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Those meant for trial work will feel invigorated rather than exhausted by the battle
A recent online law firm article points out that a reason for lawyers to reject a potential litigation client is to weigh the potential benefits of the litigation against the exhaustion and the harm on a lawyer’s family relations that can come from the intense energy,...
Judges as both fallible and potentially excellent
Judges are not deities. They are humans. They are selected through a combination of some or all of the following: Meritocracy, vetting for ability (with various sorts and quality of vetting), political considerations, and elections by the public. Even some of the most promising-seeming judicial candidates...
Engaging with clients in the place where they are, even if on a roller coaster
One of my favorite clients and I were debriefing about his case, and talking and joking a lot just as regular people — not as lawyer to client — in a courthouse conference room, after we scheduled the next proceeding in his case. This man...
The importance of being tough as nails along with being compassionate
Not long after I posted yesterday’s blog entry on the persuasive power of treating the battlefield as a playground, I benefitted again from keeping those principles in mind when maintaining equanimity when an unanticipated arrow was sent my way, disintegrating the arrow into a spot of...
How to Apply a Mindful Lawyering Retreat to One’s Daily Life
Earlier this month (June 2012), I unplugged from email and the phone except for a handful of communications with my family and office, for the apparently first Cultivating Balance law world retreat at the Blue Cliff Monastery in Pine Bush, New York, where anything but...
Gaining advantage over opponents without angering them
On May 25, I wrote about Jan Diepersloot’s Warriors of Stillness, This book further says: "Both in the conduct of his life and in the methods of his teachings, Master Cai [Song Fang] epitomizes how knowing one’s own center and that of those we come in...
Winning on Framing Club Ah v. Club Blah
Photo from website of U.S. District Court (W.D. Mi.). An essential focus at the Trial Lawyers College is to replace verbal legalese droning at trial with painting word images, telling persuasive stories by re-enacting events, and talking from the first-person perspective of non-lawyers involved in...
Maintaining calm in the eye of the storm
Some people seek calm by avoiding conflict. I seek to use calm to harmonize conflict to the advantage of me and my client. By applying the principles of t’ai chi to my Fairfax criminal law practice, I do my best neither to chase an opponent’s...