Study Law Online

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by Kizmet, Mar 27, 2018.

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  1. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    Dreams are nice. I have them every day. But it's the goals that provide my family with shelter, health insurance and food.

    I'm not heartless. I get it. I have long held the "dream" of me as a humble shopkeeper selling my wares on a pretty cobblestone street and greeting patrons by name. Realistically, I know that if I tried to open the store of my dreams it would be an uphill battle. I could do it. But it would be a lot of hard work that, if I was truly lucky, would merely match my current salary and provide my family with none of the fringe benefits they presently enjoy.

    So I dream that dream sometimes before I fall asleep. Then in the morning I put on my HR suit and go to work for another day of filling job requisitions and firing people who fail the post-accident drug tests.
     
  2. sideman

    sideman Well Known Member

    [QUOTE-Neuhaus-So I dream that dream sometimes before I fall asleep. Then in the morning I put on my HR suit and go to work for another day of filling job requisitions and firing people who fail the post-accident drug tests.[/QUOTE]

    When I got my first management job at 21 I was essentially a hatchet man. I fired employees without a second thought. Sure, most deserved their fate but looking back, some of them probably deserved a second or third chance. Later on and through the end of my career, with over 40 years as a manager/owner, I would become physically ill when I would have to terminate someone. Confronting them when they were wrong---no problem. Warning them of dire consequences---no problem. But letting them go for good was difficult as I'm sure it is for you too Neuhaus. Nobody likes to be the "bad guy". It's a dirty job but somebody has to do it. Do the best thing for the company. Just don't have any regrets.
     
  3. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

  4. FTFaculty

    FTFaculty Well-Known Member

    Law schools are often the point of refuge for people who are bright (or can play the game well enough to fake being bright) who are just no good at the hard sciences. That was me and most of my classmates.
     
  5. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

  6. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

  7. FTFaculty

    FTFaculty Well-Known Member

    The article says law schools are skeptical about online education because law schools are traditionally Socratic exchanges between professor and student. I'm wondering what rock law school professors and administrators have been living under. The online masters in accounting I've been taking has been a free-flowing Socratic exchange throughout. There are two live interactive sessions a week. One of my professors will make a statement, and if no one says anything, will say "Hey, who calls 'BS' on that? Come on people, someone throw that back at me!" And then often a lively back-and-forth will go on. It's actually a lot of fun. There's more interaction than I ever saw back in law school, which always seemed a little forced and stilted. These technologies have been around for a couple decades or so and many online programs have utilized them to great effect.

    But this is typical of law school academics, they go forward through life staring backwards 20, 30, 300 years, it's an occupational hazard of being in a profession which emphasizes the common law and ancient precedent, but not actually practicing law and staying fresh with new developments. A real, head back in history (but not in reality) mindset can prevail. Again, the tech has been there for 20 years, wake up, sleepy law schools! Wake up, incompetent ABA!

    Of course, the reality is they're probably neither sleepy nor incompetent. Maybe the professors are. But not the ABA. They know what they're doing. They know the field is glutted. They know they have to come up with any cock-n-bull reason they can to keep the barbarians from storming the gates and killing average salaries in the profession. So they come up with artificial barriers and they make up silly things like you can't have a Socratic exchange online which is a side-splittingly funny lie.
     
    Last edited: May 4, 2019
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  8. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

  9. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

  10. sideman

    sideman Well Known Member

    I find it interesting that Concord claims "first to offer an online law school" when Abraham Lincoln and others had them beat. Easy to overlook when they're the loudest crier in the town square. Regardless, good for California to push forward while the ABA crawls.
     
  11. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    ALU was founded in 1996. Concord was founded in 1998. It's an odd statement for Concord to make unless there is something weird out there, like ALU didn't offer online learning right off the bat or something. Though I think their claim to be the first RA online law school is probably pretty safe.
     
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  12. Maxwell_Smart

    Maxwell_Smart Active Member

    The same rock some members here are living under. Some people are dinosaurs and will always hold to outdated views no matter how much changes around them and no matter how much those changes make their views obviously and flatly wrong.
     
  13. Maxwell_Smart

    Maxwell_Smart Active Member

    I never had to fire anybody who didn't earn it and I spent a lot of time to saving people' jobs when written rules of discipline didn't match the gravity of the issue. There are some places where every communication from management to report is a threat of discipline, then they wonder why morale is so low and turnover is so high. But if I had ever reached the point where fighting back against overly-tough rules didn't work and I was forced to fire someone unjustly, I would've first resigned, then let the person know it was coming, then alerted the DOL, and then joined the victim's side in any litigation or state action if necessary, and having sued a few companies over their mistreatment of workers, that's not just lip-service.

    On the flipside, I also worked in places where it was damn near impossible to get rid of bad employees because the system was set up to give them so many chances. You in some ways respect a system that looks for ways to keep people over ways to get them out, but there is a point where it goes from being fair to being foolish and on more than one occasion that approach caused some serious issues where people got hurt.
     
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  14. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    Firing people sucks. It's not nearly as common a duty for me as people might assume. I do it. And the people whom I fire universally deserve it. 90% of the terminations I do are for theft. 5% are the result of failing post-accident drug tests and the other 5% are usually the result of unapologetic racist statements that are either coming at the end of multiple bouts of mandatory training or are just so egregious that they cannot be overlooked.

    It brings me no joy to take away someone's livelihood even when they 100% deserve it and have been repeatedly warned. Though I admit I didn't lose much sleep over terminating a manager who had been accused over the course of a decade of being prejudiced against non-white employees and then, when I confronted him about it, looked me square in the eye and said "Yeah, the blacks don't work so hard and the <derogatory term for hispanics> are even lazier." Still, I took no pleasure in it. Though I was relieved that whatever damaged he had caused to our employees I could now set about repairing.

    Layoffs, on the other hand, those are just heartwrenching. My company went through this some years ago. Assembly line. Manager and I would sit in a conference room with two doors. They'd come in one hoping we had good news and leave through the other one crying. Even HR had to lose some people and terminating beloved colleagues is even harder.

    At the end of the day, though, I've had the discussion with some of my best friends. We've all agreed that if it was coming anyway, better to be fired by a friend than some stranger.
     
  15. sideman

    sideman Well Known Member

    Indeed. Just before I made the big move south from the midwest, in my 20's I worked as an assistant to the Plant Supervisor in a good sized manufacturing plant. My boss had about 120-some people in his charge and the company made flywheel ring gears. Anything with a starter has one of those. Well anyways, everything was humming along for the first few months until International Harvester (now known as Navistar) employees went on strike. Literally overnight we lost 70% of demand for our product. I still remember walking into work and feeling like I was at the funeral of my best friend. My boss took me aside and asked that I document everything he was doing to cover us as we were a union shop and they always questioned everything we did. Then he began the excruciating process of laying off almost 100 workers. I never ever want to experience that again. It took almost two weeks to do and at the end I was laid off too. It was no big deal for me since I was single with no dependents. But a lot of the people there had put in 20-30 years and had a family to support. It took an emotional toll on all of us, but especially my boss. One of the best bosses I've ever had had to be the one to break the bad news to every single one of them. He was eventually let go a few months later and then I lost track of everyone since I was exploring all my options outside of a dying city. The plant closed due to the long strike and stands empty to this day almost 40 years later.
     
  16. sideman

    sideman Well Known Member

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  17. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

  18. sideman

    sideman Well Known Member

    Here is one of the first public records requests, certainly more to follow. I was just struck with how well written it was and could be a model for other requests.
    Also initial reports from some of the bar takers say that knowledge of what subject areas were on the test didn't help them in their pre-knowledge of what to study and prepare for the exam. One would think it would help you focus on only the subjects that would be addressed and gain an advantage.

    file:///C:/Users/Courtesy%20Driving/Downloads/20190731%20Letter%20Sarkar%20to%20State%20Bar%20re%20CPRA%20Request%20(1).pdf
     
  19. sideman

    sideman Well Known Member

  20. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    That's awesome, although unsurprising. They've long seemed to be the pick of this particular litter.
     
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