Regardless of your goals, there's no point in blogging unless you enjoy the process of writing and have a passion for your subject matter. Otherwise, the blog will fall flat. While it may achieve desired goals of increasing search engine optimization, it will ultimately be uninteresting and will have few regular readers.
The best blogs come from the heart. The lawyer's voice and passion for the subject matter are obvious. The blogger offers his or her opinions without hesitation and isn't afraid to express a minority viewpoint.
A few blogs spring to mind as prime examples of this type of blogging. Some are well known, others less so. But all are great examples of blogs that continually draw readers in and bring them back for more.
A criminal defense lawyer I know used to ask me "just exactly what is it that you 'litigators' do everyday anyway?'"
What we do, my friend, is discovery.
Discovery.
Saying that discovery is part of litigation practice is like talking about the wet part of the ocean.
How do you know when you're finally finished with legal practice? When do the heavens open up and angels descend with the news that you've finally done enough and may now go and do that which you truly love?
It's usually a discovery moment.
For one of my former law partners, it came on the heels of a five page meet and confer letter. Single spaced. When my friend's secretary came into her office with the written response, the expression on her face ranged between shock and amusement.
"You're not really going to send this, are you?"
"Yes, I am. Let me sign it."
"No no no no no no no. I can't let you do this."
"Yes you can. Let me sign it."
"Pleeeezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz."
"Sign."
Here's the response that struck fear into the heart of an overworked legal secretary:
Whatever.
And yes. She sent it.
For those of you who have not yet reached the promised land of Discovery Whatever, I've got very very very good news for you.
We’re celebrating Mothers Day by posting Blawg Review #263 at the She Negotiates Blogfor one obvious and some not so obvious reasons. The obvious reason is the word “She.” The not-so-obvious reasons are: (1) Mother’s Day was a peace and reconciliation movement before it was a holiday; and, (2) peace exists only when we have the political will to seek and the negotiation tools achieve the resolution of conflict.
The first woman legal blogger who joins She Negotiates to Power Her Dreams and leaves a May 3-week post beginning with the words, she negotiates, she succeeds, she networks, she resolves or she transforms will win a free ticket to the Negotiation for Women Workshop at the Pasadena Women’s City Club on June 10 (7-10 p.m.) with attorney-mediator, arbitrator and negotiation trainer Victoria Pynchon and east-coast business negotiation guru John Tinghitella.
So get ready to celebrate the woman who negotiate, network, resolve, succeed, and transform with a nod to mom for Blawg Review #263!
What women are saying about the Craving Balance Negotiation Course:
"I learned more during this hands-on negotiating course than in another higher priced class. Victoria and Lisa helped me make the emotional changes necessary to demand a higher value for my work, and taught a step by step process for getting the most from sales negotiations."
Yes, Virginia, lawyers do "win" mediated settlement negotiations every work day. They do so by:
their reputation for success at trial;
their ability to choose the right moment to first discuss settlement;
their ability to "control" their team and their client ("control" being a legal term for good client relations arising from top notch client communication skills);
their negotiation skill set - both in terms of long-term strategy and "at the table" tactics;
their persuasive skill set - both with opposing counsel and with the mediator;
their ability to conduct a risk-benefit analysis that approximates the true likelihood of their probable success at trial;
their determination to make aggressive but reasonable first offers;
their possession of and willingness to stick to a set of flexible "bottom lines" that give them sufficient room to "horse trade" and "hang the meat low enough for the dog to smell it;
their ability to bring the right people to the table at the right time; and,
their ability to walk away without dramatics if the other side is unwilling to negotiate in the realm of reality.
Some of these skills are in all litigators' arsenals. Where most litigators are the weakest is in the negotiation of settlements. I know it not only because it was my greatest area of weakness ("I'm paid to win not to settle") but because I see it evidenced in mediation when attorneys bargain half the day away in the useless strato- and nano-spheres.
Here are two new resources you should have at hand every working day. "Having blog resources at hand," by the way, means having a google or other news reader to send you RSS feeds.
Decision Tree Analysis - the Decision Tree Analysis Blog by PaperChace. There's a ten-day free trial of PaperChace's decision tree analysis software for mediators, a free trial I'll take advantage of once the $^%@# book is finished (any day now, really). Laywers love numbers in the way only people who don't understand them can. I've had cases settle promptly as soon as everyone has put themselves to the task of making numeric estimates of their chances of success on the merits at any given stage of the litigation. For making the uncertain certain and depressing overly optimistic client expectations there's nothing quite like numbers. Do check it out.
There's another mediation blog to read as well, but not simply "yet another" blog by yet another mediator. This is Lee Jay Berman, one of the best and busiest mediators in town, the teacher of thousands in Pepperdine's internationally known and respected "Mediating the Litigated Case" and President of his own mediation think-tank and training station - the American Institute of Mediation.
The blog, Eye on Conflict, will deliver to you free of charge the wisdom, education and training you'd otherwise pay thousands of dollars for. Listen, I spent two full years at the Straus Institute earning my LL.M in dispute resolution and every time I talk to Lee Jay he tells me something that improves my ability to help lawyers negotiate settlement 100%. Today Lee Jay mourns the passing of a giant in our field - Richard Millen. As you read Lee Jay's tribute, you come to understand just how deeply embedded he and his vision are in mediation theory and practice in Southern California.
Put these two dynamite resources in your news reader and be as good a settlement negotiator as you are a litigator and trial attorney.
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.
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.
We bloggers put a lot of work into these blogs - more work than could ever possibly be justified by ROI. We do so because we love our workand want to share it with the world; because we like to learn from other bloggers and to share our insights with them; and because we're readersand writersand, frankly, geeks!
We also blog, I think, because we always wanted to be part of the "life of the mind" that University promised to be but never quite delivered because . . . heck! we were too young to appreciate it. In my case, that meant cutting far too many classes to play PONG (yes PONG)
in the bar at The Surfer on the boardwalk at Pacific Beach just south of U.C. San Diego from which I graduated by, among other things, throwing myself on the mercy of my T.S. Eliot prof who permitted me to give him my final paper on "Burnt Norton" in the faculty dining room (thanks Jack!) as well as on Professor Lettau who let me out of the required upper division German Literature class after I flunked my translation mid-term on "Death in Venice" ("Never return to class," he said, "and I'll give you a B!")
I'm temporizing. Putting off what I'm about to say. Here it is!
SETTLE IT NOW IS THE NUMBER ONE ULTIMATE RANKED CONFLICT RESOLUTION BLOG by this obscure company. (they even gave me this prize: !!)
Because I endeavor to provide value instead of endless self-promotion in this blog, I give you a recent interview with two of the legal blogging world's foremost authorities, Robert Ambrogi and Larry Bodine. Excerpt below and full interview here (.pdf).
What are the most essential ingredients to a successful legal blog?
Ambrogi: The elements of success for a legal blog are theme, authority, consistency and voice. By theme, I mean that the blog should have a distinct focus (a topic of law, location, element of practice, target clientele, etc.). By authority, I mean that the blogger should have command of the subject and write posts that reflect that. The best posts are those that combine knowledge and insight, so that the reader will learn something about the topic and also about what the blogger thinks of the topic.
By consistency, I mean just that. Daily is good but not essential. A blogger should strive to post a couple times a week at a minimum. Better to write fewer posts of higher quality than to post a steady stream of useless information.
By voice, I mean a recognizable style. For many bloggers, this comes with time. Write for a general audience and avoid the kind of stiffness and legalese common in other forms of legal writing. [A]s with any form of marketing, [blogging] success is measured by the goals one hopes to reach. Traffic, for example, is not a measure of success if it is not coming from the blogger's potential clientele. At its simplest, success in blogging can be measured by the degree to which the blogger is able to achieve greater recognition and greater respect among those who constitute potential clients.
Bodine: Successful bloggers post frequently – once a day if possible. (I typically pre-write several days worth of posts, and time them to appear one day at a time). Successful bloggers are totally focused on their readers’ interests – they never stray off-topic and they keep out egocentric posts about being on vacation and what they saw on TV. Their content must be “unmissable” – it must make a difference in their reader’s lives. A successful blog always reflects the interests of its constituency.
As you can see, I've violated nearly all the rules but "voice" here, hoping my readers will forgive the occasional idle ramble through my stream of consciousness.
I'm happy whenever new legal bloggers contact me to ask whether I'll add them to my blog roll because it gives me an opportunity to be of service to the Blawgosphere that has done so much for me. Because I keep writing this same responsive e-mail from scratch however, I'm going to finally post my most recent free advice so that I can simply link to it next time.
Here’s how linking works.
You add blogs in which you’re interested to a news reader like google reader. You read them and find items that stir your own thoughts – that make you want to engage in a public conversation about the topic at hand.
You cite to that blog in your blog and link to it. Generally, you excerpt a bit of someone else’s post and extend the breadth or depth or reach of it.
Soon, people with a natural affinity to what you’re talking about will be citing to you and excerpting your material. If you say interesting things about settlement, negotiation, or conflict resolution in general, I’ll find you (I’ll add you to my news reader today to watch your blog grow). If I'm following you and you're practicing law and writing about it, eventually I'll see something interesting you've mentioned that I'll want to write about too. I'll excerpt a bit of your post, give you credit and link to you.
I get somewhere between 30 and 40,000 visitors a month. People who are vitally interested in your area of practice will find you because I’ve mentioned you; because I add my audience and my "authority" to your own. (See Psychology of Persuasion at the Flying Solo Blog). This will not happen as a result of your being on my "blog roll" (to which I won't add you because it's a waste of your and my time).
Before you know it, bloggers will begin arriving at your blog-door bearing gifts. It's the Blog Welcome Wagon! You'll get free advice, some of which will be good (like this) and some of which may not. I must tell you, however, that I've never received any bad advice from an active blogger.
What gifts will the Welcome Wagon bring? Lists mostly. Bloggers will tell you the location of the best schools for your children; the name of their gardener; warnings about neighborhood bullies and stores that rip you off. If your grass needs mowing or you've allowed weeds to pop up in the cracks of your sidewalk, they'll mention that too. If your Blog House gets a new paint job or adds a wing, they'll let others know it and drop by to tell you how nice it looks. Your kids will baby sit theirs. You'll be invited to neighborhood Bar-b-Q's and asked to serve on the Neighborhood Watch. If you're interested, you might eventually be elected Mayor of Your Blog Town.
Someday soon, something you write will appear in Blawg Review (for which I’m a “sherpa”). Maybe you’ll even (gasp) begin to twitter. Anonymous Ed. of Blawg Review will be in your twitter network, as will Kevin O’Keefe at Lex Blog who aggregates legal twitterers at LexTweet. Follow everyone Kevin follows. He has a HUGE twitter network of law bloggers. The Wall Street Journal’s “onespot” might follow you too and if you write something topical (the current economy is always a good bet) you’ll find your blog cited there. Then you can tell the people who poo-poo'ed your blogging effort that you were cited in the Wall Street Journal. "So there!"
Read the newspapers and magazines and watch the movies and television that your market reads and watches. Participate in their events. Speak to them in their local habitats. Share your knowledge. Link, link, link, link, link. The blogosphere is a virtuous circle of good intentions and enlightened self-interest.
In EVERYTHING you do, refer to your blog. Put it on your business cards. Mention it when you speak to other lawyers or to local business groups. Walk your talk. Have integrity. Be consistent. Be interesting, novel, innovative, passionate, wise and generous. Be of service. Always say "yes" to a Blawgosphere request, even if the "yes" is wrapped in a "no" (this, for instance, which says "no" to the blog roll request but yes to your participation in my network as a P.I. blogger).
Welcome. The water’s warm and the natives friendly. Feel free to call or write for blog advice anytime. And thanks for letting me be of service.
It's law week in Canada and the brilliantly prolific Jordan Furlong at Law21 celebrates justice with Blawg Review #207: All the News that Fits, helpfully including the following outline for his comprehensive review of the best posts in last week's Blawgosphere. If you haven't yet given yourself the pleasure of Jordan's prose, this week is the week to do so.
Section D - Life
Section E - Sports
Section F - Technology
Section G - Education
Section H - Community
Section I - Religion
Section J - Comics
Section K - Editorial
As Jordan reminds us
Exactly four years ago this week, Blawg Review made its debut. Two hundred and seven installations later — stop and think about that for a second, of all the work by Ed, Colin,Victoria and others — it’s still going strong. If you’re a law blogger who hasn’t yet stepped up and hosted this brilliant and critically important example of citizen legal journalism, you owe it — to yourself, to your blawgging colleagues, and most importantly, to the public at large that needs to hear what we know — to sign up now.
Blawg Review has information about next week’s host, and instructions how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues
They're in the AmLaw100 or 200, serve Fortune 50 or 500 clients and attended a top 10 Tier 1 law school as reported yearly by the U.S. World and News Report.
Perhaps this addiction to knowing one's precise place among one's peers started with the LSAT, the SAT or even the PSAT.
In my elementary school, we had two classes for each grade and I knew I was with the "smart kids" as early as grade three. I'm able to remember this because I learned I was being channeled into what we called "the dumb kids' class" for my fourth grade school year. I raced home crying; mom called the school; and, next thing you knew, all was right with my world again: I'd been moved to Mrs. Wells 4th grade class with all of my "smart kid" friends.
That's the precise moment I first believed that my alleged intelligence was premised upon a fraud. My "mommy" got me in.
I wonder how many lawyers have had similar experiences or live with similar fears. Our fixation on pinning ourselves to charts like insects on a board certainly suggests that I am not alone.
That being said, I announce with the usual degree of cynicism concerning any ranking the announcement that the Settle It Now Blog made it into the Avvo list of the top 50 (never before heard of Alexa list) of top law blogs (no. 33).
Sigh. I'm 57 and still "in recovery" from that third grade morality play (yes, I felt guilty about being with the "smart" kids ever after).
Here are my personal and institutional statistics, followed by novelist Don DeLillo's great meditation on the same theme.
LSAT: a shameful 613
to give you an idea of what 613 meant, "[b]y 1980 [the year I graduated], the LSAT mean for students entering the University of Illinois College of Law (no. 27) was 679 (from The Rise of the LSAT)
679 was the LSAT median for Harvard's class of 1969 if you're comparing the brain size of younger and older attorneys.
America is a sanitarium for every kind of statistic. We take care of them. We try to understand them. We do what we can to make them well. Numbers are important because whatever fears we might have concerning the shattering of our minds are largely dispelled by the satisfaction of knowing precisely how we are being driven mad, at what decibel rating, what mach-ratio, what force of aerodynamic drag. So there is a transferred madness, a doubling, between the numbers themselves and those who make them and care for them. We need them badly ; there is no arguing that point. With numbers we are able to conceal doubt. Numbers render the present day endurable, herald the impressive excesses of the future and stocked with a fine deceptive configuration our memories, such as they are, of the past. We are all natural scientists. War or peace, we thrive on the body-count. If I were on my death-bed today, and did not know the date, my cells would probably refuse to surrender. Without a calendar, a stopwatch, a measuring cup on the night table, I couldn’t possibly know how to die.
Here at Above the Law, we thrive on taking a vat of hydrochloric acid to the veneer of the legal profession and exposing the original craftsmanship underneath. Nothing is sacred.
When given the opportunity to serve for Blawg Review -- the "blog carnival for everyone interested in law" -- I was excited to take Above the Law's brand of rousing rabble out on the road. How many "Sacred Cows" are out there? How many can I hunt and grill? And as Denise Howell might ask me on her "Yo Comments Are Whack" podcast: "how many cow jokes can you take in one week before you end up on a liposuction table?" Eric Turkewitz already tussled with Oprah this week, so the easiest mark has already been bagged.
Of course, ATL is also a news organization. So while I had high hopes of continuing my friendly banter with Loyola Law School Dean Victor Gold, the news of the week inexorably pushes me in one direction. Luckily, it turns out that the thing everybody was blogging about this week is the biggest sacred cow of all, and it is ripe for poaching.
Put down those canned objections to interrogatories and read on here.
Reciprocation - People tend to return a favor. Thus, the pervasiveness of free samples in marketing. In his conferences, he often uses the example of Ethiopia providing thousands of dollars in humanitarian aid to Mexico just after the 1985 earthquake, despite Ethiopia suffering from a crippling famine and civil war at the time. Ethiopia had been reciprocating for the diplomatic support Mexico provided when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1937.
Commitment and Consistency - If people commit, orally or in writing, to an idea or goal, they are more likely to honor that commitment. Even if the original incentive or motivation is removed after they have already agreed, they will continue to honor the agreement. For example, in car sales, suddenly raising the price at the last moment works because the buyer has already decided to buy. See cognitive dissonance.
Social Proof - People will do things that they see other people are doing. For example, in one experiment, one or more confederates would look up into the sky; bystanders would then look up into the sky to see what they were seeing. At one point this experiment aborted, as so many people were looking up that they stopped traffic. See conformity, and the Asch conformity experiments.
Authority - People will tend to obey authority figures, even if they are asked to perform objectionable acts. Cialdini cites incidents, such as the Milgram experiments in the early 1960s and the My Lai massacre.
Liking - People are easily persuaded by other people that they like. Cialdini cites the marketing of Tupperware in what might now be called viral marketing. People were more likely to buy if they liked the person selling it to them. Some of the many biases favoring more attractive people are discussed. See physical attractiveness stereotype.
Scarcity - Perceived scarcity will generate demand. For example, saying offers are available for a "limited time only" encourages sales
The internet is a great place to establish yourself as authoritative; a wonderful venue to do people favors; a great place to create a community in which you become well liked; and a fabulous forum to create social proof of your value.
We call the use of the internet for these purposes "social networking."
An actual but "virtual" friend of mine, Jackie Hutter of the IP Maximizer Blog, has used social networking to the greatest legal marketing advantage as anyone else I know.
Here's Jackie's recent power point on the in's and out's of creating your online market through an online presence. Check it out.
The scope and depth of Blawg Review #202 across the pond at Head of Legal sets the aspirational Blawg Review bar high and just where it ought to be too! No sense summarizing excellence but I will leave you with the resources Carl Gardner left at the close of his comprehensive global post.
I hope you liked Blawg Review #202; and I think you should expect something quite different next week from the notorious Geeklawyer. He tells me he's having technical difficulties at the moment - but fear not! All will be well in time for Blawg Review #203.
Blawg Review has information about next week's host, and instructions how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues.
It's the British, of course, who we have to thank for the common law, the adversarial system of justice and that most lyrical denunciation of lawyers' passionate pursuit of legal procedure, Bleak House. Charon QC is a serial podcaster, writer and producer of the satiric online soap opera West London Man, founder of the largest private law school in Great Britain, and all around QC about town.
My postcast interview with the great QC is here and his own is below.
Today I am talking to Victoria Pynchon, a US lawyer based in Los Angeles, California. She was a commercial litigator and trial attorney for 24 years before shifting her practice from representing clients in court to helping lawyers settle lawsuits hat involve greater risk, expense or time than their clients wish to expend. She this work through Judicate West Dispute Resolution Services, serves as a private judge (arbitrator) for the American Arbitration Association, is an adjunct professor at Pepperdine University and blogs at IP ADR and Settle it now. Interestingly Vickie also acts as a sherpa for Blawg Review the international rolling carnival of law bloggers and is on Twitter.
“Charon QC” is a lawyer, after a fashion, but is not a practitioner. He has taught law for many years - and, to his surprise, still enjoys law; although he enjoys other academic interests as well. Law is fascinating more in the human interest than the letter, but compared to literature, science or philosophy, it does not engage the mind in quite the same way. He awarded himself the title QC when the Lord Chancellor suspended the award for real lawyers. Now, as no-one can instruct him in any matter, or would wish to, he is free to comment as he wishes on matters which catch his attention. He is, of course, a figment of a febrile imagination . He drinks Rioja - in fact he will drink any red wine, smokes Silk cut, reads all the newspapers (3 Tabloids 4 broadsheets…most days) , has a passion for motorbikes and sips espressos three time a day - ordering two each time. He sleeps for 4 hours a night - but that is his problem. He gets up and starts work (sometimes, it has to be said… writing a blog post) between 3.30 - 4.00 every morning…
He is also a habitue of The Bollo and The Swan in Chiswick/Acton - and some other well known bars in London. When he finds a meal he enjoys - he eats it every day until he can no longer face eating it again. At breakfast, he always has one egg, two slices of toast, two slices of bacon, some baked beans, two espressos, a glass of tap water and an undisclosed number of Silk Cut cigarettes - and always starts eating the egg first… on a bit of buttered toast; turning the plate around so the egg is conveniently on the right hand side of the plate. He did not know he did this until it was pointed out to him by several friends. Breakfast takes approximately 35 minutes and is often taken while reading his tabloid of choice and The Indie… and then it is but a short motorbike ride back to his Staterooms where the day can begin. Breakfast is at 7.00 and more often than not Charon sits at a table outside - even in very cold weather - so he can keep an eye on the world as it goes by. He can also smoke outside without offending other early risers.
If blogging isn't fun or compelling in some other way - if I'm not just BURSTING to share something with my readers, I'm not doing it. The same is true for Blawg Review. If it's not laugh out loud funny, genuinely inspiring or impossible to put down (the well told tale) I'm not reading it. Really. Talk about social networking and search engine optimization all you want. Twitter on with an eye toward building your "brand" or expanding your client base or padding your curriculum vitae. I admire you for blogging and linking and tweeting with a genuine business plan. Me? I'm just trying to have a little fun; give and get a little wisdom; and, populate my life with smart people who make me think, laugh or cry.
Before I proceed, I want you to know what I mean when I say "well told tale" because that's pretty much the standard for my Blawg Review nominations (along with creativity, which needs no example other than the Blawg Review that exemplifies it below.
Magnolia. Well Told Tale. Which also asks the question most critical to reconciliation (about which this blog posts quite a bit): "What can we forgive?"
That said, here are my choices for Blawg Review of the Year.
I said "Flat out brilliant! And fun!" at the time and looking back at David's Multi-State Bar Exam Template for Blawg Review #182, I'm as entertained today as I was at first sight. I'm certain thousands of other lawyers reading Gulbransen's Bar Exam Blawg Review still have nightmares about this test (as do I) ten, twenty or thirty years later. Blawg Review #182 subverts the nightmare and makes this old boogy-man a clown. Sharp in lay-out too, which no other Blawg Review of 2008 matched. And I must admit that any Blawg with the kicker "wise up suckers" shows just the kind of rebelliousness I look for in my posse.
Below: Wise Up from Magnolia
BlawgReview #182 is highly deserving of the award for Blawg Review of the Year.
"Arlo Guthrie was at my door," reports Eric Turkewitz. "Which was kind of funny," he said, "since I hadn't exactly invited him to Thanksgiving dinner with the law bloggers we were having, but this being Thanksgiving he thought it would be a friendly gesture to show up and help me write Blawg Review. And so he did." Blame it on the Baby Boom or my Lit Major, but taking the Legal Blawgosphere on a Time Trip back to Alice's Restaurant is likely my own favorite for BlawgReview of the year even as I give it an even tie with Preaching to the Perverted's slick 21st Century template.
BlawgReview#188 is equally deserving of the award for Blawg Review of the Year.
Below: Alice's Restaurant (no need to acquire the taste; you pretty much had to be there)
The Wedding Guest is the Compelling Narrator's ideal reader and the Ancient Mariner the Ideal Reader's compelling narrator.
He holds him with his glittering eye--
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years child:
The Mariner hath his will.
The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot chuse but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
Colin's Blawg Review also grasped us by our labels and demanded our attention, for which we were richly rewarded, garnering my humble Blawg Review of the Year nomination in a four-way tie.
Below Jack Nicholson Recites Rudyard Kipling in Honor of Blawg Review #189
Ron Coleman's BlawgReview #191 at Likelihood of Confusion is the final, but not the least, of my Blawg Review of the Year Nominations for 2008. Ron reminds us that the law; the way we are tormented by it and the means by which we torment it back - is totally the JUDEO part of our Western Civ heritage.Ron's Hannukah theme does not merely suit the year-end holiday spirit but also our entire rule of law Schtick as it takes us several centuries back in time to find the original legal mash-up. As I wrote at the time #191 was first posted:
The Menorah represents Torah She'baal Peh or the "Oral Law" which is a companion of the Written Torah; the part that man can derive, embellish, and - in a sense - 'create' by using his own diligence and intelligence in accord with the God-given hermeneutical principles. In other words, the Torah She'baal Peh is the original mash-up and hence a fitting symbol for Ron Coleman's brilliant (pun intended) Blawg Review #191.
We here in the Goldberg-Pynchon household celebrate both Chanukah and Christmas, as you can see from the really really bad iPhone photo of last night's menorah blazing before the tree in the background.
The Menorah represents Torah She'baal Peh or the "Oral Law" which is a companion of the Written Torah; the part that man can derive, embellish, and - in a sense - 'create' by using his own diligence and intelligence in accord with the God-given hermeneutical principles. In other words, the Torah She'baal Peh is the original mash-up and hence a fitting symbol for Ron Coleman's brilliant (pun intended) Blawg Review #191.
Eight days, we learn from Ron's post, is the Hebrew equivalent of This is Spinal Tap's 11 on the dial.
Nigel Tufnel: t's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where? Marty DiBergi: I don't know. Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do? Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.
But I digress.
Listen, I have nothing to add. Which is why I'm fooling around here. You just have to go to Ron's Blawg Review to get the full magnificence of the effort. I've done one of these Blawg reviews myself and collapsed from exhaustion. Ron put the whole thing off until the Sunday it was due (if he's not lying to me) which means . . . . well . . . . he's AWESOME. And, god bless him, if you ever feel geeky, you know there's a least one legal blogger geekier than thou.
(8's being so . . . well, holy or something . . . we do note that if you let the "1" in the hundreds place stand for the "servant" candle and subtract the remaining "1" from the 9 in the 10's column, you get Blawg Review #8 which was hosted by Crime and Federalism back in 2005. But that's not all. This is my 1,007th post -- really -- EIGHT!! All of which simply re-proves this: you can make something of nothing and nothing of something, particularly if you ever attended law school).
And for our Jewish readers' viewing and listening pleasure, Adam Sandler singing his infamous Chanukah song.
Blawg Review has information about next week’s host, and instructions how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues.
No, I did not make the ABA's Blawg 100 this year, but my good online buddy, the brilliant and energetic Susan Cartier Liebel of Build a Solo Practice and Solo Practice University did. Here's just one of the many reasons Susan has the following she does. She's ridiculously generous. Rather than resting on her Blawg 100 laurels, she asks her blogfriends to come along for the ride. After posting her own Top 10 (in which Susan kindly included Settle It Now) she challenged the rest of us to
create a list of recommendations of those blogs you believe others should learn about and publicize on your own blog. Let's take the idea behind the ABA 100 and expand it. Let's make December of every year the month we introduce our readers to new blogs of note. Let's give everyone who blogs for education or love of writing and who does so with consistency and quality a pat on the back for a job well done.
Blawg Review, which every week delivers to your virtual doorstep the best posts in the legal blogosphere. BlawgReview is edited by (the currently D-pressed D-listed) anonymous Ed. whose wit and perspicacity has made Blawg Review the place for Blawg-gregation. This year, you'll see that nearly a quarter of the 100 Top ABA Blawgs hosted Blawg Review. The test of a great blog is not how it powers itself, but how it empowers its readers. That's why I'm giving Blawg Review the No. 1 spot in my own top 10 list here. (like the nice little gold statue, Ed? - "Oh my goodness, it's heavy!")
My new favorite ADR Blog Settlement Perspectives offers unparalleled "street" advice about how to do best that which every litigator will do most -- settle the darn thing! Written by the delightful and charming John DeGroote, Chief Litigation Counsel since 2000 for BearingPoint, Inc., f/k/a KPMG Consulting, Inc., Settlement Perspectives routinely hits the post out of Blawg Park. If you aren't now subscribed to it, take my advice and hit the RSS feed RIGHT NOW!
I am a huge Adam's Drafting fan because I spent the vast majority of my litigation career parsing the difference between words like "sudden" and "quick" and because my first legal research assignment back in 1976 was to inform the senior litigation partner at the unlamented Arthur, Dry & Kalish what the word "all" meant. So I can't help but get a little thrill out of posts with titles like - Enumerated Clauses - When the Trunk is Too Short for the Branch. If Ken Adams had his way, there wouldn't be a single commercial litigator working today on any case requiring my skills -- contract interpretation and application. Damn you, Ken Adams! If you remember how to diagram a sentence, Adam's Drafting is your new best friend.
For the fashionista IP lawyer, there is Counterfeit Chic, a model of legal style, wit, grace, and depth of analysis. Smart and fun, CC is written by the brilliant, eclectic and ridiculously accomplished Law Professor Susan Scafidi whose interest in fashion came out of the closet before I knew what "RSS feed" meant. And don't miss the must-read IP book of the 21st century, Professor Scafidi's Who Owns Culture.
My final five are the blogs that keep me working, thinking and sometimes eating -- mediator blah blah (laughing) the Mediation Channel (living), Tammy Lenski(Mediator Tech - eating - and Conflict Zen - breathing) and ADR Prof Blog (thinking). If you have friends and family, let alone legal disputes, these ADR blogs are all a must on your own personal Top Blawg list (and with this post I hereby grant Tammy Lenski an honorary law degree)
And those of you who haven't yet drunk deeply of the Twitter KoolAid, dive right in @vpynchon.
You have to be of a certain age, an age I myself am barely tall enough to be (right, 23 in 1975) or of a certain nostalgic hippie-era state of mind (right again) which Eric Turkewitz must himself be since he cannot have lived nearly as many years as I have, to celebrate Blawg Review #188 with an authentic Alice's Restaurant Thanksgiving dinner.
We were all fined $50 and had to pick up the garbage in the snow, but that's not what Turkewitz came to tell you about. Didn't come to talk about the draft either since he can't be old enough to remember the building they had down New York City called Whitehall Street, where you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected.
Turkewitz talked about everything being fine, imagining everyone could smoke cigarettes and all kinds of things, until the Sargeant came over and asked "KID, HAVE YOU REHABILITATED YOURSELF?") so T could say "I'm sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin here on the Group W bench 'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug."
And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a study in black and white of T's fingerprints. And the only reason he's singing his Blawg Review song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if you're in a situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into the shrink wherever you are ,just walk in say "Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant.". And walk out.
A law firm contends new Louisiana lawyer advertising rules slated to take effect in April will restrict its right to comment on Twitter, Facebook, online bulletin boards and blogs.
The Wolfe Law Group filed a federal suit today challenging the rules, claiming they would subject each of the firm’s online posts to an evaluation and a $175 fee, according to a press release. The construction law firm says in the suit that its own blog may qualify for an exemption for law firm websites, but its comments on other blogs would not.
The firm claims the rules would restrict its First Amendment right to speak freely about its trade. To make its point, the law firm has launched a blog called Blogging is Speaking.
Sometimes your business or professional negotiation has to take place in Court. This is an example.
Leave it to a legal marketing blog -- Lawyer Casting - to choose Evolution Day for its first entry into the BlawgReviewOSphere. As blogger Joshua Fruchter explains in Blawg Review #187, because the anniversary of Charles Darwin's publication of The Origin of Species on November 24, 1859 is inextricably intertwined with the idea that only the fittest survive, Evolution Day should be celebrated with advice for survival. And so it is.
For those of us who toil the legal fields, Fruchter suggests a range of survival options including
There's advice for law firms here as well, so crawl on out of the loser gene pool and make your way over to Blawg Review # 187. The survival of the legal species might just well depend upon it!
*/ Pepper Hamilton is podcasting?????? A short but vivid season of my legal career was served as a Pepper associate back in the late '80s (Alum Network here) when this grand old Philadelphia law firm turned 100 at which time it was still using quill pens - at least in the Philly office. In the Los Angeles office, we associates routinely gathered in the library (yes! with books) and were required to share the one Lexis/Nexis research station which we were forbidden to use except in the most dire circumstances and with pre-approval.
Every time I post something political, I can see Kevin O'Keefe wince.
"Your blog says 'everything you always wanted to know about negotiation,'" Kevin once said to me. "And you're blogging about Guantanamo. You are betraying your readers and they will leave you."
So election-fever overtook me, for which I apologize to my "base."
I'm workign 12-15 hour days so I've recruited a couple of FABULOUS guest bloggers like the brilliant and energetic Susan Carter Liebel at Build a Solo Practice and Solo Practice University. Whoever said, "if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it" was thinking of People like Susan.
I'm poll watching in Nevada. Why this is so exhausting I'm not certain. The poll workers are uniformly great. Patient. Persistent. Painstaking.
The people who are voting remind me of jurors in the way they approach their civic duty. Today, for instance, there was a major discussion in line about those people (a lot) who are voting only for President -- skipping past the proposed bond-raising, law changing and judge choosing issues.
"It would be wrong," one of the group finally concluded, "to vote on these issues because we don't understand them." Everyone in the huddle quickly concurred and the line fell silent again. They are voting for the next President of the country and they are feeling like their vote matters. And since I'm in a "battle ground" state, Nevada, their vote matters more than mine does because California is in the bag for the Dems.
But I was going to tell you how fabulous Blawg Review #182 over at Preaching to the Perverted is. You'll have to forgive me for digressing and for now saying simply go right over to Preaching now because it's without question the bet blawg review of the year.
We'd like to take this opportunity to thank Diane for her many contributions to Blawg Review, having now hosted four outstanding presentations -- #43, #94, #130 and #181. Behind the scenes, in her role as a Blawg Review Sherpa, Diane has made contributions to many other issues of Blawg Review, too. So, speaking for myself and all the other Blawg Review hosts she's helped along the way, we'd like to say thanks a bunch and give you this extra little bit of link love to show our heartfelt appreciation.
Tomorrow I'll start my day by reading, and giving my own readers a head's up on what looks to be one of the best Blawg Reviews of the year by the best ADR blogger ever.
(totally unrelated photo; just getting my iPhone photos from Paris in the mix)
But what a Blawg Review Diane has given us. Thank goodness it's Columbus Day or I'd be short-changing my actual work-work by reading #181 half the day and its links the other half of the day. And don't expect Diane to limit herself to mediation. Most of us are also lawyers, after all, so she also covers the best legal posts of the week on the topic of the law, legal practice, life as lawyers -- the "whole catastrophe" as Zorba said.
ATTENTION all legal bloggers and would-be bloggers!!
Those of us who will be attending the State Bar Convention in Monterey this weekend will be meeting at 5 pm on Saturday evening in the Fireside Lounge here.
Please let me know if you'll be able to attend by dropping me an email at vpynchon@settlenow.com or texting me at 323-217-5162.
If you believe that law blogging is not only informative and entertaining, but capable of transforming our lives, our society, our culture and our legal system as well, run don't walk over to Peter Black'sFreedom to Differ which not only rocks, it twitters, on One Web Day. Surely this will be the BlawgReview of the year!
. . . .one recurring theme on this blog has always been a recognition of the value in a strong and free internet. Therefore it is an honour to be able to host Blawg Review on Monday September 22, 2008, which is One Web Day 2008. One Web Day was founded three years ago by Professor Susan Crawford from the University of Michigan, and she describes it as an "Earth Day for the internet". The One Web Day website describes the day in the following terms:
The idea behind OneWebDay is to focus attention on a key internet value (this year, online participation in democracy), focus attention on local internet concerns (connectivity, censorship, individual skills), and create a global constituency that cares about protecting and defending the internet. So, think of OneWebDay as an environmental movement for the Internet ecosystem. It’s a platform for people to educate and activate others about issues that are important for the Internet’s future.
If you'd like to host BlawgReview or submit to it, click here. All future BlawgReview hosts please note -- THE BAR HAS BEEN RAISED!
Now we just need a blogging claims adjuster and we can bring peace to the Middle East.
Below are John's impressive credentials. We meant to meet for a "quick" cup of coffee. We talked negotiation strategy and tactics for nearly three hours.
As I review websites I often wonder about the experiences of the authors and the biases they bring, so I feel I should disclose mine for those who want to know more. I have been fortunate to work with two “hands on” in-house legal teams, with settlement negotiations handled primarily by employed lawyers rather than their law firms. I am also lucky to have practiced in law firms with true trial lawyers who generated genuine negotiating leverage whether settlement was their objective or not. Through these experiences I have settled cases threatened, pending or mediated in about 20 states - from Montana to Florida and from New Hampshire to California - and have managed the resolution of disputes around the world. Working with and against some very good lawyers and employing some of the truly legendary mediators, I feel fortunate to have seen a real cross-section of styles and approaches. In almost all of these cases I have had the opportunity to work behind closed doors with the people who really decide when cases settle - CEOs, CFOs, General Counsel, COOs, individual plaintiffs, insurers, board members, auditors, and more.
Legal Literacy hosts Blawg Review # 176 and just in time for the Presidential election! We're reminded that today is International Literary Day; that millions of people throughout the world do not have the opportunity to learn the 3Rs; that the U.N. is ushering in the UN Literacy Decade; and, most importantly to local national concerns, that "literacy is what gives us the freedom and the key to survive" both individually and as a thriving democracy.
I've been talking about the election to a lot of people because I'm involved in the campaign. I cannot tell you how many well-educated people are relying upon their "gut feelings" to choose the next President because they aren't "really interested" in or "don't have the time to explore" the actual issues.
So I do what I'm trained to do as a mediator. Ask a lot of non-threatening well-meant questions to help people think about the decision that so many of us and our forebears fought so hard to win the right to make. Of couse I'd like them to vote for my candidate. But if they decide, after thinking through the issues, that they want the other guy, I won't argue. I might, however, ask a few more questions.
The idea is to post links to five great blogs (other than law blogs) on your blawg and tag five of your favorite blawgers to do the same under the post title ‘5 Blogs & 5 Blawgers.'
I'm tagging the following 20-something law bloggers to pick up the meme before I fulfill my own meme-blagations:
where labor unions still celebrate Labor Day (above)
My meme delay is largely to to the fact that my computer crashed (below). The screen wouldn't even go on. Sigh.
(note my new diet)
So I wrote this post on napkins at the Cafe Europa at 6th and 46th, just two blocks from the office building where I typed in a typing pool '75-'76 and then worked as a paralegal (Shepardizing the old way) '76-'77.
The City is a crystalline container of my youth.
It makes me think of my first husband, the social worker and his friends the community organizers and my days in the "New" Left , which retreated into our universities and was granted tenure during the Reagan Revolution ("drug store truck drivin' man")
where it irrirtated or enraged subsequent generations of "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" University students. American Universities - the mausoleum of the "New" Left.
(the German voice over stops when Baez begins to sing).
I don't want to send you to blogs. I want to send you to the very few magazines of general circulation that not only recall phrases like "activism," "community organizing," "grass roots" and the grimly prescient "military industrial complex." (President, War Hero and General Dwight D. Eisenhower) but still actually use them (don't worry, I'm not sending you to Mother Jones or In These Times).
I'm going to tag five 20-someting bloggers in an attempt to break through my own habits of mind and ask them to send me to five new places that represent progress or change or simply another way of looking at the same old issues at depth.
(above: my Central Park flag lapel pin so you won't think I don't love America)
Here are the Five (non)Blogs If You Want to Skip the Overly Long NYC Windup
The New Yorker. I know. Thisis predictable but you have to read the foreign policy articles to know what's really going on. And this is from the point of view of the "establishment." Like this one about Abu Ghraib that went beyond the photos and the headlines. This 2003 article on the occupation of Iraq is one of those pieces of journalism that made me realize just how little I knew and how much more I needed to. The only way to deal with the relentlessness of a weekly New Yorker subscription. Throw the magazine out when the next one comes whether you've read it or not.
The LA Weekly. I'm sure you have a journal like this in your town. The local entertainment scene. Personal ads. And admirably decent political reporting performed by what we used to call the "alternative press." (maybe they still do).
The London Review of Books. If you're looking for a little anti-Americanism, this journal is for you. I tired of it after 9/11, but it was and is a tonic to navel gazing Americans who can't imagine what the rest of the world is thinking about us. The other problem with this journal is that you have to have been smart enough to have actually understood the entire Joyce oeuvre to grasp it, Finnegan's Wake. I was a LIT-TRA-CHUR major at a fine University and I just never understood most of what was printed here. Still, it's worth recommending to anyone who might.
Granta. It's a quarterly literary journal out of Britain but it's not, you know, difficult. The issue titled What We Think of America (self-described below) made me angry, sad, joyful, perplexed and grateful. And Granta accomplishes this nearly every issue. Check out the issue on Factories, particularly the Isabel Hilton's article Made in China and the View from Africa. Granta makes me think things I haven't thought before. And when you're 50+ that's more than a plus. It's a revelation.
The September 11 attacks on the US provoked shock and pity in the rest of the world, but mingled with the sympathy was something harsher: anti-Americanism. It wasn't confined to the West Bank or Kabul. It could be heard in English country pubs, in the bars of Paris and Rome, the tea stalls of New Delhi. ‘Hubris’ was the general idea: in one opinion poll, two-thirds of the respondents outside the US agreed to the proposition that it was ‘good that Americans now know what it’s like to be vulnerable’.
Is the US really so disliked? If so, why? In this issue twenty-four writers drawn from many countries describe the part America has played in their lives – for better or worse – and deliver their estimates of the good and the bad it has done as the world's supreme political, military, economic and cultural power.
I know I promised to tag my five 20-somethings but I'll have to come back to it. My napkin ran out.
And for the three of you who have not yet seen this video of why not to come to court drunk and how not to respond to the Judge's questions in an intoxicated state, see this hilarious video.
The rest of us -- most of us - by the grace of whatever Higher Power we invoke in our darker moments - have not needed the services of Jamie Spencer at the Austin DWI Lawyer Blog, host of the Labor Day Edition of Blawg Review #175.
This week, Jamie brings us, among other great posts of last week:
Check Blawg Review for submission guidelines to host Legal Literacy, a blog I've never visited but will now add to my Google reader as a good source for material on its topic -- building bridges between business and the law.
Finally, my best field sobriety test anecdote from the police report:
Police officer: Please recite the alphabet backwards.
Driver: (laughing) Are you kidding? I can't even do that when I'm sober!
Here's the web page for The Other Bar for any attorney who believes he or she may have just a tiny problem, perhaps a small issue, with drugs or alcohol. There's no day quite like the day you finally realize that there's a single, relatively simple solution to an enormous number of personal and professional problems.
Step One: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
It's a small internet world. David Donaghue of DLA Piper who hosts Blawg Review # 173 at the Chicago IP Litigation Blog shares not only the insane continuing desire to host Blawg Reviews with me, but also a LexBlog platform and a history of high school swimming competitions -- me back and free -- he fly and IM (my fly looks more like a caterpillar; I bow deeply to anyone who competes in the fly and in the IM that requires fly skill).
My 'net connections also create two degrees of separation between me and an Olympic medalist. Pictured here is New Zealand meditator Geoff Sharp's nephew sporting a bronze rowing medal for New Zealand, surrounded by his cousins, three of whom are Geoff's bright, talented and good looking children.
Don't you love the internet? If so, swim on over to Blawg Review # 173 for some of the best posts of last week in the legal blogosphere.
There's been some salacious commentary (such as WAC's Like a Vixen) about Blawg Review # 171. I just want to say to anyone who missed the sexual revolution -- on either side of the generation gap -- we're sorry to have started it all. We just never really left high school.
We've also heard some complaints that the most recent Blawg Review is just too darn long. In honor of our sister blog and those attorneys who are still billing 2400 hours/year, we give you the IP Executive Summary of the Virgin Blawg Review #171 below.
My late mother, aleha ha-shalom, told me repeatedly that I had a religious obligation to learn every day, and I have honored her memory by doing exactly that. Learning also involves changing how you think about things; it doesn't only mean reinforcing the existing views you already have. In this respect, Second Circuit Judge Pierre Leval once said that the best way to know you have a mind is to change it, and I have tried to live by that wisdom too. There are positions I have taken in the past I no longer hold, and some that I continue to hold. I have tried to be honest with myself: if you are not genuinely honest with yourself, you can't learn, and if you worry about what others think of you, you will be living their version of your life and not yours.
Other IP bloggers have, of course, reflected on Patry's Final Blog Words here and here.
The IP Dispute of the Week, of course, is Hasbro's suit against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla for their Facebook hit Scrabulous. Scrabble itself was invented during the Depression by Alfred Mosher Butts, an out-of-work architect. How did he do it? As the New York Times explained in its review of Steve Fastis book, Word Freak (Zo. Qi. Doh. Hoo. Qursh)Scrabble's inventor assumed that the game would work best if the game letters "appear[ed] in the same frequency as in the language itself." So he
counted letters in The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune and The Saturday Evening Post to calculate letter frequencies for various word lengths. Playing the game with his wife, Nina, and experimenting as he went along, Butts carefully worked out the size of the playing grid (225 squares, or 15 by 15), the number of tiles (100), point values for the letters, the placement of double- and triple-score squares, the distribution of vowels and consonants, and so on.
If Player 1 opens with "fringe" (double word) for 24 points; Player 2 follows by slapping an "i" on the triple word score followed by an "n" for "infringe" and 33 points; and, Player 1 responds with "ment" for 19 points, the combined score for "infringement" is 75 points. Our readers can do the math and moves on "trademark" and copyright."
"a new studio tactic [is] not to prevent piracy, but to delay it . . . Warner Bros. executives said [they] prevent[ed] camcorded copies of the reported $180-million [Dark Knight] film from reaching Internet file-sharing sites for about 38 hours. Although that doesn't sound like much progress, it was enough time to keep bootleg DVDs off the streets as the film racked up a record-breaking $158.4 million on opening weekend. . . The success of an anti-piracy campaign is measured in the number of hours it buys before the digital dam breaks.'"
If you're sufficiently virginal to believe in magic, check out the Law and Magic Law Blog's announcement of the dismissal of a defamation lawsuit againstMagic Mag as protected opinion while Ernie the Attorney has at least one more make to make your iPhone magic here.
Next week, the Blawg Review will be hosted by the Ohio Employer's Law Blog which we expect will be far more respectful of BR's readers' political, religious and sexual sensitivities than this one was. Thanks for letting us play. And a very, very, very good night!
This is how hard I'll be working this week -- with a little help from my IP ADR Blogger colleagues -- to bring Settle It Now's readers one of the best Blawg Reviews of the year over at the IP ADR Blog this coming Monday.
Though we've been reading Blawg Review since we put up our first tentative post on blogger (here!) in June of 2006, as hosts, we're Blawg Review virgins. So send your best posts this week to Blawg Review (follow those guidelines above) for possible inclusion in possibly one of the best BR's ever (we like to set our own bar high!)
Blawg Review is the blog carnival for everyone interested in law. A peer-reviewed blog carnival, the host of each Blawg Review decides which of the submissions and recommended posts are suitable for inclusion in the presentation. And the host is encouraged to source another dozen or so interesting posts to fit with any special theme of that issue of Blawg Review. The host's personal selections usually include several that reflect the character and subject interests of the host blawg, recognizing that the regular readership of the blog should find some of the usual content, and new readers of the blog via Blawg Review ought to get some sense of the unique perspective and subject specialties of the host. Thanks to all the law bloggers who collaborate to make Blawg Review one of the very best blog carnivals of any genre.
My friend, Joe Mockus, a criminal defense attorney in the San Francisco Bay area, once asked me, "just what is it that you do all day long?" I know what Joe did. He had at least one hundred court appearances a day and once in awhile tried a major felony case. He was negotiating while I was writing stake-in-the-heart summary judgment motions in cases with 2 million documents coded in the Phillipines. I took a lot of depositions and, if I was very very very lucky, I got to try a case to a jury once every five to ten years.
And next week, we'll be hosting the Blawg Review over at the IP ADR Blog. Which reminds me, this is likely the first and only post on this blog you'll get this week!
Habeas corpus actus reus corpus delicti crimen falsi crimen innominatum crimem laesae maiestatis de minimis non curat lex.
The Magnolia criminal law bar exam question half-way through this opening to the darkest comedy of the 20th Century, Magnolia.
POPULAR ADR BLOGGER GETS SOME FACE TIME IN LOS ANGELES
By Greg Katz
Daily Journal Staff Writer
SANTA MONICA - Nearly everybody in the Southern California mediation community knows the face of mediator Geoff Sharp but not too many have met him.
That's because the New Zealand-based mediator's scruffy mug sits atop his popular ADR blog, Mediator Blah ... Blah ..., at mediatorblahblah.blogspot.com.
Sitting down for coffee at a beachfront hotel with Los Angeles mediator and fellow ADR blogger Victoria Pynchon, Sharp said his blog is what got him his ticket for this trip to Southern California.
He was in town at the request of the Pepperdine University School of Law, giving a lecture at the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution's annual summer dispute resolution conference last week.
"For someone like me to get to Pepperdine - why would you ask a farm boy like me?" Sharp said, laughing. "The blog's the only way that I talk to these people."
Sharp's witty and concise blog helps chart the course of the online mediation conversation. There are about 150 ADR blogs worldwide, according to one blogger, and many of them link back to Sharp's.
He blogs a potpourri of ADR links, anecdotes and opinions on a wide range of mediation topics, most of them relevant to both local and international audiences.
In one recent post, he chided some "lazy" neutrals who have given parties the impression that mediation is "a process where you show up at a downtown building but never speak to, or even meet, the room full of people with whom you have your problem and whose cooperation you require to solve it."
In another post, Sharp described a mediation in which a lawyer asked him to calculate the hypotenuse of a right triangle.
Sharp said he initially was worried that he couldn't do it.
"But I am pleased to report dear reader, that I was equal to the task," he wrote.
Sharp also broaches sensitive subjects, writing at length about how difficult it is for mediators to build their practices.
But whether the difficulties of mediation are financial or mathematical, he wouldn't think about going back to litigating.
In the late 1990s, Sharp left his litigation practice at Bell Gully, a large New Zealand law firm, to start mediating.
Sharp is now a member of the advanced mediation panels for both of New Zealand's widely recognized mediation training organizations, LEADR and the Arbitration and Mediation Institute of New Zealand.
He also is consulting with the International Mediation Institute on its proposed mediator qualifications standards. Mediator standards are a frequent subject of his blog posts, as well.
He said he relishes the freedom he gained from leaving a big firm, though mediating often proves lonely.
"If you ask why [mediators] blog, it's because we're so solitary," Sharp said.
Becoming an ADR blogger, he said, was like making friends "on the same block in a new town," even though most other bloggers are in other countries.
Sharp said that blogging about mediations, with their strict confidentiality rules, can be complicated.
At first, he would post about specific events in mediations, such as one lawyer who wore his Bluetooth headset throughout a mediation, even when he "went to the john," Sharp said.
Was it blinking?" Pynchon chimed in.
But now, with a wider audience, Sharp focuses on the more philosophical and legal issues in mediation. When he wants to tell a particular story, he embellishes the events that happened in mediation so no one feels their confidential conduct is being publicized.
"I haven't let the facts get in the way of a good story," says the disclaimer on his blog.
Pynchon, who writes the popular ADR blog Settle It Now, at negotiationlawblog.com, said that even when bloggers are careful, mediator blogs can disturb parties. One party recently came to Pynchon asking whether a post referred to that party's case.
It didn't.
Another post, about the California Supreme Court mediation confidentiality case, Simmons v. Ghaderi, provoked the defendant to call Pynchon personally.
"It's like having a cartoon character come to life," Pynchon said of being contacted by someone she only knew through reading briefs and opinions. Simmons v. Ghaderi, 143 Cal.App.4th 410 49 Cal.Rptr.3d 342 (2006).
But despite the occasional hassle, blogging has become a way of life for the two mediators.
"For me, blogging and dispute resolution rest on the same principles: collaboration and reciprocity," Pynchon said.
Sharp nodded his agreement.
"I don't do this profit," he said with a smile. "I do it for ego."
Before giving you today's list of ABA Journal resources that landed in my in-box this morning, I want to announce my appearance on the Journal's dot com front page in its "Ask the Experts" feature.
If you have a question -- any question -- relating to negotiation strategy and tactics, conflict resolution, mediation advocacy, persuading the opposition that he doesn't fully understand just how $%#*^ his case is, the social psychology of conflict, or the settlement of that pesky piece of litigation that is turning moldy on the upper right hand corner of your desk, just write it into the email box here and your answer will be quickly forthcoming.
Self-promo out of the way, here's the latest on ABAJournal.com resources:
ABAJournal.com has created four new features designed for busy lawyers.
Blawg Search: We've partnered with Justia.com, the leading legal information portal, to create a search engine covering all of the 1,800-plus blogs in our directory -- including yours. It's like Google for lawyers, pinpointing in an instant the most sophisticated and up-to-date commentary by legal professionals on any topic. Use the search box at the top of any of our pages (including our homepage: www.abajournal.com), and on the search results page click on the "Blawg Results" tab. Plus you can subscribe to an RSS feed of any search to follow the results in your feed reader.
News Widget: Now you can add continuously updated ABA Journal headlines to your blog or to personalized pages like iGoogle or Netvibes with our news widget. We're posting 25 to 50 fresh stories every business day, so you're sure to deliver the latest breaking legal news to your readers. Visit our widget page to grab the free code: www.abajournal.com/widgets
Twitter Feed: Are you using Twitter, the most popular microblogging platform? Then you can integrate our headlines into your personal Twitter page. Dozens of lawyers already have. Visit our page and click "Follow": www.twitter.com/abajournal
Facebook Page: If you're a member of Facebook, one of the most popular social networking sites, you can become a fan of the ABA Journal. Our Facebook page features our latest headlines, recent covers, and special announcements. Visit our page and click "Become a Fan": http://www.facebook.com/pages/ABA-Journal/13563247155
And to celebrate winning the Webby People's Voice Award in the Law category, we're letting our readers pick which of three acceptance speeches we'll give at the June 10 ceremony. Each is just five words long -- the maximum length the Webby Awards will allow. To cast your vote, visit: http://www.abajournal.com/news/webbyspeechvote/
We hope you find that these features, and more that will be coming in the months ahead, make ABAJournal.com even more useful and informative. We love getting feedback from our readers. If you have suggestions, drop us a line: www.abajournal.com/contact
And nice to find the Best of the Best aggregated for readers on a weekly basis at Political Calculations which we'll be adding to our blog roll post haste!
The web moves so fast I can hardly keep up. But this Alltop listing is supposed to mean that you're very very good at what you do -- blogging in an area of specialty like ADR or "the law."
I'll just go ahead and assume that it's meaningful because bloggers need all the lovin' they can get for pursuing, often on a daily basis, their largely uncompensated written work.
In any event, I'm always happy to appear in any group that includes the following tremendous blogs:
The Carnival of Trust is a monthly, traveling review of ten of the last month's best posts related to various aspects of trust in the business world. It is much like the weekly Blawg Reviews that I post links to and have hosted, but those generally contain far more than ten links. My job this month was to pick those ten posts for you and provide an introduction to each post that makes you want to click through and read more.
Here's David's generous mention of the Settle it Now Negotiation Blog and my recent post on convincing your clients to give up more than you (their attorney) predicted while still maintaining your credibility.
On the subject of trust-based leadership, Victoria Pynchon at the Settle It Now, Negotiation Blog has an excellent guide for maintaining your client's trust during a difficult negotiation: How Can I Convince My Client to Lose More than Predicted and Still Maintain My Own Credibility? The answer is complex and multi-faceted, but it boils down to the fact that you have to get the stakeholders and decision makers face-to-face, get their buy in on resolution as a goal (in addition to winning), explore all avenues of resolution, and you have to let them explore all aspects of the dispute, even those that do not matter. The last point is a difficult one for lawyers. As a lawyer you generally want to remain focused on the settlement inputs -- money, confidentiality provisions, sale of existing product if something about the product is being changed, etc. -- but from a trust perspective it is important that the stakeholders resolve not just those issues that go into a final agreement, but any problems or concerns they have related to the dispute or the parties to the dispute.
And let me just add here -- though I'll sound like a broken record to my regular readers -- that business people seek out lawyers because they believe themselves to be victims of injustice. (see my short-short video on this topic here)
Though I, as a mediator, am always seeking business solutions to legal problems, the client's injustice problem must be addressed to maintain your credibility (and retain your client's trust.). Every great mediator I know will address this issue with your client unbidden. If you're using less than great mediators -- raise the issue yourself -- all competent mediators should be prepared to address the issues foremost on your client's mind right including -- Will I lose? How much more is this going to cost me? and Am I Being Extorted or Low-Balled?
Thanks for the mention, David! I truly am greatly honored. But more than that, you've helped me reach greater numbers of business people with a message that I carry somewhat like an old-fashioned missionary -- go beyond positions; find the parties' interests; create value; claim as much of that value as possible; craft business solutions to a legal problems; and, frankly address your client's injustice issues. They'll be yours for life.
Practicing law, particularly litigation, is often frustrating, sometimes humiliating, and frequently simply dispiriting. On the other hand, the practice of law can be thrilling, intellectually stimulating, challenging, absorbing, and a darn good way to make a good living.
When you shift the purpose of your legal practice from winning cases (litigating) to negotiating settlements (mediating) you also shift your focus from solving intellectual legal puzzles to serving individual party interests. As a result, you give considerably more thought on a daily basis to what makes people really happy, or, at a minimum, fairly well satisfied.
That's why you find "work life balance" and career advice in a negotiation blog -- because you cannot negotiate what you really want in exchange for what you do unless you are able to plumb the depths of your own true desire and discard any out-moded ideas about what "should" make you happy.
For these reasons I bring you a dynamite (and very funny) article by career coach Lisa Gates of 360 Alliance Coaching. If you're slogging around not knowing what to do with your early- mid- or late-legal-career-crisis, you couldn't do any better than to book a few sessions with Lisa.
We all have places in our lives where we get stuck, augured in by a particular belief like, “work is hard,” or “children are too expensive,” or “politicians are evil.” To make matters worse, we often can’t distinguish between the truth and a disempowering belief because we attach little refrains like, “that’s just the way it is.” It’s as if our minds have become the honeymoon destination for Archie Bunker and Nurse Ratched.
If we really listen, we will hear a quality of flatness, resignation or a dissonant righteousness in our speaking. To bring choice, openness, and inquiry back into your reality try adding the challenge “oh really?” to these 29 worn out perspectives (or your own) and turn up the heat on those victim-making, life-killing, soul-sucking, war-making phrases that have been sapping your fulfillment.
1. I don’t have the time.
2. Everything on my to-do list is important and essential.
3. I can’t quit. If I do, everything will fall apart.
4. If I take time off, I’ll lose my game.
5. Nobody will hire me, I’m too old.
6. You’re supposed to get married and then have the baby.
7. Get your diploma, go to college, get a master’s, get married, get a career, have a family, grow old, die.
8. I need an MFA to get published.
9. Art is good, but if you want to make a living, you have to get a real job.
10. I am a complete loser without my [to-do list] [blackberry] [iphone] [rolodex].
11. You’re a loser if you use a rolodex.
12. I can’t delete all those emails.
13. You have to get a telephone. Everyone has a telephone.
14. Nobody will respect me if I don’t have a Ph.D.
15. I have to know how it ends before I begin.
16. You have to start at the bottom if you want to get to the top.
17. A black man can never be president.
18. My vote doesn’t count.
19. Women over 50 should not have long hair.
20. I’m not creative.
21. Investing is pointless as my age; I should have started years ago.
22. It’s all my mother’s fault.
23. It’s all your mother’s fault.
24. I don’t have any choice.
25. If I don’t make it by 30, I never will.
26. If you’re an artist, you need a career to fall back on.
27. Finding love is just not in the cards for me.
28. I’d rather travel, but I have to get a degree first.
29. There’s nothing I can do about it (the all-time favorite).
Now that you’ve disrupted the homeostasis, what other perspectives are now clamoring to be heard?
About Author:Lisa Gates is a coach and completion catalyst - the crazy glue on the soles of your sneakers that keeps you committed to your book, your project, your big idea. Committed to inspiring the leadership possibilities of livelihoods in action, Lisa has three words for all idea-crazed writers, entrepreneurs and dreamers: Someday is now. Find her at 360 Alliance Coaching.
Today Forbes.com, home page for the world's business leaders, announced the creation of a Business and Finance Blog Network, comprised of a community of pre-screened, influential business and financial blogs.
The Blog Network's content will focus on senior business decision makers and high-net-worth investors. Topics will be relevant to the banking, trading, hedge fund management, affluent investing, and senior business decision-making communities. Participation in the network is by invitation only, and all blogs are vetted by Forbes.com editors for appropriate content, and to ensure that they are in keeping with the Forbes editorial brand.
The network will allow advertisers to target a highly engaged, exclusive niche audience of senior business decision makers and affluent investors easily and effectively. Four hundred-plus blogs have already joined the network, with many more expected to sign on before the official launch in the next few weeks.
"There is no denying the growing importance and influence of blogs within the media landscape," said Forbes.com President and Chief Executive Officer Jim Spanfeller. "Forbes.com can ensure advertisers are reaching a hard-to-find and very desirable audience within safe, well-lit environments by exclusively inviting 'best of breed' business and investing bloggers to our new Business and Finance Blog Network."
Nick Ricci has been appointed General Manager, Sales. He will be responsible for overseeing the sales, marketing and promotion for the Blog Network as well as the Forbes Audience Network (FAN), which launched in November 2007. Nick joins Forbes.com from About.com, where he served as Senior Vice President, Sales and Ad Operations. He has also held senior sales management and marketing positions at Times Mirror Magazines, Cox Interactive Sales, and Hachette Filipacchi Media US. Nick is already in the process of hiring and building a dedicated network sales team.
"I'm thrilled that Nick has joined Forbes.com to oversee the sales efforts for the Blog Network," added Spanfeller. "He is a seasoned executive with several years of sales and marketing experience who will play a key role in driving the network's success."
Not only is the delegation of Dan's blogging responsibilities smart, it's pie-expanding.
Though Dan's readers are likely missing his voice with their daily coffee and eggs, he's turned their loss into other bloggers' gain by asking several of his colleagues to "guest blog" while he's gone.
I should tell you that I do know [Evil's] first name; but she has told me that she'd hunt me down if I revealed her identity. So instead, I've asked her to provide a short blurb to introduce her; here was her candid response:
Evil HR Lady works for a Fortune 500 Company making sure that as many people as possible get fired. Hence, the Evil part of her name. She blogs and takes questions here.
Nothing like an HR person with a sense of humor, right? Well, she also has a very entertaining blog that is part Ask Amy, and part Jack and Suzy Welch. . . .
Even though I do hate the term 'win-win' as far too redolent of marshmellows roasting over a camp fire ("say, pass the Hershey's chocolate, would you?") Dan is exemplifying the essence of integrative, interest-based "win-win" problem solving for his readers.
While he rides off on his white stead to win win win win win his client's case at trial!
Thanks for the opportunity to meet your readers, Dan. And go get 'em!
O.K., from time to time I draft a brief for someone. It keeps my hand in the game and REALLY -- it's MUCH EASIER to make $$$ doing what I did for 25 years than for what I've been doing for four. I have HIGH HOPES that my research and writing mini-career will soon be shut down by my ADR career, but in the meantime . .. . . .
Shameless plug: Listen . . . . I'm very very very very good at negotiating the resolution of complex commercial litigation. I should be in heavy rotation. Try me! I won't let you down.
Yesterday, I spent hours researching a fairly obscurecontract interpretation question. I didn't find case ONE and I'm a pretty good little first year research associate -- always was. So what did I do? I turned to my virtual buddy, Ken Adams (who never writes a rambling post like this one)over at the brilliant, thorough and sophisticated Adams Drafting. My brain must have been turned off yesterday because I couldn't find anything by searching his blog either.
Voila!! In my in-box this morning, a link to the most comprehensive, practical, brilliant (relatively lengthy) article ON MY PRECISE LEGAL QUESTION that could easily make the difference between winning a $2.5 million appeal or losing it.
Listen. You can't find this stuff in academic articles. And you can't find it in Witkin or CalJur or AmJur or in the case law. You can't find it in the California Civil Code's canons of construction or maxims of jurisprudence (my favorite: "superfluity does not vitiate").
Ken Adams is the foremost authority on contract drafting in the nation. And I have that wisdom tucked into my back pocket the moment it finally occurs to me to go over to his blog to have a look see.
So that's how I use the legal blogosphere. It's my law firm. It's my community. It's my home.
I've never actually met Kevin O'Keefe, the founder of LexBlog, but I owe him a great debt of gratitude for dropping by my old blogger site one day to say he liked a post of mine.
Listen, Kevin is one of those people whose brain is so active you have to put those nuclear material warnings around it.
What Kevin does for a living, however, is not designing and maintaining blogs for lawyers.
What Kevin does for a living is to build communities, jump-start dialogue, inspire lawyers and those who serve them to reach for the higher value and the deeper meaning, and to guide and maximize entrepreneurial effort.
THE ABSOLUTE TRUTH
A fellow blogger told me today was Kevin's birthday (thanks Stephanie!) I only remember my own husband's day of birth because it is the same as mine. I "penned" this post before I knew that Kevin had kindly complimented by blogging today.
Synchronicity. Which is not surprising because Kevin's spirit now pervades the legal blogosphere. He taught me the deep rules of blog road. And every time a new LexBlog blog hits the runway, I can see Kevin's influence there -- his injunction to not just "join the high level conversation" going on in the blogosphere and in more journalistic venues, but to maximize every opportunity that someone else's insight presents to extend that conversation into your own niche and raise the stakes at least one level upward.
WHY KEVIN
If you want to get an idea of why Kevin is so meaningful to his bloggers, read his mission statement -- the following is an excerpt from it -- Why I Do LexBlog:
To help lawyers. A significant percentage of lawyers became a lawyer because of some principle they held - some burning light inside of them, some cause. Law school, student loans, and the practicalities of working long hours to make money and achieve what others have defined as success have just about drowned out that burning light. Blogging about something that you are passionate about, getting positive feedback from others about your blogging, and getting legal work in the area of law you are passionate about sparks that flame inside. Lawyers start to feel good about themselves.
Greg May over at the California Blog of Appeal wants to know -- and may well use your response in one of his upcoming presentations. I think it would be good for Greg (and the rest of us!) to hear particularly from non-blogger lawyers.
My husband -- an AmLaw 100 over-60 litigator -- has finally stopped saying "no one reads legal blogs; I don't know anyone who uses legal blogs; we're too busy."
What I'm thinking is that lawyers are too busy not to read blogs!
I don't, by the way, miss the law books. And there are times when I think there's nothing quite so beautiful as a mother board. But I do recall with fondness the days when most of the associates would be working together in the library. We laughed a lot. I wonder how young associates manage their work lives now -- so isolated in their offices in front of the miracle of computer research but without the camaraderie of their peers.
O.K., they're not exactly articles. They're posts. It's much much easier to write a post than it is to write an article (N.B. IP ADR BLOGGERS!!!)
Maybe it's just me, but I get more miles per gallon out of reading a blog post than an article.
Why?
First, I'm just generally more interested in people's subjective experience than I am in people's opinions about how things are or should be.
This is the primary difference between an article and a blog post. An article is usually filled with facts and opinions. Period. If a post contains facts and opinions, it expresses them through the writer's unique set of experiences -- through the writer's subjectivity.
You don't have to be convinced by a poster's opinion -- you get to experience it. Then you can accept or reject it on its own terms. As an old Lit major, that's pretty much how I live in the world -- subjectively.
As the poet Galway Kinnell once explained, if you express your personal, unique, individual experience truly enough, you become the voice of a creature on the planet speaking. The more subjective your experience, the more universal it is.
I'm writing this post because I'm celebrating 100 blog posts over at Mediate.com.
I'm celebrating 100 because I like round numbers, birthdays, anniversaries and turning points.
This year, for example, I want to net six figures. It's nice and round and substantial. And because I'm doing what I love to do (mediating) instead of simply what I'm good at (practicing law) six figures will be quite enough for me until I'm shuffled off to the old folks' home. Where I'm hoping, by the way, to reach 100 in good health so I can blog about whatever it is that holds the attention and sparks the passion of someone at the century mark.
Thanks for reading. There are about 80,000 of you a year now. I know that's not much on an internet where Lonely Girl 15 gets 25,000 "hits" a day, but it's a lot of people interested in my little niche -- negotiating the settlement of commercial litigation -- not to mention my experience of that niche.
O.K. Big confession. In 25 years of legal practice, I never developed a book a business. Not one page. Not even a post-it note. Which puts me in mind of a Hugh (Gaping Void) McLeod drawing.
Other than to urge you to run right out and buy Dr. Tammy Lenski's new book Making Mediation Your Day JobI parrot once again Mr. McLeod's platinum advice for making your own rain (which, shhhhhhhhhhh, the rain maker's big secret -- it's often way more fun than practicing law!)
Review of Making Mediation Your Day Job next.
So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years:
1. Ignore everybody.
2. The idea doesn't have to be big. It just has to be yours.
3. Put the hours in.
4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.
5. You are responsible for your own experience.
6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.
7. Keep your day job.
8. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.
9. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.
10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.
11. Don't try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.
12. If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.
13. Never compare your inside with somebody else's outside.
14. Dying young is overrated.
15. The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.
16. The world is changing.
17. Merit can be bought. Passion can't.
18. Avoid the Watercooler Gang.
19. Sing in your own voice.
20. The choice of media is irrelevant.
21. Selling out is harder than it looks.
22. Nobody cares. Do it for yourself.
23. Worrying about "Commercial vs. Artistic" is a complete waste of time.
24. Don't worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually.
25. You have to find your own schtick.
26. Write from the heart.
27. The best way to get approval is not to need it.
28. Power is never given. Power is taken.
29. Whatever choice you make, The Devil gets his due eventually.
30. The hardest part of being creative is getting used to it.
Nancy Hudgins, a California lawyer-mediator, has a new blog -- Civil Negotiation and Mediation. She describes her mission this way:
I chose th[e name Civil Negotiation and Mediation] three reasons.
I will be discussing negotiation strategies in civil litigation.
I will be making a pitch for putting the “civil” back into civil litigation.
I will be reflecting on how civility is a hallmark of mediation and should be an aspiration of litigation.
I hope to make accessible the research from social science, psychology, and neuroscience on negotiation and mediation.
Along the way, we’ll have some fun.
I hope you’ll join in the conversation.
Good goals, Nancy! We're excited to watch your venture bloom!
For those who don't know Nancy or her experience, here's a short bio taken from her new blawg.
Nancy Hudgins, a California lawyer-mediator, has specialized in civil litigation for 29 years.has specialized in civil litigation for 29 years. She has represented both plaintiffs and defendants, chiefly in personal injury, medical malpractice, elder abuse and product liability lawsuits, but also in a wide variety of complex litigation, including civil rights, fraud and class actions. She has settled and mediated thousands of cases. In addition to civil litigation mediation, she also co-mediates divorces with John Duda, a marriage and family therapist. Visit her website at www.hudginslaw.com/mediation.
Trial attorneys, negotiators, mediators and settlement judges all share the same essential concern -- how to reach and persuade our audience.
Trial lawyers have a product to sell -- their client's narrative -- which is always just one version of the "truth." Negotiators are also selling -- a business proposition their bargaining partner will find attractive. Settlement judges who have not been trained as mediators are generally selling fear -- the uncertainty! the expense! the delay!
And mediators? What's on display at our hot dog stand? The needs and desires of the parties, certainly. Many arrive at the mediation without having given any thought to their own true wishes at all. We tend to go a little deeper than the negotiators, who are selling the future rather than also attempting to repair the past. We try not to be fear mongers like some of the worst settlement head-bangers we remember from our own legal practice. And, unlike trial lawyers, we straddle the "truth," attempting to harmonize the parties' narratives rather than selling one version as superior to the other.
So what are we mediators really selling? Reconciliation. Accountability. Understanding. Consensus.
And this Bears Upon Political Campaigns and Jury Trials in What Way?
I don't subscribe to many blogs, diverting the few dozen that capture my interest to my news reader. I do subscribe to Anne Read's Deliberations, however, because she really "gets" people's pre-dispositions -- the ones I need to understand for the purpose of helping my clients to comprehend -- appreciate even -- the other guy's point of view.
Today, for instance, Anne reminds us that we are in the midst of a Great National Jury Seminar. All we have to do is click on the campaign news. As usual, Anne is looking past the easy answers -- race, gender -- in favor of exploring the deeper reasons we might vote for someone of our own nationality or hair color -- shared stories. Here, for example,
What do race and gender really mean? Most studies of jurors conclude that juror demographics don't directly affect verdicts -- with the important exception that jurors lean toward parties of their own ethnicity. (That's from Devine et al, Jury Decision Making: 45 Years of Empirical Research on Deliberating Groups, 7 Psychology, Law, & Public Policy 622 (2000)). But at the same time, we know that people of different races and genders often have shared experiences. Since experiences in turn shape attitudes, race and gender matter in ways that go beyond loyalty, but are difficult to define.
Trial lawyers have long wanted to understand this better -- and these days, so does every news organization in America. One fascinating piece of this is how individual one's group identity can be, as Newsweek explains in an article that's well worth reading in full:
Which candidate a voter identifies with is one of the most important gut-level heuristics, since it is tantamount to deciding that someone is enough like you to "understand the concerns of people like you," as pollsters put it. "If you feel a candidate is like you racially or by gender, you're more likely to believe that that candidate will support what you support," says [Harvard political scientist Pippa] Norris. But with a white woman and a black man vying for the Democratic nomination, where does that leave black women? Whom they most identify with depends on which aspect of their own identity dominates their self-image. . . . .
So are we all just Willy Lomans, carrying our self-esteem, our hopes and dreams, our successes and failures in our sample cases -- to display -- or not -- when a customer calls? I think we are. And the mistake we make, when we make one, is to direct our customers' attention only to the glittering lures -- the "sales" talk -- the promises of a brighter future, a better marriage, a faster car.
If we take a deep breath from time to time and listen to ourselves instead of pontificating and persuading, we'll be reminded that we're all seeking the same thing. Community. Belonging. Understanding. Even shared sacrifice. Every negotiation, every mediation, every trial represents a human relationship in crisis. If we really get that, we can start working together again, in the same general direction, even when our ideas about how to accomplish that differ.
An Unpaid Political Stream of Consciousness
Listen. No one will gasp in surprise when I say I'm a lifelong Democrat. Nor will my readers likely be surprised to hear me articulate my fondest election year desire -- that Hillary and Barack -- sooner rather than later -- will find a way to join experience with vision for the purpose of leading this country out of the long season of division that, let's be frank, began in the sixties and has never healed. That they will together lead this country back to what it's truly best at -- uniting a diverse, fractious, irritable, needy, greedy, fearful, hopeful people into a single nation with a higher purpose than our own individual and narrow interests. The UnitedStates.
If both candidates could put their campaigns -- their money; their volunteers; their momentum -- together for the purpose of healing discord and revealing a new national consensus -- we would not simply feel great about our country again, we'd actually begreat again.
Let's welcome New York attorney-mediator Christian S. Herzeca of Mediation Meditations to the blogging block and thank him for joining the conversation about what "true" mediation really is.
Who is to say that a mediator is truly practicing true or false mediation?
I attended a conference regarding mediation in personal injury cases, where insurance company defendants were discussing the relative merits of mediation versus showing willingness to go to trial. I was appalled to hear a panel member, a sitting judge, describe what he referred to as the mediation that he practices in his cases. He described his mediation by invoking the law of the jungle, predators and predation, excoriating "weak" plaintiffs and coercing them to settle by telling them in chambers that the strong defendant would devour them at trial. He seemed impressed by his analogy. I remember talking to another panel member, a retired judge, after the conference, shaking our heads as we agreed that if this can pass for mediation, then there is no useful meaning to the practice.
If you haven't checked out our blog roll page lately, you might want to take a look here. These are the blogs we actually read both here and over at the IP ADR BLOG.
My name is Andrew Mitton and am the author of Legal Frontier. This blog is about the future of the legal profession. What are the trends? What are the predictions? What new technology is changing the profession? And more.
So here is a little bit about me:
Went to law school and learned how to think like a lawyer.
Clerked for a judge, worked for a law firm, worked for some large corporations.
Reviewed, negotiated, and drafted many contracts.
Arbitrated, litigated, and settled many cases.
I’ve since learned that it’s better to think like a human than to think like a lawyer.
I'm hoping Professor Menkel-Meadow will contract the Blog Bug and start her own -- thus raising to credibly scholarly heights the blog-versation concerning the social and economic justice issues raised by all ADR practices.
If you're a writer -- you know -- of fiction -- and you somewhat compulsively track your blog statistics because, well, you don't smoke cigarettes anymore, your blogging day doesn't start any better than this.
Search google.com (sue step mother for wrongful death)
The mind reels with the possibilities. But I have paperwork to do.
The video, for those with procrastination in mind, takes about as long to watch as stepping outside to smoke a cigarette would. And "stop smoking" was one of your New Year's resolutions, right?
Because she's everyone's favorite ADR blogger. And not just because she writes the best; has the most eclectically "on message" posts; is the most responsible member of the ADR Blog Possee (yes, she's the ADR Blog Neighborhood Watch Captain); always finds the most apt images to illustrate any point she's making; and, is a mediator's mediator. No, it's genuinely because she's just so darn nice!!
So it is with great pleasure (and a surprising lack of envy!) that I direct you to Diane's terrific new blog site -- The Mediation Channel -- that looks ridiculously easy to navigate and slick without being, you know, all shark-skin suit-ish.
Stephanie West Allen at Idealawg and Julie Fleming Brown at Life at the Bar launched their Second Annual Lawyers Appreciate Meme Tag yesterday, asking tagged attorney bloggers to post on professional appreciation.
The idea is simple Legal bloggers end the year with a note of gratitude by writing a post on what lawyers appreciate and passing the meme baton along to lawyers whose blogs you appreciate.
"Gratitude lists" are one of those self-help techniques at which I used to scoff. That was in the Pynchon Cynical Age, which lasted far too long past adolescence. During what I'll call late adulthood, I learned the following about gratitude lists:
they bring you back to reality when you're about to whine about how much more other people are making than you; how unlucky you are to have been "raised by wolverines" (h/t to Nathan Lane); how much better you could be doing if you were (pick one) younger, older, slimmer, prettier, male, female, caucasion, African American; European; better schooled; better loved; more athletic; less prone to anger, accomodation, submission, etc., etc., etc.
they remind you how frankly embarrassing it is to complain about life circumstances when you have the privilege of practicing law.
incoming anecdote -- I once took a few minutes in a group session to complain about life with my law partners at a time when I was making more money in a single year than my parents -- at my age -- had made in their lifetimes. After I'd completed my tale of woe du jour, a willowly young Latino woman stood up and said she "really related" to what I was saying because the previous year when she'd been making a documentary about her South American villiage, it was destroyed by the eruption of a nearby volcano.
Point taken -- If I've not being grateful, I'm not paying attention
gratitude lists are most beneficial when you least want to make them, i.e., when you'd really rather nurture a sense of injustice. Today, whenever I'm in danger of doing that, I recall the documentary film maker and my self regard transforms itself into the desire to be of service to others.
The Year-End Appreciation Meme Temporarily Releases Litigators from the Bondage of Complaint
whether we litigators were contentious and complaining before we started practice, we had no choice but to complain after we began litigating -- since all litigation literally commences with a "Complaint."
when people used to ask me what it was like to litigate, this is what I said: every morning someone who is being paid extremely well gets up with the sole purpose of making me wrong; of proving that I am stupid, disingenuous, ill-tempered, dishonest, of bad faith or just generally evil. I, in turn, get up with the same purpose.
Gratitude meme tags release us, ever so briefly, from the emotional and spiritual assaults of the daily giving and receiving of complaints.
Gratitude Meme Tags Allow Me to Work Collaboratively with Other Legal Bloggers
This benefit of the meme tag needs no explanation. I can only say that legal bloggers do all of us an extraordinary service every working day. They freely share, without expectation or hope of recompense, the increasingly complex and arcane knowledge they have gathered and learned at depth. I used to mistrust Witkin, as I was taught by my first mentors to do. Today, I confidently turn to the legal blogosphere to obtain legal niche theory and practice from some of the best minds working today.
You just can't beat that.
Happy holidays and a great New Year to every legal blogger sharing his or her expertise with the rest of us without any reward other than the occasional inspirational year-end meme tag.
Below, f/k/a's explanation of why you'll want to wait until '08 to follow the links to Complete Lawyer 2008.
(Dec. 21, 2007): The f/k/a Gang apologizes for any confusion. When we enthusiastically told you about the focus on office bullies in the upcoming issue of The Complete Lawyer yesterday, we forgot that the crew at TCL is still in the final stages of putting together the entire edition. That means that the links provided below will indeed take you to the featured articles, but you can't yet navigate around the TCL site from those pages to see the entire Jan-Feb. 2008 version of The Complete Lawyer — because it doesn't yet exist. The complete package won't be available until the first week of January. So, please enjoy this preview, but blame the f/k/a Gang, and not Don Hutcheson's crew at TCL for links that take you to their prior editions, and not to the understandably not-yet-ready-for-blog-time Vol. 4, No.1.
Claiming that the $4.85 billion Vioxx Settlement improperly "allows [defendant] Merck to dictate the advice a lawyer will offer" to clients, some Vioxx plaintiffs' attorneys have asked the federal judge overseeing the deal to "keep some of their clients outside the settlement while still allowing other clients to accept it."
Under the global settlement agreement reached by lead counsel in New Orleans last month, "if the lawyers want any of their clients to receive money from the settlement, they must recommend the deal to all their clients."
Those attorneys resisting the requirement are saying not only that the provision "would prevent them from offering the best independent judgment for each client" but that "[a]greeing to the provision might open them to future lawsuits from disgruntled clients."
What is that advertisement at the top of Victoria Pynchon's Negotiation Law Blog?
It's the first of several ads to be delivered on this site by Forbes.com.
Why is she junking up her blog with advertising; does she need the $$$ that badly? .
It's true that I will earn some income (a few dollars a month? a couple of hundred? I have no idea).
But I'm not in it for the ad revenue.
Why then?
Believe it or not, this blog is not merely a marketing device. It is also an attempt to spread the good news of collaborative problem solving and interest-based negotiation to whomever those skills might help in their business and personal lives.
Learning interest-based negotiation and mediation skills radically changed the quality of my life, my work and my personal relationships. I don't just want to share that, I'll go all the way to say I have a mission to share that.
O.K., But What Does This Have to Do With Advertising from Forbes.com
I'm joining the Forbes.com Business and Financial Network to bring the Settle It Now Negotiation Blog to as many people as might find it useful, most particularly business people and attorneys.
Forbes.com's homepage has -- drum roll please -- 20 million visitors a month.
I have 5,000-6,000 visitors a month.
I'd like to have more.
I'm truly hoping that the Forbes.com network will provide a greater array of information and advice to my existing five to six thousand monthly visitors and that the addition of my blog to the network will get the central message of this blog to more people.
What is your blog's central message anyway?
Here it is.
A community thrives on collaboration and reciprocity. All communities -- local and global -- thrive on collaboration and reciprocity. And individuals living in collaborative and reciprocal communities are happier and healthier than those who don't.
The rest is implementation. And practice.
So, let's see how this Forbes.com community can further that goal.
Hop on board! The train is getting ready to leave the station.
But don't worry about being left behind. We're a local so you can jump on any time you're ready!!
Although I mediated many cases as a litigator and trial lawyer, it wasn't until I began serving as a mediator that I realized how much trial attorneys and mediators have in common.
Yes, yes, I know -- trial lawyers are trained assassins and mediators are neutral facilitators of negotiated resolutions. And yet we both use the power of persuasion to assist us in "selling" our wares to our respective audiences -- trial lawyers to juries and mediators to the disputants and their counsel.
I'm a regular reader of trial blogs for this reason and hope that trial attorneys and mediators will continue having a dialogue about those matters that are of common interest to them.
Nice roundup guys and thanks again for including me!
I don't know how I let my own LexBlog birthday go by without thanking Kevin O'Keefe (video here from smays.com) for building this blog in October of last year and, more importantly, for letting me in on all of his Blog Secrets when I called him one day to say,
"Hey!! Kevin. I'm not reaching my market. Wassup?"
It was that conversation that led almost immediately to the construction of the IP ADR Blog and the potential dissolution of my marriage (only half kidding, folks!)
I thank my blogging buddies on a regular basis so am not going to list them here again. What I am going to do is to become completely transparent by giving you my statistics, one of the best reasons to buy a lexblog product in the first place (and no Kevin does not pay me for this; he inspires me to do this).
O.K., here goes.
The Monthly Statistical Increase Over LexBlog Year One
MONTH TOTAL UNIQUE
Oct ’07 7,854 4,880
Sep ’07 6,913 4,085
Aug ’07 4,808 2,732
Jul ’07 4,826 2,501
Jun ’07 5,515 2,793
May ’07 5,725 3,145
Apr ’07 5,546 2,850
Mar ’07 4,081 1,691
Feb ’07 3,112 1,016
Jan ’07 2,556 916
Dec ’06 2,124 596
I don't know what happened to the November '06 statistics (Kevin?) but they were pretty low even though I'd been using a Blogger template for the same blog since June of '06.
I frankly don't know whether these statistics are good or bad. I only note that they rise steadily over time.
These are also of great assistance to me when Mr. Thrifty (over 60) tells me (for the 100th time) that "nobody reads blogs, particularly not lawyers". I think he's still using a quill pen.
The Time People Tend to Spend Reading the Blog Once They Find It
This is a fairly typical "session tracker" report. I don't know what "timed out" means, but I often see a 5 minute notation so I'm pretty sure it's more than five minutes. This shows not only how the reader found my site, but also how long they viewed it.
1 hit from Search google.com (negotiation with a Watna) timed out
3 hits 2 mins, 47 secs
1 hit from Search google.com (Litigation strategy for young attorneys) timed out
1 hit from Search google.ca (toronto parking tag class action lawsuite) timed out
1 hit timed out
1 hit timed out
1 hit from Search google.pl (sobanski palace complex plans) timed out
2 hits from Search google.com (snyder vioxx settlement los angeles) 2 mins, 29 secs
3 hits 1 min, 58 secs
1 hit timed out
1 hit from images.google.com/imgres… timed out
1 hit timed out
1 hit timed out
1 hit from Search google.com (vioxx settlement Girardi) timed out
1 hit timed out
1 hit timed out
1 hit from Search google.com (divorce mediation strategy) timed out
There are a lot more statistics on the LexBlog tracker, but I figure I'm down to the total geek bloggers by now and even they are getting bored.
What do these statistics mean to me? They confirm that I am building an audience; they tell me what my readers are interested in; and, the assure me that people stay to read once they find me, even when they're just downloading an image.
They are the candles on my FIRST LEXBLOG BIRTHDAY cake.
(disclaimer, right: this is not the sky; photo by NilsGeyland)
Check out C.C. Holland's Law.com article Mind the Ethics of Online Networking about ethical problems that might arise if you use Linkedin, Facebook and the like to build your legal or neutral practice.
If you're risk averse, Holland and lawyers she interviews advise caution.
First, Why Do Those of Us Who Use Social Networking Sites or (Gasp!) Blogs, Take the Risks.
Holland identifes a handful of internet lawyer pioneers, including your faithful blogger.
Colin Coleman, a business attorney in Needham, Mass., uses the networking site LinkedIn to build professional relationships and make introductions. Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Victoria Pynchon, who recently launched a commercial-litigation mediation practice, likes the wayFacebook mimics a neighborhood and allows people to get to know her. And Southern California entertainment lawyer Richard Jefferson maintains a MySpace page to ensure his clients consider him cutting-edge.
While their focuses are different, all three attorneys share one trait: They've recognized the value of these social-networking sites to help support and expand their businesses.
Early adopter attorneys are clearly at the forefront of a new networking movement. At the same time, these pioneers are blazing ethics trails into previously uncharted territory.
Gee, I Didn't Feel as if I Was "Blazing Ethics Trails into Uncharted Territory."
O.K., I sound a little bit like a jerk when I'm quoted as saying
I'm a pretty ethical person and I'm not risk averse -- that's why you buy malpractice insurance. I don't let fears of liability keep me from doing anything."
Particularly when it's followed by Holland's comment that "most standard malpractice policies would not cover an ethical or disciplinary violation regarding an advertisement or communication to potential clients."
I'd meant to conclude that remark with advice given me long ago: that good relationships with your clients is the best guard against malpractice. Even so, as Holland correctly notes, if I'm violating ethical rules, neither good client relations nor malpractice insurance will protect me.
And what I don't know can hurt me. From Holland's article I learn that:
the LinkedIn site . . . testimonials -- e.g., "Jane is a fabulous attorney who really knows her stuff" . . . [run afoul of] . . . the California rules governing advertising and solicitation [unless the testimonial-carrying page] contains an express disclaimer.
My LinkedIn testimonials are primarily from attorneys for whom I've provided mediation services. Though of course they all differ, each offer the opinion that I'm a pretty darn good mediator. Here are a couple of edited examples:
I have had the pleasure of using Ms. Pynchon on several high dollar (and some low dollar) mediation sessions. While the amounts in controversy varied, her results were always great. Did she mediate a settlement in every case - no (but she's come pretty close with a 90% track record). . . . Overall, for my tough cases, I always call Vick[ie] first [because] I know that Vick[ie] can find a way to reach compromise when others will give up or run out of creative options. . . . July 13, 2007
Top qualities: Great Results, Expert, Creative Tappan Zee
hired Victoria as a Attorney in 2005, and hired Victoria more than once
Ms. Pynchon is a brilliant mediator. Not only does she have a natural talent for mediation, but she is committed to improving her skills through hard work and study . . . which translate into the ability to quickly analyze the facts and law of a case and then be able to talk to the attorneys and the parties knowledgeably. I recommend Ms. Pynchon without reservation.”
Top qualities: Great Results, Expert, Creative Lilys Mccoy
hired Victoria as a Mediation in 2005, and hired Victoria more than once
So I should disclaim these by saying, for instance, that although these lawyers thought I did a great job "results might vary and side-effects could include nausea, dizziness, upset stomach and irritation"?
I don't mean to make light of the issue, but I've never found disclaimers of any sort of much use to anyone. And other than Tappan's comment that I generally resolved about 90% of his cases, these are all opinions as to quality, not representations of fact.
Still, I do have a disclaimer on this blog, warning my readers that:
This Blog/Web Site is made available by the lawyer or law firm publisher for educational purposes only as well as to give you general information and a general understanding of the law, not to provide specific legal advice. By using this blog site you understand that there is no attorney client relationship between you and the Blog/Web Site publisher. The Blog/Web Site should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a licensed professional attorney in your state.
I suppose that's all I really have to say on my Linked In and FaceBook pages and I guess I'd better do so. Today, in fact.
But d'you think I really need to say that the photo on those sites is two years old when I was twenty pounds lighter?
(right, new blogger and health care mediator Richard J. Webb)
I was just in the hospital with a friend the other day, standing next to her bed while the "physician in charge of Motion Picture Blue Cross" was copping an attitude in response to her request to see the x-ray of her comminuted multiple ankle fracture.
"Why are you insulted?" she was asking when I entered the room.
My friend was trying to understand why the hospital wanted her moved to a skilled nursing facility before it moved her (and her morphine drip) back to the hospital for surgery. .
Her physician had already told us that he wouldn't advise moving her but that "Motion Picture Blue Cross" was insisting that her hospital stay be terminated. Immediately. I'd been unable to convince him that his patient was seeking medical, not coverage advice. He looked 15 (o.k., I grow old) and sounded cowed by the carrier.
"My husband sues insurance carriers and I represent them so we've got the carrier angle covered," I'd told him. "So please just give us your medical advice."
So I'd just been saying that hospitals "desperately need conflict resolution training!"
With this post, I start my first blog and what I think is the only blog site devoted to the topic of alternative dispute resolution in the healthcare industry. As stated above on the masthead, I intend to blog at the intersection of ADR and healthcare law.
We're all looking forward to getting to know you and to learn much much more about health care ADR. And if you're ever in town, I know a nice little hospital that could use your help!
CALL IN NUMBER: The Highspeed audio bridge conference room number is 5650382 and is available by phone at **New Access Numbers (10/16/07) 1-605-475-8590 and by Skype at +990008275650382. The audio conference is required for participation.
THE DISCUSSION: Conflict resolution specialists Nelson, Pynchon, Brannigan and Levin will join in conversation with three non-conflict specialists who reach the public directly and effectively:
QUESTIONS TO BE CONSIDERED: Some of questions to be considered: "Why aren't people beating down the doors of peacemakers, whether mediators, facilitators or negotiators? and, "How can the internet engage people online in ways that facilitate and promote peacemaking?"
Yes, we did talk mediation marketing and who should make the first offer over a wonderful lunch today at the London Law Society, but we also covered childcare, American politics (oh, do let's change the subject) and the dreadful exchange rate (oh, do let's change the subject).
Thank you to commercial attorney and mediator Justin Patten of Human Law for escorting us about and giving good advice about visiting the Royal Hall of Justice, which we did, peaking in on what appeared to be a criminal appellate argument (3 red-robed Justices & prisoner in the "dock") and one final argument in a civil case (one red-robed judge).
Unfortunately, I failed to catch Jeremy Phillips of IP Kat or Andrew Mills of Freeth Cartwright and the IMPACT blog on camera after a day-long seminar on Intellectual Property Litigation and Dispute Resolution, about which more later.
Many thanks to Christine Mast over at DRI's informative, timely and well-written newsletter The Business Suit for mentioning the Settle It Now Negotiation Blog.
Chistine's commercial litigation specialties include insurance coverage and professional liability, fields in which I labored for many years
MAJOR ASIDE ON INSURANCE COVERAGE
If you're litigating a commercial case, are not a coverage specialist and have decided -- from reading the policy language -- that there's no coverage -- run to someone like Christine, or if it's a really really really big liability, my husband, Steve Goldberg over at Heller -- who litigated the World Trade Center coverage litigation on behalf of Silverstein's lender -- for counsel and advice. It's not difficult -- it just requires specialized knowledge, knowledge many commercial litigators lack. See the sad tale of Guess v. Jordache here.
END OF ASIDE
Christine says she's new to the blawgosphere so I wanted to thank her for the mention of our blog by showing her how the whole machinery of the thing works == like a giant internet barter circle of the kind described by author-lawyer Patricia Williams in her groundbreaking work, An Alchemy of Race and Rights. See also the Benefits of Barter here.
But remember, there's a code of excellence here in the blawgosphere and I won't link to www.AccidentLawyers.com just because they mention me (not yet).
I mention Christine's article and the entire Newsletter because it's a great resource and my readers trust me to steer them to good stuff.
Queen Latifa from Chicago on the seemier Tit for Tat side.
So, what do you say, Christine? Get your law firm to take the blogging plunge by talking to my good friend Kevin O'Keefe over at LexBlog. Online networking and practice development is geometric, as is LinkedIn, both of which I highly recommend, whether you're building your own business or just expanding your "book."
Thanks to Concurring Opinions for directing us to TouchGraph where you can get a visual print-out of your blog's network neighborhood. Below, Settle It Now's connections thanks to Geoff Sharp at Mediator Blah Blah who took a screenshot of it for me when I announced my inability to do so myself. See how wonderful community can be?
Geoff, would you like to teach me to fish or do me a similar favor for the IPADRBlog?
I urge you to CLICK HERE IMMEDIATELY for the most extreme and hilarious family "negotiation" (read: manipulation) tactics ever to flow from a pen (with marvelous illustrations) from a Blog you'll immediately want to add to your Blogroll: Mixed Emotions by Rutu Modan.
This is a New York Times Blog (don't worry, fellow amateurs, the BigBloggers have to appeal to a much wider audience) which describes its author as follows:
Rutu Modan, an illustrator and comic book creator, is a chosen artist of the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation. She has done comic strips for the Israeli newpapers Yedioth Acharonot and Ma’ariv and illustrations for The New Yorker, Le Monde, The New York Times and many other publications. Her first graphic novel, Exit Wounds, will be published in June. Ms. Modan, usually based in Tel Aviv, is currently in Sheffield, England.
And if you want to off-set this dark whimsey with a little practical know-how from the smartest guys in the room, here's the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge article, Five Steps to Better Family Negotiations.
grab []our sunscreen and head for the beach at the summer-themed Blawg Review #114, hosted by lawyer and mediator Stephanie West Allen collaborating with Julie Fleming-Brown, an executive coach for lawyers.Stephanie publishes two blogs, Idealawg, sharing fresh discoveries about innovations and ideas to inspire the practice of law, and Brains on Purpose, which covers topics at the intersection of neuroscience and conflict resolution.
Julie publishes the well respected Life at the Bar, helping lawyers find satisfying and meaningful careers. And Blawg Review is the weekly review of the best in legal blogging, hosted each week at a different blog.
To say I had no idea what I was getting into is an understatement. If my husband had known, he would have found a way to block my access to blogger. But we were blog innocents in those days.
Whatever blogging does for my ADR practice, it is nothing compared to the personal satisfactions of blogging -- having a ready avenue for creative self-expression and continued critical self-reflection on my own ADR practice has made me a happier, more fulfilled person and a much better practitioner than I otherwise be.
Why the latter? Some of it results from the discipline of recounting the actual process by which a case settled or failed to. And a lot of it comes from the friends I have made and colleagues I have met around the world.
So for my first blog-birthday, I give you the following gratitude list for those who welcomed me and whose blog-words continue to enliven and inspire me.
She told me about the best schools for my children, the least expensive and best dry cleaner in town, the hours the local farmers' market was open and the activities available for someone like me. She also taught me how to edit .html code at a time when it could just as easily have stood for "hoping to motivate lovers" as it stands for whatever the heck it actually means. Thanks Diane!
New Zealand mediator Geoff Shape must be next. His Mediator blah blah takes the gravity out of mediating without eliminating its profundity. He went on vacation once, for at least two weeks, and I pined for his humor, his grace, his vitality, his enthusiasm and most of all his authenticity. Geoff is also the founder of the Mediation Vblog Project, that sent me out to buy a webcam and invite all the people I loved over for coffee and an interview. Mostly, Geoff cracks me up in that way brilliant comedians do who make you look at something in an entirely new light because that light is more true than any you've ever seen. Thanks Geoff!
Third and fourth are Renaisance women Gini Nelson -- Engaging Conflicts -- and Stephanie West Allen --Idealawg and the new. neuroscience conflict resolution blog -- Brains on Purpose. These women's interests and knowledge range so far, wide and deep that I leave their blogs a little slack-jawed with admiration and always stimulated to begin exploring new intellectual terrain.
All of these people have been extremely generous to me and many others. There aren't enough words available to thank them. So I simply leave you with their blog links.
Thanks for This Year
I count my years June to June because I began my mediation practice in June of 2004. This year, I have again been blessed by scores of people in the ADR field to whom I owe this fabulous new career of mine. They include the following, wonderful and brilliant people in no particular order.
Judges Alexander Williams, III and Victoria Chaney for whom I "clerked" as a superannuated extern while studying for my LL.M.
Var Fox, Alan Brutman, Rosemarie Chuisano and their unbelievably great staff at Judicate West, all of whom took me in and nurtured my practice at a time when I couldn't predict having a single additional case coming to me.
Hey listen!! If Hollywood and the music industry can award themselves tens of thousands of real gold-plated statuettes a thousand times a year, why can't we give ourselves gold and silver virtual awards for contributing more "genuis" to the thinking world in any single day than the entire entertainment industry does in any decade you might want to name?
Stephanie has graciously asked me to play this meme tag game under the following rules:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn't fit your blog).
Stephanie asks that we "tag blogs with real merits, i.e. relative content, and above all - blogs that really get you thinking!" rather than those, say, with the highest first weekend box office gross (i.e., X-Men).
The following blogs make me think:
Geoff Sharp's Mediator Blah Blah, who writes like a truly great comedian; he makes it look easy; it hits your insight-center before you have a chance to self-censor; and, it's way deeper than you think;
the Electronic Intifada (which may not actually be a blog but which I read as if it were one),
Lawrence Solum's Legal Theory Blog, for the truly geeky wanna-be academics in the crowd like me;
position yourself as an expert and demonstrate your experience.
the information in your blog should directly help your market solve a problem or address their wants and needs
read other peoples' blogs and get a handle on what they're doing
reading blogs within your industry will give you a sense of what niches are underserved and will help get your own creative juices flowing so you can write authoritatively when it's your turn.
initiate conversations with other bloggers by commenting on their blog entries
when you set up your own blog, [they will be] more likely to link to you, and send their readers
you need to blog regularly, under your real identity with an authentic voice
be sure that you have something personal and interesting to write about.
cross-promote
consider adding a blog to your existing Web site
for experimenting with a blog, there's nothing more simple than setting up one on Blogger.com, operated by Google
use a "tagging" service, such as that provided by Technorati.com, to help advertise your blog
a tag is basically a label you give your blog -- say 'professional services.'
anyone who uses Technorati and has subscribed to that tag will receive a notification of your new blog entry on that subject
encourage your customers to subscribe to your blog's RSS feed.
Everyone who knows the difference between distributive and integrative bargaining and the iconic story of the ONE ORANGE should go directly this morning to Geoff's blog, Mediator Blah Blah. First, a snippet to encourage you:
Today I found myself inducted into the Mediators' Mile High Club at 23,000ft when two young, remarkably similar looking girls seated in 16E and 16F needed my help.
(yes, they look sweet and compliant now, but just wait until the plane takes off!)
(The ultimate digression: starting a post with a digression: This beautiful blog was created, and is "hosted," by LexBlog, the only legal blog outfit in town worth talking to when you decide to drop blogger, typepad and the like and go professional).
[Chubb] now says law firms publishing blogs will be covered by their malpractice policy so long as lawyers are not answering specific questions in a way that could be construed to be legal advice.
That from James Rhyner, worldwide lawyers professional manager for Chubb Specialty Insurance, in speaking with Lisa Berman, reporting for the New Jersey Law Journal (pdf of story).
Chubb does insure this new form of communication -- and will continue to do so within select parameters.
Ryhner also acknowledged, as reported by Berman, "[T]hat there have been no malpractice suits against blogging lawyers in the United States over bad legal advice. But he cites a U.K. suit involving Lloyd's of London that he is monitoring.
Geoff Sharp kindly passes along his dad's advice not to be average and to always be in mid-career in his brilliant article on Starting a Mediation Practice here. (chart is Geoff's own)
My dad's career advice? Never be a civil servant or wear a hat. Huh??? Some dads give sound career advice and others zen koans to chew on for the rest of your life. We love them equally because, well, because they're our dads!
Somedays, however, thinking of this little chart is all that keeps my internal energizer bunny rev'ving.
Stephanie West Allen at Idealawg has tagged me and eleven others to respond to Alex Shalman's Gotta Get Goals by "list[ing] and writ[ing] about the top 5 to 10 goals that you gotta’ get so that you can truly say you have achieved your wildest dreams in life. These have to be your best, most exclusive, and over-the-top goals that you can pick off your goals list."
I'm thinking, SHOOT!! I already write about myself too much, but Stephanie is one of my favorite people so I hate to disappoint her on this meme. Therefore, you can skip this post as more blather from the most narcissistic person on the planet or read my top ten.
The casual observer may not think these goals much to hope for, but if I achieve them, I will have achieved more than I ever believed possible and will die a happy woman.
to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety; this is my primary purpose; everything else is gravy.
when I say "stay sober," I mean, to maintain a peaceful and loving balance in my life no matter what my circumstances -- to be content and of service in a war zone, a jail cell, a hospital and on my death bed.
to make a difference in the world, every day, one person at a time.
to be awake, present, to my experience and compassionate to that of others.
to continue to overcome those defects in my character that keep me from being of service.
to be self-supporting through my own contributions.
to be humble and more even-tempered.
to express myself creatively without pretense, desire for fame or hope of financial reward.
to know myself, my strengths and my limitations.
to contribute to my family, my friends and my community at the highest level possible without self-aggrandizement or need of reward.
In the words of the poet Mary Oliver, I want to be able to say
all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
I can't be the first one to ask these questions, but here goes:
why don't the media giants recognize that when I post a scene from A Few Good Men in a blog read primarily by attorneys (a damn good media market) it's free advertising to a new generation of lawyers who were in elementary school when FGM was released in 1992. This goes in spades for equally good (or better) lawyer movies like The Verdict, screenplay by the brilliant David Mamet with Paul Newman doing some of the best acting in is entire career. Today's young lawyers were in their bassinets when this one was released in 1982. And where do they learn about the old movies they may want to see? From the internet.
haven't these guys read The Long Tail? (see extended entry for a wikipedia primer on long tail or "niche" marketing).
don't they know that most young people (say, everyone under 30) believe that content should be free. That by yanking movie clips or sound bites from YouTube they are alienating huge numbers of potential viewers under 30?
wouldn't Viacom be better off spending $100,000 per month devising a way to use YouTube's media-delivery system to its own benefit rather than paying people that same sum to track down its "pirated" YouTube content and execute it there?
There's an old saying that "what you resist persists." The internet, YouTube, google, blogs, mp3 players, ripping, burning and copying are here to stay.
The means of production (and co-production) is in the hands of the people.
Still, large concentrations of capital remain (and will always remain) in the hands of corporate giants.
This is not David and Goliath because David just wants to listen to his music, man. The people who want to "monetize" David's listening (and recording) enjoyment will always find a way to do so. That's their job.
The people will continue to create and share. Mix and burn. Copy and compile.
Not that I mind Big Media wasting their money trying to stop the tide of progress.
It's just that I'd rather they use it to make better movies.
Not surprisingly, the blogosphere points to the irony of Viacom's suing YouTube while CBS is finding effective and profitable ways to work with the video sharing site. David A. Utter with WebProNews points out that the first CBS March Madness clip on YouTube prominently displays UPS advertising and indicates the potential for major profit for the network and YouTube as well. Utter says, "Why Viacom misses the potential of YouTube while their former brethren at CBS embrace it would be a question we would like to see Viacom answer if their YouTube/Google lawsuit ever comes to trial."
It was not that long ago that Tanya posted her first article on the Los Angeles County Bar Association Blog site. I'm pleased to see that her entire group is now bringing its expertise, knowledge, wisdom and know-how not only to its clients, but to anyone else whose vital commercial interests include the growing area of Privacy Law.
Because I can't describe Proskauer's blog any better than it does, I give you the Privacy Law Group's first welcome message with a link below:
Welcome to the Proskauer Privacy Law Blog. Proskauer’s Privacy and Data Security Practice Group is tremendously pleased to bring you what we hope will become a trusted source for summary and analysis of breaking legal developments in the evolving field of privacy and data security law. This blog is designed in part to complement our recent privacy treatise published by PLI entitled Proskauer on Privacy: A Guide to Privacy and Data Security Law in the Information Age.
Today we bring you posts regarding (1) the introduction of federal legislation that would give the Attorney General very broad authority to enact rules requiring Internet Service Providers to retain records so law enforcement can access customers’ online activities; (2) adoption by the EU Data Protection Working Party of a new model application form for Binding Corporate Rules; and (3) some of the many new proposed bills in the 110th Congress regarding data security breach notification that would preempt the more than 35 currently existing state laws.
In addition, you can find posts that I previously contributed to the California Privacy Law blog hosted by the Los Angeles County Bar Association.
Of course, we are interested in your feedback, and welcome your suggestions and comments. We look forward to hearing from you.
For the posts referenced in Proskauer's welcome message, click here.
The most common complaint I hear from young attorneys at all levels is the lack of mentoring available to them. Since the internet is their domain, I ask those attorneys over thirty-five to pick up this "Advice to Young Lawyers" meme tag and run with it.
Memes, for those of you who may be unfamiliar with the word, are ideas or units of cultural information that replicate and are transmitted virally from one human being to the next. In cyberspace, bloggers spread memes by tagging other bloggers and inviting them to amplify or discuss the idea, transmitting it in turn to other bloggers, and enabling the meme to propagate rapidly.
Tammy Lenski has created a meme for mediators, riffing on a post by Vickie Pynchon, on "How to Start a Mediation Practice"--a must-read for anyone interested in becoming a mediator. Tammy recounts her own proven formula for success in launching a practice as a mediator and has "tagged" Mediation Mensch Dina Beach Lynch and me, inviting us to continue the conversation on this theme.
Since the meme is coming back around to me, I "tag" Kristina Haymes of Mediation Marketing Tips whose excellent mediation marketing advice has been a great help to me.
These people are my mediation posse even though I've not met any one of them. They keep my spirits up when they start to flag, share their abundant resources, wisdom and strength with me, and hip me to new ways to market my practice, new case law, new mediation techniques, and new ways to express my mediation practice in the world. I genuinely don't know what I'd be doing without them.
If you blog, they will come. I don't have sufficient thank you's in my gratitude bag for these wonderful ADR professionals. Visit their sites often. If you take the blogging plunge, they will arrive at your front door like the townspeople of some mythical Elysian American 1950's farm community, with flowers, tips on dealing with the local merchants, casseroles and favorite recipes. Life doesn't get any better than that.
Part III of Building Your Mediation Practice next.
From the intersection of Do and Don't, we thank Concurring Opinions for hipping us to the latest, clearest, most skimmable advice on blogging for the Fortune 50 of Law Firms (and you know who you are).
With the rush to create content, it's easy to forget that all business communications directed to the public are subject to a variety of laws, regulations and other legal concerns. This article provides a high-level overview of the key points to keep in mind as you assess whether your company-related blog is legally compliant.
THE DO'S
DO make a clear decision on whether the company will sponsor and/or host a blog (or several), and what the objectives are for each blog. Blogs don't make sense for all companies and you should be clear about why having a blog (or several) will advance the corporate interests as well as interest readers, and are worth the resources to start and keep one or more blogs running
The Social Web - A World of Possibilities from the public relations/public affairs firm Tunnheim Partners provides the statistics for all the jabbering we do here about matriculating your law or ADR practice into the Web 2.0 University. Excerpts below:
In a year when YouTube won Time magazine’s invention of the year and corporate CEOs were quick to create their own avatar – a virtual personalized identity – 2006 proved that “new media” now includes much more than blogs. The always-changing media landscape has forced public relations professionals to constantly re-examine the term “new media” and continuously find its hidden opportunities.
Gone are the days where a company could merely post information on a static corporate Web page and expect customers to find it. A survey by Ketchum and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center found that nearly half of all industry professionals use their corporate Web site to post important company news and announcements, but only 6.8 percent of all customers will go to the Web site to find it. Today’s more socially minded Web user will look to more interactive online locations to influence their beliefs about a company, product or concept – including the virtual world.
And if you don't know what Web 2.0 is, check out the O'Reilly Explanation which includes the following comparisons between Web's 1 and 2.
Web 1.0
Web 2.0
DoubleClick
-->
Google AdSense
Ofoto
-->
Flickr
Akamai
-->
BitTorrent
mp3.com
-->
Napster
Britannica Online
-->
Wikipedia
personal websites
-->
blogging
evite
-->
upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation
-->
search engine optimization
page views
-->
cost per click
screen scraping
-->
web services
publishing
-->
participation
content management systems
-->
wikis
directories (taxonomy)
-->
tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness
-->
syndication
And no, we here at the Negotiation Law Blog don't know what half of these things mean. The point is only that we're learning and we invite everyone else along for the ride.
Web 2.0 and The Machine in a nutshell by ZDNet's Dan Farber -- Worth watching: Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, has posted a captivating and incisive 4-minute and 31-second video explaining the basic premise of Web 2.0, concluding that Web 2.0 is primarily about linking people. But it is the journey of this video that is the reward.
Blog etiquette requires that I link to this video rather than simply lift it & post it here but I can't figure out a way to link to any given article on Denise's blog -- only to the blog itself. So I'm lifting it here with apologies to Denise at Bag and Baggage.
All participants walked out of the seminar with a writing/blogging marketing plan and some of the groups exchanged business cards, agreeing to act as "marketing buddies" to achieve the goals set at last night's session.
The Basics to Set Up Your Blog
Several attendees asked me to provide the links to blogging resources that I mentioned last night so here they are:
Google's Blogger -- where you can set up a blog free in about half an hour no matter how technologically over-50 you are. There are other resources, like typepad, but I have no experience with them.
Feedblitz syndicates your blog, i.e., permits you to put an email subscription box in your blog's sidebar and allows your subscribers to choose a direct "feed." I have no idea how the RSS ("really simple syndication") feed works, but I use it myself and it's easy to set up at Feedblitz.
I am indebted to Diane Levin for turning me on to MorgueFile, where you can get free images courtesy of a benevolent conspiracy of photographers who offer their stunning photographs free of charge. Before Diane turned me on the this source, I used (and still use) istockphoto.com where most images cost a dollar. Flickr also provides free images.
Google Alerts will send you articles and blog posts on any topic you choose. Just put in a key term like "mediation," "negotiation," "insurance coverage," "family law," "health care industry," "community mediation," "restorative justice," "social psychology," etc. and google will deliver the web results to your email box. (See also Google Tracking for Client Awareness at Netlaw Blog -- remember, your clients are Just Not That Into You; they are, however, into themselves).
Have I said "God bless google" recently? God bless google, particularly for constructing a library of every book ever written still in existence today at books.google.com. The New Yorker article on this dizzyingly audacious endeavor, Google's Moon Shoot, is here.
If you want to see both exemplary blawging and a great ad for blogging all around, see Diane Levin's "Mediation Channel" Blawg Review #94, collecting last week's best posts. A Boston lawyer and mediator, Diane Levin publishes Online Guide to Mediation. Diane's been a model for me and many others who blog/blawg and, like WAC?, she seeks to reach bloggers, lawyers and business people outside of the often-insular U.S. She's thoughtful, skillful, outspoken and (gulp) fun.
Diane gives new meaning to the words collaboration, reciprocity, generosity, wisdom, wit and top 'o the bell curve smarts. It's rare to find all these qualities in a single human being. And did I say she's tireless?
Sometimes we mediators get caught in a conversation with ourselves and, in the process, get farther and farther away from what the attorneys who seek our assistance need from us.
I'm linking to her series here, as well as to some of the trial attorney and other blogs that think deeply and well about the mediation process and have much to teach us mediators.
Time prevents the full list this morning but I'll supplement this post this afternoon.
Diana Skaggs' Louisville Divorce Law Journal pays more attention to alternate dispute resolution than any practicing attorney blog I'm aware of. Her insights are spot-on, her knowledge broad and her wisdom, well, wise. Check it out!
Trial Tips from Trial Lawyers You've found the blog where a number of the USA's top trial attorneys join together with litigation experts to lend their expertise on topics that matter in your trial practice. Gain insight in case selection, work up, trial strategy, evidence, and post settlement issues. Contributors will reqularly share their real life experiences and knowledge to help you represent injured consumers.
And it's not just the settlement/mediation tips that will grab your attention. Trial lawyers put the passion, wit, loss, longing, love and fury back into the dry legalisms of their clients' claims. Because that's what we mediators do as well, you'll find cruising the Trial Lawyer Resource Center an endless source of inspiration.
Since I'm using the cover of one of Julie Schumacher's great novels for this post, I'm linking to her web site here. You can also find her bio and more of her great books by clicking on the image itself. If you're a creative writer, you might also think about sending your work to the r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary journal, for which I serve as Editor-in-Chief, website designer, manuscript reader and chief bottle washer.
A memetag is the blogosphere's equivalent of a chain letter. It requires a blogger to request another blogger to post on a particular topic. This memtag post is Five Things You Didn't Know About Me. The tagged recipient must "tag" others to pass it along.
No dire warnings of misfortune or promises of great wealth accompany these requests. They are their own reward.
I'm teaching an employment ADR course at the Straus Institute, Pepperdine University School of Law this semester with master employment mediator Stefan Mason. One of the class assignments is to write regular self-reflective journal entries on employment issues.
I am journaling along with my students on the class ADR blog . The linked One Page Identity Journal Assignment requires the students to dig under the surface of their own experience and write about the way in which their identity is intertwined with their status as law students or lawyers, business people or teachers, writers, doctors, academics, etc.
As America prepares to send 21,500 more young men and women into harm's way in Iraq, I am asking all Blawgers to observe at least one day of mourning this month over lives lost in Iraq.
Lawyers should take this [civil] approach in cases of every kind. It's not about gamesmanship. It's about helping your clients achieve a fair result that they will be able to live with and work with for the longer term. Among lawyers, the first step towards achieving fair results for your clients is to treat your peers in the same way -- with fairness and civility.
Robert's essay bears reading in its entirety folks. Then it should be read again with an eye toward forwarding it to the adversary you've been (uncivilly) battling with during the year.
Perhaps you can append your own personal note with the link saying something like this -- "let's begin the new year on a more friendly footing."
You might even (gasp!) offer an actual apology for any incivilities on your side of the street during 2006.
I can hear counsel now, saying, "but they'll use it against me!" If things have deteriorated to the point where your opponent would use a heartfelt call to greater colleagiality against you, things are seriously out of hand.
Julie Fleming Brown of Life at the Bar and Stephanie West Allen of Idealawg are ending the year with a flurry of appreciation in the legal blogosphere. They each sent an e-mail to three bloggers asking them to write a post to their blogs beginning with the words: "Lawyers Appreciate . . .then pass the baton on to three more bloggers. The countdown will last until the last day of the year."
Wikipedia, which lawyers appreciate for its admirable effort to be inclusive, comprehensive, multi-vocal and "true," defines integrity in its popular sense as:
holding true to one's values [or] being one's word; doing what you said you would do (by when)/(how) you said you would do it. Integrity is knowing what is important to you and living your actions accordingly. . . Integrity is how you allow others to see you.
It's YOU . . . . (see Tammy Lenski's post on the new "you generation." We're collaborative and reciprocal. Ground-breaking. Generous. Spirited. Passionate.)
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
It is time to explain myself — let us stand up.
What is known I strip away,
I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
And what you can do with an ADR blog, you can sqaure with a legal blog in your specialty.
Yes, you will get CLE credit by subscribing to this audio seminar, but that's hardly the point.
Junior associate to senior partner, manager to entrepreneur, beginning to senior ADR professional, you can and will expand your business if you listen and attend to the lessons learned by Diane and Tammy during their blogging tenures.
For more information, click on the ad to the left or here.
We won't say it's fun because (shhhh) because we're keeping to ourselves the big secret that marketing is actually more fun than practice.
The best blogging campaigns are acts of love. You cannot impose your own selfish values upon the blogosphere and still expect results. What you can do, however, is give a damn. It's a surprisingly effective strategy.
Thanks again, Hugh! Clearly, I've come to the right place!
The lesson? Canned legal warnings and preemptive legal strikes transmitted to potential adversaries who are under 35 will meet with the same shoulder-shrugging, eye-rolling, "whatever'ing" of your local teenager. Entire blog post quoted verbatim below.
Baker and McKenzie, has received some increasing(and not complimentary) attention on the blogosphere. What are the reasons for this?
It follows the pre-emptive strike written by the law firm on behalf of their client, Infront Sports and Media to the american weblog, Boing Boing. Baker and McKenzie observed that their client 'anticipates the possibility of unauthorized streaming and downloading of FIFA World Cup matches.'
The letter goes on to warn that the law firm will be 'actively monitoring your website ... to identify unlawful activity and will, if necessary, take appropriate action to ensure the protection of Infront's rights of those licenses.'
“Oh brother. I don't even know what the FIFA World Cup is. I'm guessing it's soccer, which I hate just as much as any other pro sport. Every editor at Boing Boing detests professional sports, and we would sooner stream a video of a crumpled up paper napkin in the corner of a room than show some jackasses running after a ball. The only time we would ever post anything about pro-sports would be to make fun of them.”
Human Law's comment?
My take on this is that most law firms do not appreciate the significance of blogs and the capacity of an organisation and individual to hit back on the web. This story is dominating the blogosphere at the moment yet still most law firms have no idea how potentially damaging blogs can be to their(and their clients) business.
The Discovery Referee Speaks
Yes, Virginia, lawyers do "win" mediated settlement negotiations every work day. They do so by:
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My 
First and most importantly, I suppose, are the
18th Century Dispute Resolution Technology: The (.jpg)
I have no idea whatsoever what 
!!)
Lawyers are shrewd keepers of the score. 
NEWS ALERT: I'm not working here. 
Blawg Review
You have to be of a certain age, an age I myself am barely tall enough to be (right, 23 in 1975) or of a certain nostalgic hippie-era state of mind (right again) which 
See the 
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I'm poll watching in Nevada. Why this is so exhausting I'm not certain. The poll workers are uniformly great. Patient. Persistent. Painstaking. 
.jpg)
This is how hard I'll be working this week -- with a little help from my 
Self-promo out of the way, here's the latest on 
Thanks again to IP attorney .jpg)
Practicing law, particularly litigation, is often frustrating, sometimes humiliating, and frequently simply dispiriting. On the other hand, the practice of law can be thrilling, intellectually stimulating, challenging, absorbing, and a darn good way to make a good living.
Listen, Kevin is one of those people whose brain is so active you have to put those nuclear material warnings around it.
Greg May over at the 
O.K., they're not exactly articles. 
Trial attorneys, negotiators, mediators and settlement judges all share the same essential concern -- how to reach and persuade our audience. 
Let's welcome New York attorney-mediator Christian S. Herzeca of 
If you haven't checked out our 
Stephanie West Allen at 
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Claiming that the $4.85 billion Vioxx Settlement improperly "allows [defendant] Merck to dictate the advice a lawyer will offer" to clients, some Vioxx plaintiffs' attorneys have asked the federal judge overseeing the deal to "keep some of their clients outside the settlement while still allowing other clients to accept it."
I don't know how I let my own 
TIME: Friday, October 19, 4 PM Eastern (20 GMT)
Yes, we did talk mediation marketing and who should make the first offer over a wonderful lunch today at the London Law Society, but we also covered childcare, American politics (oh, do let's change the subject) and the dreadful exchange rate (oh, do let's change the subject).
One year ago, on June 14, 2006, I ventured onto 
We're proud to say that our friend 
From the .jpg)
Everyone who knows the difference between distributive and integrative bargaining and the iconic story of the ONE ORANGE should go directly this morning to Geoff's blog, 
(The ultimate digression: starting a post with a digression: This beautiful blog was created, and is "hosted," by 
Stephanie West Allen at Idealawg
ALL TIME MOST POPULAR SEARCHES
Hat tip to Elliott Wilcox' 
First, a huge round of Settle It Now applause for my fellow ADR Bloggers -- Diane Levin of the 
The Social Web - A World of Possibilities
Sometimes we mediators get caught in a conversation with ourselves and, in the process, get farther and farther away from what the attorneys who seek our assistance need from us..jpg)
Bertolt Brecht once asked
Do check them out!
Attorney and 
, 
The best blogging campaigns are acts of love. You cannot impose your own selfish values upon the blogosphere and still expect results. What you can do, however, is give a damn. It's a surprisingly effective strategy. 
