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Bad PowerPoint is ubiquitous. PowerPoint presentations are like writing: anyone can do them, but few people can do them well. And the number of people who think they do them well is much greater than the number of people who actually do.

As anyone who has attended a legal conference can attest, many of us don’t have a clue about how to design effective PowerPoint presentations. The result is distracted audiences, confusing presentations, and ineffective teaching.

The fault is not in the PowerPoint tool. The fault is in how people use the tool. As Peter Norvig has said,

PowerPoint doesn’t kill meetings. People kill meetings. But using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table: You can do very bad things with it.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I spoke at this summer’s annual conference of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI). My topic was How to Ruin a Presentation with PowerPoint. That presentation is now available on YouTube.

My presentation focuses on some of the most common mistakes people make in creating PowerPoint presentations and discusses how to improve your PowerPoint presentations. My comments aren’t limited to the Microsoft product. Almost…

The people at New Media Rights, a non-profit affiliated with the California Western School of Law,   have developed an interesting new legal app called The Fair Use App.  It is designed to help filmmakers and video editors understand the fair use doctrine in U.S. copyright law. The app runs users through a series of questions about their use of others’ content and explains how their answers to each question affect the availability of the fair use doctrine. In effect, it’s a digital flowchart.

Fair use is a complicated, multi-factor analysis, so there is no final yes-no answer. But this app would be a good start for a filmmaker trying to understand the law.

The app’s not perfect. For example, at one point, it asks if the content being used is in the public domain, with no explanation of what that means. I doubt most lay people would know exactly what that means. And I’m not a copyright expert, so I can’t say whether it’s substantively correct on all points. But, assuming it is, it’s a good tool. Consulting with an experienced copyright lawyer would be better, but most of the people using this app wouldn’t consult a lawyer…

Bridget Crawford (Pace Law) has posted an extensive list of law school professors on Twitter that is available here.

Previously, I compiled a list of business law professors, in both business schools and law schools, but to avoid overlapping with Bridget’s list, I am only including business school legal studies professors in this updated list.

I will update the list from time to time. Updated: August 8, 2020.

Thomas Baker III (Georgia) – @DrTab3

Perry Binder (Georgia State) – @Perry_Binder

Jody Blanke (Mercer) – @JodyBlanke

Liz Brown (Bentley) – @proflizbrown

Seletha Butler (Georgia Tech) – @ProfSButler

Kabrina Chang (Boston University) – @ProfessorChang

Peter Conti-Brown (Penn/Wharton) – @PeterContiBrown

Greg Day (Georgia) – @gregrrday

Laura Dove (Troy) – @LauraRDove

Marc Edelman (CUNY) – @MarcEdelman

Leora Eisenstadt (Temple) – @LeoraEisenstadt

Adam Epstein (Central Michigan) – @AdamEpstein

Kevin Fandl (Temple) – @kfandl

Jason Gordon (Georgia Gwinnett) – @JMGordonLaw

Nathaniel Grow (Indiana) – @NathanielGrow

Enrique Guerra-Pujol (Central Florida) – @lawscholar

Lori Harris-Ransom (Caldwell) – @HarrisRansom

Laura Pincus Hartman (DePaul) – @LauraHartman

John Holden (Oklahoma State) – @Johnsportslaw

David Jess (Michigan) – @ProfessorHess

Lindsay Jones (UGA) – @profsainjones

Debbie Kaminer (CUNY) – @dkaminer2

Kathryn Kisska-Schulze (Clemson) – @ KKisska13

Mike Koval (Salisbury) – @MikeKoval123

Jeremy Kress…

It’s barely July and I have received a surprising number of emails from my incoming business association students about how they can learn more about business before class starts. To provide some context, I have about 70 students registered and most will go on to work for small firms and/or government. BA is required at my school. Very few of my graduates will work for BigLaw, although I have some interning at the SEC. I always do a survey monkey before the semester starts, which gives me an idea of how many students are “terrified” of the idea of business or numbers and how many have any actual experience in the field so my tips are geared to my specific student base. I also focus my class on the kinds of issues that I believe they may face after graduation dealing with small businesses and entrepreneurs and not solely on the bar tested subjects. After I admonished the students to ignore my email and to relax at the beach during the summer, I sent the following tips:

If you know absolutely NOTHING about business or you want to learn a little more, try some of the following tips to get more comfortable…

Many of you have probably heard of bitcoin, the private digital currency that some mainstream merchants are now accepting. (Rand Paul recently became the first presidential candidate to accept donations in bitcoin.)

Bitcoin was developed by a software programmer who used the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. It is built on cryptography software known as the blockchain, which both issues the currency and authenticates transactions using it.

If you haven’t heard of bitcoin or you don’t know much about it, I strongly recommend an interesting, informative new book : The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order, by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey.

Vigna and Casey are reporters for the Wall Street Journal. I think they’re a little too optimistic about the future of digital currency, but their book is an excellent non-technical introduction to the bitcoin phenomenon and the blockchain software that underlies it. The book isn’t limited to bitcoin; Vigna and Casey talk about other digital currency. They also discuss other potential applications for the blockchain software, such as gambling, self-enforcing “smart” contracts, and currency exchange.

The book’s discussion of regulatory issues is limited. If you’re looking for a discussion…

One week after the SEC levied the largest dark pool trading violation fine against USB, a group of nine banks (including Fidelity, JP Morgan, BlackRock, etc.) introduced a new dark pool platform, an independent venture called Luminex Trading & Analytics.  Dark trading pools are linked to the role of high frequency trading and the notion that certain buyers and sellers should not jump the queue and shouldn’t be the first to buy or sell in the face of a large order. The financial backers of Luminex were quoted in a Bloomberg article describing it as a platform “where the original purpose of dark pools, letting investors buy and sell shares without showing their hand to others, will go on without interference.”

The announcement raises public scrutiny about dark pools, but among financial circles (like those at ZeroHedge, it is being touted as a smart self-regulatory move by the major mutual funds to prevent the money leach to HFT’s, which some seeing as the beginning of the end for HFTs. 

If you are looking for more resources on dark pools and HFTs– there are two brand new SSRN postings on the subject:

When I first started teaching at the University of North Dakota School of Law, I had the pleasure of having Patti Alleva as a colleague and mentor. She is one of the workshop presenters of the program listed below. Patti is an oustanding teacher, and a teacher of teachers.  

One of the great things I took away from my time with her is to teach intentionally.  That is, we all have different styles and goals, and that’s okay.  In fact, it’s a good thing.  We don’t all need to teach the same way, but we all should think about what we do, learn about how others learn, and then make decisions in the classroom for a reason.  Risks are okay (and, with Patti, encouraged)  — some things we try don’t work. We learn from that, too, and they can make us better.  The key is to try to maximize the learning experience for students.

I think, in the big scheme of things, I am an okay teacher.  I work at it; I care, and I genuinely want my students to learn and succeed.  And I do things in my classes for a reason.  How good I am, is…

I recently traveled to far western Texas to backpack in Big Bend National Park. An ice storm hit west Texas shortly before my trip. The ice cleared before I drove out from Dallas, but knocked out the power in the area I was visiting for several days. That power outage taught me several important lessons.

The Resilience of Small Businesses

The power outage demonstrated yet again the resilience of American small businesses. I was amazed at how well, and how quickly, businesses were able to adjust to the loss of power, computers, and the Internet. Those adjustments make life much easier for people like me, stuck in the area with no local support.

It’s obvious to me now, but I never thought about the fact that gas stations can’t pump gas without power. I will forever be grateful to the gentleman who owns the small Fina station in Marathon, Texas. He hooked up a portable generator to one of his gas pumps and hand-pumped gas for people like me who would have been stranded in the middle of nowhere without it. (Marathon, Texas truly is in the middle of nowhere; look it up if you don’t believe me.) He even…

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…