Group #2 Legal Practice
• Presenting Information: Basic Principles Applied to Digital Presentation for Lawyers
Conrad Johnson, Columbia Law School
Law is a profession that runs on information. Every lawyering activity has an information component. Lawyers perform three core tasks: we gather, manage, and present information. This article is an exploration of how to present information. We begin with a set of “presentation principles” that apply to any presentation. From there, we apply those principles to common contemporary lawyering presentation challenges, specifically, those that involve the digital presentation of information to clients, colleagues, triers of fact, and broader communities via the Internet.
Lawyers are communicators. So much of what we do involves presenting information to others. Overwhelmingly, aspects of presentation are taught as part of learning to perform discrete traditional skills – interviewing, counseling, negotiation, collaboration, advocacy. Having a unified framework of presentation principles that apply to any presentation allows teachers, students, and lawyers to thoughtfully structure and evaluate their communications.
Technology is changing the practice of law and has expanded the palette of presentation possibilities. Presenting for the “screen,” whether through presentation software (like PowerPoint), emails, e-briefs, texts, or conducting meetings, virtual proceedings, teaching, or expanding access to justice online, call us to critically re-examine how we present information, as well as our choices of communication mediums. This article will connect the “presentation principles” that unify and structure all presentations to common digital presentation challenges for lawyers.
• Ms. Attribution: How Authorship Credit Contributes to the Gender Gap
Jordi Goodman, Boston University Law School
Misattribution plagues the practice of law in the United States. Seasoned practitioners and legislators alike will often claim full credit for joint work and, in some cases, for the entirety of a junior associate’s writing. The powerful over-credit themselves on legislation, opinions, and other legal works to the detriment of junior staff and associates. The ingrained and expected practice of leveraging junior attorneys as ghostwriters is, to many, unethical. But it presents a distinct concern that others have yet to interrogate misattribution disparately impacts underrepresented members of the legal profession.
This article fills that space by offering a quantitative analysis of the gendered disparate impact of normative authorship omissions in law. Using patent practitioner signatures from patent applications and office actions, which include a national identification number correlated to the time of patent bar admission, this work demonstrates how women’s names are disproportionately concealed from the record when the senior-most legal team member signs on behalf of the team. This work illustrates that, when women reach equivalent levels of seniority, they do not overexert their power to claim credit to the same extent as their male peers. This parallels sociological findings that competence-based perception, accent bias, and perceived status differentiation between male and female colleagues can manifest in adverse and disparate attribution for women. The gender gap in the legal profession is exacerbated through this practice by falsely implying that women do less work, are more junior, and do not deserve as much credit as their male colleagues.