Associate's Mind

Two articles stood out to me from mainstream press outlets this past week*. One from the Atlantic, and one from the Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic’s piece, The Jobs Crisis at Our Best Law Schools Is Much, Much Worse Than You Think (citing LST’s 2012 report) delves into the abysmal employment landscape for new lawyers: The barren job [...]

  The 21st century hasn’t exactly been rainbows and ponies for the legal industry. As has been pointed out frequently here and nearly everywhere else, lawyers are facing unprecedented pressures on the profession. This has led to new lawyers adapting and performing in ways that were not anticipated while in law school. In a paper entitled Practicing Theory: [...]

I’m pleased to announce that I have signed a book deal with ABA Publishing. The book is focused on the transition from law school to law practice. It will be released Fall 2013.  The entire legal industry is in a state of flux. Legal work is being automated, down-sized, and outsourced. The amount of work is shrinking [...]

  Oddly enough, the internet is actually quite old school when it comes to relationships. Trust is given on first impressions. It’s essentially all a handshake deal. How Google Works A PageRank results from a mathematical algorithm based on the webgraph, created by all World Wide Web pages as nodes and hyperlinks as edges, taking into consideration authority [...]

  By now I presume that everyone has read the op-ed in the New York Times by Case Western Reserve’s law school dean, Lawrence Mitchell, entitled “Is Law School Worth the Money?” In the op-ed Dean Mitchell makes the pitch that going to law school is still a good idea and a solid return-on-investment. As expected, [...]

  Roughly a month ago I received a review copy of Steven Stark’s Writing To Win. It’s taken this long for me to get the review up because A) I’ve been busy and B) I always fully read any book I receive and Writing To Win is long and dense – albiet in the all the best ways possible. [...]

  It’s a little rough around the edges, but here is a video on encryption, US border crossings, and electronic devices. It’s based off of this post from about year ago about the USA v. Cotterman case. I put it together as an experiment as I think video probably has a larger reach than 3000 word breakdowns [...]

I previously wrote about the gamification of social media services in a piece entitled: You’re Being Played By Twitter. The article touched on the use of engagement statistics and feedback loops in order to draw users deeper into the services provided. Essentially, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc  all manipulate the egos of users in order to [...]

I was recently asked this question by a reader: I see that you had a baby during law school. Other than the tips from the post about outside time commitments, any advice for an upcoming 1L with two tots and a wife? I was going to reply privately, but decided to post my response here [...]

  I’m rather passionate about legal writing. In particular, I’m looking for ways to improve my own. I think my writing is pretty good (I was number one in legal writing in my class for what it’s worth), but I know I have a long way to go to get it to “great.” As such, [...]