FSU College of Law Research Center Blog

Trial Techniques in a Visual Culture

New York Law School has created the Visual Persuasion Project to explore the effect of "visual rhetoric" on the representation of legal issues and to train students in more effective advocacy using visual technologies.  In the Neuroethics and Law blog, Christopher Buttafusco suggests that there may be fundamental differences in the way that the brain processes different types of visual information that could raise questions about the need for different standards of admissibility based on format.

Posted by Robin Gault

10 Ways a Lawyer Can Benefit from Working with a Professsional Coach

From the Blog Lawyer Information this post on how lawyers can benefit from having a professional coach.  Here's an excerpt:

Coaching is a collaborative process that is focused and results oriented. A Professional Coach can help lawyers overcome challenges, increase strategic thinking and improve communication skills. In addition, many lawyers hire Coaches to help them develop a savvy professional image, cultivate ongoing career and personal goals and to achieve greater work-life balance. Unlike a consultant, a Coach doesn't come in and solve the problem for you. Instead, a Coach partners with you to assess how best to resolve issues and achieve your goals.

Read the whole post here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

The Billable Hour

A small Boston law firm has banned the billable hour and refuses to take clients who want to pay by the hour.  This is discussed in a recent Boston Globe article.  An excerpt is below:

But the Shepherd Law Group is one of the few firms to voluntarily abandon the billable hour system entirely.

Shepherd, a five-lawyer firm that specializes in employment law, charges its clients a flat annual fee or flat price per task. Clients can call the firm as often as they want to discuss legal issues, although some services, such as training and litigation, cost extra. The new approach helps clients determine legal costs in advance and often prevents legal problems from escalating because clients are no longer reluctant to seek advice out of fear of incurring a hefty bill, said Jay Shepherd, the firm's founder.

"Hourly billing is wrong and it's anti-client," Shepherd said. "There's a disincentive to be efficient since you get paid more if you take longer to finish a matter - even though the client wants it to be finished as fast and efficiently as possible."

The American Bar Association concluded in a 2002 report that hourly billing is at the root of much that is wrong with legal practice: brutal hours, lack of collegiality (since time spent chatting with colleagues is time not spent billing), fraudulent billing, lawyers who intentionally stretch the time it should take to finish a matter, unpredictable costs for clients, little time for friends and family, little time for community service, and a system that rewards lawyers for quantity over quality.

Read the whole article here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

American Legal Ethics Library

Cornell's Law School's Legal Information Institute has created a digital library containing the codes or rules setting standards for the professional conduct of lawyers.  It also includes commentary on the law governing lawyers.  It is organized on a state to state basis.

The narratives and primary material that comprise the core American     Legal Ethics Library have been structured to function as an integrated     collection. All elements of the library can be the subject of a full     text search or entered via a table of contents, but each element is linked     to the rest of the collection in multiple ways permitting a user to track     a specific issue or point from code to commentary in a single jurisdiction     or vice-versa and to follow that same question into materials covering     other jurisdictions. For example, a user interested in Florida's treatment     of conflict of interest can readily find the appropriate code provisions,     follow a link from them to the related portions of the state narrative,     and through the narrative access comparable sections in the ABA Model     Rules or Code or the legal ethics codes of other states.

You can view it here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

 

Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (2007)

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has released its Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (2007).

Abstract:
The Foundation's two-year study of legal education involved a comprehensive look at teaching and learning in American and Canadian law schools today. Intensive field work was conducted at a cross-section of 16 law schools during the 1999-2000 academic year. The study provides an opportunity to rethink "thinking like a lawyer"—the paramount educational construct currently employed, which affords students powerful intellectual tools while also shaping education and professional practice in subsequent years in significant, yet often unrecognized, ways.

You can view the Summary of the Findings and Recommendations here.

The Law Library's copies are at KF272.E34 2007

Order the entire 240 page report from here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

3D JD

Standford Law school has announced a new model for legal education, which is changing the law degree program into a three dimensional program.  News.LawReader.com has a short article on the subject. Here's an excerpt:

STANFORD, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Stanford Law School today announced changes that are transforming the JD into a three-dimensional degree program that combines the study of other disciplines with team-oriented, problem-solving techniques and expanded clinical training that enables students to represent clients and litigate cases—before they graduate.

Stanford’s innovation is being driven by the new demands on modern lawyers, which are fundamentally different from those present when the law school curriculum was formed.

Stanford Law School Dean Larry Kramer said the pedagogical changes the school is spearheading are focused on the second and third year curriculum. He hopes Stanford’s reform—which began last year and should be fully implemented by 2009—will provide a model for legal education generally.

Read the whole article here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Law School Curriculum: What is technology's role?

There's an interesting article in the November 8, 2006 National Law Journal, The Law School Curriculum: What is technology's role?  Here's an excerpt:

Professor Charles Nesson, a pioneer in the use of technology in legal education and a founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, is teaching an experimental class called "CyberOne: Law and the Court of Public Opinion." He's talking to students about how to make an argument not just to a judge, but to a global audience. As he puts it, CyberOne is "a course in persuasive, empathic argument in the Internet space." Students are figuring out how to use blogs, podcasts, wikis, online video and virtual worlds to build their cases inside and outside of the courtroom. It's out there-both figuratively and literally, as it's also being taught in Second Life, a virtual world. Then again, Nesson is usually onto something when he's out there.

These experiments may well lead to greater use of technology in law school classrooms. But the broader question lingers: Can technology play a transformative role in legal education at a systemic level? At the Berkman Center, in partnership with LexisNexis, we've begun a research project this fall to survey lawyers and law faculties about what they think on this front. By the end of the year, we expect to publish the results and highlight some of the most promising ways forward. We don't yet know where this study will lead, but it's pretty clear that the answer doesn't lie in law schools starting to teach technology-specific courses. After all, a smart young lawyer can figure out how to use a new e-discovery software package in a few hours.

Read the entire article here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

 

Law Blogs Creating Ethics Problem

There may be as many as 2000 law blogs which discuss topics from bioethics, to legal theory, to environmental law and everything in between, but an ethical problem has arisen as to how much of the content is speech and how much is advertising.  An article in the October 6, 2006 National Law Journal Law blogs raising prickly ethical issues discusses this:

Many states are in the process of revamping their attorney ethics rules, and part of that process involves the prickly issue of whether blogs should be regulated as advertising.

On the one hand, states want to protect consumers from unscrupulous lawyer advertising presented under the guise of an online diary. On the other hand, they want to preserve the free flow of ideas-and valuable legal information presented in a public forum-that the new technology has fostered.

And thanks to Mary McCormick for another source on this, from the November 7, 2006 Chicago Tribune, Lawyers face right to blog; Kentucky

has rules that broadly define advertising to include virtually any communication to the public by a lawyer that contains any information about the lawyer or the lawyer's practice. The rules also require that ads must be submitted for commission approval, along with a $50 filing fee.

Read the whole article:
Law blogs raising prickly ethical issues
Lawyers face right to blog

Posted by Jon Lutz

Law School Curriculum

Stanford Law School Dean Larry Kramer has a long post in the Blog Law School Innovation on the topic of law school curriculum:

Ask any law school graduate what was the most significant intellectual experience he or she had in law school (that is, what really shaped their thinking, what stuck with them, what mattered most), and almost all will give the same answer: the first year. This seems to be true no matter what law school they attended, no matter what career they chose to pursue, and whether they graduated last year or fifty years ago. I spend probably half my time talking to Stanford graduates, usually beginning a first meeting by talking about their time here, and I get this answer almost 100% of the time. The first year, in other words, is the part of law school that really seems to work. The problem with legal education is in the second and third year and consists mainly of failing to keep students engaged by offering them something of equivalent educational and intellectual value to what they got in the first year. It is, from that perspective, puzzling to see not just Harvard, but most schools that think about curriculum reform focus all their energy on changing the first year.

Read the whole post here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

'Snowbird' Law Practice Hits a Wall

The definition of a "temporary" practice in a state where one is not licensed may be ripe for litigation and change.  Morris Ronald Gould, a Florida resident who is admitted to practice law in New York but not in Florida, wanted to advertise in Florida of his ability to advise on "New York legal matters."  Gould's claim in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida against the Florida Bar asserts that restricting his proposed advertisements violates his free speech rights.  Gould argues that he is allowed to engage in this limited practice under Florida's multijurisdictional practice law. Gould v. Harkness, No. 04-23178-CV-MORENO.   

In its motion to dismiss, the Bar argued that Gould's proposed advertisements concern unlawful activity and are misleading.  After an August 8 order dismissing his action, Gould appealed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.  He vows to take his case to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.   

Posted by Faye Jones