October 2016

My October included some signifiant tricks and a bunch of parallel treats.  I will highlight but a few of each here.  They illustrate, in my view, the busy mid-semester lives that law professors may have.

The Tricks

It was a real trick for me to give three distinct presentations in three cities (two in person and one virtually) in a two-day period early in the month.  On the morning of October 6, I participated in a panel discussion at The Crowdfunding Conference in New York City (New York).  That afternoon, I jumped on a plane for Little Rock (Arkansas), where I gave a continuing legal education presentation on crowdfunding for the Arkansas Bar Association as part of a program on “Capital Raising Today and Securities Law Issues.”  Finally, later that day, I was Skyped into a the North Carolina Law Review 2016 annual symposium in Chapel Hill (North Carolina) on “The Role of Law in Entrepreneurship,” at which I presented a draft paper, forthcoming in the North Carolina Law Review, on the important role of business finance lawyers in entrepreneurial enterprise.  

It then was a trick to refocus my energy on faculty hiring a few days later.

A couple of interesting studies about gender in the business context have recently been released.

First, a study by A. Can Inci, M.P. Narayanan, and H. Nejat Seyhun concludes – based on profits earned from insider trading – that women executives have less access to inside information than do men with similar positions.  They attempt to control for the fact that women may simply be more risk averse by controlling for trade size; they find, however, that even when doing so, men make more than women.  Of particular interest is the fact that even though their study goes back to 1975 (when there were fewer women executives), they find that the gender differences are stronger in more recent years, from 1997-2012.  They believe that the differences are attributable to informal networking that grants men access to better information than women; these differences fall away for firms that have a greater proportion of women executives.

Second, the Rockefeller Foundation finds that when a company experiences a crisis and the CEO is a woman, eighty percent of news stories cite her as a problem; when the CEO is a man, only thirty-one percent of news stories cite him as a problem.

Of…

Building on Joan’s personal reflection about her time in practice and stemming from a conversation with a student this week, I decided to post (and solicit comments) on the BigLaw practice areas that are most/least conducive to part-time work or work while raising children. While no practice areas in BigLaw are well known for being incredibly flexible, it did appear that certain practice areas were more flexible than others.

In my view, tax appeared to be the most flexible practice group area and M&A (my first practice group area) appeared to be the least flexible. Granted, I never practiced tax law, but as an M&A attorney you solicit comments from many areas within the firm and you get a sense of their schedules.

The advantages of the tax group were a high billing rate (some of the very highest in the firm) and a lot of piecemeal, often not urgent, work. Sure, we “urgently” needed tax comments on most of our deals, and when clients are paying BigLaw rates, they almost always want a prompt response. But in my limited experience, the tax lawyers controlled their timelines more so than any of the other attorneys I worked with. There were…

Fresh on the heels of reading several Dean search announcements come across email the last several days, the following ABA article on the rise of female Law Deans caught my eye: Cynthia L. Cooper, Women Ascend in Deanships as Law Schools Undergo Dramatic Change, ABA Perspectives Summer 2016.

The list of current deanship openings is available at The Faculty Lounge, as well as a run down of of positions filled last year.

Sorry folks…sick little one on my hands today!

-Anne Tucker

The Washington and Lee University School of Law seeks to hire a faculty member with research and teaching interests in the fields of corporate law, securities regulation, and regulation of financial industries. Our school has a long history of distinction in these areas, and we are excited to advance our trajectory with this new hire. In addition to this subject area focus, we look for an individual who will embrace and meaningfully contribute to our close-knit, collegial, and intellectually vibrant community.

We warmly invite applications for a tenure-track or tenured position beginning July 1, 2017, and we are particularly focused on lateral candidates. In all cases, candidates for the position must clearly demonstrate a record of excellence in teaching and scholarship. Appointment rank would be commensurate with the candidate’s qualifications and experience.

Washington and Lee University School of Law is an Equal Opportunity employer that adheres to a robust nondiscrimination policy. Our school has a firm commitment to enhancing the diversity of our faculty and, in that regard, we welcome candidates who are members of communities traditionally under-represented in the legal profession and academia.

Kindly direct applications and questions to the Chair of the Faculty Appointments Committee. Applicants should submit…

The summer before I entered law school, I worked in the legal department of a major international business firm.  I learned a lot.  But I realized by the end of the summer that most of the interesting legal questions and matters that the business firm generated (requiring transactional and litigation work) were farmed out to a veritable stable of law firms that represented the business firm on a regular basis.  I then determined (based on my very unscientific single-firm study) that in-house work was not for me.  That was 1982.

Fast-forward 15-or-so years.  By then, I had been working at a major international law firm for twelve years doing transactional work I enjoyed.  A client asked me to interview for an open in-house position.  I did.  I was ready to focus my attention on one business and had a good relationship with the in-house lawyers at the client firm.  Many friends had successfully moved to in-house jobs and were happy and well-adjusted in them (some after trying several to get the right fit).  I was in line to get the job.  But the client then determined to downsize and eliminated the open position.  

Several years later, I resolved to pursue a different path.   I decided to spend my second career teaching and writing about business law–a road well suited to me in many ways but less traveled by business law colleagues.  This was a harder decision to reach in many ways.  But I knew it was right, and in the end, I jumped in with two feet.  In 2000, The University of Tennessee College of Law gave me that opportunity.  The rest is a history that readers likely already know well.

What of the in-house road not taken?  

The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Annual Meeting will be held Tuesday, January 3 – Saturday, January 7, 2017, in San Francisco.  Readers of this blog who may be interested in programs associated with the AALS Section on Socio-Economics & the Society of Socio-Economics should click on the following link for the complete relevant schedule: 

Download Socio-Economic AALS Participants + Descriptions 161018

Specifically, I’d like to highlight the following programs:

On Wednesday, Jan. 4:

9:50 – 10:50 AM Concurrent Sessions:

  1. The Future of Corporate Governance:
    How Do We Get From Here to Where We Need to Go?
    andre cummings (Indiana Tech)                            Steven Ramirez (Loyola – Chicago)
    Lynne Dallas (San Diego) – Co-Moderator        Janis Sarra (British Columbia)
    Kent Greenfield (Boston College)                        Faith Stevelman (New York)
    Daniel Greenwood (Hofstra)                                 Kellye Testy (Dean, Washington)
    Kristin Johnson (Seton Hall)                                 Cheryl Wade (St. John’s ) Co-Moderator
    Lyman Johnson (Washington and Lee)
  2. Socio-Economics and Whistle-Blowers
    William Black (Missouri – KC)                                 Benjamin Edwards (Barry)
    June Carbone (Minnesota) – Moderator             Marcia Narine (St. Thomas)

1:45 – 2:45 PM Concurrent Sessions:

1. What is a Corporation?
Robert Ashford (Syracuse) Moderator                             Stefan Padfield (Akron)
Tamara Belinfanti (New York)                                             Sabeel Rahman (Brooklyn)
Daniel Greenwood (Hofstra)

On Thursday, Jan. …

The Economist recently published an opinion piece arguing that bigotry has become a lucrative business.  As the magazine puts it:

The country is in an unusually flammable mood. This being America, there are plenty of businesspeople around to monetise the fury—to foment it, manipulate it and spin it into profits. These are the entrepreneurs of outrage and barons of bigotry who have paved the way for Donald Trump’s rise….

Breitbart News, in particular, has excelled in pushing boundaries. … It has provided platforms in its comment section for members of far-right hate groups who rail against immigration and Jews.

The outrage industry has clearly reached a milestone with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. …He won the hearts of 13m Republican primary voters by recycling conservative media hits such as “build a wall” and “ban all Muslims”. …

There are big bucks in bigotry

Twitter has been a particularly virulent source of online bigotry and abuse.  Buzzfeed recently published an article on Twitter’s 10-year failure to halt hate speech – often targeted at particular users – that stems from a combination of corporate dysfunction, failure of (white, male) corporate leadership to recognize the problem, and business exigencies that emphasized user growth.  In…

Sadly, I am still in the midst of grading business associations and civil procedure midterms so I cannot finish my substantive post on Wells Fargo yet. WF is the gift that keeps on giving from a teaching perspective, though. Yesterday I showed students some of the litigation that has come out of the debacle to illustrate the difference between a direct and derivative suit (and to reinforce some civil procedure principles too).

Last night I took a break from grading to go to a Meetup called Ask a Start Up Lawyer. I hope to teach a 2-credit skills course on legal issues for startups, small businesses, and entrepreneurs next semester and I have found that going to these sessions and listening to actual entrepreneurs ask their questions helpful. Last night’s meetup was partcularly enlightening because a number of international entrepreneurs here in Miami for a State Department initiative attended. While in the past some of these sessions have focused on funding options and entity selection, last night’s “students” mainly wanted to learn about intellectual property and international protection. Many of them come from countries with no copyright law, for example. Others come from countries where owning shares is a rarity.