Happy Monday, I’m Eriq Gardner.

Welcome back to The Rainmaker, a little shorter this week as I travel for Thanksgiving. Still, I’ve got a couple items in this edition that should make for some very interesting dinner table conversations about free speech. Plus news on the legal misadventures of Elon Musk, Shari Redstone, the state of Israel, Pras Michel, A.I., and David Boies.

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Let’s begin…

• Elon’s Sound and Fury: As advertisers like Disney and Apple abandon X (formerly Twitter), Elon Musk spit out this Friday night proclamation, “The split second court opens on Monday, X Corp will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.”

  It’s now Monday evening, and unsurprisingly, no lawsuit has yet come. Perhaps nuclear detonation looms, but that wasn’t really the point of Musk’s message, was it? His ire was directed at a report regarding the proliferation of antisemitic content on the platform that he paid $44 billion to acquire. Announcing a lawsuit is always cheaper than psychotherapy.

  The real problem with bringing legal action is the scant upside. Even if a case exists (dubious), the journey would probably be interminable, inviting an uncomfortable fact-finding quest, and likely without any winnings to merit the endeavor. Plus, Musk is already in court with the Center for Countering Digital Hate over that group’s analysis of hate speech on X. A cutting dismissal motion (read here), filed just a couple days ago, probably hit the mark in its assessment that Elon strategically avoided a defamation claim in the case in order to sidestep the inconvenient truth about what’s actually circulating on the social media forum. So what’s different this time?

• Campus Wars in Court: On Friday, the Supreme Court privately discussed taking up a case concerning the escalating hostility toward free discourse on college campuses. The invitation was extended by Speech First, an advocacy group that has initiated lawsuits nationwide challenging, on First Amendment grounds, the use of “bias response teams.” These teams usually involve administrators intervening upon reports of off-color jokes, demeaning flyers, misgendering, and similar incidents. Speech First is specifically seeking the justices’ review of Virginia Tech’s bias response team, especially after the Fourth Circuit concluded that the First Amendment “does not stand in the way of modest efforts to encourage civility on college campuses.” The group’s petition has support in conservative legal circles, and today, when the high court released a long list of denied petitions, this case was intriguingly absent, meaning it will likely be relisted as justices take a closer look.

  The case arrives at a time when speech on campus is a hot-button topic. Amid the conflict in Israel, both Jewish and pro-Palestinian groups have reported a surge in threats of violence. In some cases, college officials have intervened by prohibiting advocates on both sides of the spectrum from expressing their views.

  Expect to hear about new lawsuits launched very soon over this sort of censorship, as well-intentioned as it may be. I hear a few legal efforts are already underway…

• Endless Sumner: The death of media titan Sumner Redstone, in 2020, kicked off a raging debate about his estate tax bill, and whether his daughter, Shari, might have to sell Paramount or CBS to pay off a humongous tab that some had pegged at a billion dollars. In fact, the estate taxes actually came out at just north of $209 million, which I have on good authority is being paid on an installment plan. That’s good news for Shari, since she’s already on the hook for Sumner’s debts, thanks to a settlement a couple years ago. Paying, say, $20 million a year is certainly a burden, but probably one that can be shouldered.

  Then again, I also hear the Internal Revenue Service is actively auditing the Sumner Redstone estate tax return and requesting additional materials from the executors of his estate, so there’s certainly the possibility of trouble down the road. After all, the I.R.S. has battled the family before: About a decade ago, the government took on the Redstone patriarch over whether a 1972 transfer of stock to his children was a taxable “gift” or not. (He lost that case and had to pay about $1 million in back taxes.) Incidentally, Sumner Redstone’s first job after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1947 was working for the tax division of the U.S. Department of Justice.

• Ready or Not: The criminal case against Pras Michel looked to be headed toward a grim resolution in April, as the former Fugees rapper faced conviction for acting as an unregistered foreign agent while wrestling with mounting debts that shadowed him around town. By summer, Michel bid adieu to his former attorney, David Kenner, and made a request for a public defender.

  In a curious twist, Michel recently secured representation from a prominent firm, Arent Fox, and appears to be gaining traction in his bid for a new trial. One of the arguments put forward by the new legal team is that Kenner provided ineffective counsel at trial by relying on an A.I. program to write a closing argument. The government’s retort? Well, that might be summed up as, “Hey, the A.I. didn’t do a half-bad job!” (Read the brief here.)

  But the even stranger twist is the news that Kenner previously secured a trial postponement because of a personal medical crisis, which left the octogenarian attorney hospitalized. In new court papers, Michel claims he wasn’t made aware of the incident and is seeking access to his former lawyer’s medical records, asserting that these records might shed light on whether he was deprived of his Sixth Amendment rights to effective counsel. Meanwhile, the government is countering with its own bid that Michel be deemed as having waived attorney-client privilege, so prosecutors can investigate all this talk of a bad lawyer. This criminal case is now hurtling toward a rather extraordinary evidentiary hearing as soon as next month, promising a meta mini-trial reflecting on the prior proceedings. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that Leo DiCaprio will make a cameo this time.

• DoNotSue: Speaking of A.I. lawyering, I previously covered the travails of DoNotPay, a service designed to assist users with simple legal tasks like contesting parking tickets. This led to legal disputes questioning whether DoNotPay was practicing law without a license. Recently, the company achieved a victory against one opponent—a small Chicago law firm that claimed the “World’s First Robot Lawyer” was unfairly engaged in false advertising. On November 17, a federal judge ruled that the Chicago firm, MillerKing, lacked standing, stating it “has not plausibly alleged that it has suffered a diversion of clients or reputational harm as a result of DNP’s actions.” Read the ruling here.

• Another Note on A.I.…: A bunch of music publishers are now shooting for a preliminary injunction to place guardrails around the ability of companies to train A.I. models on song lyrics, alleging copyright infringement. Concord v. Anthropic, which is being litigated in Nashville, is also pretty funny, in addition to potentially significant: The defendant’s product apparently mashed up Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” and Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back,” among other horrors.

  The hurdle for an injunction is pretty high, since the publishers have to demonstrate a likelihood of prevailing and irreparable harm. But the upside there is that the move will force the judge to more quickly analyze issues like fair use that are being reserved for down the line in similar cases. And in a songwriter-friendly forum that’s traditionally been very hospitable to copyright plaintiffs, this dispute might even become the first A.I. battle to ascend to the appellate stage. (See the full motion here.)

• You’ve Been Served? It’s been mostly wins for Camille Vasquez. The 39-year-old lawyer who rode the Depp libel trial to wild success was recently named partner at Brown Rudnick, joined NBC News as a contributor, and was just honored as “Young Lawyer of the Year” by The American Lawyer.

  Of course, not all libel battles unfold smoothly. Consider Vasquez’s latest effort, on behalf of Duane Baughman, who runs a political direct mail consultancy with past clients including Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. In June, Vasquez (along with fellow Depp team member Benjamin Chew) initiated a defamation lawsuit against a woman who apparently claims she was sexually assaulted by Baughman while working for Mike Bloomberg’s first mayoral campaign, in 2001. The lawsuit extends to this woman’s sister for repeating the alleged smears to Baughman’s recent clients, including Congresswoman Barbara Lee.

  The challenge? Serving the legal papers. The Brown Rudnick team recently briefed the judge on the extensive efforts their investigator undertook, which included scrutinizing social media, staking out a library the accuser frequents, and scouring property records—as the sister has apparently moved 17 times across seven states in the last 25 years. It’s kind of ironic to witness Baughman, one of this generation’s foremost experts on voter targeting, encountering such difficulty finding his mark.

• Gone Fishing: Happy trails to the pioneering litigator David Boies, who announced he will be stepping down as chairman at Boies Schiller Flexner next month. At 82, he remains incredibly active—tackling problems like Google’s privacy policies, addressing FTX’s implosion, and challenging the federal government’s continued regulation of cannabis (I haven’t delved into that one yet). Nevertheless, he saw the wisdom of handing the firm’s reins to a new leader. All the best.