Donna recently suffered the loss of her oldest sibling. She described the pain her oldest brother suffered before his death and her very great loss in his passing. She describes the lessons she learned from his death, lessons we should all heed. She said "His passing is a wake up call:
::Tomorrow is promised to no one :: Good health doesn’t just happen – eating well, exercise, moderation, etc.
:: All the money in the world doesn’t mean a thing if health problems exist…."
Amen, Donna, and my condolences. These lessons should not only be learned once, but practiced every day we have left.
Roberta Chinsky Matuson is the President of Human Resource Solutions and author of the new book, Suddenly in Charge: Managing Up, Managing Down, Succeeding All Around (Nicholas Brealey, January 2011). Join Ed and Roberta as they explore how extraordinary results can be achieved by creating work environments which allow workers to thrive.
In today’s L.A. Times, a doctor talks about her reaction to meeting a patient in an airport restroom. The patient was out of context and the doctor was taken aback, at first not recognizing the patient. She concludes by suggesting how much she learned about the patient by seeing her in her own environment, the place where she works. As a consequence, she starts to think about how her future treatment of this patient will be altered.
How often do we, as lawyers, see our clients in their habitat? What kinds of information might we gather, mostly unspoken information, that would dramatically alter the advice we provide? In many cases, quite a bit! Yet, not many lawyers take the time, unbillable time, to visit our clients to really get to know more about them, their work and family environments, and the possible impact on the clients of the advice we provide.
Like the doctor writing the article, I suspect our approach would be somewhat different. And, perhaps more important, the connection the client has with us would be dramatically different! That bond, needless to say, would result in better representation and more referrals. Interested?
The issue of child visitation is a very hotly and bitterly contested issue among many parents who find themselves in a divorce court. Using technology in this process, "virtual visitation," has only recently come to the fore. Below is a guest post from one of the leading Family Law attorneys in Southern California.
How many people have gone through a child custody battle themselves, or know someone who has gone through such a battle? Every day, parents fight in the courtroom to be able to see their children, to spend time with them, to interact and share the lives of their children. I just successfully finished a 4-day trial advocating for a father to insure his children were not moved out of state by their mother.
What about Abbie Dorn, a woman who was left paralyzed while giving birth to her triplets? Abbie has been fighting to see her triplets and today in the Los Angeles Superior Court, Abbie Dorn was granted visitation.
Parents all over the country fight to see their children, but this past week, the New York Times published an article which advocated “virtual visitation” via Facebook. This article was not about monitoring your children’s interactions to insure their safety and well-being, but rather it was about reading your children’s Facebook pages as a means of being involved in your children’s lives.
To me, this is no different than reading your child’s diary as a means of staying involved rather than fostering a communicative relationship. “Virtual visitation” to me is absurd if intended to be the means of maintaining a relationship. The world has turned impersonal with an advent of technology. This should not be the case in a parent/child relationship. Parents who seek success in their relationship with their children and in the courtroom need to be directly involved with their children and to interact with their children to create a strong parent-child bond.
Someone said, "Business, by definition, is taking a risk. Law, by definition, is staying away from risk."
I look at law a bit differently. I think law looks to the past for today’s decision with a view to guide tomorrow’s action.
And accounting, is merely recording this period of time in order to tell the government what we did and, as a result, how much "protection money" we need to pay.
What do you think the functions or attributes of the three professions/businesses are?
Jason Wisdom, of Wisdom Consulting, has been working with companies in the legal, financial, education and medical industries for 15 years, showing them how to leverage technology as a business, and bridging communication gaps between their business and IT. Jason resides in New York City, and works with companies all over the world. He and Ed talk about how lawyers can increase their revenue by embracing the real benefits of technology.
I recently wrote in my LawBiz Tips Ezine about how law schools continue to churn out new graduates even as demand for them drops, and cited a New York Times article on this issue that concluded:“Today, American law schools are like factories that no force has the power to slow down – not even the timeless dictates of supply and demand.”
Now it appears that the law of supply and demand has not been repealed after all.The Wall Street Journal reports numbers from the Law School Admissions Council showing that the number of law-school applicants this year is down 11.5% from a year ago to 66,876. The figure, which is a tally of applications for the fall 2011 class, is the lowest since 2001 at this stage of the process, which is almost 90% completed.
The reasons aren’t hard to understand.Firms increasingly prefer to hire lateral attorneys who have already had on-the-job training and books of business, rather than new graduates who don’t understand “The Business of Law®” and will take years to begin returning a profit on the investment made in them.And from the student side, the realization that going six figures into debt to get a J.D. degree that offers no assurance of gainful employment is not exactly a smart idea – especially for those whose main motivation to attend law school was to make the supposed “big bucks” available rather than to pursue a legal career.
So who is hurt most if the law school bubble does burst?We can only hope it will be the law schools themselves, who continue to pour huge resources into “gaming” the law school rankings so that they can move up from number 19 to number 17 and thereby (they presume) entice more students to enroll.When the housing bubble burst, it was – and continues to be – the financial geniuses at the banks who were left holding the bag.Are law school administrators any smarter?
