During a recent discussion in LawyerSmack about lawyering, power imbalances, and the ability to shrug off being slighted, someone made a statement that really resonated with me. I immediately recognized its truth and have long shared the sentiment: If you can’t let the bullshit go, the job can absolutely destroy you. Being an attorney can bring with it a lot of baggage, but in the same way that ducks’ feathers are impervious to water, you need to let slights and unwarranted critical remarks roll off your back. Being Like a Duck A couple of years ago, I was defending a...
I recently read Company Man, the memoir of John Rizzo, who was an attorney for the CIA for more than thirty years. Rizzo’s career spanned the covert war in Afghanistan helping the Mujaheddin fight the Soviets, to post-9/11 scandals about CIA enhanced interrogation techniques. Rizzo shares unique insight into his role giving legal advice when there was very little precedent or guidance to go on. One particular sentence in the book struck me as being widely applicable in a business context. Rizzo asked the director of the CIA about his relationship with the directorate of operations. He received a response very...
In the summer of 2004, two friends and I backpacked Europe for ten weeks on a shoestring budget. Knowing this opportunity wouldn’t come again, I carried my camera with me everywhere. I burned through dozens of rolls of film. In fact, I only remember going out once without a camera, and I remember it well. It haunts me. We were staying at a cottage near Chamonix, France. Late one afternoon, as the light was beginning to falter, I began walking from the cottage to a pay phone a mile or so up the road. As I looked up at the...
I don’t want anyone to misconstrue this as encouraging you to sit back on your laurels for those things you consider strengths. To the contrary, you need to continue to hone those skills to best employ them to your clients’ advantage. On the flip side, you can’t just resign yourself to being bad at some aspects of practicing and write them off as losses. Two Components of Civil Litigation You can break litigation practice down into two components: written and oral. It’s been my experience that most lawyers are good at one or the other. Those who excel at both...
A while back, Keith Lee wrote about lessons he learned from chopping down a tree with an ax. I will not deny that is a very impressive thing to do. But when I had two dogwood trees that needed to be cut down, I didn’t reach for an ax. I called my brother-in-law, who came over with his chainsaw, and we made relatively quick work of it. My reason for using a chainsaw in this situation is efficiency. I have an ax. I could have invoked my inner Paul Bunyan. But that was not the most efficient method of resolving...
About ten minutes from my office, there lies a winding road that leads to an abandoned bridge with rotting wooden planks. The bridge spans a large creek that babbles and gurgles through riffles as it runs toward the Cahaba River. It’s a green and quiet place with only the occasional canoe passing through. Sometimes at lunch, I’ll go there to do some fly fishing. There aren’t many fish there, but being there isn’t really about the fishing anyway. It’s much more about the being among the trees and boulders and water. And taking a brief reprieve from the day’s work...
After my 1L year at Cumberland, I clerked for six weeks with the St. Clair County District Attorney. St. Clair County lies east of Birmingham and is home to the Coosa River. I expected my time there to be fairly quiet, because what could really be going on in a quaint, rural county? Answer: All the things! Aside from the story I’m going to share today, here are some other cases I worked on while I was there: a guy who sexually tortured then murdered a girl he met at a bar, then dumped her body in the woods; another...
I’ve always had goals for my life. I’d venture to guess that most of us have. But until last year, my goals were always amorphous, non-specific, undeveloped creatures that had little bearing on my daily activities. That has changed, thanks in large part to reading and listening to Michael Hyatt and others like him. In 2016, I sat down and started setting goals for 2017. Specific, well-stated goals. Some of them were intimidating. But I wrote them in such a way that I knew what steps I would need to take in order to achieve them. And now I’m a believer...
A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post about networking as an introvert, which the folks over at Law School Toolbox noticed and retweeted on several occasions. A few weeks after that, we got together and they asked if I would write a guest post and consider doing an interview for the podcast. I obliged an did both. First, I wrote about the qualities that law firms are looking for when hiring clerks and associates. Then Alison Monahan interviewed me about: Life as an associate in an insurance defense firm; The all-important billable hour; Blogging as a lawyer; What young...
We have this purple plant sitting beside a west-facing window in our house. It only gets a couple hours of late-afternoon sunlight per day, and otherwise it just receives the ambient lighting available in the room. I gave it to my wife for Mother’s Day, so it’s been with us for a few months now. The plant is doing okay. We mostly remember to water it about once weekly. And it’s surviving. That’s about it. Surviving. There aren’t any new blooms. It isn’t growing significantly. The plant is just subsisting. We haven’t put it in an environment where we can...
