Associate's Mind

One of my favorite books that my Brother-In-Law MBA turned me onto is David H. Maister’s “Managing the Professional Firm.” It’s an incredible book that lays out all the unique problems facing professional (accounting, legal, consulting, etc.) firms. While I am, obviously, nowhere near managing a firm at this point, it provides real world examples [...]

There seems to be a general lament among the elder generation of lawyers in regards to the quality of new law school graduates. Simultaneously, there is also a cacophony of complaints from recent law school graduates about the general state of the legal profession and the dissonance between what they felt they should have received [...]

As I noted on Monday’s post on Judge Posner’s research, judges believe that juries favor the more confident lawyer. Here is some more research backing that up, from The Jury Room: Researchers (at Harvard Business School, no less) find that if you “act more like a peacock” you will not only look more powerful, you [...]

Just saw this over at Overlawyered. (You read them right? They’re great.) “Deposition Tricks: The Dirty Dozen” by Neil Dilloff of DLA Piper. The following practice tips probably will be of the most use to younger litigators. To the more senior lawyers who use these tricks, this litany will resonate loudly. The Big Pause How Boring [...]

F. Peter Phillips (commercial mediator, former Senior VP of CPR) recently had an interesting post on resolving conflicts. He frames it in from the perspective of a hospital negotiating with a misdiagnosed patient. For the details, go check it out, but I’ll re-produce the basic steps here: Taking Responsibility.  The first stage is to admit the [...]

It’s tough to go it alone. Navigating the business and legal world as a young lawyer can be difficult. There’s a reason firms have an established associate -> junior partner -> partner  system. Having a system in place that helps develop and foster growth in new attorneys under the guidance of more experienced ones is [...]

Steven Pressfield, author of The Legend of Bagger Vance among many others, recently put up a blog post entitled, Getting to the Flow. An excerpt: The lady plans to seduce her lover. Her object is to create a night of magic. How does she do it? First the setting, the lighting, the music. The mood, [...]

A couple weeks back the British Psychological Society put up an overview of some recent clinical research into what makes an apology effective. Ryan Fehr and Michele Gelfand at the University of Maryland have drawn on research in other disciplines, including sociology and law, to explore the idea that apologies come in three forms and that [...]

This isn’t legal related at all but I found it very compelling. A soldier, a Scotsman, who landed at Normandy on D-Day, armed with only his pipes: ANY reasonable observer might have thought Bill Millin was unarmed as he jumped off the landing ramp at Sword Beach, in Normandy, on June 6th 1944. Unlike his [...]

I would hope that most people at this point are familiar with Nassim Taleb and his work The Black Swan. For the unaware, from Wikipedia: The Black Swan Theory or “Theory of Black Swan Events” was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain 1) the disproportionate role of high-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of [...]