Associate's Mind

  The use of computer automation and software continues to make its presence felt in the legal industry. Much of it is actually rather banal or inconsequential; Twitter for lawyers or some other silly thing. But there is a gradual, continued push to actually develop software that helps streamline the time it takes lawyers to find [...]

I was looking through some old  law review articles I’ve downloaded (don’t judge – I’m not the only one) and I came across an interesting survey and results on judges’ preferences regarding writing styles entitled: PERSUADING JUDGES: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF WRITING STYLE, PERSUASION, AND THE USE OF PLAIN ENGLISH by Sean Flammer. The article rightly points out that [...]

  In the wake of the horrific tragedy of the Newtown shootings, President Obama is set to unveil new firearm control tomorrow. Firearms evoke a wide rage of opinions from people. Many people favor stricter regulations on the availability of firearms. Others feel as though firearm ownership is regulated enough. And neither side is apt [...]

Interesting study was just released in the International Journal of Obesity entitled The Influence of a Defendant’s Body Weight on Perceptions of Guilt. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the influence of a defendant’s weight on simulated jurors’ perceptions of guilt. DESIGN AND METHODS: Participants were 471 lean and overweight adults (mean body mass index: 25.34±5.91) who read a vignette describing a [...]

A reader reached out to me with the following request: I am a lawyer by training but returned to school and am currently a graduate student at the London School of Economics working on a project looking at how lawyers feel about their work. I was wondering if it might be possible to post a [...]

  I recently got around to reading a whopper of an old law review article that I had been wanting to read for awhile entitled, “Inside the Judicial Mind.” From the introduction: …we conducted an empirical study to determine whether five common cognitive illusions would influence decision making of a sample of 167 federal magistrate [...]

I came across a new law blog recently, entitled Circuit Splits, focused on splits in appellate courts sitting in different federal circuits. It’s a new blog, but it shows promise. In a recent post, they put up something I had been looking for in the past in and thought I would share: different ways to [...]

  Maybe others were aware of this, but I was not. Starting in 2007, the Law Library of Congress began archiving blawgs: The collection has grown to more than one hundred items covering a broad cross section of legal topics.  Blawgs can also be retrieved by keywords or browsed by subject, name, or title. I went [...]

  Remember that party from college? That crazy time where we went and picked up the security guard from our apartment complex on the Strip at 2 am? And instead of picking him up, we ended up going out with him and walking down the Strip barefoot. Then the sorority! And what about when the [...]

  As I’ve written about before, there is growing pressure on the legal industry from large companies that are producing standardized “form” documents for consumers at much lower costs than obtaining such documents from a traditional law firm. Yet somewhere in that process, a lawyer was at least involved in the creation of these form [...]