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April 22, 2023
Salzburg, Austria: Mozart, salt, Huns and lawyers.
You may dream in American. But you still live in the world.
Salzburg, Austria. Far from being a museum piece (e.g., Venice, sadly), and being a favorite on the tourist's short list of cute small Alpine cities (e.g., Kitzbuhel, perky but less storied) in Europe, Salzburg is best appreciated by digging deeply, no pun intended, and with a reverence. Celts settled Salzburg, where they mined salt. The salt commerce never stopped--and in later centuries barges floated tons and tons of it on the Salzach River to points all over Europe. By the 8th century, salt barges were subject to a toll. Rome had claimed Salzburg around 15 BC. Much later, around 800, Charlemagne ate and slept here. It was capital of the Austro-Hungarian territory between 1866 and 1918. Apart from Mozart, art, salt, ancient Celtic culture, St. Peter's (below) and restaurants carved into cliffs, this staid Austrian city is home to the International Business Law Consortium, an established (1996) group of over 100 first-rate law and accounting firms in strategic cities worldwide. What more could a new age road warrior and her clients ever want? Well, frankly, Mainz, Germany is pretty cool--but we'll save that for a future post.
St. Peters in Salzburg.
Original post: May 18, 2010.
Posted by JD Hull at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)
Earth Day 2023, Edition No. 53
Today is Earth Day, No. 53. The first was on April 22, 1970. It was started by the late U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.), and organized and led by Denis Hayes, National Coordinator for the 1970 Earth Day, and since then a mainstay leader, thinker and writer in the environmentalism movement.
Senator Nelson was a lawyer, outdoorsman, true Wisconsin character, ex-governor and hardworking legislator. To get an idea of him, see my 2005 remembrance of "The Earth Day Senator", which appeared in Environmental Protection Magazine after his death in July of 2005. In Nelson's very first speech as a senator--in March of 1963--he had argued that reductions in America's air and water quality to be a pressing national issue. .
"We need a comprehensive and nationwide program to save the natural resources of America," he continued. "Our most priceless natural resources are being destroyed."
Step right up, folks. This was new and different 1960s-era stuff. Conservation and protection of natural a resources--once the province of civics classes, the scouting movements, and a few scattered organizations like the Sierra Club--was about to become national, emotional and political.
Six years later, Nelson tapped Hayes to launch the first Earth Day. Denis Hayes has been student body president at Stanford University, and an activist against the war in Viet Nam. After Stanford, Hayes was attending Harvard's Kennedy School of Government when Nelson in 1970 hired him to spearhead the first Earth Day.
Hayes himself became a leader, solar power advocate, author and main driver in the then-new environmental movement. See this past post on his widely-discussed new book (with his wife Gail Boyer Hayes) "Cowed: The Hidden Impact of 93 Million Cows on America's Health, Economy, Politics, Culture, and Environment."
Earth Day is now observed in 193 countries.
Nelson
Hayes
Posted by JD Hull at 07:59 AM | Comments (0)
April 21, 2023
The Best of Partner Emeritus: On Stewardesses.
Flying is not the fun it used to be. If you came of age after The Great Neutering, here's some great American cultural and client service history you may have missed. See the nostalgic exchanges between commenters back in January of 2016--back when it had comments--at David Lat's Above the Law in "Former Biglaw Partner Who Got Wasted On Plane And Caused Flight Diversion Charged With Airplane Assault." Seventy-eight comments. Below is a sampling:
I miss the old days of flying first class on Pan Am. The stewardesses were very friendly, smoking a cigar was not taboo and slapping a flight attendant’s posterior was greeted with a “you’re a feisty one aren’t you?” Nowadays, you get placed on the “no fly" list for innocuous conduct.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:52 PM | Comments (0)
In Praise of Real Girls: Parker Posey
They're picking up prisoners--and putting them in a pen. All she wants to do is dance.
--Danny Kortchmar/WB Music Corp. ASCAP (1984)
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Get "Party Girl" (1995) and watch her dance in the last scene. Add Ms. Posey to our Pantheon.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:44 PM | Comments (0)
“106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses.”
Posted by JD Hull at 11:01 PM
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April 20, 2023
Bring Back Real Girls: Audrey Tautou
b. Beaumont, France 1976
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
Read Fischer’s Albion’s Seed
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12 Rules of Client Service
...are right here. Revel in their Wisdom. Ignore them at your Peril. Teach them to The Help.
Posted by JD Hull at 08:59 PM | Comments (1)
JDH IV smirk at 23. Highland Park beach.
Posted by JD Hull at 12:23 AM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2023
Happy 53rd Earth Day. Thank you, Sen. Nelson.
Happy Birthday. Earth Day. 4.22.1970. Thank you my first boss Gaylord Nelson and Denis Hayes.
Posted by JD Hull at 05:02 AM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2023
The Wrong Stuff?
What if the regime of diversity, inclusion and equity produced a substantial breakdown of the day to day management of the Western world and the collapse of most of our physical infrastructure? Because I think it really could. And soon.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
Writing Well: The Editors.
"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft." --H.G. Wells (1866-1946)
"I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse." --Henry James (1843-1916)after a request by the Times Literary Supplement to cut 3 lines from a 5,000 word article.
Herbert George Wells, 1908
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)
Norman Cousins: But can you write?
It makes little difference how many university degrees or courses a person may own. If he cannot use words to move an idea from one point to another, his education is incomplete.
--Norman Cousins, Editor and Writer (1915-1990)
Cousins in 1951 on Ninoshima Island (Chugoku Shimbun)
Posted by JD Hull at 11:14 PM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2023
Frederic Leighton, “The Return of Persephone,” 1891
Spring ignored Mankind and arrived as usual. Finally. Happy Spring to any fellow Druids, Life Worshipers and Optimists. Get out of your cars and dance.
Below: Frederic Leighton, “The Return of Persephone,” 1891.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
April 16, 2023
Rule 4: Deliver legal services that change the way clients think about lawyers.
Based on actual experience lawyering, we wrote and published 12 Rules of Client Service in installments during a six-month period starting in October 2005. The 12 rules do seem to have legs. We are flattered. In whole or in part, they regularly appear in publications and sites for lawyers and non-lawyers (e.g., accounting and real estate). Some folks who discuss, quote or mention them like all 12 rules. Others like one or two in particular.
Our favorite? It's Rule Four: Deliver Legal Work That Change the Way Clients Think About Lawyers. It's our "Harry Beckwith" rule. Harry Beckwith, who first ignited the thinking of many professional services thinkers in "Selling the Invisible", was a huge influence on how we could make changes in everyone's lawyering--and the idea here is really his, not ours. An excerpt from Rule 4:
Why try "to exceed expectations" when the overall lawyer standard is perceived as low to mediocre? If your clients are all Fortune 500 stand-outs, and the GCs' seem to love you and your firm, is that because your service delivery is so good--or because other lawyers they use are so "bad" on service? Why have a low standard, or one that merely makes you look incrementally more responsive and on top of things than the boutique on the next floor up? Why not overhaul and re-create the whole game?
If you read the better writers on selling and delivering services, like Harry Beckwith in Selling The Invisible, you pick up on this simple idea: Rather than under-promise/over-deliver, why not change the way people think of lawyers generally and what they can expect from them generally? Get good clients--those clients you like and want--to keep coming back to you by communicating in all aspects of your work that you care deeply about your lawyering for them, you want to serve their interests on an ongoing basis and that it's a privilege to be their lawyer. Show them you fit no lawyer mold.
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Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
86 more, Jack…
Posted by JD Hull at 11:23 PM | Comments (0)
Dean Swift
Swift was a Titan in rebellion against Heaven.
-- John L. Stoddard, 1901
Anglo-Irish, Angry and Brave: See one of our past tributes to Dean Swift (1667–1745) in "Heroes and Leaders: Anyone out there with soul and sand?"
Posted by JD Hull at 08:23 PM | Comments (0)