White House thumbs are on the scales of justice once again. A second round of threatening communiques from the Trump Administration to law firms, this time concerning their relationships with Diversity Lab, was dispatched on January 30, 2026.

This should concern all of us, and it also is very personal to me. I am acquainted with Diversity Lab and its founder Caren Ulrich Stacey through my work and admire her extensive and successful efforts to advance young lawyers, especially young women lawyers, and help them reenter the profession after hiatus periods.

I was introduced to Caren Stacey shortly after she founded OnRamp Fellowship, and I served as an advisor to that project in the early years. When she described me as having a “tireless pursuit and desire to create … the advancement of women in the law” in the front pages of one of my books, she might also have been describing herself. Her vision was extraordinary, and the role she and her project filled helped so many young lawyers, who had left practice for a few years, get back on their feet and continue to do remarkable legal work.

Hundreds of young lawyers have been matched with scores of prestigious legal organizations over the life of the project. After early success with the OnRamp Fellowship, Caren Stacey wrapped that project into Diversity Lab, which sought out law firms and legal departments willing to ensure that all talent has fair and equal opportunities to advance into leadership. What became known as “Mansfield Certification” for achieving diversity and equity goals seems to be at the crux of the objection by the Trump Administration.

This comes as no surprise. The letters that FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson sent to 42 major U.S. law firms on January 30th cautioned that participation in Diversity Lab’s Mansfield Certification program may expose those firms to liability under both Section 1 of the Sherman Act and Section 5 of the FTC Act.

We have seen this before. Some of these same law firms were targeted last year by Trump Executive Orders threatening their businesses, citing in part their allegedly discriminatory hiring practices. A handful of law firms, following the example of Paul Weiss, reached deals with the White House to void or sidestep such orders, and other firms, led by Perkins Cole, fought the Executive Orders and filed successful lawsuits challenging the president’s actions as unconstitutional.

So, which kind of response will law firms choose this time around? Cooperation/capitulation or push back?

We will wait and see. In the meantime, I am reminded of Shakespeare’s famous line in Henry VI. “The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers” if we are going to accomplish our goal of lawlessness.

It is time to lawyer up!

Remote work, working from home, hybrid work schedules — whatever you call it, the concept appears to continue to be alive and well, not DOA, as some big firms want us to believe.

Recently, it seems that BigLaw is sending memos out, without abandon, mandating that the lawyers at those firms return to the office. And while that may seem ominous to some recipients, the proof is in the pudding — or, in this case, whether they want to eat their pudding at a remote location or whether they are are willing to eat it in the office.

There should be no question about something as axiomatic as “what the powers that be at BigLaw want, the powers that be at BigLaw get”? However it does not appear to be that simple, and the disconnect between words and actions is at the heart of the confusion. In short, the messages in the memos are clear, but the mandates are not being enforced. So why is that?

The easy answer seems to be that many partners at BigLaw don’t want to trek to the office five days a week — or even three or four days a week. As a result, many of those firms are interpreting back to the office to apply only to managers and associates, presumably because the business needs to continue to run smoothly and the associates need to continue to learn. Such an approach may get the partners off the hook but also begs the question of who will be present in the office to mentor the associates.

Or, consider this. The mandates, which turn out to be no mandates at all, may not even apply to associates based on concerns about retention of talent, which is always on the minds of law firm partners and managers. When associates are hit with the high cost of commuting five days a week and related costs, including early morning and late afternoon childcare in some cases, very talented associates may start looking for greener remote work pastures. Faced with that possibility, managers might overlook enforcing the back to office mandates for associates as well.

So, it makes me wonder what the reason is for sending the memos at all if the only thing to be accomplished is confusion. And hypocrisy, for that matter. It is well known that remote work during the pandemic led to record high profits for BigLaw. So is it the BigLaw version of keeping up with the Joneses? If one firm does it, they all have to do it — whether it makes sense or not.

Whatever the reason, the logical conclusion is that the current state of play for back to the office is a mess.

However, the results of a recent survey of 2800 legal professionals, which includes questions about remote work, sheds some light on actual practices. According to responses addressing remote work, fewer than one-third of respondents said that their offices are fully staffed five days a week. Attorneys still are on record “quibbling” about 3 or 4 day schedules, and hybrid schedules were the most popular at large firms (51 plus lawyers). For those firms balking at even hybrid schedules, the reasons include security and privacy concerns, which makes little sense. How could issues of security and privacy have been handled adequately for the years of remote work during COVID and now be a problem?

More reason for confusion!

For all of the survey results, search Affinipay’s 2025 Legal Industry Report.

Getting to the courthouse early matters a lot. Not on the morning of your trial — that is fundamental. Always arrive early when you are appearing before the judge.

This is something different. This is about exposing young lawyers to trial practice early in their careers. It can be extremely important to their professional development.

For me, my first trip to the courthouse came very early. My Dad was far ahead of his time when he began taking his ten-year-old daughter to the courthouse — his version, I guess, of “Take Your Daughter to Work Day.” I would ride my bike to his office and walk to the courthouse with him where “we” would file a paper or talk to the clerk of court. If we ran into the judge in the hallway for casual conversation, that was a definite plus.

Admittedly, that was not the norm at the time. But those are very vivid and treasured memories for me. I don’t think Dad was doing it with any expectation that I would follow in his footsteps as a lawyer. That role was reserved for my brother. Such were the times!

But I clearly enjoyed those outings. I knew that, as a lawyer, my dad did something important, and the courthouse was where he did it. The courthouse was a serious place, the judge was a powerful person, and the lawyers were pillars of our small town, whose jobs were to represent their clients well and to improve the community where their clients lived. Some of the stories about those experiences appear in my book, What Millennial Lawyers Want: A Bridge From the Past to the Future of Law Practice (Wolters Kluwer Aspen Select Series, 2019). You might enjoy reading them.

So when I saw an article titled “How Young Lawyers Get Trial Experience and Why It Still Matters,” it got my attention. It was not that the subject was so new or unexpected, but I found the article to be comprehensive in laying out options for young lawyers to become familiar with the trial process — to see whether it interests them and also to prepare them for the first time they might be asked to enter an appearance or to argue a motion. The courtroom is a particular place, and it is better to get familiar with it early on.

I also remembered when a young lawyer in a healthcare regulatory practice told me that he wanted to change his practice focus to trial work because he needed to “feel more like a lawyer.” I knew what he meant, and I also knew that he was not diminishing the value of corporate lawyers any more than I do. It is just a very personal thing. Being a trial lawyer did that for me, too.

That article also should be of interest to seasoned lawyers who take their roles as mentors seriously. But that is the very thing that exposes the weakness of the article. It does not say that! The emphasis in the article is on how young lawyers can get that experience themselves, and I call foul to that.

Let’s face it, most young lawyers, who are responsible for billing two thousand hours a year, are not likely to spend much time as observers in the courtroom without the idea coming from the top and endorsed by the top. That nudge needs to come from seasoned lawyers who take developing talent seriously.

Mentors are critically important to bringing these kinds of professional experiences to younger lawyers. It is folly to leave it up to young and vulnerable junior associates to figure out what they need on their own. Senior lawyers need to take time out from billing hours and developing work to “ladder down” and do something that was done for most of them. In my opinion, that something is as much of a professional responsibility as anything in the Code or the Canons.

Wherever they are, the mentors need to step up. A significant part of their value is to develop talent, and there is no excuse for shirking that responsibility, whether it is a trip to the courthouse or to hear the opening bell ring on Wall Street. Most successful lawyers can identify someone who served as a mentor for them, and young lawyers today have a right to expect equal treatment.

The article closes with the following words, “The profession still needs lawyers who can stand up, speak clearly, think on their feet, and own outcomes. Those skills don’t develop by accident. They develop because someone decided they mattered and acted accordingly.”

That someone needs to be a mentor. If that is what the author meant, the message should have been much clearer.

Here’s the article: https://abovethelaw.com/2026/01/how-young-lawyers-get-trial-experience-and-why-it-still-matters.

Journalists are being attacked in unprecedented ways in our country. From White House press conferences to ICE arrests, it looks like all out war on the press. Journalists are being treated as if the First Amendment constitutional protections do not exist.

Most recently, the arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Forte in Minnesota are so unprecedented and contrary to established law that they shed alarming and dangerous light on the state of our national justice system. The lawyers among us should be especially outraged. I know I am, and not just because I am a lawyer.

I also am a writer, and in that role, I have been a journalist. I have written opinion pieces for many prestigious legal websites, magazines and journals since founding Best Friends at the Bar in 2007. I am proud of the many articles I have written, but it only takes one bad experience to teach a very valuable lesson.

That experience came while I was a monthly columnist for the ABA Journal. In 2021, I published an article titled “Are Women Lawyers Paying Enough Attention to Upward Mobility?” which called attention to the dual roles of many women lawyers as mothers and professionals and included advice on successfully navigating obstacles on their career paths. That article followed the publication of three of my books supporting women lawyers, recognizing their challenges and encouraging their advancement. It also followed my personal experience as a woman lawyer with children. In other words, I knew the drill, as recognized by the three levels of editors who reviewed and approved the column.

But the faceless young women lawyers on social media had a different interpretation. They read the column as advice not to have children if they intended to succeed in the law, and they launched a brutal personal attack on me that included threats and doxxing and lasted for weeks, with enemy fire coming over the internet hour after hour, day after day.

Clearly, I survived, and the attackers did not silence me. Fortunately, they did not have guns or kangaroo courts, and their methods taught me a very important lesson.

Five years ago, I was not familiar with “cancel culture.” But I learned about it very fast. I learned that when those who cancel come from faceless social media, they cannot be stopped by factual responses or worthy defenses which only encourage further attacks.

Most importantly, perhaps, that experience was a shot over the bow that I did not recognize at the time. I thought it was about me, but it was not. It was about society. A society that was undergoing such divisive change and since that time has become almost unrecognizable in so many ways.

If you are a lawyer like me who cares, do whatever you can to combat the forfeiture of our society to such malignant forces. Make your opinions and fears known. Find powerful people who share those opinions and engage them. Do whatever you can and hope that the highest court in our land wakes up to the dangers and shuts down the hateful powers that have been created.

But be smart about it. Danger lurks. However, we may not get another chance.