Minnesota Lawyer Blog: 3/23/08

Saturday, March 29, 2008

The U of M Law School drops out of the 'Top 20'

The University of Minnesota Law School has slipped out of the top 20 in the influential rankings published by U.S. News & World Report, the Pioneer Press reports. The PiPress goes on to say:

The university now ranks 22nd among national law schools, according to the 2009 rankings due to be released today. That's down from a rank of 20 in 2008 and 19 in 2007.
While many experts attack the U.S. News rankings as a poor and superficial way to judge an institution's quality, the numbers carry tremendous weight with prospective students and law firms looking to hire top graduates. The university has promoted its law school as a "top 20" destination. In December, as it named David Wippman its new dean, the university referred to its law school as "consistently ranked in the top 20."

The picture was mixed for the state's three other law schools. The PiPress notes a jump for Hamline University's law school, which joins the University of St. Thomas in the ranking's "third tier." Meanwhile, William Mitchell College of Law fell from the third tier to fourth.

For more from the PiPress click here.

I have written before about how little stock I put in the accuracy of the U.S. News & World Report rankings. Drawing such fine distinctions between law schools -- the difference between a #20 and a #22 school, for example -- is completely arbitrary. Tweak your magic formula of weightings a bit, and, lo and behold, the schools flip flop positions on the list.

It would be almost laughable, except there is no doubt these ratings have real world effect, particularly if your law school drops out of the "Top 20," as the U of M did. The U of M can now expect a drop in its law school applications and for its law graduates to have a slightly harder time in securing big firm jobs outside the region.

I don't know about you, but that makes me mad enough to cancel my U.S. News & World Reports subscription, if I hadn't already done that a decade ago, that is ...

Friday, March 28, 2008

Judges, lawyers get dramatic at RCBA annual dinner

The Ramsey County Bar Association had its annual judges' dinner last night at the Town & Country Club in St. Paul. As usual, the festivities featured chicken, drinks and judges and lawyers doing their best to entertain during a raucous theatrical revue. Here are just a few of the highlights from the theatrical part of the show that the mainstream media somehow seems to have missed:

-- Minnesota State Bar Association President Brian Melendez doing the emceeing (he actually got off a number of good one liners);
-- Woodbury attorney Paul Peterson doing his best Donald Trump impression, which include sporting a wig made to simulate the Donald's trademark hair (where does one procure that?);
-- Judge Kathleen Gearin portraying an Irish mafioso to hilarious effect; and
-- Judge Elena Ostby during a mock version of Jeopardy (repeatedly answering with the phrase, "Who is ... Jay Bennanav?")

Kudos to all those brave enough to demonstrate their theatrical flair. If any of the judges at the gathering last night are suffering from "black robe disease," I think (at least for that night) they were cured.

Legislative auditor to launch a preliminary investigation of AG's Office

The state’s legislative auditor is launching a preliminary investigation to determine if there is any basis for allegations of ethical and legal misconduct occurring in Attorney General Lori Swanson's office.

For the Minnesota Lawyer article, click here.

Since the auditor is going to limit his review to just the ethical and legal complaints, perhaps University of St. Thomas School of Law Dean Thomas Mengler, whom Swanson has reportedly enlisted to review her office, could be helpful to Swanson in identifying managerial areas that could use addressing.

ABA helping law students cope with stress

Yesterday was National Mental Health Day -- at least according to the American Bar Association Law Student Division.

The naming of the day, March 27, is part of the division’s recently established mental health initiative, and is intended to increase awareness of mental health concerns suffered by law students.

According to a press release from the ABA, between 20 and 40 percent of law students suffer from clinical depression at one time or another. Practicing lawyers experience mental health issues at a rate that is eight to 15 times higher than that of the general population. And of 104 occupational groups, lawyers ranked highest in numbers of professionals managing depression.

These stats convinced the Law Student Division that there was a need to equip students with tips on how to cope with things like stress and depression. To that end, and to kick-off the inaugural observance of National Mental Health Day, the division developed a tool that it says will aid students and academics in learning about some of the prevalent mental health problems law students experience.

The Toolkit for Student Bar Associations and Administrators includes a comprehensive section on signs and symptoms of depression and anxiety, information on stress reduction and other keys to minimizing the symptoms of some mental illnesses.

Having gone through the law school experience myself, this sounds like a good idea to me. And anything we can do to prepare students for the stress involved in practicing law is a positive thing. I hope law schools and law students take advantage of the Law Student Division’s efforts in this regard.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

AG's Office getting closer to an independent review -- but what kind?

A couple of interesting developments in the ongoing controversy that has been much reported as of late in the Attorney General’s Office. The Associated Press is reporting that AG Lori Swanson wrote in a letter to Legislative Auditor James Nobles that union organizers "have largely made anonymous and conclusory allegations in the press and blogosphere."

According to the AP, Swanson sent a similar letter to the Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility outlining the allegations and asking that the office review them for rules violations. And she enlisted Thomas Mengler, the dean of the University of St. Thomas law school, to conduct an independent review, the AP reports.

While I have the greatest respect for Dean Mengler, a highly regarded member of our legal community, one wonders whether there would be the necessary buy in from the rank-and-file or even the general public when the AG is handpicking her own independent reviewer. But even getting by that simple acceptance question, such an approach raises a bevy of potentially thorny issues, including:

To whom would Mengler be reporting? (Swanson? The office? The Legislature?)
What would be the scope of the review? (Just the ethics complaints? All non-union issues? All management-related issues?)
What limitations would be put on the investigation?
To what information would he be made privy?
To whom could he talk? (And under what circumstances?)
How could he carry out an investigation without the power to subpoena?
What confidentiality would be afforded individuals providing information?
What would be done with the data collected?
To whom would the final results be made known?

These difficult questions would have to be answered up front and to the satisfaction of interested parties in order for such a review to meet with more success than the much-derided staff-polling approach undertaken earlier by the AG utilizing ex-Judges Miles Lord and Jonathan Lebedoff.

If a reviewer comes in at the AG’s behest and follows the ground rules that she herself sets up, I suspect the review will do little to stabilize the office situation or instill public confidence. With so much water having passed under the bridge at this point, it's likely that many would view this as a strategic maneuver designed to head off a more rigorous investigation. While Mengler's involvement may prove helpful in any number of regards, it is no substitute for a thorough independent review by Legislative Auditor Nobles.

According to MinnPost’s Eric Black, a legislative commission is convening Friday to consider the possibility of having Nobles conduct an investigation of some of the issues reported in the AG's Office.

What gets us out of bed in the morning

People have been preparing a Requiem for the newspaper for several years now. But rather than spending too much time blaming the Internet or Craigslist, consider this statement:

The agenda of the American news media continues to narrow, not broaden.

This is just one of several trends identified by the Project for Excellence in Journalism in its recent "State of the News Media" report.

To drive the point home, an exhaustive analysis of news coverage showed that court and legal news fills just 0.4 percent of the news hole (which is what we like to call that blank space between ads) in mainstream American media.

0.4 percent!

That makes legal news the second least covered domestic issue in the country. Only development and sprawl gets less attention than our legal system.

That’s sad, but for me, strangely rewarding at the same time. Legal news keeps us up at night and gets us out of bed in the morning. And if we didn't do it, I'm not sure anyone else would.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

We hold this truth to be self evident: Movie references are universal

I had the opportunity earlier today to stop in at a press conference at the Office of the Secretary of State where Mark Ritchie announced that an original copy of the Declaration of Independence will be on display during the sesquicentennial celebration in May. (Click here for Minnesota Lawyer story.)

Now before I go any further, I should mention that one of the reasons I decided to check out the press conference was that the costs of bringing the Declaration to Minnesota are being underwritten by Minnesota Lawyer's parent company, Minnesota-based Dolan Media. I also have a lifelong interest in Thomas Jefferson, the one founding father with whom I share a birthday. Plus he was a lawyer and a writer. If Jefferson were alive today, I'm sure he'd be posting on this blog ...

In any case, as I listened to the expected nice, but vanilla descriptions of the document's historical importance, I wondered who would be the first person to mention the action flick, "National Treasure." I did not have to wait long -- it was Ritchie himself. After a recitation of what made the Declaration significant, the secretary of state added that there had been a lot of interest in the document since the movie "National Treasure."

Sigh. Ritchie was, of course, right. The film did generate quite a bit of interest in the Declaration. But it's unfortunate that the fact that the Declaration is the cornerstone document of our entire democracy isn't enough by itself to spark everyone's curiosity. Some folks need that "as seen in the Nicolas Cage movie" tagline to get them interested. I would have asked what that means for our dwindling attention spans our celebrity-obsessed culture, but I was too busy checking on my iPhone for more coverage on last Monday's Duluth visit by George Clooney and Renee Zellweger.

Andrea Kajer of the Minnesota Historical Society, who is coordinating the security locally, no doubt will hear a lot of references to "National Treasure" in the next couple of months. I thought I'd be among the first, so, in a conversation with her immediately after the press conference, I asked whether precautions had been taken to avoid a Nicolas-Cage-type scenario. She graciously responded to my admittedly weak quip, "Yes, we don't want anyone looking for treasure maps on the back."

Minnesota litigators: Repent!

Minnesota has a reputation as a state that’s friendly to litigators, and a new survey by the Pacific Research Institute seems to bolster that image.

The conservative think tank recently released its U.S. Tort Liability Index: 2008 Report, a ranking of each state based on its tort laws and tort costs. The index ranked Minnesota as a “sinner” -- meaning the state has “relatively high monetary tort losses and/or high litigation risks and relatively weak tort rules on the books…[and] are likely to face high and rising tort liability costs in the future if lawsuit abuse continues unchecked.”

Minnesota ranked 17th among states for the highest risk of litigation, and 4th for incoming monetary awards. According to PRI, that makes Minnesota a “judicial hell-hole.”

While Minnesota’s legal community would surely rather be seen as saints, at least they aren’t perceived by PRI as “suckers” -- a state with weak tort rules “because they currently have relatively low monetary tort losses and/or few litigation risks and, therefore, foolishly believe that they are not vulnerable and reform is not needed.”

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

A celebration of the First Amendment

Anthony Lewis’ new book, “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate,” is a fascinating, concise and thorough survey course of the First Amendment. At fewer than 200 pages of text, it’s not an in-depth look at freedom of speech but more like a celebration of it. And I’m not saying that because he celebrates the rights of reporters: he argues that the press is “not always the good guy” and judges should apply a balancing test to the question of a reporter’s right to protect anonymous sources.

Also interesting is Lewis’ take on Republican Party v. White which, as all sentient Minnesota lawyers know, is based on the First Amendment rights of judges and judicial candidates. He says: “The Minnesota decision seems to me an egregious misapplication of the First Amendment, treating it woodenly and ignoring the reality involved. The test of judicial decisions is not, as Justice [Oliver Wendell] Holmes said of political speech, ‘the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.’ Some of the greatest judicial opinions have run against popular opinion—as did those of Holmes and [Justice Louis] Brandeis when they dissented from the punishment of radical speech. If judges announce their views in election campaigns, in effect telling the voters that they will decide this way or that, they appear to be just another species of politician. The commitment of judges should be to the law, to interpreting it as faithfully as they can, and not to current popular opinion.”

Lewis goes on to note that when a court narrowly decides a case, as it did White, there is always hope to those disappointed by it that a later court will overrule it. But he also notes that since the “ascendancy” of the First Amendment in New York Times v. Sullivan, the court has not changed its mind about the central importance of freedom of speech or of the press.

Monday, March 24, 2008

St. Paul sued over GOP convention speech restrictions

Cooperating attorneys for the ACLU of Minnesota and the Minnesota Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild filed a complaint today in the United States District Court, against the city of St. Paul on behalf of the Coalition to March on the RNC and Stop the War, according to a press release from the ACLU.

The complaint challenges the city’s violation of the coalition’s rights to free speech and due process of law, in connection with the coalition’s plans to demonstrate at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul on Sept. 1, 2008. The complaint seeks to require St. Paul to grant the coalition’s request for a demonstration permit in sufficient detail, and to require the city to amend its permit procedure to provide basic due process to permit applicants.

Cooperating attorneys representing the coalition include Robert J. Hennessey, Lindquist & Vennum PLLP; Bruce Nestor, De Leon & Nestor; David B. Potter, Oppenheimer Wolff & Donnelly LLP; Howard Bass, Bass Law Firm; and Jordan Kushner, Kushner Law Office. Professor Raleigh Levine from William Mitchell College of Law has been consulting on the case.

Study: Childless women are the most 'productive' lawyers

Carol Elefant at Legal Blog Watch and the Wall Street Journal Law Blog report today on an interesting recent British study finding that the most productive lawyers of all are childless females. At the bottom of the list? Women with young children.

It's a study whose results are sure to offend -- particularly given that the methodology is subject to attack. As Elefant points out in her piece, the sole criteria used to determine productivity is the number of hours billed.

"[A]s we all know, hours billed don't necessarily correlate to efficiency; indeed, longer hours may signal less productivity, not more," Elefant writes. "I'd be curious to see, for example, whether women lawyers manage to complete tasks more quickly precisely because they have less time. If that's the case (and I suspect it is), perhaps having children makes them more productive, not less."

Interestingly, the study found the opposite was true of men -- i.e. male lawyers with children tend to be more productive than those without. One wonders if this "productivity" isn't a means of dodging out on domestic chores. Billing an additional hour may not look so bad when the alternative is to go home and change a diaper ...

News conference at federal courthouse at noon

The Minnesota chapter of the ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild and members of the Coalition to March on the RNC are having a news conference at noon at the federal courthouse in Minneapolis. The purpose of the conference is to discuss the ongoing efforts to get permits for planned demonstrations when the GOP national convention is held in St. Paul this September.

Minnesota Lawyer Blog