Archive for June 2005

I’ve always been a smiling lawyer.  During the later round of my first year moot court competition (where I made it, out of 80 students, to the finals!), one of the judges told me that he appreciated my smile when I started my argument and since then, I’ve always smiled in court, to juries and…

Have you ever sat down and calculated how much it costs per hour to run your law office?  I haven’t (though I know what my overhead and expenses are from my tax returns, just haven’t reduced them to an hourly rate).  Yet it seems that most of us ought to know that number off the…

When I put up this post about the ethics of collecting a profit on fees paid to contract attorneys, I didn’t include my own thoughts because my views are mixed. From an ethical perspective, I’m fairly certain there’s no problem with the practice, so long as overall rates are reasonable.  In fact, the entire large…

Sometimes I just know that I’ve been practicing solo too long.  One reason?  I’ve completely forgotten how to converse in “partner-ese,” that obscure language used between partners and associates where associates must read between lines, jump through hoops and do everything else short of just asking direct and time saving questions. Consider these encounters described…

Are lawyers required to pass on cost savings from legal outsourcing (or any other cost savings measures to clients?  Rees Morrison considers this question, first raised in another article on outsourcing to India (Daniel Brook, Legal Affairs, May/June 2005 issue)  The article quotes Thomas Morgan, a law professor at GW as stating that bar association…