to the Wall Street Journal this way and leak it beforehand in an effort to get control of it certainly shows that he has kind of a modus operandi here, but he also shows to go to the Wall Street Journal, which eagle-eyed observers pointed out immediately after this came out. The Wall Street Journal, even though Politico's the one who ultimately would publish the leaked opinion first, the Wall Street Journal had been making some comments about what was going on with the Dobbs deliberations in the weeks before the leak came out that were weirdly patient of that about what was going on. They were saying stuff like we believe there's a majority for overturning row, but a couple of the justices are being wooed to another side. We don't know what's going to happen. We're worried that they might do that. All of these statements get the narrative that if a Lito leaked that opinion in order to lock in justices and prevent them from looking like hypocrites and pulling back on it, which is the most likely interpretation of what happened. The fact that he goes to the Wall Street Journal with this, more or less, and knows that there are the people he can call on a moment's notice to get something published, suggests that he has a preexisting relationship with those folks to publish his thoughts internally. It makes you rethink all of the Wall Street Journal editorial board's coverage of the court, and whether or not they've been basically a pipeline for his opinions all along. This is why you diversify your portfolio, people. Yeah. Nice. Classic reference. Two points. So that's that. So there's that. There's also the making it worse part, bizarrely rather than deny that he went on this trip for anything, which is not that he really could. He admits to doing it and admits to taking the private jet travel and not disclosing it. His response to that is to put a bunch of definitions from Websters and Blackslaw dictionary, two sources that literally no lawyer would ever actually look at. Let's them in this Wall Street Journal thing to say, look, technically, I wasn't required to disclose private air travel because it's a facility. And planes are like facilities based on these definitions. These definitions, of course, are not the definitions in the statute itself or the regulation surrounding it, which means, well, I mean, it just kind of underscores the level of bad statutory analysis that this guy does. So he doesn't disclose. He then claims that it's all OK because otherwise this plane would have had an empty seat. That's not really how bribery works, like it's like saying that, you know, I had to take the briefcase otherwise the briefcase full of money would have just sat there. So that that's not really a defense. It's weird. It also set up. Well, this is the other thing. Let's talk about getting ahead of the narrative because I think you're right that that's generally a good idea. But in this instance, the thing that I wrote, this story was brutal for me just as a personal level because I, you know, story broke in the evening. I worked on it, got a draft finished right around midnight. And that's when pro-publica, because they had been scooped on this, they accelerated the release of their report and they put it out. So I then ended up working till about two or two thirty in the morning to get the article adjusted to include their stuff. It was brutal for me to, I just want to say, because if Alito was right and the only thing that made him have to take the flight was that there was an empty seat, I was just as qualified. So when I'm finding out that I'm missing out on free six-figure travel, it hurt, you know. I would say I lost sleep, but I had a great mattress. Oh, see, he is always coming back. So the problem with, and I put this in my original draft before pro-publica followed up was that I, at the time, said, you know, I worry that this is not a particularly smart strategy to try and pre-rebut pro-publica, because pro-publica throughout the Clarence Thomas thing has looked like they understand how to deliver the pain, sandbag to deliver the pain. Remember, they first put out some allegations about Clarence Thomas getting some stuff from Harlan Crow. Clarence Thomas's defense of himself was, oh, that's all covered by the personal hospitality exception, and that's why I didn't have to disclose it. And that's when they dropped the, oh, except your mom gets free housing, and your nephew gets free tuition, which can't be personal, now can it, Clarence. So they understand how to hold back stuff to drop the hammer after somebody makes the expected response. So all Samolito did was basically lay out his strategy and allow pro-publica to hit immediately, which ended up happening, because his defense was he barely knows who Paul Singer is, other than going on this trip, which, well, turned out not to be true, and pro-publica was able to bring a bunch of receipts of the many contacts between him and Paul Singer, including a contemporaneous above the law article from 2009, which was kind of fun to dig up. I mean, I didn't work above law back then, but yeah, it popped up in the pro-publica report. I read it. And in 2009, David Lat attended the conference, I believe it was a Fedsock conference, where the two were joking around about their buddy-buddy trips. So here in this, I got to say, and this is pushed back against you. I think that Alito is the one who's been fitting information to Wall Street Journal, while likely truth is the wrong angle. The right angle is who the fuck is feeding pro-publica info, because they got this shit going back two decades. And it's like one, what has legal journalism been doing for the last 20 years to not be able to tell tabs on something like most, most like, out there jurists? And two, it's like, how do they keep getting this information on these people? I mean, if it's sort of myured, like, shouts out. They're good reporters, I think, is a big part of this. And they have a article up explaining kind of like the oral history of how this report came together. And they talked to like the private plane pilots from that trip and everything. They really went in depth to get all of this together. Yeah, no, they, but you raised an excellent point. I did see some social media traffic that, you know, isn't wrong that was like, this must be a really embarrassing moment for not to call out a specific person, but people like Nina Totenberg, who have kind of crowned themselves the go-to sources on everything's insider Supreme Court. They were always about like, we know exactly what's going on. And you got a wonder if, well, this has been going on for 20, 30 years. We never, we had to wait to hear about it from the public, what in the world were you doing that whole time? You know, it is a bad time for a reporter. It's weird. It's weird in real time to have the suspicions that you've taken a propaganda branch as real reporting. I mean, like in there, in there are points where like the role of propaganda isn't always just like straight up like, because then people will be like, oh, well, this is, we're always lying to you. Case, you sprinkle some truth, you know? So I do think there is interest in the sea, like the angle of why one yes is a controversy, but it's a controversy because all this has been happening for 20 years, people have been sitting on these cases for decades that they've clearly been implicated in and have during this time, I've been able to make these claims by like they're like, not partisan hacks would have you with little pushback. Yeah, like we didn't necessarily know that he had been flown there on this plane until the ProPublica report, but what the 2009 above the law report shows, even though it was not written as a expose, it was more just covering the event. But if you read between the lines of it, you knew that he had gone to Alaska with this guy on a trip. At that point, you can look at the financial disclosures and see that that hadn't been disclosed anywhere. So that should have raised a red flag. You should be, you know, he ends up being involved in it. Maybe there was a presumption that he paid for his own ticket. Do you need to disclose if he paid for your own shit? Well, that, right. Yes, you would, you would need to, you do not need to do that. So there can be that presumption, but I think you at least have to raise the question when you're talking about expensive vacations with billionaires, whether or not, you know, they shouldn't really be in the same tax bracket, right? True. You know, he should be staying at a different hotel. I think, I think in like, in defense of people from, you know, to 29, 2009, and this is kind of to your point, I think the assumption is that, of course, a judge isn't being, us praying court justice isn't, isn't taking gifts from multimillionaires or billionaires. So maybe there's just a, a bacon, good faith assumption that they're paying for their own trip. Yeah. Although, I mean, well, query whether it's okay even if they are paying for their own trip. Fair enough. Yeah. Right. But, but it's at least something somebody could have questioned. And then you add on to this trip, having happened and that you know contemporaneously that it happened. You have the, you have the cases involved that are run by this guy where he has business before the court that Alito is, is adjudicating. And Alito's defense of that in his op-ed is, his name isn't on it. It's just like NGL, I can't remember, I think it's that, NGL capital market, capital securities, LLC. How would I have known that that was him putting aside that that's how corporations work? And so if his argument is, unless I see a person's actual name on something I don't consider to conflict, that is a scathing like admission as to whether or not the Supreme Court has any ethical rules of value at all. But also, because he locked into that answer, ProPublica was able to bring receipts into their initial report pointing out that you had to live under a rock, not to know that that's what this guy, that was the company, this guy ran. He was actually writing his own editorials in major newspapers talking about how he was the person behind this case. So there was no way to really not know that without raising even worse questions about whether or not Samoito is smart enough to be on the court. So you've got, that's something you knew at the time. You knew at the time he was making a, he was participating in a case that was this guy's personal hobby horse case and that you knew that he had gone on vacation with him. You may not have known that he'd been flown there. You may not have known that he hadn't paid for anything. But you knew that his buddy's case that he went vacationing with was being determined by the court and he was not recusing himself. Fair game. Yeah, and that's something that Supreme Court reporters could have pieced together at the time if they were focused on it. Above the law, like we dabble in Supreme Court stuff, we obviously do analysis of decision stuff, but we're not, you know, we don't hang out at one first street, like some folks are able to do. We're also outcovering other things. So, you know, it's not like I lead, you know, I don't blame Lat for not digging through a bunch of financial forms back in the day, but there are people who really, really should have been on this. Anyway. 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. The digital edge podcast where the law and technology intersect. I'm Sharon Nelson and together with Jim Callaway, we invite professionals from all fields to discuss the latest trends, tips, and tools within the legal industry. Stay up to date on the rapidly changing legal tech landscape with the digital edge on the legal talk network. All right, we're back. Let's talk about weed, I guess, right? And more about judges and ethics and weed and so on. Go. Oh, I thought this was an extension of small talk. I was going to ask what your favorite, if you had a favorite string. Yeah. There was an interesting case coming out of DC, two parties as usually is some guy and some person he lived near. And she was complaining that the weed he was smoking was giving our all sorts of health problems. And she sued the guy in court, $500,000 and damages. None of that happened. I mean, she wasn't able to prove that she had actual health problems and she didn't get money for it. But the judge decided that he could no longer smoke in his own home because that because him smoking interfered with her right to enjoy her property. And he had to go like say, 20 or 25 feet away from his own house to smoke, which he did because he had a medical license. So he was at least presumably able to prove that his use of marijuana was for some medical reason. Yeah. Well, so now this, this is interesting. So now my take on this case was it is, you know, it is problematic that people can't do anything inside their own home. That said, it really speaks to a weird situation that we're in where this happened from marijuana. I don't know as though this would have ever happened for tobacco, right? Which you would think, which actually we have documented ways in which that can cause health problems for secondhand consumers. And there are instances where there have been like public housing and has been restrictions on being able to smoke cigarettes and public housing. This was a private affair. This was a private homeowner's. And I really don't get what I'm, the way I'm assuming this makes sense is if there are some prejudice against marijuana you specifically, because if it's just a issue of like battling property rights, I mean, he has the right to enjoy, I mean, how do you, how do you really balance his right to enjoy his property against hers? If there isn't some sort of skew against the object, right? Because I'm like, right, when it's cold out in this winter and he's like, I don't know, let's presume he has joint pain, not only does he have joint pain, he has to then go outside to smoke. Of course, he can have edible. There have some tincture or some other thing. But that's beside the point. The issue is why were his neighbor's property rights, the right to enjoy and prioritize over his when his neighbor had no clear showing of a health issue, but he had a clear showing of a health issue. I didn't get it. It didn't make sense to me. Yeah. Like, and, and you know, yeah, I think there's definitely, there's definitely something that wouldn't happen if it wasn't marijuana, right? We don't think it would necessarily have happened with tobacco, even though it can as you point out. And there also could have been less intrusive ways. Like, the, I think judges have some, some creativity here. They could have mandated that a filtering system be put in or they could have, you know, done something to be to better balance the interests of the, of both parties rather than just deciding to side with one. Yeah. I also feel like this, this crosses into it and I, I hate to sound like, like I'm a fed sock person here. This, this seems like it crosses into using courts to do what should be handled by political branches, right? Like if, if marijuana or tobacco or whatever it is, if it is legal, it can be consumed in your home. And if it causes impacts for somebody in a different home, then that's up to Congress to make it illegal to consume in your home. Like, that's not a place where the courts can go should be going and saying, well, we've decided you can't use tobacco in your house, even though everybody's allowed it to be legal. We've decided now. Like, that feels like it's going a bridge too far toward a regulation that should be handled by somebody who's actually qualified to do regulations. I don't know. I mean, even if, even if I'm sympathetic to the idea, like if, if you're in an apartment where things leak over, if it's to, I wouldn't necessarily worry, like I'd have nothing about whether it's marijuana or tobacco, if that's going on, like it seems like there should be some sort of redress to it. But like you said, filtration systems or something seem like a much more appropriate answer. Or if it was like rent old, then the landlords could get involved or something, but like, yeah. Right. I agree. I agree. We have a system for a reason. You need to do the network of befriending billionaires who have bought the Congress people that make the laws do things in your favor, you know? You can't. You can't circumvent it and then go to the judges who are bought by the millionaires. Yeah, you got to, I mean, just because it's cheaper to buy one of nine than it is one of 538, like, come on. 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 into life this diverse area of the law. Join us on Workers' Comp Matters on the Legal Talk Network. 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. All right. Well, so the long awaited above the law law school rankings are out. That was a big news from last week. We do our. We'll drop that rule for that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Above the law's law school rankings are out. There you go. So, yeah, we do our own law school rankings. Obviously, the US news rankings have been beset by controversy this year with bunches of people boycotting and causing all sorts of nonsensical results and delays and whatever. Hours are out and people should check them out as usual for those who aren't familiar with how our rankings work. We began as a response to US news and US news has engaged in some reform of their methodology and response to this over the years. But when we started it, it was because US news was fixated on school inputs, large portion of the rankings were who has students with the best GPAs and undergrad GPAs and the best LSAT scores. And we thought that the appropriate metric of judging a law school should be on the back end, how many of these people are getting real jobs? How many of these people are getting high paying jobs because, you know, it's one thing to be able to say, I got a job. But if that job isn't covering your student loans, then that's not really a good outcome. I got to say, I do think that that is a very interesting non-loyery take on law school rankings because there is, I think, baked into the traditions of the, traditions of the vocation. There's a strange fetishization of prestige and the decision to focus on outcome rather than incomes, I think, reflects a more prioritization of use of these schools rather than the, you know, special or associated with them, you know. Yeah. And one thing that was surprising about it when we find, when we did create these rankings is we assumed, in some ways, that it would still reflect prestige, right? Because theoretically, the prestige is being built by the outcomes. It's being built by, you know, prestige isn't coming from somebody had a good GPA coming in. It's built by, oh yeah, I worked with somebody who graduated from there for 20 years and they're super smart. My thing is, I still assume that a lot of the prestige still comes from whatever schools had the best sports teams in 1800. Yeah. Well, fair. A lot of values had like, we're, we're college, we're college, we're college sports sports. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So is it, but it turned out that when we started focusing more on outcomes, obviously, the schools at the top are still elite schools, but it is not exactly the elite schools that you would think based on the US news rankings, like Duke basically dominates our rankings. So they've been first or second over the last four or five years. They repeated as number one again. That is very much an elite private school, but it is not in law school terms, Yale or Harvard. And yet, because our system takes into account those outcomes, the quality of those outcomes, and puts a lot of weight on how much the tuition and debt is that you come out with, Duke comes out better. And that's, look, don't take all any ranking as, you know, perfectly gospel and just like choose Duke over somebody who's number two or three, because, well, they're one and not three. Like, use them for a lot of different reasons, dig into the numbers, think about it, take all the information into account. But it is interesting that when you strip away the reliance on how smart the kids are coming in, and by smart, obviously, in heavy quotation marks, how accomplished they were as undergrads coming in, you get a different picture in, it's very interesting to see how that plays out year over year. Besides Duke, were there any interesting schools on this list this year, or the least of placements? No, I mean, well, Yale continues to drop in our first Christmas team this year. Yeah, it wasn't on the top 14, which is, yeah, and again, 14 is a weird number again, like, lawyers for sure. It's completely arbitrary. Yeah, yeah. But it was cool to see you like, yeah, look at that, look at that lower half of top 20, take that. Yeah. You know, we've gotten flack in the past for the idea that we privileged the high paying jobs. And this is part of actually the Yale complaint against US news was US news was going to play. They were complaining about it from the perspective of US news starting to consider debt loads. They were saying, oh, well, that's going to privilege people who are rich going into rich, whatever. It was all dumb. You can read all about how stupid it was in our coverage. However, we have gotten flack for hyper-privileging big law jobs and big law salaries, because hey, that downplays public interest work, which is unfortunate and we don't necessarily want to, you know, suggest a law school isn't as good if everybody is going into public interest work at a high level too. That said, our logic is there's not a particular, to defend the methodology. Our logic has always been there's not a really good way of saying this is a quality job and this isn't vis-a-vis all the jobs that everybody gets out of law school and keeping track of everyone and whatever. We can say that if the law school is producing a lot of people who are going to big law firms that are paying the top salary, that tends to suggest that the student body graduating is in high regard in the industry and even if folks who are coming out of that law school are choosing to go into public interest work, they're probably going into the higher level public interest work too. We think of it more as a proxy than we just think that it's important to go to big law. We're saying that that's the end-all of industry work, but we'd think it's a proxy. We wish we could come up with an easier way to be able to say that this public sector job is better than this public sector job, but that's fraught with a lot of issues. The salary is easier. It's a lot easier to say this school is employing students that go to a firm that plays them 180 to start and this one is employing students that go to a firm that starts out to 10 then to say, well, this school is employing students that have a public interest job where they're saving the polar bears and over here they're employing public interest where they're fighting the prison industrial complex. It's a lot harder to weigh that qualitatively. Like, look, not for nothing. There's public sector people doing what I would consider bad public sector work. There are people who are taking jobs working for nonprofits to make sure that gay people don't have rights, and that is awful, but nonetheless a public-e-job to these things that are going to work for some nonprofit. How do you deal with that? Does that say about the law school's ability to place the student in a job that they want? That's what we're doing. That still needs to matter, too. Looking at how the schools position their graduates to get the best is what we want, and a good proxy for that is how many, because most people aren't going to go into public sector work. How many of them are going to higher-paying jobs than lower-paying jobs is that proxy, whatever. Anyway, defending our methodology a little bit, because that is definitely the criticism we get the most for it. That's why. All right. Well, we've gone on for a while. We should wrap up. Thanks, everybody, for listening. You should be subscribed to the show that we get all the new episodes as soon as they come out. You should give us reviews. I know it's annoying to do the review thing. Most people just listen to podcasts and never get around to doing the reviews. It takes a few seconds. Just give the stars and move on, or better, give the stars, and write a couple of sentences. Just like, love the show. It's great. They're fun. Yada Yada. That helps. The algorithms view that as engagement, and then they recommend the show to more people. Then more people can join our fun little crew here. You can even spite Joe and literally write Yada Yada. We just want the engagement. Well, I don't know about Yada Yada, but you can definitely, you can definitely spite me by saying that you like everybody else better. Who knows? Whatever. Anyway, you should be doing all that. You should be checking out above the law so you could read these and more stories as that we write about them every week. You should be following us on social media. The blog is at ATL blog. We're on that. Joseph Patrice. I'm Joe Patrice on Blue Sky. I need to be doing better job about that. Patrice is at rights for rent, as in he's writing, his, he's a writer, rights for rent, and you should be listening to the other, you should be listening to the jibbo, which not here this week, but Catherine will be on our usual other host. That's her show. I'm a guest on the legal tech week journalist frown table for those of you into legal tech. You should be checking out the other shows on the legal talk network. I think that brings us full circle and we can be done. Oh, no, more important announcement. We are not going to be here next week for anybody who was hoping to hear a fourth July episode, but we, it's, it's, it's fourth of July and so we're not going to be here. But we'll be back a week after. 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 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 our page at legaltalknetwork.com. We'll see you there.