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And still a great political property. Don't write her off. Now you've all done it. She's really mad. And outside the cabin. See Joan Walsh's "Sarah Palin Resigning as Alaska Governor" at Solon.com. This is a fine-looking, energetic and feisty American woman. And in the Yank outlaw mold. We need a Sarah. Especially since--as Holden Oliver noted back in February--the French started getting all the good Anchorettes. Palin still married to that former First Dude guy?
]]>A wise man's country is the world.
--Aristippus (435-360 BC), as quoted by Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosphers
"There is hope. I see traces of men." Aristippus was shipwrecked on the island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea. He and his fellow survivors did not know where they were or if the island was inhabited. But he sees geometric figures drawn on the sand.
]]>From the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, where there are Old Ones and Young Ones in their dark Monday suits: Men of all ages with shaved heads who look a lot like Moby, in different sizes. Two guys who resemble the late Hunter Thompson, only calmer. And tall trilingual Nordic women, many beautiful, none serene today, with serious faces, clutching open cell phones and tiny red laptops.
All prepare for battle this week in the mostly-down markets of the West.
Grasshopper, when you get back to the States, it's trial time again. ADR, with its frequent moments of sanity, is over. Change gears to U.S. courts. For business trials, or non-business trials, bench or jury, see for starters the outlines for Trial Notebooks, either One or Two, at Evan Schaeffer's Illinois Trial Practice. We like the latter, but please mix and match. Use your barely-used brain. Both sides of it.
And be advised. As Tom Hanks, or someone, once said: "There is no boilerplate in baseball". Each client, each problem to solve, each transaction, and each trial: each is wonderfully unique, and Different From The Other, whether your firm does "cookie-cutter" work or not.
(Photo: Warner Bros.)
designed by God to seem as provokingly dissimilar from the British as possible. Catholic, Cartesian, Mediterranean; Machiavellian in politics, Jesuitical in argument, Casanovan in sex; relaxed about pleasure, and treating the arts as central to life, rather than some add-on, like a set of alloy wheels.
Don't let the French best you. Not on the 4th of July, anyway. Come live in the world. Education is not just about getting a job.
It's not about the lawyers anymore. No one cares you're a lawyer. No longer impressive. In America, they made it easy to become a lawyer.
Some day, everyone, including your waitress in Richmond, Kentucky, will be a lawyer. And hey she's gaining on you, Jack. So get a head start. Distinguish yourself by serving clients. And get higher standards. Surprise them.
Rule 4: Deliver Legal Work That Change the Way Clients Think About Lawyers. From our Mr. Rogers-esque and annoying-but-accurate 12 Rules. A note about our waitress: Blaise. She attended Oberlin, had to quit twice to make money, graduated, was Coif in law school (night division), made Law Review, and has a Marshall Scholarship.
And a kid. She's a CPA, too. Blaise knows the difference between Whitman, Wordsworth and Whittier. She never feels sorry for herself. She thinks it's a privilege to just work. Blaise the waitress is going to kick your wazoo in the workplace when she gets a job at your firm.
What about your waitress?
I'm staying at the crossroads, believe I'm sinking down.
If you can navigate through all the painstaking diplomacy without pulling a hamstring, do visit ALM's Legal Blog Watch and read "Are the BigLaw Layoffs a Good Thing?", and the related links. It was inspired by a provocative and courageous Dan Slater column July 1 at NYT's Deal Book. Note: In writing the op-ed piece, Slater, of course, used his real name. Most of the twenty-five commenters--presumably Cuban dissidents, battered housewives and former Tony Soprano crew in the Witness Protection Program--did not.
"I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees. Asked the Lord above, have mercy now, save poor Bob if you please." Robert Leroy Johnson (1911-1938) used his real name when writing and performing.
]]>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 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.
My problem with all that? 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.
Thomas E. Kane can help you get your "fun" thing on.
]]>Say you sue me because you say my dog bit you.
Well now this is my defense:
My dog doesn't bite.
And second, in the alternative, my dog was tied up that night.
And third, I don't believe you really got bit.
And fourth, I don't have a dog.
--Richard "Racehorse" Haynes, Houston, Texas (1927- ).
Trial Lawyer. Athlete. War Hero. Persuader. Actor. Planner. Tireless Worker. Lots of enemies, lots of friends. He turned 82 this year. Kinky Friedman called him “one of the most successful and most colorful silver-tongued devils to grace Texas since God made trial lawyers.” He's still at it.
At your shop, talk about real client service every single day--as if it were a substantive area of law practice. Make it a running conversation. And if you are serious about building and keeping a "client service culture", you need to underscore it at every performance review.
It's an idea that is here to stay--in this, or any other economy. See "Performance Reviews Based On Client Service Criteria?" Are you serious about all that "client service" stuff on your website?
]]>Life is short, opera is long, and Wagner is longer.
--Plácido Domingo, Spanish tenor, L.A. Opera general director.
German tenor Johannes Sembach (1881-1944) as Lohengrin.
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The 90-day notice is a minimum requirement; a tenant with additional protections already in place (e.g., "Section 8" tenants) won't lose those existing protections. The Act defines bona fide in such a way as to prevent the prior owner from abusing the requirement by mischaracterizing himself as a tenant.
The notice is relatively simple to execute. And as the Washington Post suggested last week, it may not be slowing down the resale process. Still, it is a hard and fast required step. The Obama administration's summary of the legislation as passed is here. It includes a sunset provision that terminates its requirements on December 31, 2012.
]]>Let’s say you’re a blues guitarist with a broken ring finger on your fretboard hand. What do you do? If you’re Albert King, you put a splint on it, and you get out there and play.
It's about "the customers"--and not just about being polite and courtly to other attorneys. Visit Ray Ward's Minor Wisdom.
I know it, I see it. The Huns will not come.
In 451, Sainte Genevieve (422-512) saved Parisians from the Huns, the legend goes. People had started to flee Paris in anticipation of the invasion led by Attila--but stopped when she told them she had a vision that the Huns would not enter Paris. She became the city's patron saint. In 1928, a grateful Paris erected a statue to her on the Pont de la Tournelle, a bridge now about 400 years old. Genevieve is facing east, the direction from which the Huns approached.
She is also said to have converted Clovis, king of the pagan Franks, to Christianity--but she hasn't quite worked that magic on me. I still visit her anyway. If you walk in a southwesterly direction--from, say, the Place des Vosges on the Right Bank--to get to the Left Bank, you can use that bridge (Pont de la Tournelle). If you do, you can walk right under Genevieve, with Notre Dame and Ile Saint Louis on your right.
