Associate's Mind

Often times around the blawgosphere you’ll here noise about the death of the billable hour – that it’s outdated and no longer relevant. You’ll hear about alternative fees and value-based client arrangements. However, the Supreme Court disagrees according to an April 2010 ruling in the matter of Perdue v. Kenny. From Steven J. Harper over [...]

Earlier this month I was contacted by Carey Ransom, the CEO of Realpractice.com in regards to my report on my first month of blogging (available in the sidebar at the right). We spoke a bit about transparency, and the lack thereof, that is often found online and in the legal blogging area in particular. After [...]

Cognition, the magazine of the International Journal of Cognitive Science, has a great research article titled “Magic at the marketplace: Choice blindness for the taste of jam and the smell of tea.” In the study, they set up a taste test at a local market and asked shoppers to sample tea or jam, but with [...]

The British Psychology Society has recently highlighted an interesting study that measured the effects of facial expression (untrustworthy/neutral/trustworthy) on an opponent’s decision making while playing hundreds of one-shot rounds of a simplified version of Texas Hold’em poker against hundreds of different ‘opponents’. An excerpt: Each round the participants received a two-card hand and their opponent had bet [...]

Yesterday I posted about happiness being a choice. Largely speaking, most of the events in our lives are out of our control but the one thing we do have firm control over is the attitude we choose with which to confront the world. On an intuitive level, it would follow that a happy worker is more [...]

Given the current economic malaise, many freshly minted lawyers (and law students) are concerned about their career opportunities. There are numerous stories about law firms shedding excess lawyers and deferring the start of new associates. As such, many new lawyers may be tempted to focus on emphasizing their achievements and attempt to show their competence [...]

A number of law bloggers recently commented on the 50th anniversay of Harper Lee Collin’s To Kill a Mockingbird. In particular, many have noted their admiration of the character of Atticus Finch and how he has become a sort of idolized embodiment of what makes a good and just lawyer. However, the anonymous Wall Street investment banker [...]

Arbitration, mediation, trials – any time two parties come together to discuss making a deal, they will engage in negotiation. As the world continues to become more inter-connected and business and law engage across time zones and cultures; it is worth noting that what might seem an effective negotiating tool in one culture, can be [...]

I continue to focusing on an excerpt from Dr. Robert Jeffery Sternberg’s book, In Search of the Human Mind, written in 1994. In it, Dr. Sternberg lists what he believes to be the twenty reasons why intelligent people fail. Now, regardless of public perception or personal anecdote, lawyers are intelligent people. Certainly some are more intelligent than others, [...]

I continue to focus on an excerpt from Dr. Robert Jeffery Sternberg’s book, In Search of the Human Mind, written in 1994. In it, Dr. Sternberg lists what he believes to be the twenty reasons why intelligent people fail. Now, regardless of public perception or personal anecdote, lawyers are intelligent people. Certainly some are more [...]