May 2014

You must all realize that we are in a service business. In this day and age of faxes, emails, internet, etc. clients expect you to be accessible 247. Of course, that is something of an exaggeration — but not much. . . . Unless you have very good reason not to (for example when you are asleep, in court or in a tunnel), you should be checking your emails every hour.  One of the last things you should do before you retire for the night is to check your email. That is why we give you blackberries.

– Bill Urquhart (Quinn Emanuel)

A recent Mother Jones article reminded me of the infamous e-mail from law firm partner Bill Urquhart, a portion of which is quoted above.  While Mr. Urquhart’s e-mail may have been a bit blunt, I think it captures the e-mail checking expectations at many of the top law firms.

My e-mail checking habits were formed at two large law firms and those habits have carried over into my current position as a professor.  E-mail checking is reflexive for me.  I don’t really want to know how many times a day I check my e-mail, but I would…

Last week I blogged about enterprise risk management,  lawyers, and their “obligations” to counsel clients about human rights risks based in part on statements by the American Bar Association and Marty Lipton of Wachtell, who have cited the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. I posted the blog on a few LinkedIn groups and received some interesting responses from academics, in house counsel, consultants, and outside counsel, which leads me to believe that this is fertile ground for discussion. I have excerpted some of the comments below:

 “Corporations do have risk with respect to human rights violations, and this risk needs to be managed in a thoughtful manner that respects human dignity. I did wonder, though, whether you see any possible unintended consequences of asking attorneys to start advising on moral as well as legal rights?”

“I agree. Great post. Lawyers should always be ready to advise on both legal risks and what I call “propriety”. If a lawyer cannot scan for both risks, then he or she is either incompetent or has integrity issues. Companies that choose to take advice from a lawyer who is incompetent or has integrity issues probably have integrity issues too. I’m…

I am generating my summer reading list–both business and pleasure. At the top of my list is Other People’s Houses, by Jennifer Taub (Vermont Law School), which will be available from Yale Press on May 27th.   The official website for the book describes the project as:

Drawing on wide-ranging experience as a corporate lawyer, investment firm counsel, and scholar of business law and financial market regulation, Taub chronicles how government officials helped bankers inflate the toxic-mortgage-backed housing bubble, then after the bubble burst ignored the plight of millions of homeowners suddenly facing foreclosure.

Focusing new light on the similarities between the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s and the financial crisis in 2008, Taub reveals that in both cases the same reckless banks, operating under different names, received government bailouts, while the same lax regulators overlooked fraud and abuse. Furthermore, in 2013 the situation is essentially unchanged. The author asserts that the 2008 crisis was not just similar to the S&L scandal, it was a severe relapse of the same underlying disease. And despite modest regulatory reforms, the disease remains uncured: top banks remain too big to manage, too big to regulate, and too big to fail.

…

The New York Times Dealbook Blog reports that France is opposing GE’s attempt to acquire a large portion of Alstom:

“While it is natural that G.E. would be interested in Alstom’s energy business,” France’s economy minister, Arnaud Montebourg, said in a letter to Jeffrey R. Immelt, the G.E. chairman and chief executive, “the government would like to examine with you the means of achieving a balanced partnership, rejecting a pure and simple acquisition, which would lead to Alstom’s disappearing and being broken up.”

The government’s legal means for stopping a deal would appear to be limited, though it could refuse to approve such an investment on national security grounds. The government does not hold Alstom shares, but the company is considered important enough to have received a 2.2 billion euro bailout in 2005. And Mr. Montebourg noted in the letter on Monday that the government was Alstom’s most important customer.

Alstom’s energy units, which make turbines for nuclear, coal and gas power plants, as well as the grid infrastructure to deliver electricity, contribute about three-quarters of the company’s 20 billion euros, or about $30 billion, in annual sales.

Alstom is France’s largest industrial entity, and the government says the deal…

As a student, I hated exam review sessions. I considered them coercive. I felt compelled to attend even if I had no questions, lest I miss something important the professor might say.

Because of that, I have always been reluctant to hold exam review sessions in my own classes. But I recently realized that technology can eliminate the coercion. As long as I record the review session and make it available to all students, no one is compelled to attend. Students who skip the voluntary review session can check the recording to make sure they didn’t miss anything of interest.

I have been making recordings of my classes available to students for several years, so I should have thought of this much sooner. I usually blame my spouse for my failures, so I’ll try to think of some way to blame this on her as well.

I’m not sure why students still want exam review sessions. In this era of ubiquitous email, you don’t need to have the professor in the room to ask questions. And my email responses are probably better than off-the-cuff answers in class. But, for whatever reason, students still like review sessions and, now that the…

June 6-7 Emory Law’s Conference on Transactional Law–register here; view program here

June 7-9 AALS Workshop on Blurring Boundaries in Financial and Corporate Law–information here; registration here.  (early bird ends today, May 2nd).

-AT

For those interested in some empirical research on the new hybrid entities (a/k/a social enterprise):

There are still relatively few of these hybrid entities being formed, but they have definitely started a lot of conversations.  

During the school year before this past one, I had the privilege of serving as the faculty advisor for a law review symposium.  We brought in an excellent group of professors and practitioners and, at least from my point of view, the symposium went quite well.  The planning process, however, was much more involved than I had originally thought.  All professors should go through the conference planning process at least once, if only to gain more respect for those who plan the conferences at which we present and attend.    

While I am certainly not a conference planning expert (and my students did the vast majority of the work for that one symposium), I decided to share some of my thoughts here.  Hopefully, these thoughts are helpful, though there may be nothing new for the seasoned conference goer and planner.  Feel free to leave comments to fill in the gaps I leave or to offer your own opinions.   

Start Planning Early.  We started planning our October symposium in late-February/early-March.  That timing worked well for us.  Professors were finished with (or putting the last touches on) their spring articles, but not quite in exam-scramble mode yet.  Initially, I thought we…