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While I am already looking forward to returning to the classroom in the fall, one of the reasons that I love summers is that I get to catch up on reading. It has been an embarrassingly long time since I have finished a fiction book, but I am committed to making fiction an increasing percentage of my reading.  

Percy’s Moviegoer won the 1962 National Book Award. I have my brother Will to thank for the recommendation and for the book itself. The novel focuses on the life of a New Orleans area stockbroker “Binx” Bolling, and his search for meaning. I won’t ruin the story for those who have not read it, but I was moved by the Binx’s struggle against what he called the malaise and everydayness. Binx appears to be a pretty sad character, spending a good bit of time hiding from life in movie theaters and engaging in flings with his secretaries, but he can also inspire the reader to ask serious questions, engage in meaningful relationships, and live more intentionally. 

 

Next month, I will speak at a legal conference in Chicago. The invite-only audience will consist of in-house counsel, law firm partners, academics, and legal tech pioneers. The website for the conference has not been updated to reflect my new school or topic, but I have titled my talk “Why Lawyers Need to Demand that Law Schools Innovate or Die.” In the 20 minutes allotted to me, I hope to discuss the state of legal education, the bar passage crisis in so many states, what the bar should test on, the push for “practice-ready” graduates, the effect of the rise of artificial intelligence, and what law schools can and should do differently to educate tomorrow’s lawyers. It’s a good thing I’m a fast talker.

I will be looking at the programs mentioned in this article as well as some innovations mentioned in this article, which mentions my institution, the University of Miami and its LawWithoutWalls program, which I have participated in since its inception in 2011. In fact one of my LWOW mentees, Margaret Hagan, now heads a program at Stanford, which I will highlight.

I have a few questions for the readers, as I prepare my presentation. Assuming (just for a minute) a world with no bar exam and no ABA standards:

  • If you are a practitioner hiring graduates, what would you want law schools to teach more of or less of?
  • If you are a professor, how would you teach differently, especially if you are teaching core or bar classes?
  • Should we be teaching more or fewer courses online?
  • Should we have more clinical courses and experiential learning opportunities or are these “nice to haves”? Do the ABA Standards go too far or do they not go far enough?
  • Do we need 3 years of law school? Or do students barely learn enough in 3 years? See more on this debate here.
  • If you are a recent graduate and are now either self-employed or working with others, what do you wish you learned in law school in the offered courses?
  • If you are a recent graduate, do you think there are classes that law schools should be offering but don’t?
  • In the age of artificial intelligence and ROSS, which can go through 1 million pages of legal text a second to perform legal research, should we be teaching students different research skills? Should students learn more about legal technology? Should they be able to explain both the rule against perpetuities and legal chatbots?
  • How much training/teaching should employers do and how much should law schools do?
  • How can we address the access to justice crisis? Can legal tech help? 

I know that just discussing any one of the questions above could take more than 20 minutes, but I value your thoughts. Please feel free to leave comments below or send me an email at mweldon@law.miami.edu.

Reuters reports that minor league baseball players lost a claim for artificially low” wages.  The court found, appropriately: “The employment contracts of minor league players relate to the business of providing public baseball games for profit between clubs of professional baseball players.”

Samuel Kornhauser, the player’s lawyer plan to ask the 9th Circuit to reconsider (probably en banc) or appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Kornhasuer, in an interview, stated: 

“Obviously, we think it’s wrong, and that the ‘business of baseball’ is a lot different today than it was in 1922. There is no reason minor leaguers should not have the right to negotiate for a competitive wage.”

Kornhauser is certainly correct that things have changed in the last 100 years, though I would argue that the justification for the antitrust exemption was just as unfounded in 1922 as it is today. The origin is the Federal Baseball decision, and it was wrong then, and it is wrong now.  But it is also the law of the land. The 1998 Curt Flood Act, as the court appropriately explains, “made clear [Congress intended] to maintain the baseball exemption for anything related to the employment of minor league players.”

There is no question Congress can change the law, and there is no question Congress has not. This is one to be resolved via negotiation or legislation, issue, and not via the courts.  

This post follows on my earlier travel posts on prepacking and packing for conference travel.  For last week’s post, I used my trip to Mexico City for the Law and Society Association conference as an example.  This week, I assess my packing skills by chronicling briefly what I used and commenting on that assessment.  Bottom line: I did OK but could have left a few items of clothing and my flip flops at home.

For my plane travel to Mexico City a week ago last Sunday, I wore the reversible dance leggings (pattern side facing out), one of the tank tops, the embellished sweatshirt, and the suit jacket wth my sneakers.

BLPBOutfits1

Once I got to the hotel, I determined to take a walk through Chapultepec Park (Mexico’s rough equivalent of New York’s Central Park).  For the walk (and the rest of the day), I swapped out the sweatshirt and jacket for one of the button-downs I had brought–a medium green insect-repelling shirt I originally had bought to use when I taught in a study abroad program in Brazil.

For Monday, another sightseeing day (but one that I planned to end with an Ashtanga yoga class), I dressed for the day at the outset: reversible yoga shorts (pattern side facing out), light blue tank top, same green button down, and sneakers.

BLPBOutfits2

I noticed during the day that folks in Mexico City do not wear yoga shorts around.  So, I would revisit my decision to wear them all day on that basis.

Continue Reading The Traveling Business Law Prof: Part III – Using What You Pack

The second season premiere of Queen Sugar, a television adaptation of Natalie Baszile’s novel, aired earlier this week, and if you’re the kind of person who likes to catch pop cultural depictions of business issues, this is a nice sleeper to add to your viewing list.  It airs on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network, and was created by Selma director Ava DuVernay.  (Interestingly, in a departure from most Hollywood productions, every episode is directed by a woman.) 

Queen Sugar is about three black siblings who inherit their father’s ailing sugarcane farm in Louisiana (I admit, there’s a bit of provincialism to my fondness for this show – it takes place just outside of New Orleans), and struggle to turn it into a viable business. 

Nova, an investigative journalist specializing in the racial disparities of the Louisiana criminal justice system, has difficulty reconciling her political commitments and her romantic life.  Ralph Angel, the little brother, was recently released from prison, and his efforts to raise his young son are hobbled by lingering legal limitations and what he perceives as his ongoing infantilization at the hands of his older sisters and his aunt.

Charley, the show’s main focus, is a business woman, and only a half-sibling, who has spent most of her time among the wealthy and powerful (white) Los Angeles elite.  (In a telling detail, Charley is noticeably lighter-skinned than her brother and sister).  Charley’s career until now has been devoted to managing her husband, a successful basketball star.  When the marriage ends – due to a sexual assault scandal – Charley is forced to confront the reality that as a black woman, unmoored from her famous husband, her business savvy and experience carries far less weight.  Charley’s arrogance can be counterproductive, but her anger and frustration at her diminished social status (not unlike the frustration Ralph Angel experiences) are channeled into ambition for the farm.

Qs

Thus, Queen Sugar is a family drama that revolves around the difficulties of running a small business, intersected with issues of race, class, and gender.  As the siblings navigate their interfamily tensions, they must simultaneously contend with various setbacks, including their own farming inexperience, their dwindling financial resources, and an ongoing feud with the wealthy white Landry family, which controls the local sugar mill and uses its monopoly power to squeeze black farmers. 

Queen Sugar’s story unfolds at a leisurely, measured pace that might not be for everyone, and the performances can veer into the stagey.  Nonetheless, it tells a compelling David-and-Goliath story of small business owners versus the larger industry, featuring realistically flawed characters who are devoted to each other as family and united in purpose, but who can’t fully put their differences aside. 

Recently, I participated in a focus group on running shoes for Brooks. A few years ago, I did something similar for New Balance. 

Brooks paid each participant $100 for 90 minutes. 

The group was well-facilitated, and the group members stayed incredibly engaged. The 90-minutes flew by.

The research Brooks was conducting on both shoe design and marketing was extremely qualitative. It was essentially a brainstorming session. I do think Brooks could have gotten more out of the time if they would have had everyone privately write down their own ideas first, as there were about three or four of the ten of us who dominated the discussion. 

While this type of focus group was not cheap—$1000 in payment plus renting the room plus travel for two employees from Seattle—it was surely a very small fraction of their production and marketing budget. And I do think Brooks got some valuable ideas. Brooks does this sort of thing all over the country, and their employees said that they do start to hear patterns in the responses. It is those patterns that Brooks acts on, as they can’t possibly address every one-off comment. 

This focus group made me think that universities should consider similar focus groups with applicants and with local companies. I know a bit of this happens informally at most places, and perhaps it happens formally at some places, but I do wonder if it is done with the same regularity and intensity as for-profit firms like Brooks. I think the insights would be valuable, and even if the insights are poor, the organizing institution does get to explain itself (and show it really cares) to the focus group participants. 

Yesterday, during a conversation with a law student about whether corporate social responsibility is a mere marketing ploy to fool consumers, the student described her conflict with using Uber. She didn’t like what she had read in the news about Uber’s workplace culture issues, sex harassment allegations, legal battles with its drivers, and leadership vacuum. The student, who is studying for the bar, probably didn’t even know that the company had even more PR nightmares just over the past ten days— the termination of twenty employees after a harassment investigation; the departure of a number of executives including the CEO’s right hand man; the CEO’s “indefinite” leave of absence to “mourn his mother” following a scathing investigative report by former Attorney General Eric Holder; and the resignation of a board member who made a sexist remark during a board meeting (ironically) about sexism at Uber. She clearly hadn’t read Ann Lipton’s excellent post on Uber on June 17th.

Around 1:00 am EST, the company announced that the CEO had resigned after five of the largest investors in the $70 billion company issued a memo entitled “Moving Uber Forward.” The memo was not available as of the time of this writing. According to the New York Times:

The investors included one of Uber’s biggest shareholders, the venture capital firm Benchmark, which has one of its partners, Bill Gurley, on Uber’s board. The investors made their demand for Mr. Kalanick to step down in a letter delivered to the chief executive while he was in Chicago, said the people with knowledge of the situation.

… the investors wrote to Mr. Kalanick that he must immediately leave and that the company needed a change in leadership. Mr. Kalanick, 40, consulted with at least one Uber board member, and after long discussions with some of the investors, he agreed to step down. He will remain on Uber’s board of directors.

This has shades of the American Apparel controversy with ousted CEO Dov Charney that I have blogged about in the past. Charney also perpetuated a “bro culture” that seemed unseemly for a CEO, but isn’t all that uncommon among young founders. The main difference here is that the investors, not the Board, made the decision to fire the CEO. As Ann noted in her post this weekend, there is a lot to unpack here. I’m not teaching Business Associations in the Fall, but I hope that many of you will find a way to use this as a case study on corporate governance, particularly Kalanick’s continuation as a board member. That could be awkward, to put it mildly. I plan to discuss it in my Corporate Compliance and Social Responsibility course later today. As I have told the students and written in the past, I am skeptical of consumers and their ability to change corporate culture. Sometimes, as in the case of Uber, it comes down to the investors holding the power of the purse.