Year: 2013

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Are Law Students Dumber? Law Profs See Damage Done by NCLB

One professor at a top-20 law school recently confided that he has to teach his students how to write business letters. A professor at another elite school complained that grading exams is far more difficult now because the writing skills of students are so deficient that each exam requires several reads. Bernstein’s article suggests that he knows what accounts for this—federal education policy. He  may be right.
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Teaching to the test overshadows (if not supplants) teaching critical thinking, higher-order reasoning, and the development of creative-writing skills. As Bernstein emphasizes, contemporary teaching or teaching to the test does not “require proper grammar, usage, syntax, and structure.” In fact, those skills may be perceived as unimportant in this modern age—as many of the tests taken by K-12 students employ multiple choice, and those that require essays grade on a rubric that pays little if any attention to the quality of writing.

Law Professors See the Damage Done by ‘No Child Left Behind’ – The Conversation – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Something to add to the pile facing legal education today: students may not be as smart as they used to be. And that’s a problem because the law is more complex today than ever and requires extraordinary analytical and critical thinking skills. If you show up at law school lacking the necessary skill set, you will not do well.

As the father of 2 teenagers I can tell you that even in the best public schools “teaching to the test” is a great problem. Bright kids hit high school without a lot of writing and independent thinking skills and aren’t learning or even working on those skills there. I can certainly see where issues are going to come up in higher education as these kids move forward.

Be sure to read the comments following the Chronicle piece, there is some good stuff in there.

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Reflections on #ReInventLaw and Some Thoughts on #ReInventLegalEdu

I spent Friday March 8 at one of the most interesting conferences I’ve ever attended. The ReInvent Law Silicon Valley conference promised 40 speakers in 9 hours, a day of the best in innovation in law practice, courts, and more. It certainly delivered. Much has been written about specific sessions and the ideas presented, so I’ll skip that sort of analysis. Instead I’d like to give you my impressions a few days after the conference and after having let it sink in a bit.

It is now apparent to me that there is a major structural shift going on in the way law, especially “big law”, is being practiced. Practice and the courts are embracing many aspects of technology as part of doing business. Lawyers and judges are looking to technology to increase efficiency, automate rote tasks, and create space, physical and virtual, for more personal interaction between attorneys, clients, judges, parties, and legal consumers. There is a growing awareness that the delivery of some basic legal services can be delivered by non-lawyers and that there is a great unmet need for legal services among those who cannot afford to pay hundreds of dollars an hour for a lawyers time.

As with all structural shifts like this, there are barriers and points of resistance. A major barrier to the shift is ABA Rule 5.4 governing the professional independence of a lawyer. This rule effectively prohibits the investment of outside capitol in law firms or organization engaged in the practice of law. Without access to outside capital and business structures practicing attorneys will have a difficult time taking full advantage of the opportunities presented by increasing the use of technology. They will get there eventually, but the rate of change would greatly accelerated with an infusion of outside capital.

Of course it isn’t just a practice rule that is slowing down the ReInvent Law movement. Lawyers themselves need to examine the way they have traditionally structured practice. The billable hour came under criticism just as often as Rule 5.4 during the presentations. The use of billable hours builds inefficiency into the system and was cited as a strong demotivator of efficiency in practice. Indeed the wisdom of continuing the “big law” model of life tenure partnerships was questioned. A more flexible structure with compensation linked to actual outcomes is seen as a better model to deal with the swift changes in technology confronting the legal profession.

And what about legal education? While the gathering included members of the legal academy both as presenters and in the audience (the organizers of the event are professors at Michigan State University College of Law), the focus of day was really on the practice of law and to a lesser extent the courts. Reform or reinvention of legal education was the topic of only a couple of the presenters and this was a shame because we could really use a #ReInventLegalEdu movement right about now.

There is little doubt that legal education in the US is facing a crisis of its own. Enrollment is down, applications are down, graduate employment is down, and debt load among graduates is high. On top of that the nature of the practice of law is under going a structural change. As law schools struggle with the crisis I think they are at risk of increasing the disconnect between the academy and practice especially if they continue to turn out graduates who are being educated for a style of practice that is disappearing.

The challenge to law schools, in the face of this crisis, is to embrace the changes moving through practice and the courts and #ReInventLegalEdu. There is an opportunity here for law schools to change, to embrace the technology and methodologies heralded by ReInvent Law, to provide the research and development that the practice and courts will need, and to graduate more tech savvy lawyers. I think change is coming to legal education and law schools have a choice, lead the charge to a new legal practice future or have the change imposed on them by the practice and courts. I’m hoping something like #ReInventLegalEdu helps to lead the way forward.

 

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An Experiment in Document Conversion and Generation

This is the README file for the Github repository that holds the files used and created in this experiment. I’m including the README in its entirety since it kills 2 birds with 1 stone.

1. Introduction

This repo holds a set of files that I created as an experiment in getting old work out of proprietary formats. The idea is to take a MSFT Word file and convert it into something that is human readable, open formatted, and convertible.

To do this is I settled upon AsciiDoc to mark up the text of the paper. I chose AsciiDoc over Markdown because of the depth of features and availability of conversion tools.

2. The Process

I decided to use a local install of Etherpad Lite (EL) as my primary text editor for this project. I did this because of a few features including autosave, versioning, and the potential for real time collaboration. I hoped that these features would provide me with a useful editing tool.

Once EL setup and configured I was faced with the problem of how to get the text of the paper into the editor in the first place. My initial inclination was to retype the document, formating and editing as I went along. Faced with a 10,000 word doc and no appreciable typing skills, I was not happy with this option. After a bit of poking around in EL I found its import features. To get MSFT Word files imported required a bit more configuring, but it worked. I then imported the Word file into EL.

The import process added the text of the document to the editor. It stripped all of the formatting from the text and inserted the 112 footnotes in-line into the text. All of this was actually a good thing, making the process of marking up the doc with AsciiDoc easier. Using the original word processing file as a guide I worked through the document adding the necessary AsciiDoc markup to format the paper. The most tedious part was the 112 footnotes, but since AsciiDoc handles footnote with in-line markup it moved along as fast as could be expected.

In total I spent about 6 hours working on the AsciiDoc version of the document. The most time was spent tagging footnotes and figuring out the format for the bibliography
[I am still not really pleased with the way the biblio looks. I think I can fix though on a later iteration.]
The rest of the formating such as section titles, quotes, emphasis, and lists was straight forward though I did keep a copy of the AsciiDoc User Guide open in another tab to help out.

I found the Etherpad Lite interface easy to work with and really appreciated the autosave and versioning features. EL doesn’t know about AsciiDoc markup though so that presented a challenge. In order to preview the work I had to export the file as text and then do the basic AsciiDoc to HTML, opening the resulting file in another browser tab to see what was going on. As I became more confident of my work, I checked less often so this was not much of an issue. I marked major revisions as saved revisions at the end of section of the document to give me a nice clean revision history.

Once I had a nice clean version that produced good HTML, I exported a final copy to my local computer and set about using the AsciiDoc utility a2x to generate the document in various formats. For this particular experiment I went with XHTML, PDF, and EPUB. The generation/conversion process was marred only by my problems with understanding the format for the bibliography at the end of the document. Once I figure out just how to mark up the bibliography process was flawless. a2x first converts the AsciiDoc marked document into a DocBook XML file and then converts the DocBook file into other formats. The process uses the standard set of XML processing tools as well as CSS to generate the files. By using custom CSS files, the layout and formating of the various output files can be changed as needed.

3. The Files

The files included in this repo are the ones used and generated as part of the process described above.

KELSOFIN20130111.docx The MSFT Word file that was used for the starting point. This document began as a WordPerfect file in 1992 and was moved to Word in the mid-90’s.
KelsoPaper.txt This is the AsciiDoc version of the file as created and edited in Etherpad Lite. This is the file used to generate the other formats.
KelsoPaper.pdf PDF file generated from KelsoPaper.txt using the command a2x -v -f pdf KelsoPaper.txt
KelsoPaper.html XHTML file generated from KelsoPaper.txt using the command a2x -v -f xhtml KelsoPaper.txt
docbook-xsl.css CSS file used to style KelsoPaper.html
KelsoPaper.epub EPUB file generated from KelsoPaper.txt using the command a2x -v -f epub KelsoPaper.txt

4. Conclusion

I am happy with the results of this experiment and hope to be able to further explore the use of Etherpad Lite and AsciiDoc as a tool set for creating free and open documents.

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Having a Routine May Make Decisions Easier

Vohs’s experiments tested whether everyday choices — which candy bar to eat or what clothes to buy, for instance — wear down our mental energy. The results? Vohs and colleagues consistently found that making repeated choices depleted the mental energy of their subjects, even if those choices were mundane and relatively pleasant.
So, if you want to be able to have more mental resources throughout the day, you should identify the aspects of your life that you consider mundane — and then “routinize” those aspects as much as possible. In short, make fewer decisions.

via Boring Is Productive – Robert C. Pozen – HBS Faculty – Harvard Business Review.

Fascinating stuff. Now I know why it’s hard to decide to what to have for dinner at the end of a long day and why lots of decisions early in the day result the need for a nap in the afternoon.

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MySQL 5.6 Released, NoSQL Features Added

A lot has changed in the database market in the two years since the MySQL 5.5 release. For one, the rise in the popularity of NoSQL databases has escalated in recent years. The NoSQL trend is not one that Oracle is ignoring.

“SQL is a very flexible language that allows you to do a lot of things that are not possible through a direct NoSQL type approach,” Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL Engineering at Oracle told InternetNews. “So we’ve tried to join the best of both worlds with the full power of SQL to do complex queries and at the same time we’re introducing a NoSQL access type API.”

Oracle Releases Open Source MySQL 5.6 with NoSQL Features — DatabaseJournal.com

The NoSQL API will be available alongside traditional SQL access to the same database giving the admin a powerful option for data access without forgoing the existing code. It will be interesting to try this new feature and see what the community reaction is.