Inspiration & Encouragement

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…

Starting and running a law firm isn’t always the joyful journey that many of us imagine.  When it comes to the decision of whether to start a firm, many lawyers suffer from analysis paralysis, drawing up detailed business plans and weighing the pros and cons and waiting for “the right time,” (whenever that is) that…

The 2018 Winter Olympics figure skating competition didn’t go exactly the way eighteen year old Olympic figure skater Nathan Chen had hoped. Entering the competition as the only male figure skater in the world to complete five different types of quadruple jumps in a single performance, Chen stumbled through the team competition and short skate…

As Seth Godin observes, marketers usually sell pleasure.  Think about some of the most popular legal marketing programs. They teach you how to take your law practice to seven figures, or how to run a six-figure practice in a seven-hour workweek and so on. The programs sound great. Some of these programs have worked for…

For a quarter of a century, superstar commercial litigator Roberta Kaplan  was what I like to call “big law famous.” In other words, I imagine that  Kaplan, a litigation partner at powerhouse law firm Paul Weiss, was well-known to the small circle of biglaw folks who subscribe to publications Bloomberg  and American Lawyer  – but hardly…