I'm sorry to say, but word has come down that there will not be a Copynight meeting in DC this month due to the holiday weekend.  So head home for the holidays earlier and enjoy some extra cranberry sauce.

Tip of the Hat to The Command Line for the first notice. (Sorry Joe)

-Kevin

The Life After Law School Podcast

A discussion on the effect of where you live on your life and your practice initiated by Richard Florida's book, "Who's Your City: How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life." http://tinyurl.com/6h58o6

Announcements:
November Copynight is Tuesday the 25th www.copynight.org
Six Weeks Til Solo taught by Carolyn Elefant at Legal Blog Watch, MyShingle and the Legal Marketing Blawg.
Please help out Dr. Floyd's Doug Price at http://www.doctorfloyd.com/doug/


See Also:
Direct Link to some "spiky world" maps http://tinyurl.com/2vqvt8
Link to Richard Florida on the Colbert Report http://tinyurl.com/68pfra

Feedback from Jennifer

Please send in your feedback!
Leave comments on the website: www.lifeafterlawschool.libsyn.com
Send your email to lifeafterlawschool@gmail.com
Call the LALS Voicemail line at (206) 203-0102
Submit reviews in iTunes and Podcast Pickle!


Music and sounds courtesy of Digital Juice.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

I'm sorry, but I'm running late with the current episode.  Summarizing all the information turned out to be a little bit more than I anticipated.

I'll get this up as soon as possible.

-Kevin

I am quite honored to say that the Life After Law School Podcast is now listed with the Podcast Pickle.  The Pickle is an excellent directory for all types of podcasts.  Go and check them out




-Kevin

The episode discusses some of the stress points in the Cravath Method as it is applied by the spectrum of firms today.  The main issues for discussion are the Cravath Method's lack of scalability and the paradigm shift that has occurred in legal education since it was created in 1900.

Inspired by Professor William Henderson's post "How the Cravath System Created the Bi-Modal Distribution" on the Empirical Legal Studies Blog.

See Also Deborah J. Cohen's article "End of the Road for the 'Cravath Model'?" in the ABA Journal.

Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP

The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog "Barak Obama: The U.S.'s 44th President (and 25th Lawyer-President!)" by Dan Slater

Debate on "Is Success Killing the Internet?" by Jonathan Zittrain
Book Forum "Against Intellectual Monopoly" by Michele Boldrin
"Six Weeks Til Solo Practice" taught by Carolyn Elefant
The Solosez Listserv for solo practitioners (mainly)
Meet me at DC Copynights or find/start your own local chapter

Feedback from Carey and Fabiola.

Next Episode will discuss the book "Who's Your City?" by Richard Florida

Please send in some feedback!
Leave comments on the website: www.lifeafterlawschool.libsyn.com
Send your email to lifeafterlawschool@gmail.com
Call the Voicemail line at (206) 203-0102
Leave a review in iTunes

Music and sounds courtesy of Digital Juice.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Yaah!!

The Life After Law School Podcast is now listed in iTunes!  It's searchable, subscribe-able and everything.

Go ahead and check it out in iTunes.  You can preview episodes, download them to your iPod and leave reviews.



Now I need to get back to recording!

-Kevin

This is the first episode where I introduce myself and lay the groundwork for a new series in legal media.

If you have comments, questions or suggestions please contact me!

On the web at http://lifeafterlawschool.libsyn.com
Via email at lifeafterlawschool@gmail.com
Call the voicemail line at (206) 203-0102

Music and sounds are courtesy of Digital Juice.

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

Yes!!  Now you can add your voice to the mix!

Through the mysteries of the interwebs and the grace of K7, you can now call in your questions, comments and general verbage directly to the podcast.  Just remember that comments can (and probably will) be played on the podcast.

The number: (206) 203-0102

So give it a try!

-Kevin

At its heart, this podcast is a search for ways to survive as a young lawyer long enough to overcome the financial hurdles and lack of practical legal skills to earn a career.  Newly minted law grads face a radically different world at the beginning of their careers from the one that hiring committees walked into.  Legal education has remained in the early 20th century while market forces have rocketed the business of law to heights undreamed of, leaving the legal profession behind.

This podcast is part search, part chronicle and mainly a different point of view of the legal industry than the one normally presented.  The present view of the law is dominated by the culture of BigLaw firms which influences bar leadership, legal press, public impressions and the expectations of law students.  BigLaw does have its place in the legal landscape and fills its niches very well, its just casting too long a shadow over the rest of the law for other stories to be told.

I want to look at these other stories and other paths or definitions of success in the law.  We'll look at the forces that have shaped the legal industry's past and present to try and predict where it will go in the future.  These questions are geared to young lawyers who are trying to start their career, but the topics will be of interest to law students who will soon enter the workforce and prelaw students who are thinking of going to law school.  The three different stages of people all have the same ultimate goal: to become a successful lawyer.  Each one has a different point of view of the business of law with different questions that I think will surprise and inform the others.

This is a search for a different model of success, for many models to fit different people in whatever way they seem fit.  Lend me an ear.

A podcast is simply a different way of delivering content to an audience.  The main difference is that it is the audience chooses what and when they will consume.  Through the magic of Adam Curry and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds content authors can set up feeds that will deliver that content to the audience when and where they choose.

Unlike traditional broadcast media which decides what programs to run and when to run them, you as the audience member can choose what programs you wish to watch or listen to and you receive them in your podcatcher as soon as they are placed in the feed.

There is some debate as to where the name "podcasting" comes from.  It is commonly thought that it comes from Apple's iPod which helped popularize podcasts, but others consider it to be a shortened version of Programming On-Demand casting.  Like all legends, there is probably a little truth to both stories.

Podcasts are consumed through RSS aggregators, also known as podcatchers.  The single largest and most used podcatcher is iTunes which has helped with the popularity of podcasts with Apple's iPod media players.  Or was that the other way around?

Podcatchers:

iTunes
Juice
Doppler
Songbird
Podcast Ready
Zune Marketplace
PodNova
Google Reader

For more information, check out the following resources:
Podcasting Article at Wikipedia
Podcasting for Dummies, 2nd Edition by Tee Morris, Chuck Tomasi and Evo Terra

Avatar Image from Face Your Manga

It's finally getting a little quiet around here with the leaves turning color and the air cooling to a crisp.  It also means that the cicadas that live in the tree right outside my window are finally falling silent.  That's one set of the bugs that have been plaguing me here as I continue to get everything ready.

I've also worked out a number of technical bugs that have held me back.  I've plugged the pipeline allowing me to convert recordings to MP3, which was such an incredibly easy fix that I'm embarrassed that it held me up.  I've also figured out answers to my image and music issues.  The last technical glitch is ambient noise which is partially dealt with by the passing of the cicadas, but I'm also working on a collapsible rig to assist with that.

Another big bug in everyone's bonnet is the extremely accelerated rate of change present today.  Most of that has to do with the current economic downturn and the resulting media play the economy is getting with the presidential election.  Law firms and lawyers are also going through a number of changes due to market forces.  The first large change was the amount of chatter generated by Professor Bill Henderson's blog post on the rise of the bi-modal distribution in salaries.  I would like to take more time in the near future to discuss his findings, but for now I'll just say that the amount of discussion this generated has been eye-opening.  But Professor Henderson did not stop there and his posts kept coming and coming.  Before we could digest the ideas presented by Professor Henderson, the economy hit us very hard.  Firms have broken up, delayed incoming classes of new attorneys, fired dozens of lawyers and then Wall Street blew up.  Market forces are in play and they are going to change the way law operates as a business in the same way that market forces drove up associate pay and partner profits.  There will be much to discuss.

But the biggest bug has been myself.  In late August I started a contract gig that quickly fell into a hard burn of 80+ hour weeks and that just sucked the life out of me.  That job is over now, another victim of the credit crunch.  While it might happen for a week or so in the future, I do not want to go this long again without placing something in the feed.

You'll hear from me soon.

-Kevin

Avatar image - Face Your Manga

I must offer my apologies as I am running waaay behind my schedule right now.  Real Life does have that annoying habit of getting in the way of good ideas.

It was a perfect right-left combo.  The right cross is my still existing technical issues and the left hook is that I was cut from my job.  On the technical side, I'm still lacking artwork and music and while I have answers in the works, they will take some time to work through.  I have recorded pieces and episodes, but they basically sound like slop in a tin can.  My current studio is my dining room and I have very little defense to the ambient noise all around.  That is another work in progress as I have a plan but lack the materials.  And the time...

I was cut two weeks ago from my previous gig, which did last a good long time.  I was given an hour's notice on a Friday afternoon and while that doesn't sound like much, the staff attorneys handled it rather well.  I did spend the weekend in the gloom and doom, but early in the next week I was able to secure a new gig.  It's a short term electronic document discovery job with heavy, heavy hours.  It's the heavy overtime that's currently keeping me from working on my recording issues.  But I am searching for further solutions, researching topics and working on the episodes themselves.

My largest concern right now is that time and events are passing before me and the issues I want to tackle are changing rapidly.  In order to move on with the overall conversation, I need to bring into this feed what is going on in the world around us.  So while I work on the technical issues with the audio podcast, I will blog what's happening in this feed.  While I find that to be a rather insignificant use of the power of LibSyn, it will be a better use than I am currently making of it.  Once the podcast is up and running, it will take precedence in the feed but the blog will supplement it.

So instead of tickling your eardrums, I will entrance your eyeballs.  Thank you for your patience.

-Kevin

Hi there,

While I'm working behind the curtain on some of the technical issues, I'd like to post some contact information for your questions, comments and suggestions.

Website:  http://lifeafterlawschool.libsyn.com
Email: lifeafterlawschool@gmail.com
Skype: kncrosby
Twitter: Baelen

I'll be adding other ways to contact in the near future, as well as a regular contact info section in the sidebar.  Right now, the technical issues I'm working are including music, including graphics, adding in HTML modules in Libsyn and reducing the ambient noise in my "studio".  It doesn't help that the new family who just moved into the apartment right on the other side of the wall from my rig just *loooooves* Rock Band.

That's all for now and thanks for keeping your eyes (and ears) open here!

-Kevin

Hello,

I'd like to thank you for stopping by and seeing the beginning of this new podcast.  I have just activated the account here at Libsyn and would like to thank them very much for their awesome product.

Scripts are being recorded, interviews are being sought and I'm searching for artwork and music to set the mood.  Keep coming back and keep an eye on the changes.

-Kevin