We are proud to announce that Ronda Muir has been chosen as a Fellow-Elect of the College of Law Practice Management, with her induction to take place at the College’s 2019 Futures Conference on October 24-25 in Nashville, Tenn. Muir will be serving on a panel discussing “Resilience and the High-Performance Culture.”
Management
Will the GRE Save Lawyers from Depression?
Starting with the class of 2023, Yale Law School is joining a couple dozen other law schools, including Harvard, Penn, Georgetown and NYU, in offering applicants the opportunity to take the GRE instead of the LSAT as an entrance requirement. The question, logically enough, is whether that change in entrance exam will make any difference…
Kirkland & Ellis On Board for Mental Health
Only a month after Morgan Lewis announced hiring its “Well-Being Director,” Kirkland & Ellis unveiled a firm-wide Wellbeing Program for its 2,500 attorneys and staff to help address mental health and substance misuse issues that the profession was flagged in the 2016 ABA and Hazelden study as being at high risk for. Among 13,000 licensed…
The Wages of Stress
This tragedy is starting to get sadly repetitive. Yet another major player in BigLaw has died. The chair of Baker McKenzie, who had taken a leave of absence because of “exhaustion,” passed away “unexpectedly” last month at age 56 with no cause indicated. Paul Rawlinson had been appointed global chair of the firm in…
Enter the Well-Being Director
In a move that hopefully signals the beginning of a much-needed and potentially powerful trend benefiting lawyers everywhere, Morgan Lewis has hired its first Director of Employee Well-Being to implement its program called ML Well.
…
Continue Reading Enter the Well-Being Director
A Feeling for Ethics
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.”…
Addressing Firms’ Greatest Challenge
A recent survey by Robert Half Legal found that 83% of law firm respondents noted increasing demand over the last year for legal services. That is a welcome new trend after years of lower demand and lost legal jobs. But that promising development comes with a new challenge for legal employers–hiring the best legal professionals to provide those services.…
Emotional Intelligence Makes You Run Faster and Play Harder and Win!
If there were any question as to whether emotional intelligence positively impacts every endeavor, research has recently verified that even athletes benefit from EI. A study of marathon runners showed that, of 237 runners, those with higher emotional intelligence finish half-marathons faster than their low EI competitors, even after controlling for the effects of physical training and the number of half marathons run in the past.
…
Continue Reading Emotional Intelligence Makes You Run Faster and Play Harder and Win!
A Shared Tragedy
As we count our Thanksgiving blessings, we should remember the many lawyers (and their friends and families) who are not feeling blessed, but rather tormented by the life they are leading in the law.
…
Continue Reading A Shared Tragedy
Exhaustion: Building a Successful, Sustainable Legal Organization
Paul Rawlinson, Baker McKenzie’s Global Chair, stepped down temporarily from his position last month. The firm’s announcement read in part:
“Based on the advice of his doctor, in response to medical issues caused by exhaustion, Paul has decided to take a step back from Firm leadership and client responsibilities to make his health and recovery…