Better Law Practice Through Better People Management
In the final tranche of a triad of bad news over the last few weeks, two recent reports–one about associates and another about partners–point out how, despite the current abysmal employment market, there are still lawyers of various stripes who, given the chance, would choose to jump overboard rather than hang on to their position.
In a…
A well-known investment banker confided recently that lawyers are partly to blame for the financial meltdown. Why, apart from wanting to deflect the responsibility to someone other than bankers?
The reasoning was that, particularly with the advent of Sarbanes-Oxley, lawyers have become such an integral part of the business process that their bias toward risk-aversion has seeped…
An article by psychologist Amy J.C.Cuddy in the February 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review reports that we make fast assessments of people on two bases: their intentions and their competence. And more importantly, we assume one is related to the other. This response is evolutionarily linked, she argues, to the advantage of quickly determining whether an unknown person 1) is friendly…
In another blow to our already wilting sense of competence, the UK reports that according to research from the Centre for Market and Public Organisation, lawyers surveyed there who were born in 1970 (now climbing the legal ranks) have lower IQs than lawyers assessed in 1958 (and now either in very senior management or already out…