The Wall Street Journal law blog is featuring Mark Herrmann’s The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law this week.  The series started today with a review and an excerpt from the book on defending depositions, and the blog promises that excerpts will continue through the week. If you’d like to go whole hog and buy the book [...]
Bruce MacEwen, author of the fascinating Adam Smith, Esq. blog, has written an interesting piece about CMS Cameron McKenna, the #13 firm on the UK 100. As described in this article, the firm has moved from a two-tier partnership to a single tier. Even more interestingly, to manage the firm’s intolerance for underperformance, the partners are [...]
I found an interesting article titled, “We listened to associates, Now partners have to do their bit” in TheLawyer.com. The article describes Allen & Overy’s new career management and reward structure for its associates. The following paragraphs jumped out at me:
Naturally, the plans have some practical benefits for the firm. By sweeping away the annual [...]
Someone recently found this blog with a search on “All Lawyers Are Assholes.” Yes, complete with the initial caps. After I quit laughing (and got over being briefly miffed that this search implies that I, too, am an asshole simply because I’m a lawyer), I started wondering whether the searcher was looking for confirmation of his/her [...]
Have you heard this distinction before? All sorts of management experts talk about how people can work more efficiently, more effectively, maximizing the results of time. Some of them even have good ideas.
I’ve been thinking about what it means to say that practicing law is hard work. I don’t have any question that it is [...]
It’s often easy, and rather in vogue, to think that practicing law is a drain, a burden, incompatible with having a personal life. Sometimes that’s true. If it’s more often than not true for any individual lawyer, there’s a problem that needs a solution — a new way of approaching practice or managing your energy, [...]
JD Hull has a terrific blog called “What About Clients?(tm) “Â You can probably guess the focus, and I encourage you to check it out.
A recent post titled WAC?’s Usual ‘Muscle Boutique’ Rant Gains Currency? includes the following:
It’s time for lawyers with the right credentials . . . [to] chuck . . . your work-life balance [...]
Thinking of leaving the law? Over the last couple of weeks, the JD Bliss blog has featured several stories about lawyers who’ve left the law or found a way to combine practice with creative pursuits like making jewelry and writing. And if you’re a lawyer nurturing a creative dream, read This Time I Dance: Creating the Work [...]
Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to the degree to which one is:
*Â aware of one’s own feelings,
*Â able to discriminate among those feelings and to manage them to faciliate appropriate responses,
*Â able to motivate oneself despite feelings of self-doubt, inertia, etc.,
*Â able to recognize others’ emotions based on various cues,
*Â empathetic to others’ feelings, and
*Â skilled [...]
Timesheets routinely come up as a bemoaned part of practice, something that no one likes to do.  Many lawyers develop the habit of doing timesheets in bulk, usually at the end of the week but sometimes at the end of the month. That’s a terrible habit for a wide variety of reasons.Â
Unless your notes are truly [...]
October 30, 2006 
