“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”

– Aristotle

The  trick is not holding other people accountable – but holding yourself accountable. It’s the central starting point of developing an appropriate professional mindset. Recognizing that you are personally responsible for your actions and results (or lack thereof) delivered to clients.

You must strive to do the best you can in all situations. While it will make a difference in the quality of the work you produce, more importantly it makes a difference in you. Pushing yourself to deliver better work, better services, better solutions will allow you to self-create new challenges and excitement in your job. It will help keep monotony and routine at bay.

Ladder of Accountability

Rodger Dean Duncan, a strategic management consultant, often places accountability in the context of a ladder – with those people with a low level of accountability on the lower half of the ladder, and top performers with high levels of accountability at the top. At the very bottom are people completely unaware of the fact that personal accountability is even necessary part of success. If you’re a lawyer or law student at the “unaware” level, there’s probably no helping you at this point – sorry.  If someone in your firm is at the base of the ladder, save yourself the a headache and go ahead and fire them.

If you find yourself on the lower half of the ladder, you need to change. You are never going to get hired or progress in your job if you cannot move higher up the ladder. This is where people are playing the blame game instead of addressing problems and finding solutions. People believe that outside circumstances are the only things that determine their success.

• “It’s not my fault!”
• “How could I have known?”
• “No one told me it was supposed to be done that way!”

It’s also were self-defeating attitudes live. Where people believe that they are luckless losers. That nothing they do can ever be done right. They’re going to be screw-ups no matter what they do.

Managing Yourself

To move past these lower rungs of the ladder, you have to manage yourself. To hold yourself accountable for your work and your life. You will have to ask yourself some hard questions:

• Who am I really? Am I someone who is going to coast along or claw my way ahead?
• What are my core values? Not the ones I give lip service but that are actually expressed in private moments? Are they actually expressed in my work?
• Where do I feel as though I belong? Where do I not belong?

People who know immediately know their answers to these questions are likely at the top half of the ladder. People who function from the upper half of the ladder go out of their way to take ownership of problems and situations they face. The concept of ownership is an important one – if you own something, you are responsible for it. You have to want to own problems that arise in your job (your life really) because it places the responsibility for solving the problem squarely on your shoulders. No one else is going to solve it for you.

At the highest rung of the ladder are people who “make it happen.” Duncan describes their commitment as relentless not ruthless. Yet often times “make it happen” people exhibit both these qualities. They get results no matter what it takes. Duncan believes that “make it happen” people are ”worth their weight in gold because they know that things happen because of them, not to them.” 

Maybe you feel down on your luck in law school. Or that the job at your firm sucks. Or that your solo practice is struggling. Maybe you don’t even have a job.

If you find yourself in these situations it is imperative that you ask yourself:

“Did this happen to me or because of me?”

Choose the latter. Because then you can decide to make something else happen instead.

It’s easy for lawyers to become entrenched in their position and lose the perspective of someone not well-versed with the law. They lose perspective on what it feels like to be a client. Clients usually come to a lawyer feeling one of these things:

• I’m worried.
• I’m feeling threatened.
• I’m feeling insecure.
• I’m exposed.
• I’m feeling ignorant.
• I’m impatient.
• I’m suspicious.
• I’m taking a personal risk.

A client comes to you, in a vulnerable state, and likely unsure of how to select a good lawyer. When you talk to a client it’s important not to address only their legal issues. You have to read the client, understand where they are coming from. You have to establish a rapport and build trust with the client.

The client might not know if their problem is simple or complex. They might not know how much such services might cost. They might have to reveal private or embarrassing information to you. All of this is relevant because when a client retains a lawyer they are not just buying a service, but entering into a relationship. If you think all you are doing is selling services, then you are not seeing things from the perspective of your clients.

Update: I was called out in the comments for lacking specificity in the above post – which is a fair assessment. In law, like many things, the devil is in the details. The above is not true for every client. Some clients will be savvy consumers of legal services. Some clients will be be shopping around on price. Some clients will be institutional and will come to you with 40 page thick outside counsel guidelines and policies for you to adhere to. Some clients will come to you because they are your friends or family.

But the client I am speaking of above is the client who is down on their luck. The client I am speaking of does not know you, or any other lawyer. The client above comes to you because perhaps this is the first time they have ever needed a lawyer. A couple just had a child and need estate planning. A parent whose 16 year old just got a DUI and hit a pedestrian. A new small business that has had their logo stolen. These clients are vulnerable and ignorant of the law and how it functions. They need guidance and have no one else to turn to. They might come to you off the street or from your website, but hopefully they will come as a referral from a former client. When these types of clients come into your office, establishing trust is paramount.

Very briefly over at PrawfsBlawg there was a post up entitled How To Increase Your Risk of Not Getting Tenure by recently tenured Harvard law prof I. Glenn Cohen. I say was because it quickly got pulled down. Over at TaxProf, Paul Caron has a clip from the post:

1. Write less than one paper a year or leave most of your publishing for late in your tenure clock
2. Co-author too much
3. Being too much of a wallflower or being not enough of a wallflower
4. Focus too much on teaching or service
5. Fail to get to know those in your field, fail to be a good PR agent for yourself
6. Undertake projects with timelines incompatible with your tenure clock, including books
7. Focus on the views of your mentors to the exclusion of the views of your faculty as a whole and outside readers

The list is no doubt idiosyncratic and missing many good pieces of advice. Others will disagree. I welcome that and encourage people to add in the comments. The last thing I will say is that while this list is focused on what people can do to increase/reduce their risk of getting denied tenure, because that is where your agency is as a junior, I don’t want to let faculties off the hook. I think we should think of tenure denials as failures on our part, either as to early screening or (more often) as to helping our colleagues through the process of tenure. There are many things faculties can do better vis-à-vis junior faculty, and this list is not meant to let the faculty off the hook.

Tenure, the holy grail for academics – for law professors a six-figure job for life. With tenure you are suddenly plucked forth from the free agency model of a liquid workforce that the rest of the proletariat must toil in; safely ensconced in the ivory tower for life.  If you want to achieve this lofty goal,  just make sure you don’t focus too much on teaching and serving students. No wonder the post was short lived. I’m sure there was a law professor pile-on urging Prawfsblawg to take the post down. But like the last time there was an unpopular post on Prawfsblawg that was taken down that I pointed out – this is the internet baby. Don’t put something up on the internet if you aren’t prepared for the world to see it – forever. Prawfsblawg doesn’t seem to enjoy the unrelenting focus of the greater online legal world, but if  you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen (google cache link of Cohen’s post).

To Cohen’s credit he notes that:

Again, I am being cynical here but a realist; this is not the way I would like tenure to work, but I think it is the way it works right now in many institutions.

This should make every practicing lawyer very sad and worried for the future of the profession. Here is a law professor – at Harvard – saying that his job stability is better served by not serving his students. The people that we are entrusting to train the next generation of lawyers are being encouraged by their institutions to not focus on students, but instead on papers, projects, and other scholarship that has little to no relevance in the actual law practice. They might make schools look nice but as has been noted by Justice Scalia, bears little relation to what happens in the real world: “The academic mindset is too far removed from the practice of law.”

I’m not sure what the solution is, but there is going to have to be a fundamental shift in the nature of law schools if this is how they function. A law school’s purpose is not prestige, or papers, or books. A law school’s purpose to produce new lawyers. Period. That should be their entire focus. If that is not their focus, there are going to be serious problems facing the legal industry in the future.

I was talking with some 3L students a month ago who were oh-so-ready to graduate from law school, but also nervous knowing that the bar exam is looming not too far away. Thinking back to when I took bar exam, there was a certain level of anxiety and apprehension in the months leading up to the bar exam. It’s difficult for there not to be. Three years of your life riding on a single test.  For many people, the pressure of bringing to bare three years of knowledge on a single test can give rise to a high degree of stress.

This can often kick in the fight-or-flight response, to no real benefit. In reaction to a high degree of stress, which your body can interpret as a harmful event or attack, your sympathetic nervous system kicks in releasing  stress hormones. Your body doesn’t go into full adrenal dump, but does pump you full of hormones that stimulate your heart rate, blood flow, and glucose release. Your body becomes full of “nervous energy.”  But you have a choice in how you deal with this energy.

There was a post over at Consultant’s Mind a couple days ago about eustress - ”good stress.” Eustress is distinct because it is not a stressor-type, but rather a selective response to stress. When faced with a high pressure situation, there is going to be a natural physiological reaction your body (nervous energy), but there is no correct or natural psychological response. A person can self-define their psychological reaction to stress – if they take the time to develop it.

Generally speaking, our responses to stress are set out at an early age or early in our development of a skill set.

• When you gave a speech in 4th grade, you tripped on your way to podium, now you’re scared whenever you speak in public.
• The first time you asked a boy out in 8th grade you got declined, now you’re tongue-tied when you approach a man at bar despite that you’re an attractive, successful lawyer.
• You decide to take up kayaking and break your nose the first time you go out, now the kayak is collecting dust in your garage.

If we’re not careful, these early responses to stress triggers can develop into permanent habits and routines that determine how we react to the stressor. We have to actively choose to develop new responses to these stressors. It’s just a matter of breaking down stressful situations into their component parts and asking ourselves: what specific instance is triggering the stress (person, place, time, activity, etc), and why are we responding in such a fashion? Was the response “burned in” at an early age like in the above examples? Was the response assumed through the observation of others responding to similar stress?

Once the stress trigger and response has been identified, it’s a matter of overriding the default response with a new one. No easy task. It’s often best achieved with weeks of diligent practice. In the case of the bar exam, I took 2 months off to study and treated it like a job. I went to a designated location, and studied from 8 am – 5 pm, Monday through Friday. I took BarBri and watched a number of the videos, but mostly I spent my time taking practice tests – placing myself in the exact situation that I was going to find myself in in 2 months. This was not exactly a fun experience. Locked up in a room, by myself for hours on end every day, memorizing voluminous amounts of law.

But as the Bar Exam neared, while I did feel a rise in nervous energy, I had been training myself for weeks to harness that energy and channel it into test performance: high speed reading, memory recall, mnemonics, elements, memorization of typical fact patterns, elements, etc. I was constantly practicing turning my nervous energy into something productive instead. By the time the Bar Exam rolled around, I simply felt ready. There was some nervous energy to be sure, but I was able to harness it and channel it into taking the test – and then let it go when I was done. Between the 2nd & 3rd night of taking the Bar Exam, I went out and drank beer for a few hours with a couple of other law school classmates who had adopted the same study pattern as I had – we all passed easily. I was completely relaxed instead and not gnawing my fingernails off.

The same is true for anyone performing at a high degree of a skill. Over at Study Hacks, Cal Newport recently had a post on The Deliberate Rise of Stephen King. Newport shares King’s method of writing in his early years:

When I got my rejection slip…I pounded a nail into the wall above the Webcor [phonograph]…and poked [the rejection slip] onto to the nail…By the time I was fourteen (and shaving twice a week whether I needed to or not) the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing. By the time I was sixteen I’d begun to get rejection slips with handwritten notes a little more encouraging.

Again and again, despite facing rejection (Stress! No one likes me!), King continued to plow forwards and funnel that energy into his craft. As Newport goes on to note:

King was careful to always aim above, but just barely above, his current skill level. His first published story was in a fanzine — the 1960′s version of a blog. He moved from fanzines to second-tier mens magazines like Cavalier and Dude. After he cracked that market he moved on to top-tier mens magazines and top-tier fantasy and science fiction publications. Only once he could consistently hit those targets did he succeed in selling his first novel to Doubleday.

Let’s step back and summarize these key points of King’s training: lots of practice, driven by honest feedback and challenges just beyond his current skill level.

When faced with stressful situations that fill you with anxiety, you can either passively accept your mind’s response, or you can choose to harness the situation in your mind and let it become energy to fuel your work. It will not happen right away. It will take concerted effort, mis-steps and failures.

It may takes years of practice, but with deliberate practice you can turn your anxiety into achievement. 

I also recently received a review copy of the second edition of Brian K Johnson & Marsha Hunter’s The Articulate Attorney: Public Speaking for Lawyers.

Johnson & Hunter get right to the point of the matter with their very first sentence:

People expect attorneys to be good public speakers.

Yet as all lawyers know, the public speaking skills of lawyers range from world-class to abysmal, with most lawyers likely falling closer to the latter end of the scale. But the general public expect lawyers to be eloquent and full of personality when speaking. People have seen dozens of lawyers give speeches and argue in courtrooms in TV and movies – and isn’t everything on TV true?

As a result, people expect their lawyer to be a good public speaker – especially if they are going to retain the lawyer to represent them in court. Yet even beyond that, because so many people expect lawyers to be good public speakers, friends and communities that you are a part of may ask you to speak at events as well. There are always events, clubs, panels, boards, parties, etc. that are in need of speakers and often look to lawyers to fill that roll. It also presents an excellent opportunity to present yourself as a lawyer to to groups of new people.

But if you are one of the many lawyers – people really – that are apprehensive about public speaking, you may find yourself turning down these opportunities, to your detriment. I can’t say that The Articulate Attorney will be a panacea for your public speaking fears, but it does provide a thorough framework that any lawyer should be able to use to develop or improve their public speaking skills.

The Articulate Attorney is broken down into four sections:

1. Your Body
2. Your Brain
3. Your Voice
4. How-To Practice

This is not a book of generalities. Each section goes in-depth on specific tactics to tackle problems speakers face. The section on the body goes over breathing, stance, gestures, eye contact, and more. In “Your Brain” strategies are provided on how to deal with the adrenaline dump that often comes from public speaking and focusing your nervous energy into power for speaking. This continues in the section on voice with methods to control tone, avoiding “uh,” and proper pacing for different types of speaking. Finally, in the “How-To Practice” section, a plan is provided for putting into place the strategies laid out in the book. Johnson & Hunter go out of their way to emphasize the importance of practice:

Practice is the path to expertise. It is the only way to improve skill in any discipline. The more complex the skill, the more practice is required.

Being a good lawyer is an incredibly complex discipline, one composed of many sub-skills. Many lawyers become overwhelmed by the variety of skills they need to develop in order to grow into a competent lawyer. Their professional development stagnates because it seems like too much to tackle. The reality is that you just need to breakdown the skills you need to hone and polish and tackle them one at a time. If public speaking is one of the skills you need to develop and improve (and most lawyers likely should), then you would do well to pick up The Articulate Attorney.

* Affiliate link

I received a review copy of Professor Joseph Kimble’s new book Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please: The case for plain language in business, government, and law. Professor Kimble has long been one of the leading advocates for the use of plain language in legal writing. His earlier book, Lifting the Fog of Legalese: Essays on Plain Language, is generally well regarded as a guide to developing the use of plain language in your legal writing.

In contrast, Writing For Dollars, Writing To Please is not an instructional book on how to develop plain language writing skills. Instead it sets out dozens of examples of the benefits of plain language in government, business and the legal industry such as:

Before:

• § 95.455 – Authorized Frequencies
• § 95.457 – Policy governing the availability of frequencies.
• § 95.437 – Limitations on antenna structures.
• § 95.511 – Transmitter service and maintenance.
• § 95.613 – Transmitter power.
• § 95.509 – External radio frequency power amplifiers prohibited.

After:

• § 95.401 – On what channels may I operate?
• § 95.408 – How high may I put my antenna?
• § 95.409 - What equipment may I use at my CB station?
• § 95.410 – How much power may I use?
• § 95.411 – May I use power amplifiers?

The book also goes on to detail many of the cost saving benefits from various implementations of plain language, citing sources ranging from the US Office of Veteran Affairs to the UK Royal Mail system. All in all, the book presents a powerful argument for the adoption of plain language in many settings.

Yet the book is not a technical or how-to guide on plain language writing. There is a broad overview on plain language in the beginning of the book but it is rather short. The book is much more focused on presenting why people should adopt plain language instead of showing people how to adopt it.

If you’re interested in the plain language movement or want some ammunition to back up your argument for adopting plain language in your organization, this book would be a valuable resource. But if you’re looking on how to actually integrate plain language concepts into your own writing, you’d be better off picking up Kimble’s earlier book or Steven Stark’s Writing to Win.

* Affiliate link

This past week, I wrapped up the manuscript for my forthcoming book, The Marble and The Sculptor – hence the lack of updates this past week. Not to mention it was a hectic week.  A large brief for an arbitration was due. Spent half a day at a pro bono “Wills for Heroes” clinic putting together wills for firefighters. Taking the family to the pool to go swimming. Making a half-hearted effort to stay on my workout schedule. But sometimes there is only so much time in the week. Finishing the book meant early mornings and late nights – and left little time for blogging.

But that’s how it goes sometimes. I generally see work-life balance as an illusion. Sometimes you work. Sometimes you are engaged in other activities. To somehow say that your “life” and your work are separate spheres completely mis-frames a person’s approach to their life. If you have a goal of finding work-life balance – you’re never going to achieve it. There’s no such thing. There is only life. Work is part of it.

Maybe you hate your job. That’s why you think of the time spent away from it as “life.” But considering that you likely spend most of your time at work, that’s an untenable position. If your job is so horrible, quit. “But I have tons of debt!” “I need benefits!” “I have to make my house payments!” Okay, if you are in a situation in which you have to keep your job then you need to refocus and reframe your approach to it. Unless you absolutely despise every single aspect of your job (unlikely) – then you need to find ways to minimize the unsavory parts of your job and maximize the parts you do enjoy.

Breakdown what parts of your job trigger stress. Is it the time of the week? A certain co-worker? A certain type of work? Try to identify them – be specific. Not “I hate Mondays,” but, “I don’t like the required staffing meeting from 9:30 a.m. -10:30 a.m. because it interferes with my workflow right as I get going for the day.” This is much more useful. Once you’ve gotten incredibly specific you can begin to look for change. Get to work earlier on Mondays. Make a suggestion that the meeting be moved back an hour. Find work that can be completed in small amounts of time before the meeting – answering emails, etc. It’s not going to suddenly make Monday the most awesome, best day of the week (it’s still Monday!), but more than likely “I hate Mondays” will turn into “Mondays are okay.” You just need to look for the opportunities in your life to make small changes that can lead to sizable returns.

But guess what? You’re going to fail. You’ll have some success for awhile but then get tripped up. Some emergency will come along and throw off your small change. You’ll find yourself reverting to old patterns of behavior. And that’s okay. Finding satisfaction at work (life) is going to require failure. It’s how we grow. What you can’t do is write off the small changes you make if they don’t work the first time or get interrupted or don’t stick. It’s a tough lesson to learn. I know still beat myself up over it from time-to-time; frustrated when things break my routine.

Balance. Or lack thereof?

Yet true “balance” is coming to terms with the fact that your life is never going to be a perfect work/family/friends/hobby time split.  Depending on the demands of certain aspects of your life, work might be more important – it certainly was for me this past week. There was no time for friends, and only little time for family and hobbies. But that’s okay. That’s what balance had to be for me this past week. This week is going to be a bit more light on “focused work” and more focused on meetings and phone calls – which allows me to spend more time on the areas of my life.

Finding balance in your life is not a one time affair. It’s something to experiment with, struggle with, and continuously adjust and adapt as your schedule – your life – dictates.

Anyone else been struggling with balance?

There has been a bit of discussion around legal blogs lately debating the importance of networking and building relationships in person v. some other method of building relationships.

There are a number of marketeers, social media gurus, and lawyer coaches out there who will tell you that being on the internet, and social media in particular, are the next “big thing.” You’ve got to get out there and be on the web! Make sure you’re sharing! Engage with strangers! Take out Google Ads! Build organic SEO link-fests strewn across dozens of second rate press release sites. Or whatever the current advice is.

Why are marketeers recommending this to lawyers? What are the benefits? Marketeers say that there are clients (which is incorrect, there are potential clients on the internet, they do not become clients until they are retained) out there and you need to engage with them in order to build trust. Trust is the key factor here. People have to trust something or someone before they buy a product or retain services from them. For some people the threshold of establishing trust is low, for others it is high. But trust is essential in the client-lawyer relationship. Without it, you’ve got nothing. The question then becomes, how to best build trust in potential clients. Demonstrate to them that you are a lawyer worthy of their trust? Is social media really the answer?

Let’s look at a recent survey conducted by Forrester Research. The survey came as part of a research study by Tracy Stokes entitled How To Build Your Brand With Branded Content. The study’s methodology:

Forrester conducted the North American Technographics® Online Benchmark Survey (Part1), Q2 2012 (US, Canada) in April and May 2012 of 58,068 US and 5,635 Canadian online adults ages 18 to 88. For results based on randomly chosen samples of these sizes (N = 58,068 in the US and N = 5,635 in Canada), there is 95% confidence that the results have a statistical precision of plus or minus 0.4% of what they would be if the entire population of US online individuals ages 18 and older had been surveyed and plus or minus 1.3% of what they would be if the entire population of Canadian online individuals ages 18 and older had been surveyed. Forrester weighted the data by age, gender, income, broadband adoption, and region to demographically represent the adult US and Canadian online populations. The survey sample size, when weighted, was 57,499 in the US and 5,347 in Canada.

Keith, that was a lot of math. I’m a lawyer, I went to law school so I don’t have to do math. What does it all that mean?

It means that the survey has a high degree of statistical precision and that the results of the survey very likely match the general populace’s trust in advertising and promotion. Furthermore, it is worth noting that this was an online survey – not done over the phone or in-person. Which is why Forrester included this little note:

Respondents who participate in online surveys generally have more experience with the Internet and feel more comfortable transacting online. The data is weighted to be representative of the total online population on the weighting targets mentioned, but this sample bias may produce results that differ from Forrester’s offline benchmark survey.

So hey-hey, these are your potential online clients. They have experience with the internet, they feel comfortable in making online transactions. So let’s cut to the chase and look at how these savvy online consumers ranked trust in advertising and promotions across the board:

People, particularly savvy internet users, barely trust social media posts, website ads or mobile apps.

There is some potential for trust there, something in the nature of 10-15%. Compare that to the highest ranked category of trust, recommendations from friends and family . 70% of people trust recommendations from people they know. I’d imagine this would be even higher if it was in-person recommendations and not online ones. So where should a lawyer spend their time and energy in trying to build trust again?

That’s not to say that you should abandon social media. Social media is fun and can be a great way to act as a virtual water cooler. But it’s not a particularly good place to try and establish trust with clients. A lawyer is far better off in providing high degree of service to their existing clients, and going out into their community and building new relationships. That’s the magic formula. The same magic formula that it’s been for 150 years.

Over on r/law, a user asked, “Are there any good TED Talks on the law/legal issues?

For those unaware of TED:

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, under the slogan “ideas worth spreading”.

The TED main conference is held annually in Long Beach, and its companion TEDActive is held in Palm Springs. Both conferences will move from Long Beach and Palm Springs to Vancouver and Whistler, respectively, in 2014. TED events are also held throughout the U.S. and in Europe and Asia, offering live streaming of the talks. They address a wide range of topics within the research and practice of science and culture, often through storytelling. The speakers are given a maximum of 18 minutes to present their ideas in the most innovative and engaging ways they can. Past presenters include Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, Malcolm Gladwell, Al Gore, Gordon Brown, Richard Dawkins, Bill Gates, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and many Nobel Prize winners. TED’s current curator is the British former computer journalist and magazine publisher Chris Anderson.

Since June 2006, the talks have been offered for free viewing online, under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons license, through TED.com. As of May 2013, over 1,500 talks are available free online. By January 2009 they had been viewed 50 million times. In June 2011, the viewing figure stood at more than 500 million, and on Tuesday November 13, 2012, TED Talks had been watched one billion times worldwide, reflecting a still growing global audience.

via Wikipedia

There were a number of good suggestions in the comments at Reddit.

• Lawerence Lessig on the corruption in American politics
• Hard truths on the American justice system
• Lessons from death row
• “Copyright Math”
• The problem with eye witness testimony

Anyone know of any other good TED talks on legal issues that might be of interest?

A buddy of mine, who does IT for a large company, recently shared an email he received from Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. IN conjunction with Amazon EC2, Amazon also offers:

Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes are network-attached, and persist independently from the life of an instance. Amazon EBS provides highly available, highly reliable, predictable storage volumes that can be attached to a running Amazon EC2 instance and exposed as a device within the instance. Amazon EBS is particularly suited for applications that require a database, file system, or access to raw block level storage.

So you can run rent cycles on Amazon’s computers plus use it for storage for whatever you’d like. Many of the most popular web services run on it. With the huge push for cloud storage and computing, it’s quite possible that some law firms have data stored on Amazon’s EBS – even if they’re not aware of it. Anyway, back to that email my friend received.

Dear [redacted],

Your volume experienced a failure due to multiple failures of the underlying hardware components and we were unable to recover it.
Although EBS volumes are designed for reliability, backed by multiple physical drives, we are still exposed to durability risks caused by concurrent hardware failures of multiple components, before our systems are able to restore the redundancy. We publish our durability expectations on the EBS detail page here http://aws.amazon.com/ebs

Sincerely,
EBS Support

Whoops. The Cloud is the all important solution to your practice except when it fails. From Amazon:

Amazon EBS Volume Durability

Amazon EBS volumes are designed to be highly available and reliable. Amazon EBS volume data is replicated across multiple servers in an Availability Zone to prevent the loss of data from the failure of any single component. The durability of your volume depends both on the size of your volume and the percentage of the data that has changed since your last snapshot. As an example, volumes that operate with 20 GB or less of modified data since their most recent Amazon EBS snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% – 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume. This compares with commodity hard disks that will typically fail with an AFR of around 4%, making EBS volumes 10 times more reliable than typical commodity disk drives.

Because Amazon EBS servers are replicated within a single Availability Zone, mirroring data across multiple Amazon EBS volumes in the same Availability Zone will not significantly improve volume durability. However, for those interested in even more durability, Amazon EBS provides the ability to create point-in-time consistent snapshots of your volumes that are then stored in Amazon S3, and automatically replicated across multiple Availability Zones. So, taking frequent snapshots of your volume is a convenient and cost effective way to increase the long term durability of your data. In the unlikely event that your Amazon EBS volume does fail, all snapshots of that volume will remain intact, and will allow you to recreate your volume from the last snapshot point.

The Cloud isn’t perfect. Nothing is. Amazon is aware of it – that’s why they offer “point-in-time consistent snapshots” across multiple zones on their network.

The point being is that you shouldn’t trust any one point of storage for your information. Sure use the Cloud, but also back up to a local drive, and have a system in place to make permanent replicas of your data at set points in time (record to tape, burn to DVD, etc.) Or face the .5% possibility that all your data might dissolve like a whisp of  cloud.