Hogan Lovells

* Corporate Counsel names the finalists for its best legal department awards. Come see if FTX made the list! [Corporate Counsel]

* Taylor Swift hires Venable attorney as general counsel. [Minute Mirror]

* Tom Cotton doesn’t actually legislate, but he does write letters like an elderly shut-in complaining to the local paper about the weather. His latest attempt at making a pen pal involved writing 51 law firms to warn them that he thinks hiring diverse attorneys violates the Supreme Court’s college admissions opinion. [Law360]

* Senate panel poised to pass Supreme Court ethics package that will die on the vine after this. [Reuters]

* Government unveils new merger guidelines to replace the old guidelines that encouraged bigger and bigger mergers. When people say the government keeps losing antitrust cases, a big part of that is the pre-existing pro-merger guidelines that the government just made up decades ago. [New York Times]

* A profile of retired Judge David Tatel as he heads to Hogan Lovells to work on pro bono matters. [Bloomberg Law News]

* The other day we featured a story about a lawyer leaving the job to cycle through the Americas so it’s only fair to balance that with a two-time Olympic cyclist who became a lawyer representing injured cyclists. [ABA Journal]

* While others talk layoffs, Paul Weiss announced it’s still looking at first-year applicants. And when it comes to job security, Paul Weiss has a strong reputation. [Intuitive Career Coaching]

* Elon Musk asks court to lift protections designed to keep him from committing more SEC violations. What could possibly go wrong? [CNBC]

* The Supreme Court may still want to blow up the internet, but they don’t seem like they want to do it over this case. [SCOTUSBlog]

* Delaware lowers bar passage score. Apparently global climate change has made hell freeze over. [Reuters]

* Hogan Lovells net income down 13 percent. Starting to see why they might be in the merger market. [American Lawyer]

* Put aside four days in the office… could we really operate on a four-day work week? Yes, reports obvious study. [Courthouse News Service]

* Law firms band together to oppose SEC request for the names of Covington clients targeted in cyberattack. [Law360]