Legal Profession Commons^™

Crowdsourcing (Bankruptcy) Fee Control, Matthew Bruckner

Matthew Adam Bruckner

In this article, I explore how crowdsourcing can help reduce the cost of professional representation in corporate bankruptcy cases. The cost of professional representation in bankruptcy cases is currently a hot topic, with oral argument haven taken place before the U.S. Supreme Court in Baker Botts L.L.P. v. Asarco, L.L.C. in February 2015, which case addressed various issues raised in my article.

In brief, the fees of lawyers, investment bankers, and other bankruptcy professionals has been spiraling out of control because chapter 11’s existing fee control system is broken. That system can neither identify ...

Experiential Education And Our Divided Campuses: What Delivers Practice Value To Big Law Associates, Government Attorneys, And Public Interest Lawyers?, Margaret E. Reuter, Joanne Ingham

Margaret E. Reuter

How will law schools meet the challenge of expanding their education in lawyering skills as demanded from critics and now required by the ABA? This article examines the details of the experiential coursework (clinic, field placement, and skills courses) of 2,142 attorneys. It reveals that experiential courses have not been comparably pursued or valued by former law students as they headed to careers in different settings and types of law practice. Public interest lawyers took many of these types of courses, at intensive levels, and valued them highly. In marked contrast, corporate lawyers in large firms took far fewer ...

For Men Only: A Gap In The Rules Makes Sex Discrimination In The Client Selection Process Ethical, Michele N. Struffolino

Michele N Struffolino

For Men Only: A Gap in the Rules Makes Sex Discrimination in the Client Selection Process Ethical

By Professor Michele N. Struffolino

ABSTRACT

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The billboard states: “Divorce: Men Only.” The reaction is one of confusion. Something just does not seem right. Isn’t this discrimination? Is the system willing to allow this message because the need to protect men’s rights in divorce outweighs the systemic and societal harms associated with the message?

Although this article focuses on the ethical issues associated with firms that exclude women from the pool of potential divorce clients, the existence of women only ...

Redefining Professionalism, Rebecca Roiphe

Rebecca Roiphe

REdefining PRofessionalism

Abstract

Rebecca Roiphe*

Most scholars condemn professionalism as self-serving, anti-competitive rhetoric. This Article argues that professionalism can be a positive and productive way of thinking about lawyers’ work. While it is undoubtedly true that the Bar has used the ideology of the professional role to support self-interested and bigoted causes, professionalism has also served as an important way of developing and marshalling group identity to promote useful ends. The critics of professionalism tend to view it as an ideology, according to which professionals, unlike businessmen, are concerned not with their own financial gain but with the good of ...

Vol. 48, No. 07 (February 23, 2015)

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

When Peace Is Not The Goal Of A Class Action Settlement, D. Theodore Rave

D. Theodore Rave

On the conventional account, a class action settlement is a vehicle through which the defendant buys peace from the class action lawyer. That single transaction will preclude future litigation by all class members. But peace, at least through preclusion, may not always be the goal. In a recent Fair Credit Reporting Action (FCRA) case, In re Trans Union Privacy Litigation, the parties agreed to a class action settlement that did not preclude individual claims. The 190 million class members surrendered only their rights to participate in a future class or aggregate action; they remained free to march right back into ...

Forum Selling, Daniel M. Klerman, Greg Reilly

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series

Forum shopping is problematic because it may lead to forum selling. For diverse motives, including prestige, local benefits, or re-election, some judges want to hear more cases. When plaintiffs have wide choice of forum, such judges have incentives to make the law more pro-plaintiff, because plaintiffs choose the court. While only a few judges may be motivated to attract more cases, their actions can have large effects, because their courts will attract a disproportionate share of cases. For example, judges in the Eastern District of Texas have distorted the rules and practices relating to case assignment, joinder, discovery, transfer, and ...

The End Of Law Schools, Ray Worthy Campbell

Ray W Campbell

Law schools as we know them are doomed. They continue to offer an educational model originally designed to prepare lawyers to practice in common law courts of a bygone era. That model fails to prepare lawyers for today’s highly specialized practices, and it fails to provide targeted training for the emerging legal services fields other than traditional lawyering.

This article proposes a new ideology of legal education to meet the needs of modern society. Unlike other reform proposals, it looks not to tweaking the training of traditional lawyers, but to rethinking legal education in light of a changing legal ...

Why The Bar Examination Fails To Raise The Bar, Carol Goforth

Carol Goforth

This article considers whether the current bar examination format achieves its stated objectives of protecting the public by testing minimum competency to practice law. After discussing the nature of the current bar examinations offered in the United States, the article looks at the skills associated with legal practice, and evaluates whether the bar examination is assisting in the process of insuring proper legal training for lawyers or hindering it.

Vol. 48, No. 06 (February 16, 2015)

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

Breaking Bad Facts: What Intriguing Contradictions In Fiction Narratives Can Teach Lawyers About Coping With Harmful Evidence, Cathren Page

Cathren Page

Abstract: Breaking Bad Facts: What Intriguing Contradictions in Fiction Narratives Can Teach Lawyers About Coping with Harmful Evidence

by Cathren Koehlert-Page

Walter White is the “nerdiest old dude” that Jesse Pinkman knows. His students ignore him and whisper and laugh during class. They make fun of him at his after school job at the car wash where he is forced to stay late. His home décor and personal fashion could best be described as New American Pathetic.

And yet by the end of the hit television series, Breaking Bad, White is a feared multi-million dollar drug lord known as Heisenberg ...

Solicitors' Right To Advertise: A Historical And Comparative Analysis, M. Catherine Harris

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Law’S Algorithm, John O. Mcginnis, Steven Wasick

Florida Law Review

This Article offers a historical, theoretical, and practical perspective on law as an information technology. Law fundamentally concerns information—providing information to the community about the content of legal norms and, at least in its common law form, eliciting information about the world from the disputes before a court. This Article first surveys law’s history as an information technology and shows how law is changed by the information technology of its day. It then applies information theory to understand how the computer—the key technology of our day— is changing how practitioners conduct legal search and thereby which forms ...

Vol. 48, No. 05 (February 9, 2015)

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

Impartiality And Independence: Misunderstood Cousins, James E. Moliterno

James E. Moliterno

No abstract provided.

The New-Breed, “Die-Hard” Chinese Lawyer: A Comparison With American Civil Rights Cause Lawyers, James E. Moliterno

James E. Moliterno

No abstract provided.

Buying Voice: Financial Rewards For Whistleblowing Lawyers, Nancy J. Moore, Kathleen Clark

Nancy J Moore

“Buying Voice: Financial Incentives for Whistleblowing Lawyers”

Kathleen Clark and Nancy J. Moore

Abstract

The federal government relies increasingly on whistleblowers to ferret out fraud, and has awarded whistleblowers over $4 billion under the False Claims Act and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform and Consumer Protection Act. May lawyers ethically seek whistleblower rewards under these federal statutes? A handful of lawyers have tried to do so as FCA qui tam relators. They have not yet succeeded, but several court decisions suggest that they might be able to do so under confidentiality exceptions to state ethics law, which several courts have ...

Enduring Design For Business Entities, William E. Foster

William E Foster

The success or failure of an institution may hinge on some of the earliest decisions of its founders. In constitutional design literature, endurance is a widely accepted drafting objective. Indeed, constitutional endurance is positively associated with prosperous and stable societies. Like drafters of constitutions, business organizers have almost innumerable objectives for their enterprises, and attorneys drafting organizational documents must take into account these myriad goals. Oftentimes the drafting process fails to fully address some of the most important of these aims and results in suboptimal structures that lack predictability and reliability.

This article looks specifically at small business organizations and ...

Whose Truth? Objective And Subjective Perspectives On Truthfulness In Advocacy, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

A lawyer confronts many features of the world that are given, inflexible, and must simply be dealt with; at the same time she has latitude for creativity, for the exercise of skill and judgment toward the realization of the client’s ends. Although in law school it may seem that the law that is open-textured, manipulable, and the wellspring of creative lawyering, in practice the facts do not come pre-packaged and accepted as true for the purposes of an appellate court’s review, but are highly contingent and the product of the interaction between a lawyer and witnesses, documents, and ...

Vol. 48, No. 04 (February 2, 2015)

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.