TechnoLawyer: Law Office Management

Originally published on October 7, 2010 in our free BigLaw newsletter.

Urban Dictionary, that distant, surly cousin of the Oxford English Dictionary, defines "douchebag" as "an individual who has an over-inflated sense of self worth … [who] behav[es] ridiculously in front of colleagues with no sense of how moronic he appears." One of the pitfalls of working in a large firm is that you run the risk of becoming a douchebag.

The transformation to office jerk typically starts innocently enough — a monogrammed shirt here, a four page absence memo there — that is, until your bad habits overtake your persona and you become the person that you swore you'd never become — a douchebag. In this issue of BigLaw, you'll learn how to recognize the signs of douchebagdom, and how to prevent or reverse this unfortunate but curable condition. Simply implement the "de-d-bagging" techniques described below, and put your concerns to rest.

1. Cleansing Your Office

If home is where the heart is, the office is where the douche lives. These tips will help you douchebag proof your physical office space:

• Remove all awards, degrees, and Ansel Adams lithographs from your walls.


• Return to the IT Department the 1-800-Dentist headset that you use for telephone calls.


• Dismantle and discard any torchiere floor lamps.


• Lose the Bose speakers, especially if they contain an iPod dock.


• Refrain from using any pen that: (1) is a fountain pen; (2) requires a twisting motion to expose the tip; (3) is engraved; (4) is sold individually; (5) uses special ink; or (6) costs more than $5.


• Bring home your golf clubs.


• Remove annoying framed pictures from your desk, including black and white wedding photos of you and your spouse, travel photos of the Golden Gate Bridge or other exotic destinations, and photos with sports celebrities.


• Eliminate any air purifiers.


• Discard (or finish) the bottle of Scotch next to your monitor and don't replace it with another one.


• Clear your bookshelves of distinguished but useless books such as law school textbooks.

2. Cleansing Your Personal Habits

A douchebag-proofed office may still have a douchebag as its occupant. If you want to remain "normal," make sure you don't:

• Wear cufflinks or French cuffed shirts.


• Use a money clip.


• Wrap your tie around your head for any reason.


• Carry a leather valise, especially by Tumi. Also, do not use the term "valise."


• Wear driving shoes/loafers without socks, sport tasseled shoes, pants with animals embroidered on them, or polo shirts with popped collars.


• Allow copies of The New Yorker, Architectural Digest, Food & Wine, or Milan Kundera books to "accidentally" peek out from your (former) valise.

3. Cleansing Your Work Communications

Now that you've cleansed (and in doing so upgraded) your office and personage, it's time for the final step. Below you'll find some subtle ways to let your colleagues and clients know that you're a changed man or woman:

• Stop using the email salutation "Gentleman."


• Delete your "Sent from my iPad" email signature line. You can keep your iPad, but don't walk around with it or bring it to the bathroom.


• Don't ask for a roll call on a conference call when everybody knows who's on the phone.


• Resist the urge to send blacklines that spell out numbers and identify them in parentheses, as if people are illiterate, e.g., "twenty-nine (29)."


• Refrain from talking about "destroying" the other side in court.


• Don't fake complain about your hours for the purpose of bragging and subtly finding out what others' billed.


• Turn off the light in your office when you leave instead of leaving it on, closing the door and pretending you're still at work.

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Dragon Dictate for Mac: A Speech Recognition Miracle?

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The Mobile Web: A New Legal Marketing Frontier

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Originally published on September 20, 2010 in our free SmallLaw newsletter.

It's lunchtime again here at SmallLaw. My goal for today is to help you prevent an unsuccessful outcome when taking a prospective client or referral source to lunch. The topic is personal hygiene. Personal what? Before you assume that this column does not apply to you — stop! Recognize that you might be the last person to know that something about you is off — way off — especially if you have surrounded yourself with people who won't tell you the truth.

It's imperative that you know whether you're making a hygiene faux pas. We all form judgments. If something looks wrong, smells wrong, etc., it distracts us from absorbing further information. We simply stop. That's a natural reaction. Thus, when your referral source notices something amiss at lunch with you, he or she might be too polite to mention the problem, but you can be absolutely certain your source has stopped listening and isn't going to refer business to you.

It's easy to make a hygiene mistake. We can all remember someone making one of the mistakes I've outlined below. Not only do we remember the mistake, but it's what we most remember about that person. You can check some of these issues yourself, but some will require the assistance of a trusted advisor. You'll want to skip consulting anyone who has adjusted to you (your spouse) as well as those financially dependent on you (your assistant). Find someone you can rely on who will tell you the truth — maybe your sibling or your law partner (both are usually willing to say something mean to you).

The Top Eight Personal Hygiene Mistakes

1. Hair in all the wrong places. Don't have hair growing out of places it shouldn't. Trim your eyebrows, ear hair, and nose hair. Do it yourself or pay someone to take care of it for you (your hair stylist).


2. Stench. Don't stink. Use deodorant. Wear cologne or perfume if necessary. If you have an evening outing, go home and shower beforehand so you'll be fresh.


3. Bad breath. Brush your teeth, try breath mints, and see your dentist or doctor if the problem persists. No one wants to tell you about your breath, and no one will. There is no question that your smelly breath will cost you business. It's just the way the world works.


4. Smoking. Don't smoke. If you need to smoke, do it outside of the presence of referral sources. Avoid smoker's breath. Make sure your clothes don't reek of smoke. Smoking is at its lowest levels among highly educated, affluent people. It's not an appealing habit.


5. Bad hair every day. Get rid of the dated haircut. If you're sporting the comb-over, it's time to leave the 1970s behind. If you're sporting the same haircut you had in college, it's time for a refresh. Get a decent haircut. It's hard to miss a bad haircut, and people make judgments about you when you've got it wrong.


6. Smeared, gaudy makeup. Get your makeup right. If you're going to wear makeup — and there's no requirement that you must — get it right. Misapplication of makeup is worse than no makeup at all. I'm certainly no expert on makeup, but I'm told that it's fairly easy to receive instruction on proper application of these products in the cosmetics department of many stores.


7. Oily, greasy hair. Wash your hair daily. Don't waste that nice haircut by failing to shampoo away the dirt. Keep your hair clean and shiny. You might be cleaning your hair properly but using a product that doesn't work for you. Consult your haircare professional.


8. Creepy fingernails. Keep your fingernails trimmed and clean. Weekly trimming of your nails is essential. Don't let them get too long, and don't chew on them to manage their length.

These hygiene mistakes are not trivial issues. Prospective clients and referral sources understand them much better than the legal mumbo-jumbo you're spewing about. Get your personal appearance under control, and you're going to find it much easier to get the business you seek. Get them wrong — even one of them — and you're wasting your time at lunch.

Written by Lee Rosen of Divorce Discourse.

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Will USB 3.0 Speed Up My Printer?

N.J. Court OKs Googling Jurors During Voir Dire

Don't Pay Your Employees More Money for the Same Work

The Evolution of Law Firm Web Marketing

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Stopping Word From Automatically CAPITALIZING Words

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Originally published on September 13, 2010 in our free BigLaw newsletter.

Last week, the legal tabloid site Above the Law reprinted a column that originated on Sweet Hot Justice entitled Does This Law Degree Make My Ass Look Fat? The column made the rounds in various online coffee klatches populated by female lawyers, prefaced by explanatory notes such as, "This author vocalizes something that I and many of my female contemporaries have experienced," and "OMG, this is SO true," and "Duh."

A Romantic Hobson's Choice?

The premise of the Sweet Hot Justice column is as follows (and here I paraphrase):

You're a single guy in your late twenties or early thirties, and you can choose to date one of two female candidates:

The first is Woman A, an attractive 28-year-old with a modest employment history (translation: series of lackluster receptionist jobs), little (or no) career ambition, and an, um, "understated" intellect.

The second, Woman B, is an attractive, financially secure biglaw associate who is also smart, funny, and runs a successful cupcake cartel in her free time.

Faced with these options, posits the column's author, Legal Tease, the average guy will go with Choice A. "Why?" "Because, if the status quo in my firm … and in my life … and in my friends' lives … and in any bar from New York to L.A. is any indication, a law degree confers about as much romantic value to a single woman as a meth habit and a hidden penis."

Has Sweet Hot Justice Laid Down the Law on This Issue?

Have years — even generations — of struggling for gender equality in the workplace led us here — to a romantically barren wasteland? Is it possible that Woman B's cupcake-making is indicative not of her entrepreneurial spirit, but of the free time she has because she can't get a date? If the anecdotal evidence is to be believed, the answer is a simple "Yes."

Sadly, report a number of female associates, the trailblazers to whom we owe our professional opportunities may have set the bar too high — at least for most men to sidle up to and buy us a drink. "Let's face it," says Dawn, a senior associate at a New York law firm, "everyone knows that you can't survive in the law firm world without being fairly aggressive, or at least tough enough to handle the brutal hours, the unpredictable schedule, and the daily battles with adversaries. I think men assume that women who are comfortable in that world are not dating material."

But why? Why aren't fortitude, ambition, and guile more appealing traits than, say, a penchant for shopping, scrapbooking, Farmville, or spending a precious (and potentially billable) hour blow-drying your hair to get prettied up for a suitor? Because, explains Suzanne (also a biglaw associate), men seem to equate these qualities with a tendency to be combative. "Strike that," she adds (with admirable attention to protecting the record). "They hear "litigator" and think "bitch." That's why, when I meet men, I initially tell them that I "work at a law firm." Sooner or later, the truth must prevail, but I don't want to scare them off right away."

Some women noted that (what one litigator referred to as) the "Dating Kryptonite" issue has caused a schism to develop within the ranks of female lawyers within the firm. "Women in law firms have been fighting to balance work and family life, and many firms — including my own — are finally starting to take the needs of working mothers seriously," reports one associate.

"But cast aside in the whole debate are the needs of single women — without the perceived legitimacy of a husband or children, our non-work needs, and lives, are viewed as non-existent, or inconsequential. Everyone assumes that I am available any time, be it a weekend, late night, or holiday, because I'm not married and I don't have kids. Sometimes that's true, and given how many hours I bill, it will probably continue to be true. I don't know whether to be happy for the women who are sitting at home with their kids, or resentful that they leave early while I eat wilted salad at my desk at 9 PM."

The Rise of the Litigatrix

A number of the women I heard from were saddened by the dichotomy between increasing parity in the workplace, on one hand, and a simultaneous plunge in their dating stock. "I place a lot of blame on the way female lawyers are depicted in pop culture," says Kim, a smart, attractive, and inexplicably single associate. "Ally McBeal was an appealing character, but things have gone downhill from there," she wrote in an email. "She was non-threatening — she wore inappropriately short skirts and was totally insecure. I'm sure a lot of guys would have loved to review her briefs."

In recent years, however, the female lawyers portrayed in movies and on TV have grown increasingly bitchy, morphing into what Above the Law's Managing Editor David Lat has described as, "the Litigatrix."

"On the plus side," writes Lat, the Litigatrix is supremely confident and competent. The Litigatrix is very good at her job, and she knows it. Above all, she's strong-willed and tough — a woman making her way in a man's world." But, he warns, "[l]et's not mince words: the Litigatrix is a bitch. She didn't excel in litigation's testosterone-soaked precincts by playing nice."

But wait: there's more. In addition to the pervasive image problem, says associate Dawn, the average female lawyer "lives like a nun, with one critical difference." That difference? "You know how nuns are the brides of Christ?" she explains. "Well, I am the bride of the billable hour. I've been on the verge of going to trial for five months now," she continues. "It keeps getting adjourned, but I have no free time. I meet men, we hit it off, and things are great until they get wind of the fact that I have a very, very heavy workload. The limitations on my time are one issue, but the other issue is control: they have to defer to my schedule, and I think that's a problem in terms of gender dynamics."

Just Desserts?

So, what might help ease the dating drought of the biglaw female lawyer? Where are the men who will welcome a woman who brings home the bacon, but eats it at 11:00 at night with a side of ice cream? Comedian Tiny Fey has one great idea — the Brownie Husband. I'll have time to think of a few more later, when I get home. Not surprisingly, I don't have a date tonight.

How to Receive BigLaw
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Originally published on September 6, 2010 in our free SmallLaw newsletter.

Do you work in a small law firm? Do often you feel like you don't have enough time for all your tasks or to attract new clients and increase your income? I feel your pain. For a long time, I wished for a 25th hour in the day. Then I discovered something that made me more productive, creative, and efficient, which is just as good as finding extra time. In this special Labor Day SmallLaw column, I'm going to share my secret with you.

Eleven years ago I discovered yoga and have added minutes to my daily clock ever since. My yoga practice has also helped me manage all of the turmoil these last few years stemming from the economy and the erratic job market. In truth, I'm not sure how I would have coped without yoga as a constant source of reassurance and resilience. Sometimes I would show up on my mat with a heavy heart, but with every session I left a bit lighter. Ironically, I didn't just survive the past few years, but absolutely thrived in unprecedented ways — and I have yoga to thank for that. In fact, I became such a believer that I now teach yoga to busy professionals.

Why You Don't Currently Practice Yoga

Working in a small firm gives you a million reasons to put off adding yoga to your life:

1. You need to drum up new business and manage a lean operation — opportunity is everywhere and you need to seize the opportunity before someone else does.


2. You need to make the most of every waking moment because you have finite resources, and a lot to accomplish in a short period of time.


3. The last thing you want to do after a long day at the off is something that feels like work.


4. You have to spend time with your family, friends, dog, etc.


5. You need some time to just unwind and do nothing so you can gear for another busy day tomorrow.


6. Your body's just not flexible.

The list goes on and on. I know these excuses well because I lived them for a long time. When I first started to practice yoga 11 years ago, a co-worker of mine, an ashtanga yoga instructor, told me I could really benefit from yoga. The stress of working in a small organization where I had a lot of responsibilty weighed heavily on me. It was making me old beyond my years. I told him I had no time, and then he said he'd fit the classes into my hectic schedule. Then I told him I had no money to pay him, and he said he'd give me the classes for free. In short, he countered every excuse I could think of until I ran out of excuses and gave yoga a whirl just to get him to stop nagging me. I was such a brat — I wasn't looking a gift horse in the mouth. I was kicking a gift horse right in the teeth.

Yoga Is Not a Miracle Drug, But a Rejuvenating Tool

Finally I stepped onto that mat and something in my body opened up. I thought I actually heard an audible "click." The more I practiced, that same click happened in my mind and my heart. Before I knew it, life started falling into place in a much better way than it had before yoga. It helped me cross the chasm from the life I had to the life I really wanted. I had to put in the work, and if I could commit to that, yoga assured me of gifts beyond anything I could imagine. I stand taller and breath easier now, literally and figuratively, because of it. Yoga takes time, but it also gives us time back by helping us be more productive, creative, and efficient.

Yoga is not magical or miraculous. It takes work and dedication. You have to want to change. There are always setbacks and disappointments in yoga practice as in life. That's part of the journey. Yoga doesn't prevent these challenges from arising, but it helps make them easier to learn from and manage.

A consistent yoga practice helps change your perspective, offering a new path forward through your current professional roadblocks. While yoga often helps improve your body, its real benefit lies in the calming and focusing of your mind. It also boosts your creativity and curiosity. Once you change your mind, you can change anything.

Written by Christa Avampato of Christa in New York: Curating a Creative Life.

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Today's issue of Fat Friday contains these articles:

Bob Leonard, Three Tell-Tale Signs of a Bad Client

Jim Calloway, Some Clarifications on Fastcase Legal Research Service

Stephen Seldin, Review: Fujitsu ScanSnap and TWAIN Compliance

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New Media and the Courts: Current and Future Status (PDF)

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Give Your Legal Writing Nine Lives

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