The Red Velvet Lawyer

"Time Famine" Begins in Law School and Later Creates Law Practice Unhappiness Christine P. Bartholomew (SUNY-Buffalo), Time: An Empirical Analysis of Law Student Time Management Deficiencies , 81 U. Cin. L. Rev. 897 (2013): This Article begins the much needed research on law students’ time famine. Time management complaints begin early in students’ legal education and generally go unresolved. As a result, practicing attorneys identify time famine as a leading cause of job dissatisfaction. To better arm graduating students, law schools must treat time as an essential component of practice-readiness. Unfortunately, most law schools ignore their students’ time management concerns, despite growing calls for greater “skills” training in legal education. * * *   [T]his Article presents a psychometric study of 1Ls – the first study to ever quantify law students’ time management problems. The study identifies five specific dimensions 1Ls lack: perceived control...

A Practice Life  I Can Hardly Imagine Yesterday, in the context of discussing new grads working in legal temp jobs, I said: Many of these document review jobs have begun disappearing as they move offshore or get done by computers that can scan, analyze, and report the data in ways not possible for easily-bored, human brains.    This shift is a small part of the  commoditization  of law jobs that Richard Susskind discusses in his book  Tomorrow's Lawyers . Commodity work will continue to lose value in the marketplace and the price for it will move towards $0.    When I read that book this summer, I realized that a recessionary economy was just one of the challenges new grads will face over the life of their careers. But, I will save that discussion for a later posting. This December 5, 2013 bl og posting  by Rohit Talwar discusses some of the "disruptive" legal technologies that ...

"What Hot's and What's Not in the Legal Profession" Red Hot practice areas?  Energy, regulatory, health care. Hot practice areas?  Financial services, IPOs, litigation, labor and employment, intellectual property, real estate, and corporate. Getting Hot?  Interns rights, privately held and family business, education, elder law, and ADR. So says Bob Denny in his 25th trends report released on December 3, 2013. Bob Denny, founder of Bob Denny Associates, Inc., identifies trends in the legal profession at least once a year.  His last report came out in June 2013. His consulting firm, founded in 1974, provides management, marketing and strategic planning services to over 800 companies, professional firms, and non-profit organizations throughout the United States, as well as in Canada and the Caribbean. His report also identifies practice areas seeing less action (cooling off), the hot geographic areas for law, marketing and business development...

Over 340 Years of  Private Practice Experience  Among ASL's Faculty It frustrated me to no end when highly-ranked Washington and Lee University School of Law -- to much fanfare -- announced in 2008 their practice-ready curriculum for 3Ls students.  The press release from the school's Dean said: [We] are embarking on a dramatic revision of [the] law school curriculum, entirely reinventing the third year to make it a year of professional development through simulated and actual practice experiences.   This is one of the boldest reforms in American legal education since Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell pioneered the new curriculum at Harvard Law School in the late 19th century. What?  WTF?  Appalachian School of Law had created -- from its inception in the mid-1990s -- a practice-ready, experiential curriculum for all students (not just 3Ls) long before Washington and Lee announced its program!  But for us, the pedagogical approach was...

That’s right. A very large number of law graduates choose not to practice law.  Instead, they pursue careers in banking, other financial institutions, insurance, technology and e-commerce, management consulting,  corporate contracts administration, alternative dispute resolution, government regulation or compliance work, law enforcement, human resources, accounting, the military, government executive positions, legislative positions, administrative agencies, teaching, journalism, risk management, judicial clerkships, law school administration, law firm professional development or CLE training,  or other professions.  In the report I summarized in yesterday's blog , authors Simikovic and McIntyre analyzed data for 2009 from the U.S. Census Bureau and  the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to conclude that about three out of five law graduates work as lawyers.  Fifty-eight percent of all law degree holders report “lawyer” as their occup...

This morning, I spent several hours reviewing the law blogs (or blawgs) that look interesting to me and adding them to this website so I could track them more easily.  The good news is you can track them more easily, too, by reviewing the list on the right side of this page. That list will show the name of the blog, the title of the latest posting, and how recently the author posted. For this research project, I used the list of 100 top legal blogs assembled by the ABA found  here .  I focused on the following categories: Legal News/Analysis Trial Practice Business of Law Marketing a Law Practice Careers/Law School Courts, and Legal Technology I hope you find this resource helpful.

Richard Susskind, in his new book, Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future (2013), describes the fundamental shift occurring in the legal field.  The 2008 economic downturn accelerated that shift. His theme is simple: To respond to client needs when they seek more value for the money; when technology can perform routine tasks more cheaply, quickly, and accurately than attorneys; when well-trained lawyers live in Asia and can work globally; when most people still have no access to affordable legal services, the legal profession will "dispense with much of our current cottage industry and re-invent the way legal services are delivered."  He calls the situation a "perfect storm" for reform.   He begins by discussing the business model based on hourly billing.  Typically, a firm uses a large number of associates per partner on an assigned project.  Those associates, in earlier times, worked months on document reviews ...

"We are living in a moment of time, the first moment of time, when a billion people are connected, when your work is judged (more than ever before) based on what you do rather than who you are, and when credentials, access to capital, and raw power have been dwarfed by the simple question "Do you care about what you do?  We built this world for you.  Not so you would watch more online videos, keep up on your feeds, and LOL with your high school friends.  We built it so you could do what you're capable of.  Without apology and without excuse.  Go."  Seth Godin, The Icarus Deception . My little law school, Appalachian School of Law (ASL), sets itself apart from the crowd in several ways, but perhaps its unique feature is a fearless bet on students who might not otherwise have the opportunity to attend professional school.  We tell them: "Go."  Our students, often showing a poorer performance on the standardized admiss...