A new podcast

Plus the latest on what's happening at the intersection of law and technology

Hey friends!

I’m so excited to announce the launch of the Barside Pod, which I’ll be co-hosting with my friends Matt Margolis and Cece Xie! Over the past few years I’ve gotten to know both of them through the content creation community.¹ I’d always danced around the idea of co-hosting a podcast with them, especially since they’re both funny and insightful about what’s happening in the legal world. A few months ago, I brought up the idea of launching the pod, and they were totally down!

I know the three of us each have our own reasons for joining the podcast world, especially during this time when the market seems pretty saturated. I can’t speak for my co-hosts, but as for me, there are 3 reasons why I’m super stoked about the Barside Pod.

1 - I want to share some of my more half baked ideas

This was a big reason why I started this newsletter in the first place. I used to joke that I’d hit “publish” on my newsletter articles when they were 50% ready, to force myself to share my ideas with the world. But as my audience has grown, I’ve found myself being more guarded about what I share. Writing has become harder. “You’ve got almost 8,000 subscribers now, posting ideas that are 50% thought through isn’t going to cut it any more!” I tell myself.

That’s why the podcast is such a great medium for me. It makes me feel ok about spouting off on random thoughts without feeling self conscious about it. Like me wondering aloud why so many non-Biglaw people care so much about Biglaw salaries.

2 - It’s a lot more fun when you do it with friends

The hardest part about the content creation journey has been its solitary nature. Everything I produce, whether it’s a newsletter article, a Tik Tok, or a shitpost on Twitter, is done in complete isolation. It gets lonely. That’s why the Barside Pod is different than all of my other media projects. It’s something that I’m creating with friends.

This is especially important as you grow your audience. Everything becomes trickier as you become more well known. And at the same time, you become even more lonely, because the successes and challenges you face are not relatable at all to your friends and professional peers. Incidentally, this is why I’ve always tried to connect with other creators in the legal space. The journey’s just a lot more fun when you’re doing it with people you like and enjoy spending time with.

3 - Betting on ourselves in a saturated market

A few years ago, I was the host of a corporate podcast where I interviewed lawyers about their careers. A friend of mine (who happened to be in my target audience) was pretty direct in her reaction to its launch. “There are so many podcasts out there now, and I can’t tell the difference between all of them!”

That comment sat with me for years. So I ended up staying away from podcasting because I wasn’t sure I’d bring something new to my listeners. But that’s exactly why I think the Barside Pod will be different. Instead of conducting generic interviews, Matt, Cece, and I will instead leverage our own respective audiences and share authentic commentary based on each of our unique vantage points in the legal ecosystem.

Will that be enough to set us apart? I guess we’ll find out.

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Latest News

• A huge debate has erupted over on Law Twitter, about whether law review editors should be paid. The source of this discourse seems to be a petition from the Stanford Law Review (and signed by a few other law journals) to push for compensation for its student editors. Having nothing intelligent to add to this conversation, I opted to make a dumb joke about the whole thing. Honestly though, law review is just like so many other gold stars in the legal profession, where someone exploits the young and ambitious by making them do tons of shitwork in an attempt to impress strangers who probably aren’t worth impressing.

• OpenView, a leading venture capital firm that backed two notable legal tech startups—Persuit and Logikcull (my first startup)—has shut down. It appears that a big part of the reason was that two key people at the firm departed, which reminds me of how something similar happens at law firms. Departures of key personnel leads to more departures, which suddenly accelerate the entire firm’s downfall. Sometimes the most profitable institutions are also the most fragile. If you want to read more about what happened to OpenView, I highly recommend this outstanding article by Kyle Harrison.

• The incomparable Matt Levine wrote about LLMs and the professions, opening his article with this memorable line: “One possible way to think about large language models is that they are extremely good at being mediocre at a lot of white-collar jobs.” It’s a really good article that discusses a hot topic these days: What happens when AI replaces junior lawyers?² And importantly, if these junior roles get replaced, how will we find the senior lawyers of tomorrow? These are important questions that we actually discussed on episode 2 of the Barside Pod (coming out next week!)

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1. In addition to their work on social media, they each author their own newsletters. Matt’s is called Point Two and covers legal news; Cece’s is called debrief and “investigates culture, work, and being alive.” They are both fantastic and I highly recommend you subscribe to them!

2. To read more on that, I highly recommend checking out AI’s Rise May Motivate Law Firms to Quit Their Traditional Ways by Ironclad’s CEO Jason Boehmig, and AI Will Invert The Biglaw Pyramid by Cece Xie (which you may remember was a guest post here from a couple months ago).