Clothing of the well-dressed FutureLawyer.
Friday, March 22, 2019
Inconvenience and Management
An organization that is one of my clients occupies a large and very nice building that has one significant omission: it does not have a coffee shop. There's a restaurant that is relatively close but it is not the sort of place one slips into for just a cup of coffee and its service is slow. I believe the lack of a nearby coffee shop where people can pop in for quick meetings reduces informal communication and relationship-building. That gap can be enormously important.
Likewise, another client farms out all of its legal work to a highly-respected law firm. There are benefits to that approach but, once again, the inconvenience factor arises. Managers who want to get a quick off-the-cuff legal opinion can't just walk down the hall or to another floor to chat with a lawyer co-worker. They have to contact the outside law firm which in itself is inconvenient. Doing so may even require the approval of their boss. As a result, they don't get legal guidance until a crisis has arrived. If they have made mistakes in the interim due to the lack of timely legal advice, that delay may be very costly.
Watch out for the subtle ways in which the organization can be affected. Bricks, mortar, and distance can affect communication.
As San Francisco Declines
City Journal: Erica Sandberg on the City's attempt to put a homeless shelter on the Embarcadero.
Thursday, March 21, 2019
The Florida Man Challenge
The Naples Daily News examines the bizarre activities of a modern character who arises in many a news story and Google search: Florida man.
The game is played by putting "Florida man" on Google followed by your birth date.
Click and a strange story emerges.
When It Happens
David Kanigan receives a text message and a wave of thoughts on an extraordinary man.
Rest in peace.
Rest in peace.
Daily Planning and The YOU Section
When preparing today's index card, the one that will guide your activities, you may find that the natural tendency is to list tasks related to commitments to others.
That's fine, but under a section at the bottom called YOU, list two things that will make you (remember you?) very pleased if you do them today. They may not be capable of full completion, possibly because they are of an ongoing nature, but if you make progress on them, you will be happy.
An important note: the tasks should conform with the sort of person you want to be.
The King of Crime Fiction
From the August 21, 2013 copy of The New Yorker: Anthony Lane on "Elmore Leonard's Talk."
An excerpt:
"One problem was that a single page of him made other writers, especially the loftier and more lauded variety, seem about as legible as wallpaper paste."
The first Elmore Leonard novel I read was "City Primeval." That was the beginning of a serious addiction.
Amazing writer.
Wednesday, March 20, 2019
Fast is Slow. Slow is Fast
Within the last 24 hours I've encountered two examples of sensitive situations in which the wisest advice is "Slow down." The desire to speed through a sensitive matter is entirely understandable. The issues are unpleasant and people want them resolved pronto. Unfortunately, rushing can create new problems. The counter-intuitive strategy of slowing down will save time in the long run by preventing possible mistakes and by improving the overall quality of the resolution.
As Dwight Eisenhower used to say, "Let's not be in a hurry to make our mistakes."
"Swamp"
The word "swamp" is dressed up in the workplace. Some words that are used in its place are:
- Committee
- Research
- Matter
- Inquiry
- Study
- Opportunity
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
Lingering Lingo
I just dated myself by telling a lawyer my old email address is "kaput."
Wanted him to know I am on the up-and-up and am not trying to hornswoggle him.
Wanted him to know I am on the up-and-up and am not trying to hornswoggle him.
The Good Man
Orson Welles discussing Shakespeare, Falstaff, and "Chimes at Midnight."
I find it difficult to watch this and not want to have a prolonged conversation with him. Fascinating man.
I find it difficult to watch this and not want to have a prolonged conversation with him. Fascinating man.
Slaying the Small Dragons
You can't avoid the large dragons that are going for your throat. A significant amount of anxiety, however, can be created by the small dragons that are in your territory and which have not yet been slain.
You know you need to confront them but other things somehow always seem to arise.
If you currently are not in a battle with a large dragon, finish off at least one small dragon today.
How do you know it is a small dragon? There are two simple criteria: you've been putting off the task and you will feel much better when it is finished.
And remember, if left alone, small dragons get bigger.
[Photo by Thomas Despeyroux at Unsplash]
First Paragraph
K-Sue Park volunteered with the American Civil Liberties Union as a law student, but by the time she was a Critical Race Studies Fellow at UCLA a few years later, she had concluded that the ACLU "should rethink how it understands free speech." Its "narrow reading of the First Amendment," she wrote in the New York Times, blinds it to the illegitimacy of "hate-based causes." "More troubling," Park continued, "the legal gains on which the ACLU rests its colorblind logic have never secured real freedom or even safety for all."
- From Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America by Noah Rothman
- From Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America by Noah Rothman
Monday, March 18, 2019
"What the Hell is Going On?"
Politics. Commerce. Education. Communication.
Take some time today and read this essay by David Perell.
[Photo by John T at Unsplash]
First Paragraph
"With this fifth volume of my memoirs I begin the story of what happened to me when I left Fleet Street in 1982 and went into television as the main way of earning my bread. The effect on my literary reputation was immediate. It was thoroughly compromised, and even now, after a quarter of a century, it has only just begun to recover. After the calamitous reception of my Charles Charming show in the West End - the disaster is only partly evoked in the final chapters of my previous volume, because so many of the details remain too humiliating to write down - I regained the will to live by painting bicycles for my children.This creative upsurge extended itself to the construction of a novel, Brilliant Creatures. Overly decorated with flash, filigree and would-be-satirical pseudo-scholarship, the book nevertheless achieved the approval of the public. It even hung up there near the top of the bestseller list for a little while, like a parachute flare with delusions of stardom. I had to admit that the change of title might have helped. My original title had been Tactical Voting in the Eurovision Song Contest."
- From The Blaze of Obscurity: The TV Years by Clive James
- From The Blaze of Obscurity: The TV Years by Clive James
Sunday, March 17, 2019
Saturday, March 16, 2019
A Changed Washington
In Commentary, Andrew Ferguson writes a farewell to the Washington he once knew. An excerpt:
In the meantime, the city that Nathan knew slowly vanished, swamped in money. The riches showed in the demolition of old neighborhoods, downtown and elsewhere, and their replacement by boxy office buildings wrapped in ribbon windows and, lately, block after block of luxury apartments outfitted with roof-deck swimming pools and climbing walls. As a result, the city is safer, more comfortable, more abundant, and far less interesting. Not long ago I passed by the sight of Al’s Magic Shop—a cobwebby, cluttered gag store I wrote about a couple times. I saw George H.W. Bush at Al’s one day back in the eighties, when he was still vice president. As his Secret Service detail stood watchfully by, Bush loaded up on hand-buzzers, whoopee cushions, and fake vomit. He was a notorious gag guy.
Hitchens is Missed
Clive James, in North Face of Soho, imitating Christopher Hitchens describing the chicken crossing a road:
"Blind drunk . . . drunk as only a chicken with no head for alcohol can be . . . headless chicken . . . sobbing, clucking drunk . . . not shedding the occasional feather as chickens are wont to do . . . every feather glued to its body by wine-flavoured perspiration . . out of El Vino's with hanging beak . . . the busy road looming before it . . . the broad thoroughfare as an unbridgeable chasm, if I may quote Edith Wharton . . . doomed from the egg onwards . . . a fish out of water . . . standing up to be counted . . . helplessly victimized in a chicken-hostile environment . . ."
[Photo by Keagan harris at Unsplash]
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