idealawg

Is Yoga Legal? New blog written by a "lawyer-yogi"

The tag line of the new blog written by lawyer Rebecca Stahl is "Where two worlds collide, one lawyer-yogi considers whether those worlds can coexist." She writes:

Since entering law school, I have struggled with being a lawyer-yogi. Lawyers have a tendency to view yoga either as fitness or just plain weird, and yogis have several pre-conceived notions about money-hoarding, unethical attorneys. While these are gross generalizations, I found myself bombarded by them, struggling to exist in both worlds, not only because I "had" to, but because I truly enjoy them both. Yoga was a spiritual sanctuary, where my body and mind were free, while the law provided the intellectual nourishment that I have craved my entire life. Deep down I know that the law can provide real justice, and I am driven to find ways to make that happen more often. And so, as I began a new legal job and entered a program to one day be able to (legally) share yoga with the world, I decided to chronicle my attempts to join the two. As we studied the first Yama (an ethical standard and how we conduct ourselves externally in life--one of the 8 limbs of yoga), Ahimsa (non-violence), I found myself thinking how wonderful it would be if more lawyers and their clients approached their cases with non-violence. And the idea of "Is Yoga Legal?" was born! Is Yoga Legal? will be a place to explore yogic principles and how they can be applied to the law, as well as daily life.

If you are drawn to that perspective and dilemma, you may want to follow Is Yoga Legal?.

New blog on the neuroscience of social interactions

Jamil Zaki, grad student working in social cognitive neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner's lab at Columbia, has begun writing a blog he is calling Your Brain on Us (Psychology Today). Here's what Zaki tells us he will be posting about. From his blog post The two human natures:

Some of the ideas I'll focus most on are:

(1)    The many ways that our thoughts, perceptions, and emotions are tied to those of other people, and the ways this psychological interconnectedness drives prosocial behaviors such as altruism and cooperation.

(2)    The incredible amount of mental resources people devote to understanding other minds, and ways that individuals' psychological and physical well-being is intimately tied to their ability to connect with others.

(3)    Circumstances that can alter, shut off, or reverse people's sense of interdependence with each other, leading to the antisocial behavior we saw during the Baghdad riots, the Rwandan genocide, and other humanitarian catastrophes.

(4)    Reconciling the (distant, often-electronic) social connections available in contemporary life with the much more direct interpersonal contact for which our social instincts likely evolved.

Click to read Zaki's journal articles.

Some advice for law students and new lawyers (includes Twitter and blogging)

Dean Patricia White's offer to University of Miami 1Ls of incentives to delay their legal education, and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe's ending of the lockstep model of law firm promotion are signs that the profession is truly changing, according to Ari Kaplan. In "End of a law school era?" (National Law Journal), he discusses these changes and their implications for law students and new lawyers, and gives budding lawyers some advice.

Those who flourish tend to: 1) highlight an area that is most interesting to them; 2) identify the people with whom they want to associate; and 3) understand where key issues in their areas of interest proliferate. These factors give them a sense of direction. Students who take the time to craft this brief plan are not just looking for a job; they are architecting a career. It is a mindset that has been passed from senior partner down to junior associate, and must now be transferred from practitioner to pupil.

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Unlike law students in the past who would take classes or CLE courses to demonstrate their interest in a particular subject, students today can distribute their views in a blog or via Twitter 

Are blogs or coursepages better tools for profs?

Law prof James B. Levy addresses that question at Legal Writing Prof Blog. He includes a video looking at whether Web tools can replace Blackboard and other learning management systems (LMSs).

Lawyers in virtual offices can use LinkedIn, blogs, and Twitter for marketing

An article in the Puget Sound Business Journal provides a list of suggestions for lawyers with virtual offices. From "The rise of the virtual law firm":

— Use online resources. Attorneys operating a virtual law firm often lack a dedicated marketing professional. Marketing or public relations consultants can be helpful if the budget allows. If not, marketing and business development can be daunting for a novice, but many online resources have made the process easier.

LinkedIn is an easy-to-use social networking site for professionals. After creating a profile, attorneys

Good-by to a favorite in the mediation neighborhood of the blawg/blogosphere

I am sorry to read that Geoff Sharp of Mediator Blah... Blah... is closing his blog. From his last post blah... blah... bows out:

Regular visitors to this blog will have noticed a gradual decline in posting over the last couple of months.

Life, dear reader, has got busy and the call of the keyboard is not what it was after 1016 posts. I have decided to pack it in.

To some extent I feel this blog has achieved its aim of bringing the best of the ADR web to those who might not have otherwise sought it out. I leave you in the hands of many doing exactly that and better than I ever could.

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It's time for new projects and, for me, a time for family to pull together and look after our own.

I will miss reading Mediator Blah... Blah... . Geoff has stratospheric levels of both wisdom and wit. His was one of the top blogs on mediation and, as you can see from the comments to his post, many of us will miss it. I wish him the best and thank him for past posts!

Excellent blog by Professor Peter Friedman for the students in his contracts class

He tells me that he had such success reaching his students a year and one-half ago with his blog What Is Fair Use that he is starting a new blog 1L Contracts. Professor Friedman has already posted on his new blog to assist his students in acclimating to law school. Take a read (he's a terrific writer) and send the blog link to your favorite law students. The first posts:

• An Introduction to Legal Reasoning: Welcome to the Matrix

Most people come to law school knowing it will be difficult but with no idea why.

• Reading and Briefing Cases

Judicial opinions are not written to teach students the law.

• Learning Law is Hard. Ask Questions, and Dare to be Wrong.

My own experience was that it was only after about five years of practice that I felt like I was not committing fraud when I told people I was a lawyer.

Blog Glob: "Law firms contend with new form of info leakage: Blogs"

Excerpt:

It wasn’t that long ago that law firms would only have to worry about the spread of office gossip when sensitive news was announced internally.

But today, leaked internal documents to blogs such as Above the Law have changed the way law firms disseminate news internally. This strategy has kicked into high gear as law firms have been forced to announce a lot of bad news in the past year.

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Sites like Above the Law have been airing the profession’s dirt — from layoffs and slashed salaries to more edgy personal information about certain partners.

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But since the recession hit home for the legal industry last fall, the blog has filled a niche not often served in the large law firm world. It has removed some of the public relations machine from the equation.

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“About five years ago, we wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the press got a hold of information,” [Topper] Ray said. “But now it’s almost like you are posting a memo directly on the Internet.”

Click to read the rest of "Law firms contend with new form of info leakage: Blogs" (Philadelphia Business Journal).

Blogger happiness has increased over the last 4 years according to this study

I have questions about this research; you may too, if you read it. Happiness is not just a matter of word choice or responses to words but the study, although reductionist, is at least a fun read. The abstract of "Measuring the Happiness of Large-Scale Written Expression: Songs, Blogs, and Presidents" [pdf] (Journal of Happiness Studies):

The importance of quantifying the nature and intensity of emotional states at the level of populations is evident: we would like to know how, when, and why individuals feel as they do if we wish, for example, to better construct public policy, build more successful organizations, and, from a scientific perspective, more fully understand economic and social phenomena. Here, by incorporating direct human assessment of words, we quantify happiness levels on a continuous scale for a diverse set of large-scale texts: song titles and lyrics, weblogs, and State of the Union addresses. Our method is transparent, improvable, capable of rapidly processing Web-scale texts, and moves beyond approaches based on coarse categorization. Among a number of observations, we find that the happiness of song lyrics trends downward from the 1960s to the mid 1990s while remaining stable within genres, and that the happiness of blogs has steadily increased from 2005 to 2009, exhibiting a striking rise and fall with blogger age and distance from the Earth’s equator.

Note: Article about the study: "Scientists develop 'sensor' to measure happiness" (Hindu News Update Service).

Image credit: Tomorrow Bystander.

Welcome lawyer mediator Rina Goodman to the blogosphere

This morning, I was happy to receive an e-mail from Rina Goodman of Transforming Conflict announcing the launch of her new blog. Rina and I have had many long telephone conversations so I know that I can very enthusiastically recommend that you follow her posts. Congratulations, Rina!