Practice Blawg » Commentary

Giving Thanks

Shaun G. Jamison — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:15:43 +0000

Thanksgiving is upon us. For some, holidays are a joyful time and a wonderful reminder of what we have. For others, however, the holidays bring stress and depression.

One way to bolster your internal defenses against stress and depression is to make a conscious effort to give thanks. Being in a state of thankfulness is healthy and leads to more contentment. Just as negative emotions make themselves more permanent in your psyche the more you focus on them, positive emotions stay with you if you make them a habit. One method of cultivating an attitude of thankfulness is to write it down. At the end of each day, write down three things you were thankful for that day. Instead of looking for things to be unhappy about, you can note that for which you are grateful.

Let me suggest a place to start:

You have the privilege to practice law. Many dream of being a lawyer, but not everyone gets to live that dream.
You have clients. Clients don’t just pay the bills. They refer new clients, present opportunities to learn new skills, give you feedback if you’re open to it.
You have a life filled with opportunities to experience, grow, and change. You had the smarts and energy to get yourself through law school; surely you can find these opportunities and make the most of them.
You have challenges. While unwelcome now, challenges will make you stronger and better in the future.

You can just “be” thankful or you can acknowledge your thanks to your family, friends, colleagues,clients, and community. Do it — in person, over the phone, with a handwritten card, or by email.

Celebrate Thanksgiving this year by trying conscious thankfulness. Better yet, make it a year round habit and see if you feel differently and your practice changes as a result.

Editors’ Note: If you are concerned about stress or depression in yourself or others, check out the resources provided free through Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers. As we’ve noted in a previous post, we can all do more to assist lawyers suffering from depression.

© Shaun G. Jamison for Practice Blawg, 2011. | Permalink | No comments yet | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Depression, stress, thanks

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Your Obituary

Nancy Hupp — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 18:28:13 +0000

Yes, I read the obituaries. Not every one every day, but I peruse them frequently because I am genuinely interested in peoples’ “stories.” Knowing this, my sister sent one from her local paper which said the deceased loved his family, “but his hogs always came first.” (Yes, my sister lives in Iowa, and the deceased was a hog farmer.)

What would your obituary say? What would you want it to say? How will you be remembered?

Let’s state the obvious. No one wants to be remembered only for their work. But likewise, no attorney wants the obit to read, “Great person, lousy lawyer.” Discussions of work/life balance abound. How can you be remembered well in both arenas?

My father-in-law, a lawyer for 50+ years, died in early June. I was not surprised to hear his friends and family reflect on his good qualities. Long ago, I recognized and appreciated that my parents and in-laws gave their families nonstop teachable moments of grace, decency, and class. What gave me pause, serves as inspiration for this post, is not what friends and family remember, but what my father-in-law’s clients and work associates said. Take note:

I had the honor and pleasure of knowing John by way of his serving as corporate attorney for _______ for over 30 years. John was far more than an attorney… He served as advisor, confidant, peacemaker, and friend and always did so with great intelligence, integrity, humor, graciousness and humility. He will be deeply missed by all of us.

I was John’s secretary almost 50 years ago. He was the most honorable and finest man for whom I ever worked. I was invited to dinner with his family many times during the years his children were growing up. He was always kind and caring and I thought very highly of him.

I knew John from my years attending _______ stockholders’ meetings… and then from my participation on the ____ board for a few more years. John was an anchor of reason, patience, and support for all of us… I once told John that he occupied a prime place in my very small pantheon of genuine heroes. He just smiled … shrugged and – always the gentleman – said he appreciated that even though it wasn’t deserved. It was more than deserved. I admired his clarity, his humility, his amazing patience, his loyalty and his steadiness. Did I mention his patience? Every time he spoke, it brought mind a man named Herb Shriner, an early television personality in Indiana who was a kind of witty Mr. Rogers for grownups. That’s who John was for me… a much-needed Mr. Rogers who taught us all how to behave as mature adults. I join you and your family in mourning the loss of John’s physical presence in the world, but he will remain inside me as a spirit guide as long as I live.

Wow. I am speechless.

There is no shortage of advice on how to be a good lawyer: communicate, keep abreast of current developments, deliver competent, cost-competitive service. Add this: be true to yourself, to your values, day in and day out.

“Intelligence, integrity, humor, graciousness and humility…”

Doesn’t get any better than that.

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Abuse of Our Own

Nancy Hupp — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 22:10:15 +0000

At long last, District Court Judge Halverson of Nevada has been removed from the bench. I read with interest and some amusement about the antics of Judge Halverson. Of course, I don’t mean to make light of the disgrace she brought to the bench, nor to laugh off the abuse of her staff. But I can’t help but to be amazed at the outrageousness of her behavior detailed in an earlier interim order – among other things, ordering her staff to pick up paper she had thrown to the floor and to “keep ice in the judge’s water at the level she deemed suitable.” Got me thinking about what kinds of ludicrous behavior we’ve all endured at the hands of our colleagues. So I sent an email to a couple of attorneys and was not disappointed in their response.

The first recalled a colleague that routinely asked his secretary to wax his desk.

The second started his career as an associate with a prominent personal injury firm in a major metropolitan area. The Big Kahuna, we’ll call him Mr. P, ordered Bill to get him some of his favorite yogurt. When Bill asked what kind, Mr. P replied, “You know, the swirly kind”. Mr. P’s secretary advised him that this meant the soft serve Dairy Queen vanilla/chocolate swirl yogurt.

The piece de resistance was when Mr. P summoned Bill to his private residence at 9:00 pm to give him his pants to be tailored and ready by the next morning for Mr. P’s flight out of town. Bill dutifully searched but failed to find an all-night tailor, but did find a tailor early the next morning and proudly presented the pants to Mr. P in time for his departure, whereupon Mr. P. decided not to take the pants with him.

From time to time a practitioner will post on one of the MSBA listservs with a tale of getting abused by a client. Although unacceptable, at some level we all understand that clients are often interacting with attorneys at the worst time of their lives, so we cut them a little slack. But judges? Colleagues? Hmm. Hard to think of any rationale for this kind of behavior, although I did find an upside:

“The nice thing about egotists is that they don’t talk about other people.”

Let me know if you have any of your own stories to relate.

© Nancy Hupp for Practice Blawg, 2011. | Permalink | No comments yet | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Colleagues, Professionalism

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Applying Google’s 20 Percent Time in Practice

Nancy Hupp — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:47:14 +0000

I took a sabbatical from writing blog posts for the last six weeks of 2010. Why? Well in November, my boss, Greg Luce, challenged staff to adopt Google’s Innovation Time Off concept for the remainder to the year. For Google engineers, that means they spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them. Many of Google’s new product ideas hatched during these periods.

Greg, being who he is and in the job he is in, added a twist, that is, that the 20% of the work time should concern technology projects of interest to each of us.

I will admit that my first reaction was an observation that Greg just gave birth to an oxymoron, at least as far as I was concerned. Don’t get me wrong, I use technology, but admit that I rarely find technology in and of itself interesting. There, I’ve gone public. (Actually I’ve confessed to similar feelings in a previous post.) To me, technology is a means to an end not an entertainment on its own.

Right behind the first reaction, was a second, somewhat snottier observation—that Greg and some of my other co-workers would feel no pain with this assignment, while the long-suffering me would struggle under the yoke of oppression. I explained to Greg that for him, the assignment was essentially “go forth and do more of what you love to do, excel at, and will do anyway” while for me, it was “go forth and spit and swear and struggle and at the end of the period, you’ll still be the tech-lite-est one on the team.”

At this point, you may be wondering how it is that I am still employed. I’d have to credit Greg’s thick-skinned-ness when it comes to my outbursts, which he refers to as necessary and productive “push back.” Also, to my credit, he knows that at the end of the day I tend to be an obedient soul, even enthusiastic, and so it was with the 20% project. I jumped in, kept jumping, swearing, asking questions, swearing, making mistakes, swearing, asking for help, swearing. And at the end of the six weeks, I was converted. Not to technology as my plaything, but to the concept that forcing oneself to travel new territory results in newfound knowledge, but more importantly, in newfound confidence.

I experimented with various presentation software like Prezi and Mac’s version of PowerPoint, learned about jpegs and pngs and such, and really dug into the admin side of WordPress. I also learned some intangible skills:

Anything can be “Googled.” I knew this before but I previously assumed that no one would ever pose the dopey tech questions I have. Alas, dopes abound and more astonishing, there exists techies who answer without making dopes feel dopier. I not only found answers, I found that I understood them, even posed a few to the masses on the Internet machine.
My questions are not always dopey. Even those who know how to do certain things, don’t necessarily know why. I tend to be a “Why” kind of gal, so I pushed others to learn a bit in order to answer my questions and not lose face.
It would too much of a fairy tale ending to say I learned to like the struggle with things I am not naturally adept at. I will say, however, I enjoyed the AHA! feeling that came after the struggle, when I “got it.” In between curses, there were lots of those moments.
I can make my kids proud. “You did that?”

I was unable to carve out 20% of my time to experiment, even taking a sabbatical from the blog and some other tasks. My workload couldn’t be shifted that much on such short notice. So, I worked more hours to enable the experimentation. It was worth it, both for me and for the MSBA. In my experimentation time, I came up with a couple of new ideas for practicelaw. For myself, I finished another 5k, this one virtual. (The first was a real one, in October. You may not be impressed but if you knew how little I like to sweat, how slowly I ran when I first started training, and how naturally clumsy I am, you’d be awed.)

Now that I’ve dragged you through my period of self-flagellation and revival, if you are still reading, you may wonder why I thought this an appropriate blog post. Think of it as a pass-it-forward post. Many attorneys have confessed to having more free time on their hands than they’d like and everyone has things they don’t know, dread doing. This post is my start as a motivational guru, with the hopes that if the encouragement is from a regular Joe, you might hear and embrace the idea of taking some time a couple of times a week to expand your horizons. Encourage your staff to do the same. Good luck. If you need some swear words to help you on the journey, contact me. I have a passel.

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Try Removing the Plank from Your Eye First

Gregory Luce — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 20:09:03 +0000

We’ve posted a number of writing tips on the blog. We’ve also highlighted U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Kressel’s writing guide for lawyers, a post we titled “Write Like You Learned Something in High School.” Here’s another fine piece of advice: Don’t criticize a magistrate judge’s argument or characterize it as “nonsensical” unless you have thoroughly proofread your own brief or memorandum. Or, as U.S. District Court Judge Paul Magnuson advised in a recent opinion, you should first “remove the proverbial plank from [your] own eye before inserting such careless rhetoric into [your] briefs.” We’ll stop there and present you with Exhibit B in the continuing attempts by attorneys to make their best arguments but falling a bit flat:

“Plaintiff has not established that the R&R’s conclusions are incorrect. Additionally, the Court notes that Plaintiff’s counsel’s characterizations of the Magistrate Judge’s R&R as “nonsensical,” and “an exception to the general rule” that such R&Rs are typically “wellthought [sic] out, unbiased, and well-drafted,” are wholly unfounded. (Pl.’s Objection at 1.) On the contrary, Magistrate Judge Keyes’s 43-page R&R presents a detailed assessment of the facts of this case and a cogent analysis of the legal issues. Indeed, perhaps counsel should remove the proverbial plank from his own eye before inserting such careless rhetoric into his briefs. A cursory investigation by this Court yielded no fewer than 15 spelling, grammatical, or citation mistakes in counsel’s six-plus page brief—including two occasions on which counsel misspelled his own client’s name— which made for an onerous examination of Plaintiff’s objections. Counsel would do well to refrain from propagating such baseless characterizations in the future.”

–U.S. District Court Judge Paul A. Magnuson, writing in Bartlett v. Astrue

© Gregory Luce for Practice Blawg, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Drafting, Proofreading

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