Lawyer Skills

Anyone who knows me (or follows me on Twitter) knows that I love sports, particularly my beloved Golden Gophers. So it should come as no surprise that I watched the press conference with our new men’s basketball coach, Richard Pitino. After ...

Maybe it's time to accept that email just wasn't designed to do all the things we try to get it to do. Like manage projects and files, share documents or (groan) schedule meetings. It's not just that it's considered "old-fashioned," but with so ...

Social media. A familiar topic for me, and a staple now at ABA TECHSHOW. I'd be remiss if I didn't say I walked into the session, "Social Media as Information Gathering Tool," a skeptic last week. Obviously, social media is an information ...

A shocking number of ethics complaints stem from a very simple problem: lawyers not communicating with their clients. Clients pay for our time and effort, and they deserve to hear from us. Plus, our ethical obligations require that we be in ...

It seems excellent lawyers do not always produce excellent legal writing. Whether due to a lack of time, of mental energy, of colleagues available to proofread, or of awareness of just how bloated a legal document can get, good lawyers sometimes ...

When you’re in need of an expert to serve as a witness in your case, to consult on a special matter, or perhaps even to serve as a speaker at your bar seminar, where do you look? Your first instinct may be to use a search engine, or to search a ...

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that ...

When young attorneys begin their career, they get loads of information thrown at them, meet a lot of “very important” people and enter a lifestyle that’s extremely different from the one they lived in law school. It can be overwhelming. In this ...

“No problem,” he said, as he emerged from the alligator-infested river. "No problem," he said, as he slaughtered half a tribe of natives. “No problem,” said the hangman, as he yanked the lever to hang the man—but not for slaughtering the tribe. ...

“When I came out of law school,” recalls Scott Westfahl, director of professional development at Boston’s Goodwin Procter, "I was told ‘Keep your head down, do good solid work and you’ll be elevated into the partnership and build a client base. ...