Category Archives: Odds and Ends

 

March 2nd, 2008

Avvo Rating System: Thanks, But I’ll Pass


The Avvo web site for rating lawyers came on line last year to the sound of widespread derision. I won’t re-invent the wheel, just point you to Scott Greenfield’s most recent post on the subject at Simple Justice, where he goes through some of his past criticisms, which Avvo has been working on from the beginning. The last time I checked it out, they wanted my credit card number just to write a review of another lawyer. Thanks, I thought, but I’ll pass.

Since Greenfield said today that many improvements had been made, I went back for a visit. After all, the days of lawyers or clients finding appropriate counsel from books is rapidly going the way of the dinosaur, and potential clients may find such websites that will replace Martindale-Hubbell. So this is the nightmare I found when I tried to create an account to update the profile they created for me:

A “terms of use” document that I started to read, before I realized it didn’t have an end. Or at least it didn’t have an end any rationale human being would ever see. After reading the part about giving them the right to change the terms at any time without my agreement, and this could be to take my first born for all I know, I knew it was unlikely I would agree to their terms of use.

It then went on to assert that they had the right to send me as many junk emails as they want from whoever they sell their lists to. You can’t opt out. I mean, really, are you guys kidding with this crap? [Edit: Apparently you can opt out of commercial emails, but not “service or account-related emails.” See the comments.]

Quickly disgusted, I copied and pasted the terms of use into a Word document, ran the word count, and found their 15-page magnum opus to be 4,983 words long. And some of it, for reasons known best to people who apparently don’t deal with actual humans, is IS WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS IN BLOCKY PARAGRAPHS FILLED WITH WRETCHED LEGALISTIC MUMBO JUMBO making it almost impossible to read. Is this where you put stuff when you really don’t want folks to read it?

I quickly left the site. Thanks, Avvo, I’ll pass again.

Addendum 3/27/08: More on lousy legal drafting using all caps at The Legal Satyricon, wth many links: Seven sixteenths of one inch… Maddox meets contract drafting

 

February 4th, 2008

Super Bowl Snoozer….


Point 1: The Powers That Be continue to start games so late the little people miss out. That goes for the World Series too. I remember watching the stuff as a kid, but mine won’t have those memories. I find it hard to believe they won’t get the same advertising dollars by starting the game two hours earlier. The whole thing is penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to developing the next generation of fans.

Point 2: The Manning-Tyree Scramble and Catch will live on forever the same way that Mookie Wilson’s at bat in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series lives on.

Point 3: Don’t jinx yourself. The Patriots greedily tried to trademark 19-0. Which caused the NY Post to file a trademark for 18-1.

Of course that was not the only thing premature, as attested to by this new book by The Boston Globe:
19-0: The Historic Championship Season of New England’s Unbeatable Patriots.
[Update: The link went dead after I grabbed this image]

Think the Pats will file a trademark suit against the Globe?

And if you feel you need to see The Play replayed, in case you too fell asleep because the NFL started the game so late as they bow to the Temple of the Almighty Dollar, here is the small snippet. Thanks to short-sighted NFL greed, children in the eastern part of the country never saw it live [Update: It looks like the NFL wasn’t too pleased with seeing the clip on YouTube and had it taken down. I guess that’s one way to make sure the little ones never see it. Way to go NFL!]

Point Last: Dan Hull at What About Clients has his Super Bowl themed Blawg Review #145 up and running, for more legal looking stuff. And it’s anything but a snoozer.

 

December 26th, 2007

Why BigLaw Gets the BigBucks

Scott Greenfield is perplexed. He’s a top-notch criminal defense guy with more years of trials and appeals under his belt than he probably cares to count, and doesn’t understand why BigLaw is paying obscene amounts of money to young associates who are years away from gaining actual, useful experience.

Scott writes, with salaries now approaching $200K (actually way more when you count the bonuses), that the ridiculous numbers now being paid are surely the thing that will drive business away from BigLaw and into the hands of the solos and small practitioners. “First year associates are near useless as lawyers,” he writes. “They are incapable of producing useful legal work, and at best churn out wasteful hours of memos stating the obvious at great length in order to produce the requisite number of hours. Sure, they think they’re doing a bang-up job, but that’s only because they have no clue of the utility of their efforts.”

While it’s understandable that newbie lawyers will go to these places to put in their 2,000+ billable hours a year, have no life, rake in the dough and get little useful experience if they actually intend to litigate cases, it doesn’t explain why the clients hire them.

But that part is easy. Clients often hire BigLaw for one reason: Because the person that does the hiring knows that no one will ever second guess them on trying to find “the best.” They don’t have to actually be the best, of course. It’s like the old Wall Street saying that no one ever got fired for buying IBM. It didn’t have to be the best stock, and the BigLaw firm doesn’t have to be the best firm. But the person that does the hiring knows that they won’t lose their job with a BigLaw pick, but that picking a firm with “only” 100 lawyers, or heaven forbid, just five lawyers or a solo, opens them up to criticism if things go wrong. The fact that the smaller firm might be able to do twice the job at half the price doesn’t really factor into the equation.

It’s just the age-old game of CYA. Nothing more. Nothing less.