Recently, Joanna Penn was talking on her podcast about all the different things she's tried and revenue sources she has developed over the years as a part of her writing business. She said that every year she does an analysis of the work she enjoys and finds productive and the work she needs to either delegate or abandon. Here's the part that stuck with me though; Penn said it's as important for her to know what the work is that she doesn't do, as it is to recognize what she does do. Not twelve hours before listening to that podcast...
It occurred to me one day in early October, while working on a problem no one in my firm had dealt with before, that I had just entered my seventh year of practice. And that suddenly seemed like a pretty significant amount of time. This started me on a pig trail thinking about how comfortable I am on a daily basis with my knowledge and experience levels. I was also curious about how comfortable others with similar experience levels were with their practices, so I ran a poll on Twitter and LawyerSmack, asking this question, "For those who have been...
"It takes a village to raise a child." This maxim could easily be applied to lawyers. Sure you can try to go from being a baby lawyer to a adolescent lawyer to a full grown lawyer on your own. You can try doing it without a mentor to help you grow and without a community to support you. But why would you want to? Traditional Sources of Community for Lawyers It used to be that you were limited by geography to finding and participating in a community. Local bar associations played a huge role in the lives of many lawyers,...
One of the major determinants for how an associate’s year-end review is going to go is how much money she made the firm. There are other things too, like how an associate is developing client and case management skills and whether the associate is developing her own book of business. But when everything is boiled down to its rawest form, partners at most firms want to know how profitable the associate is. Since an associate’s profitability is the most important thing to her employer, she should make it a priority to know this information herself. But I recommend that she...
Because in our line of work, time is money, I keep close track of my billable hours. I write my time entries down after each billable event. When I hear about lawyers not writing down time for a couple of days and having to go back and recreate it, I shudder. People are generally lousy judges of how long things have taken to accomplish tasks. When lawyers go back and recreate time, they are sure to overbill clients for some tasks while underbilling clients for different tasks. Not to mention the things they’ve done and forgotten about in the last...
In January of 2018, in the middle of the college football national championship game, Nick Saban substituted out his quarterback Jalen Hurts, who had led Alabama to its second consecutive national title game. Saban sent in his true freshman QB Tua Tagovailoa, who by all accounts was expected to be the next great quarterback. In the final moments of the game with Alabama trailing, Tua delivered a strike to his wide receiver for the game-winning touchdown. For the next eight months, something of a quarterback controversy brewed in Tuscaloosa. For the 2018 season, would Alabama's quarterback be the junior who...
Good goals are a beacon to let you know you're headed in the right direction. They enable you throughout the course of a year to review your list to affirm whether you are taking actions to help you achieve the goals you've set. Without goals, you are a boat adrift at sea. You can paddle as hard as you're able, for as long as you can, in whatever direction you see fit. But without a specific destination in mind and a beacon to guide you, there is no correct direction for you to travel. Your efforts become flitting and circular....
When I look at my traffic on the blog every month, the same few articles are at the top of the heap every time: Objecting to Discovery Requests under the new FRCP 34; Beware of Bogus Requests for Admission; Your Client Died during the Case - How about a Suggestion of Death?; and What Is a Party's Duty to Supplement Discovery? The trouble (if you can call it that) is these aren't the types of articles I most enjoy writing. But they are the issues I and other lawyers are encountering on a regular basis and frequently have questions about. They are the...
How many times have you heard something to this effect: "The key to getting clients is to just do great work." Well, I'm here to tell you that's a partial truth, at best. Clients expect you to do great work. Clients expect great work. That's what happens when you pay upwards of $150/hour for someone's services (and often 2-3 times that amount). There are built-in expectations. So for someone to tell you that if you just do great work, you'll get more clients, is mostly inaccurate. Because the reality is, if you just do great work you'll be ... meeting...
I was involved in a multiparty email exchange about a pre-trial scheduling order. As sometimes happens in conversations among many lawyers about how much time to allot to discovery, expert disclosures, and dispositive motion deadlines, things went a little sideways. And since all this communication was occurring by email, no one could read anyone's tone, and each inferred the worst from the other parties to the exchange. Everyone was sitting in his or her own office getting progressively more frustrated. I got an email from one lawyer putting opposing counsel on blast. Just really letting him have it. The allegations...
