Category Archives: Law schools

2011 Law Firm Legal Research Requirements for New Attorneys

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2011 Law Firm Legal Research Requirements for New Attorneys

Patrick Meyer

Thomas Jefferson School of Law
September 26, 2011
Abstract:    
This article summarizes results from the author’s 2010 law firm legal research survey, which determined what research functions, and in what formats, law firms require new hires to be proficient. This survey updates the author’s 2009 article that is available at this site and which was based on this author’s earlier law firm legal research survey.

These new survey results confirm that law firms need schools to integrate the teaching of online and print-based research resources and to emphasize cost-effective research. The following federal and state specific print-based resources should be taught in an integrated manner: legislative codes, secondary source materials, reporters, administrative codes and digests.

 

Source:  LSN Law & Society: The Legal Profession eJournal Vol. 6 No. 74, 11/16/2011

Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers

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Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers
The Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) at the University of Denver.
http://educatingtomorrowslawyers.du.edu/

The site includes examples of innovative courses and and a respurces page with strategic plans, teaching strategies, and surveys.

From the description and press release:

“Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers” provides a platform to encourage law schools in the U.S. to showcase innovative teaching to produce more practice-ready lawyers who can better meet the needs of an evolving profession.

Rebecca Love Kourlis is the Executive Director of IAALS and a former Colorado Supreme Court justice.

“Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers leverages the Carnegie Model of learning,” Kourlis says. “Our project provides support for shared learning, innovation, ongoing measurement and collective implementation. We are very excited to launch this project to encourage new ways to train law students and to measure innovation in the years to come.”

William M. Sullivan is the Director of “Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers.” He also is the lead author of the 2007 Carnegie Foundation report, Educating Lawyers.

“Our goal is to encourage law schools that are already committed to innovation to share what they know in a structured, collaborative place so that other law professors may discuss and develop new teaching techniques,” Sullivan says.

IAALS will manage this initiative, the first of its kind in the country. The initiative is partnering with a growing number of law schools (including Stanford Law School) in a consortium committed to innovative teaching The initiative is fully funded by IAALS, the consortium, and the University of Denver.

Martin J. Katz, Dean of the Sturm College of Law at the University of Denver serves with Kourlis and Sullivan on the initiative’s Executive Committee.

“We want to help law schools integrate three sets of values or what the Carnegie Foundation calls ‘apprenticeships,’” Katz says. “They are knowledge, practice, and professionalism. We believe this initiative can change how law professors and deans, students, and ultimately the legal profession respond to our changing world.”

WordPress and Law Libraries

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I recently attended a fantastic conference: WordCamp San Francisco.

I came away feeling very inspired by the event and the community.  As a ‘frugal’ person, I was also super impressed at how they managed to pull off such a polished affair for only $50/person for full registration — that included lunch and caffeinated drinks for 3 days!

I thought that the name tags were pure genius.   Instead of getting a bulky brochure with all the program details (many more than I’d ever want), the name tag

was actually a small booklet attached to a lanyard.  And, everything you *really* needed to know was inside.  It had the mini-schedule, conference hash tags, maps, etc.  Very nifty.

I was also wowed by the numbers shared (and artistic, jazz inspired slides) during Matt Mullenweg‘s State of the Word address on Sunday.  Two statistics that were really impressive:

This made me wonder: how do these numbers relate to the .edu domain slice?  And, in particular, the law school environment?
So, although highly unscientific, if you do work in the law school/law library world, would you take a moment to answer the following question.  I’ll be happy to share results.

The FTC should begin an investigation into U.S. law schools

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That’s the conclusion reached by Joel Murray in his paper “Professional Dishonesty: Do U.S. Law Schools That Report False or Misleading Employment Statistics Violate Consumer Protection Laws?.”

From the conclusion:

The FTC should begin an investigation into U.S. law schools. Many law schools are violating the FTC Act by reporting false and misleading employment statistics. The FTC has jurisdiction over law schools because they are professional schools oriented towards preparing students for legal careers and therefore, provide pecuniary benefits to students. If a law school reports false or misleading employment statistics in marketing materials or to U.S. News and World Report, the law school engages in deception and false advertising in violation of the FTC Act. Reporting false employment statistics is deceptive as prospective law students have limited, or no, resources to determine a school’s actual employment statistics. These employment statistics play a material role in a prospective law student’s choice to attend a law school. . . .

And here’s the paper’s abstract:

This paper examines the potential legal application of the Federal Trade Commission Act (FTC Act) to American Bar Association (ABA) accredited law schools. In recent years, evidence has emerged indicating that many law schools are misreporting or falsifying employment statistics in marketing materials and to the U.S. News Rankings and World Report law school rankings, the preeminent rankings for United States (U.S.) law schools. The reporting of false or misleading employment statistics to prospective students may violate provisions of the FTC Act that prohibit deceptive practices and false advertising. This paper reviews evidence that U.S. law schools are misreporting employment statistics, examines how the FTC Act applies to U.S. law schools, and argues that U.S. law schools that misreport or falsify employment statistics violate multiple provisions of the FTC Act.

And here’s the complete cite:

Murray, Joel, Professional Dishonesty: Do U.S. Law Schools That Report False or Misleading Employment Statistics Violate Consumer Protection Laws? (May 27, 2011). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1854709

 

“Why do we need law libraries when ‘everything is available online?’”

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Volume 1, number 1 of UC Irvine Law Review just landed upon my desk.  It’s a symposium issue “Training for the Practice of Law at the Highest Levels: Reflections from UC Irvine” and it includes an article by library director Beatrice A. Tice, “The Academic Law Library in the 21st Century: Still the Heart of the Law School.”

I. The Information-Knowledge-Action Paradigm
II. Heart of the Law School, 1783 to 2000
III. The Academic Law Library in the 21st Century
IV. Still — and Always — the Heart

I always enjoy inaugural issues, and this one is a keeper.

Professional Adjunct Instructors Association (PAIA)

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Professional Adjunct Instructors Association (PAIA)

http://paiassoc.wordpress.com/

Dr. Allison Friederichs, co-founderDr. C.J. Remmo, co-founder

The site includes a “Resources” page with links to information on teaching, publishing and classroom  assessment.

From the PAIA mission statement:

The Professional Adjunct Instructors Association is a nonprofit organization founded on the principle of recognizing and enhancing the value of the adjunct instructor’s role in higher education.  We believe that many adjunct instructors possess a wealth of knowledge, experience, and passion to offer higher education institutions and their students.  PAIA exists to facilitate the processes by which institutions maximize the potential adjunct instructors bring to higher education.

PAIA is committed to teaching as an art form, care for students, and improving the adjunct-institution relationship.  Our primary focus is to provide adjunct instructors with resources to continually improve teaching and curriculum design skills with a student-oriented focus.  Additionally, PAIA is dedicated to developing strong relationships with colleges and universities to ensure that our professional adjunct members meet the high standards set forth by these institutions.

 

New Web Resource: SCOCAL: The Supreme Court of California, Annotated

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We are pleased to announce the launch of our new Supreme Court of California website, SCOCAL (http://scocal.stanford.edu).

SCOCAL is a joint project between the Robert Crown Law Library at Stanford Law School, and  Justia, Inc.

The site provides free access to the full text California Supreme Court opinions from 1934 to the present, along with detailed annotations of selected cases written and edited by students in our Advanced Legal Research class here at Stanford.  For selected cases related California Supreme Court briefs, other documents and news items are also available, all free of charge. Users may subscribe to separate RSS feeds of new opinions, annotations, Court news and follow the site on Twitter.

Special thanks to FastCase for providing a large number of the California Supreme Court opinions available on the site.

Teaching without a textbook

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A benefit of being here at Stanford for a long time is to see how teaching evolves.  Back when I started it seemed like everyone taught from a textbook.  Today approximately 40% of the courses being offered at the law school do not require a text and I predict that percentage will only increase. 

My own course, Advanced Legal Research, does not require a textbook.  We (I co-teach with Erika Wayne) are very fond of several books, and we were going to assign Murray and DeSanctis’s Legal Research Methods (it’s very good – great explanation of Boolean, useful “Practice Pointers,” and more) but I just couldn’t bring myself to make our students buy a slim, paperback book with a “Suggested Retail Price” of $67.00.  If the book was $ 19.99 or less, we probably would have required it.  But $ 67?  That’s just too expensive in my mind.    So instead we search the Web for relevant readings and find great material in places like the Legal Scholarship Network and throughout the Free Web.

Law libraries as innovation centers

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Harvard Law Library director John Palfrey is quoted in this story from today’s Boston Globe:

Boston Globe, Monday, May 24, 2010

Home / News / Education  

Harvard’s paper cuts
School library works to maintain stature in the shift to digitalBy Tracy Jan

The thin, tattered book, an 1899 dissertation on Homer, written in French, is tucked into one of the more than 40 shelves devoted to the epic poet in the stacks of Widener Library. Collecting obscure works like this one has helped Harvard amass the world’s largest university library…”Libraries have to think of themselves as innovation centers, and not just repeat what we have done in the past, “said Harvard Law professor John Palfrey, who is a leading a project to shape the future of the school’s libraries.

. . .

Palfrey has added engineers, statisticians, and graphic designers to the law school library staff. His team is working on a Web application that browses a virtual bookshelf with works stacked against one another to re-create the experience of wandering through musty stacks and serendipitously stumbling upon titles.

The library is also planning to build a virtual reference desk, where students who rarely seek the help of librarians can solicit research advice without having to set foot in a library. Librarians would assist students through e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging, and Skype.

. . .

And Harvard Law School is in discussions with other law schools about having each school collect in specialized areas.

. . .

Legal Research as a Fundamental Skill: A Lifeboat for Students and Law Schools

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“Legal Research as a Fundamental Skill: A Lifeboat for Students and Law Schools”

University of Baltimore Law Review, Vol. 39, pp. 175-227, Winter 2009

SARAH VALENTINE, City University of New York – CUNY School of Law

This article argues that current legal research education is dangerously deficient and demonstrates how it can be reconceptualized to become a synergistic first year course that supports the learning of doctrine and legal analysis, as well as necessary research skills in accordance with recent suggestions by the ABA, the authors of the Carnegie Report, and other legal commentators.

Most law schools provide legal research instruction that is not only ineffective in teaching basic research skills but is potentially hazardous to students attempting to learn legal analysis. The ability to electronically search and access law has created a paradigm shift that has affected the very framework of the law as it has been understood and taught for the past one hundred and thirty years. The very act of accessing the law electronically restructures the law itself. It erodes the idea that one can learn the law from the scientific study of readily agreed upon precedent. As the historical understanding of law shifts, the ability to teach students to “think like lawyers” using the structured concepts of the legal system developed in the 1880s, but still relied on by law professors today, begins to collapse.

Creating an excellent legal research course is not necessarily difficult. It requires that legal research be taught as both a fundamental legal skill, requiring analysis and doctrinal knowledge and as a fundamental lawyering skill, integrated into the entire first year curriculum, not merely linked to legal writing. In addition, it must teach information literacy skills and the teaching should be informed with adult learning methodologies. Such a course provides students not only with the necessary research skills for law practice, but assists them in building the conceptual framework necessary for legal analysis.

 

Source:  LSN Legal Writing Vol. 5 No. 3,  02/02/2010