Resources
Here you’ll find:
- A repository of original, free forms and documents in PDF format provided by An Associate’s Mind.
- Links to every post in the Great Conversation series.
Associate’s Mind Forms and Documents:
This is a report I compiled about my experience on the first thirty days of a legal blogger. I have yet to see anything else out there like it. It’s a systematic breakdown of traffic, referrers, top posts, clicks, social media, rankings, etc. If you’re looking for some ideas of what to aim for when looking to start a law blog, I haven’t seen anywhere better to start.
Based on the research of Dr. Robert Jeffery Sternberg’s book, In Search of the Human Mind, the “Top Twenty Reasons Lawyers Fail” was on of my most popular posts initially. Taking Dr. Sternberg’s list of why intelligent people fail, I applied it to lawyers over the course of a number of posts. Eventually I compiled it into a single document for easy consumption.
A fairly common business practice is something called a SWOT Analysis. It’s a a strategic planning method used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats involved in a project or business venture. It adapts fairly well to developing initial litigation positions. This is a brief guide I put together on how to go about doing it.
Another common business practice are After Action Reviews (AAR). An AAR is a process used in business to try and discover and understand lessons that could be learned from successes and failures on a project, with the goal of improving future performance on similar projects. As a new lawyer, you want to review your own personal performance on a matter.
The Great Conversation
Here you’ll find a comprehensive list of all of the posts in the “the Great Conversation” series.
For the unaware, from Wikipedia:
The Great Conversation is a characterization of references and allusions made by authors in the Western canon to the works of their predecessors. As such it is a name used in the promotion of the Great Books of the Western World published by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. in 1952.
It is also the title of Volume 1 of the first edition of this set of books, authored by Robert Maynard Hutchins, and an accessory volume to the second edition (1990), authored by Mortimer Adler.
According to Hutchins, “The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day.” (The Great Conversation, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1952.)
Adler said, “What binds the authors together in an intellectual community is the great conversation in which they are engaged. In the works that come later in the sequence of years, we find authors listening to what their predecessors have had to say about this idea or that, this topic or that. They not only harken to the thought of their predecessors, they also respond to it by commenting on it in a variety of ways.” Mortimer Adler: “The Great Conversation Revisited,” in The Great Conversation: A Reader’s Guide to Great Books of the Western World, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., Chicago, 1990, p. 28.
The entries are as follows:
