« March 08, 2009 - March 14, 2009 | Main | March 22, 2009 - March 28, 2009 »
March 21, 2009
A Cambridge degree. An Oxford education.
More Celtic and Brit quirk. For all you godless, dancing and (according to National Geographic yesterday) flesh-eating druids out there in America and western Europe, March 21 is the traditional date of the vernal equinox (this year it fell yesterday, the 20th). Spring and re-birth begins. Time to do the Antler Dance, hit Stonehenge, make oaths, worship Oak trees, fight naked, eat, that kind of thing. But it's also the date on which Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, Cambridge-educated scholar, clergyman and Reformation leader, was burned at the stake at Oxford in 1556 after Catholic Queen Mary came to power.
Reviews on Cranmer, part-politician and part-preacher, are mixed. On the 21st, and after already being sentenced to death, he "withdrew" previous "recantations" of his anti-papal positions that might have saved his life. He was a devout Anglican, after all. He had wavered, except on that final day. Forget about doctrine, and Europe's holy wars, silly and sad in retrospect. Not the point. In the end, Cranmer had serious sand.
Posted by JD Hull at 10:11 PM | Comments (0)
March 18, 2009
Marketing and Client Service: Your staff must "buy into" them.
Now more than ever. We've repeatedly said about Client Service (or "ease-of-use") and your employees: "Buy into it or leave". Your firm can be cool-hip-irreverent about everything else. But not Client Service. Same for Marketing--which in service professions you are always doing anyway as you work. See Tom Kane and WAC's "Rule 3: Ensure Everyone Knows That The Client Is The Main Event". Make CS and marketing details part of your evaluation criteria for all employees, and all working shareholders.
Posted by JD Hull at 12:07 AM | Comments (0)
March 16, 2009
Talk about an employer's market.
"Hi. I am nobody from nowhere--and I am about to eat your lunch." ALM's Legal Blog Watch: "Lawyers Can't Even Find Work for Free". Which raises the question: would you strut your stuff for free (1) to showcase yourself, (2) to get experience or (3) to keep sharp? If your answer is "no", we predict that you are about to meet--and be upstaged by--some of the most ambitious people with JDs on the planet. Of all ages and pedigrees. Right now, Blaise, our waitress friend from night school, is figuring out a way to eat your lunch.
A bad economy for Teacups and Weenies.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:42 PM | Comments (0)
A moving tribute to the Human Spirit.
And to drunkenness, madness, small animals, the secret Ree-Lax Parlor in DC's West End, "dooce"-bags, Kelly's Irish Times Saloon, Ruthie, and far more deplorable pleasures of the flesh. Enough to curl Freud's hair. To make a blind man see. To send a Good Man straight to Hell laughing about it. Some really sick stuff--especially if you're from Elkhart, Indiana. Slick, too. It's rendered under a cheap, transparent pretext and gloss of Art, Literature and The Classics. Long. Larry Flynt and Madonna were each too freaked out and flustered to get through the whole thing.
Well-written, though. Very.
In short, Blawg Review this week does not disappoint. It is the real Barrister-Prince of Darkness in rare form--even for him. But there are far more unsettling things in this world than a London Lawyer messing with you: reading the books of Mormon or Revelation for the first or twentieth time, an hour in any Target store, or watching American lawyers employed by insurance companies (their real clients, as they see it) argue discovery motions on Fridays in courts all over and knowing they will get paid for it.
So in perspective, but still out of its head, GeekLawyer's Blawg Review #203 is wonderfully eccentric, even revolting, but it hits home, and (gulp) it's dang funny, if you have any sense of the English: XXX-rated, in campy vile taste, and arguably pregnant with a new industry of actions for defamation, slander per se and false light privacy that will pump new life into any lulls currently experienced by First Amendment lawyers in New York, DC and LA.
Just kidding. In your button-down lawyer world today, you may behold offensive movies, "bad" pictures, "bad" language, the F-word all over the place, by golly. If you are appalled, don't read it all, dog. Bonus Badness: it will set back trans-Atlantic relationships about 50 years.
Southern Brits: a quirky but sick race. We've tried to tell you.
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 10:14 PM | Comments (2)
LexThink March 29-30: Head Heartland, Young Man.
The next LexThink is Sunday and Monday, March 29-30, 2009 at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri.
Even the payment terms are innovative. If we can, we will send someone from Hull McGuire PC. Will all depend of course on actual length of this year's St. Patrick's Day recovery period--generally a fortnight (about 13.5 days average) so we'll be cutting it close.
Do visit LexThink: Innovate for details. Designed by Matt Homann, our friend, adviser and entrepreneur-lawyer-international consultant--his recent travel schedule makes WAC?'s seem provincial, pedestrian, pint-sized, paltry--who was looking freshly at things before that was cool. Go see Matt in Missouri this month. Catch him in the Heartland before he heads back to Europe.
Matthew Homann in repose.
(photo by E.T.Attorney)
Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)