I am stumped. Every time I talk with a lawyer lately, they want to talk about lawyer advertising. It really gets my attention when I am travelling. It is certainly the first thing I see as I enter every city. Lawyer advertising on billboards appears often before the sign welcoming me to the city. Most […]
According to my wife, I work a lot. Mostly I agree with her. When we first married I worked in technology and it was common for me to work all day, all night and all the next day. I have had a couch in my office for years because I discovered that I can sleep […]
Inattentional Blindness Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice a fully-visible, but unexpected object because attention was engaged on another task, event, or object.1 Test a Friend Skeptical? Test a friend. Testing yourself won’t work because you are already aware that this is a split attention test. Knowing that, you will be more attentive to […]
The nagging question for me is the same as it was four years ago, “how could all of that happen and I didn’t see it?” If there was an invisible gorilla, how did I not see it? The complete answer is a moderately sized book. Here, however, is one method you can use to avoid […]
In Law Firms of Endearment, I wrote that “[f]or law firms, primary stakeholders are clients, benches, bars, clients, employees, suppliers, communities and partners.” A Law Firm of Endearment, however, “becomes a vehicle of service to every stakeholder group.”1 Clearly, the bench is a primary stakeholder for attorneys. This is easily discernable by considering what happens […]
A lateral hire is attractive. They are already trained. They already have experience. They have already been vetted. Usually, the objective of hiring someone laterally is filling an existing need in the firm or organization with as close of a match as possible, usually from outside the firm or organization. For me, it was an […]
Is there such a thing as Law Firms of Endearment? The authors of Firm of Endearment define a firm of endearment as a firm that is reorganizing and optimizing in response to the new age we live in, the Age of Transcendence.1 An example of a non-legal Firm of Endearment would be Whole Foods. Age of Transcendence In […]
Shared office space, coworking, virtual office, whatever you want to call it, shared office space is the future. Even large traditional firms are sharing space with attorneys outside the firm walls with no guarantee that at least some of legal work won’t happen at Starbucks or a Regus facility. With growing acceptability of shared office space, what […]
Rather than best practice, my law firm was really hodgepodge. Most of my practices, I adopted from attorneys I worked for. I copied several practice forms from a “Bridge the Gap” continuing legal education course. I changed a sentence or two in my forms as I bumped into cases that suggested a change. When a problem […]
A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. -Samuel Goldwyn You may win in court even though you failed to reduce your agreement to writing. Even so, the best practice is to reduce your agreement to writing. In most situations, written agreements do an excellent job of clarifying what everyone’s duties are. In […]