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Amazon Prime Now has debuted in Nashville. Amazon Prime Now offers free two-hour delivery on many items for Prime members. The service is amazing and is already changing the way I shop. I really dislike shopping malls, especially during the busy holiday season, but I also dislike waiting weeks (or even days) for shipments to arrive, so Amazon Prime Now is a perfect solution.

With Amazon Prime Now expanding, I imagine even more brick and mortar retailers will be headed to bankruptcy unless they find a way to differentiate their companies and add more value.

Brick and mortar retailers may find differentiation through community building services. I already see some retailers attempting this. Running footwear and apparel stores are offering free group runs starting from their storefronts and/or group training programs for a fee. Grocery stores are offering group cooking classes. Book stores are offering book clubs. The list goes on.

These brick and mortar retailers are finding it more and more difficult to compete with e-retailers on price and convenience. With the rise in technology, however, face to face community seems to be increasingly rare. Brick and mortar retailers that aid in community building may…

I’m knee deep in grading my business associations exams and so far, I’m pretty pleased. Maybe it’s my in-house background, but I spend a lot of time with my students getting them to focus on providing strategic advice to their fictional clients because that’s what my former clients demanded. My operations and executive colleagues complained that lawyers didn’t understand business or their pressure points and offered legal advice without thinking of the big picture or strategic considerations. With that in mind, my students work in law firms and do a variety of exercises from Michelle Harner’s skills book. When they answer questions in class based on cases or drafting exercises, I force them to think like a client rather than just the lawyer. I drill into them the importance of speaking to their clients in plain English, and I tell them if they can’t break the concepts down in their own words, then they don’t really understand them. Their final exam required them to advise a number of different clients based on the same fact pattern, and I am enjoying reading the different strategies that my 69 students devised based upon the same set of facts.

I get a…

A warning to all of you in the real (non-academic) world: law school exam season has begun. You know what that means: it’s whine time. Time to read blog posts by law professors complaining about the miseries of grading exams. (What you read in the blogs is nothing compared to what you hear in the hallways of law schools.)

Grading law school exams is not a pleasant task. It’s intellectually grinding, but it’s not just the work. I care about my students and I hate to see some of them waste their promise.

But, on a scale of 1 (easy) to 10 (hard), grading law school exams is at most a 3. Some people have to clear septic tanks for a living. Police officers and soldiers put their lives on the line every day. I worked in a pea cannery two summers, and, even compared to that, grading exams is a breeze.

I have it easy, so I promise not to whine this year. I have a well-paying job that mostly allows me to do what I love, so I can tolerate grading. (Don’t bother tracking down my old blog posts; I admit I’ve whined about grading in the past.). …

I recently received the following call for papers via e-mail

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Law and Ethics of Big Data

Co-Hosted and Sponsored by:

Virginia Tech Center for Business Intelligence Analytics

The Department of Business Law and Ethics, Kelley School of Business

Co-Sponsored by:

The Wharton School

Washington & Lee Law School

 

April 8 & 9, 2016

Indiana University- Bloomington, IN.

Abstract Submission Deadline: January 17, 2016

We are pleased to announce the research colloquium, “Law and Ethics of Big Data,” at Indiana University-Bloomington, co-hosted by Professor Angie Raymond of Indiana University and Professor Janine Hiller of Virginia Tech.

Due to the success of last year’s event, the colloquium will be expanded and we seek broad participation from multiple disciplines; please consider submitting research that is ready for the discussion stage. Each paper will be given detailed constructive critique. We are targeting cross-discipline opportunities for colloquium participants, and the IU community has expressed interest in sharing in these dialogues. In that spirit, the Institute of Business Analytics plans to host a guest speaker on the morning of April 8.th Participants are highly encouraged to attend this free event.

Submissions: To be considered, please submit an abstract of 500-1000…

With the recent release of bar results in many states, I have been obsessed of late about the sorry state of bar passage across the country–as well as specific bar passage issues relating to our graduates.  So, rather than (as I should and will do soon) responding to Steve Bradford’s prompting post on the final JOBS Act Title III crowdfunding rules and the related proposals regarding Rules 147 and 504 under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (as well as his follow-up post on the Rule 147 proposal), I have decided to focus on bar passage for my few minutes of air time this week.  Specifically, I want to begin to explore the question of what we can do, if anything, as business law professors to help more of our students succeed in passing the bar on the first attempt.

At a base level, this means we should endeavor to understand something about the reasons why our individual students fail the bar the first time around.  A lot has been written about the national trends (inconclusively, as a general rule).  And I am sure every law school is now analyzing the data on its own bar passage shortcomings.  But my experience teaching Barbri and my conversations with former students who have not passed the bar indicate a number of possible causes.  They include (and these are my descriptions based on that experience and those conversations, in no particular order):

  • Failing to state the applicable legal rule(s) and apply them to the facts;
  • Difficulty in processing legal reasoning in the time allotted;
  • Nerves, sleep deprivation, illness and the like; and
  • Engaging insufficiently with study materials and practice examinations.

Assuming that these anecdotal observations are, in fact, causes contributing to bar exam failures for at least some students, how might we be able to help?

This week I thanked the law review editors at the West Virginia Law Review for their hard work on my forthcoming article. They seemed truly grateful for the thanks, which was well deserved, and it made me think that I should thank law review editors more often.

Law review editors put in a tremendous amount of time working on our articles, often well after-hours given all of their other commitments. Even when the process is frustrating, I think we need to be thankful and professional. Also, given that I have had a few rough editing experiences, I now state my preferences up front, which (at least this time) led to better results. 

Somewhat related, over at PrawfsBlawg, Andrew Chongseh Kim has a couple posts on the law review process: one on exploding offers and one on peer review of law review articles.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with exploding offers, and I actually think more law reviews should use them. The submission game incentivizes submission to many journals and trading up multiple times. This process wastes an incredible amount of student editor time and they have every right to effectively shut down the expedite process.

As I have…

From potential employers to faculty, I hear a common mantra that students are “no longer able to write.” Thus, we need to get them practice ready in a way that apparently we, as law schools, used to do. 

I, too, share frustration with poorly written materials and poor performance generally. I also worry about the practice-ready nature of some of our students. Still, I find myself compelled to say that, in my experience, the vast majority of our students are thoughtful, intelligent, and capable.

I also can say that many of our students do not push themselves to deliver the high-quality work product of which they are capable.  I long for the self-motivated student, the same way I have (at times) longed for the self-motivated employee.  Some people have it, and some people don’t.  Like height, one can’t really teach motivation, but we can try to help students find their own motivation from within.  And we can set expectations high enough that failure is, in fact, an option. 

I have come in contact with quite a few students, and I don’t think we have an actual literacy problem with the students I have taught over the years (a few stark…

Last week was the oral midterm examination week for students in my in Business Associations class.  I admit to exhaustion and jubilation at the end of that week every year.  I think the students feel about the same way . . . .

This year’s examination related to an expulsion of members in a member-managed limited liability company (LLC).  The facts were based on an interesting Tennessee case with which many LLC aficionados are no doubt familiar: Anderson v. Wilder.  The exam questions related to the validity and effects of the expulsion under the Revised Uniform Limited Liability Company Act and the LLC’s operating agreement, the potential breaches of fiduciary duty and failure to comply with the contractual obligation of good faith and fair dealing, and the possible resulting causes of action and remedies–including any effects of the members’ dissociation.

In a blog post last weekend from Lou Sirico and our other friends at the Legal Skills Prof Blog, I divined support for all of us who engage in practice-focused legal education: these teaching/learning methods can help students to thrive, not merely survive.  It has been my (admittedly anecdotal) observation that students who engage in simulations (as well as those who participate in clinics and internships/externships) in law school are happier and more well-adjusted about their education and their post-graduation employment.  Last week’s oral midterms–conducted in groups of three–gave me some windows on that world.  I will share a few here.

Last week,  I asked whether casebooks should include statutes. That post provoked a healthy debate in the comments and elsewhere. Today, I want to address another content question, this one dealing not with the content of casebooks but with the content of the Business Associations course itself. What securities law topics should be included in the basic business associations course?

The answer to that question obviously depends on whether the course is for three or four credit hours. I don’t think a comprehensive business associations course should ever be limited to three credit hours. But, if I had to teach a three-hour course, I would not cover any securities law. Agency, partnership, corporations, and LLCs are already too much to cram into a three-hour course. Adding securities topics on top of all that would, in my opinion, make the course too superficial.

Luckily, I have the hard-fought right to teach B.A. as a four-hour course. In a four-hour course, I think it’s essential to cover proxy regulation. Federal law or not, it’s mainstream corporate governance, at least for public companies, and many, perhaps most, securities regulation courses don’t cover it.

Beyond that, I’m not sure any securities coverage is…

Currently, I am planning to attend the MALSB Annual Conference in Chicago this coming April. The conference is described by the organizers below. While ALSB regional meetings like this one are usually attended mostly by legal studies professors in business schools, I am told that the conference is open to all.

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The Midwest Academy of Legal Studies in Business (MALSB) Annual Conference is held in conjunction with the MBAA International Conference, long billed as “The Best Conference Value in America.”

The MBAA International Conference draws hundreds of academics and practitioners from business-related fields such as accounting, business/society/government, economics, entrepreneurship, finance, health administration, information systems, international business, management, and marketing. Although the MALSB will have its own program track on legal studies, attendees will be able to take advantage of the multidisciplinary nature of this international conference and attend sessions held by the other program tracks.

 [More details are available under the break.]