This post was originally published twelve years ago today. However, as I ponder the topic posed by Northwestern Law Professor Michael Zuckerman about how law students shouldn’t use automated writing technology because they will miss out on learning how to do initial drafts, this post seems as relevant now as ever. – GL]
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Suffolk Law Professor Shailini George joins us to talk about her new book, The Law Student’s Guide to Doing Well and Being Well. Professor George talks about the need for law students to take better care of their mental and physical health in order for them to not only do well in law school but to be better lawyers once they enter the profession. Whether it is stopping task switching, setting boundaries on their time, or allowing themselves to be bored, she lays out a guide for students to do better, by being better to themselves.
She shares some of the techniques and projects she developed in her classroom, that help law students better understand how they need to focus on the task at hand. And, how to reduce the number of distractions that call out for their attention. This Fall, Professor George begins teaching a new course based on her book to help students create healthy habits and lifestyles and to develop coping mechanisms to better handle points of crisis that may come their way.
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Information Inspirations
Products like Casetext’s Compose and Brieftext.com worry Northwestern Law Professor Michael A. Zuckerman that law students will use these tools to work around the practice of drafting documents, and learning the process through doing. We think that perhaps technology doesn’t have to be seen as replacing the learning process, but rather enhancing it.
We’ve heard a number of legal tech stories, mostly involving men, but in this Women Love Tech article, Laura Keily explains how she developed Immediation in 2019, while also raising two young children. When COVID hit in 2020, Immediation suddenly became a very big deal.
Greg discovered that the big push to come back to the office can open up unexpected opportunities, including artificially increasing those serendipitous interactions by hanging out near the ice cream machine.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland laid out some new standards for the FBI to use in order to confiscate journalist’s information. The balancing of the First Amendment and the need for FBI investigations seems to be shifting in the new administration.
Dentons Nextlaw Labs‘ Maya Markovich understands that rational lawyers would observe market dynamics and client pressures to weigh the costs and benefits of adapting their behaviors to survive change, stay employed, and make their work more fulfilling. But, people don’t always make rational decisions. And, law firm’s economic structure incentivizes lower efficiency as a method of obtaining higher revenue. Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Spotify
When we all started working from home last March, we each did something to help us keep sane and stay engaged with our families, our friends, and our peers. Eugene Giudice found a unique way of doing just that with a daily note to all of the above. After more than a year of these daily inspirational emails, he put them into a book called Reflections During a Pandemic: Thoughts While Sheltering In Place. Eugene’s writings mark places in time and bring back memories of those periods of hope and despair. As we begin exiting the pandemic, it helps to reflect back on where we were, and how we managed to get through it.
Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 123 – Eugene Giudice on Reflections During a Pandemic
Leading a professional association over the past year has been tough. It’s like getting all of the work, and not getting any of the fun experiences of traveling to meet people around the world. For the American Association of Law Libraries’ President Emily Florio and President-Elect Diane Rodriguez, they’ve made the most of the situation they found themselves in. (Hat tip to the past-President Michelle Cosby, too!) As Florio and Rodriguez prepare for AALL’s second remote annual conference in a row, they are leveraging the experience from last year’s remote conference to make this year’s experience even better. A longer conference. More individual interactions. A virtual tour of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And, expanded vendor opportunities. In July, the favel will be passed to the new president, but Florio still looks forward to sticking around for another year as the association and the executive board begins the process of getting back to face-to-face interactions, and an in-person conference in Denver in July of 2022.Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Spotify
As we make our way to the next version of the workforce in a post-pandemic world, we look back at a discussion of the Delta Model Competencies with Northwestern Law School’s Alyson Carrel and Vanderbilt Law School’s Cat Moon. This interview from November of 2019 is possibly more relevant today than it was when we initially recorded it. While we typically focus on the T-Shaped lawyer model of being an expert in certain areas of the law, and knowledgeable of the necessary disciplines and technology. Moon and Carrel add a third layer to this model to cover the personal effectiveness skills needed to provide effective legal services.
Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 121 – The Delta Model Lawyer with Cat Moon and Alyson Carrel
Summer Associates and the upcoming Fall Associates had a unique experience with their On-Campus Interviews (or OCI) over the past two years. Some of the recruits still have not actually met face to face, the members of their firm who hired them. We talk with Kerry Benn, Director of Series, Surveys & Data at Law360 about Law360 Pulse’s recent survey on this topic and see how the firms, the students, and the schools adjusted during the pandemic. The survey of over 1,200 law students breaks down the popular firms and practice areas, how COVID impacted the process, and how things look as students make their way into the firms this Summer.
When Ropes & Gray launched their R&G Insights Lab consulting arm, one of their goals was to create a dynamic legal team with specialized expertise in analytics, behavioral science, and strategic consulting. Dr. Caitlin Handron completes the behavior science part of that mission, and she talks with us about how that expertise helps guide clients on issues of risk and compliance, DEI goals, and cultural assessments. Dr. Handron’s experience at Stanford University’s SPARQ “Do Tank” prepared her for applying behavioral science to the real world of the corporate environment and put those scientific techniques into practice. While it may seem strange for a law firm to apply these types of scientific principles to the advising of clients, Dr. Handron mentions that the legal environment is really not much different from the rest of the world… as much as we lawyers would like to think we are.
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As much as we complain about the PACER federal dockets, it pales in comparison to most of the state court docket systems when it comes to tracking and searching cases at the state and local levels. Josh Blandi, the co-founder, and CEO of Unicourt is leveraging APIs and normalizing court data across multiple state and local courts to help clean up the data and make searching and tracking better. Josh joins us to discuss how they are gathering the information, the roadblocks that state courts and the private companies they contract with throw up to restrict data, and some new advancements in Unicourt’s APIs that link multiple pieces of data to allow for better analytics. We also discuss the collaboration between companies like Justia, Fastcase, and others to pool their resources and reduce the overall costs of accessing the very expensive data that courts produce. One other side project Josh is doing with Public.Resources’ Carl Malamud is the Code Improvement Commission GitHub where they are posting the state statutes for Georgia, Tennessee, and other states for anyone to download and use without any copyright or licensing restrictions.
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Rocket Lawyer just announced that they will be testing the sandbox of non-lawyer ownership in Arizona. Rocket Lawyer already established such an operation in the UK and in Utah, and they and eight other companies have applied to the Arizona Supreme Court for their approval to start operations there with the goal of providing legal services for less than the price of hiring an attorney. Eyes are moving over to California now to see if they are the next state to create a sandbox for companies to provide alternative legal services.
The legal job market is hot! Leopard Solutions released a report showing that there are almost 8,300 open and available attorney jobs in the 1,000+ law firms they are tracking. Recruiters are overloaded with opportunities, so if you have a decent practice, expect some calls. We speculate that the same is going on for many of the law firm support positions. There’s going to be a lot of movement over the next year.
To modify the quote from Field of Dreams, “ask for it, and they will come” applies to this week’s show as we mentioned the Bloomberg Law Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Framework survey a few weeks ago and suggested that they come on the show and talk more about it. Molly Huie from Bloomberg Law is running the survey and joins us this week to talk about what the mission of the survey is, and how it differs and supplements other surveys and certifications currently in the industry. The DEI Framework is Bloomberg’s effort at creating a benchmark for DEI results in the legal industry. With corporations asking law firms for their diversity statistics, the DEI Framework may work as a common metric between firms and clients. Huie discusses the nearly two-year process of pulling the survey together, their efforts to work with other DEI partners in the legal industry, and the process of how to score firms who submit data. While getting diversity statistics may be a challenge, Huie thinks that the DEI Framework will get firms to start collecting the data and measuring their success. Firms can use the contact form to request access to submit their data. The survey is open until the end of August.
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Dechert is collaborating with Silicon Valley design firm Ideo to create a human-centered design approach for their new innovation program. With around 100 hours of training and projects lined up for the initial 40 participants, Dechert is looking for “real-life or business challenges” to solve.
The Utah Supreme Court expanded its regulatory sandbox to include legal advice on medical debt advice given by non-lawyers.
What happens when you combine a collection of mini-hackathons and the concepts of eSports gaming? You come up with something that NYU Law Professor Houman Shadab calls the No-Code Sports League.
Michigan Legal Help is assisting in Access to Justice issues through DIY tool kits arranged by Michigan counties.
Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 117 – Molly Huie on Bloomberg Law’s New DEI Framework