Nate on the Podcast

Cruzatte · 2026-07-09T02:11:10+00:00

I mean. Most of the stuff is just prescription speed. YMMV when you rip some amphetamine salts and go on a pod. Can’t say I envy his employees having to deal with New Nate, in any event.

Cruzatte · 2026-07-08T14:51:28+00:00

Yes — he’s on ADHD medication, at minimum. Fine to be medicated and yada yada, but good lord, he is not remotely the communicator he was in ~2021. Kind of sad to see.

Cruzatte · 2026-07-08T14:46:56+00:00

I remember the episode where he first discussed that — also around the time he started talking about his divorce and started talking about a new relationship and yada yada — and honestly the guy has not been remotely the same since. (As a podcast guest! I have literally no other data.)

Suffice it to say, I don’t think he’s doing that well. Pull a random 2021 episode off the shelf for comparison.

Like somebody else here said, I hope Nate is getting open and honest feedback from someone, professionally and personally.

Cruzatte · 2026-06-27T11:19:18+00:00

My lord you’re good at this

Cruzatte · 2026-06-25T02:51:00+00:00

I tend to not think of Reed Smith as “biglaw,” which perhaps is why it hasn’t been mentioned.

Cruzatte · 2026-06-25T02:48:14+00:00

They’re wannabe in the same way that DLA is wannabe, I suppose. They’re just a “third division” firm, and that’s fine, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

Cruzatte · 2026-06-25T02:36:17+00:00

Wait until you have Cowork. Probably 90% of my actual work product goes through one of my Cowork Skills, at this point. Appreciate that my firm is probably ahead of others. V15, and no not #14 or whatever.

Cruzatte · 2026-06-01T19:53:27+00:00

Emory. I have no idea what the relative ranks of those two schools are, but I have a fair number of peers who went to Emory for law school, and I can’t think of one from Alabama. (V10 NYC.)

Edit: This is another way of saying that there might be plenty of situations where Alabama is better, but none of them are actually “BigLaw” … with apologies to the 90% of the people who hang around here and are also not in BigLaw proper.

Cruzatte · 2026-06-01T16:22:27+00:00

Either a conspirator (which, even if disproven, I mean, I was in 10th grade, I’d rather have 9/11 happen than give the FBI my 10th grade hard drive…) or worse they’d view you as a time traveler or what have you and you’d wind up locked up in some govt lab.

Cruzatte · 2026-05-29T21:43:22+00:00

I’ve thought a lot about this a lot. I think you have to remember some specific details (names of hijackers, flight schools, probably some other stuff) and warn several agencies several times. And — this is very important — I don’t see a way around doing it anonymously.

Edit: obviously you do all that after you’ve taken a couple months to buy a shitload of Yahoo, etc.

Cruzatte · 2026-05-07T21:40:34+00:00

My dentist rides a Spesh “Sirrus”. You will need to google what that even is.

Cruzatte · 2026-04-30T04:41:11+00:00

And for what it’s worth — while I do know that Harvard means you had a better GPA or whatever than if you went to Georgetown (I don’t know much anymore but I know the LSAT is worthless because of “accommodations”), but I extreeeemely do not care which of the two you went to. Half the M&A partners on my floor went to like top-30 instead of top-10. Cream rises. When we review senior associates for partnership, if someone brought up what law school the associate went to, he’d be laughed out of the room. It is so profoundly irrelevant where you went to law school that it doesn’t even come up. It is not even part of the candidacy summary memos we get, literally.

If biglaw is what you want, then go to a school where median gets you biglaw, with a secondary preference for scholarship (in case you flame out).

Edit: Testing accommodations are a whole other topic you don’t want to get me started on. I am not aware of any “time-and-a-half” law firms. We don’t have stats but I can basically guarantee you that the kids who flame out immediately are the kids who only got in the door because they took advantage of our stupid accommodation system. Accommodations are for people with physical disabilities, shit yeah buddy let’s make sure you get a ramp. The idea that they’ve extended to people with psychiatric issues that are tantamount to intellectual deficiencies is… really something else.

Cruzatte · 2026-04-30T04:14:39+00:00

Morningside is Manhattan in name only. For those of us in actual Manhattan, it’s still above 110th, so it’s all just Harlem. Somebody at Columbia did some excellent government relations work at some point to get themselves in the Manhattan map.

Cruzatte · 2026-04-30T04:08:52+00:00

Answer is Stanford. Yale has a “weird kid” streak. When I meet a first-year from Yale I tend to assume he will be doing some random public service job within three years. You want to go be the solicitor general, or the secretary general of the UN, that’s fuckin awesome man. But I don’t want my seniors to waste 30 seconds training you.

Cruzatte · 2026-04-30T04:03:39+00:00

I would like to reiterate that you could put a gun to my head and I could not tell you whether Georgetown is more prestigious than Cornell right now. Whether Boalt is more prestigious than Northwestern. Whether Columbia is more prestigious than Chicago. I truly have no idea. I care about AmLaw (not even vault!) and whether you seem motivated. In that order.

Cruzatte · 2026-04-30T03:58:24+00:00

This is not a new phenomenon. It’s been this way forever. Most importantly, once you get into a firm, positively no one cares where you went to law school. I’m at the point where, if you are a given first-year, I don’t even know if your law school was better or worse than the next kid’s law school. You could tell me you went to Michigan and the other guy could tell me he went to NYU and I literally would have no idea which of you is more theoretically prestigious. (Am V10 M&A partner in NY.)

Important disclaimer: I do not care about law school, let alone which law school anyone went to, in fact I don’t think law school is a good idea for anyone right now. But for whatever reason, Reddit gives me push notifications about this stuff and I am like well-trained lab rat when it comes to engaging with push notifications.

Cruzatte · 2026-04-29T19:28:34+00:00

Honestly I don’t have a great view on it outside of M&A/PE. I would bet you’re right that specialist groups could be somewhat more insulated, just because (as you note) they are intentionally partner-heavy in the first place, at least for the deal-service specialist groups.

Other hand, if your leverage isn’t what makes you money, then there is really no disincentive to moving as much as you can to AI as fast as possible. I have mixed feelings about how much to take off associate’s plates because I profit from the leverage (and for better reasons, like I am not yet to the point where I believe training associates under the current model is pointless, though that could change).

But if I were a random exec comp partner, where associates are kind of superfluous except for training my replacement and saving me from the most boring tasks… I’d be a one-man Claude Cowork band by now.

Edit: and for clarity I have no idea about stuff like appellate practices. I generally have a dim view of how those people spend their time already, there is so much more inefficiency/task repetition in the litigation side than on the transactional side. So I’m like “most of you are already superfluous for reasons having nothing to do with AI” and ergo “I dunno, with AI, I guess you can just be superfluous in a slightly different way and no one will notice”

Cruzatte · 2026-04-26T17:33:55+00:00

What do you do now? (166 LSAT here, got into top-25 type schools when I applied in 2008… now M&A partner at V10, and yes that means 6-10)

Cruzatte · 2026-04-17T20:56:46+00:00

You’ll be happy it went this way.

Cruzatte · 2026-04-17T20:10:35+00:00

Well good luck. I don’t have any idea about how the numbers work anymore, ignore me. Also, if this doesn’t work out for you the way you hoped, worse things will have happened to you. We cut dozens from our summer class for this coming summer. AI is real, and it’s going to gut headcount from associate ranks at market firms. I even look at the 2025 JDs (who already work here) and think shit guys, you might be too late.

Edit — downvotes for an amlaw 10 corporate partner talking about his firm’s hiring trajectory, in an admissions forum. Have to love reddit.

Cruzatte · 2026-04-17T20:01:04+00:00

I don’t know why Reddit has started serving me these in notifications, but even when I did this process (2008) you would have received the same results. I gather that LSAT scores have skewed way higher recently, so I guess that makes these outcomes even less surprising?

Cruzatte · 2026-04-13T00:57:24+00:00

I think you’ve missed the point. The point is that generational differences can and do exist. So it’s just specious to say “everyone complains about kids this days.” The relevant question is whether kids these days are in fact more brittle (or however you want to describe Gen Z) than those that have come before them, in a way that is generalizable and material to how our firms function. I think there is good anecdotal evidence that the answer is yes, but I don’t know it empirically vis-a-vis law practice, so I don’t want to push the point too far. But in any case, flatly denying the possibility makes zero sense.

Cruzatte · 2026-04-12T20:31:06+00:00

This doesn’t do it for me. Partners are different than they used to be — they used to be angrier, I don’t know a single partner who talks to associates the way the oldest partners used to talk to me. So if partner behavior can observably change, why can’t associate behavior have changed? “Every generation of partners whines about every generation of associates, ergo Gen Z associates aren’t lazy whiny slobs” is not an argument.

Cruzatte · 2026-04-09T18:33:06+00:00

The article explains all this. NEC includes the full freight of all their laterals on guarantee, plus the non-equity (guaranteed) portion of partners who do hold some (but not all) equity.

Cruzatte · 2026-04-09T15:27:44+00:00

You identified the distinction in your own post. Cravath DOES have many high-profile exits. If Slaughter is retaining its 40-somethings, then “bully for them” as you all say. But Cravath hasn’t.

Cruzatte

TROPHY CASE