Legal Profession Commons^™

E-Memos 2.0: An Empirical Study Of How Attorneys Write, Brad Desnoyer

Faculty Works

Email has changed law practice. It is now changing the legal writing classroom. For over a decade, scholars have developed a foundation for teaching e-memos. But as e-memo pedagogy evolved, scholars diverged in their advice and their textbook samples, leaving professors and students with contradictory instruction. This Article seeks to bridge that divide and build upon the scholarly foundation with empirical evidence.

Between 2018 and 2019, over 100 practicing attorneys reviewed and ranked sample, substantive e-memos and answered questions about e-memo preferences and habits. The results of the study reveal attorneys prefer e-memos with explicit and detailed legal reasoning, not …

Practicing The Be Practice Ready: Making Competent Legal Researchers Using The New Process And Practice Method, Jason Murray

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Good With Words: Speaking And Presenting, Patrick Barry

Books

Suppose you were good with words. Suppose when you decided to speak, the message you delivered—and the way you delivered it—successfully connected with your intended audience. What would that mean for your career prospects? What would that mean for your comfort level in social situations? And perhaps most importantly, what would that mean for your satisfaction with the personal relationships you value the most?

This book is designed to help you find out. Based on an award-winning course and workshop series at the University of Michigan taken by students training to enter a wide range of fields—law, business, medicine, social …

Notes On Nuance: Volume 1, Patrick Barry

Books

To succeed in law, business, education, government, health care, and many other fields, it is becoming increasingly important to distinguish yourself as a savvy communicator. Social media has only accelerated the ways in which we all must learn to use our words to connect, compete, and create. There are features of the English language, however, that many of us haven’t taken full advantage of yet. Notes on Nuance is designed to help change that.

Drawing on a diverse collection of authors—from novelists to physicists, from ancient Greek historians to modern-day CEOs—it reveals the hidden mechanics that skilled writers use to …

Behind Bartkus: A Flamboyant Lawyer, A Vindictive Judge, And The Untold Story Of Double Jeopardy’S Dual Sovereignty, Stephen E. Henderson, Dean Strang

Faculty Articles

A young defense attorney earns his client, charged in federal court with bank robbery, a jury acquittal. (It’s the attorney’s first.) One would expect the impartial judge to thank the jury for its service. Instead, this one harangues both jury and defense attorney (“entailing changes in his complexion from red to purple to dead white”), publicly rails against the verdict, attempts to bar the jurors from future service, refuses to release the defendant, and successfully prods prosecutors to bring a duplicative state prosecution that would end in conviction for the same crime. To anyone who respects the rule of law—or …

Mitchell Hamline School Of Law Summer 2020 Covid-19 Legal Response Clinic, Natalie Netzel, Ana Pottratz Acosta, Joanna Woolman, Kate Kruse, Jon Geffen

Faculty Scholarship

This essay is a reflection on lawyering in a time of crisis. It details the Mitchell Hamline School of Law Clinical Faculty’s response to the community needs resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic by creating the COVID-19 Legal Response Clinic. It also recounts the impact of the murder of George Floyd and the long overdue national reckoning with systemic racism, sparked in our city. Additionally, against this backdrop, it examines the trauma-informed approach taken in clinical work and the classroom to help students process their own trauma and apply this approach in their work with clients.

Amid these concurrent crises in …

Thinking Like A Lawyer About Legislation: Implementing Legislative Decision Theory Through Improved Citation, Hugh L. Brady

Journal of Legislation

The Texas Supreme Court in the late 1990s, in two significant cases, arguably interpreted statutes to achieve a result directly opposite to the Texas Legislature’s decision to adopt a specific text. Why do lawyers and judges struggle when reading and applying legislation, especially when using enactment history? Under Professor Victoria Nourse’s legislative decision theory, the struggle is attributable to the fact that lawyers do not consider the legislature’s institutional rules and procedures to find the proper text to interpret a statute in light of the available legislative evidence. Wider implementation of her theory is hampered by current legal citation practices …

Microaggressions, Questionable Science, And Free Speech, Edward Cantu, Lee Jussim

Faculty Works

The topic of microaggressions is hot currently. Diversity administrators regularly propagate lists of alleged microaggressions and express confidence that listed items reflect what some psychologists claim they do: racism that is, at the very least, unconscious in the mind of the speaker. Legal academics are increasingly leveraging microaggression research in theorizing law and proposing legal change. But how scientifically legitimate are claims by some psychologists about what acts constitute microaggressions? The authors—one a law professor, the other a psychologist—argue that the answer is “not much.” In this article, the authors dissect the studies, and critique the claims, of microaggression researchers. …

Change At The Speed Of Leadership, Lee Fisher

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

“The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born—that there is a genetic factor to leadership. . . That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.”

“Lawyers are in the anomalous position of serving as leaders but generally lacking leadership training and skills. Competency in lawyering skills often functions as a proxy for leadership skills, despite the evidence that leadership skills are distinct and may take years to develop. Our neglect of leadership skills is reaching crisis proportions because nearly half of all current law firm partners will retire within the next ten …

Who Wants To Be A Prosecutor? And Why Care? Law Students’ Career Aspirations And Reform Prosecutors’ Goals, Shih-Chun Steven Chien, Stephen Daniels

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Often called “progressive” or “reform” prosecutors, a number of reform-minded prosecutors have been elected recently across the United States—promising a distinctive vision of criminal justice and signaling that their role will be more attuned to issues of race and equity than “law and order.” Furthering this vision requires dramatic changes to the working cultures—the norms, practices, and even personnel—of their offices. Diversity plays a major role.

One central challenge is identifying, attracting, and hiring newly-minted lawyers who can, over time, be socialized into and sustain a changing organizational culture. This article empirically examines that challenge, which involves two sides of …

Foreword, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Foreword.

The Deans' Roundtable, Dean Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Dean Danielle Conway, Dean Tamara Lawson, Dean Mario Barnes, Dean L. Song Richardson

Seattle University Law Review

The Deans' Roundtable.

Roberta Karmel And The "Brooklyn School", Edward J. Janger

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Informed Consent Doctrine In Legal Malpractice Law, Vincent R. Johnson

Faculty Articles

The doctrine of informed consent is now deeply embedded into the law of legal ethics. In legal malpractice litigation, the doctrine holds that a lawyer has a duty to disclose to a client material information about the risks and alternatives associated with a course of action. A lawyer who fails to make such required disclosures and fails to obtain informed consent is negligent, regardless of whether the lawyer otherwise exercises care in representing a client. If such negligent nondisclosures cause damages, the lawyer can be held accountable for the client's losses.

Shifting the focus of a legal malpractice action from …

Collective Wisdom: When To Impeach With An Inconsistent Statement, A. J. Bellido De Luna

Faculty Articles

The recognition of multiple goals of cross-examination is nothing new. Despite early emphasis on cross-examination as being needed to expose “mendacity,” Dean Wigmore viewed cross-examination as the essence of the trial and truth-seeking process in the United States. He viewed it as capable of serving two ends: proving untruths and completing the story by eliciting facts that “remained suppressed or undeveloped” on direct examination, including “the remaining and qualifying circumstances of the subject of testimony, as known to the witness.” Precisely because of the presence of dual objectives, timing is everything. Said differently, assume a witness has information useful to …

Menstruation And The Bar Exam: Unconstitutional Tampon Bans, Bridget J. Crawford

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Some states have policies that prevent bar exam candidates from bringing their own menstrual products to the test. Via social media, awareness of these policies achieved new heights in the weeks leading up to the July 2020 bar exam. While states adopted different approaches to administering the bar exam during the COVID-19 pandemic, a small number of jurisdictions responded to public criticism by permitting test-takers to bring menstrual products with them to exams. Not all states have adopted permissive policies, however. This essay explains why outright bans on menstrual products at the bar exam likely are unconstitutional. So-called alternate policies, …

January 2021 Newsletter

Ergo

No abstract provided.

The Trial Preparation Procedures—Civil, Will Rhee, L. Richard Walker

Law Faculty Scholarship

In an effort to provide scholarship immediately useful to the litigator, this Article proposes a detailed systems workflow to plan and coordinate preparing for federal civil trials called the Trial Preparation Procedures—Civil or "TrialPrepPro—Civil" for short. Although there is an abundance of anecdotal "learning from doing" trial preparation guidance, empirically testable "learning about doing" trial preparation guidance is rare. We present our TrialPrepPro to learn more about doing.

The TrialPrepPro is modeled after the battle-proven U.S. Army Troop Leading Procedures used, with modifications, by all U.S. military services, our NATO allies, and many other foreign militaries. Although there is ample …

Judges And The Deregulation Of The Lawyer's Monopoly, Jessica Steinberg, Anna Carpenter, Colleen Shanahan, Alyx Mark

Faculty Articles

In a revolutionary moment for the legal profession, the deregulation of legal services is taking hold in many parts of the country. Utah and Arizona, for instance, are experimenting with new regulations that permit nonlawyer advocates to play an active role in assisting citizens who may not otherwise have access to legal services. In addition, amendments to the Rules of Professional Conduct in both states, as well as those being contemplated in California, now allow nonlawyers to have a partnership stake in law firms, which may dramatically change the way capital for the delivery of legal services is raised as …

Seeing Those We’Ve Rendered Invisible – A Clarion Call For Criminal Justice, Stephen E. Henderson, Jordan Thomas

Faculty Articles

Jonathan Rapping, Gideon’s Promise: A Public Defender Movement to Transform Criminal Justice (Beacon Press 2020) In this brief review, we situate Rapping’s work among those demanding criminal justice reform, praise an unrelated bonus, and propose a friendly amendment to nudge his vision over the finish line of justice. It will not be enough to provide newly enabled and supported public defenders to those our systems consider indigent. We ought to provide them to us all.