Keep your finger on the legal world's pulse

As the second Trump administration prepares for cabinet confirmations, incoming officials are questioning National Security Council (NSC) career civil servants about their political affiliations and social media activity. At least some of the employees are said to have begun packing their belongings after being asked about their loyalty to the president-elect, despite earlier assurances of remaining in their positions. Mike Waltz, Trump’s pick for national security adviser, has in recent days signaled his intention to dispense with all nonpolitical appointees and career intelligence officials serving on the NSC by Inauguration Day. Waltz told Breitbart News last week that “everybody is going to resign at 12:01 on January 20,” adding that he wanted the NSC to be staffed by personnel who are “100 percent aligned with the president’s agenda.” Waltz said: “We’re working through our process to get everybody their clearances and through the transition process now . . . Our folks know who we want out in the agencies, we’re putting those requests in, and in terms of the detailees they’re all going to go back.”

 

Missoulian

The Baltimore Sun

Los Angeles Times

The Supreme Court has agreed to review the legality of a crucial aspect of the Affordable Care Act, which allows a task force to mandate that insurers provide preventive medical services at no cost to patients. This decision follows an appeal from President Joe Biden's administration against a lower court ruling that favoured Christian businesses opposing coverage for HIV-preventing medication. The businesses argued that the task force's structure infringes upon the U.S. Constitution.

 

Reuters

Private equity firm KKR & Co is facing a civil lawsuit for allegedly avoiding antitrust scrutiny in at least 16 deals between 2021 and 2022. Justice Department official Doha Mekki said that “Through document omissions, alterations, and failures to report deals, KKR threatened the integrity of the (Antitrust) Division’s premerger reviews and, in some cases, obscured the market impact of its deals and serial acquisitions." KKR noted in response that “Not a single alleged ‘error’ was material to or interfered with any merger review."

 

Reuters

VT Digger examines problems posed by Vermont’s remote court hearing system, which allows defendants and others to take part in certain hearings from home or prison. Such virtual hearings now constitute some 50% of all hearings in the state. Isaac Dayno, the Department of Corrections’ executive director of policy and strategic initiatives, remarked: “It’s a huge shift in our court system. It’s a more Orwellian form of justice.” Matt Valerio, Vermont’s defender general, added: “The number one thing of every single office is, ‘Do away with regional video arraignments.' It’s neither effective or efficient, and the quality is awful.” He also raised concerns about the difficulties in establishing an attorney-client relationship under these circumstances.

 

VT Digger

McAfee & Taft examines the so-called "legal deserts" of the U.S., those parts of the country with fewer than one lawyer for every 1,000 residents. The article notes that in North and South Dakota, annual stipends are provided for attorneys who practice in qualified counties, while the Illinois State Bar Association Rural Practice Associate Fellows Program pays a $10,000 stipend to associates in rural law firms who make a one-year commitment. Sydney Einarson Bata, a shareholder at Einarson Law Firm in Grafton, North Dakota says that in such locations “It’s going to be the lower-income people that are hurting, and that’s a miscarriage of justice. If we let people just gravitate, the more professional people gravitate towards our bigger cities. It will leave the rest of us out of it.”

 

McAfee & Taft

Chris Kavanaugh has been appointed as partner at law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. The former top federal prosecutor in Virginia had been with the Justice Department for over 17 years before officially stepping down in December.

 

Reuters

The 2025 Report on the State of the U.S. Legal Market has found that law firms are grappling with changes to both business culture and technology perspective. It found that some 77% of professional services workers believe the rise of artificial intelligence and GenAI will have a significant effect on their profession by 2030, while 42% believe the impact will be transformational. The transition to this new landscape is expected to be both problematic and expensive, with investments in new technology likely to result in budget cuts elsewhere.

 

Thomson Reuters

Legal Dive examines the likely impact Donald Trump's return to the White House is likely to have on business regulation and the competition landscape. Kellie Lerner, managing partner at Shinder Cantor Lerner, a boutique antitrust firm formed in October 2024 comments: "I think that there is going to be a lot of continuity because antitrust has become a populist issue. And I think in many respects, the Biden administration laid out the case for why antitrust matters and how it impacts everyone’s day-to-day." She also predicted a rise in mergers, with the Trump administration expected to be "less aggressive against deals" and to make only minor adjustments to current policies.

 

Legal Dive

Lawyers representing 73 Swiss banks seeking to avoid a tax-evasion probe by U.S. authorities wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice raising questions over a dozen demands, including the banks' cooperation with other nations. The letter, dated December 21st, asks the U.S. to discuss issues which present substantial obstacles to their clients’ ability to "cooperate fully with . . . any other domestic or foreign law enforcement agency designated by the Department,” among a wide range of other changes. "This requirement is not found in the Program and, indeed, turns a Program specifically focused on U.S. tax issues into a global cooperation agreement without any safeguards or guarantees of appropriate consideration of the banks’ cooperation," the document argued.

 

Reuters

NPR reports that thousands of workers who are in the U.S. illegally have received deportation protections from the government in exchange for participation in labor investigations - but with Donald Trump returning to the White House, there are a lot of questions about what will happen to people who are in the country illegally, and the future of the program to help the government enforce the law is uncertain.

 

NPR / National Public Radio