« May 21, 2008 | Main | May 23, 2008 »
May 22, 2008
Ford CEO Mulally: Tough times
Rising fuel and steel costs mean reduced production and profit goals. Bloomberg. The Guardian. The Detroit Free Press. AP. Good news: we'll get smaller cars on the road.
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
Ted Kennedy
To be Irish is to know that in the end, the world will break your heart. --Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Call me a cultural stereotype. A boomer. A limousine liberal. I don't care. Ted Kennedy being diagnosed with malignant cancer of the brain floored me. I don't even know why.
Long ago, Duke University, which changed my life in a number of ways, awarded me my first paid desk job to work for Wisconsin's Senator Gaylord Nelson. With some help from my father, I rented an overpriced and horrible little apartment across the street from the hospital on Washington Circle where I had been born 21 years earlier, and excitedly entered the world I'd been seeing on television since I was in my early teens growing up in the Midwest. That first sunny Monday morning in May, I walked all the way to work, zig-zagging down Pennsylvania Avenue, and then up Constitution Avenue, well over two miles total, just to take it all in. But I walked in a hurry.
The Hill job was in health policy, and I was asked to follow and report on the work of the busy U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Health, chaired by then 42-year-old Ted Kennedy. I saw Kennedy up close a lot during committee sessions and mark-ups during the next 3 months. (A few years later, I worked again on Capitol Hill, and lived there for many
years. I'd see him around. Today, if I were lucky, he might recognize my persistent face if he saw me--but I certainly wasn't important those first 3 months.) But way before that, as the "last Kennedy", he was always part of the soundtrack of my life and my friends' lives since we were in our early teens. But he was more than a name, mystique and the booming populist oratory and Gaelic cadences of speech which come naturally to him.
For me, Ted Kennedy has never been about ideas, legislative agendas or even the Kennedy schmaltz: the hope, the dream that never dies, the struggle, all that. He left that music to others, like to his uber-aggressive brother-in-law, Steven Smith, and to his staff. I just never saw Kennedy as an ideologue, even when he ran for the American presidency--which I bet he never really wanted. A character out of a novel, he's simply as Irish as they come: brooding, playful and contradictory. Quietly but definitely war-like. He's smarter than people think, and remarkably adept at sifting through and making sense of too much information thrown at him. In the main, though, he's passionate, human, even poetic--and vulnerable in all the best ways.
Like lots of senators, he's also distracted as hell, even endearingly spacey--but warm and charming, a natural politician, easily the best in his family. He can turn that on and off. Like Bill Clinton, and for whatever the reason, Kennedy genuinely likes people; it's not for show. Watch the guy in a crowd. He's at ease once he's there. He physically resembles most, and is most like, his mother Rose, the family saint and caregiver. And that soulfulness, I think, helped him to be very good at his job. Family friend and economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said that Ted Kennedy was the best U.S. senator he'd seen in his lifetime.
Finally, the last Kennedy is as wounded as they come, too. Try, if you can, not to cry when you watch a clip of his eulogy of his brother Robert in 1968, when he was 36. Kennedy's voice cracked badly, and I can't forget the sound of him as he struggled to finish the speech for his older brother. It wasn't about politics, ideas, or even about anyone's family. The sound was pure grief and loss, unashamed.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)
HRC: Until the last dog dies.
That's a Bill Clinton Ozark mountains expression. We have always liked it even though WAC? writers (and Hull McGuire lawyers) are very split among the three candidates still punching, and we have some stalwart if calm Clinton dislikers. But wondrous, irrational keep-your-options-open optimism is very American. Sometimes it works. From today's daily Hillary Clinton campaign e-mail update: "On May 31, we'll hear the decision from the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee on whether they'll seat the delegates from Michigan and Florida". But, she continues, "Puerto Rico votes in 10 days, and the last primaries in Montana and South Dakota are just two days later, and...." See Salon's "She's in it to spin it".
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
How To Work With A Weenie, If You Must.
Two fine posts on Gen-Y, Gen-X, Boomers:
Scott Greenfield, NYC, Simple Justice, "Hull to Gen Y Lawyers: Get It or Get Out". Greenfield is a criminal trial lawyer and writer.
Jordan Furlong, Ottawa, Canada, Law21: Dispatches From A Legal Profession On The Brink, "How to Work with Boomer Lawyers". Furlong is Editor-in-Chief of National magazine at the Canadian Bar Association.
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)
Got proofreading?
Proofreading errors are avoidable, even under the gun--if you make ardor in proofreading a habit.
Take invoices to clients. Invoices, if done correctly, are a great way to communicate what you've done for a client and they can even serve as a marketing tool. They are a genre of documents we all need to get right. Clients can always be expected to read them. So they need to be really "right", right?
Lawyers don't talk about proofreading enough. It amazes us that badly proofread pleadings and letters still emanate from some of the best American and European law firms. It mars and even desecrates otherwise good and sometimes brilliant work. Mistakes will happen in
law practice in any event--but the idea is to minimize them, and especially those you can control. Proofreading errors are avoidable, even under the gun, if you make ardor in doing it a habit. Our recurring nightmare is that the GC of our best client says: "If at $___ an hour you guys can't spell [or write], believe me, we can find a law firm tomorrow morning that can." For that reason, as mentioned in a 2005 WAC? "Just Say It" post on writing for lawyers, Rule 5 (of 8) in the good writing section of our firm's Practice Guide is:
5. Proofread, proofread, proofread. (Oh yes, at our firm, we have a written policy on proofreading you must actually sign before you start work. Go ahead, laugh.)
"Pretend that, for every typo you miss or grammatical error you make, you have to buy Dan Hull as many Heinekens as he could drink in one evening in his late twenties on St. Patrick's Day in the most expensive Capitol Hill watering hole he and his friends could find."
Together with thinking and writing simply and clearly, there's no more important habit for a lawyer to develop. Misspellings, omitted or misplaced words and off-the-charts bad grammar are often important errors which blot out otherwise good work--and ones we can control.
It's that simple.
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:59 AM | Comments (2)
Learning well
Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.
--William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), poet and statesman.
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)