Breaks between blogging : a brief apology

June 27, 2007 — Shannon Quadros

Dear reader (yes both you and Mom),

I do apologize for neglecting to post lately. I will say that it has entirely been due to my pursuit of things academic and the two recent computer crash debaucles that I have yet to fully recover from. Nonetheless I shall be back to my loquacious self soon enough unless of course the law review write-on competition doesn’t do me in first. More on that when I’m in the middle of it!

Till then a Property Law final is looming this Saturday so I shall rise again thereafter.

Au revoir,

Shannon

P.S.: To keep yourself mindlessly entertained there are a score of fantastic blogs that I’ve linked to on the right so run through those for a while, why don’t you?

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It’s 10 o’ clock; Do you know where your customers are?

June 27, 2007 — Shannon Quadros

Mark Bennett has been spouting pithy wisdom these days like it’s going out of style. In particular his post on “Something to look for in a Criminal Defense Lawyer” struck a chord with me because it resounds across all industry. The ability for your client/customer to communicate easily with you and have access to you is paramount. I do not have clients, I have customers and particularly when my customers seek me out, it means that something has gone wrong. And when something has gone wrong, the customer might not necessarily want a solution - though that is likely something that they seek - one of the other main things that they seek is to be heard. Heard by you, the product/service provider. I don’t know any of my customers that do not have my cell phone and don’t unfortunately liberally use it. It makes my electronic leash feel all the more so but I am certain that I have avoided more fires and put more out because I have been able to address the client immediately. I am reminded of the Maloof brothers who own amongst other things the Sacremento Kings and the Palms in Las Vegas. They matter-of-factly said on an interview on CNBC that they don’t think twice about granting access to them to all their clients and suppliers. Their reasoning was that ultimately the buck stops with them and that if a customer needs to speak with them then they are doing a disservice to that customer if they are unavailable.

I’ve had lawyers in the past that had more gatekeepers than the gold in the sultan’s palace. I agree with Mark, nobody is going to go or rather ultimately stick with a service provider that doesn’t talk to their customer/client. 

Posted in Business, Communication, Law, Law firms. No Comments »

Let’s backup just a bit

June 15, 2007 — Shannon Quadros

For the second time in 8 days I’ve had to reformat my laptop’s hardrive. An unpleasant thought because, sorry as this may sound, my laptop and my electronic leash (read cell phone/pda)  are the two things that keep me insane during my time at work and at law school. Do you have any idea how painful it is to lose data and all the settings, tweaks and neat little programs you’ve accumulated over time?

I haven’t lost a limb or the like but not being armed (no pun intended) with my laptop shuts me down. I have my schedule on there, my class notes, everything. That’s why a long time ago I decided to get on www.Connected.com and get their automated backup system for a nominal amount a month. It has saved my brown behind far too many times to mention and if I didn’t at least have all my data in a secure place right now I would be screaming ‘bloody murder’ and be pulling out my law-school induced thinning hair.

Trojans and viruses aside, laptops frequently get stolen or damaged and I can’t fathom how half my class if not most of my class is backup free. I, however, don’t know if I’m ready to lose those campaign-crushing reputation-ruining pictures from Lake Havasu quite yet. To further that effort I recently also purchased an external harddrive to backup the 60GB of music , video and pictures I had on my computer. That stuff is far too precious and especially the video and pictures, almost irreplaceable.

So why am I blabbering on and on about all of this. One simple reason: Not only will your data loss affect you immensely, it will probably affect your clients/co-workers/family and countless others if something that someone needs is predicated on your work effort. I’m almost certain that someone could sue you for malpractice for not adopting commonly accepted technology practices.

Think about being a page away from a nobel-winning dissertation only to find it going to digital hell in a handbasket.

As a technology professional, not backing up is like sitting in a tanning bed for 8hours while you smoke a pack of cigarrettes an hour and drink methanol cooled with dodgy ice from a highly suspect water/sewer system. Yes it’s that bad. And when you lose the only copy of that picture you took with Madonna/Dubya/the Pope/that hot member of the opposite sex you met last night, you’ll wish you had backed up.

My two cents.

Posted in Technology. 1 Comment »

No law student left behind

June 8, 2007 — Shannon Quadros

Law Prof. Nancy Rapoport had an insightful concise posting on her blog about the ramifications of Bar Review, Bar/Bri and its corollary to the effects of the Bush administration’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy.

First off, it drives me insane that Bar/Bri has a virtual monoply on the bar review business and has been squeezing law students for as much as they can get. And yet we have no solution inspite of a class action that was brought against them. And good luck trying to find a legally competent law student that is willing to test your theory that they don’t need Bar/Bri to pass the bar. Half the time I think Bar/Bri is fear, like Kaplan, Kumon and Network news: If you don’t take Bar/Bri you’ll fail, if your child doesn’t go to Sylvan tutoring he’ll fall behind in elementary school and will be selling ice-cream out of truck; stock up on duct tape for when the hurricane comes or your puppy and child will fly away.

What saddens me most about bar review and the bar exam in general is that law schools now come to almost inherently rely on those classes to fill in the gaps. I have more than once heard, law professors & administrators say ‘it’s okay if you don’t take this class, you’ll learn all you  need to know in bar review.’ First off, if we don’t need to know this why is it on the bar in the first place (anyone listening State Bar????) and second if law schools start to supplant their teaching to bar review, have law schools lost their way?

Is this a gross case of pedagogical passing of the buck??

For my engineering licensing exam for example, we had two parts to that beast. We had a general exam where we were expected to know some imporatant principles across the board of engineering disciplines. Therefore we were expected to know the basisc of mechanics and some chemical engineering but we weren’t expected to advanced structural analysis. In our second section we were asked to pick an area of engineering to be tested on or take another general exam which went a little further into every area. Now I know that we won’t exclude areas of law to test in the bar exam but obviously there is some disconnect with the state bar ( which is comprised of nothing but lawyers ) and law schools ( similarly occupied by lawyers ) with one group deeming a certain tenet of law important and the other group disagreeing. Obviously we’ve got a lacuna in communication. Is that really so hard to resolve?

Posted in Communication, Education, Law, Law school, Public Policy. 3 Comments »

Anno Domini, Anno Lex

June 8, 2007 — Shannon Quadros

Friday has traditionally always been an administrative day for me at work. It’s on Fridays that I get my paper work in order, make sure everything is filed and generally apply the principles of the clean desk philosophy. Part of that ritual involves me tuning to my favourite BBC Radio One on the internet and usually catching Pete Tong’s weekend intro show live from London and letting that play in the background while I sort everything out. Today I started a bit early and have been listening to a brilliant set by Paul Van Dyk, trance DJ extraordinaire, and it made me realise how I’ve had to leave many of the things that I enjoyed doing behind ever since I started law school.

Summer sessions for an evening law student are particularly onerous. With copious reading and a paucity of time, many of my classmates find ourselves in a real life ‘24′ constantly chasing the horological dragon. So how do we manage to get it all done and have some semblance of our pre-law identity back? Ridiculous amounts of discipline.

To paraphrase what my Torts professor said, if there’s anything you’ll get out of law school it’ll be the self-discipline.  Discipline is a bitter pill to swallow for someone like myself that has been such a big procrastinator I would put off procrastinating (and consequently get things done). So what words of wisdom do I have for my fellow Lex-addicts?

Carrot & whip: When you’ve done what you were supposed to do, let your hair down, let yourself go get a drink with friends, spend time with loved ones -whatever makes you happy. Now here’s the hard part. When you don’t get your reading or outlining in, you’ve got to learn to setup consequences that you’re not thrilled with. Like foregoing leisure time or giving up a weekend outing. Hard, yes. Almost bi-polar schizophrenic, probably. Effective, absolutely.

Posted in Evening student, Law school, Life, Part-time, UH Law. No Comments »

A new class, a new beginning? Perhaps the beginning of the end

June 1, 2007 — Shannon Quadros

Being in law school and taking breaks from it is like suffering from a post-traumatic stress disorder. When you’re going through the stress stimuli, the world’s quite often a blur and you’re bursting with responses and reactions and you’re so overwhelmed that you don’t say much. When it’s over because you’re so overwhelmed you often don’t know where to begin. That’s why I’ve been silent for the past few weeks. Savouring my time away from law school, discovering that I still had friends that were willing to speak with me after many moons of neglect and just the ability to not spend much time in front of my laptop has kept me from blogging. Now that the summer semester is upon us however, it’s back to the old ways.

This summer features Property Law with a visiting professor from Chapman School of Law, Donald Kochan , who not only has a website going, but some degree of progressive pedagogical thought, enough to be willing to have a mid semester practice exam, reviews thereafter and even posting old exams online. I hear the rumblings in the cobwebbed halls of legal academia already.

Property Law is my crash course into the world of economics. Having been a tech-geek for far too long, I’m glad I decided to pursue law because I would have never been exposed to much of the thinking, literary linkage or historical lessons that the study of law affords me. I mean where else can you have pithy wisdom from ancient Roman tomes such as Juntinan legal thought right next to the equally potent maxim of “Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers”.

 To all the prospective law students out there, the study of law is not what you thought it was going to be. Not that it’s bad in any sense, it’s just that you’re not learning what you see on TV. You don’t really learn to cross-examine a hostile witness in anything but perhaps trial advocacy or by being part of the mock trial team. Two things that most law students don’t ever delve into. You don’t go to law school to learn the state of the law or what the law is on the books currently (well not really). You’re in law school to learn why the law is the way it is and perhaps if you’re lucky, how to apply it.

Law professors have this nasty habit of trundling to death the tired phrase : “you’re in law school to learn how to think like a lawyer”. If you want to know how to do that, just read this. (hat tip to Gilman for that one). That’s right, the study of law is really just playing one very long game of “What if?”.

I think I’ve just become a jaded second year law student.

Posted in Blogging, Donald Kochan, Evening student, Law, Law school, Life, Property Law, UH Law, University of Houston. No Comments »