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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…

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…

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.

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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.
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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…

According to Dr. Mary Czerwinski, manager and principal researcher of the Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment group at Microsoft Research,”Emotions are fundamental to human interaction, but in a world where humans are increasingly interacting with AI systems, emotions may be fundamental to our interactions with machines as well.”

Several recent announcements illustrate…

A full day’s discussion in NYC of business analytics in a digital world as it applies to law firms, which Muir participated in, has been captured in Business Intelligence and Analytics for Law Firms: Insights for a shifting business ecosystem. Muir’s article on the need to recognize and utilize emotional data is included. You can…

Recently, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan partner Joe Milowic broached the topic of mental health in the legal industry by speaking publicly about his long-standing struggle with depression. His is hardly the first to voice the anguish of such a condition. Www.lawyerswithdepression.com is a national award-winning website written by a lawyer on just that topic,…

Don’t let your summer go by without getting the ABA’s best seller Beyond Smart: Lawyering with Emotional Intelligence. To make it even less painful for you to brush up on your EI skills, you can now get Beyond Smart in either paperback or e-book at a 25% discount using Discount Code ABASUM25. Let the