Credit Rating Agencies, Structured Securities, and the Way Out of the Abyss

The article examines the role of credit rating agencies (CRAs) in the evolving financial markets, and particularly in connection with the structured finance markets. The movement away from relationship-based lending based on trust, to the less personal capital markets, makes an objective assessment of creditworthiness essential to the structure of legitimate transactions, as well as to the credibility of investor decision-making. Yet, the financial crisis of 2008-2009 revealed that the CRAs seriously underestimated the risk of many complex securities that they rated. As CRAs have devoted a greater share of their resources to develop methods of rating these progressively more exotic securities, their influence over the market has grown exponentially. As a result, the issue of the accuracy of credit ratings and the accountability of CRAS is increasingly critical. The article reviews the voluntary reforms adopted by the largest CRAs, and calls for a more robust regulatory infrastructure and dramatic modification of CRA practices

The Apps for Justice Project: Employing Design Thinking to Narrow the Access to Justice Gap

The lack of available resources to make civil justice available to all, coupled with the fact that existing strategies fail to account for the research on cognitive capacity and other deployment challenges faced by the poor, explain in large part why a high percentage of low-income individuals facing legal problems fail to take action to respond to their legal problems. Such a failure to respond in a timely fashion to a nascent legal problem can lead to an escalation of the initial problem and the emergence of new ones. The access-to-justice community has begun to respond to this intensifying crisis in ever-more creative and innovative ways. Recent years have seen an expanding array of technology and non-technology-based tools designed with the purpose of helping people who cannot afford market-rate lawyers. Such innovations have recently led to adjustments in funding for legal aid programs and in advancements in self-help and assisted-self-help tools. These advancements include on-line client intake systems, self-help triage programs, legal diagnostic tools, robot lawyer chat systems, and legal expert system applications. These tools have the potential to be scaled to serve millions more people and make possible a system that provides effective legal help to everyone who needs it, when they need it, and in a form they can use. The Apps for Justice Project has focused on the development of one such solution to the access-to-justice crisis. Launched in 2016 and funded with a grant from the Maine Economic Improvement Fund, Apps for Justice has developed practical, technology-based tools (applications, or apps) that enable low- and moderate-income residents to address their legal and law-related problems. The apps, written at a fourth grade reading level to best serve the widest audience, use plain language rather than legal jargon. Additionally, drawing on the literature from distance education, public health, behavioral economics, experimental psychology, cognitive psychology, and sociology, each app includes links to positive self-affirmation exercises and employs psychologically affirming language. This article describes both the evolution and development process of this project

Professional Responsibility Redesigned: Sparking a Dialogue Between Students and the Bar

In recent years, there have been many public and private, formal and informal complaints about the behavior of lawyers. Moreover, lawyers\u27 tenuous reputation for honesty and integrity has been tarnished by recent, well-publicized scandals. The public, as well as members of the bench and bar, have further decried a decline in attorney professionalism. More than once, it has been suggested that in some way, failings of law schools are to blame. In response to these observations about the professional behavior of lawyers and as a result of the author\u27s experiences of teaching a traditional, Socratic-method Professional Responsibility class for many years, the author decided to focus concentrated efforts on redesigning the Professional Responsibility course

The Costs of BAPCPA: Report of the Pilot Study of Consumer Bankruptcy Cases

Substantial changes were made to the consumer bankruptcy system with the enactment of BAPCPA. These changes, however, were enacted without data support for, or recognition of how such changes would affect the cost of accessing the bankruptcy system. The Costs of BAPCPA Pilot Study undertook a review of the costs of the consumer bankruptcy system following BAPCPA\u27s enactment, to determine if costs were increased, and if so, whether these costs were passed on to the consumer. The issue of costs distills the question of what attorneys are charging consumers to represent them under the new regime. Thus a study of the costs of the consumer provisions of BAPCPA is in essence, the study of consumer bankruptcy attorney fees. The study also sought and discovered the answer to the question of whether unsecured creditor distributions were impacted by BAPCPA

The Effect of Bankruptcy upon a Firm using Patents and Trademarks as Collateral

The Bankruptcy Code sets forth an orderly process for the distribution of a debtor-in-bankruptcy\u27s assets. This process has the effect of altering many of the procedural and substantive rights and obligations of the debtor, as well as of the debtor\u27s creditors. Parties asserting a property interest in assets of a debtor in bankruptcy, however, must rely on nonbankruptcy law to determine the nature and extent of their property interests. The most commonly asserted interest by creditors involved in a bankruptcy are security interests