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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:

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…

Over the past few months, I have received a number of e-mails from the alumni associations of each of my two former law firms.  

In theory, I think these alumni networks are good ideas. They could help us keep in touch and could introduce us to people with common ties to those law firms. They could also help the law firms maintain ties with alums who could become clients.  

In practice, however, I rarely use any of the alumni services offered.

One of the main reasons is that my former firms do not have offices where I currently live (in Nashville) and they rarely, if ever, have events here.  If I still lived in Atlanta or New York City, I would probably attend some of the offered alumni CLE events, but I am probably never going to travel for them. 

As to the online alumni networks on the law firms’ websites, I think the contact information for alums probably stays relatively out of date (as people choose to update their information on major social networks, but may forget about the ones at the law firms).  LinkedIn law firm alumni groups are probably the most useful thing that the law…

Like many people I know, I am a huge fan of Frank Pasquale.  Thus, I was very excited to read his Balkanization interview (available here) discussing his forthcoming book, “The Black Box Society.”  The interview touches on a wide range of topics, so you should go read the whole thing, but here is an excerpt to tempt you in case you’re on the fence:

I think our academic culture is very good at analysis, but oft-adrift when it comes to synthesis. Specialization obscures the big picture. And law can succumb to this as easily [as] any other field. For example, in the case of internet companies, cyberlawyers too often confine themselves to saying: “Google and Facebook should win key copyright cases, and subsequent trademark cases, and antitrust cases, and get certain First Amendment immunities, and not be classified as a ‘consumer reporting agency’ under relevant privacy laws,” etc. They may well be correct in every particular case. But what happens when a critical mass of close cases combines with network effects to give a few firms incredible power over our information about (and even interpretation of) events?

Similarly, old banking laws may fit poorly with

…

Crowdfunding site GoFundMe recently removed the funding page for a person looking to crowdfund her abortion.  Past crowdfunding campaigns have funded fertility treatments, gender confirmation surgeries, organ transplants, and other medical procedures and treatments.  Watsi is an entire crowdfnding platform dedicated to financing medical care for patients through donations.  While I usually research and write about crowdfunding business entities and projects, the crowdfunding of medical procedures and treatments has gotten more and more traction with those needing or wanting financial assistance for expensive medical care.  It seemed like a good time to say something about it . . . .  But what to say?

I have updated our Business Law Professors on Twitter List with some professors I met at the ALSB conference last week.

Tweets from the recent professor additions to the list are below. 

The New York Times spotlighted Michigan State’s Reinvent Law Laboratory and Entrepreneurial Startup Competition in this article.

“[P]ushing its students to understand business and technology so that they can advise entrepreneurs in coming fields. The school wants them to think of themselves as potential founders of start-ups as well, and to operate fluidly in a legal environment that is being transformed by technology.”

The article also highlights University of Colorado’s Tech Lawyer Accelerator.

Fascinating stuff.  What is your school doing, if anything, on this front?

-Anne Tucker

I’ve updated our business law professors on Twitter list here.  

Below are tweets from some of the new additions to the list.  

Earlier this spring, I posted about transactional resources  (the current source list is available here: Download Transactional Law Resources).

Continuing with the theme, I want to highlight a new hybrid resource, JURIFY, which is a mostly-free, online transactional law resource. 

“Jurify provides instant access to high-credibility, high-relevance legal content, including forms and precedent in Microsoft Word® format written by the world’s best lawyers, white papers and webinars from top-tier law firms, articles in prestigious law journals, reliable blog posts and current versions of statutory, regulatory and case law, all organized by legal issue.”

Here are the stats:  Jurify, launched in 2012, covers 5 broad transactional areas:  General Corporate, Governance, Mergers & Acquisitions, Securities and Startup Companies.  The 11,000+ sources that the website currently contains have been verified by transactional attorneys and generated from free on-line platforms or submitted by private attorneys who are voluntarily sharing their work.  Documents are organized according to 586 tags.  Three transactional attorneys started this website (husband/wife duo and their former law-firm colleague); none take compensation from editors, publishers or law firms. 

Jurify is a unique transactional law resource for the following reasons: 

  • FREE (mostly). Website contents including primary law, secondary sources

…

Our BLPB group has had a number of email discussions recently about the use of social media including blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for professional purposes. My home institution has discussed the same topic and even held a “training” session on technology in and outside of the classroom.  Because I am a heavy user, I volunteered to blog about how I use social media as a lawyer and academic in the hopes of spurring discussion or at least encouraging others to take a dip in the vast pool of social media.

Although I have been on Facebook for years, I don’t use that professionally at all. I also don’t allow my students to friend me, although I do know a number of professors who do. I often see lawyer friends discussing their clients or cases in a way that borders on violations of the rules of professional conduct, and I made sure to discuss those pitfalls when I was teaching PR last year.

I have also used LinkedIn for several years, mainly for professional purposes to see what others in my profession (at the time compliance and privacy work) were thinking about.  I still belong to a number of LinkedIn…