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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

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Easier said than done. I can't speak for the other three, but Lindsey Halligan would not make it through Senate confirmation. Her Wikipedia bio says:

After graduating from law school, Halligan worked for Cole, Scott & Kissane, an insurance law firm specializing in residential and commercial properties. She became a partner in 2018. At Cole, Scott & Kissane, Halligan represented insurance companies against lawsuits filed by homeowners and corporate plaintiffs.

This is a bit misleading for someone not familiar with the legal industry. Cole, Scott, & Kissane is what's known as a "defense mill". She did not represent insurance companies directly in coverage cases or bad faith cases, etc., she represented them as carriers covering other defendants. So if you get into an accident that's your fault and the person you hit isn't happy with what the insurance company is offering they sue you, your insurance company pays for your representation and pays the settlement. While they're the ones paying for everything and (mostly) calling the shots, they aren't the named defendant; you are. These places are known for low pay and high billing requirements, and that she made partner after five years isn't surprising because most attorneys will jump ship as soon as they get a better offer. And being partner doesn't mean that you can bring in business like it does at most firms, just that you get to bill at partner rates which are ten bucks an hour more than associate rates. This is mostly just to compensate for a lower billable requirement due to increased administrative work.

After nearly a decade of doing that, during which time she never once took a case to trial, she met Trump and he hired her as one of his personal attorneys in the classified documents case, where she basically did doc review. I don't want to denigrate what she did here (there's a kind of do review that's bottom of the barrel in the legal profession, but this isn't that), because reviewing documents and analyzing them is a core part of legal work. But it hardly qualifies one to be United States Attorney. Most of these people are career prosecutors with significant trial experience. Halligan is about as qualified to be US Attorney as I am, and I'm not qualified at all. There are people associated with this board who are more qualified by virtue of their having worked as criminal defense attorneys for some amount of time. The only real "qualification" she had was that she was willing to sign an indictment that literally no other attorney in the office was willing to sign.

Amateur hour is the fact that these indictments even happened. The Comey one was already on incredibly thin ice anyway after Halligan failed to read the corrected version of the indictment to the grand jury before they voted on it. Or that the James indictment, which didn't have a lot of meat on the bone to begin with, somehow failed to make the best argument. Or that literally everyone in the US Attorney's office for the Eastern District of Virginia, including Trump's named interim US Attorney, came to the conclusion that unemployment was preferable to being involved in these prosecutions. Given Trump's vindictiveness, it's a miracle he didn't order Halligan to fire the entire staff and just not have any prosecutions in the Eastern District for a while. If there's one silver lining to the corruption it's that it's balanced by a heavy dose of incompetence.

After nearly a decade of doing that, during which time she never once took a case to trial,

To be fair, that is a moderately impressive achievement (unless she was handing the trial work off to a trial specialist). That type of law firm avoids trials like the plague.

The Comey indictment paperwork screwup is one of the all-time great amateur hour screwups and the Lowering the Bar and/or Above the Law accounts of it are going to be coffee/keyboard risks. If Trump were more personally involved I would say it is an example of his scofflaw attitude and calculated contempt for procedural regularity and cast aspersions that he was trying to lose on a technicality deliberately in order to avoid losing on the merits, but in this case I think it is just that Halligan is incompetent and either she didn't bother to find a competent junior career AUSA to help her with the paperwork or the whole thing is so outrageous to the culture of career prosecutors that she couldn't.

The lawyer who was selected for hotness has a fool for a client.

The lawyer who was selected for hotness has a fool for a client.

Lawyers are like houses - if you judge by the usual criteria, you pay through the nose and get one no better than anyone else’s. So you need a find a criterion which is meaningful to you :P

What's the lawyer version of the worst house on the best street you can afford?

A paralegal or wet-behind-the-ears junior associate writing under a Biglaw letterhead.

The worst lawyer from a Big Four legal company, naturally.