temper tantrum – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Justice Alito Almost Messed Up The Internet; Then He Threw A Temper Tantrum

from the doesn't-play-well-with-others dept

It turns out the internet was one Sam Alito petulant tantrum away from being a total disaster. In two key First Amendment cases, Alito was given the majority opinion to write. And, in both of them, his insistence on obliterating the old boundaries of the First Amendment caused other Justices to switch sides – and Alito to act like a spoiled brat.

This year, the Supreme Court session ran later than usual. Usually, they finish up by the end of June, but this year it extended the term over to July 1st. There were, obviously, a bunch of “big” decisions (Presidential immunity! Chevron deference!) that were held to the very end, including the two big internet cases: the NetChoice cases and the Murthy case.

As people awaited the decisions, there was a fair bit of SCOTUSology as court experts (and non-experts) speculated based on the number of decisions written by each Justice (and which months the cases were heard in) as to which Justice would have the majority decisions in remaining cases. I heard from quite a few such experts who expected that Alito would have the majority decision in the NetChoice cases, given that the other Justices all seemed to have majority opinions from February cases, and Alito’s name seemed to be missing.

Some people were surprised because in basically all of the internet cases oral arguments, Alito seemed quite out of step with the rest of the Court (and reality). When the decision finally came out, saying that the lower courts didn’t do the proper analysis for a “facial challenge,” it sent the cases back to the lower courts for a redo. But the majority opinion included some very important commentary about how the First Amendment still applies to social media editorial discretion. The overall ruling was technically a unanimous decision, but some noted that Justice Alito’s “concurrence” read like it had been written to be the majority opinion. It delves deeper into the facts of the case than a concurrence normally would (the majority opinion normally handles that).

Oh, and one other weird thing: in that final week of June, people were confused by Justice Alito not showing up to a couple of decision days, and his absence was never explained. Until now.

CNN now has quite an incredible insider’s tale of how Justice Alito had, in fact, been given the job of writing the majority opinion in the NetChoice cases, but lost it because he tried to push the decision too far into saying that states could regulate content moderation.

Alito, while receptive to the 5th Circuit’s opinion minimizing the companies’ speech interests, emphasized the incompleteness of the record and the need to remand the cases. Joining him were fellow conservatives Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch and, to some extent, Barrett and Jackson.

On the other side was Kagan, leaning toward the 11th Circuit’s approach. She wanted to clarify the First Amendment implications when states try to control how platforms filter messages and videos posted by their users. She was generally joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Brett Kavanaugh.

Alito began writing the court’s opinion for the dominant five-member bloc, and Kagan for the remaining four.

It’s also interesting that Justice Jackson was siding with Alito. During oral arguments, Justice Jackson asked some… odd questions, leading some to worry about how she might come down. The CNN report suggests those fears were legitimate.

Either way, Alito pushed his views too far and caused both Barrett and Jackson to bail out.

But when Alito sent his draft opinion around to colleagues several weeks later, his majority began to crumble. He questioned whether any of the platforms’ content-moderation could be considered “expressive” activity under the First Amendment.

Barrett, a crucial vote as the case played out, believed some choices regarding content indeed reflected editorial judgments protected by the First Amendment. She became persuaded by Kagan, but she also wanted to draw lines between the varying types of algorithms platforms use.

“A function qualifies for First Amendment protection only if it is inherently expressive,” Barrett wrote in a concurring statement, asserting that if platform employees create an algorithm that identifies and deletes information, the First Amendment protects that exercise of editorial judgment. That might not be the situation, Barrett said, for algorithms that automatically present content aimed at users’ preferences.

Kagan added a footnote to her majority opinion buttressing that point and reinforcing Barrett’s view. Kagan wrote that the court was not dealing “with feeds whose algorithms respond solely to how users act online – giving them the content they appear to want, without any regard to independent content standards.”

Barrett’s concerns have been worrying to some, as it suggests that algorithmic recommendations may not be protected by the First Amendment. This would upset a bunch of what people thought was settled law regarding things like search engine recommendations. However, the hope is that if such a case comes before the Court (which it almost certainly will…), that a fuller briefing on the record would clarify that algorithmic recommendations are still speech.

As we noted, Alito’s concurrence reads pretty petulant. It declares the majority’s “First Amendment applies to social media” explanation as “nonbinding dicta.” CNN details that this was him being angry that he lost the majority on that case.

But the key reason he lost control over the decision seems to be that he, unlike the eventual majority, would have sided a lot more with the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, which upended a century’s worth of First Amendment law.

Alito had the backing of only two justices in the end, Thomas and Gorsuch. He expressed sympathy for state efforts to restrict what, in an earlier phase of the Texas case Alito called “the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day.”

In his separate July 1 opinion for a minority, Alito pointed up why states might want to regulate how platforms filter content: “Deleting the account of an elected official or candidate for public office may seriously impair that individual’s efforts to reach constituents or voters, as well as the ability of voters to make a fully informed electoral choice. And what platforms call ‘content moderation’ of the news or user comments on public affairs can have a substantial effect on popular views.”

Like Oldham, Alito took jabs at the “sophisticated counsel” who challenged the state regulations.

The same article notes that Alito also lost the majority on another “Fifth Circuit misunderstands the First Amendment” case. The one involving Sylvia Gonzalez, who was retaliated against by the mayor for her efforts to shake up the local government. The Fifth Circuit originally said this was totally fine. Eventually, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the Fifth Circuit to try again.

But again, Alito tried to go too far:

When the justices voted on the case in March, the majority agreed that the 5th Circuit erred in the standard it used. Alito was assigned the opinion.

But as he began writing, he went further than the other justices in his review of Gonzalez’s case. Alito and his colleagues realized he couldn’t “hold five,” as the expression goes, for a majority.

A new majority agreed to dispatch the case with a limited rationale in unsigned opinion. Rejecting the 5th Circuit’s reasoning, the Supreme Court said the 5th Circuit had applied an “overly cramped view” of the court’s precedent for when people may sue for First Amendment retaliation claims. The high court noted that Gonzalez could not show evidence of whether officers handled similar situations differently because her situation, involving the alleged removal of a document, was exceedingly rare.

Alito also wrote a concurrence for that case, but here he went on a long rant basically explaining why even if the Fifth Circuit used the wrong standard, there were lots of reasons why Gonzalez should have lost her case. Basically, if he had written the majority opinion, all of this would have qualified as “nonbinding dicta” under Alito’s own standard. Now, at least, it’s just a concurrence.

But, apparently, because Alito was ticked off that he couldn’t “hold five” in either of these cases, it caused him to take his ball and go home (i.e., just not show up at the Court on decision days):

On June 20, when the chief justice announced the opinion in Gonzalez v. Trevino, Alito’s chair at the bench was empty. Alito missed that day, as a total four opinions were handed down, and the next, June 21, when the justices released five other opinions.

Justices sometimes skip one of these final days of the annual session, but usually there’s an obvious reason for the absence, such as travel to a previously scheduled speech. Court officials declined to provide any explanation.

Alito returned for the final four announcement days of the term, yet sometimes appeared preoccupied. On the last day, when Kagan announced the decision in the NetChoice case, Alito was reading through material he had brought along to the bench.

Poor baby.

In both cases, Alito’s view of the First Amendment seems disconnected from reality and history. And, in both cases, he still had a chance to write the majority opinion (sending both cases down on what is, effectively, technicalities). But, in both cases, he was unable to write a reasonable opinion, causing his colleagues on the bench to jump ship to more reasonable rulings.

And, in response, he decided to just sulk like a teenager who didn’t get his way. In the end, that left us with a much better, more First Amendment supportive majority decision (in both cases). But it’s truly incredible how close we came to bad decisions in each, and how both of those flipped due to Alito’s insistence on pushing his terrible, unsupported ideas about free speech.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, content moderation, free speech, samuel alito, supreme court, temper tantrum
Companies: ccia, netchoice

Microsoft Ditches Twitter From Its Ads Platform… So Elon Announces Plans To Sue Microsoft

from the not-how-any-of-this-works dept

Elon Musk seems to take a personal affront to anyone who says “dude, we’re not going to pay your crazy prices for stuff.” For example, he pulled the NY Times “verified” badge weeks before everyone else was set to lose it after they announced they wouldn’t pay.

Now, Microsoft has announced that it is dropping Twitter from its Smart Campaigns advertising platform, in part because of the $42,000 per month API fee (the “small” package) that Musk is trying to charge. This comes right after Intercom, one of the giant customer support companies, which many organizations use to manage their customer support work on Twitter, announced that it was also dropping Twitter support from its platform over Musk’s API fees.

The Microsoft move is a big deal, because it means even fewer advertisers will likely be putting ads on Twitter. But, Microsoft realizes that it’s just not worth it to pay the ridiculous fee for very little benefit, so it has told customers that Twitter will be gone as of next week.

Musk, in his typical fashion, responded by throwing a little tantrum, and suggesting he’s going to sue Microsoft… for “illegal” use of Twitter data.

“They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time” the man says.

This is another tell from Musk. I mean, he made the same bullshit claim about Substack after he had the company (temporarily) block users from interacting with any tweet that had a Substack link in it, claiming (falsely) that Substack was “trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone.”

So, yeah, this lawsuit is not happening, or if it does, I don’t expect it to go well for Musk and Twitter. Contrary to Musk’s belief, he doesn’t have any sort of intellectual property rights over data on Twitter. Claims that Microsoft did something “illegal” in using Twitter’s data seems massively unlikely. I’m guessing he’s making some sort of swipe at OpenAI, which Microsoft backed and which Elon is at war with (despite helping to found it).

Musk has complained a few times in the past that some of OpenAI’s training data was from Twitter, but… that’s legal. “Training” on data means reading the data, and as long as the data is public, then it’s open to be read, and used in such a manner.

Still, there’s a larger point here: beyond the stupidity of his current API pricing, why would any business feel comfortable trusting important business to Twitter when the company’s owner and CEO acts like a petulant child in response to a company not wishing to pay his extortionate fees?

This is why Twitter is failing. Elon Musk himself is a liability. He’s the one driving advertisers and partners away.

I keep seeing others in Silicon Valley trying to tiptoe around this, and try to piece together some grand plan here, just like Republicans did with Trump during his administration. You have to get over it. There is no grand strategy. There is a petulant, immature, rich kid, who has spent too long surrounded by suck ups and yes men, who has no one who will tell him that he is the problem.

Twitter wasn’t a great business, and was primed for a big shakeup. And maybe it needed new management. But there were ways to shake up Twitter that didn’t literally drive away much of its revenue due entirely to the CEO’s own antics. Even when he has good ideas (encrypting DMs, promoting the premium subscription features) he seems to still fuck it up. There were wide open ways to improve Twitter.

And instead he’s throwing temper tantrums when faced with the consequences of his own actions.

Filed Under: api, data, elon musk, lawsuit threats, pricing, temper tantrum, training
Companies: microsoft, twitter

from the for-national-security? dept

It’s no secret that Donald Trump doesn’t like Section 230. Wait. Actually, let’s back up and try that again: it’s no secret that Donald Trump doesn’t like what he thinks Section 230 is about, which has little-to-no-resemblance to what Section 230 is actually about. However, over the long weekend, things took an even more ridiculous turn than usual. It started on Thanksgiving when the President was signing some legislation and taking some questions from the press. For unclear reasons, the setup where he had to sign things was with a very small desk affixed with the Presidential seal. While this desk has been used before for such things — and Trump has even joked about the size of it, the framing of the shot — the lack of people around him, the wide frame of the shot, the tread over carpet, and just… everything really made it look like the President was sitting at an elementary school desk.

The internet started to have some fun. Actually, lots of fun.

It was not long until #DiaperDonald started trending on Twitter.

And, then, it was not much longer beforel the Commander-in-Chief of the military, and the leader of the United Stated of America decided to throw a tantrum on Twitter and claim that Twitter made up its trending topics (it does not).

That’s the supposed leader of the free world saying:

Twitter is sending out totally false “Trends” that have absolutely nothing to do with what is really trending in the world. They make it up, and only negative “stuff”. Same thing will happen to Twitter as is happening to @FoxNews daytime. Also, big Conservative discrimination!

All of that is, of course, nonsense, but it was followed up just five minutes later with:

That’s him saying:

For purposes of National Security, Section 230 must be immediately terminated!!!

The fact that this comes so close to the tweet whining about #DiaperDon trending suggests that this has literally nothing to do with “national security.” If Trump has learned one thing while he’s in office, it’s that one way that the President can actually get stuff done (such as start trade wars) without the need to get Congress’s approval is to claim “national security” to make it happen. But you can’t just get rid of laws that way. That’s not how any of this works. At all.

Also, um, if Section 230 was terminated, it wouldn’t change the fact that Twitter might show trending topics that are critical of the President. Because that’s protected by the 1st Amendment. You know… part of the Constitution that the President swore to protect and uphold when he was sworn into office?

Of course, if 230 were terminated, meaning that Twitter (and others) might face more annoying and costly lawsuits for the actions of its users, one thing it might be a lot more prone to do is to delete the account of troublemakers spewing conspiracy theories and nonsense on its platform. Such as the soon-to-be-leaving President Donald Trump.

Filed Under: diaper don, donald trump, intermediary liability, national security, section 230, temper tantrum, trending, trends
Companies: twitter

Anti-Trump Ad Demonstrates Both The Streisand Effect & Masnick's Impossibility Theorem

from the a-case-study dept

Well, this one hits the sweet spot of topics I keep trying to demonstrate: both a Streisand Effect and Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem. As you may have heard, a group of Republican political consultants and strategists, who very much dislike Donald Trump, put together an effort called The Lincoln Project, which is a PAC to campaign against Trump and Trumpian politics. They recently released an anti-Trump campaign ad about his terrible handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, called Mourning in America, which is a reference to Ronald Reagan’s famous Morning in America campaign ad for the 1984 Presidential election. The new ad is, well, pretty powerful:

And while it’s unlikely to convince Trump fans deep into their delusions, it certainly got under the President’s skin. He went on one of his famous late night Twitter temper tantrums about the ad, and later lashed out at the Lincoln Project when talking to reporters. He was super, super mad.

And what did that do? Well, first it got the ad a ton of views. Earlier this week, one of the Lincoln Project’s founders, Rick Wilson, noted that the ad had already received 15 million views across various platforms in the day or so since the ad had been released. Also, it resulted in the Lincoln Project getting a giant boost in funding:

The Lincoln Project, which is run by Republican operatives who oppose President Donald Trump, raised $1 million after the president ripped the group on Twitter this week ? marking it the super PAC?s biggest day of fundraising yet.

Reed Galen, a member of the Lincoln Project?s advisory committee, told CNBC that the total came after the president?s Tuesday morning Twitter tirade in reaction to an ad titled ?Mourning in America,? which unloads on Trump?s response to the coronavirus pandemic. It recently aired on Fox News, which Trump often watches and praises. Galen said it was the Lincoln Project?s best single-day fundraising haul

Not only that, but it has opened up more opportunity for the Lincoln Project team to get their word out. With so much interest in the ad, it opened up opportunities for the project members to get their message in various mainstream media sources. Reed Galen wrote a piece for NBC:

What we accomplished this week was not something to be celebrated. No commercial should have the power to derail the leader of the free world.

And another Lincoln Project founder, George Conway (who, of course, is the husband of Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway), wrote something similar for the Washington Post:

It may strike you as deranged that a sitting president facing a pandemic has busied himself attacking journalists, political opponents, television news hosts and late-night comedians ? even deriding a former president who merely boasted that ?the ?Ratings? of my News Conferences etc.? were driving ?the Lamestream Media . . . CRAZY,? and floated bogus miracle cures, including suggesting that scientists consider injecting humans with household disinfectants such as Clorox.

If so, you?re not alone. Tens of thousands of mental-health professionals, testing the bounds of professional ethics, have warned for years about Trump?s unfitness for office.

Some people listened; many, including myself, did not, until it was too late.

That’s the kind of media exposure you can’t buy, but which you get when you have a President who appears wholly unfamiliar with the Streisand Effect.

And that then takes us to the Impossibility Theorem, regarding the impossibility of doing content moderation at scale well. After Trump’s ongoing tirade, Facebook slapped a “Partly False” warning label on the video when posted on Facebook. While the whole situation is ridiculous, it’s at least mildly amusing, considering how frequently clueless Trumpkins insist that Facebook censors “conservative” (by which they mean Trumpian) viewpoints. Also, somewhat ironic in all of this: the only reason that Facebook now places such fact check labels on things is because anti-Trump people yelled at how Facebook needed to do more fact checking of political content on its site. So, now you get this.

Part of the issue is that Politifact judged one line in the ad as “false.” That line was that Trump “bailed out Wall St. but not Main St.” Politifact says that since the CARES Act Paycheck Protection Program has given potentially forgivable loans to some small businesses, and because the bill was done by Congress, not the President, that line is “false.” And yet, because angry (usually anti-Trump) people demanded that Facebook do more useless fact checking, the end result is that the video now gets a “false” label.

Of course, this shows both the impossibility of doing content moderation well and the silliness of betting big on fact checking with a full “true or false” claim. One could argue that that line has misleading elements, but is true in most cases. Tons of small businesses are shuttering. Many businesses have been unable to get PPP loans, and under the current terms of the loans, they’re useless for many (especially if they have no work for people to do, since the loans have to be mostly used on payroll over the next couple months). But does that make the entire ad “false”? Of course not.

And Rick Wilson is super mad about this. He’s right to be mad about Politifact’s designation, though it’s really a condemnation of the religious focus on “true or false” in fact checking, rather than in focusing on what is misleading or not:

But the ad doesn?t actually claim that small businesses received zero help. Rather, it makes the point that Main Street America is still seriously struggling as the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic continues.

But Wilson is also mad at Facebook:

Speaking exclusively to Mediaite, Wilson called the decision ?the typical fuckery we?ve come to expect from both the Trump camp and their tame Facebook allies.?

?Facebook is perfectly content to allow content from QAnon lunatics, anti-vaxxers, alt-righters, and every form of Trump/Russian ? but I repeat myself ? disinformation,? he pointed out. ?This is a sign of just how powerfully ?Mourning In America? shook Donald Trump and his allies. Their attempt to censor our ad isn?t a setback for us; it?s a declaration of an information war we will win.?

Separately, the Lincoln Project also sent out an email to supporters, again blaming Facebook:

… it’s no secret that Facebook has stood by and done little to nothing as lie after lie ? from the Liar-In-Chief himself ? runs wild on their platform.

(Oh, and let’s also not forget the conspiracy theories, foreign disinformation campaigns and negligence that got Mark Zuckerberg questioned by the United States Congress.)

But, this? This is an entirely different and dangerous kind of collusion.

And what is Facebook’s excuse for playing favorites with its recently-transferred former employees in the Trump campaign?

They say a “fact-checker” labeled our claim that “Donald Trump helped bailout Wall Street, not Main Street” was untrue.

….Really?

The email goes on to justify the “main street” line with a bunch of links, and then again argues that Facebook is “censoring the truth” to help Trump:

Is that “Partly False?” Of course not.

We told the truth about Donald Trump…

He lost his damn mind over it on Twitter…

Attacked us in front of Air Force One…

Then sent his spin machine to discredit us…

And now his allies at Facebook are doing his damage control by censoring the truth he doesn’t like.

I get the frustration — and I find it at least a bit ironic that the whole “fact checking” system was a response to anti-Trump folks mad at Facebook for allowing pro-Trump nonsense to spread — but this is just another example of the Impossibility Theorem. There is no “good” solution here. We live in a time where everyone’s trying to discredit everyone they disagree with, and many of these things depend on your perspective or your interpretation of a broad statement, like whether or not Trump is helping “main street.”

We can agree that it’s silly that Facebook has put this label on the video, but also recognize that it’s not “Trump’s allies at Facebook” working to “censor the truth he doesn’t like.” That’s just absurd (especially given the reason the fact checking set up was put together in the first place).

But, hey, outrage and claims of censorship feed into the narrative (and feed into the Streisand Effect), so perhaps it all is just designed to work together.

Filed Under: donald trump, fact checking, fundraising, george conway, impossibility theorem, masnick's impossibility theorem, political ads, reed galen, rick wilson, streisand effect, super pac, temper tantrum
Companies: facebook, lincoln project, politifact

Ajit Pai Attacked Hollywood & Silicon Valley Because Even Republicans Are Against His Net Neutrality Plan

from the that's-a-temper-tantrum,-not-leadership dept

We were mystified last week when FCC chair Ajit Pai decided to attack both Hollywood and Silicon Valley because some (not all) people in both communities have spoken out against his plans to gut net neutrality. The attacks were weird on multiple levels. Regarding Hollywood, the comments were strangely personal — picking out a list of entertainers, often taking their comments out of context, and attacking them in very personal ways. It was, to say the least, unbecoming of an FCC chair to directly pick on entertainers for voicing their opinions. The attacks on Silicon Valley were… even stranger. First, he claimed that the demand to keep net neutrality was really a ploy by the largest internet companies (i.e. Google & Facebook) to keep their dominant position. But that ignores the fact that without net neutrality, they’re well positioned to further entrench their position. More importantly, it totally ignores the fact that neither Google nor Facebook have been strong advocates of net neutrality (and, in many cases, have pushed back against net neutrality).

Bloomberg now has an article up explaining why Pai would make these attacks: apparently even among Republican activists, there’s effectively no support for his plan to kill net neutrality. So, rather than (1) admit he’s made a huge mistake or (2) give good reasons for his plan, he thought he’d pull a sort of Trumpian game of blaming other people that Republicans are supposed to hate, in the (not very accurate) stereotypical view of the US from the reality distortion field known as Washington DC.

For some reason, restoring the lost power of huge telecom companies hasn?t lit a fire in grassroots circles on the right, a point that Pai?s political allies have been acknowledging privately for months. So the FCC chair came back from Thanksgiving looking to create a spark. In a speech on Tuesday, Pai angrily denounced celebrities and tech companies who have been criticizing his plans to undo the 2015 rules. Hollywood is always a good scapegoat, of course, and Republicans looking to stir up anger in 2017 do well to frame their issues as a response to the unchecked power of Silicon Valley.

[….]

This isn?t a new tactic for Pai. ?He had the same complaints about us being shills? for internet companies, said Tom Wheeler, the FCC chairman who ushered in the 2015 rules. Anger towards tech on the right has only grown since then. Brent Skorup, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center, a research organization at George Mason University with a free market bent, regularly talks to Republican Congressional offices about tech policy. ?They see a lot of these issues through the lens of payback for tech companies,? he said. (Skorup supports Pai?s approach.)

This is not how good policy is made. This is not leadership. This is the Chairman of the FCC throwing a childish temper tantrum and blaming industries, just because he thinks it might provide him additional cover for his bad, poorly thought-out plan. “But, Mommy, those other kids were mean to me, why are you blaming me?!?!??!”

Once again, it’s worth remembering that outside the bubble of Washington DC, net neutrality is widely supported across party lines. Multiple studies back before the 2015 rules were put in place found that Republicans/conservatives supported net neutrality by an overwhelming amount (over 80%). A more recent study from last year found the same thing.

At this point, it’s undeniable that the vast, vast, vast majority of Americans who understand the issue favor having net neutrality rules in place. It is a small, but vocal, contingent of folks (often with ties to the telco/cable duopoloy) who magically feel differently about it. A good FCC chair would actually convince people why he’s right and why they’re wrong. But that’s not what’s happening. Pai is just lashing out, and because he thinks his side hates Hollywood and tech, he’s decided to try to somehow, nonsensically, strap his own argument to the anti-Hollywood, anti-Silicon Valley message he thinks will help get people excited.

It’s a bad strategy for someone with a bad policy.

Filed Under: ajit pai, fcc, hollywood, net neutrality, silicon valley, temper tantrum

from the throwing-a-temper-tantrum dept

People keep telling me that most lawyers today understand things like the Streisand Effect and how trying to shut people up often draws that much more attention to things. It may not be true for small time lawyers, but the big law firms — I’m told — they all recognize this. Enter Dentons. Dentons is a pretty big law firm. American Lawyer magazine recently noted that, after merging with another firm, it was becoming the world’s largest law firm. So you would think some of the lawyers there would know better than to throw an astoundingly childish temper tantrum over the way that very same American Lawyer magazine covered them. But, you’d be wrong.

As a few different lawyers have kindly sent in to us, Dentons has ramped up its ongoing spat with ALM, which started a year ago when Dentons stopped disclosing its “global profit per equity partner.” Apparently most global law firms are willing to disclose this and ALM uses that data to discuss the state of various law firms. When Dentons stopped doing that, ALM (quite reasonably) argued that perhaps this was because the numbers didn’t look that good and perhaps had been dropping:

I?m going to suspend any question of an ulterior motive here?that Dentons didn?t report its latest global PPP figure because, by our estimates, that number would have shown an overall PPP decline year over year of 20 percent, the worst showing in the Am Law 100.

Guess who didn’t like that? Dentons! The law firm sent out a surprisingly petulant statement at the time, that included the following:

This lack of understanding of basic math, let alone simple logic, is not only stunning, but proves our point: contemporary law firms that operate in many different places and in many different business cultures can not be compared with those that don?t. It is an apples to oranges comparison.

[….]

Let?s hope that the American Lawyer?s researchers understand math and logic better than their editors, and are willing to engage in meaningful and serious conversations about the changes in our profession and in our business.”

This year… same basic thing. Dentons won’t publish the info, and ALM takes some guestimates — suggesting Dentons’ profits per equity partner are down again. Because that’s a reasonable assumption. In response, Dentons threw another shitfit:

Again, the firm went ballistic. Mike McNamara, US Managing Partner, sent out a “correction demand” on Tuesday saying that AM Lawyer’s methodology was “mystefying” and that it had “created” numbers that were “clearly false”. Although he refused to provide the correct ones. AM Lawyer said it stood by its figures. The rest of the market is cracking out the popcorn and waiting for another ill-tempered open letter to be sent out. Watch this space.

No need to wait long. That was a month ago. Soon after, Dentons went out and set up an entire website calling attention to the fact that it won’t publish its profits per equity partner like so many other firms and is just picking a fight with the largest trade magazine covering the legal fight.

And… that’s not all!

Dentons has started taking out advertisements about this spat — which have only served to draw more attention to Dentons’ unwillingness to disclose its numbers. And then, on top of all that, it complains that ALM won’t run the ad itself.

Hey, Dentons, if you want to pay some media property to run your silly ads calling more attention to the fact that, even as the largest law firm in the world, you can’t resist acting like a child who’s told that he can’t have another piece of candy, feel free to throw that money our way. We have no problem running your ad.

Even more ridiculous, Dentons (again, the world’s largest law firm) is going around claiming that it’s being bullied by ALM. As RollOnFriday notes in the link above:

It’s hard to see the enterprise as anything other than an expensive and very public embarrassment which has given the matter an unnecessary amount of airtime. Dentons might have, more sensibly, just ignored it. Or published its figures like absolutely everyone else.

But, in the meantime, the world is learning (1) that unlike other firms, Dentons won’t publish its numbers and (2) despite being the world’s largest law firm, it appears to act like the world’s most insecure.

Filed Under: american lawyer magazine, law firms, streisand effect, temper tantrum
Companies: dentons