« November 12, 2006 - November 18, 2006 | Main | November 26, 2006 - December 02, 2006 »
November 25, 2006
Getting it together for 2007.
Clients, employees, delivering services. Step back from your canvas a little. Get back to the real work of long-term planning. Tough decisions. Fine tuning. A brush stroke here and there. Peek out from under your billable hours during the holiday rush, and think-- maybe do a little self-ass kicking. Employees and clients are your main assets. Who at your firm gets it? Who will never get it--even though you like him or her? How best to staff this or that project? New types or niches of work? Which clients are draining you and need a new law firm? Are there new clients to target? This is the hard but joyous discipline of renewal. While you are at it, see Tom Collins' post "Nine Steps to Improved Law Firm Financial Performance in the Coming Year" at More Partner Income. Or anything Tom writes.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
Music for Young Lawyers: "Another Billable Christmas"
Heads up, associate lawyers, but also partners because you have more money. First, turn your speakers up. Just keep your meters running, Bluebooks out, and billable hours high (to hit 2350 by December 31, if you're on the wimpy side). Then, to get you in the mood for the holiday season, and to help you work with a song in your stomach, see New York lawyer Lawrence Savell's "Merry Lexmas From The Lawtunes"! Larry gives you a great sampler at his Lawtunes.com site, but you'll want to purchase the full "Lexmas" CD and other CDs for your very own.
Maybe buy some for your Mom, and high school friends, who won't be seeing you that much this Christmas anyway. My favorite could be "Santa And I Are Gonna Pull An All-Nighter On Christmas", or maybe "All I Want for Christmas Is A Stomach Lining" - not sure yet. Oh yeah, Larry, the composer and creator, told me in an e-mail that that's him singing on these. Even if Larry weren't a friend of my friend Patrick Lamb, I'd hire the guy. He's got Moxie, Madness and The Spirit. And he knows how to treat associates. Now get back to work.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
Don't try this at work: Stern dumps (on) his "client base".
From Forbes.com, see Has King of All Media been dethroned? Whether you like him or not, Howard Stern is a great man, good soul and extraordinarily successful entertainer who has done gutsy things for radio, comedy and the 1st amendment. But taking his show in the middle of a hugely popular run on a syndicated CBS-owned FM radio station to Sirius satellite radio in 2004 and in effect repudiating his "client base"--for whatever reasons--was a dumbass move. The guy and the un-PC world he created will survive, but there's a lesson here: if it works great, don't dump on it.
Posted by JD Hull at 03:20 AM | Comments (0)
November 24, 2006
"I'm There for you Baby" Gets International.
"I'm There for you Baby", with serial over-achievers Neil Senturia and Barbara Bry, airs at its regular time tomorrow. Tune in to San Diego's CA$H 1700 AM, 1-2 p.m., West Coast time, or listen "live" via simulcast on the CA$H web site. This week includes: "The best and brightest are coming to the United States to seek their entrepreneurial fortunes--we should welcome them." ITFYB is about dreams, running a business, clients, employees and money.
Posted by JD Hull at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)
November 23, 2006
"Customers are always..."
If you haven't seen Maria Palma's Customers Are Always blog lately, you should. There are consistently good pieces of advice here by someone who knows, cares about and lives and breathes real service. Presented here are customers and clients as both valued people and business assets--without a trace of cynicism or negativity. It's all real.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
The First Company: Massachusetts Bay Colony (1630-1691)
Or, more precisely, the Massachusetts Bay Company, which founded the Colony. Wikipedia, which I distrusted at first but now increasingly rely upon, does a nice job with the story of the "first" American company and company town.
Posted by JD Hull at 04:37 PM | Comments (0)
A New Blawg.Org
Blawg, Bill Gratsch's clearinghouse for legal weblogs, is about to enter its 5th year. Blawg just acquired a new format and look. In addition to past features, there's an even better organization of blogs by category, including World Blawgs. Blawg now even has its own blog, Blawg Blog.
Posted by JD Hull at 03:59 AM | Comments (0)
Blawgosphere: "A Generous Place".
If like me you are relatively new to blogging, or even if you consider yourself to be an old hand, please see "Blawgspace is a Generous Place (2006)" at DennisKennedy.com. It revisits a 2003 Dennis Kennedy post. Consider it part of the "legislative history" of blawging which too many of us know too little about. Note the mention of the "First Ones."
Posted by JD Hull at 12:25 AM | Comments (0)
November 22, 2006
KR Watch: The Huckster Comes Through.
WAC? nearly missed that on November 10, and as he had promised last summer, hip and ambitious Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee pardoned Keith Richards over a 1975 reckless driving/concealed knife arrest and related guilty plea deal and fine. Good move--for Keith, anyway.
Posted by JD Hull at 06:11 PM | Comments (0)
November 20, 2006
Borat: Aggressively un-PC, Disturbing, Wonderful.
Speaking of not-PC, ten days ago I saw Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, a spoof about a goofy anti-Semitic eastern European journalist created and played by a Jewish comedian and actor. It's not for everyone, but Borat is marvelously demented, inventive and painfully on-the-mark satire. A Vanity Fair reviewer called the movie a mirror Americans could hold up to themselves. I saw Borat in a theater of the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of conservative Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a Jewish enclave of that city, and one of very few locations in western Pennsylvania where Borat was shown. The audience, one of all adult ages, howled.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
Fertile new 4th Amendment/international law: Mini-Sub Stops.
Where will it end? One Sunday you and some buds are just tooling around in your sub off Costa Rica and the U.S. Coast Guard stops you, for no reason at all.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)
Blawg Review #84
BR #84 is hosted this week by Transcending Gender and is, like Jen Burke's other sites and works, thoughtful, way beyond androgynous, feisty. This was refreshing, and also well done. Burke is an author, lawyer, photographer, thinker, leader, activist and more--and she's apparently good at all of it. Bravo.
Posted by JD Hull at 10:32 PM | Comments (0)
November 19, 2006
The War on Jargon, Legalese and Other Goofy Speech.
See Jay Shepherd at Gruntled Employees on the demise of legalese, cop babble, corporate-speak and the McDonaldsization of language: "Abandoning Jargon 'At A High Rate Of Speed'".
Posted by JD Hull at 12:25 AM | Comments (0)