Associate's Mind

  The Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Initiative and the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) at the University of Denver just released a new tool called Law Jobs: By the Numbers™. “This tool is a natural outgrowth of the law school employment data that is now available,” said Alli Gerkman, incoming director of Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers and IAALS’ [...]

  I’ve already mentioned it on Twitter, but if for some reason you’re a only-follows-the-blog type of guy/gal, you really owe it to yourself to check out Aaron Kirschenfeld’s The Law School Crisis, Visualized. It’s the best overarching accumulation of the law school crisis data that I’ve seen. Go check it out.

  Via Jason Wilson: “Legal employers aren’t hiring very much – that’s the problem.” “Cost is the thing.” “In the next 3-4 months, we are going to see a crisis hit law schools that will be many times greater than the crisis in legal education that prompted the creation of this task force in the [...]

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 [...]

  Although you’ve probably heard from both of them before, law professor Brian Tamanaha, and Dean Mitchell of Western Reserve Law School were on WHYY’s Radiotimes yesterday discussing the topic “Rethinking Law Schools.” You can give it a listen here:   Here’s the TL;DR: Tamanaha Risk in writing book? Back lash from colleagues, but some were supportive. Negative [...]

  Quick FYI for those wanting to submit articles to Law Review/Journals, see this paper on SSRN entitled: “Information for Submitting Articles to Law Reviews & Journals“: This document contains information about submitting articles to law reviews and journals, including the methods for submitting an article, any special formatting requirements, how to contact them to request an expedited [...]

  “Popular culture has made a career in law look easy and lucrative. But this is complete fiction.” Thus begins the Alabama State Bar’s (ASB) informational booklet, “Thinking of Going to Law School?” But wait, it gets better! Before you go any further, you need to make a realistic assessment by honestly answering three questions [...]

  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 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 case you’ve been living under a rock for the past – mmm, five years – the legal industry is not doing so hot right now. And as a result, law schools and firms have come under a large degree of scrutiny. This past week a number of mainstream medis outlets discussed the problem. [...]