Last week, a Clemson administrator, Catherine Watt, made a presentation about Clemson's obsessive focus on improving its US News rankings, which seemingly drives every aspect of Clemson's decision-making. Some of Clemson's ranking-driven decisions may not be especially controversial and may even be laudable, such efforts to manage class sizes more carefully. Other decisions are potentially controversial, such as the decision to manage admissions by SAT scores--a logical effort to improve student "quality," but potentially inconsistent with Clemson's moral obligations as a land-grant institution. And one allegation was particularly explosive--Inside Higher Ed reported:

Watt said that Clemson officials, in filling out the reputational survey form for presidents, rate "all programs other than Clemson below average," to make the university look better. "And I'm confident my president is not the only one who does that," Watt said.

Some coverage from Watt's presentation:

* A recap of Watt's presentation from Inside Higher Ed

* Clemson's official responses

* A New York Times blog post

* The Associated Press story

* Bob Morse at US News. As usual, he is in denial of how ranked institutions actually respond to US News rankings. He says: "the rankings are not meant to drive the mission or any other strategic goals that a university may be trying to attain." Fair enough, but we have decades of experience to prove that they do exactly that. When will US News internalize that message?

Morse also believes that deliberately downgraded ballots won't affect the result: "U.S. News has safeguards in place to prevent strategic voting from affecting the results. We subtract a few of the highest and lowest scores from respondents before the results are calculated in order to prevent downgrading or upgrading from altering the results." OK, fine, but this check in the system does little to improve my confidence. Let's put it this way: the US News rankings are partially based on institutions voting on their competitors--which, of course, is a natural invitation for gamed voting. Can you imagine any other circumstances where we would deem competitor votes credible?

I finally got fed up with Internet Explorer 7. The last straw was the fact that it was choking on Ajax-heavy websites. When I would have the combination of Gmail, Google Calendar and Facebook (or even a subset of these) open as windows, my computer RAM would go into a downward spiral that led to chip overheating, causing the fan to essentially run continuously. This was also destabilizing the windows, leading to at least one browser crash a day.

I decided to try Google Chrome. After all, Google owns almost every aspect of the rest of my life; why not my web browser too? I've been running Chrome for the past few days and so far it has been very stable. I have also had almost no situations of runaway chip usage due to Ajax-intensive sites. So far I'd consider the test a success.

However, Chrome also has some quirky aspects. If you have any thoughts about how to deal with these, I would welcome input.

* my biggest frustration with Chrome is that the default screen size is much smaller than my actual monitor size, causing Chrome to render most pages in microscopic type with an excess of white spaces on the page. I can fix this on an ad hoc basis by "zooming" in, although that sometimes distorts page rendering. Is there a way to permanently boost the default screen display so that every new Chrome window shows web pages larger? I have tried boosting the default font size, but that works inconsistently and often just distorts the page layout without improving readability.

* I miss certain aspects of the Google toolbar. Most obviously, I liked being able to see the PageRank of a site. Is there an easy way to view a site's PageRank in Chrome? I also like Chrome's native spellchecker, but I don't fully trust it is working all the time. Is there a way to force spellchecking on demand?

* There are some buttons in my Movable Type pages (probably Flash; maybe Java) that just don't show up. Any thoughts why? I'm assuming I'm missing some essential plug-in, but I'm not sure what it is or how to get it.

* IE has a feature that automatically tells me if a web page has an RSS feed. Is there an equivalent capability for Chrome?

Forbes recently ranked Mountain View as the fourth best place to live among towns under 100,000 people. As the Mountain View View points out, this ranking is despite the magazine's belief that we don't have good restaurants in town, even though we have a vibrant restaurant scene--especially in downtown on Castro Street, where the competition is particularly high. They don't even mention our year-round farmer's market, a huge treat within biking distance.

We used to live in San Carlos before our Wisconsin sojourn, and while I liked San Carlos a lot (especially the Bay views from the hills), Mountain View is even better. There are more services and resources in town, and there are more things to do in the South Bay than in the mid-Peninsula. And I have the apparently typical commute time of 20 minutes--a reverse commute, no less, as I rarely experience much traffic in either direction.

The New York Times has an expose on the efforts of beef manufacturers to come up with new fancy brand names for cow parts to increase consumer demand for beef. The article starts out:

the nation’s 800,000 cattle ranchers began a radical search for cuts of meat that consumers would buy besides steaks and ground beef.

The idea was simple. Dig around in the carcass and find muscles that, when separated and sliced in a certain way, were tender and tasty enough to be sold as a steak or a roast.

Thus, the article discusses the new "Denver steak" cut of beef, which is going for about 2X the price of ground beef. As one butcher says, “The difference in a good name is worth $3 or $4 a pound."

So if you're tempted by the new beef cuts coming out, just recognize that you are being merchandised to buy rebranded and repackaged cow parts. As the article's title says, "Same Cow, No Matter How You Slice It?"

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Last week, I went to a lunchtime student-oriented talk by Gordon Davidson, chair of Silicon Valley firm Fenwick & West, on the topic of "The Art of Being a Business Lawyer and the Changing Business of Law." Gordy laid out 10 tips for being an effective counselor (most of this post is my impression of his talk in my words, not verbatim statements by him):

1) "If "This answer must be wrong," reexamine your assumptions." The goal should be solving client problems, not necessarily answering the questions a client asks.

2) "Do the numbers; the answers might just appear." Lawyers are afraid of numbers, but sometimes crunching the numbers can reveal an easy solution. For example, if you calculate that a particular provision isn't worth very much financially, it should be easy to compromise.

3) "Recognize revenue (and expense) when you see it." Many law students don't know that received cash, recognizable revenue and invoiced amounts are all very different things.

4) "Look for real options; they have real value you can calculate."

5) "Learn the art of negotiation."

6) "Keep your eye on the business reality." Clients can be enamored with their ideas; sometimes a lawyer has to be the voice of reason to point out when they are being unrealistic.

7) "Business sense is as important as legal skill." Clients pay for a lawyer's judgment, not just the lawyer's knowledge of legal rules.

8) "Look for solutions, not just risk."

9) "Save "no" for when you really mean it."

10) "Think about the business consequences of your legal advice and how you communicate it." If your advice requires your client to do things you think the client isn't likely to do, you need to find another solution.

None of these points should be unfamiliar to experienced business lawyers, but Gordy did a great job of providing students with a pragmatic view of life as a business lawyer.

Gordy then turned to a discussion about the changing business of law. He discussed that clients won't pay for training new lawyers. In engagement letters, clients are restricting the firm's use of first and second year associates. Some clients are refusing to pay for any lawyer research, expecting that either lawyers know the answer off the top of their head or will do the necessary research to get up to speed on his/her own dime.

Gordy talked about the firm's fixed-fee arrangement with Cisco to handle all of Cisco's M&A work for a single periodic fee--an arrangement that is working well because Cisco's needs are mostly predictable. Indeed, Gordy said that he would like to do more arrangements like this but clients are reluctant to do so.

The fixed fee arrangement is part of a broader trend away from the billable hour. The alternative fee arrangements can have the benefit of encouraging the lawyer to assess the value of incremental tasks using the same approach the client would, i.e., is the extra effort a good allocation of scarce resources? However, some people think that eliminating the billable hour will reduce lawyer stress, but Gordy doesn't agree. From his perspective, the stress comes from a lawyer's desire to deliver good service to the client, and this desire is the same whether or not the billing arrangement is hourly or on a fixed fee basis.

He discussed the efforts of lawyers to work smarter and avoid duplicative tasks within a firm. He said Fenwick is building out internal wikis to capture the firm's knowledge in a more organized fashion. For example, some underemployed associates are being asked to build out the firm's wiki on cleantech. He also thinks that technology will, over time, reduce a firm's partner-to-associate ratio/leverage.

Finally, he mentioned Legal OnRamp as a marketing tool. It sounds like the firm's experience hasn't been that encouraging. He said the firm had posted about a dozen items to Legal OnRamp but these had not translated into prospective client inquiries.

I got an email from a graduating student telling me that his law firm had asked incoming associates to volunteer to defer their start dates for a year. This is an unfortunate situation, and naturally it produces significant stress and anxiety. I thought it would be worth publicly sharing my response to the student:
___

I'm sorry to hear of what surely must seem like bad news. However, if you can afford it, your choice is an easy one: take the year off and enjoy life. As a working attorney, you will get very few opportunities to have a big block of discretionary time like this ever again. Here, you are being encouraged to legitimately enjoy a big block of time. For most of us, who never felt free to take a year off in our overprogrammed lives, this would be a blessing in disguise.

Plus, it is no fun working at a firm when there is too little work to go around. The lack of work creates bad dynamics, like work hoarding by more senior associates and even partners, and the pressure to find work can chew up your life. You will feel like you need to wait by the phone/email from dawn to dusk just in case any scrappy work is available to pick up, so you will work harder but with less tangible rewards in a situation like that. Also, some associates are tempted to overbill/pad their hours when they don't have enough work to legitimately meet their hourly requirements, and this isn't a healthy situation.

If you cannot afford to take the year off, then you have fewer good options:

1) You can go to the firm and hope they will take you and that the environment isn't terrible.
2) You can try to find a different one-year gig. Given how many attorneys are going to be in 1 year deferral situations, this market will be intensely competitive for any good paying work.
3) You can try to negotiate a buyout from the firm, i.e., get some cash to tide you over, but obviously less than the typical starting salary. If they haven't already offered cash, I suspect this money won't be easy to get.

I gave another talk today for PLI describing social networking sites and blogs. Even though it was for a lawyer audience, it was more fun than a typical CLE talk because it had no law. My talk slides.

A couple of weeks ago, the High Tech Law Institute hosted the fourth gathering of Bay Area legal bloggers. About 20 bloggers and friends gathered on campus for a very spirited discussion. Attendees included Harry Boadwee, Cathy Gellis, Eric Goldman, Joy Haas, Kirk Hanson, Eric Hartnett, Greg Haverkamp, Gordon Johnson, Kimberly Kralowec, Mike Masnick, Cathy Moran, Amy Morganstern, Joe Mullin, Simon Offord, Chris Peeples, Colin Samuels, Michael Sardina, Mister Thorne, Kevin Underhill and Julia Wei.

We talked about blogger burnout. While updating the census of local blawgers, I noted that many bloggers who started in 2005 and 2006 have either stopped or substantially curtailed their blogging. We came up with a number of possible explanations for this phenomenon:

* one blogger said he had run out of things to say. I think this may be more common than people realize.
* a few bloggers discussed the rise of competing publishing platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. As one blogger described it, the increased number of communication channels has dissipated efforts across all channels. This is definitely different from our first Blawger gathering 2 years ago, when Facebook and Twitter were far less popular than today. In my case, Twitter (which I automatically link to my Facebook status report) has unquestionably usurped some of the posts I used to make at this blog.
* a few bloggers discussed the lack of time to blog. This is an age-old issue. One blogger described how she goes through cycles of blogging depending on her schedule. Unfortunately, bloggers can have difficulties maintaining audience if they go silent for an extended period of time, so blogging in cycles isn't the easiest thing to do. (It can help to have reliable co-bloggers who can smooth out the publication cycle).
* one blogger described how she is burned out on reading blogs. I've definitely been there! In my case, switching from Bloglines to Google Reader has helped reinvigorate my reading excitement by expediting my ability to manage my data inflow. It's also allowed me to expand the blogs I'm reading, especially those that are episodic.

We then moved into a discussion about managing comments to blog posts. I don't have much to contribute to that discussion because my blogs don't have open comments, the legacy of a pernicious comment spam attack that caused my blog host to shut me down for a morning. Bloggers have very disparate attitudes towards comments to their blog posts. One blogger mentioned how she didn't really like comments because of the risk of commenters disclosing personal details (which can be a real problem for prospective clients). A different blogger preferred comments over email because of the public response; several bloggers discussed how it can be embarrassing and self-perpetuating for a blog to allow comments but never get any. As one blogger said, people don't want to feel like they are talking to themselves. Several bloggers also noted that lawyer-readers can be especially reluctant to comment to blog posts because they don't want the accountability. When I did allow comments, I definitely had that perception.

We also discussed Twitter. For a while, I was confused about Twitter's value proposition because, like blogging in its early days, the early adopters of Twitter used it to chronicle their personal life. Much like this early usage defined bloggers as self-absorbed and exhibitionist, I initially had the same impression of Twitter. However, once I figured out that Twitter was just another content publication platform, I found it could extend my reach. As a result, many of my tweets simply promote my blog posts, but I do make other types of tweets, including short entries that would have previously made it onto this blog and various personal observations that would never have warranted a blog post at all. One blogger commented that this mixing of personal and professional can help humanize a person.

What has amazed me about Twitter is that I've aggregated a bunch of lawyer-readers who would never have found or subscribed to my blog. This baffles me because Twitter is IMO a terrible reading interface. I find Google Reader a much more intuitive way to subscribe to and manage incoming content. As a result, I subscribe to very few people on Twitter because I'd rather read them in my RSS reader if I can. However, having identified a way to aggregate new readers shows me that people consume content using a variety of different interfaces. If people find Twitter a good substitute for an RSS reader (even if I don't), then it's in my self-interest to publish my content in the places people are reading.

There can be too much of a good thing, and we did discuss that some people are too noisy/frequent with their tweets, which can actually drive away readers/subscribers. We discussed at the meeting (and I've since heard elsewhere) that people are putting themselves on a Twitter "diet," i.e., a maximum number of tweets per day.

I'm not sure what the future holds for the Bay Area Blawgers group. Attendance has dropped significantly from the first gathering. Further, blogging is changing rapidly between the influx of "corporate" bloggers (i.e., law firms that are setting up blogs principally for SEO juice) and the splintering of publication options. It's not clear to me if there remains a blogging community sufficient to support a standalone event about blogging. Nevertheless, maybe we'll try to gather the group again in late 2009/early 2010, perhaps in San Francisco, and see who shows.

Prior resources related to the Bay Area Blawgers:

* Announcements of Bay Area Blawgers 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0.
* Recaps of the first and third gatherings. Beth Grimm has written an interesting meta-recap.
* Photos from the second and third gatherings.
* List of possible issues for a blawgers' discussion.
* Census of Bay Area Blawgers.

For April Fool's Day, Lisa thought it would be fun to do a one-hit wonders spinning mix. I must say, it was fun to put together. Obviously, the heavy emphasis on 80s music was unavoidable. The mix:

1. Turning Japanese -- The Vapors. I was amazed that Lisa had never heard what this was rumored to be about.
2. Take On Me -- a-ha. The video really takes me back to MTV's halcyon days. And the hair!!!
3. Tainted Love -- Soft Cell
4. I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) --The Proclaimers
5. Barbie Girl -- Aqua. I actually play this song in my IP course every year, if for no other reason than to delight in getting that song into students' heads for the rest of the day.
6. Tubthumping -- Chumbawamba
7. Rock and Roll (Part 2) -- Gary Glitter
8. Hot Hot Hot -- Buster Poindexter
9. Jump Around -- House of Pain
10. 99 Luftballons -- Nena
11. Who Let the Dogs Out -- Baha Men
12. Unbelievable -- EMF
13. Rock Me Amadeus -- Falco
14. Safety Dance -- Men Without Hats
15. Bust a Move -- Young MC
16. Lean On Me -- Clulb Nouveau
17. Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye -- Steam

Of course, the description "One Hit Wonder" raises some difficult classification issues. For example, several of the groups had subsequent top 40 hits that no one remembers any more. And a number of the groups had big careers internationally, such as a-ha, Aqua and Gary Glitter. Oh well. The music is so good, I trust no one will mind.

See also Lisa's Thanksgiving Spinning Mix.

When I became a new law professor, I did a little research and tried to assemble articles addressed to me--the new law professor. The stack has been sitting locked away in boxes now for a while, so rather than continue to try to maintain a dead tree's archive, I'm passing along a bibliography of articles I identified, plus some more recent articles. The list does show my age (I became a full-time professor in 2002) but some principles remain true to this day.

* Rachel Arnow-Richman, Bibliography for New Teachers, 26 Hawaii L. Rev. 489 (2004) (focused on contracts professors).

* Robert H. Abrams, Sing Muse: Legal Scholarship for New Law Teachers, 37 J. Legal Educ. 1 (1987).

* Susan J. Becker, Advice for the New Law Professor: A View from the Trenches, 42 J. Legal Educ. 432 (1992).

* Richard Delgado, How to Write a Law Review Article, 20 U.S.F. L. Rev. 445 (1986). Although its principal audience is students, I think Volokh's Academic Legal Writing [Amazon Affiliates link] is a more useful and modern treatment of the subject.

* Cheryl Hanna, The Nuts and Bolts of Scholarship (2004).

* Mary Kay Kane, Some Thoughts on Scholarship for Beginning Teachers, 37 J. Legal Educ. 14 (1987).

* Howard E. Katz & Kevin Francis O'Neill, Strategies and Techniques of Law School Teaching: A Primer for New Teachers (2007).

* Eric L. Muller, A New Law Teacher's Guide to Choosing a Casebook, 45 J. Legal Educ. 557 (1995).

* Douglas K. Newell, Ten Survival Suggestions For Rookie Law Teachers, 33 J. Legal Educ. 693 (1983).

* Kent D. Syverud, Taking Students Seriously: A Guide for New Law Teachers, 43 J. Legal Educ. 247 (1993).

* Donald J. Weidner, A Dean's Letter to New Law Faculty About Scholarship. 44 J. Legal Educ. 440 (1994).

* Douglas J. Whaley, Teaching Law: Advice for the New Law Professor, 43 Ohio St. L.J. 125 (1982).

There are a lot of materials on teaching generally. You might find the following further resources helpful:

* My careers in law teaching page

* Madeleine Schachter, The Law Professor's Handbook: A Practical Guide to Teaching Law Students (2003) [Amazon Affiliates link]

* Dorothy A. Brown, Selected Articles on Law Teaching for the New Law Teacher (2005)

* Materials from the Legal Scholarship Blog

* Mercer Law's Law School Teaching and Learning Resources

* Georgetown Law's Law Teaching & Scholarship Guide

* Michael A. Gerber, Milk and Cookies for Untenured Faculty, Selected Resources (2001) (emphasizing resources for bankruptcy professors)

* Sharon Dolovich, Making Docile Lawyers: An Essay on the Pacification of Law Students, 111 Harv. L. Rev. 2027 (1998)

* Jordan H. Leibman & James P. White, How the Student-Edited Law Journals Make Their Publication Decisions, 39 J. Legal Educ. 387 (1989). This is a little dated but it has some neat statistical analysis of journal practices.

Good luck! Feel free to contact me if I can help in any way.