Inspiration & Encouragement

Each week, the ABA e-report has been featuring some of the runner up entries in its Ross Essay Contest.  One of this week’s essays, Opening My Mouth by Elizabeth Streit caught my eye.  Streit doesn’t write about solo practice; she’s a government litigator.  But what she’s written about how government practice transformed her life as…

You don’t have to join an organized pro bono program or set a grand mission like getting rid of the billable hour to improve the practice of law.  Jennifer Sawday of the California Estate Planning Blog is changing the practice of law just by being in practice, by charging fair rates and doing a good…

Fellow blogger Allison Shields of Legalease Consulting wrote this article in this month’s ABA Law Practice Management magazine on ten ways to get motivated.  Suffice it to say that the article worked well enough to get me to put up this post!

Maybe, we can’t all be as happy as this lawyer. But we shouldn’t give up on finding happiness in our profession and this week, a couple of bloggers have some suggestions on how to make that happen.  First up, Dave Swanner offers a post, Do You Enjoy Practicing Law? where he gives som ideas on…

So, you want to work in public interest, but can’t find a position or afford to take one?  Why not start your own firm instead, with a public interest firm on the side?  That’s what Scott Levine of Aegis Professional Services did as reported in this article,  Scott Levine Fulfills dream of starting public interest…

This past month has been crazy-busy, but busy in a good way.  Many new opportunities have come my way and I’m optimistic about what’s ahead.  But I’ll be the first to tell you that my practice has not always been this way.  I’ve had slow months when I felt frustrated enough about earning the equivalent…

Via Stay of Execution and Rob Hyndman comes this link to a great piece by Paul Graham on How to Do What You Love.   Because after all, that advice to “do what you love” is easy, it’s finding what you love and figuring out how to do it that’s a life work.

Someone on the Solosez listserve posted a link to this article from the Harvard  magazine on Samuel Williston, 20th century legal scholar, Harvard law professor and author of an authoratative contracts treatise.   But though Williston worked late into his life, he suffered a nervous breakdown in his mid thirties that almost derailed his career.  The…