I am excited to join the fanfare introducing BlawgWorld 2007. (Download your free copy by clicking the image above or this link.) This nifty eBook includes posts selected from 77 of the “most influential” legal blogs, addressing practice management issues, substantive issues, technology issues, and more. I am honored that Life at the Bar is included.
If you need [...]
I was in a Starbucks last week reading Beyond the Big Firm: Profiles of Lawyers Who Want Something More. (Review forthcoming.) A man sat down at the table next to me, carrying 3 or 4 bar review books, and looking somewhat frazzled. He kind of nodded to me, and I nodded at his books and [...]
One of the interesting things about coaching is that periodically, the topics on which I’m coaching someone will rise up and smack me in the face. Pride may go before a fall, but working with someone else on an issue they’re facing seems highly likely in some bizarre cosmic way to raise the same issue [...]
It occurred to me this week that there’s (at least) one activity that, perhaps counterintuitively, is a foundation of work/life balance and productivity: recreation.
While coaching a client this week and introducing Stephen Covey’s Urgent/Important quadrant system for prioritizing and completing tasks, I explained that true recreation — something that’s reenergizing, that “re-creates,” rather than passive activities [...]
All writers have their favorite pieces, and while I wouldn’t necessarily elevate blogging to author status, I certainly have my favorite posts. One of them is Relationship or one-night stand: how law firms view associates(and clients). It’s a favorite for two reasons: first, it draws on an article about client development by David Maister to [...]
I’m not a physicist (I can barely spell the word) but as I remember it, the second law of thermodynamics is that entropy, which for purposes of this post only might be a synonym for chaos or disorder, tends to increase. Another way of saying this is that systems tend to move from a state of higher [...]
I’ve been making a lot of calls this week, not only to lawyers and law firms but also to doctors’ offices and a variety of businesses, and I’ve discovered something disturbing. On a distressingly high number of these contacts (including some in-person contacts as well as phone calls), the people who greeted me and who [...]
Sometimes I work with clients who are caught in a pattern they want to break. It may be a behavior that doesn’t serve them (for instance, not completing time sheets until the morning they’re due and losing the details that would yield more billable time), a thought that produces an action that doesn’t serve them (such [...]
Have you heard this old saw? People used to say that law firms need four categories of lawyers: finders, minders, grinders, and binders. It’s still true to some degree, though today’s atmosphere requires lawyers to develop their skills in each of these areas, rather than simply selecting the most comfortable skill set and roosting there. [...]
I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading lately (a by-product of not being able to work using my own computer) and I’m enjoying the diversity of ideas that are coming through my selections. From the point of view of the stereotypical lawyer or law firm, the most subversive of these books is The Power of [...]
July 30, 2007 
