Information Filled Under 'In-house Law Departments' Category
"How to Shift Law Firms to a Performance-Based Compensation System" Thursday, November 19th, 2009
In the news: “In the last year, several Am Law 100 firms have announced that they have shifted to, or will shift to, a performance-based compensation program for associates. Dan DiPietro, Lisa Keyes and Laura Saklad write that designing and executing a successful performance-based system aligned to a particular firm’s strategy takes time, and the changes can require major cultural shifts and can even run the risk of costing, rather than saving, the firm money
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"How to Shift Law Firms to a Performance-Based Compensation System"
Ken Auletta’s new book, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, ponders whether the 1,000-pound Gorilla of the Web is pursuing an altruistic endeavor to offer all the world’s information for free or is a marauding monster on a mission to dominate the media and information landscape. With Google in command of my e-mail platform, my blogging platform, my search platform, my RSS reader, my photo-storage platform and even my document collaboration platform, I certainly should be worried that Google could become the Big Brother I never wanted. But I am lulled into complacency by the simple fact that Google does what it does so well.
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The Google Gorilla Enters the Research Game
There has been plenty of talk over the past year or so about how the billable hour at law firms is under attack, and how changes may be in store. Of course, most of it is just talk so far, and precious little action, as law firms cling to their traditional ways. One firm that claims to have completely done away with the billable hour, however, is the Shepherd Law Group, which states that it hasn’t billed or even tracked a single hour since 2006
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Must Law Firms Know the Cost of Each Matter They Take On?
Last month, an article in The New York Times observed that for people being squeezed by the recession, a summons to perform jury duty holds a new fear: financial ruin. In Bonneville County, Idaho, for instance, the jury commissioner said that while she typically summons 400 people for a two-week term of service, she has lately had to “pop it up to 500” because of rising numbers of economic hardship claims.
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Recession Prompts Wave of Volunteers for Jury Duty
Seattle University School of Law professor Joaquin Avila says he was the primary author of the 2002 California Voting Rights Act, drawing on advice from Robert Rubin, legal director for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, and others. Since then, all of the $4.3 million collected in settlements under the law has gone to Avila, to Rubin’s committee and to lawyers working with them, The Associated Press found in its review of these cases. So far, all of the cases have been initiated by Rubin’s committee or by Avila, who is also a member of the committee.
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Law a Jackpot for Lawyers Who Wrote It, AP Says
As I wrote back in August, the number of Twitter followers one has continues to be an extremely misleading metric. This week, Mark Britton, CEO of Avvo, advanced that idea further, writing on the Legal Technology blog that it was time for him to “let the cat out of the bag” and debunk the notion “that the number of Twitter followers one has is positively, if not perfectly, correlated to the amount of influence someone has in the marketplace.” Britton states flat-out that “the number of one’s Twitter followers has nothing to do with his or her influence.” He explains, as I discussed in August, that with very little effort anyone can pick up tens of thousands of followers simply by following tens of thousands of people themselves. Britton says that, in fact, the “true Twitter litmus test on the influence front” is as follows: Look at the ratio of the number of people someone is “following” vs.
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Twitter ‘Number of Followers’ Debate Rages On
I thought we had completely maxed out on the Supreme Court geekiness with the baseball cards and then the oral arguments available on iTunes, but no… not even close. Today, I present you with the new gold standard in Supreme Court geekery: “FantasySCOTUS.net, the Premier Supreme Court Fantasy League.” FantasySCOTUS.net is the brainchild of Josh Blackman, who admits to being an “unashamedly big Supreme Court nerd.” At the beginning of the October 2009 term, he writes, “a friend asked me to predict the outcome of several Supreme Court cases.
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Plenty of Fantasy Players on This Bench
Posted by Evan Schaeffer: “That’s what Marc Andreessen calls “techniques, tactics, and tricks for maximizing personal productivity.” In a long post, he explains some of his favorite tips (some of which I’m paraphrasing)– Don’t keep a schedule; Keep three and only three lists: a Todo List, a Watch List, and a Later List; Each night before you go to bed, prepare a 3×5 index card with a short list of 3 to 5 things that you will do the next day; Use procrastination to your advantage; Be incompetent on purpose when you don’t want to be asked again; Email only twice a day; Don’t answer the phone; Wear an iPod at work (people are less likely to bother you); Say no unless you really want to say yes; Do something you love. There are lots of links in the full post. Waste some time and read them! (Link from Litigation and Trial .)”
More Perspectives on the ‘Connecticut Five’ Tuesday, November 10th, 2009As I noted here last week, Connecticut’s attorney grievance committee begins its hearings Thursday into the cases of five attorneys accused of violating state ethics rules by participating in the Web site TotalBankruptcy.com. As I wrote then, my former Legal Blog Watch colleague Carolyn Elefant, writing at her blog MyShingle, wondered why so many in the legal community were letting the so-called Connecticut Five be “hung out to dry.” I also quoted Josh King, general counsel at Avvo.com, who argued at the Avvo Blog that lawyers should be allowed to market themselves however they see fit, “in the absence of consumer harm.” But not everyone sees Total Attorneys — the parent company of TotalBankrutpcy.com — as benign. As I noted in my earlier post, one who does not is Connecticut lawyer Zenas Zelotes
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More Perspectives on the ‘Connecticut Five’
Posted by Chuck Kallendorf : “In a case echoing State v. Bloomer back in June, in which the Ohio Supreme Court held that trial courts “had a statutory duty to provide notice to offenders of post-release control at the sentencing hearing, and any sentence imposed without such notification is contrary to law and void,” possibly allowing the release of as many as 15, 000 former prisoners now under post-release supervision, it yesterday found that once the Department of Corrections determines an offender a good candidate for placement in an intensive program prison (“IPP”) in lieu of serving the sentence ordered by the court, and notifies the court of that determination, if the court doesn’t take any action after ten days, the Department may proceed with placement in IPP and once that inmate completes the IPP can be released. State v
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"Ohio Supreme Court Upholds "Intensive Program Prison" Release"
Via this post on the ABA Journal’s Criminal Justice page, I came across this New York Times article about several people who are doing hard time because of “scent lineups,” in which a dog chose them and their smell out of a group of other, um, smells. It turns out that sometimes these dogs fail to sniff out the real criminal. Curvis Bickham, for example, was tied to a triple homicide when a dog identified him in a scent lineup.
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Prosecutor’s Best Friend? People Convicted in ‘Scent Lineups’ Fight Back
Posted by Chuck Kallendorf: “USAToday.com last Wednesday morning reported that many “states were trying to put the brakes on bad driving by targeting ‘super speeders,’ lane hogs and those guilty of multiple moving violations.” “The moves,” the article says, “come as a growing body of evidence suggests that aggressive driving — including speeding, tailgating, changing lanes without signaling, ignoring traffic signals and weaving in and out of traffic — is deadlier than drunken driving.
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"State Traffic Standards"
There’s an interesting article this week in Texas Lawyer about how judges are using social media. On one level, having judges who are familiar with social media can be helpful in dealing with certain issues that may arise at trial, like tweeting jurors or electronic discovery involving sites like Twitter and Flickr. But on another level, some of the judicial Facebook usage described in this article seemed a bit intrusive, in my view.
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Lawyers Beware: Judges May Be Watching You on Social Media
Many large firm lawyers are hopping aboard the Twitter bandwagon, (as well as those of other social media sites) and realizing big time benefits from tiny, 140-character tweets, reports the San Jose Business Journal. However, it bears noting that most of the large firm lawyers finding business on Twitter represent startups or emerging technology developers who tend to rely heavily on social media. For example, Glenn Manishin, an antitrust, telecommunications and technology policy litigator at Duane Morris says that at lease a half dozen clients have retained him based on connections built through social media.
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From Small Tweets, Big Firm Clients Grow
Posted by Larry Bodine: “Prepare for better business development with the talking points from this month’s featured articles in Originate!, the business development newsletter. Lead Article: Making His Mark – 8 Things an IP Lawyer Wished He Had Known Sooner about Making Business Development Work Attorney Nicholas Weston knew he had to do something different at his boutique IP firm. If he wanted to improve the kinds of work he was doing plus stop wasting time and money, he had to overhaul his approach to business development
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"August 2009 Issue of Originate! is Online"
At The Huffington Post, Peter Schwartz writes that we are in the midst of “the radical transformation of the legal publishing marketplace,” a transformation, he contends, that will no longer support the two largest legal publishers, West and LexisNexis. As they suffocate under their own weight, the legal research marketplace will open to “nimble, low-cost competitors and new rivals with deep pockets such as Bloomberg.” His prediction should be read with the understanding that he is the founder and president of one of these “nimble, low-cost” competitors, the online legal publishing company Knowledge Mosaic, which sells a news and research service targeted at the securities industry. That said, Schwartz makes some interesting observations about the state of legal research.
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The Reinvention of Legal Research
I presume Paul Palmer’s parents thought they were taking a stand for free speech when they brought him the T-shirt that bore the slogan, “John Edwards for President ’08.” Palmer, then a sophomore at Waxahachie High School in Texas, had gone to school that morning with a different T-shirt, one that said simply, “San Diego.” When the assistant principal told him his attire violated the school policy against wearing shirts with printed messages, he phoned home and his parents soon arrived with the Edwards shirt. You see where this going, right? The school said Palmer could not wear the Edwards shirt
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5th Circuit Disses John Edwards T-Shirt
In Minnesota legal circles, a newspaper once wrote of him, David Moskal was “known for several remarkable achievements, including the fastest disbarment in the state’s history.” Moskal rose rapidly from No. 1 in his class at William Mitchell College of Law to become one of Minnesota’s highest-flying personal injury lawyers, earning millions and profiled in the magazine Minnesota Law & Politics as one of the state’s “Tort Kings.” The newspaper article I quoted above went on to say: “He made partner by the time he was 33, and soon had all the usual perks: a house with a pool, a condo in Steamboat Springs, a lakefront cabin in a resort area, hefty alimony payments and a jewelry-bedecked second wife.” How far the mighty do fall.
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Disgraced, Disbarred Attorney Found Dead
Posted by Chuck Kallendorf: “The Office of Management & Budget (OMB) is in the process of “considering options for revising the federal government’s prohibition on web-tracking technology such as ‘cookies,’” with a goal of protecting the privacy of persons visiting federal government web sites while simultaneously making those sites more user-friendly & allow enhanced analytics. (See Federal Register announcement) The White House’s blog back on July 24th., chronicled the federal government’s policies with respect to privacy issues and the Internet starting back in 1999 , when “cookies” could only be used to collect information from a site if the agency running it gave “clear notice” of that.
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"Revising Federal "Cookie" Policy"
A Texas federal court judge granted an injunction against Microsoft, barring the company from selling some of its Word word-processing software because it violates a Canadian company’s patent related to XML (extensible markup language), reports The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and other media sources. As Wikipedia explains, XML is used to create custom markup languages, which in turn are used in a variety of products, including Microsoft Office. Back on May 20, a jury found that Microsoft had infringed on Canadian company i4i’s patent.
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Microsoft Barred From Selling Word
Law schools are accustomed to teaching students about precedent and what’s been done before, rather than helping them to identify existing trends and figure out how to move forward. But the Indiana University Maurer School of Law’s new Center on Global Legal Profession will break fresh ground, by “focusing on the unprecedented challenges lawyers are facing around the world and develop research and training materials to assist current and future attorneys in their understanding of international legal systems.” The National Law Journal offers additional details
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Center on Global Legal Profession Launched at Indiana University
Posted by Evan Schaeffer: “He wasn’t a legal writer, but Raymond Carver had something important to say about expressing complex ideas in a simple manner: When something feels complex or complicated to you, write it out carefully and thoughtfully, several different times if necessary, until it flows smoothly and expresses exactly what you want it to communicate and nothing else. Carver’s tip appeared in a letter to his daughter. The quote is pulled from a post about Carver at Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes
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"Legal Writing: Making the Complex, Simple"
Perhaps there’s an upside to the downturn after all. As this article, from Working Mother magazine describes, law firms are more willing to accommodate flexible schedules these days — not necessarily out of noble motives, but because it’s financially expedient to do so. The article describes a bunch of changes at law firms, many of which are news to even someone like me who’s been tracking this issue since the start of my beat here at Legal Blog Watch.
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Economy Driving More Work/Life Balance at Law Firms
Posted by Sabrina Pacifici: ” BBC : “Women who are optimistic have a lower risk of heart disease and death, an American study shows. The latest study by US investigators mirrors the findings of earlier work by a Dutch team showing optimism reduces heart risk in men. The research on nearly 100,000 women, published in the journal Circulation, found pessimists had higher blood pressure and cholesterol.
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"BBC Reports on New Study: Optimistic Women Live Longer"
Posted by Dennis Kennedy: “Tom Mighell and I have recorded another episode of The Kennedy-Mighell Report podcast and it’s now available on the Legal Talk Network and on iTunes. The episode is called ” The State of the Blawgosphere ” ( show notes here ) and here’s the episode description: On this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report, co-hosts Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell discuss the current state of legal blogging on the Internet and share with you what is new in the blawgosphere.
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"State of the Blawgosphere 2009 – Podcast"
Posted by Anthony Cerminaro: “As a hardworking student, you have a lot to organize, including essays, exams, deadlines, and class schedules, not to mention your social and personal life – plus any part-time jobs you may have taken on. For help, see this list of mind-mapping tools that are designed to help you see your ideas more clearly, analyze and outline research papers, become more efficient when you study, and get inspired to be more creative in your work. See also this post from 12manage for an explanation of mind-mapping.” The active links are available at the source site listed below
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"Mind-Mapping Tools for College Students & Others" [Read in Lawyers here]
With associate positions hard to come by, new graduates — desperate to find a paying job in the legal profession — are applying for work as paralegals, legal secretaries and law librarians, according to Long Island Business News. The story sites one new grad, Jessica Sparacino, who secured a job as a paralegal at Jackson Lewis, but that was only because she’d been working in that position through law school
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Should You Work as a Paralegal if You Can’t Find a Job as a Lawyer?