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WHAT WE'RE WATCHING

ONLY BIDEN FORGIVES - When it comes to lawyers' views on President Joe Biden's (now-endangered) student loan forgiveness plan, the dividing line between supporters and detractors is clear: those who have already paid their dues are not keen on letting others off the hook. In a recent Law.com readers' poll, the percentage of respondents who said they have no remaining law school debt aligned very closely with the percentage of respondents who said they disagreed with Biden's plan. Of the 98 responses to the question of how the program would personally impact them, 58.2% said they have no remaining law school debt. Meanwhile, of the 96 responses to the question of whether they agreed with Biden's plan, 55.2% answered in the negative. But is it really as simple as "If I can't have it, no one should?" In a word: yup. One anonymous comment summed up the mindset of several respondents quite nicely: "The immoral message is you don't have to keep your word. Also, no accountability for one's personal choices, e.g., how many deadbeats have spent money on tattoos or pot?" (Editor's note: This was a reader flash survey by the Law.com Contributing Editors and was not administered by ALM Legal Intelligence.)

LET IT SLIDE -  Attorney productivity at law firms continued to slide down in 2022 amid lower demand, according to recent industry data. The productivity declines have led to fears—and, in some cases, realities—of more layoffs and personnel cuts in Big Law. Still, overall law firm head count has actually increased through the third quarter, analysts say, possibly because some firms are reluctant to trim ranks, remembering the painful cuts after the Great Recession. The industry still has "fresh memories of the difficulty of rehiring talent" after the Great Recession a decade and a half ago, and firms are willing to accept some level of productivity declines so that they don't have another "lost generation" of talent, according to analysts and the latest Law Firm Financial Index report. Bill Josten, strategic content manager for Thomson Reuters, which published the productivity numbers in its quarterly financial index report, told Law.com's Andrew Maloney that head count was up 3% across law firm segments in the third quarter. "We hear so much about 'stealth layoffs,' but the numbers aren't really reflective of that," Josten said, adding that the 3% increase in head count is pretty consistent across law firm segments. "So we're not seeing a tremendous slowdown in the numbers. We're not seeing indications of large-scale reductions. It's not to say it's impossible, or it won't happen or have an impact in the fourth quarter, but it's not showing up in our numbers yet."

WHO GOT THE WORK?℠ - VillageMD has agreed to acquire primary, specialty and urgent care provider Summit Health-CityMD for approximately $8.9 billion, including investments from Walgreens Boots Alliance and an affiliate of Evernorth, a subsidiary of Cigna Corp. The transaction, announced Nov. 7, is expected to close in the first quarter of 2023. Chicago-based VillageMD is advised by Sheppard Mullin and Latham & Watkins. Summit Health-CityMD, based in New York, is represented by Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton and McDermott Will & Emery. Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz is counseling an affiliate of Bloomfield, Connecticut-based Evernorth. >> Read the filing on Law.com Radar and check out the most recent edition of Law.com's Who Got the Work?℠ column to find out which law firms and lawyers are being brought in to handle key cases and close major deals for their clients.

ON THE RADAR  - Microsoft, its software development platform GitHub, and Microsoft-backed OpenAI Inc. were slapped with a class action Thursday in California Northern District Court over alleged violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The suit, brought by Joseph Saveri Law Firm and attorney Matthew Butterick on behalf of the owners of copyright interests in materials made publicly available on GitHub, concerns the defendants' Codex and Copilot products. The suit claims that the AI-assisted software programming tools were trained using GitHub repositories and frequently reproduce and distribute without attribution, the original copyright notice or licensing terms. Counsel have not yet appeared for the defendants. The case is 3:22-cv-07074, Doe 3 et al v. GitHub, Inc. et al. Stay up on the latest deals and litigation with the new Law.com Radar. 

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