A series of articles in the Wall Street Journal last week discussed the trend in corporate America toward using analysis of data obtained through personality and other questionnaires from employees to guide better long-term hiring. The information obtained from employees coupled with their work histories gives employers, particularly of large workforces with potentially large turnover rates, a better predictive … Continue Reading
Muir’s entry "What Do Women Want? Challenging the Diversity Myth" was republished in June’s Law Practice Today, the monthly webzine of the ABA Law Practice Management Section. The article will also be used in the workshop at the ABA meeting this July, entitled "LPM Diversity and Inclusion Workshop: The New Look of Law Practice Management."… Continue Reading
At first glance, you as a woman lawyer might be tempted to pull up stakes and take yourself to Paris: according to a report by the Paris Bar, after rapid increases in the number of female law graduates there over the last few years, the number of registered women lawyers now outstrips the men, the women start practicing … Continue Reading
Perhaps the only players in the legal world getting a harsher strafing these days than law firms are law schools. The biggest complaints are 1) financial: that they unfairly entice students into their folds on promises of big payday legal jobs that most will never have a shot at and that the law schools do so at tuition rates that impose mortgage-sized … Continue Reading
So here is the typical routine: clients that demand not overnight but one-hour turnaround, associates that don’t hand in assignments on time, working into the night to deliver a reasonable product (see the first two), phone conferences scheduled for 6 am, which turn out to be at 3 am in California, where you are that … Continue Reading
In honor of the endings and beginnings at this time of the year and the personal and professional resolutions that each of us aspire to for the future, it is fascinating to look to the life of the founder of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud. A recent entry in "The People’s Therapist," a blog by a … Continue Reading
This past August a court dismissed an EEOC discrimination suit against Bloomberg contending that the company had systematically discriminated against pregnant women or those who recently returned to work from maternity leave. The judge, New York district court judge Loretta Preska, saw the EEOC’s essential charge to be that Bloomberg, as a company policy, did not provide work/life balance for its employees, which … Continue Reading
According to the recently released 2011 Associates Survey, third- through fifth-year associates billed the highest number of billable hours in 2010 since 2007, working more than two extra weeks (80 billable hours, or a total average of 2,037 hours) compared to the 1,975 average hours billed for 2009. Which may account for the fact that the average firm composite score in terms of associate … Continue Reading
Will Meyerhofer is a lawyer who worked at Sullivan & Cromwell before chucking it and getting his MSW to become a therapist. He is also gay. He writes the blog The People’s Therapist and occasionally ties in issues relating to the legal community. His latest entry is about a recent podcast he did with the … Continue Reading
The results of the AmLaw 200 Midlevel Associate Survey make for some interesting prognostications about our future. The average composite score from 5,092 associates fell to 3.728, the lowest overall score since 2004, which includes one of the lowest scores–3.96–for the associate’s own firm in recent years. While worries about being laid off declined significantly and 72% … Continue Reading
The most interesting question, in my opinion, that was asked of me and Peter Zeugheuser at last Thursday’s CCM audio conference on Origination Credit and Partner Compensation for the New Legal Landscape was not really within the purview of the topic. It was "does compensation really work as an incentive?" The topic–for a broadly diverse audience–was an overview of law … Continue Reading
According to a recent article in the ABA Journal, "Law schools need to do more than teach the legal basics–they also have a moral obligation to produce healthy and satisfied lawyers." Specifically, Michael Serota, a recent law grad, suggests in his opinion column in the New York Law Journal that law schools "help students identify their … Continue Reading
Muir participated in a panel discussion last week at the Women Lawyers Alliance first Annual Conference, held in Chicago. Muir and fellow panelists author Shaunti Feldhahn, eminent psychologist Dr. Florence Denmark and psychologist/coach Karen Kahn identified some of the challenges and facilities women have in making their mark as leaders in law firms, and also addressed specific questions on … Continue Reading
An article based on Muir’s blog entry "What do Women Want? Challenging the Diversity Myth" has been published in the ABA’s April 2010 webzine Law Practice Today. The issue focuses on effective diversity strategies in law practice management. … Continue Reading
It was my great pleasure–something I don’t often say about a conference– to attend this invitation-only gathering last week, March 21-23, of both august and up-and-coming law industry professionals as they prognosticated the future of our practice and what that might in fact look like up close for a broad array of providers and clients. While I will digest and relay over the … Continue Reading
Monday, March 8, is International Women’s Day. So how are we doing? Bain and Company recently released results of a survey, reported in the Harvard Business Review, of 1,800 business people worldwide. Eighty percent believed that companies benefit from a gender diverse workforce; 75% reported having initiatives in their workplace to improve gender parity; but less than … Continue Reading
The recent 5-4 Supreme Court ruling on the New Haven Fire Department vocational advancement exam in Ricci v. DeStefano once again stirs the waters on the question of how to choose the best from among a crowd. (See our entry "The Outliers of Law–Embracing Heresy".) The "best" in this case was determined to be simply the highest scorers, even if … Continue Reading
The Grant Study is an extraordinary longitudinal study undertaken in the late 1930s to shed light on "the urgent question of how to live well." As participants, a group of 268 (male) Harvard College sophomores, including John F. Kennedy and Ben Bradlee, were chosen for showing particular promise. An article interestingly entitled "What Makes Us Happy?" in the June 2009 issue of the Atlantic … Continue Reading
A 2008 ABA Journal survey, with reponses from more than 1400 women lawyers, produced some interesting results as to who they prefer to work with. Of the 42% of women who expressed a preference in the gender of colleagues, that preference was different depending on the age of the respondent. Female supervisors age 40 and over preferred … Continue Reading
This is the time of year when many of us take stock of our direction and goals and make plans to step up our effectiveness. This particular year, 2009, many lawyers are facing an extremely difficult once-in-a-century marketplace for which no one has been truly prepared. So we may also find ourselves questioning our ability to successfully grapple with the challenges ahead. How to acquire … Continue Reading
Sonja Lyubomirsky, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside, admits being surprised by the results of the research she conducted on how to permanently increase happiness, funded by a 5-year million-dollar grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. She conducted a meta-analysis (a "study of studies"), along with Ed Diener and Laura King, two … Continue Reading
Linklaters is reported having decreed, in a fit of concern for work/life balance, that lawyers leave their Blackberrys at home while on holiday (vacation to us). The order is designed to insulate associates, in particular, from the relentless rat race for a few sweet weeks a year, according to management. “Sometimes it’s the small things … Continue Reading
Muir will be participating in an IOMA audio conference presentation entitled "Associate Compensation: New Alternatives for a Difficult Economy" on July 22, 2-3:30 pm EST. For more information or to register, go to www.ioma.com/audioconferences/1053.html. … Continue Reading
Lawyers are introverts, big time. According to Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) results, almost 3/4th of lawyers, compared to only 1/4th of the general public, are introverts. That means they go inward to charge their batteries– preferring internal introspection to external interaction. On the Caliper Profile personality test, lawyers also rank astonishingly low in the sociability trait–which measures how comfortable a … Continue Reading
