Lawyer Skills

When I was an associate, the most prominent item on my desk was a big, black, ugly toad that sat on the front corner and stared at me expectantly all day, every day. Occasionally it would ring and I would be jerked from the safe haven of legal ...

With so much focus on the mechanics of marketing, there's not much space left for paying attention to competition—for actually getting the clients that your competitors want as much as you do. But isn’t competing for clients what the whole ...

It is easy for lawyers to slip into conflict with office staff, colleagues or service providers because most of us have never learned how to craft the kind of agreement that isn't about winning, but creates a meeting of mind and heart. The best ...

If you are a partner considering a move to another firm, you probably have two main reasons. The first almost always involves money. The second usually concerns personality factors or firm culture. That’s shorthand for “I’m ...

I got an email from one of the younger partners the other day and, frankly, I couldn’t figure it out: “snicker77: why not? @fiddle @sweaterneck @sideways = Curmudgeon?” Upon investigation, I learned that he had pasted a “tweet” into ...

Some people are born schmoozers and like nothing more than to meet and mingle at professional events. But for others, this is about as painful as watching a "Kardashians" marathon at gunpoint. If you fall into the latter category — and most of ...

We all have our own inane conference call stories. It seems a medium designed for the ridiculous and irritating and fraught with, well, stupidity. While the technology continues to improve, our conference call behavior seems impervious to basic ...

Google’s Gmail has made news in the past couple of years by “losing” users e-mail—often years worth. While these outages have primarily affected the free Gmail, even access to the paid Google Apps has occasionally been lost. More egregiously, in ...

The “no surprises” rule is always a good one to follow when it comes to relationships with outside counsel. But what’s a general counsel to think when her lawyer reveals that trouble’s afoot—and he’s departing for ...

Lawyers afraid to talk? No, it is not the punchline to a joke but, rather, the reality for more than you may think. Social anxiety expert Jonathan Berent, who has worked with more than 10,000 individuals, calls this fear of speaking “selective ...