ZiefBrief

Practicing Kindness: Dallas Lawyer Chooses Not To

I follow Mary Flood's excellent blog on Houston legal happenings, Legal Trade, because one of my closest friends is a Houston attorney.  Thanks to my friend's regular updates, I know just how disruptive Hurricane Ike was for Houstonians.  Yesterday, Mary Flood reproduced the text of a letter that a Houston attorney sent to a Dallas attorney regarding the Dallas attorney's demand for travel expenses for a deposition that had to be postponed so that the Houston attorney could deal with an Ike-related sewage disaster at his home.  From the letter excerpts below, readers will get a general idea of how understanding the Dallas lawyer was about the postponed depo:

I am sorry that a hurricane hit Houston.

I am sorry that the Houston Public Works Department had to use a fire hose to blow human feces out of my yard on the day our deposition was scheduled.

I am sorry that the city required my presence at the debacle noted immediately above.

I am sorry that your office communicated that you would only "agree" to my rescheduling the deposition if we agreed to pay your travel expenses. I am also sorry they did not mention anything about attorney's fees in your voicemail. I am especially sorry that your associate, after I agreed to pay your reasonable travel expenses, decided to put in writing that while the deposition was cancelled it was "unilaterally canceled," and that you did not "agree" to the cancellation. I am sorry that you either went back on your word or, more likely, just do not have a word.

I am sorry that you think the judge should be involved in this matter. I wonder if the judge will be sorry about that, too.

Just remember, the next time that you're tempted to be unpleasant and uncompromising with opposing counsel, your conflict could end up on legal blogs all over the country.  You can still play nice and advocate zealously for your client!

Yelpers Weigh In On SF Jury Duty

Even the tiniest mom and pop businesses gather Yelp reviews, but I was surprised to see that the experience of jury duty in San Francisco now has 21 Yelp reviews.*  What's not so surprising -- the collective two and a half stars for the jury duty experience (for those of you who are unfamiliar with Yelp, the highest rating is five stars).  Still, there are a few rare individuals out there who love jury duty and can't get enough of it, like Solange M.  She gushes, "I must be the only person in the WORLD who loves - LOVES, LOVES, LOVES - jury duty" and ends her review with a plea, "Please, call me back in."  All I can say is -- wow.

*For those of you who abhor profanity, avoid this Yelp link and Yelp in general.  Many Yelpers love to pepper their reviews with liberal doses of profanity, so it's not the site for you if the f-bomb makes you cringe.

Summary of 2007-2008 U.S. Supreme Court Term

Looking for a concise summary of the Supreme Court's major decisions during the 2007-2008 term?  You can find it in American Law Reports on Westlaw at 30 A.L.R. Fed. 2d 637 (Westlaw password required for access).  In addition to summarizing all of the Court's major decisions, this document also contains links to the full-text of each opinion and related ALR annotations. 

First Year Tips: Better Late Than Never!

Professor David Post from Temple Law has a few more useful tips for first-years in his post at Volokh Conspiracy, and his most important tip, IMHO, is don't blow off your first-year legal writing and research class!  More from Professor Post: 

You’re probably taking some kind of “legal research and writing” class during your first year, and, if you’re tempted to blow it off (as you may well be), my advice to you is: Don’t. In many, many ways, what you learn there is more important than what you learn in any one of your doctrinal classes – there are a lot of terrific lawyers out there who never really understood (and still don’t understand) property law, say, or constitutional law, or contracts. But there are very few terrific lawyers out there who haven’t mastered legal writing and legal research. (And consider this, too: all of those judicial opinions you’re reading in your “doctrinal” classes are themselves the output of judges (and their law clerks) engaged in the process of “legal research and writing”; the more you understand about that process, believe me, the better you’ll be able to understand those opinions and, therefore, the better you’ll be able to understand the various doctrinal subjects you’re encountering). If I had the magic bullet to get you to write well I’d reveal it to you, but I don’t. Legal writing, in my view, is one of those things (like playing the piano, or juggling, or carpentry) that you get better at by practice, and only by practice.

Same thing goes for legal research -- you won't learn how to become an efficient, effective researcher unless you practice and ask lots of questions about your research.  If you use your time in law school to refine your legal writing and research skills, it will make the first years of practice much less stressful.

The No Billables Experiment: One Year Later

Last fall, we posted about an Atlanta law firm, Ford & Harrison, which dropped billable hour requirements for first-year associates.  So how is the experiment working one year later?  According to this National Law Journal article, the experiment is a big success with the firm's attorneys and, most importantly, with the firm's clients.  The clients are pleased to have junior attorneys working on their matters now that they are no longer paying for the new attorneys' training:

Clients don't want to see on their bill junior associates they don't know, so when we are billing for hours there is a real disincentive to having the partner bring an associate," Holman said. "With the clinical hours, the partners can tell the client not to worry about the bill. It is an effective client development tool.

The partners like the new system, too.  Partners report that associates are gaining the skills they need faster than they would if they were worried about billables:

Holman said the firm has been surprised at how fast first-year associates begin to produce work that is billable once they are no longer under pressure to do so. She called the 1,900 billable-hour requirement "an unreasonable expectation" for first-year associates.

And the associates?  They're happy, too.  One of the first-year associates quoted in the story notes that "a lot of my friends at other big firms do document review all day and into the night. I am already on cases, and they are not going to have a chance to do that for a couple of years." 

Will other mid-sized firms follow suit?  Stay tuned -- if we see any Bay Area firms eliminating first-year billable hour requirements, we'll be sure to report it here.

Coping with Information Overload

At the start of every semester, I definitely suffer from a bit of information overload, helpfully defined by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (!) as the "provision of information in excess of the cognitive and emotional ability of an individual to process that information."  Admittedly, it's not as severe as the information overload that I experienced as a lawyer, when it was not unusual to receive over 500 emails in one day, and now that I'm an "information professional," I've found some helpful tips that keep me sane, organized, and feeling on top of things.  Sarah Houghton-Jan has compiled an indispensable list of things that you can do to stay on top of the information avalanche.  Here are a few of my favorite snippets from her article:

• "Treat physical data the same way you would treat digital data: if you do not absolutely need it, throw it out." Having a tidy workspace helps to keep your working day sane -- I recently discovered this after I misplaced my lecture notes just 15 minutes before my class was about to begin.  Because I don't have that much paper in my office and I'm really obsessive about keepings things neat, I wasn't that worried about finding the lost notes.  I found them in a couple of minutes, stapled to the back of another set of papers. If my office was more paper-strewn, I would have panicked.
• "Before using RSS, IM, email or any other tool to deliver information to someone else, think about whether or not it would be better or easier to talk in person or via the phone." We've all experienced those email exchanges where a group of people will debate a course of action endlessly over email.  Next time you're in the middle of one of these epic exchanges, step away from the keyboard, walk out of your office, and go resolve the issue in person.  Or pick up the phone if the participants are not in the same building.   
• Keep one central calendar to manage both your professional and personal commitments (Google Calendar works great). 
• Allot yourself a set amount of time to deal with your social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.).