idealawg

Blog Glob: "Long struggle takes Mt. Lebanon mom to top of legal profession"

Excerpt:

About two decades ago, [Angela] Winslow was a single mom with little education and less of a chance at a career in the legal profession. Today, she's a partner in the Downtown law firm where she once answered phones and took memos.

"I've worked hard to be where I am today," said Winslow, 45, of Mt. Lebanon. "When you work for what you get, no one can take it away from you."

This month, Winslow was named a shareholder in the firm of Dickie McCamey & Chilcote. She described the appointment as the culmination of years of hard work.

Winslow didn't talk about being a single mother during the eight years Maureen Kowalski has worked with her at the firm. She said Winslow was more interested in learning the ins and outs of the legal profession, burying herself in books on legal theory so she could become a more effective lawyer for clients.

"She never used her situation as a crutch, never looked for anyone to give her a handout," said Kowalski, also a Dickie McCamey & Chilcote partner. "She's a role model for a lot of women."

Click to read the rest of "Long struggle takes Mt. Lebanon mom to top of legal profession" (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review).

Blog Glob: Mindfulness Practice and Stress Reduction

Excerpt:

Take away my trouble, take away my grief,
Take away my heartache, I go right to sleep.
“Crazy Love,” Van Morrison

How many of us long for a magic formula to do what Van Morrison’s lover does for him in this song? But a full night of restful sleep for a conscientious lawyer? “Preposterous!” we chuckle. Our legal careers and our responsibilities weigh too heavily on our minds and bodies. Yet we yearn for respite from the worries, pain, and pressures of our careers and our lives. We grasp at myriad promises of comfort and relief, however fleeting: 20-year-old Scotch, a nicely-rolled joint, a new boat, a computer program, the right vacation. . . . The promises seem endless and nearly all involve running away from the present, from the feelings of stress generated in our lifestyles. Mindfulness practice makes no such promises, but invites us into awareness of the present moment. Too often, our regrets and plans, our worries and hopes rip us away from enjoying the here and now. To live mindfully is to be present, in body and in mind, with every bit of pain and pleasure in our lives. The results of mindfulness include reduced stress, greater focus, and increased productivity, as well as a sense of stability, peace, and happiness.

Click to read the rest of Mindfulness Practice and Stress Reduction (Cutting Edge Law).

Blog Glob: "Hildebrandt Interprets Economic Impact on Lawyers: 'Flat Is New Up'"

Excerpt:

The traditional way for law firms to weather economic downturns – cutting overhead and raising rates — are no longer enough. “Law firms must expand their efforts to understand the marked shift in client attitude that is the product of this economy,” said [Kristin] Stark. “After ten years of a ‘seller’s market’ we have rapidly shifted to a ‘buyer’s market.’

“Clients now hold the power where pricing is concerned,” said Stark, “and these clients are angry and frustrated. This downturn has quickly compounded long-term client perceptions of poor value and misalignment of resources in exchange for high rates.

“The most market-savvy law firms understand that clients currently enjoy a growing number of options to get legal services cheaper and faster,” said Stark. “These firms are actively pushing ‘big moves’ to reshape their firms – and the legal industry.”
These include:

Click to read the rest of "Hildebrandt Interprets Economic Impact on Lawyers: 'Flat Is New Up'" (Law Week Colorado).

Blog Glob - A Look into the Mind of the Negotiator: Mental Models in Negotiation

Excerpt [footnotes removed]:

There is over whelming evidence that people are ineffective negotiators. Negotiators often fail to discover mutually beneficial settlements and thus reach suboptimal settlements, leaving ‘money on the table’ unclaimed. Not surprisingly, research on negotiation has attempted to discover why negotiators fail to reach optimal settlements. The decision-analytic perspective suggests that people approach negotiation as a decision task in which they must choose from among different negotiation strategies or courses of action. From this perspective, suboptimal settlements result from judgment heuristics and biases that lead to ineffective decision making.

We propose that negotiation is better viewed as a problem-solving enterprise in which negotiators’ mental models of the causal relationships within the negotiation situation guide their behavior. Negotiators’ mental models lie along a continuum ranging from purely fixed- pie to purely integrative mental models. Fixed-pie mental models represent negotiation as a resource-claiming task in which gains for one party necessitate losses for the other party. Integrative mental models represent negotiation as a resource-creating task in which negotiators may ‘create value’ by working with one another to exchange information and maximize joint gains. If negotiators’ mental models influence their behavior, then different negotiation outcomes should be associated with different mental models. In particular, the mental models of negotiators who reach optimal settlements should have more integrative features than the mental models of negotiators who do not reach optimal settlements.

In this article, we present an initial investigation of the association between negotiators’ outcomes and their mental models of the negotiation situation. We also investigate the effectiveness of two kinds of training—didactic and experiential—in producing mental models with integrative features. ...

Click to read the rest of "A Look into the Mind of the Negotiator: Mental Models in Negotiation" (Group Processes & Intergroup Relations) [pdf].

Blog Glob - Inside the mind of an actor (literally): How does an actor engage with the part they are playing?

Excerpt:

"I think actors' brains are like musicians' in that they've been trained to learn enormous sections of language not by rote but by imaginative association," [Fiona Scott] told me before going into the scanner. "You're often in a visual architectural space in your head. In order to remember it, I need a visual image in my head."

Are all actors like that? "Probably, yes. And people who aren't actors certainly aren't like that because they say things like: 'How do you learn your lines?' Well, you don't learn your lines, you live in the imaginative moment and the line is inevitable in that situation."

Of course, that's not the whole story. Sir Ben Kingsley once told me through tears that, whenever he played a role, he always had a little phrase in his head that gave him the key to a character. When he played Anne Frank's father, it was the phrase, "Make me be the best dad in the world to that little girl."

"It's not remotely intellectual, what I do," Kingsley said.

Click to read the rest of "Inside the mind of an actor (literally)" (Guardian).

Blog Glob: "Women lawyers facing fewer barriers on partner track"

Excerpt:

Bit by bit, more women are making partner at law firms in Boston, and perhaps more importantly, the obstacles that have been traditionally unique to women aren’t as insurmountable as they used to be.

Women represent 20.7 percent of partners at law firms in the Boston area, according to fresh data from the Association for Legal Career Professionals. That’s up from 18.8 percent in 2006 and beats the national average of 19.2 percent.

And as a city, Boston is more female-friendly than most, the data suggest. Only 11 cities have a higher percentage of female partners. ...

...

“There’s a lot to be said for being in a bigger environment where you’ve got some backup support, as opposed to working in-house or at a small law firm,” she said.

Click to read the rest of "Women lawyers facing fewer barriers on partner track" (Boston Business Journal - subscription required).

Blog Glob: "You try not to sneeze so why spread the gloom?"

Excerpt:

The spread of swine flu has engendered a code of social etiquette. Hand-sanitisers and tissues have become handbag essentials while 'hands off' has become the new social protocol. These days, a single, solitary sneeze is enough to stir up a mix of fear and loathing, dread and panic.

...

You wouldn't sneeze on someone, so why is it considered acceptable to burden people with your woes? Negativity is highly infectious. It is a pernicious disease, often more destructive to the infected than the host. And there's no Tamiflu for this dose.

...

I like to call them 'soul snatchers' because when I am in contact with them I feel like I've been emotionally winded and mentally exhausted. The phenomenon has been observed by scientists, who refer to it as emotional contagion. In a study of 170 pairs of roommates, it was discovered that severely depressed subjects were more likely to have a roommate whose mood declined over a six-week period. They cheered up noticeably when they spent time away from their depressed roommates.

Click to read the rest of "You try not to sneeze so why spread the gloom?" (Herald.ie)

Blog Glob: "The Social Neuroscience of Empathy"

Abstract:

The phenomenon of empathy entails the ability to share the affective experiences of others. In recent years social neuroscience made considerable progress in revealing the mechanisms that enable a person to feel what another is feeling. The present review pro- vides an in-depth and critical discussion of these findings. Consistent evidence shows that sharing the emotions of others is associated with activation in neural structures that are also active during the first-hand experience of that emotion. Part of the neural activation shared between self- and other-related experiences seems to be rather auto- matically activated. However, recent studies also show that empathy is a highly flexible phenomenon, and that vicarious responses are malleable with respect to a number of factors—such as contextual appraisal, the interpersonal relationship between em- pathizer and other, or the perspective adopted during observation of the other. Future investigations are needed to provide more detailed insights into these factors and their neural underpinnings. Questions such as whether individual differences in empathy can be explained by stable personality traits, whether we can train ourselves to be more empathic, and how empathy relates to prosocial behavior are of utmost relevance for both science and society.

Click to read the rest of "The Social Neuroscience of Empathy" (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences) [pdf].

Blog Glob - Subsidizing inner peace: A lingerie designer uses meditation to help herself, her business and the world

Excerpt:

Growing up in New York City, [Jacalyn] Bennett was introduced to Eastern philosophies and practices by her father, a lawyer who took pro bono cases and was interested in Buddhism. But it was an offer to work in India after her graduation from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1973 that set Bennett on the path to what she calls enlightened entrepreneurship. In India, Bennett taught women how to use sewing machines, a twist on the old "teach a man to fish" concept. She would later launch training programs for mothers and their children in both India and Sri Lanka.

...

After returning home in 1984 to launch her design business, she incorporated the Gandhian ideals she had come to embrace. "Meditation can encourage things that are often lacking in businesses -- like peace, compassion and sanity," she says. "If I've got something that keeps me from ripping my hair out daily, I'm a better boss for it."

Since 1990 Bennett has helped fund and build a dozen not-for-profit meditation facilities in the U.S. and abroad, including the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center in Massachusetts and the Vishva Niketan International Peace and Meditation Center in Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, where she established a training program in healing meditation following the 2004 tsunami.

Click to read the rest of "Subsidizing inner peace" (CNN Money).

Blog Glob: Death of "Big Law School"?

Excerpt:

Larry Ribstein has been writing and blogging up a storm about the "Death of Big Law." Larry makes a convincing case that the current economic crisis is not just a blip for law firms with everything returning to normal soon. Assuming that large law frims cannot deal with the structural problems Larry outlines and that the decline of big law is long term, what would that mean for legal education?

It would likely mean the end of the law school boom - with its expanding law faculties and the bumper crop of new law schools. Like it or not, the business model (I hate applying that term to legal education, but can't think of another one) of many law schools is heavily dependent on students getting high paying law firm jobs to pay off high law school tuition. Law firms are also prime benefactors of law school endowments. Without corporate law consuming law school graduates by the dozens, law school will face massive economic pressure.

Click to read the rest of Death of "Big Law School"? (The Conglomerate).