Law school for Seagram site?

Proposal being floated among RIM co-CEO, Laurier, UW

TheRecord.com
January 11, 2008
TAMSIN MCMAHON
RECORD STAFF
WATERLOO

The former Seagram lands in downtown Waterloo are being touted as a potential location for a proposed law school.

Jim Balsillie, co-chief executive officer of Research In Motion, has been in talks with both the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University about a potential partnership to open a law school on the site at Erb and Caroline streets, said John English.

Read more...

Law School Exam Mistakes

Now that law students across the country have started classes again, it's worth revisiting the subject of law school exams. Specifically, I want to discuss common mistakes that students make on law school essay exams. I have posted on this subject before, and some of my previous posts on the subject are the folllowing:

Exam-Taking Advice
Reflections on Law School Exams
More Information on Law School Exams

Each of these posts contains additional links to other entries on this and other blog sites that you may find useful. And then there's this little classic from 2006 on the now-defunct Blawg Wisdom, which I think is very insightful.

Here are my thoughts after grading this fall's batch of exams.

1. Time management is key. It is better to competently answer all exam questions than to ace some questions and shortchange others. Your total score will be higher if you manage your time.

2. Taking a few minutes to think about how to tackle an essay question is time well spent. Take a few minutes to figure out both what you need to talk about and how best to organize your answer. And then write a quick little outline. Students who do this almost always do better on exams. They stay on point--which leads to better answers. And the outline is both (a) a way to make sure you don't forget to discuss a point you intended to discuss, and (b) a way to demonstrate to your prof that you are organized and have thought your answer through. Don't underestimate the latter point: an outline certainly cannot hurt in this regard, and it may help.

3. Law student DNA is encoded with an almost irresistible urge to not follow the advice in point #2. You know the feeling--you know your prof said to think first and write second, but you can't resist just plunging in. I know the feeling too--I have been there. But resist it with all your might.

4. The most common mistake of students who understand exam questions is to summarize the law, but not fully apply it to the fact pattern in question. The result? The answer is evidence that the student clearly understood the law, but it is not clear evidence that the student knew how to apply it. And the final score is lower as a result.

5. Another common mistake of students is to jump to the conclusion without explaining how they got there. This is, in essence, the converse of #4--applying the law, but not explaining it very clearly. This too lowers your score.

6. No essay exam answer is perfect. Exams are stressful situations, after all, and the fact patterns of essay questions are typically fairly complex. Your time is extremely limited too, except for take-home exams, and often those have page limits. So you simply can't say everything. So don't expect to. By identifying the primary issues, discussing the relevant law, and applying it, you stand a very good chance at getting a very good grade.

Law Firm Partnership: What's in a Name?

I received a comment to my last post that was way off point, but which had two virtues: one, the commenter admitted it was off topic; and two, it was on an interesting subject that is important for law students to understand. So I have made this question the subject of today's post.

Here was the commenter's question:

While off topic, I heard something that is law career material--Is it true that once you make partner you have to pay your own benefits?

The short answer is "Yes." Once you are a full partner at a law firm, you pay your own benefits. But short answers are boring, and the reasons behind this answer are quite interesting. So let me explain.

When you are a law firm partner, you are a part-owner of the firm. That's true regardless of how the firm is structured--be it a regular partnership or something else (limited liability partnership, limited liability company, corporation, etc.). Law firms are structured in all different ways, and in fact calling law firms "partnerships" is increasingly inaccurate, as many (including my old firms) restructure for liability purposes. So the term "partner" is often used solely for the sake of convention. In fact, some firms even forgo the term and call their partners "shareholders."

When you work at a company, who pays your benefits? The owners, that's who. So as a law firm partner, you pay your own benefits. Bear in mind, however, that you also reap the rewards of high profits when times are good. Of course, you also share the risks/losses when times are bad--and this sharing of loss is one of the reasons that many larger firms have restructured as non-partnership entities that allow for limitation of liabilities. Remember that general partnerships are pass-through entities, so that all risks pass, jointly and severally, to the partners. That means that if a true partnership law firm goes belly up, the associates get fired--but the partners can lose everything. I know people who have experienced that.

Another very interesting thing to bear in mind about law firm partnership is that a lot of people who carry the title "partner" are not really partners or owners of the firm. This is the phenomenon of the two-tier partnership. These people are held out to the public as "partners," and they do partner-level work, but they do not (yet) own a stake in the firm. Instead, they have employment contracts with the firm (unlike associates, who are "at will" employees).

Cynical readers might think that the two-tier partnership structure is a way to lengthen the track to partnership. They might also view it as a way for a firm to get all of the benefits of calling non-equity (non-owner) attorneys "partners" so they can charge their clients more, but not have to pay those lawyers full partner rates. In my opinion, those cynics are exactly right. It is no accident or coincidence that as the practice of law became much more profitable in the 1980s and 1990s, partnership became harder to get at many firms. During my years in practice I saw things change dramatically. Partnership tracks became longer, and the requirements to make full partner became more and more onerous. So onerous, in fact, that more and more non-equity partners (read: partners who are not really partners) are opting to stay that way. They are, in other words, lawyers with long-term contracts with their firms, and they do excellent work and get paid very well. But they are not partners. (Which means, of course, that they do not have to pay their own benefits.) Personally, I think that if law firms could do it, we'd be seeing "three-tier" partnership tracks.

So my advice to any law student on the job market--in any job market, big or small--is to ask, during interviews, about the firm's partnership structure. Pick your moment carefully. Perhaps you shouldn't ask during a screening interview, when you are gunning for the call-back interview at the firm's office. But if the moment seems right during the call-back, ask. Be polite and genuinely curious--after all, you want to work there, so you want to know how the place works, right? And if the answer contains descriptions like "two-tier partnership" or "non-equity partners" or the like, you'll know you are dealing with a firm with a protracted partnership track that has two steps. In many markets, that is the industry standard. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, however, is probably the subject of a separate post.

Potpourri Part 2

As a follow-up to my last two posts (here and here), my latest law review article, The Comparative and Absolute Advantages of Junior Law Faculty in the Classroom: Implications for Teaching and the Future of American Law Schools, was recently used as a discussion piece at a junior faculty forum held at Stetson University College of Law. That forum essentially was a pan-Florida conference on the role of junior faculty in law schools. Professor Joe Morrissey of Stetson asked whether my law review article could be used as a discussion piece at the forum. I of course was highly honored and said yes.

Professor Morrissey is active in the Association of American Law Schools' (AALS) Section on New Law Professors, and he wrote about the Stetson forum and my article in the section's annual newsletter. I have posted the newsletter article online here, with the permission of Professor Morrissey and the section. You can can link to my full law review article here.

It perhaps smacks of blatant self-promotion (I generally prefer my self-promotion to be subtle), but I was really pleased that my article was used at the Stetson junior faculty forum. My friend and fellow blogger Professor Paul Secunda of the University of Mississippi School of Law (who is moving to Marquette University Law School in the fall) has said that a virtue of legal scholarship is that it often seeks to solve problems of practical and social relevance. I agree with him, and what I find gratifying about the use of my law review article at Stetson is that perhaps the article might make a difference for some teachers in the classroom--and thus for law schools in general, and their students, and their future clients. Idealistic and quixotic, I know, but no one ever makes a difference by dreaming small.

Potpourri

There has been so much going on with the start of the new semester that it raises a problem: what to talk about? Like studies about consumers who, faced with a plethora of choices tend to freeze and make no choice, I find myself bombarded with an embarrassment of riches in terms of blogworthy topics. So much interesting stuff to blog about, so little time.

So here are two subjects that have been on my mind this week. One is a follow-up to my last post; the other is new.

AALS Panel on Junior Faculty, January 4, 2008. In my last post I blogged about a panel I was on at the Association of American Law Schools' Annual Meeting in New York City, for which I presented an article entitled The Comparative and Absolute Advantages of Junior Law Faculty in the Classroom: Implications for Teaching and the Future of American Law Schools. As the article's name implies, it is a fusion of my interest in international trade theory and my interest in/dedication to quality teaching. The paper can be accessed online from my Social Science Research Network (SSRN) page here. (You may need to register for SSRN if you have not used it before, but registration is free.) The panel went well--no hecklers, and there was good feedback. I am looking forward to the article being published this year in the BYU Education and Law Journal.

Good Lookin' Lawyers. The ABA Journal and Legal Blog Watch have reported on a study which concludes that good-looking lawyers make more money, on average, than those considered less good looking. This sounds like one of those "master of the obvious" studies, doesn't it? In a separate study, the FDA has concluded, after five years of intensive research, that the color of most oranges is . . . wait for it . . . orange.

But on a more serious note, it is disturbing that looks should matter in a skills-based profession like the law. I do not care what my doctor looks like; I care about whether she or he is competent. (Although come to think of it, having a healthy-looking doctor is somewhat reassuring, I suppose). It's especially disturbing that looks should matter in a profession that conducts so much of its business via e-mail and telephone.

Perhaps law firm hiring committees do not have entirely the same set of interests as their clients. Maybe their hiring decisions are based in part on their own visual preferences, instead of the best interests of their clients. Or perhaps it's subconscious on their part, and all other factors being relatively equal, looks tip the scale between two similar candidates. Or maybe there is a subconscious effect on the candidates' side as well: maybe better looks breed more confidence, and thus better interview results. Or maybe all three. I am not an expert in psychology, but it does seem likely that these factors play a part.

If we accept the fact that appearance matters to us, and I think that's largely incontrovertible, perhaps the question is whether anything should be done about it. Is this something that simply "is what it is," or should law firms, and law schools, take steps to try and counter this bias in favor of people perceived to be more attractive?

And for those who may be wondering, I will not be writing an article on the comparative or absolute advantages of better-looking junior faculty in the classroom. Some areas of interdisciplinary study are better left untouched.

Becoming a Mediator and Arbitrator

I'm sorry that I haven't posted in a while. Christmas kept me really busy with family committments.

Then, in the New Year, I decided to become accredited as a mediator and an arbitrator, so I have been really busy with that. It's an exciting new development in my legal career. I'll write more about it soon, as you may find it interesting or inspiring.

ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) has become a lot more mainstream in the last 15 years or so, and continues to make inroads with the public, the courts, and with lawyers. More on that later.

The Comparative and Absolute Advantages of Junior Law Faculty

As I write this post I am sitting in my hotel room in New York, where I am attending the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) annual meeting. The theme of this year's meeting is "Reassessing Our Roles as Scholars and Educators in Light of Change." There certainly is a lot of change occurring at American law schools these days, and that topic is a key focus of this blog.

Because of my interest in this subject, I am speaking at the conference on a panel sponsored by the AALS Section on New Law Professors, entitled New Law Faculty as Catalysts for Change. The title of my piece is The Comparative and Absolute Advantages of Junior Law Faculty in the Classroom: Implications for Teaching and the Future of American Law Schools. The paper can be accessed online from my Social Science Research Network (SSRN) page here.

This piece is actually a blend of two areas of interest to me: international trade theory, and law school teaching theory and practice. My piece, as the name indicates, applies the concepts of comparative and absolute advantage to the subject of law school teaching, to see what they might tell us about how junior faculty can be used to improve law school teaching and how we might rethink law school teaching overall. Here's an abstract of the article:

In the ongoing debate about how to improve law school teaching, there is a general consensus that law schools should do more to train junior faculty members how to teach. While this may be the case, this consensus inadvertently leads to an implicit assumption that is not true—that in all facets of law teaching, junior faculty are at a disadvantage compared to senior faculty. In fact, there are aspects of law teaching for which junior faculty can be better suited than their senior colleagues. This Article reviews scholarship concerning law teaching and identifies three teaching factors that generally favor junior law faculty: generational proximity to the law school student body; recency of law practice experience as junior practitioners; and lower susceptibility to the problem of “conceptual condensation”—extreme depth of subject matter knowledge that makes it difficult to see subjects from the students’ perspective.

This Article employs the economic concepts of (a) economies of scale or productive efficiency and (b) absolute and comparative advantage to suggest how these junior faculty advantages could be harnessed to improve law school teaching. With respect to productive efficiency, it is suggested that greater intra-faculty dialogue can increase a law faculty’s output of effective teaching. Currently, senior faculty members often provide assistance or advice to junior faculty in areas of senior faculty expertise or advantage—such as depth of knowledge in a course’s subject matter—but this is largely a one-way flow of information. However, if junior faculty were also to provide insight and advice to senior faculty regarding areas of junior faculty advantage, the quality of law school teaching might be significantly enhanced. Junior-senior faculty dialogue might be promoted through a variety of means, including faculty workshops and even perhaps teaching reviews of senior faculty by junior faculty.

With respect to the concepts of absolute and comparative advantage, this Article suggests that law school teaching could be improved through the specialization of teaching functions. Instead of professors individually teaching separate courses, professors might coordinate their teaching (that is, team-teach) across a number of courses in the law school curriculum, as a means to more effectively harness the respective strengths (and minimize the respective weaknesses) of junior and senior faculty in the classroom. Through the leveraging of junior faculty advantages, overall law school teaching might be significantly improved. This Article concludes by discussing the implications of these recommendations for law school culture in general and for the legal profession as a whole.

(Note: If you are not already a user of SSRN you will need to register to use SSRN, but the registration is easy, and it's free. For those unfamiliar with SSRN, it's an online network through which scholars distribute and share up-to-the-minute research. It's a great and free resource for scholarship in the social sciences.)

Also on the panel with me are Emily Hughes of Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, Geoff Rapp of The University of Toledo College of Law, and Ben Madison of Regent Law School. Moderating the panel is Michael Schwartz of Washburn University School of Law. Having him as moderator is excellent, since he is a leading scholar in the area of law school teaching and an all-around good guy.

I will post more about the panel after it occurs. In the meantime, I welcome any thoughts or input about the article.