Inspiration & Encouragement

Like many of my lawyer colleagues with college-aged students, I’ve been tracking the college admissions scandal with interest, particularly the involvement of Gordon Caplan , co-chair at Wilkie, Farr & Gallagher who paid $75,000 to bribe the proctor of an ACT exam to boost his daughter’s chances of admission to a top school.  Quite honestly, the…

What stories would you share with the world if your time on earth was limited?  Tragically, that wasn’t a hypothetical question for former biglaw attorney, wife and mom Julie Yip-Williams who was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer back in the summer of 2013 and passed away in March 2018. Upon learning of her diagnosis,…

So last year, you read MyShingle and grew excited or less terrified about starting a law practice. Maybe you read one of our top ten posts for the year and decided to stop playing it safe and to start your law firm. Or maybe you decided that it was your time to change the world. Or…

There’s a great scene in the movie Southside With You (at 1:46) about Barack and Michelle Obama’s courtship where Barack Obama addresses a group of community members at a local meeting. They’ve been told “no” about something or other, and Obama suggests that rather than take the word at face value, they flip it around…

Last spring, I tagged along on a trip to China with two of my sisters who were traveling on a research grant.  One of my sister’s colleagues accompanied us to the subway station where we politely waited as throngs of people pushed past us to board the escalator.  After a minute or two, my sister’s…

Today marks the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and a time for starting fresh. We don’t make resolutions as we do for the secular new year, but instead, do something more important as we free ourselves of the weight of our mistakes and imperfections from the past year so that we…

Imagine that you plan to get married. You race over to the bookstore and buy up a half-dozen bridal magazines to look at dresses or tuxedos or outfits for the wedding party. You peruse the wedding websites to identify a couple of cool venues in your area, then hop over to Pinterest or Instagram to…

Warren Brown, the popular Washington Post auto reporter who passed away last week could have had virtually any beat he wanted when he came to the Post in 1978 as an Ivy-League credentialed African American journalist at a time when the paper was trying to diversify its reporting ranks. But somewhat surprisingly, Brown chose to…