Uniform bar exam drawing closer to reality

• Are law schools relevant to the future of law?

  Paul Lippe, a well-known Silicon Valley GC and founder of Legal OnRamp (LOR), recently posted an essay on the Am Law Daily that essentially argues that law schools, at least in their present form, are not relevant to the future of law.

  
  
• Law school is harder than grad school

  I've been debating this since I started a PhD program this fall. (I'm talking about the humanities and social sciences -- I don't know if this applies in other fields!) Granted, grad school is a huge amount of difficult and complex reading. Since it's essentially professional training for academics, it also means learning a new working environment, a new kind of jargon, and a new bureaucracy. What it isn't -- and what law school is -- is a whole new way of thinking about and approaching the world.

  
  
• Is virtual lawyering the future?

  An interesting paragraph from an article dealing with the idea of "Good Enough" -- services or products that may not have all the "bells and whistles" of their more-expensive competitors, but do enough at the right price to be runaway successes: It turns out to be a remarkably efficient way of offering what Granat calls legal transaction services -- tasks that are document intensive. For everything from wills to adoptions to shareholder agreements, elawyering has numerous advantages.

  
  
• Law blogging and attorney advertising: Stern v. Bluestone

  The New York State Court of Appeals, in Stern v. Bluestone, 2009 NY Slip Op 04740 (2009), overturned a lower court ruling that ruled that a faxed newsletter dealing with attorney malpractice issues - the same area in which the author of the newsletter practiced. Lower courts thought this newsletter constituted advertising, and thus ran into rules about attorney advertising. The Court of Appeals disagreed.

  
  
• Cloud concerns and data safety in the legal profession

  So the fact that Dropbox allows legal access to your data is not the end of the world for use of the cloud, even for lawyers. But for truly secure offsite storage, likely more secure than even old-fashioned paper storage, consider solutions that provide end-to-end encryption.

  
  

Post title: Uniform bar exam drawing closer to reality

Authored by: krisnelson

Date posted: Oct 15, 2009

Categorized as: business • law

Tagged with: attorney • business • innovation • law • lawyer