Clients are the lifeblood of a lawyer or law firm’s business – no matter what part of the world they’re providing legal counsel and service in. It takes time to understand the needs of any client and what they are hoping to gain from utilizing the expertise of a lawyer.
A post titled “Ten Things You Should Know About Every Client” on the Hubbard One blog, The Hubbard Perspective, features some thoughts on client relationships from Jim Durham, chief marketing and business development officer for McGuireWoods.
Durham’s list includes finding out the personal goals of the client. He asks:
4) What are the primary personal goals and concerns of the individuals who hire the lawyers? (How are the people who work with the lawyers, and the people who hire the lawyers, judged and rewarded? What makes them successful?)
Interestingly, Durham also focuses on personality.
6) What are the personality and communication styles of the decision-makers? (Are they intuitors or sensors? Introverts or extroverts? Visual, auditory of kinesthetic? Big picture or detail-oriented?)
Durham says whatever you learn becomes the foundation of your strategy.
…remember, developing business comes from developing relationships. Relationships are built on trust and by adding value to people’s personal and professional lives. This requires information – information about “them,” not about you!
You can read the full post on The Hubbard Perspective.
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West author Ari Kaplan (The Opportunity Maker) is featured in a post on The Wall Street Journal Law Blog, titled “Make Yourself Useful: A Chat about Job-Getting with Ari Kaplan.” Ashby Jones talked to Kaplan about job networking for lawyers.
Kaplan, of Ari Kaplan Advisors, outlined his advice for job hunters to make and maintain meaningful contact with people from all walks of your life, which can lead to building out the network that lands you the job you want.
Kaplan told Jones, “the kind of networking I’m talking about sometimes takes more effort. But with a little bit of effort, people can really surprise themselves. Let’s say you want to meet the general counsel of a Fortune 500 company, which, might make a lot of sense for a job seeking law student or lawyer. Even if you don’t know any, there are likely a few ways to go about this. You might find one that’s an alumni of your law school and call him or her up, ask if you can come in to chat.”
Kaplan says any meeting you get, that comes out of your networking should be mutually beneficial:
“… the benefits to you are probably pretty obvious — you get a connection with someone in a position of authority and power. But how do you bring him or her something of value? It’s harder, perhaps, to think along these lines, but not impossible.”
Kaplan told Jones the job offer may take some time to get, but your approach to the job hunt and the networking should not feel like a burden.
It’s about making yourself useful, Kaplan said. “Every great rainmaker finds a way to consistently serve as a resource to clients or prospects. I’m a strong believer that the best way to self-promote is to promote others, and then let it reflect back on your character.”
Read the entire WSJ Law Blog post for more of Kaplan’s great advice.
By the way, Kaplan also got some press recently in the Houston Chronicle. In a story titled “Author says lawyers need networking updates,” Kaplan gave his view of the difference between networking and relationship-building:
“The difference is sincerity. Networking has a connotation that conveys the image of collecting business cards. Piles and piles of cards. Relationship-building humanizes the art of meeting and finding community with other people. Once you identify those common interests it’s no longer networking. It’s really just staying in touch.”
For more with Ari Kaplan, listen to a Westcast podcast we recorded with him about his book, The Opportunity Maker: Strategies for Inspiring Your Legal Career Through Creative Networking and Business Development. I found it applies not just to legal careers, I think the tactics and advice could and should be used in many lines of work.
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Several months have passed since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act became law. The impact of the stimulus has remained a key focus of politicians, commentators and citizens. That piece of legislation has spawned myriad journal articles, news, legislation and rules at both the state and federal levels of government. There is a lot to keep track of if you are interested in how the Act is impacting the economy.
To simplify things, Westlaw has released several new databases to help cut out the clutter and help you focus on Stimulus Plan information. There are databases for news (STIMPLAN-NEWS), journal articles (STIMPLAN-LAWREV), proposed state and federal regulations (STIMPLAN-FR and STIMPLAN-ADC) and proposed state and federal legislation (STIMPLAN-BILLTXT).
For example, if you want to search for articles about job creation, run the search JOB /3 CREAT! in the STIMPLAN-LAWREV database.
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Editor’s note: This post is from Cindy Carlson, a librarian relations manager at West.
There are many challenges involved in bridging the gap between what law students learn about legal research and what new attorneys need to know. I attended a session on this topic at the 2009 AALL Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. that brought several perspectives.
The session was titled Emerging from the Cocoon: Innovative Ways to Re-teach Legal Research to Externs & Summer Associates.
Dragomir Cosanici from the Louisiana State University, Paul M. Hebert Law Center was first to present and, as an academic, immediately addressed the main issue – there is no consistency of approach among law schools to teaching legal research.
Often it’s done in the first year as part of the writing program, Cosanici said. Sometimes it isn’t taught at all. And at some schools there is an option for students to take a course taught by law librarians that is research-specific.
Unfortunately, even in that last and best-case scenario, the credit given is small and the classes are often of limited size and hard to get into. So, while academic law librarians are doing their best with the resources they have, their options are limited. Cosanici’s suggestion was that law schools utilize some of the technology they have available for remote teaching to help fill the gap.
His approach was to offer a three part program as part of the package of managing externships: (more…)
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Within the current economic context, the mortgage industry continues to be an area of major concern – from participants in the sub-prime market to those concerned with how regulators are dealing with things now.
Home foreclosures and mortgages have been frequent news topics in the past year. The Obama administration has been working on plans to help with the housing crisis, including the ”Making Home Affordable” plan (also known as the “Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan”). This plan attempts to keep homeowners in their houses by making it easier to refinance or modify mortgages.
While these are not formal in the way we usually think of governmental plans – there isn’t a statutory or regulatory proposal guiding them – there are several documents available that outline the goals of the Obama administration relating to Making Home Affordable. Similarly, there aren’t pending bills or newly proposed rules available in traditional sources, but some of these documents are available on Westlaw.
If you run the search “HOMEOWNER AFFORDABILITY AND STABILITY PLAN” or “MAKING HOME AFFORDABLE” in the FADMIN-ALL database on Westlaw, you will get several transcripts and “key facts” pages outlining the government’s agenda.
In addition, the Mortgage-Backed Securities volume of the Securities Practice Series was recently updated to include discussion of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. For example, to learn about Fannie Mae’s role in sub-prime mortgages, do a search of “fannie mae” /p sub-prime in the MORTSEC database.
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United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia joined West author Bryan Garner at the Texas Bar Association’s annual meeting last Friday, June 26 in Dallas.
The spoke about some of the content in their book from West, Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges. Garner also is editor-in-chief of Black’s Law Dictionary, now in its 9th edition.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram account of the event reports that Justice Scalia said lawyers should always strive to keep things simple:
“You don’t get any credit for eloquence,” Scalia said. “Just make it simple and tell us your point. Your job is to make a complex case simple, not a simple case complex.”
Texas Lawyer’s report on the event included a warning from Justice Scalia to characterize cited precedents accurately:
“When a judge sees that you are playing fast and loose with a citation, he is not going to believe the rest of your brief.”
The Dallas Morning News story on the Scalia/Garner discussion included an exchange between the two men, about the use of contractions:
Garner, who is editor of Black’s Law Dictionary, a standard for attorneys, advocates using contractions judiciously to lighten the style. He read a long sentence from the book in which Scalia wrote that any contractions on the pages were included with his protest.
“I had no idea how vehement one could be about contractions,” Garner said.
Garner noted several major publications that embrace contractions, including The New York Times. “I certainly want to be in that league,” the conservative Scalia playfully scoffed.
The ABA Journal has a recap of the coverage of the Scalia/Garner event, in “Scalia Airs Pet Peeves at Texas Bar Meeting“.
Want more of the wisdom of Justice Scalia and Bryan Garner?
You can see a one-hour excerpt from a free continuing legal education (CLE) event that they held at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., last summer, on West LegalEdcenter.
Highlights of that 2008 Kennedy Center event also are in this Westcast video podcast:
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Summer associates and interns in law firms around the United States once again have access to relevant and useful legal research training materials from West.
But this year, that doesn’t mean they have to carry those materials around with them.
West went green, substituting heavy paperwork for easy-to-navigate online materials found on the West Summer Associate Program page on the West Web site. The move also meant the end of shipments of thousands of pounds of paper to large and medium-sized law firms all over the country.
The West Summer Associate Program is designed to pick up where law school programs left off and prepare associates for their summer internships and clerkships.
Lea Harpster, a director in Large Law Marketing at West, says the firms get a big benefit from the annual program.
“We’re there with cost-effective Westlaw research strategies and tips to ensure that summer associates have a foundation of Westlaw knowledge,” says Harpster. “We also give them an understanding of the firm’s contract so that when they’re out there working with the attornies in the firm they’re efficient and more importantly, they’re effective.”
In this video clip, Harpster explains how the changes in the West program came about for 2009. And, Stephanie Krause, a senior marketer at West, talks about some other environmentally-friendly components of the program for summer associates, including a biodegradable pen and a global tree-planting initiative:
Harpster says feedback about the green initiative by West shows it has “really resonated with the firms and the summer associates.”
The West Summer Associate Program page has more information on the materials available, including numerous webinars and ways to get additional free legal research training.
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When describing Black’s Law Dictionary, Bryan Garner refers to it simply as “the law dictionary of record.”
To him, that says it all. And it represents the amount of time and work that goes in to keeping Black’s in its respected position among scholars, judges, lawyers and law students.
“It is the most widely used legal dictionary in the world and it has been that since Henry Campbell Black wrote the first edition in 1891,” says Garner, the editor-in-chief of Black’s. “When I took it over in the 7th Edition we – a team of scholars and I – rewrote it and re-researched it. I’ve tried very hard over the 7th, 8th and now 9th Editions to deepen the scholarship and make it just as reliable a reference work as we can have.”
The new edition of Black’s, the 9th – published by West – contains more than 45,000 terms, including 2,500 new entries than the 8th. In addition to the new terms, more than 15,000 entries now cite the date when they were first used in English-language contexts, especially in judicial opinions.
Garner says the work to find new terms for Black’s is extensive and requires a lot of reading, by a lot of people.
“The way to acquire new terminology for any dictionary is to have a reading program and I have a small army of readers, volunteer readers, who help supply me with potential new terms for Black’s from books, judicial opinions, law review articles and more,” he says.
Garner, who operates LawProse in Dallas, enlists his team to help him research and write the definitions for the dictionary once he’s alerted to new terminology, as well as to review and edit the older terms.
Garner leans heavily on more than 200 legal scholars and legal professionals from around the world. (Find out more about that process in this Westcast audio podcast).
A would-be lawyer’s first link to all the hard work that goes into Black’s Law Dictionary begins in law school. Garner says “if you’re a law student and you’re trying to read a casebook or prepare to give an accurate answer in class or for an exam, you need to know precisely what a term means.”
He adds, “when you become a lawyer, if you’re making an argument in court, you want to be able to cite a reliable reference work. Black’s is the only dictionary ever to have been used as the exclusive basis for a U.S. Supreme Court opinion and Black’s is cited by the Supreme Court just about every term and by federal appellate courts and state supreme courts week in and week out.”
Garner says the 9th Edition meets his standard for honoring the legacy of Henry Campbell Black.
“He was a wonderful scholar and I’ve tried to carry on that tradition,” says Garner. “Black’s Law Dictionary is not merely a collection of what courts have said. It’s not a regurgitation of judicial definitions. We on the Black’s team view it as more of a primary source and we are as lexicographers giving it our best shot at defining the terms as well as possible to really bring it to a new level of scholarship with every edition.” (Watch a video interview with Garner).
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It’s a clichéd scenario: someone you know went to happy hour after work, had a few cocktails, then attempted to drive home, only to have a local police officer intervene. Not a smart move on their part and one fraught with many consequences. They want to curtail as many of those consequences as possible.
They call you because, well, you’re a lawyer. Unfortunately, you don’t know anything about the procedural and substantives issues to help them. What can you do?
If you are going to take the case, start by going to the DUI Practitioner tab on Westlaw. This page is loaded with resources that will help you give your client the best advice possible.
For example, you can quickly access the Handling Drunk Driving Cases treatise (the database identifier is HDRUNKDR), which will guide you through the process of advising your client through the criminal process.
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This morning, about 5 weeks after Chrysler filed for bankruptcy protection, General Motors voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. While some in the media are speculating that Chrysler will emerge from bankruptcy court soon, it doesn’t look like that pace will be replicated with GM. Given the complicated nature of the proceedings, those wanting to keep track might want to consider tracking the docket that is available on Westlaw.
To do that, access the Alert Center on Westlaw, go to the Docket Alert category and click Create. From there, you will want to create a Docket Track and choose the Southern District of New York Bankruptcy Court. The docket number for the case is 1:09-BK-50026. With a Docket Track, you will be regularly notified of new events within the case. (Note: if docket tracking is not part of your Westlaw subscription, there will be a fee to track dockets.)
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Thomson Reuters, Legal, President & CEO Peter Warwick offered his perspective on the company’s approach to the current economic reality in a panel discussion, “Adapting and Thriving in a Challenging Economy”, at the Minnesota Venture & Finance Conference.
The launch of WestlawNext brings a significant advancement in the way professional legal research is done.
Andrew F. Popper, a professor at American University, Washington College of Law, talks about his award-winning novel “Rediscovering Lone Pine.”
