Passing of a legal ethics giant: Monroe Freedman.

What an amazing person.  Hat tip to The Faculty Lounge for this sad but important news.

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. 

Best line in today's NYT op-ed about the value of college.

The op-ed is here.  And my favorite bit?

That brought [Professor] Hall to her own answer about college’s mission: “It is for developing the muscle of thoughtfulness, the use of which will be the greatest pleasure in life and will also show what it means to be fully human.”

R.I.P, Marvin Chirelstein.

Just heard the sad news.  Marvin Chirelstein made Federal Income Tax comprehensible for me when I was a lost law student, trying to figure out how "philosophy of tax" (interesting, and the bulk of the course that I took) meshed with "actual Federal Income Tax" (which is what I knew would be on the exam).  I read his Federal Income Tax paperback (now in its 12th edition) and made a vow to myself that if I made it through the course with a decent grade, I'd name a child after him. (That little factoid probably explains part of the reason that Jeff and I don't have kids:  Marvin Rapoport Van Niel?  Chirelstein Rapoport Van Niel?  See--that's quite a burden to put on a little tyke.)  Lighthearted remembrance aside, I just wanted to go on record to say that Professor Chirelstein was one of the greats, and I know he'll be missed.

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.

Chilling series, but important to read.

So grateful to CNN for this particular series.

Why Lucy Kellaway rocks, part n.

Here. 

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

Here.

More shameless self-promotion.

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

Why I switched from Fitbit to Vivofit--a customer service story (UPDATED YET AGAIN)

I like fitness trackers.  I like measuring things, and I don't expect the trackers to have pinpoint accuracy.  They exist as motivational devices and to show trends, and--generally speaking--they're good at those two things.

I said "generally speaking" because the Fitbit Charge did not serve those purposes well.  The first Charge I had lost battery life at an alarming rate.  After extensive back-and-forths with Fitbit, I finally got a replacement.  The charge worked well, but the sleep portion had two modes (normal and sensitive), neither of which captured my sleep accurately.  I know that my average sleep isn't 8+ hours (unfortunately), and I know that it's not 4 hours (thank goodness).  So, after a spate during which Fitbit wouldn't even sync my (over- or under-estimated) sleep, I gave up, ordered a Vivofit from Garmin, and asked for a refund.*

The refund process has been awful.  Obviously, each "team" (person?) at Fitbit doesn't keep a running customer log.  I got steadfast refusals to refund, one "yes, we'll refund, and here's where you send the old one" email," several "oops--we didn't mean to send it" emails, another "we acknowledge that we've sent you a refund authorization" email, and finally a "we don't care that we sent you a refund authorization--we're still not going to refund you the price, but, hey, thanks for returning it" one.  So Fitbit has my old tracker, and I'm out the money for the Fitbit.

I told Fitbit that my response to this frustration would be to blog about my experience, to tweet about it, and to post reviews, and that's what I intend to do.

Lesson to anyone dealing with the public, part 1:  keep a customer's file in one place, so that you don't whipsaw the customer with contradictory emails.

Lesson to anyone dealing with the public, part 2:  the Internet has a broad reach, and anyone with a keyboard can weigh in (for better or worse) on the company's service.

Fitbit?  Given your decision not to play fair, I'm going to spend some time this morning before work making sure I circulate this blog post as widely as possible. 

UPDATE:  my Amazon review of Fitbit went live this afternoon.

Just as a contrast, one of my Amazon packages was late in getting to me, and Amazon not only credited my account to make up for the late shipping, it also extended my Amazon Prime membership for a month--all because of a one-day-late shipment.  In case you're keeping score, that'd be:

Amazon Customer Service--an infinite number to indicate its truly superior customer service.
Fitbit Customer Service--an infinite negative number to indicate just how bad its customer service actually is.

UPDATE on 1/31/15:  I've been informed that Fitbit has mailed my refund check, but that's after--I kid you not--no fewer than 10 emails from Customer Service refusing to do so, then saying that the refund was coming, then saying it wasn't, etc., etc.  It's a bit like that scene from Noises Off:

Lloyd: [Barging in from the house] What the *...* is going on?
Belinda: Lloyd!
Frederick: Holy cow!
Poppy: I didn't know you were here.
Lloyd: I'm not. I'm in New York. But I can't sit out there and listen to two minutes, three minutes, one minute, two minutes!
Belinda: Lloyd! We're having big dramas back here!
Lloyd: We're having big dramas out *there!* This is a matinee, Love! There are senior citizens out there! "The curtain will rise in three minutes," we all start for the gents! "The curtain will rise in one minute," we all start running out again! We don't know which way we're going!

Fitbit emailed me to let me know that it was my fault for the miscommunication:  I had had the temerity to email Fitbit from two different email addresses, and Fitbit was incapable of realizing that one customer could have two addresses.  Res ipsa.
____________________
* I even actually revoked my acceptance, but Fitbit didn't want to bounce THAT sentence to its lawyers.

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.

I'm pretty sure that's not the correct use of the word.

Now that I'm back from the AALS Annual Meeting, I remember what I liked about going in years past (seeing old friends; making new ones) and what I didn't (a lot of puffery and jockeying for status).*  But the topper this year was the indiscriminate use of the word "scholar," as in "I'm a scholar of ______."

I'm comfortable with people self-identifying as professors (after all, that's our title), or saying that their area of study is X, or suggesting that they're focusing on X.  I love hearing what someone's researching, just as much as I love hearing about what that person's doing in terms of teaching (or, for that matter, his or her hobbies).  And I love batting around ideas just as much as the next person.  I got some great suggestions about some of my projects from friends at the conference. 

But saying "I'm a scholar"?  Um, that's something that the person reading the scholarship gets to decide.  

Why is it that I think that we can call what we do "producing scholarship," but that referring to ourselves as scholars is a bad idea?

Answer #1:  It's pretentious.

Answer #2:  Just as you can't make something "interesting" by declaring it thus, you can't be a scholar just because you're writing something in a particular area.  Trust me:  the best scholars don't toot their own horns that way.  Some of the most amazing folks in academia are jaw-droppingly modest.  Let your readers decide how good your work is--not you.

Just sayin.'

_____________________
*  I seriously went through Faculty Recruitment Conference flashbacks when I checked into the hotel this year--and my own FRC experience was way back in 1991.

Bad customer service winner of the week--Ulta.com.

Apparently, Ulta, "we promise to answer your question in 24 hours" does not mean what you think it does.  Ten days and waiting, and you already shipped the order for which I had questions without first answering the questions.  BAD JOB.

Our amicus brief in ASARCO was filed yesterday.

And it's here (and here). 

Why doesn't Fitbit trust its customers?

I have a Fitbit Charge.  I have that, instead of the Jawbone, because my Jawbone broke repeatedly and had to have a soft restart about once every two weeks.  Now I have the Charge, which would be better, if it held a charge longer than 2-3 days.  It's supposed to hold a charge for 7-10 days.  Either Fitbit's engineers don't have the same understanding of "7-10 days" that I do, or mine's not working.

What I did like about Jawbone was, each time I needed a replacement, the company trusted me enough to send me out a new one before asking me to send back the old one.  Fitbit refuses to do that, even though the issue of the charge failure is well-known.

Bad customer service, Fitbit.  BAD.

Dear Tim Cook: Steve Jobs wouldn't have bollixed up the Genius Bar this way.

So now, apparently, I can't just make a Genius Bar appointment.  I have to go through too many hoops, including having to override the Support Page itself and, well, lying to Apple to get to a human.

NOTE TO APPLE:   Moving things around because a techie thinks that a change might be cool is not a good justification for change.

Wishing my beloved Marine Corps a very happy birthday today.

Happy 239th birthday, Marines!

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.

I loved this post about the boycott.

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

Happy birthday, John Cleese!

And here is his lecture on how to be creative.