Associate's Mind

  A buddy of mine, who does IT for a large company, recently shared an email he received from Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. IN conjunction with Amazon EC2, Amazon also offers: [...]

  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 [...]

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. [...]

  Want deep insight into what the younger generation thinks of laws? The deep and abiding knowledge they have? See this thread on Reddit: Lawyers of Reddit, What are Some Interesting Laws/Loopholes? There are nearly 10,000 posts, of which maybe .01% were actually written by lawyers. Want some highlights? I guarantee I’ve watched more Law [...]

It’s Not China; It’s Efficiency That Is Killing Our Jobs | Dyske “Today the best ideas can efficiently and quickly propagate worldwide, and everyone can efficiently find them and buy them…When someone owns a means of production that is more efficient, it can eliminate a large number of jobs, and he stands to profit handsomely [...]

  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 [...]

[In the future] The lawyers who succeed will combine Wal-Mart Efficiency With Neiman Marcus Feel. So says Thomas Morgan, a law professor from George Washington University, to the Florida Board of Governors and the Young Lawyers Division board at their recent joint Palm Beach meeting.  This in the wake of the current upheaval in the general economy and the [...]

It’s that time of year again. The ABA Journal is soliciting input for inclusion into this year’s Blawg 100 – a list of the 100 best legal blogs in the US.  This is the first year Associate’s Mind is available for inclusion as they do not allow blawgs run by law students to be included in the [...]

For the unaware, there is a lawyer-centric blogging platform/service called Lexblog, which is geared towards providing a turn-key solution to blogging/SEO/social media/etc . The CEO of the company is Kevin O’Keefe, and he maintains a blog called Real Lawyers Have Blogs. Yesterday, Kevin put up a post asking: Can blogging and other social media fill [...]