How NOT to collect a legal bill.

We used a friend of ours, Mike Cenatiempo, to update our wills.  Mike used to work at Shannon Gracey, which is now defunct.  We paid our bill in December 2016.  We got a "past due" notice from the defunct Shannon Gracey law firm yesterday.  So....

Dear Shannon Gracey Collections Office:

The best way to ask a client about a past-due bill is NOT to start with a past-due notice.  The best way is to ask, "hey, we can't seem to find your check--was it ever cashed?"  That's especially true when the law firm has cratered.  After all, dying law firms often have problems with their business operations, which can involve losing checks while closing a practice.

So now I'm an irate former client who has no intention of losing a pristine credit rating.  I tried to find former Shannon Gracey managing partner Richard A. Lowe to complain, but the My Texas Bar site is down.  Let's see what happens when the collections person gets our letter, showing a copy of the check. 

About closing more law schools....

Yesterday, TaxProf Blog posted a story about the closing of Indiana Tech and raised the question of whether other law schools might close as well.  I think more will, and I said so in 2012, in Changing the Modal Law School: RethinkingU.S. Legal Education in (Most) Schools, 116 Penn St. L. Rev. 1119 (2012):

The world doesn’t need as many ABA-accredited law schools as it has already, just as the world has figured out that it doesn’t need as many U.S.-based BigLaw firms as it once did, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if some law schools closed over the next decade or so.

Id. at 1150.  For more about what in legal education needs to change, see, e.g., Rethinking U.S. Legal Education: No More .“Same Old, Same Old,” 45 Conn. L. Rev. 1409 (2013).

Last-minute advice for bar exam takers.

On one of our other blogs (here).

Great minds think alike -- about compensation models for law firms.

I came away from Liane Jackson's ABA Journal article, $10K prize-winning hackathon team dreams up new compensation model for law firms, doing a happy dance:  not just because I liked the ideas put forth by the winner but also because I've been writing about this issue for a while, both by myself and with co-author Randy Gordon (see Nancy B. Rapoport, 'Nudging Better Lawyer Behavior: Using Default Rules and Incentives to Change Behavior in Law Firms, 4 St. Mary's J. of L. Ethics & Malp. 42 (2014) and Randy D. Gordon & Nancy B. Rapoport, Virtuous Billing, 15 Nevada L.J. 698 (2015)).  The short version?  People do the activities that their organizations reward.  If you don't like the behavior, take a good look at your reward structure.

Thanks, Susan Fortney, for a lovely review of Virtuous Billing!

Here. 

Great advice for dealing with tiresome people.

From Above the Law and LawProfBlawg (here).

Given that I'm currently in law review submission limbo on an essay....

This LawProfBlawg post is apropos.

Hooray for Judge Phyllis Frye!

Front page of the New York Times (here)!  I've known Judge Frye for around 15 years, and she and her wife Trish are lovely, warm, wicked-smart people. 

I wish that her time at the University of Houston Law Center had been more welcoming.  The story captures some of what she went through:

The self-defense, combined with a charm offensive, began in law school itself, at the University of Houston. During her first semester, she felt shunned. Determined to break out of her isolation, she requested the seating charts for her classes, memorized her classmates’ names and approached them one by one. She tussled with the administration to gain access to the women’s restroom, the kind of fight that continues to this day.

 I'm so proud of her that I could burst, and I know that her story will inspire others.

Banality of hate (repost, with a comment).

Professor LeRoy makes an important point about failing to realize the precursors to evil (here).  By staying silent when evil occurs, we are making our world less safe and diminishing our civilization.

Man, I wish I could go to this conference....

The 15^th annual workshop on Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship, co-taught by Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, will run from June 15-June 17 at Washington University in St. Louis. The workshop is for law school faculty, lawyers, political science faculty, and graduate students interested in learning about empirical research and how to evaluate empirical work. It provides the formal training necessary to design, conduct, and assess empirical studies, and to use statistical software (Stata) to analyze and manage data.

Participants need no background or knowledge of statistics to enroll in the workshop. Registration is here. For more information, please contact Lee Epstein.

Another news clip about my talk(s) in Bogota.

Here, and here's the original post.  I'm still just amazed that I was asked to speak, and I'm so grateful to Superintendent Reyes!

Congrats to Randy Gordon and Maks Del Mar!

Maks's new book (co-edited with William Twining), which has an essay by my buddy Randy Gordon in it.  You can get the book here.

One of the best days of my life--my trip to Bogotá.

Two days ago, I had the great honor of giving two talks on behalf of the Superintendencia de Sociedades in Bogotá (more info about the talks here) at the request of the wonderful* Superintendent Francisco Reyes.  Superintendent Reyes hosted a seminar in the morning (organized by the talented Diana Silva), and he also hosted a talk in the afternoon.  I was able to visit with members of the bench and bar and heads of companies after the morning's presentations, and the questions that they asked after my talk made the experience even better.

The trip had its funny moments:  I was a little tired that day, having missed my connection to Bogotá by five minutes (United did a lot of maintenance on the plane that was picking us up in Las Vegas--a lot of maintenance), so I hung out in Houston for nine extra hours and arrived in Bogota at 5 a.m. on the day of the presentations.  Maybe the sleep deprivation is a good excuse for what happened in the afternoon:  when I was giving the second presentation, I didn't notice the earthquake** that everyone else in the room noticed quite readily.  When the audience got up and walked out of the room after about 2/3 of my presentation, I thought:  "Wow--this talk is not going well...."  (Years of living in San Francisco, and I didn't feel an earthquake???)  The building evacuation was orderly, with everyone knowing where to go and everyone quickly accounted for by floor.***  After the "all clear," I gave an abbreviated rest of the talk.  The classic part?  I'd asked, earlier that day, if Bogotá had earthquakes.  Bravo for life's little ironies.

Bogotá has some wonderful museums, and I was able to see the Gold Museum, which was flat-out amazing, and tour Plaza de Bolívar.  So with the experience of meeting great people, being able to visit again with Superintendent Reyes, having a chance to tour a bit of Bogotá, eating two memorable meals, and enjoying everyone's friendliness (and their ability to talk in fluent English, given that I have yet to learn Spanish),**** I can say that my trip was one of the best I've ever had.  I'm still floating on air (as you can probably tell from this post).




____________________
* And multi-talented:  he is also a very gifted musician.
** Yes, it was a 6.6 quake, but its center wasn't in Bogota, so the news media wasn't quite, um, accurate in its reporting of the earthquake experience in town.  Some buildings were affected, though, but not ours.  Ours was built to withstand a quake, and it did.
*** We could learn something from their emergency procedure training.  Ours is typically not as well organized.
**** And a chance to hear Superintendent Reyes play keyboards and drums.

Brava, Jean Sternlight!

My wonderful colleague Jean Sternlight just won a prestigious award from the ABA (see here).  Brava, Jean!

It's exciting to see something on my fees wishlist become a reality.

I've written about developing behavioral prompts to encourage lawyers to bill timely and accurately, and LinkedIn just pointed me to an article (here) discussing software that helps lawyers do that. 

More shameless self-promotion.

A nice mention of our second book in the Survival Manual series (here).

Really cool workshop on conducting empirical legal scholarship coming up this summer at CERL/Wash U.

See here for info.  I can't make it to this one, but I'm hoping to do one in the future.  I've heard great things about it.

Our amicus brief in ASARCO was filed yesterday.

And it's here (and here). 

Steven Davidoff Solomon's interesting take on why law schools won't close.

Here.  I especially liked his point about why incentives favor bailing out law schools rather than closing them:

[A] closed law school is worth little, or most likely nothing, to creditors. The value is only in the revenue stream it produces and perhaps its building. (You could say the books also, but these are increasingly fewer.) And these days, that revenue stream is down 20 to 40 percent, meaning that if law schools were for-profit businesses, most would be failures.

A troubled law school is like Dracula: hard to kill. Creditors will not do so because even keeping a struggling school alive means there is some possibility of repayment.

On the other hand, those closed law school buildings might be valuable to universities, as they can be repurposed for other uses, freeing up different space on campus for things like expanded research space.  So law schools that aren't free-standing should still be nervous if they're underperforming. Now is not the time for complacency.

A nice shout-out in a book review.

See here.  Thanks, Sue Liemer!