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One of my new year’s resolutions for 2015 is to fast from e-mail every Saturday. Now that I have posted this, my co-bloggers and readers can keep me accountable. Currently, I probably check my e-mail 20+ times a day, every day — a habit formed during law firm life.  

I thought about fasting from the internet/electronics entirely on Saturdays, and I am still going to try to avoid the internet/electronics on Saturdays as much as possible, but I wanted to set a realistic goal. 

An acquaintance of mine in New York City, Paul Miller, went without the internet for an entire year (with less promising results than he had hoped). While I remember a time before the internet — and a time when the internet was so slow it was almost useless — it is hard for me to imagine going without the internet for a week, much less for a year.  That said, I think it healthy to loosen the electronic leash a bit every once in a while.  

I’d also like to cut back the number of times I check e-mail and the amount of time I spend responding to e-mails in general. If any readers…

Happy New Year.

Starting Saturday morning (or maybe tomorrow night), I’ll be live tweeting from the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) conference. Because I teach both civil procedure and business associations, my tweets will largely relate to those sessions as well as sessions for new law professors.

Next Thursday I will summarize the high points of the conference, at least from my perspective. 

My twitter handle is @mlnarine and the AALS hashtag is #AALS2015. If you’re at the conference and a blog reader, please say hello.

This week I received the notice below from Professor Jason Gordon. Professor Gordon is a legal studies and management professor at Georgia Gwinnett College, School of Business. As explained below, he is offering copies of two entrepreneurship books that he thought might be useful to BLPB readers.  

Dear Colleagues,

I recently published two texts entitled Business Plans for Growth-Based Ventures and Understanding Business Entities for Entrepreneurs and Managers. These books are designed for use by clinical law professors and as a supplement in entrepreneurship courses. The second text concerns entity selection considerations, but includes entity funding and conversion considerations and specific considerations for startup ventures.

The texts also contain supplemental electronic material available for free at TheBusinessProfessor.com.

If any of you would like a free copy of either text in Amazon e-book format, please send me your email address at jgordon10 [at] ggc [dot] edu.

A preview of the Business Plans E-Book is available here.

A preview of the Business Entities E-Book is available here. 

Grades are in–a few hours late, but in nevertheless.  It must be almost time for New Year’s Eve, syllabus and first-assignment posting, the AALS conferenece, the first day of classes, . . .  and more job searching for our students!

I was reminded in an email from a student this morning that the hunt for summer and permanent law jobs is revving back up again after the holiday doldrums.  The student, a 1L mentee seeking summer employment, was asking a few questions about my cover letter post, to which I eaerlier had referred him.  I expect to start getting more of these communications from students about their job searches over the next few weeks.

Our brother bloggers over at the Law Skills Prof Blog have already struck while the iron is hot on this issue.  Specifically, Lou Sirico posted a quip on dressing for job interviews the other day.  The quoted advice?  “The interviewer should remember what you said and not what you were wearing.”  

Hmm.  Yeah.  I guess so.  Well, maybe not.

Certainly, that’s the advice I was given by NYU Law’s fabulous placement folks in “the day.”  Then, that meant wearing: a black, navy or midnight blue, or gray skirt suit; a neutral (white, ivory, gray, black) collared shirt or jewel-neck blouse; skin-tone hose; dark, solid-colored, medium-heeled pumps or really lovely flats; and either Barbara Bush pearls (the double strand) or a silk floppy bow tie (like an Hermes twilly, only not as fashion-forward).  Bo-ring.

I am proud (but call me lucky) to have gotten my job wearing (to the initial interview) a deep pink–almost fuchsia–silk-blend skirt suit (midi-length skirt, hip-length jacket), with a white collared blouse, neutral hose, black flats, and a patterned (pink, blue, etc.) floppy silk bow tie.  (This is where the folks in the UT Law Career Center lose faith that they are sending students to the right place when they refer them to me for career advice!)  I was confident and radiant in that suit (although I am not sure I realized that fully at the time), and I am convinced that made a big difference in the reception that I got from people when I wore it.  However, it’s true that I  was interviewed by a woman (a female senior associate in a multicolored silk dress with straight blond hair down to her derrière) and I was seeking employment at an entrepreneurial, individualistic firm–Skadden.  

Effective as of January 1. 2015, Tennessee will allow Tennessee corporations to engage in intrastate offerings of securities to Tennessee residents over the internet without registration.  The new law, adopted earlier this year, is the direct result of a law-student-led movement.  The key student leader was one of my students, and he kept me informed about the effort as it moved along.  (I was called upon for advice and commentary from time to time, but the bill is all their work.)

In my experience, this kind of effort–a student-initiated, non-credit, extracurricular engagement in business law reform–is almost unheard of.  I was intrigued by the enterprise and impressed by its success.  As a result, I asked the student leader, Brandon Whiteley, now an alumnus, to send me some of his perceptions about drafting and proposing the bill and getting it passed.  

This is the first in a series of three posts that feature Brandon’s observations on the legislative process, the key influences on the bill, and the importance of communication.  This post highlights his commentary on the legislative process (which I have edited minimally with his consent).  I think you’ll agree that his wisdom and humor both shine through in this first installment (as well as the others).  His organizational capabilities also are evident throughout.

My co-blogger Haskell Murray had an interesting post last month on curiosity and obedience. He wrote about the natural curiosity of children: “As a professor, I wish I could bottle my son’s curiosity and feed it to my students.” But what exactly is curiosity and how exactly do we encourage it in law students?

I recently read an excellent book on curiosity: Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It, by Ian Leslie. The book has a lot of interesting things to say about education, parenting, life-long learning, creativity, and innovation. I couldn’t possibly do it justice here. But, if you’re interested in learning and education, legal or otherwise, I strongly recommend it.
 
Leslie makes a distinction between diversive curiosity and epistemic curiosity. Diversive curiosity is shallow—wanting to know a particular piece of information. When I check on IMDb for the name of the actress in the movie I’m watching, that’s diversive curiosity. Epistemic curiosity, what we really want to encourage in our kids and our students, is the quest for knowledge and understanding, the desire to address the mysteries that don’t have readily ascertainable answers.

Google is mostly about diversive curiosity, finding answers.

In each of the classes I have taught I have offered extra credit for a reflection paper on how the media portrays the particular subject because most Americans, including law students, form their opinions about legal issues from television and the movies. Sometimes the media does a great job. I’m told by my friends who teach and practice criminal law that The Wire gets it right. Although I have never practiced criminal law, I assume that ABC’s How to Get Away With Murder, in which first-year students skip their other classes to both solve and commit murders, is probably less accurate. I do have some students who now watch CNBC because I show relevant clips in class. After a particularly heated on-air debate, one student called the network “the ESPN for business people.”

I’m looking for new fiction movies or TV shows to suggest to my students next semester. In addition to the standard business movies and documentaries, what makes your list of high-quality business-related shows? Friends, colleagues, and students have suggested the following traditional and nontraditional must-sees: 

1)   Game of Thrones (one student wrote about it in the partnership context)

2)   House of Cards (not purely business, but…

In many companies, executives and employees alike will give a blank stare if you discuss “human rights.”  They understand the terms “supply chain” and “labor” but don’t always make the leap to the potentially loaded term “human rights.” But business and human rights is all encompassing and leads to a number of uncomfortable questions for firms. When an extractive company wants to get to the coal, the minerals, or the oil, what rights do the indigenous peoples have to their land? If there is a human right to “water” or “food,” do Kellogg’s, Coca Cola, and General Mills have a special duty to protect the environment and safeguard the rights of women, children and human rights defenders? Oxfam’s Behind the Brands Campaign says yes, and provides a scorecard. How should companies operating in dangerous lands provide security for their property and personnel? Are they responsible if the host country’s security forces commit massacres while protecting their corporate property? What actions make companies complicit with state abuses and not merely bystanders? What about the digital domain and state surveillance? What rights should companies protect and how do they balance those with government requests for information?

The disconnect between “business” and “human…

In the comments to my post last week on teaching fiduciary duty in Business Associations, Steve Diamond asked whether I had blogged about why we changed our four-credit-hour Business Associations course at The University of Tennessee College of Law to a three-credit-hour offering.  In response, I suggested I might blog about that this week.  So, here we are . . . .

I watch a lot of Shark Tank episodes. Like most “reality shows,” Shark Tank is somewhat artificial. The show does not purport to be an accurate portrayal of how entrepreneurs typically raise capital, but I still think the show can be instructive. From time to time, mostly in my undergraduate classes, I show clips from the show that are available online.

Shark Tank
(creative commons image, no attribution requested)

After the break I share some of the lessons I think entrepreneurs (and lawyers advising entrepreneurs) can learn from Shark Tank. After this first list of lessons, I share a second list — things folks should not take from the show.