Welcome to Original Jurisdiction, the latest legal publication by me, David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction by reading its About page, and you can email me at davidlat@substack.com. This is a reader-supported publication; you can subscribe by clicking here.
The trend of leading litigators launching their own boutiques continues. Last month, three Chambers-ranked trial lawyers—Jessie Liu, Justin Shur, and Jonathan Kravis—left their respective firms to found Liu Shur Kravis in Washington, D.C.
What makes LSK particularly interesting is that it’s a “bipartisan boutique”—unusual in D.C., where boutiques tend to have a partisan valence. Liu was the Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney for D.C. in the first Trump administration, while Kravis worked in the White House Counsel’s Office in the Obama administration.
To learn more about how LSK came together and what its launch might reflect about the evolving legal industry, I welcomed Jessie Liu to the podcast. We first discussed her journey as the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants from a small town in Texas to the top of the legal profession—including her service at Main Justice, her tenure as U.S. attorney, and her years as a Biglaw partner, most recently at Skadden Arps. We then tackled events in the news—and Jessie shared her thoughts, as someone who served at a high level in the first Trump administration, on how the second Trump administration differs from the first.
Thanks to Jessie for joining me, congratulations to her and her partners on the launch of LSK, and good luck to them in the years ahead.
Show Notes:
Jessie K. Liu bio, Liu Shur Kravis LLP
Jessie K. Liu profile, Chambers and Partners
Jessie Liu bio, Wikipedia
Sponsored by:
NexFirm helps Biglaw attorneys become founding partners. To learn more about how NexFirm can help you launch your firm, call 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment@nexfirm.com.
Three quick notes about this transcript. First, it has been cleaned up from the audio in ways that don’t alter substance—e.g., by deleting verbal filler or adding a word here or there to clarify meaning. Second, my interviewee has not reviewed this transcript, and any errors are mine. Third, because of length constraints, this newsletter may be truncated in email; to view the entire post, simply click on “view entire message” in your email app.
David Lat: Welcome to the Original Jurisdiction podcast. I’m your host, David Lat, author of a Substack newsletter about law and the legal profession also named Original Jurisdiction, which you can read and subscribe to at davidlat.substack.com. You’re listening to the ninety-eighth episode of this podcast, recorded on Thursday, May 21.
Thanks to this podcast’s sponsor, NexFirm. NexFirm helps Biglaw attorneys become founding partners. To learn more about how NexFirm can help you launch your firm, call 212-292-1000 or email careerdevelopment@nexfirm.com. Want to know who the guest will be for the next Original Jurisdiction podcast? Follow NexFirm on LinkedIn for a preview.
In the last episode of this podcast, I interviewed California Attorney General Rob Bonta—a timely guest not only because he’s been in the news but because he’s one of the nation’s most high-profile Asian-American lawyers, and May is Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
For my latest episode, I’m pleased to welcome another leading Asian-American attorney with a distinguished career in public service: Jessie Liu. From 2017 to 2020, Jessie served as the Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, leading the nation’s largest U.S. attorney’s office. She also served as deputy general counsel of the Treasury Department and in multiple senior positions at the Justice Department.
Last month, Jessie made the news when she, Justin Shur, and Jonathan Kravis left their respective law firms to launch Liu Shur Kravis, also known as LSK. Why did these Chambers-ranked litigators step down as partners from three great firms—Skadden Arps, MoloLamken, and Munger Tolles—to found their own boutique? Jessie and I discussed that and related topics—plus other matters in the news, such as how the second Trump administration is different from the first, in which Jessie served—in a conversation that I hope you’ll enjoy as much as I did. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Jessie Liu.
Jessie, thank you so much for joining me.
Jessie Liu: Thanks so much for having me on, Dave.
DL: So we’ve known each other for a long time, but for the benefit of my readers, tell us about your background and upbringing. Where did you grow up?
JL: I was born in Kingsville, Texas, which is a small town near Corpus Christi in the southern part of the state. I was raised in College Station, Texas. That’s about 90 miles northwest of Houston; it’s where Texas A&M University is located. My parents were immigrants from Taiwan. Actually, English was not my first language, even though I was born in Texas, and I had to learn English once I started school.
DL: So we have a couple of things in common, and one of them is we were both English concentrators at Harvard. So it’s interesting that English wasn’t your first language, and then you went on to focus on it in college.
JL: Well, I learned fast, I suppose. I remember teaching myself to read the Curious George books when I was a kid. And so I moved on from there and nearly actually went to graduate school in English. When you and I were in college together, I was very, very into my work as an English major. I was focused on Renaissance drama and Shakespeare in particular, and I gave some serious thought to going to graduate school. But I also had this great interest in doing something that was a little bit more practical.
People often ask me what inspired you to go to law school—and I always tell them Rudy Giuliani. The reason for that is that sometime late in middle school or early in high school, U.S. News and World Report, which at the time was a real print magazine that had real news articles in it, did a piece on Giuliani when he was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. How he was cleaning up Wall Street, he was prosecuting insider traders. How he was fighting organized crime. How he had to take a different route home every night because he wanted to preserve his safety. And I thought, “Wow, I want to be Rudy when I grow up.”
DL: So let me ask you this. We are both the children of Asian immigrants, and I’m curious whether your parents had any thoughts on your going to law school.
JL: They did not have real thoughts on my going to law school. They had a lot of thoughts on my idea of going to graduate school in English—and they were not happy thoughts—but I would say they were actually pretty supportive of my going to law school.
DL: So when you went to Yale Law School, and having read this article that left us such an impression on you, did you have it in your mind that you might go into becoming a prosecutor or some form of government or public service?
JL: No, I always had it in the back of my mind, but I also had law school loans, and it seemed at the time an easier path to apply to law firms. So oftentimes, you’ll see students do their first summer after law school in a public-interest job or working for the government. I actually didn’t do that. I spent the Christmas holidays of my first year at YLS applying to law firms in Texas. My thought was that I would go back to Texas after I graduated and work for a firm in Houston or Dallas. And so I ended up spending my first summer after my first year of law school working for law firms in Texas. I did that again the next year, and the plan was, for a very long time, to go back and enter private practice in Texas.
DL: So you did go back to Texas after law school—but you didn’t go straight into private practice.
JL: No, I went to a clerkship on the Fifth Circuit for Carolyn Dineen King, who was at the time the chief judge. She was based in Houston. I don’t think I ever knew that there was such a thing as a judicial clerkship before I went to law school. And then I got to Yale, and everybody was talking about clerkships and how to get them and which judges were the best judges to clerk for—which was all really, really new to me.
And I essentially applied to judges in my neck of the woods. At the time, again, I was thinking about going back to work in Texas. And so I got an offer from Judge King. She’s a fantastic mentor. She joined the bench from being a Biglaw partner, actually, and she used to make us write down how many hours we were in the office each day. She said it was training for working in a law firm—although she didn’t require us to do it in six-minute increments, which was probably a good thing.
DL: I would’ve actually been curious to know how many hours I worked when I clerked; it was a lot. So that was on the Fifth Circuit, and you said that was a great experience, and Judge King was a great mentor. Where did you go after that?
JL: I then went to Jenner & Block in Chicago. I had never set foot in Chicago, except to fly through O’Hare a few times, but I got married to a law school classmate, and his first job was a visiting assistant professor position at Northwestern. So I was looking for a job in Chicago off-cycle. I flew up there, I didn’t know anything about the city, I talked to a few firms, and Jenner & Block was where I was really struck by the people. And so I ended up going to Jenner in the fall of 1999—in Chicago, though, not in D.C.
DL: And what was your practice focus at Jenner?
JL: General litigation. I did everything from some white-collar work to civil litigation to a little bit of appellate work. At the end of that year, my husband got a job here in D.C. So I transferred over to Jenner’s D.C. office, where there were actually a lot of people that I knew from law school, and a lot of people who were very well-known in the D.C. legal community—like Donald Verrilli, the former SG under the Obama administration. I spent a couple of years again doing general litigation at Jenner & Block in D.C.
DL: Did you do white-collar or criminal work at that point?
JL: Not a lot, actually. I did some constitutional litigation at the time; we always reminisce about this. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was still relatively new, and there was a lot of litigation coming out of that. So there were all these people who were suddenly telecom lawyers, and I did some of that. I think one of the principles of being a practicing lawyer is whatever the legal issues of the day are, you become an expert in them to some extent.
So I did that for a couple of years, but I started getting the itch to get into court and to handle my own cases, which is always a little harder to do in a larger law firm. So in the summer of 2002, I started looking around. I was here in D.C., and one of the amazing things about being in D.C. is that there are so many opportunities to go into government without having to move or uproot the rest of your life. So I started doing some research about where I might want to go in the Department of Justice.
DL: And where did you go?
JL: I went to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. In researching where I wanted to go, I knew that I wanted to try cases. I knew I wanted to be in the courtroom. And the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. offers what I think is a unique opportunity to do that among any of the offices in DOJ—and really probably anywhere in the federal government—because that office has local prosecutorial authority as well as federal prosecutorial authority.
So when people join the office, they start either in appellate or misdemeanors. I actually was in appellate for about nine months or so and argued a bunch of cases there, which was hugely fun. Then I went to misdemeanors, and that is a high-volume practice, where you get handed a whole stack of case jackets, and you have to go and deal with them in court. And it was an incredible training ground for somebody like me, who was pretty type-A and wanted everything to be immaculately prepared, with all my ducks in a row. And sometimes that’s just not possible in that high volume of practice.
DL: The D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office has a number of very distinguished alumni, including some former podcast guests of mine. I don’t know if you overlapped with either Jeannie Rhee or Tim Heaphy, or many other folks I might’ve had as past guests.
JL: Jeannie has been about a year ahead of me in every aspect of my professional life. She was a year ahead of me in law school, and I remember walking into a meeting of a journal at Yale Law School and seeing Jeannie at the front of the room. She already had a leadership position there.
She was about a year ahead of me in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. We were always being mistaken for each other, David. So we were constantly getting each other’s mail, and people would come up to us in the courtroom and say, “Wait, you said blah, blah, blah last time.” And then, it would turn out that it was the other person. There was even one instance where I was in court and the court clerk was announcing for the record who was representing the parties and she said, “Ms. Jeannie Rhee for the government.” And I had to actually correct her on the record.
So Jeannie and I have overlapped and crossed paths many, many, many, many times over the years. And now she’s a year or so ahead of me in starting a boutique.
DL: Yes—and we will talk about that very shortly. So where did you go after the U.S. Attorney’s Office?
JL: I was about four years into the U.S. Attorney’s Office when Ken Wainstein, who was then the U.S. attorney for D.C., became the first assistant attorney general for the National Security Division. NSD was the first time that DOJ had created a new division in about 50 years, since the Civil Rights Division was formed in the late ‘50s. The concept grew out of 9/11 and the WMD Commission, and the idea was to consolidate the national security sections within the Department of Justice, under one division with one leader, to improve coordination.
And so Ken became the first head of that. I had gotten to know him and some of his senior staff when I was an AUSA and went over to be his deputy chief of staff. We used to always call it deputy chief of stuff because it was everything from helping with cases to policy issues to looking down the hall and seeing that the Criminal Division’s supply closet was open and we might be able to snag a few Post-it notes.
DL: And I’m guessing you enjoyed that experience. I’ve heard great things about Ken as a boss, and of course the NSD does very important work. So I’m guessing you found that enjoyable and fulfilling.
JL: It was a fantastic experience. Ken and his team were wonderful to work with. Of course, the issues couldn’t possibly have been more important. I actually think back to it a lot these days because there was a little bit of a startup aspect to it, which I’m now feeling in my new role. Even though these components of the department that were combined to form NSD had been around for a long time and were very well established, it was still new as a division. And the people who were there were building it the best way that they knew how and thinking about how things should work. It was not a completely blank slate, of course, but there were a lot of opportunities to shape it. So it was a really exhilarating and wonderful experience.
DL: And then after NSD, where did you go?
JL: After NSD, I went to the Deputy Attorney General’s office. Now, this was in 2007, towards the very end of the Bush administration. There was a lot of movement going on, and people were leaving the administration and going to the private sector. People were moving to different agencies, moving to the White House, and so on. And so there happened to be an opening in the DAG’s office, and I went up there and worked on national security issues for the Deputy Attorney General. And then at the very end of the administration, I made quite a pivot and went to the Civil Rights Division as a deputy AAG working on housing issues and employment issues, and helping to supervise the appellate section.
DL: And then after your service in the Civil Rights Division, where did you go?
JL: I went back to Jenner, and I was a white-collar partner at Jenner & Block for about seven years. I then moved with a group to Morrison & Foerster, and I was there for only about a year when there was another election and I had the chance to go and work for my very good friend, Brent McIntosh, who became the general counsel of the Treasury Department. So I went over to be his deputy, and I focused on international issues and enforcement and intelligence issues, which fit in well with some of my prior experience in the national security space.
DL: So fun fact, small world, Brent was a year behind you at Yale Law School and was actually my classmate.
JL: That is true. So I’ve known Brent for a long time as well, and it was really great working with him. I can’t say enough good things about the Treasury Department; it was such a great experience. And I think it’s not as well-known as it should be: the impact that the Treasury Department has on issues like national security, especially after some of the events of the early 2000s, 9/11 and so on.
There was a renewed focus on using all of these financial tools to combat terrorism, espionage, and the whole host of national security issues that we face today. And so there are very significant resources that are devoted to that within the Treasury Department that people sometimes don’t think about.
DL: That’s right. I believe that there are a lot of entities or agencies that deal with things like money laundering and review of transactions involving foreign entities and the like, which are actually housed under Treasury rather than, say, the DOJ.
JL: Yes, and they often work very closely together. I know we’re going to get to this probably a little bit later, but after I left the Treasury Department, I became the U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia, and one of the things that I was very focused on there was national security—partly because the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office has a tremendous amount of expertise and experience in national security cases. But I was also very personally interested in it given my background. And so one of the things I tried to do was to encourage more collaboration between the Department of Justice and the Treasury Department on some of these cases involving financial threats.
For example, I created a threat finance unit. I think we may have accomplished the first seizure of a sanctioned tanker. Now you read about those all the time, and the office now is doing a fantastic job at this, but that was still relatively new when I was there.
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So you served as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia from 2017 to 2021. Are there particular things from your service as U.S. Attorney that stand out or that you’re particularly proud of?
JL: It is, of course, a wonderful, wonderful job. And I’ve talked a little bit already about how unique the caseload is in the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office compared to any other U.S. attorney’s office. It’s also the largest U.S. attorney’s office in the country by number of prosecutors, so it’s a big management job. And it’s in the nation’s capital, so it handles many, many cases of national and international importance—which we’ve all read about, over the years.
What I took away from it most was just the sheer number of people who were so dedicated as public servants to what they were doing—and the level of their dedication. When I was there, the office had about 350 AUSAs, and probably about the same number of professional staff. What really struck me is that there were, for example, AUSAs who had been in that office for decades who completely devoted their careers to prosecuting child sex offenses. They would take calls from agents—day, night, on the weekends, on holidays—to rescue children. There were victim witness advocates who had spent decades working with the families of people who had been killed overseas or who had been the victims of terrorism or who had been murdered in the District, and they gave so much of themselves to the job. I was just struck by that, and they’re the unsung heroes of this country.
DL: Absolutely—a lot of times we forget about that. We pay a lot of attention to the people at the top, and the presidentially nominated, Senate-confirmed folks. But there’s a huge host of career folks—not just lawyers, but also other legal professionals—who are doing such important work.
That actually leads me to sort of a very broad question, because we have been reading a lot in the news lately about the Justice Department. People certainly have been leaving the Justice Department—career professionals, sometimes political appointees, sometimes interim or acting appointees. There’s been so much going on at the Justice Department in the past year or so. I’m curious if you have sort of an overall take, as someone who served for a pretty long stretch in the first Trump administration, at a rather high level—if you have thoughts on what might be called “current goings-on at the DOJ,” or how the current administration might differ from the first Trump administration.
JL: Obviously I’m an observer in Trump 2.0, since I’m not in the administration; I was in the administration the first time around. So I’ll just speak to what my perceptions are as somebody who’s really right now looking from the outside in.
It strikes me that there are a lot of differences. To me, at least as an observer, it didn’t seem like there was a huge amount of difference in terms of organization or policies and procedures between the DOJ in the Bush administration, the DOJ in the Obama administration, and the DOJ in Trump 1.0. For example, all of those administrations had a White House contacts policy that was very strict about who could have contact with the White House. And from my own personal experience, that was pretty carefully observed, in Trump 1.0 as well as in the prior administrations.
All of those administrations through Trump 1.0 had a tradition of, “We’re the DOJ, and we speak through our court filings.” There was a lot of caution about what to say publicly, especially when cases were still pending. I think there’s a different approach now in the way that DOJ interacts with other parts of the executive branch and in the way that DOJ interacts with the public and with the media. So for example, in terms of public statements, I’m seeing a lot more in terms of not just press conferences, but DOJ officials going on the Sunday morning talk shows or posting on social media.
And we could have a debate about what’s the better policy and where should you draw the line. But I think there’s a real difference in the way that this Justice Department relates to the rest of the federal government and to the public at large.
DL: It’s interesting what you were saying about the contacts between the White House and the DOJ because as U.S. attorney, you did oversee some politically sensitive cases, including the prosecution of longtime Trump associate Roger Stone and an investigation involving former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. You handled some hot potato cases, I guess you could say—and now, perhaps, maybe some of those cases would be handled differently.
You mentioned the job had a heavy management component—and as a partner at a large law firm, sure, you managed associates or paralegals—but was it challenging to take over management of an office with hundreds of people?
JL: I was a little intimidated by that when I came into the office because I had some supervisory roles earlier when I was in the Civil Rights Division, for example, but it really wasn’t the same thing. It was on a much larger scale. And so, I was, I have to say, somewhat daunted by that. It turned out to be one of my most favorite parts of the job, actually, as an opportunity to figure out how to structure the office in a way that best supports the wonderful career people that we talked about who are doing their jobs—and to figure out, as a leader and a manager, the best way to work with people, to bring out the best in them and frankly in me. So I found that kind of management role really fulfilling, and it was a little bit of a surprise to me—because when you go to law school, nobody really trains you to manage really anything. And so it was new to me.
DL: Management is really important, and I admire folks with your talents who are willing to go into it. One of the reasons I’m doing my newsletter and podcast, Original Jurisdiction, as a solo is I find management very challenging. When I was at Above Law, I was dealing with colleagues and columnists and lots of other folks—and I think I was okay at managing, but it’s very stressful. The way I put it, in terms of management and why I don’t love it, is, “I have enough of my own problems to deal with.” When you’re managing people, you’re taking on all of their problems—like their family drama, their personal challenges, their illnesses that are preventing them, understandably, from doing work—all this stuff. It’s like you just take all that on. It just seems... my gosh.
JL: And people are unpredictable. We used to always say that when we were doing jury selection when I was a prosecutor, and people had all of these theories about what makes for a good “government juror” or what makes for a good “defense juror.” And the only thing I really learned from that is that it’s really hard to tell. People are unpredictable. They’re idiosyncratic, and the only way that you can get to know them is to take the time to get to know them. And so management is a hard, hard job—in my view, a lot harder than practicing law.
DL: I will not argue with you on that!
So circling back to the trajectory of your career, after you finished your service as the U.S. attorney, you returned to the world of large law firms, correct?
JL: Yes. I went to Skadden Arps in the fall of 2020. I took some time off in between leaving DOJ and then starting at Skadden. It also happened to be the pandemic. So I spent a lot of time baking banana bread and gardening and waiting to see what would happen.
DL: Tell us about your time at Skadden. You were a partner there for a number of years—more than five, I believe. How would you describe your tenure there? It’s such a storied, well-known firm.
JL: It was really an amazing experience. I was there for five and a half years. I was in the D.C. litigation group, which is the same group that Bob Bennett and Carl Rauh were in back in the day. There were many people who still remembered working with them and would tell war stories about them, which was really interesting to listen to. And I got to work on some great matters.
One of the wonderful things about being at a firm like Skadden is just the level of the complexity of the matters that the firm handles and the brilliance of the lawyers who work on them. So I learned a huge amount there and made some really good friends.
DL: Some people view opportunities at firms like Skadden as really some of the best jobs in the legal profession. They’re certainly some of the most well-compensated. But to take us to the present, a few weeks ago you left Skadden, where you had been a partner since 2020, and co-founded your own boutique, Liu Shur Kravis.
JL: Well done on the pronunciations, by the way.
DL: Nailed it—okay! I think I’ve seen on your website that you also refer to it as LSK, right?
JL: We do refer to it as LSK. Liu Shur Kravis is a little bit of a mouthful, so sometimes LSK is a little bit easier.
DL: I feel like firms that have good acronyms often do adopt them, especially boutiques, whereas Biglaw firms tend to go with the first name or first and second names on the letterhead.
So you came from Skadden and your two partners, Justin Shur and Jonathan Kravis, came from two other great firms: MoloLamken, which is an amazing boutique—I had Steve Molo on the podcast a while back—and Munger Tolles, another storied large law firm. What led you and your partners to leave three amazing firms to launch LSK?
JL: Most fundamentally, we wanted to practice together, and I can go into a little bit more detail about that, but we were also all at a point in our careers where we felt like we could do what we love doing, which is practicing law. We all love the hands-on practice of law in a smaller and more nimble setting. And as you alluded to before, we all were at fantastic firms. We all had great experiences and great relationships at our prior firms, but we were at a point in our careers and our lives where we wanted to build something of our own.
DL: And were you nervous about the prospect of striking out on your own? Because on the one hand, it’s very exciting. You alluded to how you had that startup feeling when you were launching or helping to set up the National Security Division, for example. But on the other hand, it’s not like taking a job as U.S. attorney, where you’re joining an office with established procedures and protocols. Have you found that challenging? Have you found that invigorating? How would you describe that startup aspect?
JL: I would say all of the above, and add in a healthy dose of terrifying. So we’re about six weeks in and it has been a rollercoaster of emotions, I have to say; that’s the best way I can put it. It’s really almost hour by hour. Some hours I’m thinking, “This is so great.” I get the chance to practice with two people who are great friends of mine, who I’ve worked with in various capacities. I know we work well together. We have the same idea about how we want to practice law and how great is this. And we get to build something of our own; we get to make all these decisions. What cases will we take? What kind of copier are we going to buy, to go on the totally mundane side?
And then the next hour, I will think, “What am I doing?” I had this incredible firm behind me, that I was part of, at Skadden. So what am I doing? What happens if nobody ever calls? What am I going to do? And as we talked about earlier, I’m the child of immigrants, so I’m always sort of terrified about where the next paycheck is coming from. So I have that kind of terror as well. It’s great that there are three of us because we can all support each other through that. And I have to say we have been very, very lucky. Our clients have been supportive. Our friends at Biglaw firms have been very generous with referrals. You and other press outlets that have covered us have been really wonderful. And so we’re optimistic, but it is a scary thing.
I have to say, David, I never thought I would be an entrepreneur. So I’m really surprising myself here. I’ve spent my entire life, from college on, gravitating towards big institutions and trying to find my place within big institutions. But there comes a time in maybe everybody’s life when you’ve got to try something new, and this is it for me.
DL: One thing I would also point out, which I pointed out when I wrote about your launch, is you’re not all necessarily ideologically aligned, at least in terms of your prior government service. A lot of D.C. boutiques have an ideological bent: you have a Cooper & Kirk or a Consovoy McCarthy on the right, or you have a Gupta Wessler or a Hecker Fink on the left. But LSK is fairly bipartisan because you served in the Trump administration and Jonathan served in the Obama White House Counsel’s Office, I believe. So I wouldn’t necessarily have guessed that you all were friends necessarily.
JL: Well, we are. We put it this way. We as a society are in as polarized a political environment as I can remember. And one of the things that I’m grateful for is that I have friends from all over the political and ideological spectrum. I also think it takes a particular kind of friend to start a law firm with. You can have friends that you can have a drink or a meal with. It takes a particular kind of friend that you can travel with, and that’s even more true of a friend that you can open a law firm with. I’m sure we have policy differences, and we have differences of opinion on all sorts of things. But fundamentally, we share a love of practicing law. We share a vision of what we want to do with the firm. We share a view on how we want to relate to each other as partners, which is that we really want to be a true partnership in the old-fashioned sense of the word. And for new lawyers that we’re bringing on, we want them to be truly part of the team and feel like they’re part of the firm and that they have some input in how the firm is growing and developing. And so to me, that overrides, by a long shot, any differences we might have on, let’s say, name your big issue of the day.
DL: Had you worked together with either of them at various points in your career?
JL: Yes. And all three of us had worked with each of the other two in various ways. We’ve all known each other for years. As you know, the D.C. legal community is pretty small. So we’ve run into each other; we’ve known each other for a long time. Jonathan and I worked together at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C.; Jonathan and Justin overlapped at the Public Integrity section. So we’ve had some overlap in government.
We’ve also had overlap in private practice. We’ve referred matters to each other—which is a great way of knowing whether you can work with somebody who’s at a different firm. We have, at various points, talked about one of us going to the other’s law firm or something like that over the years. We knew that we not just got along, but that we could work well together. And so that made it a really good fit.
DL: So tell us about your vision for the firm. You mentioned that you and Justin and Jonathan are aligned on your vision for LSK. What would you emphasize, say, to prospective clients? What types of matters are you looking to do?
JL: Well, we describe ourselves as an investigations and litigation boutique. And so in terms of substantive work, we want to do government and internal investigations for both companies and individuals, and we want to handle complex civil litigation. And we’re very well suited to do both of those, given our experience.
One of the ways that we want to practice, and I’ve alluded to this a little bit earlier, is that we want to be really, really hands-on. Our vision is that when each of us takes on a matter, we’re going to be involved in the day-to-day. For some matters, of course, we’re going to have either another partner, if the size of the matter justifies that, or an associate or a paralegal to work with us on it. But the idea is that we’re going to immerse ourselves in all of our matters.
And we want to partner with our clients on things like alternative fee arrangements. We have flexibility in determining how much we want to charge and how we want to do it. We want to have those conversations with our clients. And sometimes that’s harder in a larger law firm setting where you have policies that necessarily have to apply to everybody. But we’re still pretty small. And so we can say to our clients, “Look, we want you to be satisfied with the legal services we’re rendering and with our partnership at the end of the day. And so how can we make that best happen?”
We’re doing that. We’re starting to explore doing that with tech as well. I’m sure you’ve had lots of people come on and talk about AI. That’s been one of the areas that we’ve been exploring a lot. As far as I can tell, and maybe you can tell me if you’ve heard differently, it seems that law firms from the very largest law firms to the solo practitioners are still in this “let’s figure it out” stage. So we’ve been talking to a lot of boutiques and a lot of clients about what tools they’re using and how they’re using them. I would say people are a little bit all over the map, but it’s a pretty interesting time of just trying to figure that out, and we want to do that in partnership with our clients.
DL: I definitely have talked to a bunch of my guests about AI. One of my past guests, Jed Bergman, who also left a large firm to start a boutique, talked about how he saw AI as a real boon to boutiques because in the past, if you were looking to hire a law firm for an investigation, you might think, “Oh goodness, I need a firm that can throw dozens of bodies on the matter.” But with AI, perhaps that can help smaller firms.
And the other thing I’ve talked about with some of my past guests is how you also see, more commonly than you used to see, a lot of co-counsel type relationships, where you might have a boutique working with a large firm. If you as LSK are pitching yourselves for a matter that historically would involve a large number of lawyers—just “warm bodies,” you could even call them—do you feel you can handle those?
JL: I think we can, for the reasons you just identified. Technology is one of them. Frankly, the need for large armies of associates to do document review, for example, had lessened a little bit already, because large law firms for years had been using vendors with contract attorneys who were actually not part of the firm itself to do the first level of document review, and then you would have associates at the firm do second-level or maybe privilege review. When I started, it was not shocking to have armies of a hundred associates doing document review, and you very rarely see that anymore anyways. AI is going to speed that up quite a bit. And I do see a lot more co-counsel relationships. We’re actually doing that now on some of our matters with our former law firms, and clients seem to be more open to that as well.
Just more generally, it seems to me, clients are more willing perhaps than they were 10 or 15 years ago to work with smaller firms. And for that, we have some of the boutiques that went ahead of us to thank. There are so many boutiques that have just proven themselves to be top-of-the-line lawyers—and many of whom you’ve had on your podcast. So as that trend accelerates, it will be more and more obvious that great lawyers can be at any size firm, and it’s all about putting together the best team for the particular client and the particular matter.
DL: I totally agree with you on that. And we even have support from the Ninth Circuit, which reversed a district court’s attorneys’ fee award where the district judge knocked down the fees because he said, “Well, you guys aren’t Biglaw.” And the Ninth Circuit said no to that; they said something in their opinion very close to what you just said, which is that great lawyers can come from all kinds of firms.
Let me ask you, where do you see the firm in a couple of years? Because you mentioned, of course, that you want your other lawyers who join you to feel invested in its future. I believe that as of today, based on your website, it looks like you have two associates. I don’t know if you have some ultimate goal of how large you want the firm to be. Or put another way, if we talk five years from now, do you have hopes or expectations of where LSK will be?
JL: Well, we have office space that has 14 windowed offices and some other offices as well. So what we’d like to do is to fill that space within five years—and perhaps earlier than five years. Other than that, we don’t have any targets for headcount or anything like that; we’re still trying to figure that out. And I know it sounds a little cliche, but we want to—in two years, and certainly in five years—be viewed in the D.C. legal market and nationally as an elite investigations and litigation boutique that clients can go to with their most sensitive matters and feel comfortable that we’re able to handle them. And as you said, it may be that a matter is so big that it’s best handled in partnership with a larger law firm; we’re all people who play very well with others, we enjoy working with other law firms, and we can do that well. But we want to be on the map as a go-to elite litigation and investigations boutique.
DL: You’re all former prosecutors, in one way or another, but you are also handling civil litigation, I believe.
JL: We are. In fact, Jonathan is about to start a trial in a civil case, where we’re handling litigation in an intervened False Claims Act case. Those skills transfer over from trying cases in the criminal context to trying civil cases, we’ve all done a fair amount of civil litigation, and it’s something that we definitely want to do more of.
DL: It’s interesting. I moderated a panel recently and Avi Weitzman, who is at Paul Hastings and does a lot of plaintiff-side civil litigation, actually compared it to his days as a prosecutor, in terms of building a case and being the first mover and constructing a theory. So I certainly see what you’re saying in terms of the skills being transferable.
JL: I would point out that I’ve seen a lot of AUSAs and other former prosecutors go to plaintiff’s firms, or go to relators’ firms and bring False Claims Act lawsuits. So that’s a path that I feel like some years ago I was not seeing as much, but I’m seeing much more of now, and it makes a lot of sense. You’re still sitting on the same side of the courtroom.
DL: Any industries you’re focusing on or that are emerging? I know it’s only been six weeks, but I don’t know if, based on the clients or prospective clients you’ve already heard from, anything is percolating or emerging as a theme?
JL: I would say tech and defense and aerospace tend to be the areas where we’re doing the most work right now. But we’re industry-agnostic; we’re open to everything.
DL: Well, that makes perfect sense, especially given your work at the National Security Division. So let’s turn to the speed round. These are four standard questions. They are the same for all my guests. And my first question is, what do you like the least about the law? And this can either be the practice of law or law as a more abstract system.
JL: Everything takes so long, and it still shocks me that it can take years to resolve a case. You and I were English majors. When I read Bleak House, I laughed at Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the never-ending probate case that goes on so long that the entire estate is swallowed up in legal costs, but sometimes it really feels like it’s not too far off. So maybe prediction markets one of these days will solve everything, but not yet.
DL: My second question is, what would you be if you were not a lawyer?
JL: I’d have a vegetable stand at the farmers’ market. My father grew up as a rice farmer in Taiwan, and I’ve gotten very into gardening myself. I have a text chain with some former DOJ colleagues where I share pictures of what I grow, and Rod Rosenstein and I get pretty competitive about our produce.
DL: I love that. My third question is, how much sleep do you get each night?
JL: I’m pretty useless if I get less than seven hours, so I always shoot for that, and I’m a huge believer in naps. I’m really good at finding secret hideaways where I can take a nap with nobody knowing.
DL: That’s great; I share that skill. My last question is, any final words of wisdom, such as career advice or life advice, for my listeners?
JL: Well, a career, like life, is all about relationships. It’s about the people who really matter. And to be fulfilled in your career as in life, you’ve got to get to know the people around you and appreciate the people around you.
DL: Well, I have definitely appreciated our decades of friendship, and I am also grateful to you for coming on the podcast. So thank you so much, Jessie.
JL: Thanks so much.
DL: Thanks so much to Jessie for joining me, and congratulations to her and Justin and Jonathan on the launch of Liu Shur Kravis.
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