This WSJ article on nutrients in your diet describes some of the connections between diet, mainly of vitamins and trace minerals, and health from an immune response perspective. One more reason to look at all the studies and dietary pieces as a consolidated whole rather than “take two fish oil caplets a day.”

With detailed information from a variety of sources on the actions taken, not the words spoken or empathy expressed, we parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and especially self-advocates can become vastly better informed about how to cast our votes. Americans have spread out across the states and towns of our nation throughout the last 50 years; few of us live with our whole families in towns where we can influence political processes to the same extent as those who recognize more clearly defined common interests. But our children our everywhere, and there’s no reason my parents in upstate NY shouldn’t be voting to support ASD issues there just like my friends in California or Massachusetts. The problems of those children ARE my son’s problems. This entire class of children and adults, and perhaps an entire burgeoning ASD generation, needs our protection, assistance, and support so we can build in them the power to speak for themselves.

“…to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men….”

From a technical perspective, I imagine this project as being built in layers as tools rather than documents. What this means is that it starts with a straightforward national layer, since there are a number of good sources to get information about Congress and votes/actions on bills/amendments. It’s also relatively easy to look at something like Autism Votes for a list of important bills to track. Similar tools could be built at the state and then county/local levels to track both legislators and legislation. Then, the system could be expanded to track the executive branch and even judges. A user should be able to designate an organization that maintains a list of the public policy issues that group is tracking (like Autism Votes does here).

So what makes this different than Autism Votes? First off, I see this as a very direct, reductionist verdict, a thumbs-up/thumbs-down on every person tracked. Remember, the premise is that ASD issues are more important to most people in our community than just about anything else. I don’t know at which point this idea crosses over into lobbying and the political influence categories that trigger different regulatory requirements, but it’s not a problem at this nascent stage.

The key to this project is the combination of some straightforward web 2.0 tools with a definite crowdsourced component (only locals will put school board names on a list after each election) and the ability to share judgments OPENLY, so people can advocate for their own views. For example, I would imagine that the science-heavy crowd among parents would diverge greatly from the “warrior mom” contingent on how they would rate people who support/oppose particular vaccine research funding. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Politics is how we deal with allocations of scarce resources in a democracy. It might as well work!

(As an aside, if this project were built with an open and extensible design plan, such as using references to open-source/public wiki-style definitions files, it could be expanded into a grass-roots political action tool for people with any particular concern.)

Quick Reference for Causes of Action and Affirmative Defenses in Texas. — Caselaw Snippets from Recent Texas Appellate Opinions.

Lawyers with a national practice (often driven by national clients) can spend a surprising amount of time pulling specific quotes from the relevant jurisdiction to either get complaints or answers filed or serve as the initial structure for various motions. The exact language of a cause of action may vary just slightly from state to state, and it never hurts to have the elements exactly right, since words, and the particularities of construction and meaning, are the tools of a good lawyer.

This is a great idea worth copying and extending to other jurisdictions, and even, if another tech-savvy lawyer were inclined, to collate into a wiki-style site to collect these statements.

Laws (and court opinions) belong to the people.

One alternative to drafting that I’ve always liked: “check the box” forms.” During any moderately stable period in Silicon Valley, certain terms become “market,” meaning that there’s little real dispute about them in substance and only some modest dispute about seemingly meaningless particulars (such as how many demand registrations an investor gets — as Ted notes, how often is that number, 1 or 2 or 3, actually operative? How often is the number even relevant for discussions, negotiations, or planning?). A similar drafting approach is used in traditional corporate finance documents, where definitions are used to maintain standard document formats with the deal particulars implemented via the definitions, e.g., Interest Rate shall mean seven percent (7%) per annum.

Using reasonable standard language would allow any law firm to essentially take minor issues off the table, or at least put them in proper perspective, and push the negotiations and diligence process to the most economically important items: capitalization, IP, voting rights, and liquidation rights. This reductionist approach helps parties move past the distracting issues and focuses them on the critical facts to identify in the due diligence process: the dealbreakers, the price-changers, and the term-changers. (Everything else is effectively ignored at this stage if it doesn’t have one of those three effects.)

I’ll look for the forms and post whatever I come up with.

There are a range of problems that I see with this proposal, and here are some suggestions as well.

Law firm tuition has gone up in great part because of the rise in starting salaries, which have now almost doubled from my time as a first-year in a large downtown NYC firm. If salaries go down, will law schools adjust? My guess is no, which means that the “lucky” students who get big-firm jobs at reduced salaries will have to toil even longer just to break even. It will take a very long time to take the slack out of the system so that young lawyers of the future are “merely” equally stressed financially compared to their peers at today’s firms. A better solution might be to modulate pay among first-years by letting them choose their own level of hours for pay deal. Let’s remember that associates are generally not to blame for a poor business environment; they may cost money, but without them, the firm makes a lot less money. Their marginal contribution is high.

This last point is the one that bears repeating because we must remember that the market will adjust (perhaps too slowly for our liking) to normalize returns for associates. But once someone has already bought a law degree, there’s no real clawback on the price, particularly when even extreme cases don’t get to discharge student loans in bankruptcy.

My colleague and friend Prof. Tomas Nonnenmacher posted this followup of sorts based on some more recent articles about what life in NYC can be like for a lawyer without a high-end job.

[At the risk of reposting, here are my additional remarks on the subject:]

“Segmented” is a nice word for it; “segregated” would be better if it didn’t have unfortunate overtones.

Here are some underlying data:
1. This chart spurred the recognition of the problem — it details the recognition of a bimodal salary distribution for starting salaries that many law students do not know about or understand.

2. Comments and the issues for law students (as well as practitioners)

3. More salary curves, this time including curves for 1991 and 1996.

What is important to assess, and so far lacking except in anecdotal evidence, are two more things: first, a usable comparison of schools matched up to these salary curves, and second, an analysis of law school tuition increases matched up to these curves.

It is my fear that law schools generally have increased tuition as a result of the increases in some lawyers’ pay, both capturing more of the benefit from these lawyers and capturing excess benefits from lawyers who land elsewhere on the curve.

Pushing the dialogue even further out, it’s clear that this salary distribution shift is “bad” for many would-be lawyers because they just don’t (a) know about it or (b) reliably assess where they’ll end up on the curve. As for (a), my prescription is above — some uncomfortable data will help everyone figure out what’s going on and improve the use of resources for everyone: students, schools, firms, and society. As for (b), it would be trivial with the additional curves in place to give people a real sense of what their “odds” are. That would shift some activity at the margin, which is all we can expect, and everything that we expect.

But is this salary distribution and the trends that are exacerbating it bad for society? More law schools => more new lawyers => higher supply of [mostly lower-priced] lawyers => lower legal fees for clients as a whole. Maybe society gains if there is widespread availability of legal advice at $50/hour. Or there will be a lot more plumbers and fewer lawyers, which may be good: after all, I have yet to find a line where Shakespeare says “let’s kill all the plumbers.”

Among the topics of most intense interest for associates at large law firms (and even more intense interest for second-year law students, which is funny considering how remote the issue really is) is the partnership track. True, most associates learn quickly that until they get to at least fifth-year status, the brass ring of partnership, which has moved about 4 months back a year, on average, since I was a law student (7 years then, 8 at the biggest NYC firms, to a solid 10 years now), is relatively meaningless from any reasonable day-to-day perspective.

But, several big things in the world of professional service firm partnerships have changed since 1997. Goldman Sachs went public, turning senior managing directors into hundies (that’s over $100m) and probably created the intense increase in compensation thereafter (although I would have to do some research to track down the numbers. With nothing saved up in terms of equity in the firm, bankers wanted to see their money, in cash. (Or, of course, in stock that could be sold for cash – it’s mostly the same.) Also, Andersen Consulting, now Accenture, did the same thing. While it wasn’t quite as profitable as Goldman (what is?), consulting partners extracted a substantial amount of wealth from the firm. What both these firms did, however, was take away the “vested” (not in the technical sense, of course) interest of associates of all ranks in staying to make partner/MD. Without the big pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, associates became mere employees, and they realized that they needed more short-term compensation to make up for the lack of the back-end opportunity and, more importantly, they realized that the partners didn’t really care about them and were willing to sell off the future that some of those associates had been working towards.

Now, this hasn’t happened in the law firm context, in the US, because of something known as fee-sharing. It is unethical, in terms of there being specific ethical rules in each state, that prohibit lawyers from sharing legal fees with non-lawyers. In simple terms, my friend Mike can’t be a partner in my law practice because he’s not a lawyer; the concern is that the non-lawyer, not bound by the ethical rules that constrain lawyers and protect clients and the courts, might exert inappropriate influence over the lawyer and cause the lawyer to do something wrong. (Of course, spouses, children, college bursars, vendors, the IRS, clients, opposing counsel, and the government all exert these influences too, but they’re not looking to a share of bigger legal fees as the justification for their behavior. Except maybe spouses.)

What I’ve often wondered is whether a law firm really works as an independent business, if it can stay up on its own feet without the constant influx of “free talent” at the bottom of the pyramid that is paid off at the partnership level years later. Indeed, every associate that leaves (partners call that attrition) has benefited the firm by not getting the implicit value of that extra work that wasn’t compensated on an annual basis. Firms without associates generally have much lower profits per partner. Some of that is from the leverage that is gained from having employees and charging three times their salary for legal work (historically, the rule of thumb is that of billings, 1/3 goes to salary, 1/3 to firm overhead, and 1/3 to firm profits).

If an investment firm needs new people at the bottom to keep coming in and investing, so that the people who came before can get paid, we put those people in jail. That’s what we call a Ponzi scheme, and it’s considered illegal because the real value is being extracted from the new investors, not created by the company. Now, law firms do indeed do work, but how much is really extracted from the new investors, the ones that hope their name will reach the top of the chain letter?

Or, in a slightly less cynical view, are law firms more like MLM companies, where each associate is brought in at the lowest level and slowly moves up, eventually getting to bring someone else in underneath, until the threshold is crossed and profits start to roll in just from what the folks downstream are doing? Law is sort of like this, but there are no profit shares until you cross the Partner line. However, some firms do have practice-group specific bonuses, and so in those circumstances, some mid-level associates might actually be gaining from the efforts of the juniors.

I write this post because I realize that I don’t have time to turn this into a humorous article or even sponsor an undergraduate senior project to perform the actual economic analysis and compare the various professional services models, pre- and post-partnership, to law firms, to pyramid schemes and MLM systems. If someone would like to take up the topic, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to publish it here.