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’ [...]

  Just like the rest of the Apple product line received a sales boost from the success of the iPhone (dubbed the “halo effect), stories are popping up around Time’s cover story below: I have no clue how the article reads, it’s locked behind a paywall. Does Time still come out in print? I was actually kind [...]

  Many lawyers will spend significant amounts of time reading, analyzing, and deconstructing arguments of opposing counsel. This requires a significant amount of reading an research. But Daniel C. Dennett, Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, recently shared this quick shortcut he uses to when reading argumentative essays from other philosophers: Look for “surely” in the document, and check each occurrence. Not always, [...]

  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 [...]

  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 [...]

  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 still on my SSRN kick for whatever reason, deep diving into obscure law review articles whose totals reads don’t amount to one days traffic on Associate’s Mind. It’s a shame really as there are some worthwhile articles crammed in with the likes of Harry Potter and the Law or whatever. Of course, the other [...]

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 [...]

I download a lot of law review articles from SSRN. I know, I know, I’m a glutton for punishment. But I do it all for you dear reader. I also find it oddly satisfying to be 1 out of 112 people or whatever who have read one of these 50 page monstrosities. Why, that’s almost [...]