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The cover title of the Time Magazine issue coming out Monday, February 3 is  “Mindful Nation.” The ultimate benefit of mindfulness is that it improves our ability to focus our attention, which is sorely needed in our 21st century lives.  Improvements in focusing attention in turn increase our ability to both perceive and…

Discrimination comes in all forms. In our 2011 entry on the dismissal of an EEOC suit against Bloomberg, we noted that Karen Lockwood, a senior female partner in Howrey, a Washington D.C. firm and then president of the D.C. Women’s Bar Association, made a distinction between discrimination and unconscious bias: “Law firms are way beyond…

Law firm and law department managers who are using “caring” management strategies in response to the economic downturn are examples of playing nicely in the legal sandbox.  And research demonstrates that, again, being nice pays off.

According to a recent study by Grdinovac and Yancey entitled “How organizational adaptations to recession relate to organizational commitment,”…

So you’re not really feeling the love?  Or even the compassion?  How about being nice–can you at least get into being nice?

Fitting nicely into our recent blog posts about the more heartful arts, the November/December 2013 issue of the ABA Law Practice Magazine is entitled “The Business of Giving,” and features a story entitled…

Mindful of Rev. King’s exhortation to leaven power with love, remember the Doonesbury character Woodrow proclaiming “By God, I love the law!”  Well, there’s a perspective afoot in the legal industry that may take that sentiment and turn it on its head.  It sounds something like “the law is all about love!”

According to an…

“It is much safer to be feared than loved,” Machiavelli wrote in “The Prince,” a 16th-century treatise advocating manipulation and even cruelty as the means to power.

For effective leadership in the 21st century, is that still true?  Is it better to be feared or loved?

The Machiavellian approach is still being vigorously advocated today–in,…

According to the statistics, lawyers exhibit more signs of stress and distress–expressed in depression, suicide, substance abuse, divorce, etc.– than any other profession.  Lawyer leaders may be even more stressed. The Center for Creative Leadership’s 2013 White Paper on “The Surprising Truth about What Drives Stress and How Leaders Build Resilience” names stress and burnout…

As if we needed any further confirmation of the dropping demand for legal services, TyMetrix, the giant electronic billing clearing house, recently reported their “LegalView Legal Market Index,”  based on the purchases of legal services by the LegalView 70.  These are 70 large corporate clients across eight industries, 21 of which are Fortune 500, with…

A flurry of reports this month on law firm financial results for the first half of 2013 have come in with fairly uniformly disappointing news.

Flat Growth

Citi Private Bank’s Law Firm Group reports that “while the industry is no longer in freefall… tepid demand and intense pricing pressure continue to plague most firms.”  Rate…