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Contingency Fee Conflicts: Attorneys Push for Quick-Kill Settlements When Their Clients Would Be Better Off Going to Trial
Get PDFDespite the checkered history of contingency fees in the practice of law, attorneys often claim that such fee arrangements perfectly align the interests of lawyer and client. After all, contingency fee lawyers proclaim in TV ad after TV ad, we don’t get paid unless you win. That superficial logic does not withstand economic scrutiny. Utilizing a behavioral economics lens, this Article demonstrates that contingency fee arrangements give attorneys excessive incentives to settle cases that their clients would be better off taking all the way through trial. In addition to highlighting this undertheorized problem in law, we offer normative recommendations to help alleviate the conflict. Ultimately, we need to devise a hybrid fee system that provides compensation proportionate to how hard an attorney works, provides incentives for the best possible outcome for her client (whether obtained at trial or via settlement), and ensures that low-income plaintiffs can still obtain access to the doors of justice
Closing the Feedback Gap: Reflections as Diagnostic Resource
Get PDFProviding students with helpful, actionable feedback is a perennial challenge. This presentation identifies an additional data source for instructors when drafting feedback: digital student reflections. This process has a dual benefit for both instructors and students. For instructors, digitized reflections unlock an understanding of why a student drafted a certain way, minimizing guesswork and ensuring more targeted feedback. For students, this process directs the instructor’s gaze to a concrete concern or discomfort for immediate response. While not a solution for all feedback problems, digitizing student reflections allows instructors and students to work together to close the gap
Practice Area Insights — Corporate Governance and Inclusive Leadership
No full textAs ideas about corporate purpose evolve, how has that affected corporations’ implementation of diversity, equity, and inclusion measures? What can be learned from successes and failures of corporate inclusivity in leadership? Professor Jennifer S. Fan dives into these questions in this video, filmed at the ABA Business Law Section’s 2023 Hybrid Spring Meeting. In her presentation to the Academic Subcommittee of the Section’s Mergers & Acquisitions Committee, Professor Fan shares keen insights into the state of diversity in leadership of public and private companies, how corporate purpose and “publicness” govern companies’ actions in the inclusivity context, and policy considerations for corporate DEI action. A lively Q&A with meeting participants adds to the discussion
Manufacturing Innovation
Get PDFUsing intellectual property assets as the proxy for innovation measures, this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the legal and policy strategies that form the foundation for China\u27s new role as the global manufacturer of innovation. Manufacturing innovation is evident through China\u27s multi-prong approach regarding intellectual property production and maximization. Significantly, among many other policies that target innovation, China encourages the production of innovation by accepting patents and trademarks as collateral assets for financing. Entrepreneurs can quickly obtain loans against their portfolios of patents and trademarks. China also requires enterprises seeking to undergo an initial public offering (IPO) on the new tech board at the Shanghai Stock Exchange to own intellectual property assets as evidence of innovation.
Part I documents how the United States has assisted China\u27s tech and intellectual property domination through President Nixon\u27s historic visit to China, giving China Most Favorite Nation (MFN) status and ascending China to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Moreover, under Deng Xiaoping\u27s leadership during the reform period, China rapidly developed its special economic zones (SEZs), laying the foundation for subsequent tech innovation and production.
Part II contains charts that demonstrate the astounding annual growth in the numbers of trademarks, invention patents, utility model patents, and industrial designs obtained by Chinese individuals and businesses. These numbers cement China as a powerhouse in producing intellectual property assets in place of physical goods.
Part III focuses on three key factors that contribute to the production of intellectual property assets. The first factor involves the legal development of intellectual property law and rapid legal reforms. China amends and modernizes different intellectual property laws every ten years, ensuring that the laws keep pace with the rapid production of intellectual property assets. The second factor involves judiciary reform and innovation for the enforcement of intellectual property rights that establish a new level of confidence in private ownership of valuable intellectual property assets. The third factor involves how the reorganization of the national intellectual property agency affirms intellectual property assets as products of innovation that prove important and worthy of protection and management.
Manufacturing innovation also epitomizes China\u27s policies on subsidies, as explained in Part IV. China strategically maximizes its intellectual property production numbers by offering subsidies for innovator housing, filing fees, and selected industry sectors.
Most importantly, China provides ex post incentives. In Part V, this paper examines how China encourages the manufacturing of innovation by creating a special tech board on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and requiring companies filing for IPO to own patents. In addition, Chinese lenders accept patents and trademarks as collateral for loans to entrepreneurs. This encourages entrepreneurs to produce patents and trademarks because they become assets that can be used to obtain financing.
The paper arrives at Part VI by exploring the implications of what manufacturing innovation by China may mean to the United States. The United States must thoughtfully formulate a set of corrections regarding its success and failure at the production of innovation without demonizing China
Due Process Deportations
Get PDFShould pro-immigrant advocates pursue federally funded counsel for all immigrants facing deportation? For most pro-immigrant advocates and scholars, the answer is self-evident: More lawyers for immigrants would mean more justice for immigrants, and thus, the federal government should fund such lawyers. Moreover, the argument goes, federally funded counsel for immigrants would improve due process and fairness, as well as make immigration enforcement more efficient. This Article argues the opposite: Federally funded counsel is the wrong goal. The majority of expulsions of immigrants now happen outside immigration courts— and thus are impervious to immigration lawyering. Even for those who make it before an immigration judge, factors including geography, random judicial assignment, and the limited forms of deportation relief mean that most people represented by immigration lawyers are still ultimately deported. Gideon v. Wainwright’s guarantee of counsel in the criminal realm co-existed for nearly sixty years with the development of mass incarceration. Likewise, expanding federally funded counsel for immigrants could coexist with a vastly expanded deportation infrastructure without contradiction. In fact, federally funded counsel would provide cover for continued deportations, and the restrictions that would likely come with such funding would make it harder for attorneys to challenge the growth of the mass deportation regime effectively. Instead of investing in a strategy that risks normalizing expanded enforcement, pro-immigrant advocates and scholars must choose battles that aim at dismantling immigration enforcement. This means putting aside efforts that seek to add lawyers as one more mandated player in immigration cour
Teaching Visualized Legal Writing—A Necessary 21st Century Skill
No full textIn her influential 2014 Columbia Law Review article “Taking Images Seriously,” Prof Elizabeth Porter outlined the unchanging black and white world of legal writing, describing it as a “stylistic straitjacket,” seemingly impervious to “modern, image saturated communication norms.” Taking a cue from Professor Porter, for the last decade, the presenter has devised an entirely new image-driven way of teaching legal writing, which he has found to be popular with students, practitioners and judges alike, and this approach will be discussed during this webinar
How Do Japanese Clients View Their Lawyers -- and How Did Those Views Change over the Decade between Surveys? [Bengoshi ni taisuru soshōtōjisha no hyōka – 10nen de hyōka wa dou kawatta ka]
Get PDFA central component of the Civil Litigation Behavior Research Project (2003-2008) and the successor Civil Litigation Research Project (2016-2020) was a set of surveys of litigants in civil cases.1 For comparison purposes, each project also included a survey of the general public, containing a number of identical or similar questions. Among the many aspects of the litigation experience covered in the surveys, several questions focused on the lawyer-client relationship. These included questions about access to lawyers, advice by lawyers, and client evaluations of and level of satisfaction with the lawyers who represented them. After briefly examining some of the ways in which the Japanese legal profession changed in the ten years between the projects, this essay will compare results from the two studies, with a focus on items appertaining to the lawyer-client relationship.https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/faculty-chapters/1049/thumbnail.jp
