An article in last week’s Wall Street Journal Blog featured an interview with legal consultant Peter Zeughauser, who predicted a grim outlook for law firm hiring for the next few years:

It’s not going to be over before the end of the year. I think you’re going to see dramatically reduced offers to summer associates at the end of this summer, and dramatically reduced offers for people to come in as summers in 2010. These cuts could be very dramatic, as much as slashed by 90 percent.

This is just one of many recent blog posts and articles sounding the same note. The Fulton County Daily Report (via Law.com) says “It’s Time to Face It: The Big Law Bubble Has Burst”:

The Big Law bubble seemed like such a safe place. What better job security than working for a giant law firm with a diverse slate of clients, a reputation as a power house and enough billable hours for a willing Cog to propel herself via a series of 18-hour days straight through her youth and into the golden years? How could a firm with such lavish offices, premium pro-sports seating and historic origins be anything but a success through even the roughest of economic times?

Major law firms across the country are laying off staff–including partners, rescinding offers to law graduates, or paying as much as $60,000 to put them on furlough for a year. However, there is still no consensus on what all this means for the future: is this just a temporary downturn, and will the law firm market be “back to normal” in a couple of years, or is this a major structural shift such that the good times will never return?

A few law schools are tentatively responding. Some schools are strengthening their practical skills programs to make their students more competitive in a tight market; a few are experimenting with co-op or internship programs in the third year. In general, though, law schools seem to be tightening their belts for the short term but assuming that things will get all better before long.

On the other hand, some of those legal consultants arguing that the law firm market is undergoing a permanent realignment or paradigm shift, like many consultants, have a financial interest in promoting a crisis mentality–all the better to convince law firms to pay for their insight and guidance.

So what do we do? Plan to ride out a temporary downturn, or begin (if it’s not already too late) intensive self-study and radical restructuring for a radically different law market for the next generation or two?

The term “social media” is subject to many different definitions and interpretations. To make it simple: for my purposes, if you’re reading this blog, you’re a user of social media. If you ever listen to podcasts, you use social media. If you’re on Twitter, you’re a social media user.

But why do you use social media? I’m running an informal Condorcet poll at http://is.gd/qKkz. Please click on the link and follow the instructions to rank your uses of social media (blogs, podcasts, and Twitter). I’m testing some theories, and I’ll give you a tentative report next week.

Please repost links to this poll. Thanks!

Lockport

Originally uploaded by jmilles

I’ve been tagged by John Meadows: go to flickr, go to page 6 of your photo stream, and post the 6th photo. I took this photo in Lockport, NY in September 2008, when Kristina’s parents were visiting us.  I tag Kristina Lively, Sarah Glassmeyer, Meg Kribble, Wayne MacPhail, and John Scalzi.

After 25 years as a law librarian, and almost nine years as Director of the Law Library and Associate/Vice Dean for Legal Information Services, the time has come for a change in direction.  For several years I have been considering all the options available to me, and in particular the roads (so far) not taken, and I have decided to take on new challenges.  As of December 31, 2008, I will step down from my position as Director of the Law Library to return to the tenured faculty.

As a law librarian, I have come to be known with my work in the application of technology in law libraries and legal education, and more broadly in digital communication and online communities.  My work in these areas has always led me to push the envelope of traditional library services in fruitful directions.   At the same time, I have had to defer pursuing my own scholarly and teaching interests.  I have always worked on the practical side of exciting emerging technologies, and have more and more been drawn to explore the legal, social, and policy aspects of those technologies in greater depth as a teacher and scholar.

Starting in Fall 2009 I will be teaching in such areas as Cyberspace Law, Information Privacy Law, Internet Speech, Electronic Evidence, and Law and Social Media.  I will also be Director of the new Program on Law and Social Technologies in the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy.  In the latter role I plan to help the Law School build connections with University researchers in a wide variety of disciplines.

I have always loved being a law librarian, and the friendships I have made with my colleagues have meant the world to me.  I look forward to continuing to nurture those friendships, and exploring collaborations with law librarians and other technology leaders, as I take on new challenges in the years to come.

I’ve just posted a new episode in the UBLaw Conversations podcast series.  This one, co-sponsored by the Law School and the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, features an interview with Australian law professor Andrew Goldsmith on perceptions of risk after 9/11.

Law Library, originally uploaded by jmilles.

This is an HDR (High Dynamic Range) photo of the interior reading room of the UB Law Library. It was made from six separate exposures processed with Photomatix Pro. For more photos as we tear up the library for extensive roof repairs, see the blog Strict Construction.

Christopher, Bygul and Cleo

Originally uploaded by jmilles.

Trjegul wants to be alone

Originally uploaded by jmilles

My first video shot with my favorite new gadget, the Casio Exilim S10.

So I noticed that there is  WNY Psychics Meetup Group on Meetup.com.

Query: why do psychics need Meetup.com?

I’ve just received my XO laptop as part of the Give 1 Get 1 OLPC (one laptop per child) program. It arrived fully charged, and it took about 15 minutes to figure out how to enter the password for my home wifi router, but now it’s online. I haven’t had much of a chance to work with it yet, but it’s clear at this point that it’s going to be a two-fingered hunt-and-peck device, since I don’t have child-sized hands. Anyway, here’s the photo. I’ll have more to report after playing with it for a while.

Blogged with Flock

When I started my sabbatical back in June, my plans were to develop a new law school course on Privacy and Identity in Cyberspace.  My idea was to spend the six months reading a pile of literature on issues of changing contemporary views of identity and privacy in the Web 2.0 world.  I had a lot of instances that I hoped somehow to pull together: the surprising willingness of Gen Y to reveal personal information on Facebook and MySpace (and the apparent believe that “privacy” meant that parents and other adults would not read them); “debt blogging” as reported in the New York Times; gender play in online worlds like Second Life; even the ambiguous conception of identity revealed in the White House use of private email accounts which were meant to be both official (and hence privileged) and unofficial (and hence not subject to federal record keeping and disclosure laws).  I also planned to produce at least one article from all of this.  And I intended to blog my progress and the ideas I was developing.

However, the real world doesn’t always turn out according to plan.  I’m still working on those ideas about online identity and privacy, but my field research took me in a slightly different direction.  While exploring Second Life, I made a lot of new friends–most notably my new podcasting partner.

Monday I’ll be returning to work after a very fruitful sabbatical–rested and refreshed and brimming with ideas.  Stay tuned!

Meet my daemon, Vyena (from The Golden Compass movie site).

My birthday presents

Originally uploaded by jmilles.

Office Space, This Is Spinal Tap, and My Little Cthulhu. I’m a lucky man.

Just a couple of days ago it was the late Michael Jackson; now comes word of the passing of Alfred H. Peet, the father of good coffee in the United States:

When Peet, who was Dutch, came to the United States in 1955, “America had a reputation internationally as having coffee that tasted like dishwater,” Jim Reynolds of Peet’s Coffee said. “He looked at it as something of a crime.” “Everybody was drinking coffee that came out of a can,” remembered Alice Waters. Peet came to be called “the grandfather of specialty coffee,” and trained the founders of Starbucks. “He was the big bang,” said Kumer. “It all started with him.”

As you drink your morning coffee, pause a moment to remember Mr. Peet.

A story from the NYT Magazine, via Neuroethics & Law Blog:

Sherry Turkle, a professor in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at M.I.T., worries that sociable robots might be easier to deal with than people are and that one day we might actually prefer our relationships with our machines. A female graduate student once approached her after a lecture, Turkle said, and announced that she would gladly trade in her boyfriend for a sophisticated humanoid robot as long as the robot could produce what the student called “caring behavior.” “I need the feeling of civility in the house,” she told Turkle. “If the robot could provide a civil environment, I would be happy to help produce the illusion that there is somebody really with me.” What she was looking for, the student said, was a “no-risk relationship” that would stave off loneliness; a responsive robot, even if it was just exhibiting scripted behavior, seemed better to her than an unresponsive boyfriend.

Extra brownie points to the first BWTR reader who recognizes (without Googling) the reference in this posting’s title.

My Liberal Identity:

You are a New Left Hipster, also known as a MoveOn.org liberal, a Netroots activist, or a Daily Show fanatic. You believe that if we really want to defend American values, conservatives must be exposed, mocked, and assailed for every fanatical, puritanical, warmongering, Constitution-shredding ideal for which they stand.

Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com

test

From TalkLeft:

Most creators would probably prefer to have their intellectual property pirated than to be robbed at gunpoint. And then there’s this point of view:

NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing when it should be doing something about piracy instead.”Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,” Cotton said. “If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.”

Ken Fisher takes issue with Cotton’s odd sense of priorities.

Christopher

Originally uploaded by jmilles.

I took this picture of the Fishing Cat at the Washington, DC National Zoo a couple of days ago, and I’m just using it as a test of the Flock browser.  It’s supposed to make photoblogging easier.  That is all.

technorati tags:cats

Blogged with Flock

Jennimi has tagged me: five little-known things about me.  I’m following Lauren’s lead and including one that isn’t true.

1) I had an extra tooth that was removed when I was in high school.

2) Embedded in my left arm is the point of a lead pencil, a remnant of a fight in 7th grade.

3) My birthday cake of choice is German chocolate.  My mother used to make it every year.

4) Although I was an English major, I’ve never read Mark Twain.

5) My middle name is Gunther.

I tag Connie, Steve, Jeremy, Nicole, and Bill.

DSC00682.JPG

Originally uploaded by jmilles.

Michael Rebbmann writes at North Buffalo Journal and Review:

In today’s Buffalo News, we learn that former Buffalo Police Officer, Gregg O’Shei, was spared a jail sentence for using his position to gain sexual favors.

A former Buffalo police officer who forced at least two women to have sex with him or face being arrested was spared a jail term Thursday.

Gregg O’Shei, 43, told City Judge Craig D. Hannah he wanted to apologize to everyone he has embarrassed by his actions, including his victims. He declined to comment as he left court.

I am troubled by the contradiction in the account of this crime.  The two women had a choice of having sex with O’Shei or being arrested.  How can someone having a choice claim to have been forced to have sex?  They could have chosen to be arrested and not had sex with the Police Officer.  Since they chose to have sex, I don’t think they should be able to claim they were forced.

I’ve read that blog enough to suspect this is not a Jon Swiftian satire.  It was funny when Jack Benny did something like this (“Your money or your life.”  Extended pause.  “I’m thinking!”), but not here.  Is it an attempt to turn “choice” against itself?  Or is it libertarianism taken to the extreme?  Help me out here.

Today is World AIDS Day 2006.

When I got my MLIS from UT Austin in 1982, AIDS was still a mystery. I didn’t hear too much about it in my circles, since at that time everyone still thought it was a “gay disease,” and as long as you weren’t gay or sharing needles, it wasn’t of much concern. Even as the 1980s continued, in my safe little heterosexual Roman Catholic circle in St. Louis, I didn’t know too many people who were affected by it. Sure, we read obituaries of people both famous and unknown, who invariably died young after a long illness and were survived by their longtime companions. Sometime in the late 1980s a law professor at my school died of AIDS; friends of friends also died; but that was as close as it came into my life. In later years I learned that some of my friends were HIV positive, but with new medications, were living with what now appeared to be a chronic but manageable disease. At least that’s the case here in North America, where medication is relatively accessible.

A couple of weeks ago I happened to see The Nomi Song on the Sundance Channel. I think I had heard of early 1980s singer Klaus Nomi before, but even in hip Austin he was pretty cutting edge; you had to be living in downtown Manhattan at the time to really be aware of him. I thought it would be the kind of musical documentary I could watch halfway while doing other things, but it was riveting. Klaus Nomi (born Klaus Sperber in Essen, Germany) was an odd, shy little man with a classically trained countertenor voice at a time before Baroque opera had undergone its later revival, so somehow he ended up in downtown Manhattan with many other odd, misfit artists–and there he found his time and place. The film seemed to me to convey what it must have felt like to be in that unique scene at that time. And I loved Klaus Nomi. His spaceman/Weimar persona and his stunning multi-octave voice–whether doing New Wave or Baroque arias–were like nothing you can find today.

In addition to wonderful concert footage and home movies of Klaus and his circle, the film features interviews with those who know and worked with him. Nobody quite understood him, but they were all young and creative, and the possibilities seemed endless.

Klaus Nomi was one of the first celebrities to die of AIDS, in 1983. As delightful as the earlier parts of the film were, the stories of his last days were terribly sad. Lying in a hospital, abandoned by friends who knew no more about AIDS than anyone else and feared catching it, he died alone. Like so many others in those years.

I wasn’t going to write anything about World AIDS Day because I really have nothing to contribute. But by coincidence, my copy of The Essential Klaus Nomi arrived today, and I’m listening to it now. Just another of thousands who should have lived a long and happy life. I’m grateful for the time we had with him.

You are The Wheel of Fortune

Good fortune and happiness but sometimes a species of intoxication with success

The Wheel of Fortune is all about big things, luck, change, fortune. Almost always good fortune. You are lucky in all things that you do and happy with the things that come to you. Be careful that success does not go to your head however. Sometimes luck can change.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

Happy Tenure Day to me!

Originally uploaded by jmilles.

I just received and signed the letter from the Chancellor’s office. I’m official.

Due to the lack of interest, the Buffalo Niagara Podcasters Meetup previously scheduled for September 22 has been cancelled.

If anyone is interested in pursuing a meetup at another time, please let me know.

Jim Sautner, seen here in April 2004, sits and eats in his kitchen with his trained buffalo Bailey in Spruce Grove, Canada. Wild buffalo have taken over a small town in Canada’s far north, but unlike stray cats, pigeons, and other nuisance animals, these massive bovine pests can smash a truck, a local official said.  (AFP/File/Carlo Allegri)

Courtesy of Mahikthise: Bush gropes Chancellor Merkel

Taylor Marsh has the whole series, as captured by Russian television. You have to see the entire sequence to believe it.

Every woman will recognize the guy who sidles up and starts “casually” giving you a backrub without even looking at you, because he wants to preserve deniability in case you freak out. Like any practiced groper, Bush stares right past Merkel as she recoils from his touch.

The play fails, but he just moves on, eyes averted, like it’s her problem. (“Oh my God, there’s a hysterical woman displaying inappropriate behavior! I’ll just pretend I don’t notice her egregious gaffe.”)

Yes, our president, the drive-by harasser.

UPDATE: I suspect The Green Knight nails it.

From the incomparable Majikthise : In praise of the hard left

Canadians aren’t automatically leftists. However, the left is still alive in Canada, whereas in the US people keep talking about how we ought to start a progressive movement.

There is a remarkably good article on podcasting by Steve Arney in today’s Bloomington (IL) Pantagraph, featuring several of my favorite podcasts: The Redboy Podcast, Blue Dog Banter, and Illinoise!  All three are independent, amateur podcasts featuring either a couple or a group of friends spending time together and sharing it with their listeners.  What is remarkable about the article is that it shows an unusual insight (unusual for the mainstream media) about what podcasting can be all about:

Pete Moore [of Illinoise!] the other day noted that he hadn’t seen his “Redboy Podcast” friends in weeks. Because he hears their weekly podcast, he said, “I really feel like I’ve hung out with Redboy a couple times this month.”

Said Pete, “I think people think we’re trying to be radio superstars.” In reality, he said, “it’s a social network.”

Last summer, the Moores at their Bloomington home hosted the Midwest Podcast Conference, said Matt. He quickly conceded that “Midwest Podcast Conference” was a gross overstatement for 10 area podcasters having a party.

Of course, podcasting can be many things–it can be a medium for alternative viewpoints and citizen journalism, as with Bicyclemark’s Communique–but the social aspect is one of the things that makes it so appealing.