Denise Howell is a seasoned appellate and intellectual property litigator based in Los Angeles. Denise writes one of the first and most popular law-related blogs, Bag and Baggage, coined the term "blawg" and helped pioneer podcasting for lawyers. Microcontent obsessed since 2001, she is frequently quoted in the media on legal issues involving intellectual property and technology law. "Sound Policy" is Denise's show at IT Conversations, and it's also what she hopes results from the briefs she submits to court. Email Denise at dhowell@gmail.com.
Dennis Kennedy is a computer lawyer and legal technology expert based in St. Louis, Missouri. An award-winning author, a frequent speaker and a widely-read blogger, he has more than 300 publications on legal, technology and Internet topics, many of which are collected in his e-books. Dennis has been described as someone who knows almost every rock song in existence and, more importantly, how they apply to technology and law. Email Dennis at his gmail address.
Tom Mighell is Senior Counsel and Litigation Technology Support Coordinator at Cowles & Thompson in Dallas. He has published the Internet Legal Research Weekly newsletter since 2000 and blogged about the Internet and legal technology at Inter Alia since August of 2002. With Tom's singing, Ernie on guitar and Dennis' encylopedic knowledge of rock music, we may have the beginnings of a good band, if this whole blog thing doesn't work out. Email Tom at tmighell@swbell.net.
Marty Schwimmer left a partnership in the largest trademark practice in the world and founded Schwimmer Mitchell, a full-service IP micro-boutique in Westchester County, New York, where he represents owners of famous and not yet famous trademarks. He founded The Trademark Blog, the first IP law blog and the one with the most pictures. He is the first to come in and the last to leave in his firm. Email Marty at marty@schwimmerlegal.com.
Ernest Svenson practices law with a mid-sized law firm in New Orleans, specializing in business-related lawsuits. Most of his practice takes place in federal court, especially the Eastern District. He is best known for his weblog Ernie the Attorney, which he started as an experiment. Like many experiments it got out of control. Nevertheless, he continues to practice law and, occasionally,
to seek enlightenment. Email Ernest at esvenson@gmail.com.
About this blog
Between Lawyers provides just-in-time group commentary on the issues
raised when technology, culture and the law intersect. We take you
behind the firewalls and conference room doors to show you how
experienced lawyers deal with these issues and help you prepare for
the new challenges we all face. For more, see our introductory post.
A fascinating result of court decisions being published on the Internet and made freely available is that many people other than lawyers are reading and analyzing court decisions, in some cases more rigorously and insightfully than some lawyers. In other cases, however, you see people not quite getting the hang of reading opinions or misinterpreting elements of cases.
Lawyer or non-lawyer, this guide will help anyone who wants to sift through the sometimes opaque and arcane world of judicial decisions. Highly recommended.
The Yale Law Journal is looking for submissions on topics "both contentious and suitable to thorough and engaging discussion." If you have something in mind you'd better get a move on, the deadline is August 1.
While that bit of information is interesting in its own right, perhaps more interesting is the way I know about it: YLJ went out of its way to thank blawger Sean Sirrine, and ask him once again to help get the word out about the opportunity (which he did). Just another example of blawgs throwing a courtyard bazaar at the ivory tower and fostering a culture of participatory law. I can't think of a more effective way to engage those who might have something intriguing to say.
Professor Jim Maule at the Mauled Again blog continues to make me wish that I could have taken a class with him. That might be the highest compliment I can give a law professor blog.
There's been a recent brouhaha in legal education after a law professor banned the use of laptop computers in her classes. It should surprise no one to find that I think this action is preposterous.
One goal of legal education is to teach future lawyers that professionals need to be responsible. Teaching law students to be responsible requires more than denying them the opportunity to be irresponsible. It requires guiding them around the tempting distractions. If law faculty become too controlling, how are the students going to fend for themselves after graduation when the faculty isn’t there to control things for them?
The snarky ones out there might say, "Taking away laptops in law school will prepare students to work in those law firms that are busily trying to take laptops away from lawyers and have them only work on desktop computers." Some might think that I would be one of the snarky ones, but that's probably not the case.
Professor Maule, however, is a welcome voice of reason in this discussion. Highly recommended.
He discusses the debate in academia over whether academics should be blogging or, instead, confine themselves only to traditional academic vehicles. He frames the issue: "From my vantage point, it appears that the so-called traditionalists are beginning to sense the threat to their way of academic life that blogs, and technology generally, pose. Understandably, they seem concerned that the foundations of the think/write/publish routine to which they are accustomed and with which they are comfortable are beginning to crumble. The irony is that the approach held so dear by traditionalists probably isn't old enough to qualify as a tradition."
The money quote (but you should read the whole post):
If there is a difference, it's that I have almost instantaneous access to what others are thinking, ideas that would not see, and do not see, the light of day in the world of student-edited, paper format reviews that often are too late to be of use. Sometimes I seek feedback, and learn far more from listserv discussion than I would chatting with the one or two members of my faculty who have expertise in my area of the law. Then I write. The difference is that when I'm ready to publish, I publish. I don't go begging to second-year and third-year law students who have little if anything to add to the analysis, and whose focus on the technical insanities of the Blue Book or whatever citation format directive is in vogue adds weeks if not months to the process without adding anything to the message.
The 2005 Annual Report from the Law School Survey of Student Engagement, which "gives schools an idea of how well students are learning and what they put into and get out of their law school experience" (and is the basis for the article Dennis linked earlier), is here. (Via Genie Tyburski) "[T]hird-year students look similar to first- and second-year students in areas such as critical thinking, effective writing, and work-related knowledge or skills." If you were to survey practicing lawyers, you'd find resounding agreement on two points: very little about law school prepared them for for the bar exam, and even less prepared them for the actual practice of law. So why not just axe the third year? (My response: 'cause when else for the ensuing 40-odd years do former law students get to goof off?)
Scott Jaschik's "Goofing Off in Law School" in Inside HIgherEd News documents what many of us had only suspected - that there is a marked tendency for third-year law students to slack off in that third year of law school. Not that any of us at Between Lawyers did anything like that. No sirree.
I do remember an early morning class I had in my third year where on the last day of classes before the exam (the day you found out what was going to be covered on the exam) I noticed quite a few people were shaking hands with people they hadn't realized were even on the class roster because they hadn't seen each other all semester. In other words, I don't think that this story points to a new phenomenon or is symptomatic of a "new generation of law students."
I'd be curious to learn the correlation between these stats and time spent looking for a job, interviewing and working part-time jobs during the third year.
Stephen Friedman of Pace Universtiy Law School has written A Practical Manifesto for Legal Education. It's good summary of the big issues being raised in the discussion of the current state of legal education that has been heating up in the last few months.
Friedman, who has a background in the actual practice of law, lays out the case for a practice-oriented approach to legal education and identifies the key concerns practicing lawyers have expressed about today's model of legal education. I especially want to emphasize his point about the over-concentration on litigation in the curriculum, especially in clinical training.
The money quote:
Clarity of purpose is as fundamental to a law school curriculum as it is to most other endeavors. Learning to think like a lawyer is a technique, not the goal of law school. For me, it is clear that the educational goal of an American law school should be to educate and train effective new lawyers. To many practicing lawyers, that goal seems obvious. If it had been accepted, however, there would be an ongoing dialogue between legal academia and practicing lawyers on precisely how to go about creating effective new lawyers. There is little or no such discussion
I expect to see see much more discussion in the coming days, weeks and months. The tensions created by the current system and the expectations for that system are sufficiently out of alignment that I expect to see the beginning of innovation and change in fairly short order. Some of the changes could be quite massive and it is reasonable to expect to see new models of legal education arise.
If you consider only one fact out of Friedman's article, consider the amount of training that PLI does. Then ask yourself this: if PLI offered its own law school, how interested would you be in hiring its graduates? Think about that one.
People who know me know how much I admire law librarians. The law librarian blogs routinely give you great information. For example, Sabrina Pacifici's BeSpacific.com has information on government efforts on Hurricane Katrina that I simply haven't seen elsewhere and I recommend that you make a visit to her blog to see what I mean. In fact, long-time legal bloggers regularly refer to Sabrina as the best of the legal bloggers.
I was reading the law librarian group blog called "Out of the Jungle" and was, once again, struck by the high quality of librarian blogs.
Let me point you to the recent post on Out of the Jungle called "Practical Skills." In this post, Diane Murley addresses in a thoughtful and thought-provoking way a question that has been on the minds of lawyers and law students, but too infrequently, law professors and law school administrators: why don't law schools teach law students the practical skills needed to practice law?
Hey, that's a pretty simple question, and one that goes right to the heart of the matter.
Diane's post also goes to the heart of the matter and raises a series of questions that all of us in the legal community should thinking about and trying to answer.
When I was an adjunct law professor and taught an IP contract drafting course, I remember how much students appreciated the class where I took about 20 minutes and explained to them what they would actually do when given an assignment at a law firm to draft a contract. They told me tha they didn't feel that they were getting that information in their other classes.
The money quote from Diane's post:
"Do law school professors seek input from practicing lawyers on how the professors can better prepare their students for practice? Should they? Do substantive law professors care what lawyers think? If not, why not? Should they care more about whether students will be ready to practice law when they graduate?"
Her comments comparing what the approach of law professors with that of law school librarians will open your eyes and make you think.
I didn't think that it was possible for me to be a bigger fan of law librarians, but Sabrina and Diane and other law librarians have made me raise my admiration level even higher in the last few days.
There's a wide disconnect these days between legal education and law practice. You'll hear a lot of discussion about it, especially among practicing lawyers.
Thankfully, the guardians of the gates of law professor hiring are busily at work keeping people like the lawyer bloggers well away from teaching any law students.
Heck, one of the reasons we started "Between Lawyers" was because we had to research and answer questions on new legal issues long before any academic search was available. I'm sorry, but law review articles that come out a year after the fact don't make a lot of sense in today's world, but it is quaint to read about people who think that they are the most important factor in hiring law professors.
I'm curious about how innovation takes place in that environment.
Denise Howell
Dennis M. Kennedy
Tom Mighell
Marty Schwimmer
Ernest Svenson
