Judge Philip Gutierrez, who openly admonished the plaintiffs’ lawyers during the trial in U.S. District Court, will hear post-trial motions next month. He could, in theory, decide that the jury reached an improper verdict. An appeals court could also alter the size of the damages.

Still, the verdict poses a substantial risk to the league, which is a $20 billion juggernaut in large part because of its media deals.

“Juries are inherently unpredictable, but any time there’s a ruling against a sports entity, it’s significant because leagues rarely take these cases all the way to trial,” said Gabriel Feldman, the director of the sports law program at Tulane University.

The civil case cut to the heart of the league’s media distribution strategy, which for more than a half-century has been based on negotiating contracts with networks on behalf of all the teams. More than 90 percent of N.F.L. games are shown on free over-the-air television in the markets of the teams in the games, and many other games are shown in prime time on national networks. The league’s contracts with CBS, Fox, NBC and other broadcasters generate more than $10 billion a year.

Sunday Ticket was a unique product because it packaged out-of-market games already being shown by CBS and Fox and resold them to fans for about $300 a season. The plaintiffs argued that the price was deliberately inflated to limit the number of subscribers. The plaintiffs’ lawyers pointed to an email to N.F.L. executives from ESPN that said the cable sports network was willing to offer Sunday Ticket for only $70 and sell single-team packages.

The league spurned the offer and stuck with DirecTV until 2022, when it struck a new deal with YouTube TV.

During the trial, the league acknowledged that CBS and Fox would be hurt if Sunday Ticket attracted too many subscribers. Commissioner Roger Goodell, who testified last week, said the service was priced as a premium product.

The jury — and many fans — contended that the league could and should offer its games at a lower price, and with more flexible options, like team-only packages. Feldman, the Tulane professor, said the N.F.L. would most likely on appeal restate its case that while it negotiated contracts collectively, it was pro-consumer because it offered so many games over the air for free.

The N.F.L. will argue that “we are not like Coke and Pepsi — we are more like Coke and Coke Zero,” Feldman said. “We are part of the same company and part of the same goals.”

While officials went into 2024 expecting to make several rate cuts this year, they have pushed those expectations back after inflation proved stubborn early in the year. Policymakers have suggested that they still think they could make one or two rate cuts before the end of the year, and investors now think that the first reduction could come in September.

Given Friday’s fresh inflation data, the sticky inflation early in 2024 looks “more and more like a bump in the road,” Omair Sharif, founder of Inflation Insights, wrote in note after the release. “However you want to slice and dice it, we’ve made considerable progress on core inflation over the last year.”

But whether a rate cut happens in the coming months hinges on what happens with economic data — both for prices and for the labor market.

Inflation remains above the Fed’s 2 percent target, but it is much slower than it was at its 2022 peak, when overall P.C.E. inflation hit 7.1 percent. And a separate but related measure, the Consumer Price Index, reached an even higher peak of 9.1 percent and has now come down sharply as well.

Fed officials have been clear that they will cut rates when inflation has decelerated enough to make them confident that it is coming fully under control, or if the job market shows an unexpected cooling.

Policymakers generally expect inflation to cool in the coming months, though some have expressed concern that the process could be halting.

“Much of the progress on inflation last year was due to supply-side improvements, including easing of supply chain constraints; increases in the number of available workers, due in part to immigration; and lower energy prices,” Michelle Bowman, a Fed governor, said in a speech this week. She suggested that those forces might offer less help going forward.

But other officials are nervously eyeing a slowdown that is beginning to grip the broader economy and that could soon hit the labor market, worried that keeping interest rates too high for too long could come at a cost to America’s workers by slowing growth too much.

Hiring has remained strong so far, and while wage growth is cooling, it is still robust. But some measures suggest that labor conditions are in fact weakening — job openings have come down notably, the unemployment rate has risen slightly and jobless claims have recently ticked up somewhat.

“The labor market has adjusted slowly, and the unemployment rate has only edged up,” Mary C. Daly, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said in a speech this week. “But we are getting nearer to a point where that benign outcome could be less likely.”

Friday’s report showed that consumer spending remained cool in May, further evidence that steam is coming out of the economy.

Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG, said that for now, conditions still looked reasonably strong.

“Are we on thin ice yet? Not yet, and it does look like there is room to run,” she said, but she noted that the Fed must remain vigilant. “They want to cause a cooling of the economy, not a deep freeze.”

“I wished that this had lasted a lot longer because it was a great year,” Mr. Samuel said. “We did great things in that newsroom, and I wish them the very best.”

In a statement provided to The Times, Ms. Richardson declined to explain the leadership change. “Terry Samuel has been a valued colleague during his tenure at USA Today,” she said. “We sincerely wish him well and thank him for his contributions.”

Mr. Samuel has had a long journalistic career, with stints at The Washington Post, The Root and The Philadelphia Inquirer, among other outlets.

USA Today, which launched in 1982, is owned by Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain. Gannett has done sweeping job cuts across its publications since it merged with the Gatehouse Media chain in 2019 as it has struggled to get on top of its debt, which has led to protests from its unionized employees.

Numerous people compared it to a star-centric system like the N.B.A., but others worried that higher and higher pay had gotten out of hand and could strain the law firms forced to stretch their budgets to keep talent from leaving.

“Twenty million dollars is the new $10 million,” said Sabina Lippman, a partner and co-founder of the legal recruiter Lippman Jungers. In the past few years, at least 10 law firms have spent — or acknowledged to Ms. Lippman that they need to spend — around $20 million a year or more to lure the highest-profile lawyers.

One hiring partner at a law firm said $20 million pay packages were usually reserved for those who could bring in more than $100 million in annual revenue for a firm.

Last year, six partners at Kirkland, including some who were recruited during the year, each made at least $25 million, according to people with knowledge of the arrangements who weren’t authorized to discuss pay publicly. Several others in its London office made around $20 million.

One partner at a law firm said pay for top lawyers had roughly tripled in the past five years.

The take-home pay of some top lawyers is now approaching that of big bank chiefs. Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, made roughly $36 million last year. David Solomon of Goldman Sachs earned about $31 million over the same period.

At the center of the action is Kirkland, a 115-year-old law firm founded in Chicago that made an early play for private equity clients when few rivals saw them as big moneymakers. About a decade ago, Kirkland began poaching heavy hitters at rival law firms — many based in New York — who had longstanding relationships with the biggest private equity players.

That inspired fierce competition among top law firms, including Simpson, Latham, Davis Polk and Paul, Weiss. Some have changed their compensation structures or stretched their budgets to keep stars from leaving. Others have countered by raiding Kirkland to build their own private equity businesses.

“Firms do not feel like they can only think about being defensive with respect to their talent,” said Scott Yaccarino, co-founder of the legal recruiting firm Empire Search Partners. “They have to be on the offense, too.”

Lawyers have earned multimillion-dollar pay packages for more than a decade. When Scott A. Barshay, one of the industry’s pre-eminent mergers-and-acquisitions lawyers, left Cravath, Swaine & Moore to join Paul, Weiss in 2016, his pay package of $9.5 million created a stir in the industry. (Mr. Barshay’s compensation has risen significantly since then, two people with knowledge of the contract said.)

But the recent jump in pay has happened at a dizzying pace and for many more lawyers. Coupled with the fierce poaching, it is swiftly reshaping the economics of major law firms. Kirkland has even guaranteed some hires fixed shares in the partnership for several years, according to several people with knowledge of the contracts. In some instances, it has extended forgivable loans as sweeteners.

Last year, Kirkland hired away Alvaro Membrillera, a noted private equity lawyer in London who counts KKR as a key client, from Paul, Weiss for around $14 million and a multiyear guarantee, according to two people with knowledge of the contract.

White & Case recently hired O. Keith Hallam III, a partner from Cravath with private equity clients, for roughly $14 million a year, according to a person with knowledge of the contract. The firm also hired Taurie M. Zeitzer, a private equity lawyer at Paul, Weiss, for around the same amount, another person with knowledge of the contract said.

To some, the changing landscape represents a more meritocratic system in which partners can expect pay based on talent rather than seniority. Cravath, a storied, 205-year-old firm, long followed the so-called lock-step system linked to seniority, but modified it in 2021. Debevoise & Plimpton is one of the few remaining firms that continue to follow the lock-step model.

“Law firms have gotten a lot more commercial in how they run themselves,” said Neil Barr, the chair and managing partner of Davis Polk. “Firms are operating like businesses rather than old-school partnerships, and it’s led to more rational business behavior.”

Kirkland’s early bet on private equity has paid off handsomely. Globally, private equity firms managed $8.7 trillion in assets in 2023 — more than five times what they oversaw at the onset of the financial crisis in 2007, according to the data provider Preqin. Blackstone alone manages more than $1 trillion in assets, and other firms, including Apollo, Ares, KKR and Brookfield, collectively oversee trillions more.

As the private equity business took off, Kirkland’s clients began directing hundreds of millions of dollars in business its way each year. In 2023, Kirkland made more than $7 billion in gross revenue, according to The American Lawyer’s annual ranking, making it the highest-grossing law firm in the world.

A single firm like Blackstone or KKR can generate legal work from the constellation of companies, banks and others in its universe. For instance, even though Blackstone’s main law firm is Simpson, it paid Kirkland — one of its secondary law firms — $41.6 million in 2023, according to a regulatory filing.

“The private equity clients of these firms — they mint money,” said Mark Rosen, the chief executive and chairman of the legal recruiting firm Mark Bruce International.

Simpson, an illustrious Wall Street firm with roots in the Gilded Age and one of the largest private equity practices, has been a particular target of poaching by Kirkland. One person with knowledge of the rivalry called the firm Kirkland’s “farm team.” Kate Slaasted, a spokeswoman for Kirkland, said in an email: “As a firm, we have the highest regard for Simpson Thacher.”

At least seven top partners from Simpson, including Andrew Calder and Peter Martelli, have jumped to Kirkland in the past decade. Kirkland also poached Jennifer S. Perkins, a star lawyer from Latham who has represented KKR on some of its deals, to join its private equity practice.

Mr. Calder and Jon A. Ballis, the chairman of Kirkland, were among the partners who made at least $25 million last year, according to three people with knowledge of the compensation details. Mr. Calder and Melissa D. Kalka, also a partner at Kirkland, work closely with Global Infrastructure Partners, the private equity firm that recently announced a deal to sell itself to BlackRock for $12.5 billion.

In 2023, Paul, Weiss — which counts Apollo Global Management among its top clients and is aggressively building its private equity business — poached several Kirkland lawyers to build out its London office. The firm also hired Eric J. Wedel, whose clients include Bain Capital, KKR and Warburg Pincus, away from Kirkland, and Jim Langston, another private equity-focused lawyer, from Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton.

Simpson has altered its pay structure in the past year so that it can be more competitive with Kirkland and other rivals. “We intentionally made the decision to adjust our compensation structure to attract and retain the best talent in strategically important practices across our global platform,” Alden Millard, chair of Simpson’s executive committee, wrote in an email.

One sign of the frenzied nature of hiring: the use of multiyear compensation guarantees to attract lawyers. These fell out of favor after Dewey & LeBoeuf filed for bankruptcy in 2012, unable to meet millions of dollars in fixed payments and bonuses it had promised partners. Now, a different type of guaranteed payment has become popular.

Some firms are awarding new hires a number of shares in the partnership for a set period, typically in the range of two to five years. Such offers are attractive because they ensure a specific share of a firm’s profits irrespective of its annual performance.

This frenzy has meant that even lawyers without private equity connections have seen their pay rise. Freshfields — a big British firm that is building a beachhead in the United States — has recruited lawyers in the range of $10 million to $15 million, and provided additional pay guarantees to some, according to three people with direct knowledge of the compensation details.

“Law firms want people who are going to be motivated based on culture,” said Ms. Lippman, the recruiter. “But at some point if you have this big difference between firms, everyone has a price.”

To comply with the Kansas district court’s injunction, the Education Department said on Friday that it would pause monthly bills for borrowers in the SAVE program who are required to make payments as it reconfigured those amounts once again. (More than four million low-income borrowers qualify for $0 monthly payments.) More than 124,000 borrowers had already received billing notices calculated with their new lower payments, the Education department said in a court filing.

But now that an appeals court has temporarily lifted the Kansas injunction, the Biden administration can move forward and roll out the rest of the SAVE program, including the reduction in payments for undergraduate borrowers, while it appeals the preliminary injunction.

“Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit sided with student loan borrowers across the country who stand to benefit from the SAVE Plan,” Miguel Cardona, the education secretary, said in a statement. “Borrowers enrolled in the SAVE Plan can still access its considerable benefits, including undergraduate loan payments cut in half, as well as protection against interest accruing if borrowers are making their monthly payments.”

If a borrower with undergraduate debt already received a bill from their loan servicer with the new, lower amount, they should plan to make that payment this month. But if a borrower had been put into forbearance — before these court rulings, because of servicer recalculation processes — their first monthly payment will be due in August, and bills will reflect the reduced payment amount.

A “very small” group of borrowers may have been placed in forbearance after the Kansas injunction: Their payments will be paused in July, and they will owe their first, newly reduced bill in August. (Loan servicers will be in touch with specifics.)

The Missouri injunction, blocking certain loan cancellations through the SAVE program, is still in place. The Education Department said in a court filing that it believed the injunction was “legally unsound and should be reversed on appeal,” but it has not yet requested that it be lifted.

As a result, the Education Department said it was unable to implement the provision of SAVE that provides a shorter path to loan cancellation for enrollees with smaller loan balances. That’s because it is unable to wipe out the remaining debt at the end of that abbreviated term.

Under SAVE’s income-driven repayment plan, borrowers make payments based on their income and household size for 20 years (25 years for graduate degree borrowers). In a court filing, the Education Department said it believed it could continue to cancel those remaining debts.