The entrance of Bloomberg would be a natural for improved tools targeted at transactional attorneys. At least in this article, however, it appears that this is not yet a core market that they're focused upon.

Well done, Ben. Thank you for the excellent follow up.

Vance Knapp, author of the Rothgerber piece, is a CU Law alum. He returns every now and again to speak at the school.

Brad

Someone had a good find amid a 1,136-page draft legislation.

If you want to look for yourself, look at PDF p. 687 of http://banking.senate.gov/public/_files/AYO09D44_... and cross reference against PDF p.32 of http://www.sec.gov/about/laws/sa33.pdf

Disclaimer: Jason and I have co-taught at CU Law before, so agreement here may not be shocking.

In addition to entrepreneurship, I teach and research in the area tech policy. The result of patchwork state regulation in telecom regulation is not uniformly inspiring. The benefits are not always clear while the costs of compliance with inconsistent patchworks are often considerable. It would be interesting to know what significant benefits the proposed revision seeks to capture.

Well said. There is actually much more overlap in the analysis between your analysis and Jason's analysis than appeared at first blush. Ultimately, market forces are causing the instability that you're both pointing to.

One caveat: I'm not quite willing to describe law as an open and highly competitive market across the board. There are still formidable barriers to entry in most states (typically, law school and a bar exam, as well as prohibitions on practicing out of state) which keeps many would-be competitors from driving down fees. Same thing for doctors. There are some good arguments for some of these barriers, however, collectively they mean that law is less competitive IMHO than, say, software.

Speaking of which, I like the notion of transactional law as bundled software with services, which I articulated during class. Automation and ease of information use means that legal work is increasingly resembling software. And in some instances -- will makers, Bright Leaf, turbotax -- law IS software. Software scales with little marginal cost for an additional user. So what should lawyers do? In my opinion, become IBM. Give away the software and then sell the services that need to be tailored.

There is an article in there somewhere.

Brad

Olena,

Interesting cross-cultural observation that "in Ukraine and Russia attorney's services are considered to be very expensive and most population cannot afford to hire an attorney."

To the primary gist of your post: Jason's guest turn understandably highlights the instability of the traditional firm model.

That said -- and I want to emphasize this -- I am convinced that the CU j.d. is a powerful asset. The path for the first few years out of law school is not as clear now as it once was. I teach master's level students in engineering and business and the j.d. skill set is IMHO far superior in preparing you to adjust, adapt and succeed in a variety of contexts post law school. After attending CU law, I was as well or better prepared to compete against other attorneys from top 10 schools as a professional. Finally, your position in the ELC provides an additional window concerning entrepreneurial and business avenues that you might migrate to in the future. Even if the economy is brutal at the moment, I'm of the conviction that the skills that you take away from CU Law position you well to succeed over time.

Brad

Wylie,

Chapter 8 of Bit Literacy, concerning "creating bits" (including effective emails), is available under TWEN readings / Week 5.

There is a separate chapter with a suggested method of email management and retention. You're welcome to borrow it and burn a copy. I use the suggested method and find it helpful (although, to be clear, there is no silver bullet). I seem to be receiving 150 or more emails/ day during work days. And I know other professionals who are well north of this number. So the urgency around an effective email management system is one worth spending time on. A few hours of time getting an effective system wired now will save you (literally) hundreds of hours in the future.

Brad

Good find on the Virginia "common language" model.

Before rolling state and local agencies under the bus, note that the federal government -- military excepted -- has shown almost no leadership by example in this space. Most notably, the IWN network was set up to much fanfare a few years ago to get DOJ, Treasury, and other federal users on the same system. At least as of a year ago, the project appeared DOA as the federal agencies could not get it together.

Love the barrel cactus analogy. Well played.

On the cable costs, I'm not in full agreement that " the marginal cost of distribution is also zero" for cable providers. Content takes bandwidth, and at a certain point of usage which taxes a system, either a cable co needs to build out new and faster systems or, alternatively, its service will slow down. More broadly (and less to your point), I spoke with a cable insider afterwards about Preston's estimates. The insider noted that another $25 on a $70 bill goes for cable infrastructure and operational costs. For a high capital cost industry like cable, $50-55 in costs of service per consumers means that margins are getting dangerously thin.

In an irony not entirely lost upon me, I find myself addressing digital hygiene needs . . . with additional digital products in the cloud. These include password managers, financial account managers, etc. Perhaps a bit like cleaning off dirt with fresher dirt.

Fascinating post, Tawnya. Two responses:

1. Cloud computing's efficacy hinges on broadband connectivity -- e.g., the ability to get software and applications from a remote location. If Georgia's regime flails on broadband buildout and penetration, then cloud computing won't be a savior.

2. The extent of corruption in certain governments is often overlooked in critiques of the U.S. system. Dysfunctional and incestuous as the FCC can be, rampant corruption is seldom part of the system.