The Faculty Lounge

AI and the Future of Research Surveys

As law professors, most of us don't have much (if any) training in traditional social science research methodology like surveys. On the few occasions that I've dipped a toe into those waters (e.g., here), I've teamed with other researchers who have experience with those methods. Apart from lack of familiarity and training, another wrinkle for many law profs is that survey work typically requires approval of the applicable institutional review board. Law faculties are far less accustomed to dealing with IRB approval than, say, medical school faculties.

I was interested to read (here) in today's Inside Higher Education about two researchers at the London School of Economics, Friedrich Geiecke (Computational Social Science) and Xavier Jaravel (Economics), who have created an open access tool with promising survey capabilities: Conversations at Scale: Robust AI-led Interviews with a Simple Open-Source Platform.

Here's a descriptive excerpt from the IHE article by Juliette Rowsell:

Rather than having a standard set of multiple-choice and open text questions, as has typically been the case with online surveys, the chat bot takes a conversational approach, collecting interviewees’ responses and using them to generate new questions within a broad set of parameters. ***

In trials, it demonstrated some impressive results. A team of sociology Ph.D. students from Harvard University and the London School of Economics that was asked to assess the quality of the interviews based on transcripts rated them as being broadly comparable to interviews conducted by human experts.

And when the almost 1,000 study participants were asked to evaluate their interaction with the chat bot, the majority said they had enjoyed it and preferred this mode of interview over open text fields. Only 15 percent of respondents said they would have preferred the interview to have been conducted by a person.

I will be following this technology with interest.

Using AI to Write Letters of Recommendation

The following is a guest post by Joshua Galperin

As we all know, being a law professor is the best job one could have. But it is not perfect. Grading is the worst. Writing letters of recommendation is not much better. Unlike grading, however, the upsides of letters of recommendation are many. We have great students who will be great lawyers and leaders, and it is an honor to go to bat for them. But at the end of the spring semester, when I’m wrapping up grading, winding down from teaching, and planning for the summer, sometimes the pile of letter requests can feel daunting. I was making this very case to my colleague Anthony Moffa, who suggested that using AI might make the job easier. With Professor Moffa’s suggestion and inspiration from Bridget Crawford’s ongoing AI investigation on this blog, I decided try. I am glad I did. I came away from this experience very bullish on AI as an assistant for writing letters of recommendation.

In my inbox sat four requests for a variety of different letters of recommendation. One student, for example, was applying for a clerkship and another, a part-time student, to transfer to a school closer to home. I’ve written letters in these veins before, and my typical strategy is to pull up a similar letter for a similar student and use that as a template. I would then look up the details of each student’s performance, think about my interactions with the student, their relative performance in my classes, their unique strengths, and so forth. Then I’d set out to draft a letter. Perhaps it is unnecessary, but since I assume the same judges, hiring partners, and admissions committees will see multiple letters I write, I try not to copy and paste one student’s name and grades for another’s. It may be that I have almost the same things to say, but I hope a fresh letter better conveys my enthusiasm for the student I am recommending. And that’s where the tedium lies. It is also where, as it turns out, ChatGPT is a big help.

 

How are Law Students Using Claude and Other Large Language Models?

Take Reddit posts with a grain of salt, because their veracity can't be confirmed, but here's a recent post that may be of interest to those of us thinking about how to use AI in law school teaching/learning:

The screenshot may be hard to read, so here is the transcription:

I used Claude to get an A in a law school class that I never once paid attention to or studied for. I fed quality materials like old outlines and others' class notes into Claude, crafted the right prompts, and rocked that A without understanding a single thing taught in the class. Learn this approach, and you can cruise to top grades without ever cracking a textbook. But it definitely takes a certain kind of guts to pull this sh_t off.

To be sure, because of concerns about the use of AI to prepare exam answers, some professors who have given take-home exams in the past will consider switching (or have already switched) to in-class exams.

But is use of large language models by law students always a bad idea? One user responded to the post above with a suggestion:

Transcription:

A better approach is to personalize your learning about giving Claude the materials, and having it come up with new questions/answers based on the material. Try answering the questions yourself first. For stuff you got wrong, have it come up with related concepts. LLMs are amazing learning accelerators.

That seems like sound advice to me. I'm currently experimenting with having Claude generate new hypotheticals that I can use to supplement the 100+ practice questions I already give my students when teaching the basic Income Tax class.

I'd love to hear from other profs (and students) about how they are using Claude, Chat GPT, etc. to teach/learn course material.

Using Consensus AI App to Find Scholarly Legal Literature (No Hallucinations)

Chat GPT has made available via its free version (3.5) access to a custom GPT called Consensus that I am finding useful for locating scholarly articles that can give me a quick sense of scholarly approaches to pinpoint. Unfortunately, Consensus isn't linked yet to HeinOnLine/Westlaw/Lexis, so isn't quite at its full potential for legal scholarship, but it still can get a researcher pointed in the right direction, especially for interdisciplinary questions.

How to access Consensus? Within Chat GPT, choose "Explore GPTs" from the left-hand menu. Then, choose the "Research and Analysis" category under the search bar. Then navigate to the Consensus app, which is circled in red below (it looks like a "C" made out of two blue-ish colors):

What is Consensus? It's a search engine, like the ones most researchers are familiar with (the company's description is here; I have no relationship with Consensus except as a user). What makes it more helpful than, say, a search in Google Scholar is that Consensus combines the power of a large language model and the 200 million+ research papers in the Semantic Scholar database. Semantic Scholar includes materials from Cambridge University Press, U Chicago Press, and several databases that are mostly science-oriented. It also claims links with SSRN, but so far, I have found that Consensus is not super-reliable yet for scouring legal scholarship that I know for sure is posted on SSRN. Hopefully that will be fixed soon.

To test out Consensus, I asked a question to which I already knew the answer.  Because I've written about the topic, I could better evaluate the quality of the search results. Details after the fold.

Making Good Presentations at Academic Legal Conferences

As I continue to experiment with ways that artificial technology can be used to enhance legal research and writing, I've encountered several custom GPTs that purport to convert notes, paper drafts, etc. and convert them into PowerPoint presentations. Ones I've tried so far are by slidesgpt.com and studyx.ai. (I have no relationship with either, other than as an experimental user.)

I

So far, I have been impressed with the GPTs' ability to extract important information from my inputs, but the design of the slides is generic and repetitive. Perhaps with more incremental prompting, I'll get better results.

In the meantime, with a few conferences coming up soon, I've rediscovered this good advice from Philip E. Bourne (UVA, Data Science): Ten Simple Rules for Making Good Oral Presentations. Listed after the fold, the rules are pretty simple on paper, but not so easy for many of us law profs (myself included) to follow.

Using AI to Create Customized PowerPoint Images

The following is a guest post by Professor Rick Bales (Ohio Northern):

I use PowerPoint more than I used to. I think the visual stimulus helps keep students engaged, and the text prompts mean that I can ditch my notes without getting sidetracked. But I dislike text-heavy slides – I want the text to cover the highlights, and the rest of the slide to help engage the students. That requires some visual imagery.

Until recently, my images usually came from scouring the web. But for many abstract legal topics, nothing from the web quite fits, or sometimes it fits but the resolution is too low to look good on a projected slide. I’ve tried using PowerPoint’s drawing tools to create original material, but I’m not very good at it and it takes a lot of time to create just one good slide.

Over the last six months or so, I’ve been using DALL-E (the image creator that comes with ChatGPT4) to custom-design images for my slides. The main advantage to this approach is that I usually can customize my slide for its intended purpose. For example, here’s an image I used in my Employment Law course to illustrate a case about EMTs at Sacred Heart Hospital who thought they should be getting paid for their on-call time:

But not everything is customizable. I couldn’t get DALL-E to give me anything interesting to illustrate the “reasonable rate” for calculating overtime. And tort cases have been a challenge, since the DALL-E algorithm apparently has been instructed not to create images of people getting shot or maimed or killed.

Even when DALL-E can create the image I’m after, sometimes there are missteps. Words that appear in an image are likely to be misspelled. No amount of follow-up prompting was able to get DALL-E to understand that I wanted arrows pointed away from an object in an image rather than toward it. And sometimes, items in an image are just “off”, as in the image below, illustrating a workers’ compensation case in which an employee crashed his employer’s pickup truck into a tree while he was trying to retrieve a pack of cigarettes he had dropped on the floorboard. I too might have hit the tree too if it had been growing in the middle of the road!

On the upside, images like these keep students engaged. Students enjoy studying each of my slides to see if AI has gone rogue. I consider it a win any time my students are doing something in class other than watching cute puppy videos or shopping online.

My prompts tend to be short and descriptive. If I don’t get what I want after about 10 minutes of trying I might try scouring the web, and otherwise I’ll just go without an image on that slide. I don’t claim any expertise on creating these prompts. If you have suggestions on drafting prompts, or using other AI image-generators, or just generally on using AI to create better slides, please send them to me – I will compile and share in a follow-up post.

-Rick Bales

Will Claude AI Revolutionize the Law Review Article Selection Process?

I continue my experimentation with various large language models and AI tools to understand how they might be used to support legal scholarship. Lately, I've been playing around with Claude, a rival of Chat GPT.  (I have no relationship with either company.) It's free to use Claude's entry-level model. I have not paid for the upgraded version, which costs approximately $20/month.  ReadWrite has an informative review of Claude here.

I recently asked Claude to "summarize and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses" of the abstract and introduction of one of my accepted-but-not-yet-published articles, Taxing Sugar Babies, Minn. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2024). (For whatever it's worth, I'm trying to promote my paper per se, but because I wrote it, I can more readily determine how accurate Claude's results are.)

Results after the fold. TLDR; Claude's summary was pretty good and its evaluation of the weaknesses of the abstract and intro were fair. I suspect that student law review editors (either with or without being prompted to do so by Scholastica, etc.) will be integrating AI into the article submission process in the near future.

Revising Legal Writing with AI: What Hemingway Makes of the Pink Tax

One of my sabbatical projects this Spring 2024 semester has been training myself on a variety of new AI tools and exploring their applicability for legal research and writing, although not designed for those tasks. I signed up for a trial of the Hemingway Editor (free to use online + modest charge for download of desktop version; I have no relationship with the company).

I was interested to see what the app would make of legal writing, so I experimented with abstract of one of my recently published articles, Pink Tax and Other Tropes, 24 Yale J.L. & Feminism 87 (2024). I asked Hemingway to suggest a streamlined version. Results after the fold. TLDR; I'm not sure I love the edits.

Customizing Chat GPT to Write Like a Law Professor?

Like many others in law schools and beyond, I have been experimenting with Chat GPT to better understand its capabilities and limitations. From an online seminar led by Mushtaq Bilal (Literature, University of Southern Denmark), I learned that about customizing ChatGPT (clicking on your name in the lower left corner of the home screen-->click "Customize ChatGPT"). You can provide information about your areas of academic interest and how you want ChatGPT to respond (i.e., use a formal, academic tone; here's what I expect you to address if I ask for a critique of a paragraph). My anecdotal experience so far is that providing these customized instruction makes ChatGPT a more accurate source of assistance.

Separate and apart from availing oneself of the "Customize ChatGPT" screen, one can also ask ChatGPT to remember certain things, including what you have written in the past. That way, ChatGPT has a better sense of the tone, output, etc. you may be expecting (more explanation here).

I recently experimented by uploading to ChatGPT four of my published law review articles and asking it to remember that I am the author of those works.  I then asked ChatGPT to "write a paragraph about balloons in the style of Bridget J. Crawford." Here were the results:

 

I have never written about balloons before, and I haven't written anything substantial about environmental issues (or anything about consumer safety). So it is difficult to say if this is written in my "style." But I do think that ChatGPT's output in response to this prompt has some noteworthy qualities that seem "law prof-ish" to me: a coherent thesis statement, a mention of variations in legal framework, the reference to regulations, and linking to other issues ("a microcosm for examining law legal systems can evolve").  I'm interested in continuing to experiment--cautiously, ethically--with this technology.

Has anyone else experimented with custom instructions? Any tips for what is working well (or poorly) at this stage?

Drexel Kline Law Seeks Law & Technology Postdoctoral Fellow

The Drexel University Kline School of Law’s Center for Law and Transformational Technology invites applications for a two-year postdoctoral fellow, beginning September 1, 2022, with an emphasis on sociotechnical research in the areas of law, regulation, and governance at the intersection of law and technology, and the development of new technologies. Applicants from all disciplines and methodological approaches are welcome to apply.

The Center for Law and Transformational Technology was created in 2021 with a seed grant from the Green Family Foundation to bring together key stakeholders, including legal and technological scholars, industry leaders, activists, regulators, and other experts from across the country and the world. The Center supports concrete efforts to gauge the legal impact of transformational technology, promote critical conversations about the role of law in technological change and bring legal experts into interdisciplinary conversations with researchers and developers at all stages of design and development. Working across industries, the Center helps educate lawyers to play a positive role navigating a technological landscape we cannot yet imagine. By facilitating international and multi-disciplinary partnerships, the Center seeks to contribute to a future in which technology moves forward hand-in-hand with society.

The Fellow will also have the opportunity to collaborate with faculty and participate in workshops and symposia from across the University. Situated in the heart of Philadelphia, Kline Law and the Center for Law and Transformational Technology offer exciting opportunities to engage with the region’s intellectual and innovation communities.

The Fellow will work with law faculty and faculty in cognate disciplines who work with the Center. The Fellow is expected to conduct original research, teach at least one class each year (for JD students or undergraduates studying in the Law School’s newly established B.A. in Law program), and support Center activities including symposia, outreach to scholars in varied disciplines, and a student research fellow program. The Fellow is expected to participate fully in the intellectual life of the Center and of Kline Law.

The successful candidate will have obtained a Ph.D in a related field, a JD or an SJD.  Applicants should have experience and an active scholarly agenda centering on the intersection of regulation, law and/or governance with respect to emerging technologies. Preference will be given to applicants who have published in this field. 

Details and application instructions are here. 

The Law School Industry - Law and Technology @ US Law Schools

Digital technologies are an increasingly important phenomena in higher education and professional industries. Law schools have started to participate in rethinking how to train the next generation workforce/citizens at the interface of governance/technology. This post includes links to quantitative data for folks interested to learn more about the current law/tech situation in US legal higher education, and provides a few initial thoughts about the data. 

Here is an excel sheet formatted study with a wide range of data on current US law school efforts around 'Law and Technology': Download US Law and Technology Higher Education Law Schools - Haskell:Fish In addition, for an alternative visualisation for some of the information, see: https://app.flourish.studio/visualisation/2736840 

Note: The study was developed along with a PhD student, Jessica L. Fish, and funded by the University of Manchester Law School and its Law and Technology Initiative. Scholarship based partly on this data will be rolled out in the coming year, but the information provided is meant to be open sources/common for any colleagues however useful. 

A Few Thoughts... (see below)

More Online Teaching Resources

To add to the current compilation of materials on how to move to remote teaching, I wanted to share the following SSRN links.

The first was posted this week by Prof Agnieszka McPeak (Duquesne) and is a straightforward, simple best practices guide to moving things online. Six pages, easy to read and great advice:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3553094

The second is a piece I wrote last year which is longer and focuses more on the costs and benefits of law schools moving to online teaching, but it also includes some practical observations on larger and smaller group teaching online:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3491427

Hopefully some of those struggling to get online quickly may make use of these pieces. I highly recommend Prof McPeak's thoughts.

 

The Great Mass Online Teaching Experiment

For many years, I've been fascinated by the possibilities of online teaching. Things like MOOCs and flipped classrooms seem to offer real opportunities to teach in new and better ways. All the same, I've been busy with other things, and actually making the leap to offering online instruction never quite made the list.

Then came Covid-19. My students are sequestered in apartments all across China, and the Peking University School of Transnational Law campus in Shenzhen is empty. I've chosen not to return to China after the spring festival, but have been hunkered down in Chiang Mai, Thailand, waiting for the situation to gain some clarity. The clarity that has gradually emerged is that we aren't going to be teaching face-to-face for at least a while, and we're taking all our classes online.

In going online, we're joining all kinds of schools all over China. I've got a cousin who has retired from K12 teaching in Canada and is running the international section of a large school on the east coast. They've taken all high school classes online, along with most similar schools. Teachers report that students locked down in house arrest tend to be highly prepared. At an expat event in Chiang Mai, I met two kindergarten teachers from an international school in another part of China. Although the ministry of education doesn't support online teaching for kids that young, in response to parental demands they have been teaching children as young as three years old online. While hugs are hard to deliver, they can record sing-a-long songs or record readings of English books and lessons, and comment on the responses the children's parents sent back to them. Possibly hundreds of millions of students have been shifted to online instruction in China, something that has not happened at that scale in the traditional educational environment anywhere before.

My students, fortunately, are a lot more self-sufficient and able than three-year-olds. It's been a challenge to move everything online, but it seems to be working. Here are some quick thoughts. As my experience deepens, I might be back with more thoughts.

Platforms. There seem to be a lot of good platforms out there. We are using Zoom, in both its webinar (better for classes over 100 in size) and meeting (better for smaller classes) sizes. I find Zoom pretty easy to use, although with each class I find some features and shortcuts I hadn't noticed before that make it still easier. I am able to call on students by name, put them on camera, share their video with everyone, and in general carry on pretty much as we do in a regular classroom. Our budgets tend to be pretty limited, and we aren't using some of the complementary software that enables things like seamlessly moving to pre-recorded snippets. So far, that seems to be ok.

Bandwidth. As you would expect, bandwidth is an issue, both for the students and the teachers. This week in order to renew my Thai visa I took a side trip to Luang Prabang in Laos, where the internet just isn't robust enough for online teaching. To deal with that, I went asynchronous for one class, recording a lecture before I came over. Students are also differently positioned, and some students experience issues with audio quality or dropped connections. To ameliorate, we are recording all classes, and students can download and listen to any difficult portions at their leisure. I find 20 megabits per second connections more than adequate and five megabits per second too low for full functionality. (Type internet speed test into Google to get a test that will tell you your connection speed).

Disadvantages. Some of the issues involved in moving online are obvious, but others less so. For example, in our situation, library reserve - which I use heavily - is not available. In some courses, we have copies of the basic text or core readings for everyone available in the library. That doesn't work when students are scattered. For example, in my Law and Innovation class we have enough copies of the Susskind's The Future of the Professions to go around when we are all in Shenzhen, as well as enough copies of Thomas Morgan's PR book to go around when we cover specific ethical issues in the legal profession. We have no way of getting to those to students all over China. That requires adjustments in the course materials as a small subset of my students can buy whatever book I mention and others are financially constrained, so simply telling them to go to Amazon or JD is not a good solution. In some cases, the only solution has been for me to write substitute materials, which has been a huge time commitment.

You can't see the classroom as you talk in the same way you see them in a live classroom, so the skills you've developed in reading those cues aren't on point. 

There are lead time and set up issues. I use PowerPoint slides, and I've found it helpful to the students to circulate those before class so they can refer to them in a separate window. That requires having them locked down a day or so ahead of time. Online meeting links also need to be generated and circulated. I've also been designating a list of on-call students, something I don't always do in person, so that the students can be sure their cameras and microphones are ready to go. 

One thing I've not sorted out is assessment in my Civ Pro class. I typically give an exam with multiple choice and essay components. I'm not sure how I am going to do that if we are not back on campus by exam time. There are software solutions that will lock student's computers down, but we don't have them. For self-assessment, I'm using the same online quizzes on TWEN that I've used for years.

Advantages. Some of the advantages have been surprising as well. Zoom allows students to ask questions anonymously in the Q&A. This allows students to put things out there without losing face or seeming stupid, and it actually generates way more student commentary and questions than I get in a live class. I get so many comments in my Civ Pro class that keeping the flow of class moving ahead has become a bit of an issue.

Another advantage that I hadn't thought about in advance is that making the classroom non-physical opens up the world of guest panelists and speakers. I'm busy trying to pull in thought leaders and people with on-point experience to take a few minutes in both my Civ Pro and Law and Innovation classes. For example, in Law and Innovation, which has a large PR component, I'm bringing in a lawyer from Kentucky to talk about the devastation that was visited on the local community around Butcher's Hollow (yes, that Butcher's Hollow) when a corrupt local lawyer entered into a bribery deal with a social security judge to have his clients all approved as disabled. The upshot was that the Social Security Administration cut off benefits for all the clients of the corrupt lawyer, most of whom were in fact disabled, and who were neither aware of nor involved in the fraud, leaving many of them in perilous straits. I'm hoping that having live in the classroom someone who was involved in cleaning up a tragic situation caused by lawyer dishonesty will make the real-life consequences of lawyer misconduct more palpable. (By the way - feel free to volunteer to be a guest speaker).

My students, I think, are enjoying having all classes recorded and available for download. Setting aside technical problems, if they drift or lose focus for a moment, they can replay the section that did not quite make sense. If it does not make sense because I did not make sense, they can bring it up in online office hours. (Having every word recorded and distributed might be an issue for those of you with aspirations to sit on the Supreme Court or even just good reputations to protect, and if that's the case you can choose not to enable the recording feature.)

One obvious benefit of teaching online is that you can become a digital nomad and be someplace new and different. The attached photo is from my temporary office at a riverside cafe a few days ago.

As this goes forward, and I am only four classes in, I may post more. Comments on online teaching techniques are welcome. Comments reflecting your personal conspiracy theories on the origins and dispersion of the virus that causes Covid-19 will be deleted.

@SSRN and the (Arbitrary) Determination of "Scholarly" Merit

Yesterday Brian Frye (@brianlfrye) (Kentucky) tweeted:

I am sad. @SSRN has decided that my article about Gremlins (1984), "In re Patentability of the Peltzer Inventions," does not qualify for "public" status because it is "opinion, advocacy, or satire." Why judge? Oh well.  You can still download it here: http://www.ssrn.com/abstrac_id=3371989.

I followed Brian's direct link to the piece. The abstract refers refers to the many inventions of the movie's Randall Peltzer character, and explains, "This essay takes the form of an opinion letter valuating the patentability of Peltizer's inventions." I don't teach IP, but I like Brian's work and so I downloaded the essay. It struck me as funny and as an excellent teaching tool.  But if you go to Brian's author page on SSRN, you wouldn't be able to access the paper.  You wouldn't even see it.

I myself have posted material that apparently doesn't meet SSRN's criteria for a "scholarly paper," including this interview with the principal drafter of some important state trust legislation (and the interview itself has been cited in subsequent scholarship) and this short piece for Tax Notes reviewing estate and gift tax law review articles published in 2016 (even though SSRN published my similar pieces reviewing scholarship for the years 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010).

When I posted my Information for Submitting to Online Law Review Companions (a submission guide modeled after Nancy Levit and Allen Rostron's useful Law Review Submission Guide), SSRN reviewer "TyD" responded:

We have accepted your paper to appear in the "Other Papers" section of your Author Page, which is where opinion, advocacy and satirical papers are displayed as per SSRN policy. It will not be searchable by the SSRN eLibrary search engine but will be searchable by public search engines, and you may share the URL.

I asked SSRN for reconsideration, and got this from SSRN reviewer "Katie M":

We have recently reviewed your submission to SSRN. Our classifiers have determined that this submission is very useful information, however would still be considered non-scholarly. Because of our acceptance of your previous paper 1019029 [the Levit/Rostron paper, which isn't "my" paper -- BC], we have made the decision to allow the public viewing of this paper. In the future, similar submissions will be processed to appear in the "Other Papers" section of your Author Page, which is where submissions that are not full scholarly research papers (including submissions such as data tables, summary book reviews, opinion, advocacy and satirical papers) are displayed as per SSRN policy.

I don't even bother thinking that Information for Submitting to Specialty Law Reviews and Journals in Gender, Women & Sexuality will be a searchable public paper. 

So what exactly are SSRN's rules for what is "publicly available" and what is not? What I could find appears below the fold.

That "Cocky" Trademark

For anyone interested in the use of trademarks in the publishing industry, an interesting situation is emerging in the romance writers' area. This week romance author Faleena Hopkins was granted a registered trademark in a stylized version of the word "Cocky" for her romance series which includes the word in the title of each of her books. Apparently she then sent takedown notices to Amazon to ask them to remove from sale other romance books with the word in their titles and also sent letters to independent romance authors asking them to change their titles. The Romance Writers of America has apparently engaged an IP attorney to investigate the matter and there is at least one cancellation petition floating around at the moment. A number of legal issues are raised here including whether the registration should have been granted in the first place, although, in theory, there's no objection to registering a mark that relates to a book series, as opposed to a title of a single book. It's also important to understand that registration is not the same as owning the mark - it gives benefits to the registrant but it's of course possible to claim an unregistered mark as valid. So even if the registration is cancelled, there may be questions as to whether there's a valid unregistered mark in play. There's a useful summary of the situation and relevant legal issues here.

Lecture Recordings in Online Teaching

In recent years, I've been delving (both in law and other disciplines) into strategies and platforms for effective online teaching/learning. I was never a strong proponent of online law teaching in particular because, like many others, I've always felt there's something about classroom interactions that's hard to replace online. And, yes, I know there are all sorts of ABA Standards and other rules that preclude significant amounts of online J.D. instruction, so my experience in the recent past has been with online LL.M. and other similar programs.

While I was always leery of online law teaching, I have taken a lot of online courses, and started to teach several, in other disciplines. The technologies have advanced significantly since I first raised my concerns in the mid to late 1990s when law profs in Australia began to worry we'd soon all be replaced by talking heads on computers.

I still haven't come to any definitive conclusions about when, and in what circumstances, online teaching can be as good as, better than, or a useful supplement to classroom instruction, but I've recently started thinking about one particular aspect of online teaching: lecture recordings, and how best to make use of them.

I've taken, and also instructed, online classes that have no "lecture" component. There may be preset readings or short YouTube videos, or blog posts gathered together as part of the course materials, but no actual formal lectures as such. I've also taken, and instructed, classes where the instruction has utilized either interactive video classes with students (via Skype, Zoom etc) or pre-recorded lectures, or a combination of both.

Pre-recorded lectures can be particularly useful in some circumstances: for example, where the course needs to be asynchronous because students are in different places/time zones etc. 

I've been teaching a few courses recently that require pre-recorded lectures for this purpose. Because these courses are law-related and because I want discussions to be as interactive as possible (even though they're largely asynchronous and use text-based discussion boards), I record new lectures weekly, both presenting new material and reacting to/commenting on discussions from previous weeks. I do this, rather than pre-recording everything upfront, because I want to simulate, as best I can within the constraints of the technology, the feeling of an interactive classroom.

However, some people have suggested to me that this is a waste of time and it's easier to pre-record everything because this can give you the benefit of re-using lectures in later iterations of a course in subsequent semesters, and it also gives you the benefit of having everything prepared upfront and not having to fit in lecture-recording at what may become a busy time of the semester.

I'm wondering if others have faced this issue in teaching or learning in an online setting and how you feel about it. I think pre-recorded lectures that are recyclable can be very useful in many contexts including things like Bar Prep courses where there is a lot of material that doesn't change much from year to year, a lot of students in a lot of different places, and perhaps less need to create an environment that simulates a classroom setting. However, does it always make sense to save time and recycle lectures if you can? (I'm aware too that a lot of folks teaching online courses are adjuncts and visitors and have less time to spend on course prep because of, say, other practice obligations, than full time faculty members and that might make a difference too.)

So, yes, this is a finicky point and not many people are probably thinking about it, but if anyone is, I'd be interested in your thoughts.

 

New Book Announcement: Electronic Health Records and Medical Big Data (Hoffman)

Congratulations to Sharona Hoffman (CWRU Law) on the recent publication of her new book on Electronic Health Records and Medical Big Data with CUP.

Here's a quick summary for anyone interested in taking a look: This book helps readers gain an in-depth understanding of electronic health record (EHR) systems, medical big data, and the regulations that govern them. It analyzes both the shortcomings and benefits of EHR systems, exploring the law's response to the adoption of these systems and highlighting gaps in the current legal framework.  It also develops detailed recommendations for regulatory, policy, and technological improvements to enhance EHR systems’ safety, security, and efficacy for both clinical and secondary (such as research) uses. Electronic Health Records and Medical Big Data addresses not only privacy and security concerns but also other important challenges, such as those associated with data quality and data analysis. The book can serve as a primer for students and a resource for knowledgeable professionals and academics.

More info here.

The (Video) Gamification of Law

No one’s immune from the (video) gamification of life.  Games populate our Facebook pages, home screens, and even (still) once per week family gatherings.  You can be a marine, a real estate tycoon, an environmentalist, a football coach, or even a fruit ninja.  Recently, I downloaded a game to my iPhone called Landlord 2.  It’s a basic buy property and get rich game.  In this game there are several “skills” the player may purchase to improve their money-making: Tycoon (increase property slots), Lawyer (increase properties waiting for paperwork), Innovator (reduce property cost), Landlord (increase property rent), Accountant (reduce taxes), and Speculator (increase property valuations). 

All of these skills are interesting in their own right; they all simplify the complexities of property acquisition.  But, what might be of most interest to readers of this blog is the Lawyer skill.  There are two problems with this skill attribute: 1) the lawyer only functions transactionally, increasing the amount of space available for the processing of land deals, and, relatedly, 2) that the lawyer’s primary function is “paperwork.”  Both of those points cut deeply into the importance of lawyers, law, and legal knowledge. 

Practitioners and scholars alike will note that while lawyers function in transactional roles they also do much more on a variety of issues.  Lawyers are often involved in the beginning, middle, and end of legal agreements, provide counsel and engage in negotiations, and represent clients of all types in court and other proceedings.  Simply put, there’s a lot more to law than moving things through a nebulous system from one’s desk chair.  Even if transactional lawyering is understood as synonymous with corporate or business lawyering, that still denies the complexities of that wide-ranging practice area.  The only business of business law isn't sitting at one's desk.  

Secondly, the abstract notion of paperwork seems to demean just how important legal documentation is.  Paperwork would seem to include contracts, memos, briefs, and maybe emails, professional publications, etc.  Rather than discuss contracts or filing motions, Landlord 2 gives the Lawyer the job of paperwork.  This risks positioning lawyers as paperwork pushers rather than advocates, allies, and important participants in legal actions. 

Of course, television, movies, and music have all had their problems in reasonably representing law and lawyering, but now that our students, friends, family, and colleagues are on their iPads, iPhones, and other devices, we should turn our attention to the video gamification of law.  I’d be interested in readers adding their experience with lawyers and law firms in video games or apps.  What role do these organizations and characters serve?  Do they represent law firms, prosecutors, defense attorneys, etc. fairly or as best they can given the constraints of the game or app?  What games or apps seem particularly successful or particularly disastrous?  Have representations in video games changed over time? 

Other folks have written about gamification, but not video gamification.  Gamification describes a broader concept of incentivizing action through rewards.  Imagine leveling up for turning in a report to your dean or memo to a senior partner.  Of course, leveling up might involve more free time, better case assignments, an extra day off, or increased research budgets, and not a Super Mario Bros. 3 Raccoon tail. 

Readers might find these stories interesting on the debate about gamification, generally: “Improve your legal practice through gamification,” “What can ‘gamification’ do for lawyers?,” “Gamification of law: Good idea or game over?,” and for a scholarly take from Austria, “Gamification and law: On the legal implications of using gamified elements.”

When we start to address these issues, we’ll be in a better place to assess what I’ve called “coming to the law,” or how people because of their social experiences construct the legal world and their interactions with it.  If our clients and students are learning from video games and apps, then we’ll need to work with them to not only understand them and their ideas, but also to better understand law and lawyering ourselves. 

The Accidental Entrepreneur

Thanks to Al for the introduction and to Dan Filler and the rest of the Faculty Lounge crew for the kind invitation to guest post.

It's a familiar tale: you're an eccentric law professor in your mid-40s, and one day you look around to discover your children are getting older, your hair is turning grey, and you accidentally founded a high tech legal ed start-up.  

It's that last bit I thought I'd write about.  

When I began teaching, I found myself drawing charts to help me organize my courses -- charts that visually represented, and therefore helped me understand, how the concepts I was teaching were related to each other within a system.  Eventually it occurred to me that if the charts aided my understanding, they might help my students too.  So I shared them.  The effect on student comprehension was immediate.  What had seemed to them like a meteor shower of disparate concepts became useful constellations instead.  We even built some charts together in class.

Intrigued, I dug into the educational literature and found that the research was pretty unequivocal: concept maps were pedagogically superior to text alone for understanding the relationships between ideas within systems.  Books are wonderful for lots of things, but it turns out they are not the best tool available to us for teaching systemic relationships between concepts.  

The next year the casebook I had been using came out with yet another new edition (its 3rd in 6 years).  The changes were trivial -- just enough to alter the pagination so that using a mix of editions was unworkable.  I reluctantly assigned the new edition, but for the 1st time, I asked about its price (after all, I always got my copy for free).  $250, for one book, for one class.  I considered switching to an e-casebook version, but I found that the e-book was really just a pdf'd version of the book with a few hyperlinks and the publisher was still charging $180 for it.

It occurred to me that in the best of all worlds, courses could be formatted as concept maps, and the maps would contain within them all of the material for the course -- cases, statutes, practice problems, background readings, powerpoints, decision trees, even videos.  That would replace the casebook with something that was pedagogically better, more comprehensive, more flexible, and less expensive.

But I'm a technophobe.  Not only couldn't I create such a thing, it took me weeks to figure out what the people who possibly could are called (software developers, it turns out . . . but you probably knew that).  Still, the idea gnawed at me, until I took my pencil-and-paper drawings to a bunch of software development companies and asked them if they could make something like my drawings, except interactive and on one of those computer thingees.  Their answer?  Yup -- for a price.  As your typically business-savvy academic, I then tried to give the idea away. In this case, to several major publishers.  But my pitch to them -- 'just think of how much less you could charge your customers!' -- somehow did not generate the enthusiasm I imagined.

So, faced with adversity, I gave up.  Except I couldn't quite.  Because my students were swaying under a mountain of debt.  Because I knew I could teach them better with a tool designed to show the structure of relationships between concepts.  

So, I gave the developers my kids' college fund (for real -- don't tell them) and formed a company with two professor colleagues.  We called the company ChartaCourse.  We simply asked ourselves: what do we, as law professors, want in our teaching materials? We came up with 4 fundamental goals:

(1) A new format that constantly reveals and reinforces the structure of our courses.  True to the original vision, we wanted concept maps that charted entire law school courses, with all of the content for the course actually embedded within the map itself, in the right spots.  Students should constantly see the 'forest' of the course and the particular 'tree' of each concept we are studying.  And all of the material for that concept should be available with one click.  Here's what it looks like.  Notice that the dark blue color creates a trail from the general to the specific as we move from left to right:

 (click on the image to expand it)

And here's what happens when the user clicks on Pierson v. Post from the card of the left:

(click on the image to expand it)

(2) Complete customization.  Once a chart was created for a course by one of our authors, we wanted every adopting professor to be able to customize it completely.  She should be able to easily add material, delete material, edit material, re-arrange the chart, embed her syllabus, etc., and those changes should be visible only to her own students. For example, in my personal version of the Crim Pro chart, I have added a video of Freddie Gray's arrest:

 (click on the image to expand it)

The coming arrived casebook revolution

This morning, I received a survey from Wolters Kluwer (Aspen), publisher of the IP Survey textbook I use. The survey sought out what I find important in a book, and even asked if I knew any young IP professors I was impressed with (who could presumably write a new book). Why? The casebook authors (Profs. Merges, Menell & Lemley) somehow worked out a deal to take the book "private." That is, Aspen won't be publishing the book anymore, and they will self publish the book for a mere fraction of the former cost.

This is just one example of the casebook revolution. Contrary to what students might think, many professors actually do care about casebook prices. Modern technology is finally allowing them to do something about it.

The straw that broke the camel's back, I think, came last year, when Aspen offered Dukeminier, et al., as a rental only. That is, students paid for an electronic version and a paper version, could mark up the paper version, but then were required to send the paper version back. The cost was less than the prior full price of a casebook, but not by much. The rationale for this move was obvious: cut out the secondary market. Professors rebelled, and many said they would switch books before they would allow this, and Aspen relented, offering a print version (and claiming that its prior emails saying there would be no such version were misinterpreted).

But the handwriting was on the wall: book publishers are looking for a way to extract more and limit competition. Some of my colleagues get angry about that. My view is more sanguine: entry costs are low, so someone should be able to capture the market by simply competing with a lower price. If we hate this setup so much, we should just do casebooks another way. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, IP and internet law professors have led the way to start doing just that. Independent presses have arisen, open source casebooks have been created, and materials have been shared. You can now get two IP Survey texts (with a third on the way) for around $30. You can get statutory supplements for free in PDF (or cost of printing in paper). These things sell for $60-$90 from publishers. There are specialty casebooks (e.g. trademark or internet law), as well as highly focused reading materials (for example, you can get free access to my internet law readings online, or you can buy it in paper for about $35, if you want my exact reading choices for internet law).

Another benefit of the revolution is that new platforms allow for benefits not previously possible. Unlocked PDFs that allow for easy search, cut, and paste. An "open source" feel whereby edits by one professor's edits can be recombined into other books (though standardization of format would be helpful for this). More images, quotes, video links, etc., by professors willing to take fair use positions that publishers might not be willing to take.

In other words, the revolution has arrived, and is waiting to spread. Non-IP professors have not picked up on this as much (yet), though the H2O platform at Harvard has several reading lists in non-IP courses. As self-publishing platforms grow and more professors get on board, casebook publishers will see significant pressure.

I'll end this post with a couple caveats, however:

1. Publishers add value. For the most part, the cheaply available works are not nearly as polished as casebooks. They also contain far less material (which is good and bad - depending on whether the book matches what you want to teach). There are definitely exceptions to both of these.

2. Authors that have more potential upside may spend more time. If you like "notes" that sum up history, cases in other jurisdictions, etc., you are less likely to see those in a self-published book - certainly in the first editions. That work takes time, and simple incentives may limit it. On the other hand, if the author keeps 100% of the profit, then maybe such work will be worthwhile. Creating my own set of materials took a huge amount of time, and I simply had nothing left in the tank to write long notes, introductory text, hypotheticals, etc. But not all works are the same. I have colleagues who have written books with some fine problems in them, for example.

3. Sometimes the published book is just better. I like my patent law book. I like my contracts book. It's going to take a lot to convince me that another book is better. But that's what competition is all about.

4. New systems lack standardization, and thus may not offer all the features we want. Converting my fully online materials to printed materials was time consuming and, frankly, pretty ugly. There are other systems that may work better, and eventually the best ones will shake out.

In conclusion, be on the lookout for opportunities to collaborate on new textbooks in new areas, and the next time you complain about high prices, remember that you can do something about it!

[updated to incorporate and respond to some good comments]