Squire Patton Boggs litigation partner Sarah Rathke developed an expertise in supply chain issues as an associate second-chairing trials for many of the firm's Rust Belt manufacturing clients. It was when Rathke, who is based in Cleveland, was working on what she describes as an "airplane widget" case that she met supply chain consultant Rosemary Coates. "I liked her so much that I realized that she was doing on the operational side what I was doing legally — and then we wrote a book together," Rathke said when the Lit Daily caught up with her by phone yesterday.

That book, "Legal Blacksmith: How to Avoid and Defend Supply Chain Disputes," published in 2016, seems apropos of this moment with ships stacked up at sea waiting to be unloaded, containers lingering dockside and shortages of everything from semiconductors to tennis shoes to paper products. "When we get to the end of this tunnel, we'll see whether the book needs to be substantially rewritten or not," Rathke said. "We are in, in some ways, very, very unchartered territory."