Once again, based upon my personal experience and that of tens of thousands of other women in commercial legal practice I continue to believe that until we are fairly represented on commercial ADR panels, both arbitration and mediation, we cannot expect significant change. This may happen as a matter of the natural "aging" process of the field. The ADR field looks now exactly like the legal field looked to me when I entered it in 1980. Not surprising given the fact that ADR is historically a "retirement" field. That is already changing, to beneficial effect.
For the adventuresome, Peter's pro-active recommendations below. I highly recommend, by the way, that you follow Peter's Business Conflict Blog. It's one of the best out there.
(screen shot of google search for our local legal rag's "top 50 neutrals)
■ What if the country’s leading law firms—from which so many of our leading mediators and arbitrators emerge—had an incentive to encourage more diverse members of the firm to enter this field?
■ What if a benchmark survey were conducted to determine how often law firms suggest mediation to their clients; how often mediation is in fact tried; and how often diverse mediators are proposed to clients by outside lawyers and ADR provider organizations?
■ What if the property casualty insurance industry, as the largest consumer of legal services and of ADR services, conveyed its expectation that the firms that insurers pay for, when they propose mediators and arbitrators, will be expected to propose diverse individuals?
■ What if influential national ADR organizations combined forces to better reflect their corporate and legal constituents, and meet their customers’ expectations, by sharing information on excellent women and minorities who are not now on their lists, but should be?
■ What if initiatives were undertaken to encourage particularly promising women, younger people and minorities from firms to attend ADR colloquia, seminars and other events in order to network, learn and advance their visibility and recognition among the ADR community, as well as to contribute diverse views and perspectives?
■ What if a mentor program were designed and funded, pursuant to which younger female and minority attorneys could “shadow” established mediators and arbitrators (whether or not they are women or minorities) and establish skills and reputations thereby?
■ What if corporations and law firms intentionally engaged younger mediators who are women and minorities in smaller matters, so that those professionals would gain experience as neutrals and be better positioned for the larger cases?
■ What if scholarships were established to enable young people to be trained as mediators and arbitrators, with the expectation that a person thus trained would be skilled not only as a neutral, but more generally as a negotiator and client representative in settlement?
■ What if a very “early pipeline” were begun, and ADR institutions worked with Street Law Inc. (www.streetlaw.com), a national program that trains high school students in legal issues, or a similar organization to provide materials and information for children to become interested in ADR as a profession?
It is perplexing that this one aspect of the legal profession—a field that is otherwise so robust, so progressive and so creative—lags behind so miserably in satisfying client expectations for diverse practitioners. But there is no indication that it must be so. And with diligence, creativity and practical action, it will not long be so.
(image from EdTechPost : note on graph: it doesn't have to be like this. Twitter is a tool that can be used strategically as part of your marketing plan for a long, long time and it constantly gets better as the people who do these things build applications and as twitter adds new features; this is completely accurate about the start-up however)
Dear New Web 2.0 Attorney Inhabitant,
Welcome to the Island! Here are a few of its founding principles and folkways:
the natives are friendly networkers who want to share their interests; their friends; their colleagues; their knowledge; and, their experience with you;
you may inhabit any part of the Island and as much of it as you wish; there are no borders here;
no one is interested in your bio here; they want to get to know who you really are; if they're sufficiently interested in that (because you're engaging, friendly, helpful and authentic) they'll eventually get around to asking you what you do for a living (most of them will have intuited it from your interests, however, and won't need to ask);
your primary purpose on the Island is to be of service to others;
play nice;
the Island doesn't require you to do anything - you may visit it and its inhabitants whenever you please; it is not your demanding, insistent, annoying, taxing "in" box; it is not email;
the island boasts educational institutions (law blogs, for instance, and at least one legal University - Solo Practice U); bar associations (Commercial Arbitrators and Mediators and Patent and Intellectual Property Practitioners); exhibit halls (I've set up a booth to sell my book here); help desks staffed by professionals and CEO's (at LinkedIn here); playgrounds (Facebook, depending upon how you choose to use it); and, a lovely river right outside of town that you can wander over to watch, in which to fish for information, or, onto which you can launch a boat of any type, size or design - twitter).
Here are some helpful hints if you want to visit the Island's river - Twitter.
UNLOCK YOUR DOOR. Nothing says "I'm not interested in you" like a velvet rope. Twitter, like all of web 2.0 is fanatically democratic. If you get people in your network you don't want there (the Thai girls who want your sex-trade biz) you can simply block them.
to get started on twitter, amble on over to the twitter boat house of someone you trust and respect; follow everyone they follow unless they're following more than 500 people, in which case follow the people on their twitter "lists" (my list of must follow legal and other people is here).
just watch the river for awhile. Then retweet something someone says that interests you; the rest will follow.
remember who you are on this river - an attorney who specializes in employment law, for instance - and "tweet" consistently with your identity, remembering that you can and should socialize; provide value 90% of the time (linking, retweeting) and promote yourself 5% of the time (MAX).
don't wait to understand twitter-river before downloading tweetdeck. Use it. It's free. It's easy.
Remember what Malcolm Gladwell said in the Tipping Point.
Your first degree connections (you/me) will bring you the least amount of new business because you already know them and have presumably maximized their value to you (that sounds harsh; it's not, but if I added heart, this post would be way, way too long).
Your most distant connections bring you the most work because you may be the only lawyer they know. Although the people I know (lots of lawyers) might be good for your business, the people who know the people I know and the people who know them will ultimately be of the most value to you.
When asked whether the announcement of my affiliation with ADR Services, Inc. could be sent to my WLALA mailing list, I was told: women don't refer! Huh?
In 2006, I formed the Professional Women's Network of Southern California for women executives, managers, professionals, and, entrepreneurs. We now have more than 600 members spread across three social networking platforms LinkedIn (here); Meetup (here, here and here), and, ning (our true "home" here).
If women are in a position to refer, they refer. And if they're in a position to refer to one another, they refer to one another. Some women's initiatives at some major national law firms, for instance, have permitted women associates and partners to by-pass the normal intra-firm cross-marketing connectors (mainly male practice group leaders) and instead refer to the women in far-flung geographic regions who have gotten to know one anothers' specialty practices and strengths as advocates through monthly women initiative or women affinity group meetings.
If women -- the most collaborative gender, if I may be so bold -- don't refer, it's not because they don't want to. It's because there are still too few of them in positions that permit them to refer.
The Professional Women's Network is out to change all that. If you'd like to be part of Women 2.0, please consider joining the Professional Women's Networks of Southern or Northern Cailfornia today. It's free; it's fun; and, it's powerful.
My own personal 200-year present spans the life of my maternal grandparents who were nine years old in 1909, and that of my step-children’s children, who (assuming they procreate on a reasonable schedule) should be ninety-five'ish in 2109. [1]
asked here whether the shiny, flying, silver Jiffy Pop-looking craft tethered in the backyard of Richard Heene was an "attractive nuisance" under the law.
My imagined grandchildren, [6] born sometime between today and 2014, will not be strangers to any of my grandfather’s technologies. Despite the advent of compact fluorescent light bulbs, the early lives of my step-children's children will likely pass under the glow of the same incandescent lights that brightened granddad’s one-room school house. They will be transported to school in cars with internal combustion engines, learn the same alphabet from the same cardboard and paper books (as well as from the "e" variety) [7] and play many of the same games[8] he did – hop scotch, jump rope and ring-around the rosy.
Change will etch itself into the lives of my grandchildren as surely as it did my own, my parents' and my grandparents'. Hybrids will give way to fully electric (and perhaps hemp-powered)[9] vehicles (effective or defective) and though electricity will continue to be generated by hydroelectric dams, wind farms and nuclear power plants, some new and unimaginable source of power will surely push back the nights of my grand children's children. [10]
Law, politics, society and culture also exist in the 200-year present of conflict resolution.[11] In my personal 200-year span, the law seems to have changed the most profoundly. Was it the law first and culture later? Or do they weave our future together?
The first U.S. woman lawyer, Myra Bradwell, was admitted to practice a mere ten years before my grandmother was born. Mrs. Bradwell’s legal career was the subject of one of the sorriest U.S. Supreme Court decisions ever handed down, in which the Court opined,
The civil law as well as nature itself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony, not to say the identity, of interests and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea for a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband … for these reasons I think that the laws of Illinois now complained of are not obnoxious to the charge of any abridging any of the privileges and immunities of cities of the United States.
Another nineteen years would pass after Bradwell began her practice before she (and my nineteen year old grandmother) were guaranteed the right to vote. [13] And another 30 years would pass after my women's movement -- the Second Wave -- before we'd have our own business magazine - ForbesWoman (my part in it here). And let us not forget that despite the 20th Century's great civil rights achievements, when America catches a cold, black America gets pneumonia. See e.g. Problems All Around for Blacks in Big Law at Being a Black Lawyer.
My grandparents', parents' and step-children's 20th Century was dominated by genocide[14] on a scale and a technological precision unimaginable to our earlier forebears. Mid-century brought with it the threat of nuclear annihilation but also liberated millions of people enslaved by colonialism. We cured polio in my own lifetime with both "dead" and "live" vaccines (neither of them counterfeit) - a singular moment in scientific history during which no one took ownership of the cure and no one tried to stop others from seeking another, a problem Patently O addressed this week in Reverse Payments.
Whether god or satan, heaven or hell, war or peace "won" the twentieth century, the world's greatest peace-making body was created during it -- the United Nations. And here in the U.S., the “living room war,” Viet Nam, coupled with the largest generation of adolescents ever to grace American society, ended the forcible induction of young men into the military. [15]
With the recent discovery of our earliest ancestor, Ardi, our biological and social lives exist in a 4.4 million year now. Our physical bodies “evolve” in the womb along the same lines as did our species and, once born, we carry with us our earliest organs. [16] Most critical of these to conflict escalation and avoidance is our “fight-flight” mechanism – the amygdala.[17] And the most pertinent biological agents to promote the collaborative resolution of conflict are our “mirror neurons” which
provide a powerful biological foundation for the evolution of culture . . . absorb[ing] it directly, with each generation teaching the next by social sharing, imitation and observation.
How we’ve manage to survive despite our tendency to misread one another’s actions, intentions and emotions, is often the subject of those who advise us how to choose and move juries -- here -- Anne Reed at Deliberations (explaining why "they" don't see things like "we" do here); and, the Jury Room (explaining why pain hurts more intensely when we believe it's been intentionally inflicted here).
The Most Effective Conflict Resolution Technology is the Oldest
One of our true original gangsters, Al Capone, is reported to have said that “you can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone” and one of our greatest Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt said “speak softly and carry a big stick.”
As Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal explained, had Tit for Tat been tossed into the game with 50 steadfast non-cooperators, there would have been a 49-way tie for first place. But none of the players' programs failed to cooperate in at least some circumstances, leaving Tit for Tat the clear victor. According to Wright, humans, like the programs in Axelrod's competition, are evolutionarily “designed” to cooperate under at least some circumstances. The engine and benefit of cooperation is present in our neurochemistry. When scientists observed the brain activity of volunteers playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, for instance, they found that the participants' “reward circuits” were activated and their impulsive "me first" circuits inhibited when they cooperated. Cooperation, retaliation, forgiveness and a return to cooperation. Tit for Tat.
We don't "dis" lawyers here at the Negotiation Blog. We simply remind ourselves that our primary purpose is the promotion of justice, with a stable societal order closely behind. Most people don't understand, for instance, that Shakespeare's famous the first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyerswas not an insult. In King Henry IV, Act IV, Scene II, Shakespeare's sentiment was not his own, but that of a revolutionary who wished to destroy the social order.
The historic "present" of laws and lawyers is in the thousands, not simply the hundreds, of years. Hammurabi (make of his choice for the memorialization of his laws what you will) was the sixth king of Babylon, remembered for creating -- in his own name (and likeness?) - the first written and systematic legal code.
For the wrongful killing of another, for instance, the victim’s kin were paid according to the social status of the deceased party. Thus the ‘man price’ for killing a peasant was 200 shillings and that for a nobleman 1200 shillings. Payments were not, however, tailored to the loss, but fixed according to types of affront, a distinction we continue to make when we punish intentional torts more severely than negligent ones. [24]
Lawyers, litigators and trial lawyers are too often demonized by the ADR community as if you could get someone to sit down to negotiate without first pointing the gun of litigation at their heads; I salute you (and myself, for that matter!) for bringing us all to the bargaining table. See Steve Mehta's recent post at Mediation Matters, Factors When Peace Makes Sense for a note that touches upon the symbiotic relationship between litigation and mediation, litigators and mediators.
I shouldn't cite single legal blogs twice, but I cannot resist this quote of Scott Greenfield's on another pundit's view of the future lawyers have in store for them, i.e.,
shucking oysters for a living if we don't accept a future of lawyers being piece workers in factories, sending our work off to Bangalore in pdf files and complementing people on their choice of forms at Legal Zoom.
Which came first? Public civil trials or private arbitrations? You’ll be surprised, I’ll wager, to hear that arbitration was one of the earliest forms of dispute resolution, practiced by the juris consults of the Roman Empire. Roman arbitration predates the adversarial system of common law by more than a thousand years. [25]
Ah, the glory of Rome! The juris consulti were (like too many mediators) amateurs who dabbled in dispute resolution, raising the question whether they (and we) should be certified or regulated as Diane Levin asks at The Mediation Channel this week. The Roman hobbyists gave legal opinions (responsa) to all comers (a practice known as publice respondere). They also served the needs of Roman judges and governors would routinely consult with advisory panels of jurisconsults before rendering decisions. Thus, the Romans – god bless them! - were the first to have a class of people who spent their days thinking about legal problems (an activity some readers will recall Ralph Nader calling "mental gymnastics in an iron cage").
18th Century Dispute Resolution Technology: The (Inevitably Polarizing) Adversarial System
It was Buckminster Fuller who famously opined that the "significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." If you keep this aphorism in mind for the remainder of this post, you'll likely have some extraordinarily innovative comments to make in the comment section below.
As the Law Guru wiki reminds us, we can trace the adversarial system to the "medieval mode of trial by combat, in which some litigants were allowed a champion to represent them." We owe our present day adversarialism, however, to the common law's use of the jury - the power of argumentation replacing the power of the sword.
The Act abolishing the infamous Star Chamber in 1641 also granted every "freeman" the right to trial by "lawful judgment of his peers" or by the "law of the land" before the Crown could "take[] or imprison[]" him or "disseis[e] [him] of his freehold or liberties, or free customs." Nor could he any longer be "outlawed or exciled or otherwise destroyed." Nor could the King "pass upon him or condemn him."
English colonies like our own adopted the jury trial system and we, of course, enshrined that system in the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments. Whether this 17th century dispute resolution technology can be fine-tuned to keep abreast of 21st century dispute creation technology (particularly in the quickly moving area of intellectual property) remains one of the pressing questions of legal and ADR policy and practice, particularly in a week in which a Superior Court verbally punished the lawyers before it for filing The Most Oppressive Motion Ever Presented (see the Laconic Law Blog). The motion?
Defendants['] . . . motion for summary judgment/summary adjudication, seeking adjudication of 44 issues, most of which were not proper subjects of adjudication. Defendants’ separate statement was 196 pages long, setting forth hundreds of facts, many of them not material—as defendants’ own papers conceded. And the moving papers concluded with a request for judicial notice of 174 pages. All told, defendants’ moving papers were 1056 pages.
Mediator, author and activist, Ken Cloke, suggests that interest-based resolutions to conflict must replace power and rights based resolutions if we expect to create a future in which justice prevails. As Ken wrote in Conflict Revolution:
Approaching evil and injustice from an interest-based perspective means listening to the deeper truths that gave rise to them, extending compassion even to those who were responsible for evils or injustices, and seeking not merely to replace one evil or injustice with another, but to reduce their attractiveness by designing outcomes, processes, and relationships that encourage adversaries to work collaboratively to satisfy their interests.
Evil and injustice can therefore be considered byproducts of reliance on power or rights, and failures or refusals to learn and evolve.
All political systems generate chronic conflicts that reveal their internal weaknesses, external pressures, and demands for evolutionary change. Power- and rights-based systems are adversarial and unstable, and therefore avoid, deny, resist, and defend themselves against change. As a result, they suppress conflicts or treat them as purely interpersonal, leaving insiders less informed and able to adapt, and outsiders feeling they were treated unjustly and contemplating evil in response.
As pressures to change increase, these systems must either adapt, or turn reactionary and take a punitive, retaliatory attitude toward those seeking to promote change, delaying their own evolution. Only interest-based systems are fully able to seek out their weaknesses, proactively evolve, transform conflicts into sources of learning, and celebrate those who brought them to their attention.
These are the words I leave with the readers of Blawg Review #234 because they are the ones that informed my personal and professional transformation from a legal career based on rights and remedies to one based upon interests and consensus.
Whatever my own personal 200-year present was, is and will be, it is pointed in the direction of peace with justice, with an enormous and probably unwarranted optimism best expressed by the man after whom my law school was named: Martin Luther King, Jr. - the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.
Blawg Review has information about next week's host, and instructions how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues. Next week's host, Counsel to Counsel, will devote its round-up of the week's best legal posts to the Great Recession.
[16] Earlier scientific theory posited that each human embryo (see Embryo Mix-Up at the Proud Parenting Blog) passes through a progression of abbreviated stages that resemble the main evolutionary stages of its ancestors, i.e., that the fertilized egg starts as a single cell (just like our first living evolutionary ancestor); as the egg repeatedly divides it develops into an embryo with a segmented arrangement (the “worm” stage); these segments develop into vertebrae, muscles and something that sort of looks like gills (the “fish” stage); limb buds develop with paddle-like hands and feet, and there appears to be a “tail” (the “amphibian” stage); and, by the eighth week of development, most organs are nearly complete, the limbs develop fingers and toes, and the “tail” disappears (the human stage). It turns out that this one-to-one correlation was too simplistic, but it remains safe to say that our biological development still passes through several stages that “recapitulate” the evolution of our species.
[17] The amygdala is a region of the brain that permits the formation and storage of memories associated with emotional events. It permits us to “read” the emotional responses of our fellows and is thought to facilitated our ability to form relationships and live and work in groups. It is also the source of our “fight or flight” response to danger.
Studies show that some mirror neurons fire when a person reaches for a glass or watches someone else reach for a glass; others fire when the person puts the glass down and still others fire when the person reaches for a toothbrush and so on. They respond when someone kicks a ball, sees a ball being kicked, hears a ball being kicked and says or hears the word "kick."
“When you see me perform an action - such as picking up a baseball - you automatically simulate the action in your own brain,” said Dr. Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies mirror neurons. ”Circuits in your brain, which we do not yet entirely understand, inhibit you from moving while you simulate,” he said. ”But you understand my action because you have in your brain a template for that action based on your own movements. “
[22] Looking toward the future, the Neuroethics and the Law Blog predicts that in the “experiential future, we will have better technologies to measure physical pain, pain relief, and emotional distress. These technologies should not only change tort law and related compensation schemes but should also change our assessments of criminal blameworthiness and punishment severity” here.
The adversarial system of medical negligence fails to satisfy the main aims of tort law, those being equitable compensation of plaintiffs, correction of mistakes and deterrence of negligence. Instead doctors experience litigation as a punishment and, in order to avoid exposure to the system, have resorted not to corrective or educational measures but to defensive medicine, a practice which the evidence indicates both decreases patient autonomy and increases iatrogenic injury.
(Iatrogenic, by the way, is a fancy term for “we have know idea whatsoever what the source of this ailment is). Chris is looking for comments so run on over there if you’ve been thinking about medical malpractice litigation during the marathon American health care debates.
The last time I trained an in-house legal department, I asked every group manager this question: if I could leave a silver bullet behind, what would it be?
The response was unanimous from this well-run Fortune 500 Company: fix our relationship with the __________ Department: it chronically undermines our negotiations with outsiders. The _________ Department was the only one sending none of its people to the two-day negotiation training. An executive friend of mine said, "that's not surprising - no one can see a black hole."
Despite the _________ Department's absence, I created groups of in-house attendees who represented each internal department and asked them to generate a list of the interests of their negotiating teams, including the _________ department, which is one of the recommendations made by Brett, Friedman and Behfar.
There's an executive summary at the link above but I'd shell out the money for a copy of the print magazine to have the full text of this article. Here are the recommendations of the experts:
Plot out the conflicts
Work with constituents
Mediate conflicts of interest
Persuade with data
simulate the negotiation
assign roles to capitalize on team members strengths and interests
establish a plan for intrateam communication
I'll write a post a day about each of these strategies when I return from vacation. In the meantime, litigators who work with teams inside the firm; who defend complex litigation with joint defense groups; and, who must bargain with others with very different interests (construction litigation comes to mind) should be thinking of the ways in which integrated negotiation planning could maximize the settlement benefits to be gained by strategic partners.
A friend recently reminded me of a book review I wrote for one of those "get rich" books The Go Giver (below) for the sorely-missed Complete Lawyer. I reprint it here in the Negotiation Blog because I talk a lot about the power of reciprocity in bargaining. I'd summarize my response here, but I can't say it any better than I did below.
The Go-Giver, A Guide to a Life Lived Richly
American business people have been writing self-help guides to financial success since Benjamin Franklin penned Advice to a Young Tradesman and Poor Richard’s Almanac. Business consultants Bob Burg and John Davis Mann add to this tradition a new parable -- The Go-Giver, A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea.
As the title suggests, Burg and Mann recommend that we discard “go getting” -- hard work focused on individual success -- in favor of “go giving” – authentically passionate work focused on the success of others. To demonstrate how material wealth follows generous action, Burg and Mann create an elusive but legendary business consultant “Pindar,” who shares his Five Laws of Stratospheric Success with anyone who promises to practice these principles in all their affairs.
The pilgrim in this progress is “Joe,” an earnest and hard-working salesman on the brink of a third failed quarter. After promising to follow the laws Pindar teaches him, Joe meets a handful of spectacularly successful givers. These include former hot dog vendor Ernesto, who credits his restaurant and real estate empire to giving more than you take; Nicole, who owes her rise from school teacher to educational software titan to giving much to many; former insurance salesman Sam, whose many philanthropies thrive on giving without expectation of return; and, Debra, who learns to succeed in business by giving of her true self. Having quickly learned each lesson, Joe himself exemplifies Law No. 5 – the willingness to receive the bounty that flows from giving.
Unfortunately, as a guide to financial success, The Go-Giver is more fairy tale than instruction manual. All of the business icons Joe visits ascribe their riches to acts of authentic generosity. It is apparent from the context in which these stories arise, however, that the key here is neither virtue nor the inherent satisfaction to be found in giving. The key is choosing the right people to give to – those with wealth, monied connections or the power to create economic opportunities for others.
If we are moved to visit shut-ins; bring recovery meetings to incarcerated felons; or make micro-loans to third-world entrepreneurs, this book is not for us. This is focused giving and the focus is on the “haves,” not the “have nots.” If we are among the unemployed; the sick; or, the elderly, we’ll need another set of “Laws” for success – chief among them laws guaranteeing the education; training; and, health care necessary to enable us to make use of the opportunities created by the Go-Givers’ generosity. [1]
Walking the Razor’s Edge
Most Complete Lawyer readers are, however, the type of business people for whom The Go-Giver is written. No matter where we appear on the legal economic ladder, as educated people with access to the justice system, we are well poised to engage in random acts of kindness for, and reap rewards from, those who are well situated to spread a little green. [2] So long as we successfully negotiate the razor’s edge between opportunism and genuine acts of generosity, Burg and Mann’s advice will likely redound not only to our emotional and spiritual well-being, but also to our financial success.
Most readers will, of course, recognize Joe’s spectacular rise from failing salesman to coffee-bean multi-millionaire as the fairy tale the The Go-Giver all but announces itself to be. There is value here, however, in the quotidian acts of kindness in which Joe engages to satisfy Pindar’s requirement that he promptly practice the “Laws” conveyed.
The most credible results of Joe’s baby steps on the road to becoming a generous human being are his improved relationships with his fellows. Practicing “not keeping track,” Joe foregoes telling his wife his own work-a-day worries, focusing his entire attention upon the challenges of her day. His reward? An entirely believable note of love and gratitude on her pillow the following morning. Practicing “giving more value” than he receives, Joe serves coffee to his workmates as they struggle to meet a collective quarter-end deadline. Though Joe reports “feeling like an idiot” in doing so, it is clear that the warmth and bemused surprise expressed by is co-workers is its own reward.
The true lesson of The Go-Giver is not so much that material reward follows an expansive spirit, but that one’s daily pleasure increases with the size of one’s own heart. After all, when financial success eludes us – or crashes with the national economy – what we have to rely upon is not numbers on a ledger sheet, but the family, friends and neighbors who will see us through. If we give authentically without expectation of reward – because we “love to . . . as a way of life” – what we will reap is a life richly lived even if we do not thereby “get rich” in the process.
[1] As the Labor Department tells us, in the year 2000, “high school dropouts were more than twice as likely as high school graduates to be counted among the 31 million American “working poor” while only 1.4% of that number possessed college degrees. See A Profile of the Working Poor – 2000, U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics at http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2000.htm. One’s existing occupation – the job we have been lucky or well-placed enough to be trained to do -- is also highly correlated with financial success or failure. As the Labor Department reports, “[a]lmost 31 percent of the poor who worked during the year [2000] were employed in [low skill] service occupations . . . .,” including “[p]rivate household workers, a subset of service workers that is made up largely of women, were the most likely to be in poverty (20 percent)”. On the other hand, those engaged in executive, administrative, managerial and professional occupations had low incidences of poverty since “[h]igh earning and full-time employment are typical in these occupations.”
[2] For a fascinating study of way in which social networks have benefited some and excluded others, including women and minorities, see University of Colorado History Professor Pamela Walker Laird’s book, Pull, Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin.
Gwynne Monahan is not a lawyer, but she knows what it’s like to lose a job. So the Twitter thread she spotted in May about lawyer layoffs caught her attention. “Wondering why laid-off attorneys don’t band together and start a new law firm,” a lawyer tweeted.
Attorney Victoria Pynchon asked if someone would use Ning, the social networking platform, to start a site where lawyers could help one another weather the downturn. Monahan jumped on the idea because she wanted to learn Ning. Ten minutes later, she tweeted, “@vpynchon asked if anyone wanted to create a Ning site, and so I did, and here it is: Lawyer Connection.”
And so was born one of the newest of the networking sites that are proliferating in a depressed economy amid a social media explosion. Within a month, Lawyer Connection had grown to 49 members (and counting) from California to New York. They range from unemployed to established attorneys of all stripes, including lawyers with nontraditional careers. The site features job leads, events, members’ blog feeds and discussion forums. Pynchon was actively recruiting experienced attorneys for a mentoring forum in June. “Now is the time for everybody to be supporting everybody else,” says Pynchon, a mediator of complex commercial litigation for ADR Services Inc. in Los Angeles and author of the Settle It Now Negotiation Blog.
“The idea of putting together seasoned attorneys with young people who are experiencing the harshness of failure for the first time in their lives is an idea whose time has come,” she adds. “Especially lawyers who went to good schools and expected to have careers in big firms. I don’t think they’ve seen themselves as someone who may need to hang out a shingle and practice law in a downturn.”
Come join us at Lawyer Connectionwhether you are a seasoned legal professional with decades of experience to share with your younger colleagues or you are a young, new or laid off attorney searching for guidance.
I have to say that I agree with magazine mogul Tina Brown that we're in a "gig economy" not a job economy. What does that mean? It means doing an inventory of your dreams right next to a realistic assessment of your skills, along with a time line for getting your own business up and running, with or without investors, remembering that in a "gig economy" barter is a perfectly acceptable alternative to cash and in the age of the internet (Networking Wisdom in Mentoring Circles) hundreds of marketing tools that can reach millions of people globally and thousands of people locally, are right beneath your fingers on the keyboard connected to the computer that brings you the most exciting set of opportunities since we decided to send men to the moon -- social networking (now there's a proper run-on sentence, the reward for which is buying myself a new copy of Elements of Style which every job-seeker and new entrepreneur should do post-haste since written communication is the key to successful online business development).
That said, for those who NEED A JOB RIGHT NOW to pay off their law school loans (remembering that dischargable or not, we no longer have debtors' prisons), here's today's Law.com advice:
The book gives a 12-step plan for landing a new job: 1. finding passion and creating vision; 2. creating a brand; 3. creating a value proposition; 4. creating stories; 5. developing a marketing plan; 6. getting a message out; 7. creating a marketing document; 8. meeting the friend's friend; 9. power résumé; 10. preparing for an interview; 11. negotiating terms; 12. landing the job; and the next step.
The book emphasizes the importance of keeping up contacts after landing in a new job -- knowing that another may search may be ahead. But it suggests maintaining contacts by looking for ways to help other people with a "pay-it-forward" approach. "We all need help at some point," the book says. "The concept is that you are thankful for those who helped you in the past."
Villwock told the group that in his experience, the most successful CEOs and other professionals are those who are most passionate about their work. "When they stop having fun, that's when they stop and go on to the next job," he said.
He also advised the group that attitude and personal skills are as important as professional credentials. From observing executives, he said, "half their success has nothing to do with performance on the job. It has everything to do with ability to sell themselves and build trusted relationships."
If you substitute business plan for power résumé and starting the business for landing the job, you've got a perfectly great recipe for engaging the gig economy eagerly awaiting your contribution. Listen up! You didn't get the highest PSAT and SAT scores, graduate cum, magna or summa, ace the LSAT, study your $#@% off, learn lawyering skills, conquer your fear and pass the bar exam to be hat in hand looking to be someone's apprentice galley slave.
Think about it and join the rest of the gig economy.
We're looking forward to your unique and valuable contributions to the new economy right now!
The writing on the inside of the secret entrepreneurial decoder ring? MONETIZE EVERYTHING!
If you're worried about your law job becoming -- as they say in Britain - "redundant" or if you've already been laid off due to the recession, join Lawyer Connection which was born today as the result of a twitter conversation I had with Gwynne Monahan (who you can follow @econwriter).
Here's an exploration of what a mutual aid group is from the viewpoint of a social worker -- which speaks to me because I lived through my first husband's MSW in Social Work studies before he lived through my Law School experience (an eventual relationship-killer).
Mutual aid as group work technology can be understood as an exchange of help wherein the group member is both the provider as well as the recipient of help in service of achieving common group and individual goals (Borkman, 1999; Gitterman, 2006; Lieberman, 1983; Northen & Kurland, 2001; Schwartz, 1961; Shulman, 2006, Steinberg, 2004; Toseland & Siporin, 1986). The rationale for cultivating mutual aid in the group encounter is premised on mutual aid's resonance with humanistic values (Glassman, 2002) and the following propositions: 1) members have strengths, opinions, perspectives, information, and experiences that can be drawn upon to help others in the group; 2) helping others helps the helper, a concept known as the helper-therapy principle (Reissman, 1965) which has been empirically validated (Roberts et al, 1999); and 3) some types of help, such as confrontation, are better received when emanating from a peer rather than the worker (Shulman, 2006). Mutual aid transactions that occur amongst and between members stimulate cognitive and behavioral processes and yield therapeutic, supportive and empowering benefits for the members (Breton, 1990;Northen & Kurland, 2001; Shulman, 1986, 2006).
Obviously, we're not pursuing the therapeutic benefits of a mutual aid society as social worker Cicchetti is. Having been a member of such a group (a community-based women's credit union in the early 1970's for instance) I can say that the experience is not only economically, but also personally, enriching.
Let's not wait for the economy to improve. Let's start improving it TODAY. We are the change we want to see in the world.
From Diana Skaggs'
Louisville Divorce Law Journal -
"In browsing [Victoria's ADR blogs] you'll no doubt stumble upon some
information that will make you wonder how you could have practiced law
without it. Subscribe to the feeds and you'll regularly receive some of the
best CLE on the net. I wish it were required reading for all mediators."
I'm an attorney who is currently a Masters Degree candidate in
Mediation and Conflict Studies. I do not have much time to read
blogs. Thanks to the Settle It Now Negotiation Blog, I do not need
to. Your posts possess the perfect blend of thought-provoking
content and practical tools for anyone working in the trenches of
dispute resolution. I look forward to reading the blog because I
know its content will always be highly relevant to the issues I
grapple with, both as an attorney and as a mediator. Thank you for
providing us with such a great free resource. - Juliana Hoyt,
attorney and mediation student, Vermont.
There is a lot going on for women attorneys' business development these days, particularly at the Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles (check out this November 17 all-day event: 
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My 
First and most importantly, I suppose, are the
18th Century Dispute Resolution Technology: The (.jpg)
The last time I trained an in-house legal department, I asked every group manager this question: if I could leave a silver bullet behind, what would it be? 
A friend recently reminded me of a book review I wrote for one of those "get rich" books .jpg)
Connecting for Job Help
That said, for those who NEED A JOB RIGHT NOW to pay off their law school loans (remembering that dischargable or not, we no longer have debtors' prisons), here's today's 
