Category Archives: Law School

ABA to Require Expanded Employment Reports by Law Schools

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Coming to — or, rather, from — a law school near you: more detailed reporting of graduates’ employment outcomes, under new ABA rules:

As to job data, the 2011 Annual Questionnaire will request from law schools information on their graduates’ employment status, employment types and employment locations. It will also request additional and new information on whether a graduate’s employment is long-term or short-term. Finally, it will ask how many, if any, positions held by their graduates are funded by the law school or university.

New data will also be collected in the spring of 2012 (soon after February 15, 2012, the traditional nine-month-after-graduation date), for the graduating class of 2011, including whether the graduate’s job is part-time or full-time; whether the job requires bar passage; whether a J.D. is preferred for the job; whether the job is in another profession; and whether the job is a non- professional one. Definitions for these categories will be developed this coming fall. However, rather than wait until August 2012 to collect these new data, our plan is to collect those data from the schools soon after February 15, 2012 and display the data on our website in the late spring/early summer.

Overall I think this is good even though I suspect it will hurt UM, at least in the short run, since all the Legal Corps jobs, which I think provide much more valuable training and experience than most law-school-funded work, will probably show up as both short-term and law-school-funded.

Previously: Do Our Graduates Have Jobs? What Are They Making? (12/2/10) and Meet the UM Law Legal Corps Fellowship Program (10/14/10)

Posted in Law School | 1 Comment

Extreme Makeover: Law School Edition

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

That’s the title of the the Daily Business Review article on plans for our new addition to the law school, and a makeover of much of the existing structure.

It’s a long article, including a lot of history of various rejected proposals, one of which was a brand new building on a prime site near the Metrorail that would have cost well over $100 million which we don’t have to spend. (But if you’d like to spend it for us, I suspect they’d name the law school after you.)

Here’s what the article says about plans for the next phase:

[Dean] White is planning a major overhaul of the current building, including adding more communal space for students, adding and redoing classrooms and outfitting them with state-of-the-art technology, adding a brand new courtroom for mock trials and opening a new cafe to cater to the whole school. White does not yet have a cost estimate for the remodel but has already hired top New York architectural firm Kohn Pederson Fox Associate to draw up plans. She plans to show the designs to the university’s board of trustees in September when she presents the proposal for a vote.

If approved by the board, which is expected, White estimates the renovations would take 18 months to complete, Current facilities would remain open during construction.

“We are deeply engaged in the preliminary stages of working with architects and will be making a proposal to the trustees in September,” White said. “The plans are fairly far along. The building will be an addition to a major renovation to the site of our current building.”

We’re certainly tight for space, and key parts of the physical plant are getting long in the tooth, so extension and renovation are good things — or will be when they’re over. As I’m currently experiencing remodeling of my floor of the law school (and repainting and re-carpeting of my office) — which means I can’t work there this summer — I suspect the process of getting to the finish line will be fraught.

Current facilities would remain open during construction. Sounds noisy.

Posted in Law School, U.Miami | 2 Comments

Transformers

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Our Dean, Patricia White, is on Brian Leiter’s list of Nine Transformative Deans in the Last Decade — a list with the intriguing URL of “ten-transformative-deans-in-the-last-decade”. Gotta wonder who the tenth was and what happened to him/her.

Fortunately for us here at U. Miami, in addition to being lauded for her transformation of ASU, Dean White also appears on Leiter’s list of six “Deans to watch in the coming years”.

Posted in Law School, U.Miami | 1 Comment

Cooley Law School Sues Lawyers and Internet Posters

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

The WSJ reports that Thomas M. Cooley Law School is suing a law firm, and also suing four pseudonymous Internet posters some or all of whom might be former students. This is the first such case I’ve ever heard of.

Cooley has issued a statement, and links to (1) the complaint against the law firm of Kurzon Strauss LLP and two lawyers in that firm, and also (2) the complaint against four John Doe Internet writers styling themselves “Rockstar05,” “Informant,” “Anonymous,” and “Ch Bruns.”.

Cooley claims in its statement that the law firm defamed it “by falsely claiming on Internet websites, social media, and email that Cooley, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) Michigan educational corporation, has defrauded students by misrepresenting its graduate employment placement rates, average starting salary figures, and student loan default rates.” These statements were, Cooley says, part of an attempt to recruit members of a planned class-action lawsuit against it. (There is already a pending class-action claim of this type against Thomas Jefferson Law School.)

The complaints against the four Internet posters aim at the author of the blog at http://thomas-cooley-law-school-scam.weebly.com/, two commentators on that blog, and one commentator on a post at the Huffington Post.

The first issue, however, will be whether Cooley can get subpoenas and expose the identities of the posters. The leading case on this subject is Dendrite Int’l, Inc. v John Doe, No. 3, et al., 342 N.J. Super. 134, 141–42 (App. Div. 2001):

The trial court must consider and decide those applications by striking a balance between the well-established First Amendment right to speak anonymously, and the right of the plaintiff to protect its proprietary interests and reputation through the assertion of recognizable claims based on the actionable conduct of the anonymous, fictitiously-named defendants.

. . . when such an application is made, the trial court should first require the plaintiff to undertake efforts to notify the anonymous posters that they are the subject of a subpoena or application for an order of disclosure, and withhold action to afford the fictitiously-named defendants a reasonable opportunity to file and serve opposition to the application . . .

The court shall also require the plaintiff to identify and set forth the exact statements purportedly made by each anonymous poster that plaintiff alleges constitutes actionable speech.

The complaint and all information provided to the court should be carefully reviewed to determine whether plaintiff has set forth a prima facie cause of action against the fictitiously-named anonymous defendants . . .

Finally, assuming the court concludes that the plaintiff has presented a prima facie cause of action, the court must balance the defendant’s First Amendment right of anonymous free speech against the strength of the prima facie case presented and the necessity for the disclosure of the anonymous defendant’s identity to allow the plaintiff to properly proceed.

It may be, however, that NY uses a standard that is less protective of anonymous internet speech than Dendrite.

Posted in Law School, Law: Free Speech, Law: Internet Law | Comments Off on Cooley Law School Sues Lawyers and Internet Posters

For the ‘I am a Dinosaur’ File

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Tenure in disfavor among college presidents reports MoneyLaw.

Posted in Law School | 1 Comment

They Should Teach Filing in Law School

Posted on May 16, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Usually my work is fun, as it involves thinking about interesting problems. This is one the great joys of being a law professor. But much of my work has not been fun this past ten days or so. The law school is doing renovations on my floor over the summer, and in service of this project all my file cabinets were due to be removed last Friday. (See The Paperless Office (Like it Or Not).) I spent most of last week doing triage and tagging with the help of one very game research assistant. In the end I threw away about half of it, filling several recycle bins. It was a very nostalgic process, especially regarding my earliest cryptography, e-cash, and internet work: I had a chance to interact with some amazing people, far too many of whom I have lost track of since. But back to the files. I marked about 40% of the bulk for temporary storage. I took the rest — twelve banker’s boxes — home and am now trying to figure out where to put them. That takes some tidying and reorganization too.

There is, however, one aspect of this problem that does require at least a little thought: I’ve also been trying to create a schema for a paperless filing system since the tentative plan is that the file cabinets are not coming back. As one does I spent some time on Google looking for advice. Most of it was unhelpful, as it involved spending large sums of money on various proprietary document management tools. But I did find a few pieces of what looked like useful advice, especially Exadox’s Folder and File Naming Convention – 10 Rules for Best Practice. They wanted me to buy something too, but never mind that.

So here are the rules I’ve distilled for my use:

  • Every document MUST have a descriptive name.
  • Use short and simple folder names and folder structures and focus on using long and information-rich filenames.
  • Use the underscore (_) as element delimiter. Use the hyphen (-) to delimit words within an element – NOT spaces. E.g. Smith-John_recommendation-letter.pdf
  • Elements should be ordered from general to specific detail of importance as much as possible. The order of importance rule holds true when elements include date and time stamps. Dates should be ordered: YEAR, MONTH, DAY. (e.g. YYMMDD)
  • Personal names within an element should have family name first followed by first names or initials.
  • Documents with multiple versions (or likely to have multiple versions) should have as their FINAL element _V followed by at least 2 digits. To distinguish between working drafts (i.e. minor revisions) use Vx-01->Vx-99 range and for final draft (i.e. major version release) use V1-00-> V9-xx. (where x =0-9). If you go to more major versions, use the alphabet, ie VA-01, VB-01 etc.
  • Aim for a flat file structure–avoid the temptation to create layers and layers of sub-folders as things that are not visible will get lost

I’ve also defined an initial file structure based on asking my secretary for her ideas, and then adding my own ideas based on some time looking through the things found in the drive space she and I share. (I also have my own private space that could really stand to be organized better, but one thing at a time.) The top level of this structure divides the world into Admin, Courses, Research, and Projects. The admin folder has ten sub-folders, only a few of which have sub-folders of their own. None of the other three major sections currently has sub-sub-folders. So it is a very flat structure.

There is one good aspect of all this, however. I think that grading is going to seem joyous by comparison.

Posted in Law School | 2 Comments