I have for years edited or co-edited three legal treatises, first for Oceana Publications, then for Oxford University Press, and now, for West/Thomson Reuters. These are:

• Trademark Practice and Forms (Oceana/Oxford, 2001-2011; West/Thomson Reuters 2011-present)
• World Online Business Law (Oceana/Oxford 2003-2011; West/Thomson Reuters 2011-present)
• Digest of Commercial Laws of the World (Oceana/Oxford 1998-2011; West/Thomson Reuters 2011-present)

I look forward to working with the new publisher.

This was a Texas Lawyer piece from early 2009 concerning an interesting development at the beginning of my legal career in 1991–92, as a result of the last recession. Wait, make that three recessions ago. This explains how I ended up getting an LL.M. in London.

(See also New Publisher, Co-Editor for my Legal Treatise, and how I got started with legal publishing.)

Past, Present and Future: Survival Stories of Lawyers

By Brenda Sapino Jeffreys and Miriam Rozen

Texas Lawyer

April 27, 2009

Thompson & Knight partner Paul Comeaux Image: Mark Graham

Editor’s note: These are grim times for law students and associates, with Texas firms laying off lawyers, cutting summer associate programs and deferring start dates for incoming first-year associates due to a troubled economy. So Texas Lawyer decided to talk with attorneys who have experienced tough economic times in the past and those dealing with the current fallout to put a face to what’s happening in the legal employment market.

BigTex firms have scaled back before because of economic conditions. In 1991, for instance, Dallas firm Jackson Walker asked a number of its incoming first-year associates to consider a one-year deferment in

exchange for a stipend. Two lawyers who took the firm up on that offer say it turned out to be a positive experience and helped boost their careers. But does the past offer lessons for today’s associates? We talked to a lawyer laid off from a BigTex firm who’s hunting for a new job, as well as to a Bracewell & Giuliani associate who transferred to the New York City office when she noticed her Houston corporate practice was slowing down. Here are their stories.

Europe or Bust

Friends Paul Comeaux and Stephan Kinsella were preparing to graduate from Paul M. Hebert Law Center at Louisiana State University in 1991 and start work as first-year associates at Jackson Walker in Houston when they received a tempting offer from the firm: If they deferred their start date for a year, the firm would pay them $21,000.

While $21,000 doesn’t sound like much today — and it was only a net of $14,000 because it included a $7,000 acceptance bonus — Comeaux notes that his first-year starting salary was $55,000. That’s about a third of the current starting salaries for first-year lawyers at BigTex firms.

“They had too many lawyers coming in,” Kinsella says, noting that Jackson Walker wanted up to 15 of the incoming associates to take the deferment, and he recalls that about a dozen did.

Kinsella says he and Comeaux discussed their options, and both decided to take the deferment and use the time to get an LL.M. degree in international law from King’s College at the University of London. [continue reading…]

LSU Law Professor Saúl Litvinoff passed away yesterday. As noted in the LSU Law Center press release about this, Litvinoff was a true giant in the field of civil law scholarship.

Professor Emeritus and Boyd Professor of Law Saúl Litvinoff, whose impact on the legal traditions of Louisiana spanned more than 43 years, died earlier today. [continue reading…]

My article “Radical Patent Reform Is Not on the Way” was published today (Oct. 1, 2009) in Mises Daily.

***

Hardly a day passes when we do not hear of one patent abuse or another.[1] Ridiculous patents are issued or filed and companies are enjoined from selling their products. Judgments are issued, and settlements reached, for billions of dollars. (See the Appendix for examples of ridiculous patents and outrageous judgments.) Not surprisingly, there is a growing demand for reform of our patent system.[2]

Whether their demands are modest or radical, the reformers share the belief that the patent system is broken; has gotten out of hand; and is not in sync with our fast-paced, high-tech, open-sourced, digitized world — in short, that it needs to be fixed.

FULL ARTICLE

[Mises crosspost]

In the Fall 2009 issue of LSU Alumni Magazine, “Tigers in Print” section.

After launching in 2002 as one of the first blawgs (see my July 23, 2003 post, Blawgs; also Blawgs: More Than Just Fluff, Corporate Counsel, March 2003;  Legal and Appellate Weblogs: What They Are, Why You Should Read Them, And Why You Should Consider Starting Your Own, Spring 2003), my blog went into substantial hibernation as I concentrated on my practice. Part of the reason was my increasingly-outdated web design.  I’ve now re-launched the blawg, with PJ Doland’s help, moving it from its 7-year old, now-outmoded PHP-based design to a modern, new WordPress design (using the Thesis theme–simple, plain, and elegant).

Stay tuned…

See Book Recommendations: Private, International, and Common Law; Legal Theory

My friend Misty Khan has a good interview on Startup Houston about her company, Advena Artemis, and the launch of her software, HuntressPro. It’s an Outlook Add-in for sales contact management. It “provides contact management functionality such as call lists, referral source tracking and sales activity reporting”. Up to now she’s being doing customized versions of Huntress for customers, and is now releasing a downloadable software package with various optional plug-ins specific to various industries (e.g., for realtors). I know several customers of her earlier customized version in Houston and they all seem happy with it. (Competing products include ACT, etc., but Huntress has some advantages over it.) I’ve begun to experiment with it myself even though I’m not in sales, because it will be useful for some of the legal treatise editing work I do where I need to routinely contact or “touch” dozens of authors around the world for different phases of the publishing (initial contact; followup for due dates, etc.).

Still, though I’m finding a way to use it for my own non-sales need, HuntressPro is ideal for salespeople and sales teams who want to manage their follow-ups, contact information and sales activities directly from Outlook. It basically turns Outlook into a proper contact management software (what some people call “Customer Relationship Management,” or CRM). I highly recommend any sales professionals give this a gander.

If any of you know any salespeople or companies with sales forces that might benefit from this, feel free to pass this on. Check out the interview for more info.

Latest review of my 2005 book International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide, by Anne Hoffman, an international commercial and investment arbitration attorney with Python & Peter:

Book review

[by: Anne K. Hoffmann, Python & Peter; forthcoming in Arbitration International N° 3, 2007]

International Investment, Political Risk and Dispute Resolution – A Practitioner’s Guide by Noah Rubins and N. Stephan Kinsella. Published by Oceana Publications, a Division of Oxford University Press (2005), 769 pp. Price £90 [$155], ISBN 0-379-21522-5

The proliferation of arbitration proceedings conducted on the basis of BITs, and in particular the auspices of ICSID, naturally led to an increase of publications addressing this issue and the changing landscape of arbitration over the last years. Books dealing with this issue are often commentaries, basic introductions to the procedure of investment arbitration or reviews of investment awards.

The present book is different. It integrates the important issue of dispute resolution into the broader scope of international investment, explains the risks, in particular the political risk, associated with international investment and the legal framework of investment protection at large. It thus broadens the perspective of the reader and allows him to see beyond the everyday issues of the interpretation of the effect of an umbrella clause or the meaning of fair and equitable treatment in a BIT by placing these specific issues into a broader context and showing their interaction with others.
The book commences by analysing the role and effect of foreign direct investment on the global economy of the modern world. Thereafter, it is composed of three parts. Part I deals with the assessment and pre-investment management of political risk. Part II addresses the international law framework of investment protection and political risk and part III covers the issue of dispute resolution and political risk. Each of these three parts is subdivided into chapters and sub-chapters. When reading the first part, the reader, inter alia, is introduced to the various types of political risk and their measurement, is shown features which will help minimising the political risk, such as stabilisation and arbitration clauses as well as clauses guiding tribunals with regard to damages and interest rates. Lastly, he is familiarised with the various types of investment insurances existing. In part II, the authors explain the international law framework of investment protection and political risk, i.e. issues of international law in general, of state sovereignty, state responsibility and state immunity. The authors address the remedies for both states and investors under international law and their prerequisites before shedding some light on history and development of the customary international law of expropriation and investment protection, and thus those today often-used terms like indirect and creeping expropriation or national treatment. Finally, they deal with the substantive law of contemporary international investment protection. The lawyer who deals with investment arbitration will be familiar with this chapter as here – after introducing the network of modern bilateral and multilateral treaties – investment standards such as prohibition of expropriation without compensation, fair and equitable treatment, full protection and security, the umbrella clause, compensation methods etc. and their application are discussed. Lastly, in part III, the reader will be introduced to the jurisdictional particularities of investment arbitration, such as nationality requirements, exhaustion of local remedies or “forks in the road”, to the various arbitration rules relevant in this context as well as some of their prominent features. In the final chapters, the authors address the rather seldomly discussed topic of conciliation of investment disputes as well as the intervention of states in investment disputes. At the back, the book contains a variety of useful appendices, e.g. bilateral investment treaties of selected countries, an OPIC insurance contract, the Washington Convention as well as a compilation of online resources.

Thus, the first part of the book focuses mainly upon “practical” issues, namely on identifying political risk and reducing the chance that these risks will materialise. The second part addresses first general legal issues relevant to investments before focusing upon dispute resolution. It therefore is both a useful practical guide and competent source for newcomers and experienced practitioners alike in relation to international law and investment treaty arbitration where it explains general principles as well as concrete case law which has developed over the past years. Naturally, the book addresses the main cases which had an impact upon a certain issue, but will not discuss all cases decided in the context of investment arbitration – it is not a case commentary. Nevertheless, it contains vast footnotes which permit the interested reader to follow up on certain problems easily. At the same time, it explains to the practitioner less familiar with the running of an international arbitration proceeding the necessary steps from the notification of a dispute up to oral argument, including the difficult situation of the defaulting party – all of this with a view to the specificities of an ICSID arbitration and easier to access as other writings on this topic.

This book is not a lightweight and does not make for good bedtime-reading. Not being a classic law book, it is a guide which should find its place on the shelf of the person dealing with foreign investment who is interested to explore the various aspects of foreign investment and political risk in their broader context and with a particular emphasis on the legal aspects of this field. This will include, but not be limited to, the issue of dispute resolution. It is thereby well-suited for beginners in the area of investment arbitration attempting to find their way around a relatively new area of law as it covers the relevant issues comprehensively without getting lost in a degree of detail which will be the next step on the ladder of investment protection.

The authors described their goal as to write a guide which would “enable the investor to appreciate the risks associated with government interference in property rights, to minimize those risks and deal effectively with their consequences. But we also hope to promote understanding within host governments about investors’ expectations and concerns, to allow them to avoid conflict and maximize the benefits of foreign direct investment for their countries and constituencies.” The authors succeeded and thereby made a valuable contribution to exploring this topic.