hey welcome back to another edition of thinking like a lawyer i'm joe patrice from above the law i am joined by other people from above the law great title other people yes yes the role of other people we played by kathleen rubino yeah there you go and i'm the person i'm not other people I was waiting for my role to be introduced. Well, that is Christopher Williams. We're all here at Above the Law. Yeah, and we meet every week to discuss the big stories from the week that was in legal. But first, we have a little bit of small talk with the Superman fanfare there. So how are things going, everybody? I mean, I did some spring cleaning, which is, you know, really scintillating topic of conversation. but it was in fact what I did and I rearranged my furniture, which always seems like it's going to be easier. It's like, Oh, just move this there and that there and Bob's your uncle. And then you like start pushing stuff and you're like, this is going to take a minute. Yes. Furniture. That's nice. So the ballroom thing. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There is that. Not so small. The talking there, but okay. A little medium talk. I had an immediate thought and I'm like, i'm not seeing it elsewhere i don't know if i'm crazy but like it looks like the guy who they're trying to who who got arrested looks to be like he's been you know stopped by police for traffic reasons for no reason how is he alive like they kill black folks for a lot less so like i feel like so like there are people that are like kind of conspiratorial it's like oh this was a hook My thing is like, how is he still breathing? Of all the conspiracy theories, that does seem like one that should be getting a little bit more play. Then a dude got choked out for apparently having a fake 20 in a cigarette. Like he shot over fire and they found him. The only thing is he wasn't wearing a shirt. Come on. And supposedly gunfire was supposedly exchanged. And I guess a bunch of Secret Service agents missed him multiple times and yet still brought him down. I don't know. Yeah. I know. I know. I know. I know there's a thing with like Secret Service and prioritizing whiteness, but you should not have stormtroopers as your main shooters. Yeah. Right. It is nothing. He didn't get he didn't get hit once. Yeah. Yeah. Once seems weird. But again, we are not not to not to accuse the administration of having a fake shooting, but at least the other one had ketchup involved. Yeah. We're not indulging in in the conspiracy theory stuff, but it is. look and then the immediate and then the immediate oh this is why we need a ballroom nobody got hurt well and that's and that's the story that's catherine's story uh not for this week's episode necessarily but that is catherine's story that you can read now as you're listening to this detailing that within what some a few hours of the shooting the doj was already jumping on demanding that the case to block the construction of the ballroom be dropped which as i put on social media you're never beating the false flag allegations like that you you gotta you gotta realize that uh it's just gonna feed the conspiracy theories if your immediate response to it is let's see if we can get a litigation advantage here and i and i hate to be like the petridge farmer members guy but back in my day people actually died in false flags you know now you Remember? Things used to be paid in blood, you know. Yeah. Wow. Wow, wow, wow, wow. So, yeah, no. So that has been an interesting wrinkle in our historic wrinkle in history, I suppose. Which all these weekends have been. Exactly. Like, it has been unprecedented time for the last three, five years. Like, I would just like a precedent. Can we have a precedent in week? I mean, the Supreme Court doesn't care about precedent anymore. Oh. But I'm changed. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, listen. For a legal show, that's gold. Oh, okay. For everything else, that is fools gold. That is really horrible for everything else. But for this show, that's gold. All right, everybody. We should get started. We have a big story this week that actually was multiple articles of the week because it just kept going and going and going. uh cash patel who as of wait are you talking about his drinking tap oh uh as of this recording uh is the director of the fbi though there is every reason to believe he may not be by the time it hits your ears cash patel was the subject of did you hear what aoc said about that oh asked about like who should donald trump fire next she was like are there any other women because that appears to be only kind of people he's willing to Yes, we did also lose the Department of the Secretary of Labor. So The Atlantic published a article with several insider accounts detailing Cash Patel's work habits, alleging that he spends a lot of his time drinking, that he's often unresponsive and not around. He denies all of these allegations and immediately replied that he was going to sue them for all of this and made good on that pledge pretty quickly with a $250 million defamation complaint. Not quite sure why this would be worth $250 million, nor is anyone particularly sure how this would be a defamation claim given that there's really nothing in there to suggest. I mean, put aside actual malice, which they do not have any good argument for. There's not really anything in there that seems like a defamatory claim that they can make out. I mean, the reporter does not. I mean, if the reporter believes the sources they have, then that would be sufficient. Done and dusted, as they say, in the real technical parlance. So breaking down this complaint, though, we did a full breakdown of what was going on in the complaint. And the actual malice claim is not really played out. It seems as though Jesse Benal, who's a big figure in the big lie conspiracy, voter conspiracy circles, is representing Patel. He seems to think that actual malice means the reporters are mean to you, which is not what that standard means. There's actually a bunch of case law about that. Yeah. Like what it means is actually pretty well defined. I will say, I mean, he's a lawyer, so it's no excuse for him not to know. But for regular folks, for regular folks, it is one of those situations where it is an unfortunate name that we chose to give this standard. Because it sounds like you were mean. Yeah. You knew you were being mean. That's what it sounds like. Well, I'm not speaking as a regular folk, but I would imagine regular folk who have the literacy level to know the word malice. Like, right. Malice is a very heavy word. Like, it is much it is much meaner than mean. So, like, even even on that level, I don't even buy that. Like, malice is like at the level of like sinful, like they're like bloodlusty. Yeah. So it's unfortunate. This might have a different appreciation for words than the average American. Yeah, this is this is a point is it's an unfortunate term. And what all it really means is that the reporter, because this is a public figure, the reporter has to know or be reckless in not knowing that the facts in the article are fake If the reporter believes the insiders who are giving these accounts if they subjectively believe it even if the insiders are lying if the reporter subjectively believes it that would not cross the actual malice threshold. Patel has another lawsuit going against someone who had, well, we're going to get that. It tends to be passed. Yeah. So that was actually where we were going with that, has this other lawsuit against someone over similar statements and tries to bootstrap that into this complaint by claiming that the Atlantic knew this other lawsuit was out there, which means they knew that this was going to that these claims were probably false. That lawsuit got dismissed this week because, you know, there's no actual malice here. Well, yeah. And in that case in particular, I think the statement was that Patel had been more visible at nightclubs, far more than he'd been seen on the seventh floor of the Hoover building. And the judge was like, that was obviously a joke. Yeah. Like no, no, no person was like, oh, I've thought that he meant I've clocked him. And I can tell you the times it was clearly like a quippy little thing said on Morning Joe. No one took this for a statement of pure fact. Did Patel hire Drake's legal team? No, but he did. As we said, he did have one of the key figures in pushing voter conspiracy theory cases as his legal team, who is not seem to be. You know, that was an unfortunate, unfortunate timing on getting that case tossed as soon as he makes this one. There's also some, you know, just a side story. This is not the most important story about it, but there's some reason to believe that AI might have drafted parts of this complaint. There's some errors in it. Turns of phrases that chat GPT is a big fan of. One of my favorite reasons to believe that AI wrote it and not him was that a reporter recanted facts from the pleading and he was like, you're lying. Yeah, that was the story that I wrote about it. Yeah. He Cash Patel was giving a press conference about his Southern Poverty Law Center litigation. And there were some questions not about that case, although we will talk about that in a minute. But about his case against the Atlantic and several of the allegations that, you know, one of them was that the allegations that the Atlantic made was that he had been locked out of his computer and thought that he meant he was fired and he freaked out was what the Atlantic said. and in the complaint it was like it was a standard mistyped you know lockout but it was quickly resolved no problem and so they asked about like well when you were locked out of your computer and he was like i was never locked out of my computer how dare you anybody who believes that's an idiot so yeah query whether or not he read the complaint not great when you're publicly announcing that you uh that the allegations in the complaint on in your own lawsuit uh you don't believe are true. Courts really love when the complaint is alleging things that the plaintiff thinks is false. Yeah, I mean, the fact that the that the reporter in real time was able to say the complaint says the opposite of what you're saying right now. Yeah, it doesn't look great. Look, I there's no real chance of just giving a legal assessment. There's a zero percent chance of this case resolving in his favor that I can see. It's filed in D.C. makes sense because the only other logical opportunity place for him to file it would be Nevada. Nevada has a fairly harsh anti-slap law that would then lead to him being on the hook when this case inevitably gets dismissed. By doing this in D.C., he avoids that at least. But yeah, I mean, I think that this is something that, you know, people have said and above the law has published this as well, but that, you know, I think the main purpose of this lawsuit is to prove to Donald Trump that Castro is a fighter, right? That he's going to stick it to them. And much very similarly to how lots of Trump's lawsuits we know are big losers, but he does it anyway to say like, and I'm going to fight this. It's kind of the bravado of the Trumpian two era. I actually thought interesting, not that people have talked a lot about it, not particularly legal, I suppose. But the two bars that he allegedly spends all of his time in, one in Vegas and one in D.C., are both private clubs, members only clubs. I guess that's the only way that you could pull something off like this if you were a public figure and didn't want folks to know about it. But, you know, it's interesting. They're spendy, too. I think the one in Vegas is a $20,000 membership. Well, somebody. Which in Las Vegas these days, I think that's the price of two cocktails so there's a discount now but yeah no so i just thought that was interesting the the private club thing i mean that doesn't surprise me particularly i think that you're right that in the era of smartphones if you are going to regularly go out and you're a public figure you probably have to make spend that money yeah all right well let's take a break here uh we're going to keep talking about Cash Patel, but take a shift of gear when we come back. You like legal podcasts because you're curious and want to be the best attorney you can be. I'm Dave Scriven-Young, host of Litigation Radio, produced by ABA's litigation section with Legal Talk Network. Searching your favorite podcast player for Litigation Radio to join me and my guests as we examine hot topics in litigation and topics that will help you to develop your litigation skills and build your practice. I hope you'll check out Litigation Radio and join the ABA litigation section for access to all of the resources, relationships, and referrals you need to thrive as a litigator. All right, so not related related. Cash Patel was in the news for other reasons this week, which is that along with the acting attorney general, I guess, Todd Blanche. It's unclear whether or not that's actually his job or not, because Pam Bondi hasn't technically left yet. I don't really know what's going on, but he's calling himself the acting AG, so let's just go with it. Todd Blanche and Patel dragged themselves out to a press conference to announce that they were bringing criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center. Did this feel like something that was hurriedly put slapped together so that cash patel could potentially change the headlines absolutely and you can tell that it's it it really felt like it was slapped together when you started reading the complaint itself and realized that there were a series of mistakes up to and including not making any claims about in the indictment has no claims about one whole element of one of a charge of four of the charges. Yeah. I mean, listen, I want to talk about this first because it's funny, but I don't want to also ignore how horrifying this lawsuit is for democracy. Right. But so put put a pin in, you know, end times. But on the they forgot an entire element of the charge because what a clown show like a one L doesn't do that. Or if they do, they don't stay a one L very long. Wait, wasn't there a recent thing where like they made the hiring requirements more lax? Yeah, there you go. So there you go. Maybe it wasn't one of them. You lower your standards. Cash Patel, law school graduate of some school in New York that he refuses to put on his actual official government biography. He does the- It was probably School of Hard Knocks Law. But Cash Patel is the opposite is kind of the flip side of the coin of the people who say well I went to law school in Kenya That is a joke I have made Yeah That is literally the joke Really OK Yeah I wrote a story Great minds I guess OK. Or you read it a year ago when I wrote it. Probably not. That was yeah, that was an early Trump administration law school. Trump administration legal story that I wrote because Cash Patel's official biography just says went to law school back in New York, not saying, you know, it makes you think that, oh, was it Columbia? Maybe it was Cornell. You know, where did he go to law school? And it's like, no, think further down the rankings. Yeah. He went to Pace, to be clear. Not that it's a fine law school, but, you know. Yeah. So the absolutely. So the indictment, one, rather than charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with bank fraud like one would normally do in the allegations that they're talking about. They instead make it a claim under a bank secrecy statute, which is all well and good. We'll talk about this case and the substance of it and why they think that is the crime in a second. But this bank secrecy statute includes as an element, And the crime has to be an attempt to influence the bank to do something. You have to be lying to the bank for the purpose of making the bank do something, which they there's no they don't they don't even make an argument why the Southern Poverty Law Center was trying to get the bank to do anything or anything that the bank supposedly did over it, which is not great for that. That you need to have at least some element there. Now, they do have some – they do plead all the elements of some other stuff, not necessarily convincingly. They're making a series of wire fraud claims. They argue that donors were defrauded. And now we can get into the substance of this argument. The argument is basically that the Southern Poverty Law Center, who tracks and keeps dossiers on hate groups and also helps take down hate groups, one of the things – Also known as very fine people, as the president has previously said. Right, as the administration calls it. Well, that's actually more like more relevant than just kind of a quip. Sure. So they they they do this work. Part of how they do this work is that they pay in informants within these organ embedded within these organizations to, you know, hand hand over information. The SPLC actually has made the point that when they get this information, of course, it goes into their dossiers and their work. But they also, when they have direct knowledge through their informants of upcoming criminal activity, they turn that over to law enforcement, including the FBI. So this is work that they've done. They run these these payments through shell organizations so that, you know, these folks aren't getting checks that say Southern Poverty Law Center on them, which probably would go bad if they're trying to stay undercover. I just imagine if somebody got the check, like, what do you mean? I'm not in poverty. so the uh so these hate groups uh are that that's how this you know they they've got embeds uh one of which was the unite the right the charlottesville march that uh trump famously said there were very fine people on both sides it is interesting that in the despite it historically being very fine people on both sides in this uh indictment the doj is and the administration is taking the stance that it was really horrible and everybody on that side was awful. And their argument is that by the SPLC paying some people involved in it as informants, that was really proof that the whole rally itself was masterminded by the SPLC. They argue that the Southern Poverty Law Center's job is fomenting hate groups that they pay and run in order to create the motive for people to give them money. They are claiming in their wire fraud argument that donors are defrauded over this. Most donors would say we gave them that money. I knew we were expecting them to be this checks out to be trying to take down these organizations. This is a dumb case, obviously, but it's also one that I think has a couple of ramifications that are worth talking about. One, when you bring this case, you are signaling to all the hate groups out there that it is time for them to engage in a mole hunt, which is not great. And that is who you are. That is going to put the SPLC's informants in jeopardy. It is also going to chill any future informant who is going to say, I can't go down this road because I could be outed by the federal government later. But a third element that I didn't really put in my story but I put on social media that I think is underappreciated is it also says that the – it's also confirmation that the Department of Justice, despite their talk about how they're against hate groups and the SPLC is behind them, they don't care about these hate groups. And it's proof by bringing this case because it's not like this mole hunt that's going to now take place inside all these organizations is going to just look for the people working for the civil rights groups. It is going to also try to uncover people who are theoretically working for the FBI, which is – There aren't any spoilers. Well, and that's really what it is. By bringing this, the DOJ is signaling either A, they are comfortable burning their own informants or B, they don't have any because they've stopped investigating these groups. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Yeah, because there's no way that this case doesn't lead to undermining law enforcement efforts unless – I mean, and so it means you either didn't think that through or you don't care. Sure. Yeah. I think that's actually the more interesting angle. why this dumb case is actually very smart. Because the thing, I was interested in how this is being handled discursively. So like how people on the, like talking heads on the left are talking about it. Our talking heads on the right are talking about it. For, I've seen like some of the talking heads on the left who aren't legally savvy. They're like, oh, this might be a big thing, blah, blah, blah. Because they don't know that like, there are elements that haven't been met. So like, even from the left, there's like cautiousness about this maybe being a real thing and that like, kind of target the legitimacy of the poverty center. But on the right, this is great fodder for like a Darvaux tactic where it's like, we're not the racist. They're the real racists. And my thought with that is, I think one of the allegations, like about a million dollars or so was dedicated to like paying out informants or what have you. That is not a lot of money in the scheme of things. It's just not. And like, there's no way that like all those people who were like, marching on charlottesville they were doing it for uh southern law poverty center right like like they'd be in poverty if that's where all their money was coming um but yeah um one of the people that i one of the places i worked i watched us this channel called newsmax and uh what's the name uh her name was uh harmeet dylan was on there oh yeah and she was like um we don't have referring to like the right-wing protesters saying that we don't have organic, this is verbatim, we don't have organic disruption. This is the best country on earth. People love to be here. What is there to be upset about? So like the idea that the real reason that the, one, there's the backdrop of maybe the Klan isn't all that bad. They're good people too. But also to the degree that they are bad is because the Southern Poverty Law Center is paying people to pretend to be bad actors. It great cover It great cover It great plausible deniability It like yes you might have seen you know somebody burning a cross but who to say that lighter fluid wasn paid for by the Southern poverty law You know, you know, it's goofy. so dylan of course runs the civil rights division at this juncture uh that would be the folks who would bring you know more civil claims against hate groups for work they do uh it would probably you know but but would probably theoretically be looped into criminal investigations even though they would technically be a separate uh a separate endeavor but yeah it would suggest that they don't they're not involved in this at all which i think we all knew we all kind of knew but yeah yeah i I think that's the right way to say it. We all kind of knew, but now we know. I will say this whole thing feels like a plot point from the boys. I'm watching season five right now, and this is like, not to give any spoilers, but when they turned on the starlighters, this is what it feels like. All right. Well, let's take a break, and we'll be back in a moment. All right. Well, it is, as I always like to say, it's 2026, so we're not going to be able to escape a conversation about AI in legal. because it kind of dominates everything. This last week is where we learned that S&C. Sullivan and Cromwell. Sullivan and Cromwell found itself in the middle of an AI hallucination problem of its own. This is what I love about this particular story is that sometimes I think that maybe readers of Above the Law have the ability to kind of look their nose down on these AI hallucination stories, like, uh, silly little small practice people, small town, they don't understand the way the big, nope, big law does it the exact same way, also with hallucinations. Not also the first big law firm to get in trouble for this, but certainly I think one of the most prestigious ones that this has happened to. Well, and that's also a thing, and to take off of your looking down their noses, even to the extent that large firms have been tagged with this before, it's been, the large firms that are at the top of the AMLO 100 because they have a lot of revenue, but they're like a lot of smaller offices. It's happening in regional places, whatever. The like the elitism of S&C in New York. Yep. New York, New York, big law attorneys are doing the exact same thing. Right. So this it was revealed in this instance. I think it was Boyce Schiller found it, who was on the other side and flagged, hey, looks like you've got some issues here. S&C sent a letter to the court saying, hey, we self-reporting that they had been alerted to the fact that these issues existed. And then they provide an appendix of, after going back through all their work, an appendix of where there had been mistakes. And it was lengthy. and some of them were mistakes that were not necessarily the worst things in the world. Errors in like the exact way the quotes were and things put in weird places, but mistakes and mistakes that you theoretically would catch. And as I pointed out, like this is an issue that with AI that I keep coming back to. It is a valuable tool, but it is not a replacement for AI the time honored legal workflow of somebody has to sit down and read these things and verify them. And yeah, that's the time, the hours that get billed of somebody sitting there, going through each one and printing out the case and making sure everything's in there. And it sucks, but that has to be done. And there are products I would be remiss not to mention. I've written about them before. There are things, you know, I wrote about BriefCatch recently, but they're not necessarily alone, but that's like a notable product I recently wrote about that have now AI-driven products that can read the brief and flag mistakes. It can find the mistakes kind of for you, and that's valuable too, and that is a great starting point that narrows down this inquiry. But at the end of the day, there's no replacement, especially at this level. The billable hour. Well, there is a replacement for the billable hour, but there's no replacement for, this is what you're paying SNC for. And it will still- There's a reason why you hire them. It will still be cheaper to utilize AI for a lot of these tasks and then waste, and then devote this time on the backend. You can't view the fact that AI can speed things up as a reason why every aspect of the workflow needs to be automated. And it's this drive to automate every step that gets people in trouble, I think, and that it's going to be the new challenge because that is going to be what dumbs people down. It's going to be the idea that we move from, hey, it can accelerate this part of the workflow, but then human comes in to, well, it can do everything, and maybe a human just looks over it real quick. And that isn't the way this works. Like there has to be human intervention at logical points, at break points, and it needs to be constantly there because mistakes can compound upon themselves and get lost in that process that you need to let the people read the stuff. it's only it's only a matter of time before somebody creates an llm that catches ai mistakes and then they name it somebody so then they can say well somebody looked at it yeah yeah and i think you need those sorts of products to make this product this you know to reduce mistakes that that is a great first filter it's going to catch potentially all but you know worst case, 90% of those mistakes. And that means that when the human goes through it, it's going to be an easier task, but they still have to do it. Can you just imagine, listen, the vibes at a big law firm are bad at best. Could you imagine what it was like over the weekend? Because it was inevitably a weekend when they were making this appendix of every mistake that they made in this brief. Yeah. It would have been awful to not even be on the case, but just like happen to be in the office as this is going down. Yeah, that's a bad vibe leak. Yeah. Anyway, so point is everyone should be concerned. Everyone should be careful. That is not a reason not to bring AI into your workflow because it is going to be essential to get things done. But it is a cautionary tale about how you need to pay attention. And I think that's, that is everything we got, I think. Yeah. All right. So thanks everybody for listening. You should be subscribed to the show so you get new episodes when they come out. You should be listening to the Jabot, Catherine's other show. I'm also a guest on the Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable on Fridays. And we, there are also shows on the Legal Talk Network that you should be listening to. We, you know, read above the law. So you read these and other stories before we talk about them here. You follow on social media, blah, blah, blah, dot com on Blue Sky. I'm at Joe Patrice. She's at Catherine One. Chris at Rights for Rent. We all also have a limited presence at Twitter, I suppose, although I'm Joseph Patrice over there. And that's everything. Bye. Peace. Thank you.
