Articles

One of the early jobs I had in my career, I worked for a lawyer who was a terribly smart business owner and as good as anybody I’ve ever known at seeing trends and skating to where the puck is headed. I learned a lot from him, some of it not entirely pleasant to learn, that I’ve carried forward in the years since. One of the relatively few things I saw him get wrong on the business end of his practice was his insistence on never having the firm own real estate. I imagine he looked at the big law firms in the downtown high rises and noted that they rented real their estate and applied the same logic for his firm. For whatever reason, he was dead set against owning real estate.   Read More +

After more than 200 columns for this newsletter over the past 30 years, this will be My Last Monthly Missive on law, life, legal malpractice and baseball. That announcement will cause no tremors on Wall Street, nor will it stir excitement among the masses. In fact, it is unlikely to be of much interest to any sentient being on the planet except the dog, who is interested in everything I do and enraptured by everything I say because I am the Bringer of Treats and Opener of the Back Door.    Read More +

We spend an enormous amount of time thinking about something other than what we are doing in the present moment. It is called mind-wandering and can be detrimental to our happiness and well-being.  A 2010 study by Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, discovered that the average person’s mind wanders 47% of the time (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1192439). The study also found that, when people think about something other than what they are doing in the present moment, they tend to be less happy. Other studies have shown that mind-wandering and a lack of focus on a task can also lead to mistakes.   Read More +

My college roommate, Jeff, married into an old New England family that has a beautiful cabin on a lake up in Maine. When I used to live in Boston, and occasionally still if I am just the right amount of shameless, I was able to wrangle myself an invitation to stay there for a night or two.  It’s a gorgeous place up on Belgrade Lakes region – if you think On Golden Pond, you’re not too far off. If you’re younger than 50, replace On Golden Pond with, I don’t know… I am over 50. Just picture a cabin on a lake, preferably not from a horror movie.   Read More +

What if I told you that there was a pill that you can take that will immediately boost your mood, lower your blood pressure, reduce your risk of diabetes and cancer, improve your focus and memory, reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression, reduce inflammation in your body, delay brain aging and neurodegenerative disease, and reduce negative symptoms of stress? You should also know that this pill would, if taken correctly, have little or no side effects. Would you take it? I’m guessing most would. Well, it is available. It’s just not available in pill form. But it is available in the form of physical exercise and movement. Read More +

As the Carolina landscape turns red and gold and November arrives with a nip, I bring you news from the Fall Classic to brighten your Law Life:  There is greatness all around, and giants walk among us. For proof, look no further than Major League Baseball’s champion Texas Rangers, winners of the 2023 World Series.    Read More +

I love photography. Not so much the doing of it as the admiring the finished product of beautifully composed and edited photos. Especially landscape photography.   There was a time – or if I am going to be honest, there have been several times over the past 20 years because it takes a while for a lesson to make a dent in my hard head apparently – where I’ve looked at some beautiful landscape photography and thought, “I might like doing that…” Read More +

Most of the successful private law practices in North Carolina and around the US – and I am speaking here about individual lawyers’ practices as opposed to law firms – have been built on the backs of referrals. Referrals from other lawyers, referrals from other professionals serving the same client base, referrals from former clients, or – the gold standard, as many lawyers like to tout – referrals from opposing parties. From whatever source a referral comes, they all share the common trait that someone, somewhere said to a friend, colleague or loved one: “you know who you should call for help with that?” A referral is an implicit endorsement and accelerates trust right at the beginning of a potential client relationship. Compared to a cold call from, say, a Google search, it’s like you start the sales process on third base. So, how does a lawyer set about to generate potential client referrals?    Read More +

Over the past year, I have been traveling across the state talking to lawyers about well-being. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. I have been deeply moved by the flood of emails, phone calls, and letters from insureds expressing their appreciation for the content. My commitment to lawyer well-being extends beyond Lawyers Mutual presentations and articles. I am also actively involved in providing written content for the Lawyers Assistance Program (LAP), and I've had the privilege of delivering programs with the LAP on well-being and resilience. The message we have received is clear. Our insureds are hungry for tools to help them deal with the sometimes-overwhelming stress of practicing law.   Read More +

 When was the last time you truly savored a win in your Law Life?  The type of win – a job promotion, a grateful client, a favorable case outcome – is irrelevant. As is the size. The printer is finally unjammed! I found my keys! It’s not Monday! Even small victories deserve to be savored. So why don’t we do it more often?   Read More +

When you find yourself in a hole and you want to get out, as the saying goes, the first rule is to stop digging.   Nowhere is this more true than in digging out of an altogether too common hole among law firms today: reducing attorney and staff turnover. Employee turnover is expensive, disruptive to workflow, frustrating to clients and damaging to team morale. Not to mention soul-sucking when you have to sit through hour after hour of terrible interviews seeking gamely to replace the person who just left with someone – you are getting the sinking feeling – who won’t be quite as good.   Read More +

Want to rejuvenate your Law Life?  Stop working so hard and start playing more. The key to a saner, safer and more sensational Law Life might just be to have more fun, not bill more hours. And there’s a growing body of evidence to back that up.      Read More +

"We have only bits and pieces of information, but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early 21st Century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth...to AI.”1  These lines, spoken by heroic Captain Morpheus in the 1999 movie The Matrix, tell the story of [spoiler alert, though it’s arguable that no such warning is needed when talking about a 24-year old movie because, well, if you haven’t seen it by now you probably aren’t planning on seeing it anyway] the war between humans and artificial intelligence driven machines. Read More +

The web browser is one of those things that flies under life’s radar. It is almost definitely one of the top two or three pieces of software used on your phone and computer (competing with Outlook and Word, for most lawyers), and yet it also probably gets among the least amount of brain space and attention. This is kind of a shame because browsers are kind of amazing software. Free, easy to use and almost infinitely customizable, they can be huge value adds to your workflow, as well as make the other non-work parts of your life (you do have some of those somewhere, right?) smoother and easier, too.   Read More +

Could your Law Life use a miracle? How about 50 to 100 miracles an hour?  Well, they’re available now and absolutely free, right outside your window. The annual Perseid meteor shower – the Best Celestial Event of the Year, according to the American Meteorological Society – is playing now in a night sky near you. The show runs from July to September 1, with peak viewing in mid-August.   Read More +

ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI. It is specifically trained on a diverse range of internet text, making it proficient in a wide array of topics and able to respond to a variety of queries. The artificial intelligence (AI) model can be used for a variety of purposes, such as answering questions, providing explanations, generating creative text, assisting with writing tasks, and much more. It is capable of natural language understanding and generation, allowing it to engage in human-like conversations with users and provide contextually relevant responses.   Read More +

Law firm website are, for many firms, the albatross around the neck of their business development efforts. They are expensive and time consuming to create and for a lot of lawyers they are not an especially productive part of their business development systems. You have to have one, because when a potential client is referred to your firm or a potential employee is interviewing for a position with your firm, they will very likely first go to your website to see what it is your firm says to the world about itself.   Read More +

Tips and resources for hiring paralegals. Read More +