FFOI Debra Berman offers to organize a fabulous practical DR Skills exercise that goes beyond the classroom and normal competitions. She writes:
In recent times of declining class sizes, shrinking budgets, and extra focus on the bar exam, practical ADR skills training may not receive the attention it deserves. Students may leave law school without ever practicing a single negotiation or engaging in some form of legal communication with another law student or lawyer. ...
Data analytics is one of the hottest areas in business these days. Companies are increasingly adopting it to transform human resources, sales and marketing, business development, operations and other areas, across a wide spectrum of industries. The approach holds the promise of more objective decision-making and a stronger bottom line.
But when it comes to the world of private equity it’s a different story, according to Sajjad Jaffer, co-founder of the advisory and investment firm Two Six Capital....
The nature of legal services is drastically changing given the rise in the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Legal education and training models are beginning to recognize the need to incorporate skill building in data and technology platforms, but they have lost sight of a core competency for lawyers: problem-solving and decision-making skills to counsel clients on how best to meet their desired goals and needs. In 2014, Amani Smathers introduced the legal field to the concept...
Intercircuit splits occur when two or more circuits on the U.S. Courts of Appeals issue different legal rules about the same legal question. When this happens, federal law is applied differently in different parts of the country. Intercircuit splits cause legal nonuniformity, are an impediment to lawyering and judging, and have practical consequences for U.S. law. Despite intercircuit splits’ importance, there is almost no quantitative research about them. We created a unique original dataset...
Since 2011, several papers and articles have speculated about the motivations, activities, and possible anti‐competitive effects of hybrid patent assertion entities (PAEs) or, more pejoratively, “patent privateers.” Most prior work has assumed that privateers are essentially extorting money from firms by making weak infringement claims employing weak patents. Under a more classical law and economics approach, we would expect patent privateers to acquire valuable patents to reduce litigation...
The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to examine the differences between buyers' and sellers' use of negotiation tactics in face‐to‐face business‐to‐business (B2B) negotiations and second, to explore how negotiators' professed negotiation styles influence buyers' and sellers' use of tactics. The methodology is a multiple case study analysis of eighteen negotiators representing twelve companies in six real‐life buyer–seller negotiations in B2B settings analyzed using qualitative...
In this project, the authors obtained public data on over 100,000 Chapter 11 bankruptcy cases and used machine and deep-learning methodologies to explore whether models could be designed to predict Chapter 11 case outcomes. The data used was obtained from the Federal Judicial Center’s bankruptcy Integrated Database and included information about case filing dates, the court where the case was filed, the type of business entity, and basic information about assets and liabilities. Using this information,...
Last week, Kim Kardashian and Van Jones talked about Kim's aspirations to be a lawyer on Keeping Up with the Kardashians. During that discussion, the following exchange took place:
Real talk, 'Kim confided in him before the event. 'This law school s***? There is so much reading to do. I am like, dying here.''Law school is more of a socialization process than an educational process anyway,' Jones said. 'It's more learning to think like a lawyer than all the actual stuff.' He praised...
Novelist Raymond Chandler once said, “The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer.” A new book by Bruce Cannon Gibney, a litigator turned venture capitalist, gives credence to that idea. The Nonsense Factory: The Making and Breaking of the American Legal System looks at how jurisprudence has decayed over the last 70 years as laws have become needlessly complex, clouded by politics...