« October 22, 2006 - October 28, 2006 | Main | November 05, 2006 - November 11, 2006 »
November 03, 2006
Happy Birthday to Justin Patten's Human Law
One of my favorite sites in any jurisdiction is Human Law, by English lawyer-consulant Justin Patten. HL turned one this week. Justin doesn't know yet, but I may finally get to meet him in person, on his own turf, in Hertfordshire, north of London, early next year. Justin, client-focused and an expert in employment, defamation and copyright/IP law, is the only British affiliate at Law.com's Legal Blog Watch. Quite an honor. Cheers, and our compliments, sir.
Posted by JD Hull at 10:59 PM | Comments (0)
Part II: Tennessee Senate Race: 'How would Jesus vote?'
From NBC News, by Brian Williams, here's "It’s Mud Over Issues in the Volunteer State" in Harold Ford Jr. v. Bob Corker. A Williams quote: "Hand-to-hand combat for votes."
Posted by JD Hull at 05:35 PM | Comments (0)
Arsenic, Old Graves and Green Funerals.
From Jason Goodman, Managing Editor at Water and Wastewater Products magazine, one of the better management-side environmental news publications out there, here's "Arsenic and Old Graves", an interesting post-Halloween piece.
Posted by JD Hull at 03:59 AM | Comments (0)
November 02, 2006
Moving South: Kitzbühel, Austria
Kitzbühel, even older than Mainz, is a medieval city in the province of Tyrol, Austria, near the river Kitzbühler Ache. The Illyrians, a war-like lot originally from the Balkans, mined copper around here starting between 1100 BC and 800 BC. Around 15 BC the Roman Emperor Augustus occupied and claimed this area--by that time the old Celtic province of Noricum--which included the Austrian Alps. After the fall of the western Roman Empire, the Bavarii tribe settled in the Kitzbühel region (around 800). So Kitzbühel is old, with a 12th century wall around much of it, small, beautiful, historical, and a bit slow--and loads of fun for those with pluck.
Traditionally, before non-Austrians and Yanks found it, the region was like The Hamptons or a resort for wealthy and proper Austrians, who detest all forms of anarchy, even jaywalking, especially in the larger towns like Vienna. But Kitzbühel has loosened up a bit. Well, a lot. It even has decent jazz. Drinking happens. You can stay in a small castle which is now a small hotel. If my crack law firm can make a couple of ultra-goofy matters we are defending for corporate America go away, and I can get my alleged girlfriend to come with me, I will pass through here again around St. Patrick's Day to see a client rep and to attend meetings of the IBLC. Clients love the alleged girlfriend--and she can sell. And in Kitzbühel, she can ski, which for many is the point of the region.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
View from Germany: Daimler To Dump Chrysler?
"Will Daimler Shed Itself Of Chrysler?", by Dietmar Hawranek at Spiegel International. Excerpt:
[A]s long as Chrysler is still showing billions in losses, the company will be hard-pressed to attract the interest of any other automaker. This means that DaimlerChrysler must first make its US subsidiary profitable again before it can even consider selling off even part of the company.
Posted by JD Hull at 08:59 PM | Comments (0)
Mainz, Germany
With a strong mix of Celtic, Roman, Frankish and Jewish roots, Mainz is very old (founded by Roman General Drusus in 13 BC), and built on the Rhine. About 190,000 people live here. Near Frankfurt, and to many a part of Frankfurt's western edge, Mainz is Johann Gutenberg's town. For years, our firm has acted for a manufacturing client just north, and another client with a plant just south, of Mainz--but I'd go out of my way to stay here. For me, this is where the Rhineland begins.
Posted by JD Hull at 02:27 AM | Comments (0)
The rise, sort of, of legal weblogs.
Do I think blogging is (a) important or (b) the wave of the future?
Answers: (a) no, and (b) I have no idea. However, blogging, currently, due to its evolving role as a clearinghouse, lab and media outlet for the success or failure of new ideas, is telling us where the best of the legal profession will be in 10 years. It's attracted some well-respected law and business minds, and their firms along with them. In the near term, "blawgs" have become a way to keep abreast of events and developments in business law in particular at almost lightning speed. Whether you have a blog or not, there's a huge payoff in reading them. Not reading legal weblogs a couple of times a week may very well be something we do at our peril.
Frankly, that has surprised me. Blogging by lawyers is no fad. But a really good, consistently good, blawg is hard to find. Most, but not all, of the great ones are by "full-time" bloggers, usually lawyers and often consultants.* To keep a good one going, you need a unifying concept, ideas, energy and discipline, especially if you still practice law. Do realize that, if you do have a blog, in-house counsel for publicly-traded clients do like legal weblogs. And why not? Blogs are damn cute, currently popular and show your tech-ness.
But what GCs really like, however, are Working Lawyers. They really don't want to see a 500-word post on "The Mood of the Beltway" or "Why I Like Plato, My Cat" the day before your 4-week IP/antitrust jury trial starts at the Eastern District in Alexandria. And consider this, too: if a GC or associate GC for ACME International has time to read your "blawg" every day, well, that may not be a good sign re: the GC or this company. Blogging for most of us is not the main event--and it shouldn't be.
* I can think of about eight (8) "greats" offhand, 5 of whom I "know". I would identify them but all 8 of these talented people are hopelessly vain and self-absorbed pains in the ass. It's why I like them.
Posted by JD Hull at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)
Newton's Law: "Third Wave Law Firms"
WAC? always did like Texans. A man with a true virtual law firm, Texas lawyer Chuck Newton at Spare Room Tycoon has burst of fine posts on the law practice of the future. I've posted about Chuck's month-old blog and his Third Wave Firm ideas before. Others may have done what Chuck has done--but this man's turned virtual into a religion. From his bio:
My law firm does not maintain a traditional office or offices that most consumers typically associate with law firms. We have no... reception area in which to be ignored, no meeting rooms for client visits, no file room in which to lose files, no law library, no messy private office for the firm’s attorneys to hide. We have no walls to hang our licenses and diplomas, no rec room to chat with staff over coffee and donuts, and my firm’s shingle hangs from no building. Look in any phone book and you will see no yellow page ad for my firm.
We try to be the king of the Internet. We use email, Internet telephony, Internet faxing, electronic case filing, and Internet research, both to and from computers and other devices. There is virtually no one that cannot be reached, and no document that cannot be received or delivered, by phone, fax, email or (if no other alternative) mail any place in the State of Texas or the world. My law firm and I believe that staying connected allows us to tear down the barriers that keep us from our clients and their objective.
But there are these other blogs Chuck's got, like One Liberal Sum' Bitch, subtitled "One Blue Guy in a Red State" and featuring Chuck TV. Whoa. Go visit Chuck Newton.
Posted by JD Hull at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)
October 30, 2006
In Praise of Structure.
Do we lawyers know how to get things done, done right and done on time? Do we even value that? I wonder.
I am not talking here about the simple "keeping face" and survival requirements of meeting client deal or court deadlines, or even about the cliches of working hard, creative thinking, "out of the box", working smart or being persistent. I mean structure, a real standard, and "practicing structure" every day--the discipline of (1) having a plan or strategy for any one project, client or non-client, (2) meeting internal project deadlines no matter what, and (3) applying the will to work that plan and timetable.
"Structure" is not just the hard process of getting things done. It's a frame of mind and a value which must be sold to others in your shop--like the importance of making that 5 minute call to a client about a loose end at the end of the worst day you can remember, even while you could do it the next morning at 8:00. It's realizing that letting anything but emergency tasks "slide" makes you inefficient, unlikely to meet your real goals, and tired.
Do you get up early every day with a idea of what needs to be done on each project, and knowing the difference between "important" and "urgent"? Example: Monday is your deadline to have the final changes and notes to your web designer on your new firm website, an important but not urgent project you've talked about at internal meetings for months. So far, for once, you have been on track. But on Monday a longstanding client calls with two new projects; the new projects are exciting but not THAT urgent in the sense they need to cut into internal deadlines and other goals for Monday. You need to take some first steps, though, to get on top of the new matters for your client. After all, these folks are the main event.
Key ongoing internal project v. new client project. Which gets the most attention that day? Which slides? Answer: they both get attention, and neither slides. The website (long-term important) and the new client project (short-term important) are both critical projects. Years ago the Stephen Coveys and Edwards Demings out there pointed out that business people burn themselves out by waiting around only for "the urgent" in a kind of manic crisis management that keeps other important things from ever getting done or ONLY getting them done when they morph into a crisis. For lawyers, other examples would be only respecting deadlines like transaction closing dates and court-filing deadlines--to hell with everything else.
For a long time I've thought that American business schools and the training programs of global and often publicly-traded companies do a much, much better job than do law firms of training recruits to value and adhere to the structure of a plan on an item for action. It's almost as if law school and firms deem us all such "professionals" and "artists" that we are beyond learning skills of project planning and execution. What a crock. Not learning the value of pushing non-urgent but important things along at a steady pace has cost us dearly. As motivated as lawyers often are, our discipline for sticking to anything and seeing it through is often poor; again, unless it's urgent, we just don't see its value. Do our best clients run their businesses that way?
This attitude is the norm, and we lawyers--who rarely innovate or take a leadership position on anything in commerce--are just fine, thank you, with it. After all, "all the other law firms" are mediocre on the discipline of getting things done, and have "crisis-only" mentalities--why shouldn't we be that way? So we waste time blowing off important but longer term projects. Worst of all, we send to others in our firms, and especially to younger lawyers, the message: "No worries--just work on a barely adequate level; don't do things until you have to; and if it's not urgent, let it slide." As with client care and service, our standard is not only embarrassingly low, we are exporting that low standard internally whenever and wherever we can.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
October 29, 2006
Work-Life Balance This.
It's Sunday, near the end of October. This week offers us all a series of ancient harvest and life-death cycle observances with Pagan, Celtic, Roman and even Christian roots. Halloween (also called "Pooky Night" is some parts of Ireland) is just a faint shadow of this celebration of the awesome powers in the Cosmos.
U.S. kids of course love this week for its costumes and candy. Some cultures and religions commune a bit more seriously with the spirit world this week. But for me, a boring Anglo-Saxon Protestant who grew up in Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, it's just Fall (and a chance to catch again on TV two of the funniest movies ever made: The Exorcist and The Shining).
So inspired and assisted by an e-mail from my college and, later, Washington, D.C. roommate--friend, Super-father, husband, thinker, doer, outdoorsman, environmentalist, Duke and Columbia graduate, man of letters, journalist and author of, among other things, the acclaimed The Trade Warriors: USTR and the American Crusade for Free Trade (by S. J. Dryden, Oxford University Press)--WAC? offers, in an audio reading by Robert Pinsky, and in print below, John Keats's (1795-1821) poem To Autumn. And I can't improve on my friend's introduction to the poem:
"Give it up for my man John Keats and his poem To Autumn!"
1
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom‑friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch‑eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er‑brimmed their clammy cells.2
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on the granary floor,
Thy hair soft‑lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or, on a half‑reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinéd flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider‑press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.3
Where are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too—
While barréd clouds bloom the soft‑dying day,
And touch the stubble‑plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full‑grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge‑crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden‑croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.September 19, 1819
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
Writing Well: LH Wordsmith
From Arnie Herz at Legal Sanity, see "The Next Wave of Legal Sanity", and learn about LH Wordsmith. This is Lori Herz's new company. Arnie and his wife Lori have stayed on the cutting-edge of client service, good lawyering and practice management ideas. Both are fine thinkers and writers. And only two or three writers in the law blog community are as good as Lori. Period. If you or your clients can get Lori and LH Wordsmith to help with writing, jump at the opportunity.
Posted by JD Hull at 01:15 AM | Comments (0)