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Back in August, Bloomberg reported that the legal costs for the six largest U.S. banks since 2008 totaled over $100 billion. (Yes, billion with a “B.”)  Bloomberg included settlement amounts in that huge number, as well as fees to lawyers.

The financial and emotional costs of litigation, not to mention the tremendous amount of time required, amazes me.  Litigation has its place, but the vast majority of disputes eventually settle and many times all parties would have been better off settling earlier using some form of alternative dispute resolution (ADR). 

A former colleague recently pointed me to the University of Missouri School of Law’s listserv for ADR educators. 

I know many of our readers only teach business law courses, but adding negotiations to my teaching package has made me see the various intersections between negotiations and business law.  This semester, I set aside some time in my business law classes to discuss a bit of the negotiations literature, and the students seemed to appreciate it.  I just signed up for the listserv, so I cannot speak to its quality yet, but I do think more business law professors should consider exploring the world of ADR.

Washburn University has posted an opening for an Assistant Professor of Legal Studies.

I know not everyone can move to Kansas, but when I was first on the market, I even applied to jobs like this one in Kuwait.  If you really want to be a professor, you can’t let location get in your way.  Granted, I know I would have had to use my best negotiating skills to convince my wife to move to Kuwait (or Kansas).

The details of the Washburn University position can be found after the break. 

Recently, I came across a post on the Wall Street Journal’s website by Warby Parker co-founder Neil Blumenthal entitled My Advice? Stop “Networking.”

This short post caught my eye for two reasons.

First, Warby Parker is a certified B corporation and one of the more visible (they sell glasses… humor is not my strong suit) and successful companies in the for-profit social enterprise movement. 

Second, since my move to a business school last fall, I have heard the term “networking” with increasing frequency.  Sure, “networking” is discussed in law schools and there are some networking events, but in business schools the term “networking” is ubiquitous and the events focused on “networking” are constant. 

“Networking” has some negative connotations, but I think Blumenthal’s attack is misplaced.  Instead of attacking “networking,” Blumenthal would have done better to attack “selfishness.”  

There is nothing wrong, and much good, in the dictionary definition of “networking”:

the exchange of information or services among individuals, groups, or institutions; specifically: the cultivation of productive relationships for employment or business.

Networking can be a wonderful thing, for everyone involved, if you can keep the selfishness at a minimum.  Unfortunately, many people …

One of my attorney friends passed along information about a new, free legal research tool called “Casetext.”  (Disclosure: my attorney friend and her husband have an investment in the company.)

A description from Casetext CEO follows:

Casetext (https://www.casetext.com) is a legal research platform dedicated to interpreting and understanding the law. Casetext contains millions of cases, statutes, and regulations, and benefits from user-generated annotations from attorneys and professors who add analysis and insight. Contributors demonstrate thought leadership to Casetext’s 100,000 monthly users, including general counsels, law firms, and law students. Paid versions of the tool, still under development, will enable law firms to use the site’s annotations technology privately and internally for knowledge management.

Casetext and Google Scholar are both useful free resources for legals studies professors in business schools because our students often do not have Lexis/Westlaw access (or at least not full access to all the legal materials.)

Casetext uses the crowd for help with annotations and citations. Attorneys at law firm Bingham McCutchen LLP are featured annotators.  Citations can be voted up or down. 

In addition to citations from cases, Casetext also includes citations from law firm client alerts and blog posts.  One of the citations…

Last night Belmont’s men’s basketball team beat a very good UW-Green Bay team 80 to 65 in the first round of the NIT.  Both teams were extremely close to making the NCAA tournament this year. Earlier this year, Belmont beat highly ranked UNC and UW-Greenbay beat ACC-Champs UVA.

[Photos courtsey of Belmont University Basketball]

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Why is Belmont basketball relevant to this blog?

Well, actually, I just wanted to brag on my school’s team, but I will try to make a connection.

Some extremely interesting studies have been done tying atheletic success to increased applications, increased selectivity, and/or higher (academic) rankings.  See, e.g., Jain (Wharton) and Toma & Cross (UMKC & Michigan).  (While my co-blogger Steve Bradford called the U.S. News rankings of law schools “meaningless” earlier this week, even he admitted that rankings influence some student decisions.) 

In a similar study, a personal friend of mine and University of Georgia doctoral candidate, Michael Trivette, co-authored a paper in 2012 with Dennis Kramer (UVA) about the increases in selectivity and accepted student standardized test scores experienced by schools that switched athletic conferences.

Whether the time and money put into college sports is worthwhile makes for heated debate, and…