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July 30, 2011
It's Saturday morning. Know where your wife or girlfriend is?
Willie Dixon: "I-YAM..."
Posted by JD Hull at 09:28 PM | Comments (0)
July 29, 2011
Genevieve (422-502)
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
July 26, 2011
Redux: "Liking" Your Clients.
I'm no Stephen Covey. I suspect that burning inside each employee is an overwhelming ambition to Get Home, Eat Twinkies and Watch Wrestling.
Life's short. Work is important. If your work is not mainly fun, find a new gig. Work at that. Many, if not most, lawyers, I am convinced, simply don't even like what they do for a living. They went to college, law school, got married, had kids, some hard knocks.
And then they watched in slow-motion horror while their choices in life hardened around them. Education, and professional schools, are supposed to set you free--not land you in an upper-middle class prison of dashed hopes and failed plans.
Happiness, right? That was the main idea.
What business is it of mine that lots of lawyers are miserable? Answer: If you want to have a half-assed life, fine. I've come close to that myself--and fought and muddled my way out more than once. But please don't hurt your clients. And please don't repel people from entering and staying in the profession who might make fine lawyers except for the bad example set with your defeat, angst and misery because you don't like your career.
And all that disenchantment translates into settling for second-rate work, and "mailing it in"--at best. That's the worst of it. I see it every working day, especially at other law firms. You just don't love what do, folks.
You don't even like It.
Look, I am no Stephen Covey. I am less wise, less nice and, unlike Covey, strongly suspect that smoldering inside each employee, even well-educated and highly-paid ones, is an overwhelming ambition to get home, eat Twinkies and watch wrestling. But liking your work, in all but the rarest cases, makes your work better.
The quality of your work is, I think, perfectly--almost mathematically--commensurate with your attitude and your degree of contentment at work. You don't like work. So you do mediocre work. You dumb down hard things. Not even bad work--just barely adequate work. (Your clients actually pay you for that?) It makes me want to secretly send you an application for employment at Starbucks. It makes me angry.
If you're a professional, you need to like what you do. Period.
So maybe "liking" your clients helps? Yes--I think it does. See Rule One from our infuriating-but-accurate 12 Rules. I am not the only one who's noticed. In November 2008, I had the honor and pleasure of finally meeting lawyer-consultant Tom Kane, as well as his talented son, a new lawyer, on their turf on Florida's brilliant Gulf Coast. See at Tom's Legal Marketing Blog this one: "Enjoy Your Practice and Your Clients". Excerpt:
The solution: spend your marketing and business development efforts and resources seeking the legal work and clients you do enjoy. Don't waste your marketing time or dollars on the rest.
Above: Despite an often serious demeanor, Tom Kane can help you get your "fun" thing on.
Posted by JD Hull at 10:59 AM | Comments (2)
July 25, 2011
Mr. Franken of Minnesota: All Couples Good Enough, Smart Enough, Equitable Enough.
So far he's been a good Senator for Minnesota, the Dispossessed and the Left. We don't have to agree with him on everything. We like the cut of his jib. He's become important to the national conversation. Our friend and Renaissance man Al Franken did an e-mail blast Sunday morning:
There’s no good argument against marriage equality. There’s no good argument for the Defense of Marriage Act, one of the most unfair laws passed in my lifetime. And there’s no good argument for leaving it on the books.
By Waghorn
Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)
July 20, 2011
Today, Yesterday, Los Angeles: Pitches, Dreams, Log Lines, Drive & Money.
Alien, 1979, directed by Ridley Scott: "Jaws" in outer space.
Stills, 1989, novel by Samuel Hazo: Years after a celebrated war photographer loses his young wife to a stray bullet in Lebanon, disappears, and is presumed dead, he surfaces in Manhattan, and meets a young woman making a documentary about his life and work.
The Wizard of Oz, 1939, directed by Victor Fleming: Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)
July 18, 2011
Washington, DC: It Never Lost Its Glow For Me. Not Once.
Law is the ultimate backstage pass. It's the new priesthood.
Make fun of D.C. all you want; but if you've never spent 3 to 4 years here, and ideally working and living downtown, you did miss something. Never a mere technician, a good Washington, D.C. lawyer is a thinker, doer, creator, planner, problem-solver, consiligere and true trusted adviser. And no lover of routine. His or her firm is not just a shop--but a laboratory for new ideas. Not for law cattle practicing cookie-cutter law.
The range of things lawyers do here is amazing. The variety alone can suck you in forever; each morning, it fires the imagination.
And I'm happily prejudiced. I was born here. I trained, worked and still live part-time here. I made lifetime friends and enemies here. But you won't meet better lawyers. Or people.
"Aggressive", generally, is a very good thing in this city.
"Professionalism" means putting clients first--not wimpy cocktail party civility that is "all about the lawyers" and the many local bar associations that straddle the area. Swearing--and even insults--here are often okay. Not unprofessional. It's not about the lawyers.
Screwing up is never okay. Very unprofessional. Folks won't tend to hide that for you. You're own your own, Jack. Try not to screw up. So sorry; we won't coddle your malpractice here. Go back home for that charade.
Lawyers are everywhere here; it's not enough just to be one. No one cares you're lawyer. They ask themselves--and the bolder ones will even ask you directly--this question: how good a lawyer are you really? Pecking order is complex, nuanced and important.
Talented and feisty folks choose to move to Washington; they are not "stuck" here, or here by default. The city brims over with energy and personality. A rich library of people with moxie and talent.
from past posts beginning June 2006
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
Picasso, Guernica and the German Officer: "Did you paint this?"
Here's a WWII story I first heard in 1992 in Paris from a struggling young Irish painter named Richard hustling his drinks and a living by his wit, humor, charm and talent on a few choice blocks of the Right Bank. I never found out what happened to Richard. But ever since I've thought about this simple and apparently fairly well-known Picasso story at least once a week, and especially lately.
Thinking about the story accelerated in 2005.
In the Fall of that year, Julie McGuire and I were together in Madrid. We made time to see Guernica, very likely Pablo Picasso's most famous painting, and some other great modern Spanish works, at the Museo Reina Sofia in central Madrid. Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 after both German and Italian bombers shelled Guernica, in Spain's Basque Country, on April 26 of that year, during the Spanish Civil War. The bombing by Germany and Italy happened at the request of Spanish Nationalist forces. The painting is an outcry, protest and lament of the self-assured, polite, smooth and famously composed Picasso.
The smallest details of the story seem to change. But historians and journalists seem to agree on the following:
In 1942, during the 1940-1944 German occupation of Paris, German officers often visited Picasso's Paris studio at a time when some of his paintings were being burned as decadent. On one visit, an aggressive Gestapo officer found a simple postcard with an image of Guernica in the studio. The officer confronted the painter, and held before Picasso's face the postcard with its breathtaking indictments of war, national pride, meaningless death, pointless suffering, waste, government hypocrisy, inflamed leadership and self-destruction.
"Did you do this?", the officer asked.
“No, sir. You did."
(from a 6/1/11 JDH post)
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 03:31 AM | Comments (0)
John Herschel Glenn, Jr: Happy Birthday to a Crowdpleaser's Crowdpleaser.
This, Willy Loman, is what well-liked looks like. Twelve years after his 1962 earth orbits, John Glenn began to represent Ohio in the Senate. No one I know can remember anything he did in those 4 terms. But he didn't need to do anything. My fellow Buckeye was hands down the the most popular American from 1962 until 1999, his last year in Congress. He out-Iked Ike, and even seized upon the power of television before JFK. Ballsy. Unflappable. Our only Superstar Astronaut.
Born July 18, 1921, Cambridge, Ohio.
Posted by JD Hull at 12:32 AM | Comments (0)
July 11, 2011
Legal Intelligencer: "Exploring Early Settlements: Sign of Weakness or Ethical Duty?"
See this one in Philadelphia's Legal Intelligencer by Charlotte Thomas of Duane Morris. And if you represent litigation-savvy corporations, think about advocating early settlement in the context of business-to-business disputes. For those clients, it may be an even easier sell. Excerpts:
It is not a sign of weakness to try to settle a case early. It doesn't mean that a lawyer views her case as tenuous and has decided to throw in the towel. Nor does it mean that a lawyer is scared of a prominent opposing counsel or the thought of a jury trial. After all, most of us chose litigation for the thrill of trial, not because we are afraid of it. Rather, trying to settle a case early usually is the right thing to do for our clients to save money, time and the psychological commitment of litigation.
The Rules of Professional Conduct can be read to prescribe an ethical duty to explore early settlement options in litigation. Rule 1.4 directs lawyers to "reasonably consult" with a client as to strategies to accomplish the client's objectives. An attorney-client discussion about settlement is a necessary component of any discussion of litigation "objectives," since settlement is the outcome -- if not the express objective -- of most litigation. Rule 2.1 adds that a lawyer's duty to provide independent professional judgment and candid advice should take into account economic facts that may be relevant to the client's situation.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
July 09, 2011
Elizabeth Bloomer Ford (1918-2011)
Posted by JD Hull at 04:07 AM | Comments (0)
July 05, 2011
"Scientific" Evidence at the Casey Anthony Trial: Come to think of it, it bothered us a little, too.
See at Deliberations "The Real Danger from Casey Anthony's Trial: Scary Scientific Evidence". Excerpt:
A cause of death that cannot be determined by the State’s medical examiner, but can be asserted on the stand by an anthropologist who has never done an autopsy. The morphing of a projected child’s photo into a picture of her skull. The description of a colorless decompositional fluid (which is typically black). Air samples that contain "the smell of death." A phantom image of heart sticker that “disappeared” before the examiner could return to photograph it.
Posted by JD Hull at 07:30 AM | Comments (1)
July 02, 2011
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 - July 2, 1961)
Pulitzer Prize in 1952. Nobel Prize in 1954.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
Hull McGuire's Bennet Kelley: He's First in the 'Hood.
Bennet Kelley's Cyber Report on internet law just won First Place at the Los Angeles Press Club's Southern California Journalism Awards for Best In-House or Corporate Publication. Judges Comments: "Lots of news and info on an emerging field of law (and business), presented simply with lots of links for even more information." We take back some of our comments in previous posts about Bennet. So Internet Law has a future, eh?
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
July 01, 2011
The Economist: Fiscal Angst and Agony in Greece.
The Economist/Eyevine
So you think America has problems? Yesterday's The Economist tries to make sense of the ongoing and painful debate in debt-ridden Greece over a fiscal rescue plan. See "What have we become?" Excerpt:
Theodoros Pangalos, the famously blunt deputy prime minister, put it even more starkly. If Greece were to break with its would-be saviours and launch a new drachma, local banks would be besieged by panicked depositors and the army would have to keep order. “The shops will empty, and some people will jump out of windows,” he told El Mundo, a Spanish daily.
(Last year Mr Pangalos irked some compatriots, and impressed others, by saying that ordinary Greeks, as well as the political elite, had wasted the loans and subsidies that rained down on the country: “We ate it up together.”)
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 06:43 PM | Comments (0)