Toward a Writing-Centered Legal Education

The future of legal education—and experiential learning—should be grounded in a curriculum that requires students to take writing courses throughout law school. Additionally, the curriculum should be one that collapses the distinction between doctrinal, legal writing, and clinical faculty, as well as merges analytical, practical, and clinical instruction into a real world curriculum. The justification for a writing-intensive program of legal education is driven by the reality that persuasive writing ability is among the most important skills a lawyer must possess and a skill that many lawyers and judges claim graduates lack. Part of the problem is that law schools dedicate fewer than six credits to required legal writing courses and treat legal writing faculty as if they were second-class citizens. That should stop now. In making legal education more writing-centered, law schools can help struggling students to become competent writers, cultivate an educational environment in which good writers can become great writers, and bridge the divide between legal education and law practice

VI. Legal Ethics and ESI

With all of the changes surrounding social media and email, it's critical to get up to speed on the latest rules, procedures and case law. This full-day, cutting-edge course will walk you through state processes, procedures and the latest case law while equipping you with handy how-to's, sample screen shots, real world examples and shortcuts along the way. Expert attorney faculty, who know the ins and outs of these groundbreaking new forms of evidence, will provide practical tech advice that you can actually understand and start using right away. From email to Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, to YouTube, Pinterest and video surveillance, this comprehensive ESI guide will give you invaluable insight into proven ways for identifying, preserving, producing, admitting and blocking ESI

A comparison of forensic toolkits and mass market data recovery applications

Digital forensic application suites are large, expensive, complex software products, offering a range of functions to assist in the investigation of digital artifacts. Several authors have raised concerns as to the reliability of evidence derived from these products. This is of particular concern, given that many forensic suites are closed source and therefore can only be subject to black box evaluation. In addition, many of the individual functions integrated into forensic suites are available as commercial stand-alone products, typically at a much lower cost, or even free. This paper reports research which compared (rather than individually evaluated) the data recovery function of two forensic suites and three stand alone `non-forensic' commercial applications. The research demonstrates that, for this function at least, the commercial data recovery tools provide comparable performance to that of the forensic software suites. In addition, the research demonstrates that there is some variation in results presented by all of the data recovery tools

V. Real-World Examples, Handy How-to’s and Sample Screen Shots

With all of the changes surrounding social media and email, it's critical to get up to speed on the latest rules, procedures and case law. This full-day, cutting-edge course will walk you through state processes, procedures and the latest case law while equipping you with handy how-to's, sample screen shots, real world examples and shortcuts along the way. Expert attorney faculty, who know the ins and outs of these groundbreaking new forms of evidence, will provide practical tech advice that you can actually understand and start using right away. From email to Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, to YouTube, Pinterest and video surveillance, this comprehensive ESI guide will give you invaluable insight into proven ways for identifying, preserving, producing, admitting and blocking ESI

ChatGPT – What an Attorney Needs To Know When Using This New Tool

There is a large potential impact of ChatGPT, an AI language processing model, on the legal industry. In this article, Grant Gamm highlights the various benefits and limitations of the new technology, while emphasizing ethical considerations that attorneys must keep in mind when using it. The article also touches on the broader issues of bias and hallucinations that can arise with AI tools and their potential impact on society. Overall, the article highlights the need for attorneys to maintain competence in technological advancements and be vigilant about ethical implications when adopting new tools like ChatGPT.https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lawjournalonline/1118/thumbnail.jp

Discovering E-Discovery: a Resources Guide

E-discovery refers to discovery in civil litigation that focuses on the exchange of information in electronic form. Lainie Crouch Kaiser, a litigation attorney with McDermott Will & Emery, writes that “e-Discovery can be used as an umbrella term for both the legal and operational considerations related to how electronically stored information (ESI) is used in the modern day practice of law.”There are many types of ESI, including e-mail and office documents, voicemail, photos, video, and databases. Attorneys and others who write about e-discovery also include “raw data” as discoverable information. Ronald J. Hedges of Nixon Peabody writes that “[t]echnically, documents and data are ‘electronic’ if they exist in a medium that can only be read through the use of computers. Such media include cache memory, magnetic disks (such as DVDs or CDs), and magnetic tapes.” This article does not present any legal analysis of e-discovery and what is and is not discoverable, but rather it provides a listing of resources that attorneys and those who work with them can use to gain a better understanding of e-discovery and its application in both federal and state courts