Operations

Earlier today in this post, I described my disagreement with Iowa personal injury attorney Steve Lombardi’s complaints about misuse of listserves. Lombardi has now weighed in with a responsehere. Lombardi raises one issue to which I gave short shrift: that lawyers should not blindly rely on advice offered on listserves without conducting their own independent…

The way I like to tell it, I started my own law firm back in 1993, because frankly, a big law firm wasn’t big enough. Not big enough for my ego which balked at doing the grunt research without the glamour of arguing the cases or meeting with clients. Not even big enough to fit…

When I started this blog, to read the mainstream legal media, you’d have thought that solos were the only lawyers to ever miss deadlines, violate ethics rules or commit malpractice. But I’ve always believed that all lawyers, from those at ginormous firms to those who practice alone, are all equally prone to making mistakes and…

MyShingle has been named as one of the ABA Journal’s Top 100 Blawgs. I’ve placed my badge of honor in the sidebar to the left. My blog is included the in the category of Lawyer’s Toolkit, whatever that means, and if you’re so inclined, you can click on this link to vote for my blog.…

Two factors are conspiring to make 2008 a break out year for starting a law firm. Factor 1: rapidly weakening credit and financial markets are causing law firms like McKee Nelson to offer voluntary severance packages to associates and leading other firms Thacher Profitt to give notice of impending layoffs. Factor 2: rapidly increasing hourly…

I realize that these days, alternative billing is all the rage – and I too am a proponent of alternatives to the billable hour. Still, there are times when you have to resort to the billable hour, either at the insistence of a client, or under some of the guidelines for submitting a fee petition…

Thanks to a lemon of a credit market, associates at McKee Nelsonhave the opportunity to make a huge vat of life-changing lemonade. Above the Law’s David Lat is reporting here that NY/DC based McKee Nelson, in an effort to avoid economically-induced, forced associate layoffs, is offering associates two options: (1) a full bonus, plus four…

I rarely discuss politics here, but the ABA’s planned rally to show solidarity for our colleagues in Pakistan is not an issue of politics, but law – and what lawyers are sometimes called upon to do in order to preserve the law. In our own lives as lawyers, few of us will ever experience more…