Hear five chief justices read Goodnight Status Quo, a loving tribute to Goodnight Moon.https://t.co/hKWH8cQQiS
— Daniel Christian (@dchristian5) September 23, 2020
With thanks to Gabe Teninbaum for posting this in his Lawtomatic Newsletter| Issue #104, September 23, 2020
As Gabe points out, also see:
WMU-Cooley Named Top 10 Law School For Ethnic Enrollment in 2019 — from fox47news.com
Excerpt:
LANSING, Mich. — Western Michigan University Cooley Law School, with campuses in Michigan and Florida, was named a top 10 law school for racial and ethnic minority enrollment in 2019 by Enjuris, a collection of independent legal resources for legal professionals.
With Black students comprising 22.4 percent of WMU-Cooley’s total student enrollment in 2019, the law school is ranked in Enjuris’ recently released, Law School Enrollment by Race & Ethnicity (2019) [enjuris.com] report.
Will Pandemic Disruption Drive More Legal Operations Transformation? — from prnewswire.com
Deloitte Releases 2020 Legal Operations Survey
Excerpt:
NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — While 86% of in-house counsel surveyed said they see opportunity to modernize legal services provided to their stakeholders, Deloitte’s “2020 Legal Operations Survey” found that challenges remain. Respondents described their corporate legal departments’ maturity level for technology as just “foundational.”
Ashley Smith, Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory managing director, Deloitte Transactions and Business Analytics LLP said, “Organizations everywhere have undergone massive change as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and related economic uncertainties. As business strategies shift and the corporate legal department is called on to do more to help organizations navigate through disruption, focusing on legal operations transformation could help in-house counsel and their teams to evolve beyond heavy manual, tactical work – into leveraging technology to offer more strategic insights and value.”
Also see:
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Champion Of Gender Equality, Dies At 87 — from npr.org
by Nina Totenberg
Excerpt:
“Our nation has lost a justice of historic stature,” Chief Justice John Roberts said. “We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her, a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”
Architect of the legal fight for women’s rights in the 1970s, Ginsburg subsequently served 27 years on the nation’s highest court, becoming its most prominent member.
UNITED STATES – JANUARY 20: Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg arrives for President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address in the Capitol on Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2015. (Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
RBG’s Biggest Opinions, From Civil Rights To Civil Procedure — from law360.com by Cara Bayles
Excerpt:
But from the early years of her tenure on the high court, the justice, who died Friday at age 87, wrote majority decisions that showed her breadth as a lawyer and a thoughtful scholar, who gently guided the reader to her conclusion using evidence and careful, persuasive argument.
“She strongly believed that if you disagree with people, you have to convince them with the strength of your position,” said Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP appellate attorney Tiffany Wright, who clerked for Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “Her majority opinions are less fiery, but very much RBG.”
But she was also “a lawyer’s lawyer — precise, analytical, and evenhanded,” according to Joseph Palmore, her former clerk and a former assistant to the solicitor general who now co-chairs Morrison & Foerster LLP’s appellate practice. She loved even the more granular rules of litigation.
Women Lawyers Share Lessons They Learned From Ruth Bader Ginsburg — from abovethelaw.com by Staci Zaretsky
The Notorious RBG changed women’s lives and law practices across America.
Remembering Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Early Career — from abovethelaw.com by Kathryn Rubino
Impressive, even from the start.
Inclusion in Law Firms Should Be About Everyone—Not Just Lawyers — from law.com by Jennifer Johnson
Too many firms leave nearly half of their employees out of diversity and inclusion efforts, only partially delivering on the the full commitment that clients expect.
Excerpt:
Unfortunately, most of these firms are focusing only on their lawyer population, leaving a major component of the diversity and inclusion (D&I) equation without consideration: the contributions of law firms’ business services professionals. These are professionals who are working within the business of a law firm that are not fee earners.
This is no small issue. Among larger firms, it is quite common for so-called “nonlawyers” to comprise as much as 50% of total head count. These business services professionals—members of legal operations, human resources, finance, information technology, marketing and administration functions—are critical to a law firm’s success, but far too often are not treated as valuable members of the larger team.
"Pair an accomplished civil litigator looking to rethink depositions w/ a successful tech entrepreneur who just sold his startup to a larger co, add in $3.5M in seed funding, & you have a recipe for potentially disrupting how lawyers litigate big cases."https://t.co/Zb3jdd1Mb3
— Daniel Christian (@dchristian5) September 16, 2020
From DSC:
I hesitate to post this one…but this information and the phenomenon behind it likely has impacted what’s happening in the higher education space. (Or perhaps, it’s a bit of the other way around as well.) Increasingly, higher ed is becoming out of reach for many families. Again, is this a topic for Econ classes out there? Or Poli Sci courses?
Trends in income from 1975 to 2018 — from rand.org by Carter Price and Kathryn Edwards
Excerpt:
We document the cumulative effect of four decades of income growth below the growth of per capita gross national income and estimate that aggregate income for the population below the 90th percentile over this time period would have been $2.5 trillion (67 percent) higher in 2018 had income growth since 1975 remained as equitable as it was in the first two post-War decades. From 1975 to 2018, the difference between the aggregate taxable income for those below the 90th percentile and the equitable growth counterfactual totals $47 trillion.
Also see:
Why is our death toll so high and our unemployment rate so staggeringly off the charts? Why was our nation so unprepared, and our economy so fragile? Why have we lacked the stamina and the will to contain the virus like most other advanced nations? The reason is staring us in the face: a stampede of rising inequality that has been trampling the lives and livelihoods of the vast majority of Americans, year after year after year.
For New Orleans–based firm, architecture is a tool for design justice — from autodesk.com by Redshift Video
Excerpt:
When Bryan C. Lee Jr. was a boy, his family moved from Sicily to Trenton, NJ, and he was struck by not only the vastly different physical environment but also the ways different physical spaces affect people. It’s a concept that he explores today at Colloqate Design, an architecture and design-justice firm that focuses on civic, communal, and cultural spaces through the lens of racial justice.
Walmart just started delivering stuff with drones — from futurism.com by Victor Tangermann
Excerpt:
Walmart just kicked off its own drone delivery pilot, a collaboration with drone delivery company Flytrex. The pilot launched today in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and is limited to select grocery and household essential items from the retailer’s local stores.
From DSC:
It starts off with an army of drones from Walmart joined by another army of drones from Amazon.
Then company XYZ chimes in. Then company ABC chimes in. And so on, and so on, and so on.
Then the armies of drones change to more powerful, louder, more “capable” delivery vehicles that can handle bigger, heavier deliveries.
And suddenly, the skies are full of noise-making, sun-blocking pieces of human-made machinery that, for the most part, are convenient but not necessary.
We need to think — and act — very carefully these days.
Is this the future we want to create? Not me. I, for one, appreciate a quiet walk. I appreciate being able to look up at the skies, especially when they are clear.
To the relevant engineers and C-Suites out there:
Let’s shut this down — now — before the momentum gets started. Let’s follow Portland’s example by shutting down facial recognition/AI:
Rocket Lawyer to Join Utah’s Legal Services Provider ‘Sandbox’ — from news.bloomberglaw.com by Sam Skolnik
Excerpt:
Rocket Lawyer is the first big-name legal services provider to announce that it’s taking part in a Utah pilot program aimed at broadening the state’s legal industry landscape and making services more affordable and accessible.
Several other consumer-facing legal providers also will be joining the regulatory “sandbox” program, approved last month by the state supreme court. It will be run by the court’s new Office of Legal Services Innovation.
From A New Way Forward:
Also see the following “Must Reads” from A New Way Forward:
From DSC:
Along these lines…in regards to digital equity, I’m reminded of this recent graphic:
Arizona is first state to eliminate ban on nonlawyer ownership of law firms — from lawsitesblog.com by Bob Ambrogi
SALT Social Justice Series Promoting Equity Online (21 Aug 2020) — from saltlaw.org with a special thanks to Catherine M. Grosso for these resources (Catherine is a Professor of Law at Michigan State University, Co-President, Society of American Law Teachers, and an Associate Editor for the National Registry of Exonerations.)
From DSC:
To me, that last bullet point says:
“I’m on your team and I’m here to help you become the best lawyer, litigator, judge, legislator, etc. that you can be.”
Other resources Catherine and Dr. Tasha Souza mentioned:
How to use Microsoft Word’s new ‘Transcribe’ tool — from thenextweb.com by Rachel Kaser; with thanks to Tim Holt for publishing this on his blog
Excerpt:
At the moment, the Transcribe tool is only available on the online version of Word, and only to Microsoft 365 subscribers. There are plans to bring it to Word mobile at some point in the future. It also only supports English, but that’s also likely to change.
So how do you actually use the Transcribe tool? Here’s how.
