Welcome to Adverse Counsel

Most legal commentary comes in two flavors.

There's the populist version: loud takes, fast framings, attention-optimized. And there's the institutional version: careful, credentialed, and almost entirely behind paywalls at legal websites sold to other lawyers. There isn't much in between.

There should be.

Adverse Counsel is my attempt to close that gap. I'm a practicing corporate litigator — antitrust, trademark, and increasingly, AI law. I spend my days reading opinions, arguing motions, and watching the legal system adapt in real time to markets and technologies that didn't exist when most of the doctrine was written. What I write here is what I would tell a founder over coffee, a GC in a hallway, or a sharp non-lawyer who wants to actually understand what just happened in a case that affects their industry.

Three things you'll see here:

Case analysis, under the banner of "In the Matter of…" — breakdowns of specific cases, what the headlines missed, and what the doctrine actually says. The first full episode drops Monday: In the Matter of Ticketmaster: The Verdict the Headlines Missed.

Doctrinal explainers — the kind of "wait, is that actually legal?" questions that come up constantly in business but rarely get answered without a retainer. Trademark, antitrust, AI compliance.

Practitioner notes — shorter takes on developments that matter, delivered with the delay of me having actually read the thing first.

What you won't see: hot takes before I've read the documents, predictions stated more confidently than the evidence warrants, or commentary dressed up as legal advice.

One framing I keep coming back to, from Vonnegut: we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. That's not a bad description of trademark law, or antitrust, or most of what gets litigated in a federal courthouse.

It's also, I think, the right posture for a writer: be careful about what you claim to be, because sooner or later, your readers will hold you to it.

Subscribe if that's useful to you.

— G