It's the time of year when The Modern Law Library hosts like to look back on the media we've enjoyed, our annual pop culture picks episode. This year, host Lee Rawles is joined by three ABA Journal reporters: Julianne Hill, Amanda Robert and the Journal's newest employee, Anna Stolley Persky. Naturally, the four discuss their favorite books, but they also have movies, TV shows, podcasts and even a play to recommend. From documentaries to audiobooks, listeners will find ways to occupy the holiday season and the new year. For the full list of recommendations, go to ABAJournal.com/2023picks.

Human beings have told stories about violence and victims from our earliest records. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, newspapers and magazines flourished on crime coverage. Hollywood has churned out crime movies and TV shows, based both in fiction and non-fiction. But after the incredible success experienced by the podcast Serial in 2014 and the documentary series Making a Murderer in 2015, a new wave of popular media exploring real cases of potential wrongful convictions burst upon the scene. While Diana Rickard didn’t consider herself a “podcast person,” her interest as an academic was piqued. The criminology professor began listening to Serial, and became fascinated by what she saw as a new expression of the true crime genre, dubbing it the “New True.” “These series deserve our attention for what they reveal about our societal understanding of crime and punishment,” Rickard writes in her book The New True Crime: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence. “Through them, audiences are receiving ideological messages about punishment. They are also sites where inequality, power and racism are openly examined, playing a role in our public conversations about who is and is not deserving of punishment and who is and is not protected by law. In addition, by using the term ‘New True,’ I am also suggesting these series indicate a new way of constructing truth itself. Questioning the finality of verdicts, framing facts as in the eye of the beholder, the new series unmoor our faith in what is knowable.” In this episode of the Modern Law Library, Rickard explains how she sees the New True podcasts and documentary series as differing from older media. She and the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles discuss the differences between crime reporting and this serialized storytelling, and whether the New True series are managing to avoid some of the ethical pitfalls of traditional crime reporting. They also delve into whether debunking things like flawed forensic science or false confessions for the general public may have shifted the way people think about wrongful convictions. Rickard shares what she has heard from legal experts in the innocence community about the benefits—and drawbacks—of cases catching the eyes of New True producers. She also reveals what surprised her most when she researched the Reddit communities that gather to discuss New True cases.

Legal professionals are not immune to the pull of platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts. Some are even using short-form videos to inform clients about their law practice; build their business or brand; or shed light on the culture of BigLaw, crafting short-form video content giving an insider look at the profession. Among them is Alex Su, a former lawyer and head of community development at Ironclad, a contract management software company.

Like many others, Jon Kung figured law school would be a safe harbor to weather the storms of the Great Recession. But after emerging from the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law in 2011, Kung changed course.Kung, who is non-binary, says the realization the practice of law was not for them hit after they helped the local prosecutor’s office achieve a conviction in a murder trial. They received a full-time job offer with that office, but decided to turn down the job offer and look for other work. Over the next several years, they established themselves in the Detroit culinary scene, hosting secret pop-up dinners and dumpling classes, and honing their take on “Third Culture cuisine.” Kung was born in Los Angeles, and spent their childhood in Hong Kong and Toronto before landing in Michigan for college and law school. Their recipes combine elements of Chinese and North American cuisines and cooking techniques. “This new fusion that I’m referring to as ‘third culture’ takes a more thoughtful approach to the genre,” Kung writes in the introduction to their new cookbook, Kung Food: Chinese American Recipes from a Third-Culture Kitchen. “Third culture embraces each side as equal, drawing from a lived experience that is immersed in both or multiple cultrues, once again taking the mentality of the American culinary renaissance that came around in the 2010s and granting the rest of us the ability to take part in it.” In this episode of the Modern Law Library, Kung discusses their new cookbook with the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles—who made the Beef & Broccoli Potpie, the Shrimp Paste Dumplings and the Parmesan-Curry Egg Fried Rice from the book—and shares their favorite meal tips for starving law school students. Kung also shares how they went from word-of-mouth pop-ups to social media fame. In 2020, when the pandemic made their pop-up meals impossible and the murder of George Floyd prompted massive protests in their home state, Kung began using their TikTok account @jonkung as a place to find community and share recipes. They quickly began gaining followers, and started being approached to partner with brands on projects like developing recipes based on anime series. Kung shares the story of how they were offered the publishing deal for Kung Food, and what it’s like to be a social media influencer.

After 13 years and 170 episodes, Asked and Answered host Stephanie Francis Ward is hanging up her headphones and switching off her mic. Asked and Answered, the ABA Journal’s first and longest-running podcast, is ending its run—at least for now. In this final episode, Ward discusses her podcast tenure with the Journal’s Lee Rawles. Ward recently accepted a new position within the ABA Journal as an assistant managing editor after a long reporting career covering legal education and general legal affairs. They chat about the podcast’s humble beginnings with an episode about alternative billing released on April 5, 2010, and the changes Ward has observed in the legal community over that time period. A major shift Ward identifies is an increasing willingness to talk about mental health struggles and work-life balance. There has also been a sea change in attitudes towards remote work, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Ward and Rawles—host of the Modern Law Library, another Journal podcast—discuss the rapid pivot they had to make when the pandemic shut down the ABA offices and podcasts had to be recorded at their homes instead of a media room. They discuss some of their favorite episodes from the past 13 years, and which topics feel dated—like “How Can Attorneys Use Google+ to Generate Business“—versus more timeless issues lawyers face. One evergreen Asked and Answered topic Ward returned to in several episodes was helping lawyers navigate social anxiety in business and rainmaking situations, and Ward shares some of her favorite tips she’s gleaned from guests. Finally, Ward thanks the listeners who’ve accompanied her on this journey and urges them to stay in touch with legal tips and pitches. The Journal’s other two podcasts, the Legal Rebels Podcast and the Modern Law Library, will continue to be released on their normal schedules.

“You can’t think yourself out of trauma,” the introduction to Trauma-Informed Law: A Primer for Lawyer Resilience and Healing warns. “An analytical response is insufficient. As lawyers and law students, we have been trained to learn only with our minds. But there are other epistemologies—other ways of knowing and interacting with the world.” Trauma-Informed Law, published by the ABA Law Practice Division, arose as a collaborative effort between Canadian lawyers Helgi Maki and Myrna McCallum and American lawyers Marjorie Florestal and J. Kim Wright. It seeks to suggest not only how lawyers can provide better client service to traumatized people, but also how lawyers, law students and judges can deal with their own traumas. Maki points out many people say that while the initial incident that brought them into contact with the court system was difficult—be it a divorce, an assault or a contract dispute—their experiences once inside the judicial system were harder to bear and caused more emotional damage. What other profession, she asks, would accept that as an outcome for its clients? In this episode of the Modern Law Library, Maki and the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles discuss the impact of trauma on the legal profession, and the ways researchers have seen it impact people on a personal and systemic level. Lawyers may be reluctant to label their own experiences trauma, but Maki explains vicarious trauma, and how burnout is a “cousin” to trauma. One element the book stresses is how important it can be for judges to become aware of how trauma can impact everyone in a courtroom, and basic measures that can be taken to decrease the risk of causing further harm during courtroom proceedings. The ABA House of Delegates recently called for more research to be done on how court workers are impacted by what they see at work and by threats to their personal security. Maki and Rawles also discuss ways legal professionals can build support systems without endangering client confidentiality, and how law schools can prep law students for the inevitable challenges they will face in the profession.

One of the areas that has already felt the effects of ChatGPT and other large language models is contracts. Users can now use these AI-enhanced tools to help them quickly draft, analyze and review contracts. All you have to do is type in what you want, and the tech does the rest. Of course, it isn’t that simple. The technology is still in its infancy, and there are limits to what it can do.

Moving from a “win-lose” mentality to a “win-win” mentality has been a central focus of the field of negotiation and conflict resolution since the 1980s, says Sarah Federman. Working to walk away with a deal that pleases both sides was a huge departure from the idea that one side of a transaction will necessarily lose. But Federman, author of Transformative Negotiation: Strategies for Everyday Change and Equitable Futures, proposes that we can and should adapt our framing to encompass a “win-win-win” mentality. A win-win mentality “attends to the interests only of the signatories, not of those who live out the consequences of the agreement,” Federman writes. “A win-win-win model requires paying attention to those usually not at the negotiation table.” In this episode of the Modern Law Library, Federman discusses with the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles how traditional advice around negotiations—from salaries and corporate contracts to landlord disputes and personal lives—makes assumptions based on what’s worked for people who have traditionally held positions of power. Those assumptions could be outdated, unhelpful or actually harmful to minorities and others who have been economically or socially disadvantaged. Transformative Negotiations was written with four goals, Federman tells Rawles: To help people move “from precarity to stability;” to expose the blind spots in the field of negotiation studies; to propose a new approach to negotiations that addresses oppression; and to show people who do have bargaining power how they can use it to “create more equitable futures.” Advice Federman shares in this episode includes how woman can approach salary negotiations, how to achieve more economic stability through “inbox colonics,” and why being the nosy neighbor can get people through tough times. She also discusses why bonding events like firm happy hours can actually backfire on employee morale, and how firms can not only hire diverse workforces but successfully retain them.

Admittedly, Tara M. Stringfellow became an attorney simply because her first book of poetry didn’t sell and she needed an income. But after a few years at Crown Castle in Chicago doing family and real estate law, she left, heading straight to the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at Northwestern University to get back into the writing game—this time with a lawyer’s sharpened pencil.

When lawyers hear the term "LLM," their first thought may go to a master of law degree that a person earns after law school. However, the acronym also stands for “large language model,” which is technology that generates and creates writing for offerings that include ChatGPT and Google Bard. The technology doesn’t know what is accurate—that’s where lawyers come in—but the writing is impressive, it could make legal writing better and you could even use it as a writing coach, says Greg Sarab, a technologist and a lawyer.