Communication

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There’s no question that stress has taken a tremendous toll on lawyers during the pandemic. In many cases the level of work has ramped up, with lawyers trapped in their homes or some other location, tethered to their colleagues and clients 24/7, with little person-to-person interaction. Not only is the workload heavy, but few of…

As prefaced in our post of March 18, political thought happens primarily in the emotional center of the brain, not in the reasoning center. And consuming news with only one viewpoint tends to hardwire certain emotional connections, making it harder to “think” independently about political issues.

In 2019 Gordon Pennycook, a psychology researcher at…

There has long been evidence that political “thinking” is not rational, that in fact it does not involve the reasoning parts of the brain at all, but instead occurs in the emotion-processing center of the brain. In a study using functional neuroimaging (fMRI) on a sample of committed Democrats and Republicans during the three months…

Mark your calendars! Panelists Ronda Muir from Law People Management and Natalie Loeb and David Sarnoff from Loeb Leadership will be discussing emotional intelligence in the legal workplace at the New York City Bar Association at 42 W 44th St, New York, NY on Thursday, April 16, from 6:30 till 8:30 pm. The program can…

Gordon Caplan, the co-chair at the AmLaw 100 law firm Wilkie Farr who was caught up in the FBI’s recent college admission scandal, was recorded saying, while discussing plans to fraudulently get his daughter into college: “I’m not worried about the moral issue here.” Then he made an interesting comment: “To be honest, it feels a little weird.”…

Continue Reading A Feeling for Ethics

Research long ago revealed that the portion of the brain that lights up when politics are being discussed is the emotional area–the limbic/amygdala area of the brain–not the rational prefrontal cortex. In short, politics is not a topic about which we are rational–a conclusion that these days may be particularly apparent.
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Continue Reading Artificial Emotional Intelligence Predicts Election Results

Friday, October 12th was the last day of the 2018 annual IBA conference being held in Rome, Italy. Over 7,000 lawyers from around the world converged on the Eternal City to listen to dozens and dozens of programs on topics of interest, including updates in subject matter expertise, innovations in legal process and other subjects…

For those attending the International Bar Association annual meeting in Rome this upcoming week of October 7, Muir will be speaking on a 4:15 pm panel on Monday, October 8th–chaired by Peter Alfandary, Esq.–that will be discussing winning and retaining clients through cross cultural understanding. Related to emotional and social intelligence in several respects, cross…

One of the trends in corporate America that is starting to show up in law firms is the replacement of the old annual review with frequent real time reviews. Advocates of the new approach say the annual review focuses too much on past behavior, and often on behavior long in the past. At least…