Reading Time: 7 minutes
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. One of the things I’ve been looking forward to in my new role is teaching. The calendar has rolled around and I was asked to teach next fall, which is really exciting. I’ll be teaching a course on law practice technology, which is also a long-time goal. A goal that was heavily intertwined with my relationship to my oldest mentor. I went to look up his address and learned he’d died this summer.
Ray Bishop was an extraordinarily compassionate man whose creativity burned so bright. Ray, and his partner, Don Shelton, hired me as a runner in their law firm when I was 15. Law firms were part of work life until the end of law school—including dalliances in a medical clinic, a movie theater, a frame shop, a pub, a deli—but it all started back then.
Looking Back
The files in the law office were all labeled and that’s what I learned: which folders got which labels, which papers went in which folders. Over time, I learned the highly organized filing system that Ray had devised for this small law firm (I think we had 7 lawyers and 5 paralegals, plus a couple of back office staff) was far more than labels and folders. Every client had a large binder, filled with checklists and forms that the firm used from the very first interaction with the firm. Everything that could be captured was. The binders were customized based on the type of case: automobile negligence, medical malpractice, and so on. In a bit of foreshadowing, he sold them through the local Institute of CLE (ICLE) to share his experience.
Ray was also deep into technology so I was using very early PCs and the law office was on a local area network (LANtastic!). He was heavily involved in what had become the Section on Law Practice Management, which he chaired in the 90s, but had started off with the ABA’s Economics of Law Practice Section, the LPM’s precursor.
I remember a lot of my time with Ray, which overflowed to helping out his family: babysitting, yard maintenance for his wife’s Realtor properties, typical teenage work. His laugh was amazing, just unconstrained and frequent. I learned by watching Ray’s face the difference between someone who really smiles a lot and someone who is just faking it. The muscles don’t sit right when you’re faking the smile.
It’s only in hindsight you see the teaching, I suppose. One time, I was hoping for a raise over the pay I was currently getting. By that time, I was working for his software company, Future Law. While I had been in university, Ray had hired a developer to create one of the very early case management applications. No surprise, it was a digital representation of a lot of his thinking about how to organize a case.
This was the first time I’d asked anyone for a raise. I don’t even remember why I felt I needed or deserved it. But I remember Ray’s question distinctly: I know what you want, but what is it you need? We were a shoestring start up and he wanted to find a way to help me reach my goal but also keep in mind that shoestring. I think about that whenever I talk to someone about money in their career: do you need more money or are you seeking something else?
The product was called Privilege. It set a bar that most case practice management software hasn’t reached since. While a lot of legal software is “by lawyers, for lawyers“, it usually represents a single way to do things: the way those lawyers practiced. Privilege was, to its commercial detriment, hugely customizable. It recognized that most lawyers practice in a very individualized way. It also required a lawyer to understand their own processes, so they could automate them. That, plus time, became a huge challenge.It failed to make the leap to Windows 3.1.
Ray also attracted smart people who worked with him, no matter his current endeavor. The law firm’s office manager (whose kids I ALSO babysat!) eventually worked for the software company too. When she learned I was going to law school, she had a simple question: “Why?” She would repeat it as time got closer to me going.
To be fair, my experience with lawyers in those first years was not great. I think I saw every possible personality type. I saw the problems with substance abuse, the broken marriages, the supremely abusive lawyers who may or may not be a result of the pressure they operate under. I ended up working at 4 law firms before I landed in libraries, and these personalities reappeared in each place. Every so often, I would see someone like Ray but never as happy, never as fulfilled.
Mary’s question wasn’t meant to dissuade me from law school. But she, much more than I could imagine, knew what I was getting myself in for. I would not be the first person who entered law school with one expectation and came out the other end with a very different one. I’m not sure that’s changed in the 30 years since started law school. It’s a bit like people wanting to work in libraries because I like books. Uh, let’s talk.
The more I’ve thought about it over the years, and given Mary’s own arc in eventually working with libraries, I wonder sometimes if she wouldn’t have suggested libraries if I’d been open to it. It was a small law firm so there were no law librarians. But information management and retrieval and organization were the thread that I pulled all the way from Bishop and Shelton through to law school and my final law firm, McGlinchey Stafford Lang.
There’s no question I am who I am today in part because of my time working in Ray’s law firm and his software company. I attribute some of my best parts to Ray’s influence. I would check in with him periodically. It was fun to introduce Ray to my wife and to receive some wisdom before moving to a new stage.
I like to think he would laugh loudly at my joy and reinforce my own excitement with a ton of questions. Hopefully questions I would be asking myself: how are you going to impart this topic in a way that means those students, when they graduate, will be better prepared to deal with the reality of practice?
Looking Forward
I’ve already started to sketch out the content for the law practice technology course. When I popped open the ebook I wrote a decade ago, I’m finding that my thinking hasn’t changed overall. Now that I think about it, with Ray in mind, I expect I’ve always thought about legal technology in this way: how do you follow information from intake to file close?
In a way, the topic will be the easiest part. The teaching is what is at the front of my mind at the moment. One thing I’ve learned as a library director, is that there are a lot of folks who do things that would benefit from a bit of training. We promote people to manage without having seen them manage, for example. When we do that, we should ensure they get training or resources that will help them succeed.
Management is a lot of small activities based on science. That isn’t to say it’s exact. But over time, you start to see the same biases, the same lack of procedures and process that undermines staff confidence, the opaque activities that reduce staff autonomy. You can walk into a new role or visit someone else and start to pick up what works and what doesn’t. Experienced managers will act in a certain way because they have seen the issue before. New managers can be trained to look for the issues, because we know they’re going to occur, and that the ways to respond to them will result in pretty consistent outcomes.
I’m taking the same approach to teaching. As I look back, I’m not sure who the last person who actually taught me was. Admittedly, I was a terrible student. But the more I learn about teaching, the less I recognize it in my own experience.
My favorite law school professor may have been Arthur Murphey. When he called on students, he would ask, “Mr. Whelan, are you prepared to discuss …” whatever. I always was, in his class, but I have thought often about how that gave me the opening to not be ready. He retired right after I graduated. The next time I saw him, he was in dungarees and gardening outside the law school. What a role model.
I’ve been reading Small Teaching by James Lang. It was mentioned during my orientation over on main campus, where I was one of a bunch of new faculty (the only one from Law) getting exposed to our teaching training resources. This was eye opening to me, in part because, while I knew I would need to build this skillset, I didn’t know there’d be so many resources to support me.
Reading Small Teaching has been illuminating and I mean that in the best sense. It has given me a lot of practical ideas to use in my teaching. But it’s also lifting the fog and highlighting where my own teaching—in a couple of library schools, at a law school—really was not much different from what I experienced in law school. It’s always a good sign when you learn something and you can see the incremental improvement or direction change from what you have done in the past.
Small Teaching has become a bit of an empire, from what I can tell. There is also a volume co-written by someone else that focuses on online teaching. I’ve taught online for multiple semesters. I’m confident that I was not doing it as well as I could have.
My teaching prep has also been very different from my management reading and learning. Perhaps it will change over time as I get better. When I had a management challenge and it was something I was uncertain about or had not faced before, I would often focus very narrowly on it. I’d grab an article or a book, read it, absorb it, and then go to work.
So far, I’m finding that my teaching reading is leading me to more threads to follow. One book leads to another, and more thoughts about how I can teach. Small Teaching has led me to Mindsets, which I’ve just started. I can see how, when I enter a classroom, word choice and deliberate framing can make such a huge difference beyond your course.
I’m called a member of the junior faculty, which I find hilarious. I wonder if I’m the oldest junior faculty member they’ve had! It’s so much fun, though, to have the opportunity to get a chance to restart a skill from scratch. As a library director, I never felt that there was ever time away from managing. There’s always another decision, another challenge, and you course correct and improve by making mistakes first and then making fewer over time.
Could a new law library manager or director read and prepare in advance? Maybe. I read a long book with advice for academic library directors and I found it less helpful than I found more generic management and leadership advice. For someone planning a move into management, I think the path to success lies being deliberate about learning what you don’t know. You can wing it but you don’t need to, and few decisions are so immediate that you can’t take a moment to read something or ask someone.
There are all the mechanics to work on in the future too: the syllabus, the courseware, and so on. But even there, learning to think about things like backward design (shout out to the RIPS SIS blog which had a good post using those principles recently) is so helpful. Things that seem so obvious in hindsight but certainly weren’t things I’d been asked to do, let alone thought to do on my own.
It does make me wonder how many law school faculty have the resources we have, and are encouraged to teach law school courses like teachers. I really don’t have any idea and it’s been so long since I taught in a law school. Since I came from the context of being asked to teach without having any teaching education or credentialing, I can see where faculty, especially adjuncts, are just slotted into a course and asked to “teach”, which seems to mean “impart your knowledge in a coherent manner”. But there is clearly so much more to it than that. It would be like asking a law library director to come in and “just make decisions”.
I am looking forward to getting myself ready for teaching. And I am also looking forward to reflecting some of Ray’s wisdom, and humor, and unrelenting curiosity about law practice technology, putting the what and the why together. His legacy doesn’t need me to honor him. But I’ll be thinking of him when next fall’s semester begins.