Sunday, September 29, 2013

On the (business) media

I generally enjoy APM’s Marketplace podcast, notwithstanding the host’s all-too-frequent use of the phrase “c’mon, man.”  But in a recent episode, the host interviewed an Ivy League business school professor about “meetings.”  In short, there are about 11 million business meetings in the United States each day.  About half of those surveyed said that about half of their meetings were unproductive or not a good use of their time.  The prof’s conclusion: limit the duration of meetings to force the attendees to be more productive, thus getting more done in less time.  Superficially, that sounds fine.  But on closer inspection, here is my list of complaints about the podcast:

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Hiatus (and some fun links)

Knightly is on summer hiatus
Sorry for the delay since my last post, faithful Legal Watchdog readers.  To make matters worse, Knightly and I are tied up with some other projects and need to extend our hiatus a bit.  But in the meantime, I'll do what most other blogs do: link to other posts while adding nothing of value.  First, Atty. Joe Easton tipped me off to this post about a law in Florida that allows criminal defendants to collect litigation costs after they win an acquittal.  (For further analysis, click here to see what Florida's rather striking attorney general says about the law.)  It would be nice to have something like this in Wisconsin to make our hyper-aggressive prosecutors think twice before filing criminal complaints.  Of course, until they got the message and learned their lesson, the taxpayers would ultimately end up paying the tab.  But in the long run, the change in prosecutorial practices would be worth the short-term price.