Posts tagged law students
Maryland Senate Bullies Law Students for Perdue Chicken
Mar 27th
The Baltimore Sun writes today about the Maryland Senate’s get tough position on law students who have the temerity to ask courts to enforce the Clean Water Act. Sure, clean water is great. But you can’t enforce this act against Perdue Chicken because they have lots of political muscle in this state. So the Maryland Senate is going to slap around the University of Maryland law clinics by requiring them to produce a list of all the plaintiffs law students have represented over the past two years. If they don’t, they will lose $250,000 in funding.
The Baltimore Sun and the commenters to the story call this out for what it is.
The Young Turks of Information Processing
Mar 9th
Last Saturday I taught a two hour skills course to 30 or so Loyola Law Students about Digital Lawyering. Almost every one of them had a laptop in front of them, which was good. I was hooked to the Internet and demonstrated how to find things using Internet services like Google Reader, Delicious and so forth. As I referred to these services I sensed that the students were going to those sites and reading along for themselves. As I said, I think this is a good thing.
I realize that most people in my generation would be taken aback, believing it to be disrespectful for students to be doing something else while I was talking. So, let me explain why it doesn't bother me. First, I'm happy to share whatever thoughts I have with whomever wants to listen. If, in addressing 30 students only 3 of them are actually listening, that's totally fine. I'm there for those 3 students and I appreciate the opportunity to help them. If the other ones don't care about me, then I'm not concerned about them either.
The reality, however, is that most of the students were listening. But the thing is: they weren't only listening. They were also connecting dots by doing their own online research as I talked to them. This is how students today behave. I know this mostly because I have a teenage daughter (as well as two slightly older kids) and I see how she gathers information using her computer or iPhone. It's fascinating to see how adept she is at finding information. So, my first reason for not being concerned about students using their laptops is that I understand that they're actively gathering information, as opposed to passively receiving it.
The other reason that I'm not bothered, and actually happy to see students using their computers as I talk is this. My generation is pretty lame when it comes to gathering information in the digital world. In law this manifests itself most starkly in the world of e-discovery. Discovery, in law, is all about getting the low-down on what really happened in a lawsuit. You can get the low-down by interviewing witnesses or deposing them, but that takes time, costs money and is inherently unreliable. What people say happened is not usually exactly what happened.
To really get a handle on what occurred in a case with serious factual disputes (which is most cases), you have to look at documents. And today when I say 'documents' I mostly mean 'electronic documents.' Sure, there's still a lot of paper to sift through (but you should digitize it anyway). Increasingly the bulk of written communications is in email. People who email tend to make the kind of casual comments that litigators like me really appreciate. So, these days, email is what you want to look at first and foremost.
Most lawyers have trouble with email (and digital information in general) because they don't understand how to navigate that world. Lawyers who don't search for things on Internet are the worst. They lack a fundamental skill that's needed to efficiently attack digital information. Naturally they're inept when it comes to handling electronic discovery. Some of them are committing serious malpractice. But, of course, they have no idea.
The next generation of lawyers will not have this problem, or at least it won't be a prevalent problem like it is today. The young turks coming out of law school today don't have a passive relationship to information. They attack digital information the way sharks attack wounded seals.
An example of this mindset was presented to me after my lecture to the Loyola law students. Two fellows who happened to be brothers came up to the podium to chat. We started talking to me about iPhone applications, and wound up talking about 'Words with Friends,' which is basically a word game like Scrabble. I told them that I was playing with my daughter and that I was sure that she was cheating because she always won (and I knew that she didn't have as large a vocabulary as me). I mentioned that I was going to have to resort to using one of the online word-finder tools to keep up with what she was doing.
One of the brothers said that they don't allow cheating like that when they play Words With Friends. I said, "what do you mean don't allow cheating? How can you know if the other person is cheating?" He said that if someone he is playing against uses a word he suspects is not in their vocabulary he checks online to see what if that word was the top suggestion in an online word-finder. If it is then he knows the person is probably cheating and calls them on it. His matter-of-fact response caught me totally off-guard.
So, think about this for a second and see if you grasp the power of this statement. And by 'this' I don't mean as applied to scrabble or word games. Think about the mindset. Law students today use the web like detectives. They know how to gather information (fine), but they instinctively know how to trace back the steps that other people use to find information. This mindset and the online research skills that come with it are dangerous. At least to some people.
For starters, these students will have a huge advantage when it comes to doing electronic discovery. They haven't even started practicing law and already they're leagues ahead of lawyers who've been in the business for years. They know how to gather digital information, and they have no resistance to adopting new ways of gathering it if that provides an instant advantage (e.g. no one is going to have to convince them of the value of concept searching). These lawyers will know how to zero in on key information quickly and inexpensively. So if I were a traditional lawyer (e.g. one with poor Internet skills or someone who has trouble with digital information), I'd be afraid of the next generation of lawyers.
The next generation will not graduate from law school and immediately surpass veteran lawyers. But they have a skill that's already in high demand, but short supply. Veteran lawyers can't quickly learn how to gather and process digital information. Most young lawyers will learn how to practice law fairly quickly, or at least much faster than the veteran lawyers will learn what they should be learning.
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Should law reviews do more for law students by promoting blogging?
Mar 7th
I traveled to Atlanta and Emory University this week to speak at the Annual Emory Bankruptcy Development Journal’s (EBDJ) Symposium.
Turns out the EBDJ is the only national bankruptcy journal edited and produced entirely by law students. The symposium gave law students, especially those writing for the EBDJ, the opportunity to mingle with bankruptcy lawyers and judges from around the Eastern half of the US. Certainly an inside track for judicial clerkships and positions in large law.
As talented as those law students were, I couldn’t help but think two things. One, I hope my kids never end up chasing that kind of life. And two, was the law school by publishing a law journal in the traditional way selling the students short?
My kids part is easy. I hear from too many lawyers that they feel like a cog in a large corporation when practicing in large law. Amazing when you’re presented the opportunity to work with some of the brightest minds on the some of the largest and more interesting legal matters in the country. But after doing all they could in law school to get the most sought after positions they’re not happy. They feel trapped. I want my kids to be happy.
Second, a law student on the EBDJ who picked me up at the airport introducing himself as a ’2L’ went on to describe his aspirations of getting a particular article published over the next year. He and his advisor even discussed the possibility of getting an op-ed on the subject published in the Wall Street Journal.
Talking more though the 2L though seemed resigned that the op-ed was kind of a pipe dream. He also expressed a little frustration that though the subject of the article he was working on was timely today, it may not be by the time its published. Others could begin writing and talking about the issue while he’d still be working his article through the editorial and publishing process.
Seemed a little comical to me. Though I didn’t tell the 2L that.
Here he was one of the more gifted law students at Emory doing perhaps some of the best research in the country on a particular subject being held back by the system from expressing his ideas and collaborating with lawyers across the country. He wasn’t doing anything to engage reporters or editors of the Wall Street Journal that could make that op-ed a reality.
What if Emory law promoted blogging to its law review students?
The 2L could get his thoughts out now. Having blogged in a focused and engaging way for the last 7 or 8 months since school started he’d be well know among bankruptcy practitioners, law professors, clerks, and judges across the country. By referencing bankruptcy stories in the Wall Street Journal the Journal’s reporters and editors would have seen the 2L. He could have exchanged emails with the reporters and connected with them on LinkedIn – just as he would have with the bankruptcy lawyers, professors, and clerks he would have met though blogging.
Not only would his article, and others, be published in a more timely fashion through blogging, but the law student would be in a better position career wise. He’d be better known. He’d have connections across the country, some of whom may offer him a job. Anyone Googling his name would see citations to him and his blog by bankruptcy practitioners and professors who are blogging. I doubt the law school’s placement office is opening doors like that.
Having developed a personal brand through blogging, a graduating law student would control their future much more than other grads. Even those who were on law review, but not blogging. If they wanted to do a clerkship and proceed to large law, that’s great. If they wanted to pursue other opportunities, the door would be open. It could even lead to the grad being a little happier as a practicing lawyer.
Don’t get me wrong I’m not bashing big law, law reviews, or clerkships. There’s wonderful people doing great stuff and getting great experience in all three. Just thinking we as a profession and law schools could be doing more for bright law students than we are.
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Carolyn Lamm To Defrauded Law Students: "Drop Dead And Go Eat Cake!"
Jan 28th
Looks like Queen Lamm of the ABA is merely going to “look into” the blatantly fraudulent self-reported employment statistics and the sleazy shenanigans of the subprime banking/educator operators.
“Finally, with respect to your specific question about requiring changes in the way schools report salary and employment information on their recent graduates, the Section is in fact looking at ways it might revise its annual questionnaire to law schools to elicit additional information. While there is no evidence that we have seen that schools are inaccurate in their reports, we may not be asking all the right questions, and that is under review. But we also encourage prospective students to consider carefully their decision to attend law school, their choices of schools and how they finance legal education. We are concerned about student debt and the burden it places on graduates. But we do not equate that concern with limiting entry into the profession. As I said in my letter, we believe it is important that the legal profession be open to entry from all elements of society. The law is not and should not be a closed club.”
http://abovethelaw.com/2010/01/aba_defends_itself_and_the_nee.php?show=comments#comments
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