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Higher Education Becomes Just Another Labor Market: Law of Supply & Demand + Maybe Politics

It's been a perfect storm for higher education, resulting in, oh horrors: laying off tenured faculty, in addition to other classifications of instructors.  The gale forces of change include: Reform efforts by the Trump administration. On Wall Street, Apollo's Marc Roman is pitching in on that campaign.  Demographic realities. During an era of fewer births there's a reduced pool of applicants for a college education as well as advanced degrees. Disconnect between the knowledge and skills acquired during matriculation for a degree and what's marketable in terms of the ability to earn a good living. You might not know that in 1626 the Puritans established Harvard as a trade school. It was to train ministers. Nothing ivory tower about that place back then. Cost. The average sticker price has more than doubled in the 21st century. Debt. The average student loan debt is more than $42K. Epstein files. How many star professors sucked up to the pedo for donations. The New York T...
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MBA Shifts From "The Ticket" to Liability: Get AI Down Cold, Meanwhile Grab Work, Any Kind

  The client balked: They couldn't believe I recommended erasing the MBA from Stanford from their resume. But eventually, the 50-something with no offers in their job hunt and dwindling savings reset how they presented themselves. They quantified results from actual recent contract-work experience and restricted the academic background to the BS. Boomers who took calculus and the GMAT to be admitted to the MBA program vividly remember: The MBA had been The Ticket. In the late 1970s, I leveraged it, even from a non-top school, to shift from non-profit to Big Oil. In itself that "covered over" that my formal education background had been totally in the humanities.  Now, the MBA can actually be a liability in not only career change and a job search by seasoned players. The MBA also can be useless in landing those first few jobs.  Some Stanford, Harvard and Wharton recent MBA graduates hit a wall in their job search.   The big money is in the financial sector, right? We...
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Paul, Weiss' Bad Week Is Getting Worse

  The week of August 2, 2026 started out with the scathing article by The New York Times  about the inner turmoil at Paul, Weiss, plus its continuing reputational crisis. The comments to that article, both at the NYT and on influential Reddit , howl about the lawyers' greed - both at that law firm and more generally. The tone echoes the 2022 expose on Big Law "Servants of the Damned" by David Enrich. About five of those pages focus on Paul, Weiss. Now this.  Brit invader in the lucrative and unique New York City legal market Linklaters announces that it has poached three more Paul, Weiss lawyers for its sports dispute business. Bloomberg Law reports: "The firm brings aboard New York-based lawyers César Rivière, Grant May and Cara Day in its litigation, arbitration & investigations practice. Rivière is a partner; May is counsel; and Day is an associate."  As everyone knows, that practice has become big business.  Last month two Paul, Weiss partners had joi...
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Scott Barshay's Leadership at Paul, Weiss Torpedoed, PR Nothing But a Joke, Sympathy for Brad Karp

  Last week was a bad, gone worse and worse, one for law firm Wachtell.   This week starts out as what could upend the new leadership of Scott Barshay (The Decider) at Paul, Weiss.  Today's very long-form article in The New York Times  by Michael Schmidt and Jessica Silver-Greenberg depicts Barshay negatively. Understatement. He is rolled out as one-dimensionally power-driven, abrasive, divisive and downright naive about the power of the media. About the latter, he blew off any concern about the media's response to the law firm's removing from the website the Center to Combat Hate.  An example of the beating delivered Barshay? Here is the NYT coverage of the response by some at Paul, Weiss when Barshay was hired: "But there was unease among some at Paul Weiss. Partners and associates learned from lawyers at Cravath that some people there were not unhappy to see Mr. Barshay go. His ego made him difficult to work with, the Paul Weiss lawyers were told." No ambigu...
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The Week That Unmasked Law Firm Dinos, Ruled Which Romance Is Okay and Made Legal Engineers Glam

The post in Reddit nails it. This week's once-unthinkable raid of Wachtell by Gibson Dunn unmasked how vulnerable many seeming successful law firms are.  Along with Wachtell, Cravath, Williams and Connolly and more are being written off as dinos. To even survive they will have to overhaul their model and probably stick to being domestic firms. Smirk. No surprise then that Cravath, once a market-maker, hasn't matched Milbank. Meanwhile Milbank has added an off-season bonus to its salary jump. Milbank could be establishing itself as an alternate model.  In addition, as The Wall Street Journal posited, mega is the present and the future of practicing law. Obviously, the media will shift coverage to concentrating on what Gibson Dunn, Kirkland & Ellis and Latham are up to. Smaller players could be fading entities. Like Medieval monks, they may labor in obscurity.  Along with that development this week, what we also know: Cupid's bow has lots of reach in law firms. Not onl...
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This Is How the Future Looks: Mega Law Firms and Mega Churches

In the late 1960s/early 1970s the counterculture meme had been "Small Is Beautiful." That was an era when youth and other kinds of activists feared the exploding power of large multinational corporations.  Of course, small never really caught on. The stampede was to land a job in one of those multinationals. Currently, it's  taken a lot of push from some employment experts to convince Gen Z that opportunity exists in small business. The jury is still out on that one. Meanwhile, recent events and trends reinforce that the present and the future belong to big. That extends from the practice of law to the operation of religious organizations. What has dominated legal and business news this week has been the announcement by mega law firm Gibson Dunn that it hired away from small law firm Wachtell star litigation partners. Because of its size GD can "afford" to pay those powerhouse brandnames what they assess they are worth in the current hot market for talent. Expli...
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Raccoon Jimothy: Big Lessons in Radical Acceptance, Business and More

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  In a hardened world leaning into hate a raccoon with a shortened spine in Seattle stole our hearts.  Collectively, we softened. The entity got named "Jimothy."  But that didn't have to happen. Jimothy could have become targeted for a few bullets to wipe out this odd-looking creature. That was the ethos of the Third Reich.  Instead, the miracle of seeing differently took hold. That had been a meme at the internationally famous Toledo Museum of Art last fall. As a society, we put on a net kind of glasses. We became refreshed, not repulsed, by how Jimothy looked.  That kind of thinking made Dove beloved in the 1970s. It created the message that all women are beautiful, just as they are. The objective was to erase the rigid norms of how women should look which was destroying self-esteem and triggering eating disorders. Today, we consider that mindset radical acceptance.  The business lesson embedded in Jimothy is about unique value. Leveraging the spirit of J...
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