ZiefBrief

In-House Counsel Refuse to Pay for First-Year Associates' Work

The Wall Street Journal blog reported today on a growing trend among in-house legal departments: they are flat out refusing to pay for work performed by first-and second-year associates.  The big question is: how will the law firms and law schools respond?  Some firms have already launched apprenticeship programs for their new attorneys. And some law schools are beefing up experiential learning opportunities for their students.  It seems very clear that clients facing economic pressures are only going to become more demanding and sensitive about the bottom line in the future, and the legal market -- both firms and schools -- will have to find a way to respond fairly quickly.

Kindle Textbook Rental Service Now Available

Tired of carrying heavy textbooks around?  Now some law textbooks are available for rent through Amazon’s Kindle rental service.  You don’t even have to own a Kindle to use the service. You can simply download a free Kindle reading app for any of the following: PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android Windows Phone 7, Blackberry or Kindle. 

According to Amazon, you can save up to 80% off the list price of the printed version of the textbook.  Further, you can typically rent a textbook for between 30 and 360 days.  If you begin with the minimum you can always extend your rental for additional days if you’d like and you pay only for the time you need to rent the book.  You also get to keep any highlights or notes you make even after the rental period expires. 

To find a book, you just search in Amazon’s Textbooks Store and search for the book you want, either by title or by browsing the Law section.  Then look in the Formats section to see if a Kindle edition is available for rent and specify your rental dates.  Be careful, though, as some Kindle editions are only available for purchase.  Make sure you don’t accidentally buy something.  Also, before renting, be sure to compare the price of the Kindle rental to that of a new or used print version of the casebook just to make sure you’re getting the best deal. 

So far many legal textbooks do not have an electronic version available. However, Amazon’s Kindle rental program is a good start.  Hopefully, Amazon will offer more electronic versions of textbooks in the future.  For more details about the Kindle rental service, visit Amazon. 

CALI Lessons Go Mobile

With the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year, CALI has announced that its lessons will work on mobile devices, including iPads and iPhones.  Other enhancements are planned, including automatic saving of student lesson runs and scores.  We're looking forward to these improvements!

Who's Using WestlawNext?

Paul Lomio at Stanford Law Library conducted an informal survey to determine which Bay Area legal workplaces were using WestlawNext.  You can find his post summarizing responses on the Stanford Law Library blog, Legal Research Plus. Most important takeaway from Paul's informal survey:  public sector law libraries, including federal and California court systems, haven't adopted WestlawNext yet.

New/Updated CALI Lessons RSS Feed

If you assign CALI lessons to students or first-year associates, you'll be happy to know that you can now sign up for RSS feeds that will alert you whenever CALI adds a new lesson or updates an existing lesson.  Thank you, CALI!

Read Law Professor Barack Obama’s Final Exams

There has been a lot of commentary about an article in the New York Times that discussed Barack Obama’s 12 years as a law professor at University of Chicago (click here to see article). Turns out he was generally considered brilliant by most students but enigmatic by some fellow professors. What the readers of the print version of the article didn't get to see is a collection of Professor Obama's final exams and the syllabus to his class Current Issues in Racism and the Law.

Links to the materials:

Syllabus: Current Issues in Racism and the Law

2003 Final Exam
2002 Final Exam
2001 Final Exam
2000 Final Exam
1999 Final Exam
1998 Exam
1997 Final Exam | Answer Memo
1996 Final Exam | Answer Memo

McSweeney's List on Law School Classes

At this point in the semester, everybody needs a little dark humor, right?  Check out this McSweeney's List of "Classes My Top-Tier Law School Should Have Offered As Warnings About the Profession."  Thanks to Above the Law for posting this link.

The Man Behind the Curtain

The ABA Journal's April 2008 cover story on U.S. News & World Report's law school rankings includes an interview with the man who devised the ranking system, Bob Morse.  After reading the article, I found out that Bob Morse has his very own blog, Morse Code.  How very clever.

For those of you who would like to pose some questions to Morse about law school rankings, you can find him answering questions live at ABAJournal.com on Friday, April 11, from 3 to 4 p.m. Eastern Time (that's Noon to 1 pm Pacific Time, California natives!). 

Revamping Third Year

Washington and Lee's law school announced recently that it is completely changing the structure of its third year curriculum by replacing all academic courses with experiential courses.  According to the school's press release, "traditional classroom instruction will be replaced by practice simulations, real-client interactions and the development of law practice skills. All third year students will be required to obtain a Virginia practice certificate and participate in at least one real-client experience during the year."  Students will have a choice of practice areas, and the school plans to include transactional courses focusing on areas like banking and corporate finance.  Most of these recent curricular changes at law schools are being driven in part by the 2007 Carnegie Report, which called for changes in how law students are taught so that students have more practical, "real-life" experiences before they begin practicing law.  And I have to think that students themselves will be pleased with these changes.  My third year of law school definitely felt a bit superfluous, and I would have jumped at the chance to gain some real practice skills before I graduated.  I hope we see more law schools moving in this direction soon!

Does Blogging Count?

I received information about the Santa Clara Law roundtable discussion, "Blogging, Scholarship and the Bench and Bar," but wasn't able to attend.  Fortunately, the National Law Journal has a transcript of the roundtable discussion available online, and it makes for fascinating reading.  Lots of interesting debate about whether law professors' blogs should count as legal scholarship in tenure decisions and how blogging is breaking down communication barriers between practicing attorneys and legal academics.  Cindy Cohn, legal counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, had this to say about blogs and legal scholarship:  "I don't have the time to read a law review article from beginning to end very often on my issues. I'd like to see legal scholarship be more accessible to practitioners, more useful to us."  Other interesting tidbits:  Judge Michael Daly Hawkins of the Ninth Circuit noted that the Ninth Circuit judges do read blog posts about cases that they've either decided or will decide soon -- compiled for them by the Ninth Circuit's librarian, of course!.