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).

Lucy Kellaway is correct.

In today's Financial Times piece:

If one employee offends against a bank’s vision and values, it is [his or her] fault. If 5,300 do, it is the bank’s. Wells Fargo has proved that its culture is a hopeless safeguard to anything. The people who have really transgressed are not the rank and file, but the top managers who set up the wrong incentives and who looked the other way as customers were stitched up.

It really IS about the incentives.

Urban Meyer is one of my heroes.

And here's why.

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.

Best managerial advice ever (UPDATED).

There's a great article by Paula Krebs in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education's Vitae section (here).  In it, she talks about the importance of working on difficult issues by first imagining why the person sitting across the table from you has formed her views.  The idea of assuming that the other party to a negotiation has principled reasons for her position is a good way to see any difficult issue as an issue to be solved collaboratively.

Here's my favorite quote from her essay:

Since transitioning out of the faculty and into administration, I've had to work hard to learn how to shut up and listen.  My job, I've discovered, isn't to solve the problems.  It's to understand them and then work with the people affected to come up with ways to solve the problems.

Every time I have tried to solve a problem when it's presented to me, I've created more problems.  So I'm learning to talk to more people, to ask more questions, to listen to the answers.

That's darn good advice for us all.

UPDATE (5/4/15):  This post also gives good advice, as does this article.

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.

More Enron-ization of rankings.

As TaxProf Blog reports (here), UMKC has had an outside audit (here) to uncover rankings shenanigans.  What should we learn from examples like this one?  The same thing we should've learned decades ago: people respond to incentives.  For the best examples of perverse incentives, see this Freakonomics post.

Cross-posting about the team that makes a good leader better.

Here.

Wishing my beloved Marine Corps a very happy birthday today.

Happy 239th birthday, Marines!

I loved this post about the boycott.

See here.  (Hat tip to my dad for sending it to me.)

Congratulations to the wonderful Kathleen Lyon!

Full story here, but here's my favorite paragraph:

The 10^th and final Distinguished Service Award is presented to Tax Division Office of the Assistant Attorney General Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General Kathleen E. Lyon for her extraordinary work in drafting the Program for Non-Prosecution Agreement or Non-Target Letters for Swiss Banks (Swiss Bank Program).  The department has had ongoing investigations into the use of foreign bank accounts to evade U.S. taxes, and the Swiss Bank Program was designed to encourage Swiss banks not already under investigation to cooperate with the department’s efforts.  Ms. Lyon was instrumental in drafting the terms of the Swiss Bank Program.

Brava, Kathleen!

Assuming that what this professor says is true (and I have no reason to think that it's not), I'm standing with him in solidarity.

See here.  Universities are supposed to be places in which divergent views can be heard with respect and intelligent debate.  That means that BOTH sides of a debate must be heard, not just the "popular" side.  Hat tip to Instapundit for alerting me to this story.

If you're as opposed to the boycotts of Israel as I am, please read on.

From my friend Danny Sokol: 

Dear Colleagues:

The following statement is being circulated on numerous campuses to be released  in the next week or so.  We are trying to get signatures prior to it being posted, although people will also be able to sign up after it is posted.

If you are interested in singing, please drop a line indicating your approval to William Jacobson at Cornell Law, (waj24@cornell.edu) from your university/college email account. Note your title and affiliation. 

Also, feel free to share this with colleagues who might be interested.

The text of the statement cannot be changed at this point.  It is, by nature, a compromise statement intended to focus on core principles, not politics. I think it is very mild and broad. 

Here is the text of the statement:

We, the undersigned academics, vigorously support free speech and free debate but we oppose faculty or student boycotts of Israel’s academic institutions, scholars and students. 

 Our opposition is rooted in the following core principles. 

1.       Academic freedom:  The BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement discriminates against Israeli institutions, professors, and students for no other reason than their nationality and the policies of their government. Thus BDS violates the very principle of academic freedom.  Academic boycotts such as those promoted by BDS activists “are antithetical to the fundamental principles of the academy, where we will not hold intellectual exchange hostage to the political disagreements of the moment,”according to a statement signed by 300 university presidents in 2007, and additional statements written by over 250 university presidents last year in response to the ASA boycott of Israel. The American Association of University Professors, other academic organizations, and more than forty Nobel Laureates have opposed all academic boycotts for this reason. 

2.       Truth:   The factual record does not support the accusations and narratives of the BDS movement. Many are based on overstatements, cherry picked evidence, outright falsehood, or on disputed or highly biased data. 
3.       Peace: The two-state solution – which guarantees to both parties mutual recognition -- enjoys the endorsement of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and the Arab League. By demonizing and seeking to isolate one of the two parties to the peace process, the anti-Israel BDS movement sets itself apart from the global consensus for peace.

4.       Access to World-leading Scholarship:  BDS would have the practical impact of undermining academic cooperation and would deprive universities significant Israeli contributions in many academic areas, especially scientific research. It appears that such a loss is immaterial to the leaders in the BDS movement.

 This statement is not a response to any particular BDS effort on campus, but rather to the growing wave of such efforts by academic professional associations and so forth. The idea is to get out ahead of such efforts with a broadly subscribed statement.

Thank you.

Prof. Eugene Kontorovich

Northwestern University School of Law

Two of my newest favorite things, both from my buddy Walter Effross.

Walter always finds me interesting and valuable things to read (and now I can thank you publicly, Walter!)--and here are two of my favorites.  One's a commencement address, and the other is a story about how the Rolling Stones refused to boycott Israel.  Both involve a discussion of courage.  (And, for what it's worth, both stories illustrate the power of standing for something bigger than yourself, rather than the cowardice of lobbing anonymous hateful comments across the Internet.)

Bravo, Mayor (well, former mayor) Bloomberg--well done!

This whole idea of students protesting commencement speakers because they don't like the proposed speakers' politics bothers me, which is why I appreciated Mayor Bloomberg's commencement address so much.  I've experienced commencement speaker protests myself.  (Sarah Weddington was our commencement speaker during my first year of dean at the University of Houston Law Center, and I invited her because she was someone who was effective as a lawyer, in the Texas Legislature, and in the Carter Administration--and I consider her a friend.)

Law graduates who didn't appreciate her work as the lawyer in Roe v. Wade protested.  She had to worry about death threats at graduation.  (So did I.)  Even though she had recently been diagnosed with cancer, she came through and did a superb job at graduation.  The protesting students limited themselves to wearing gold lapel pins symbolizing baby feet, which was a perfectly legitimate and respectful form of protest.  I was proud of them.

Another commencement speaker at UHLC triggered a one-person protest by a student who believed that the speaker had insulted his family at a trial.  That particularlized protest, based on a personal interaction and not on a difference of philosophy, was different in kind.  We excused the student from commencement and gave him his diploma in a separate ceremony.

I know that there is a limit to the idea that students' protests shouldn't be taken into account when a university invites a controversial speaker--there are some speakers who are so reprehensible that giving them a public forum just seems wrong.  But for the life of me, I can't come up with the line-drawing that would make it clear when a speaker should be disinvited. Although I would likely know it when I saw it ("it" being the case for disinviting someone), my instincts aren't so superior that I would be comfortable using my own judgment as the appropriate benchmark.

Overall, though, universities can't be places where students learn to listen to others' viewpoints and learn to debate ideas respectfully, then where will they learn how to do that?

Life lessons for all of us--from the Navy SEALS and TaxProf Blog.

See here.  Worth reading all the way through.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

There are lots of stories about the DLA Piper partner who has been charged (not yet adjudicated, though--just charged) with charging clients for unusual expenses while he was a partner at Sidley Austin (see here, here, and here).  They remind me of the dynamic surrounding John Gellene at Milbank (see my paper reviewing Mitt Regan's book, Eat What You Kill, here). 

All organizations get the behavior that they reward. 

This mock deanship application letter cracked me up.

Here.

Rats. I hate reading about stupid Marines.

I love my Marine Corps.  (And I love my hubby, brother-in-law, father-in-law, and friends who have served.)  So it bothers me when I read op-ed pieces, like this one in today's Wall Street Journal written by a former Marine, that argue that women shouldn't be in combat.  According to the author, the reason that women shouldn't be in combat is ... well ... poo:

Yes, a woman is as capable as a man of pulling a trigger. But the goal of our nation's military is to fight and win wars. Before taking the drastic step of allowing women to serve in combat units, has the government considered whether introducing women into the above-described situation would have made my unit more or less combat effective?

Societal norms are a reality, and their maintenance is important to most members of a society. It is humiliating enough to relieve yourself in front of your male comrades; one can only imagine the humiliation of being forced to relieve yourself in front of the opposite sex.

OK, Mr. Smith:  POO is your concern?   The fact that those who serve our country are willing to do so, knowing that many of them (1) won't come back alive or (2) will come back with severe injuries, is what makes me so proud of our troops.  My guess is that the more serious risks are what our people think about before they go into battle.  Not about poo.  My hubby has not even once listed "poo" among the serious risks that he and his colleagues faced.

Women really are as capable as men when it comes to being willing to defend our country, and it irks me no end when folks ignore one of the benefits of letting women serve alongside men.  Those combat experiences that make people eligible for promotion and more responsibility need to be open to everyone willing to serve.

So, Mr. Smith:  maybe it's time to rethink your priorities.

Yet more on Larry Mitchell's sunny op-ed on why law school is a good idea.

On another blog (Law School Survival Manual), I've spent a bit of time ruminating over just what in Larry Mitchell's op-ed rubbed me the wrong way.  (See here.)  Other folks are saying the same thing, often in better ways (take a gander at the updates to my post for two such examples, and to the postings on Inside the Law School Scam (starting here). 

I guess what frustrates me most is the sense that decanal groupthink is trying to wish away a lot of the problems that face legal education.  There were many, many kudos to the Mitchell op-ed on one of the deans' listservs.  If those kudos had been from the very top law schools, I'd have understood.  Law degrees from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and other such schools are likely to be exceptionally good investments.  (After all, I benefit greatly from my degree from Stanford.*)

But when good, but not elite, schools are making their case for law school being a good investment, they can't just trot out the "we train you to think!" and "law is a lifetime career!" arguments.  I don't think that the first of those arguments applies just to law schools (pretty much any good education will train someone to think well).  And I don't think that the "law is a lifetime career" theory works when a law graduate can't get a first law job within a reasonable time.  The "you can use a law degree in other careers" argument is true, of course, but just because someone can use a legal education in other fields doesn't mean that spending six figures to get that degree is always a good idea.

I'm as proud of legal education as every other law dean is,** but I want students to enter law school with their eyes open.  (I also want law schools to provide applicants with accurate data so that they can make good choices about whether to attend law school.)

Data + realistic expectations = good choices.
Assertions + wishful thinking = a disaster in the making.



* Although, to be fair, my degree from Rice is nearer and dearer to my heart, but that's probably true of most folks' feelings about their undergraduate degrees.
** Even though I'm just an interim dean.