Good advice about jobs.

From Professor Bernie Burk (here), at The Faculty Lounge.

Hilarious, and not a bad analysis.

See here.  Hat tip to TaxProf Blog.

Prof. Michael Higdon's new article on faculty hiring.

It's another one of his typically wonderful pieces.  See here.  Hat tip to my dad, for pointing it out to me.

Bloomberg Law on the class action lawsuits against law schools.

Another great interview by Lee Pacchia here.

How to tick off a stodgy old law professor, part n.

Call her by her first name without her inviting you to do so.

Dear Law Review Editors:

Thank you very much for (1) soliciting or (2) accepting my article.  I'm happy to publish it in your journal.

I truly appreciate the hard work that you did in cite-checking and editing my article.  You cleaned up some problems and made it better. 

One complaint, though:  you need to remember that my article will be published under my name, not yours.  Therefore, I will reject all of your attempts to "clean up" my writing by replacing my informal style with your more formal one.

I'm sorry if law school gave you the impression that you must use stuffy writing in order to write well.  That's incorrect.  The best contracts are written with straightforward language.  The best briefs are those with simple, declarative sentences and active voice.

I know that some of my law professor colleagues write more formally than I do, and there's nothing wrong with the way that they write.  That's their choice, and I respect it.  But I also respect the choice of those who write less formally, and I include myself in the latter group.

When you're starting out, you find your own voice first by imitating the voice of more senior lawyers and then, slowly, figuring out your most authentic way of communicating.  Once you have your own authentic voice, treasure it.  Being true to yourself will take you far in life.

Of course, in order to break the rules of formal writing, you must know them.  So if you're weak on rules of grammar or punctuation, learn them.  Then you can decide when and how to break (some of) them.

Writing is like jazz.  Jazz is great because it knows the rules of classical music and chooses when and where to break those rules.

Find your jazz voice.  I have mine.

Bloomberg Law & David Segal on legal education.

(Disclaimer:  I'm working on some projects with Bloomberg Law, so I'm not the world's most impartial commenter.)

I watched Lee Pacchia's interview with David Segal (here), and I have a few preliminary thoughts:

1. What I liked best:  the podcast illustrates one basic truth.  No one in a bubble ever thinks he's in a bubble.
2. The distortion effect of the USNWR rankings isn't just observed by seeing how law schools reorder their priorities.  It's also seen when law schools fudge the USNWR numbers, which is precisely the wrong lesson to send to budding lawyers.
3. If the law schools were doing a creditable job of disclosing their employment and bar passage stats, then I'd feel less bad about students going to places that have high tuition and low employment and bar passage rates.  I don't believe in coddling people who are thinking of becoming lawyers.  I do, however, believe that people need to have accurate and timely information in hand before they can make informed decisions. 
4. The ABA Standards actually do have a lot to do with what freedom schools have to play with expenses. 
5. After I stopped laughing at Mr. Segal's idea that someone really inexperienced could do a decent job on a consumer bankruptcy case, I decided that his example proved the problem.  Law is a complicated field.  If we don't want to put out mere scriveners, then we have to make sure that law graduates have a full range of skills that give them the ability to provide competent advice to clients.  We may disagree on what those skills are (but see our forthcoming book, Law Firm Job Survival Manual, which will give some good basic advice on necessary skills), but we can't just give people two years of black-letter law and assume that they'll be able to advise clients.
6. I do believe that we should have teeth in whatever standards we apply.  If no school loses accreditation, even after several warnings, then the standards aren't that useful.
7. Part of the problem is that we're assuming that all law schools have, or should have, the same mission, so we're not thinking hard enough about different models of legal education.

I'm about to accept an offer to publish one of my latest essays (Changing the Modal Law School:  Rethinking U.S. Legal Education in (Most) Schools), and I'll eventually put the final version up on SSRN once the piece is published.  The short version of my essay says that there really are three basic types of law schools.  A very few of them provide unparalleled networking opportunities for their faculty and alumni; a very few of them create the risk that their graduates won't be able to become lawyers (and pay back those nondischargeable loans); and most of them (the "modal" schools) provide quite a nice legal education.  Pretending that these three types of schools are at all alike is what gets us into trouble.

All in all, though, the Bloomberg Law interview with David Segal is worth watching.