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New edition of ABA's Law Practice now online: Focus is "Managing Change: How Law Firms Are Answering the Wake-Up Call"

Click to read the July/August 2009 edition of Law Practice with its focus on change in law firms and the legal profession, and how to manage it.

Grab your beverage of choice and explore. Examples of articles included in this new edition:

• "Recession-Response Tips for Small Firm Lawyers"
• "It’s Bonus Time! Rewarding Top Performers With Innovative Incentive Programs"
• "Leadership Transitions: Seven Steps to Ensure Success"

Many more articles to be found in this new edition. And don't forget to read my column "Reading Minds." In the July/August column:

[F]our reflective contributors have submitted astute words about their favorite books on managing themselves or others. Covering leadership, time management and critical thinking, these titles are worth adding to your reading list.

Be sure to take a look at what R. David Donoghue, Jennifer Loud Ungar, Andrew Flusche, and Todd Kashdan recommended. Some of the choices are surprising.

What do you think? Paul Ogden blogs about The Insanity of How We Educate and Train Lawyers

Excerpt:

Imagine if you will the following scenario. Joe decides to become a doctor. After college he spends four years being educated at the IU Medical School. The professors teaching Joe how to practice medicine have graduated from medical school but have never been doctors themselves nor have they ever sat foot in a hospital or clinic as a medical professional.

During Joe's training in medical school he doesn't specialize in any particular area. He is not required to undergo any sort of residency or apprenticeship with an experienced doctor. Instead his profession grants him a general medical license that he can use on Day 1 to do anything from giving a tetanus shot to the most complicated surgery.

How confident would you be in having that doctor do your open heart surgery? My guess is not very. Yet the above described scenario is how we train lawyers in this country.

What do you think about the education of new lawyers?

Click to read the rest of The Insanity of How We Educate and Train Lawyers (Ogden on Politics).

Blog Glob: Yoga And Meditation Change Gene Response To Stress

Excerpt:

Research from the US suggests that mind body techniques like yoga and meditation that put the body in a state of deep rest known as the relaxation response, are capable of changing how genes behave in response to stress.

...

Mind-body practices that produce a relaxation response have been used by people across cultures for thousands of years to prevent and treat disease, wrote the authors in their background to the study.

The relaxation response is characterized by reduction in oxygen intake, increase in exhalation of nitric oxide, and lower psychological distress. Many experts see it as the counterpart to the "flight or fight" stress response that has already been shown by a number of studies to have a distinct pattern of physiological and gene expression changes (called "transcriptional profile").

Click to read the rest of "Yoga And Meditation Change Gene Response To Stress" (Medical News Today).

Blog Glob - Pay Attention: Simple Ways To Stay Focused

Excerpt:

In a New York Times article about [her new] book, Ms. [Winifred] Gallagher recommends starting the work day focusing on your most important task for a solid 90-minute block. After that, you can take a break, say, by answering email, making calls or even sipping caffeine, which also helps attention, before returning to your task. Until that break, however, be disciplined about not being distracted by anything else for those first 90 minutes; it can take the brain some 20 minutes to “reboot” after an interruption.

Time used up surfing the Web or checking Facebook is gone forever. “People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” Ms. Gallagher told the Times. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing?”

Ms. Gallagher also recommends ...

Click to read the rest of Pay Attention: Simple Ways To Stay Focused (The Juggle blog - Wall Street Journal).

Show Notion: Lawyers, don't click your life away

I thought Click, the movie starring Adam Sandler, was just another buttery popcorn-for-the-brain comedy. Then, at the recommendation of someone I respect, I watched it. This movie is a warning about how you probably do not want to live your life.

In this memorable film, Christopher Walken's character gives Adam Sandler's a remote control that allows him to click his life. Among other features, the device allows him to silence people (and dogs), stop action, and fast-forward. Although this power starts out as a great boon both professionally and personally, the ultimate results gives us all cause to think. The remote begins to learn what the Sandler character has done in the past and uses those programs for the future. 

Why do I call the movie memorable? Because ever since I watched it, I have been more mindful of when my pre-programmed remote is in charge. Our habits are those pre-programs. It may seem a bit odd to summarize an Adam Sandler comedy with words from Marcel Proust but here goes:

"We commonly live with a self reduced to its bare minimum; most of our faculties lie dormant, relying on habit; and habit knows how to manage without them."
-Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

See the movie!

Note: Here's a very similar message from Alan Watts in a short animation titled Music and Life.

More than 500 songs to "elevate, inspire and increase positive emotions"

Ever feel down? Here's a whole list of uppers, some of which will be antidotes to your negative emotions. The effects of music are individual and not universal but everyone should be able to find some songs here to raise his or her mood. Take a look at this list {pdf] created by Dr. John Schinnerer of Guide to Self. What song makes you happy?

Image credit: Hans van de Vorst.

New edition of THE JURY EXPERT is now online: Topics range from mediation to Terror Management Theory to effects of the economy

Click to take a look at your choice of articles in this edition of The Jury Expert [pdf]. Unfortunately the article titles are not live links so you will need to put the page numbers up in the page selector. Or you can go here which will allow you to click through to this edition's articles but only until the next edition goes up.

Note (added July 22, 2009): Here's the link to this edition where you can access articles either online or by downloading in pdf. Thanks to great TJE editor Rita Handrich for this link.

4-minute, Reader's-Digest-lite review of what's good for the health and functioning of your brain

Here's a quick review of brain tips presented by Dr. Daniel Amen. A bit simplified but nevertheless an excellent reminder for the beginning of a new week. The brain scans alone are worth seeing. Watch it and decide what changes you may want to make beginning today. He begins, "When your brain works right, you work right." How true!

Blog Glob: Sitting Quietly, Doing Something

Excerpt:

[Richard] Davidson worked with Jon Kabat-Zinn, a teacher of mindfulness meditation from the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, to see how a group of novices might gain from these methods. Kabat-Zinn, who has pioneered this contemplative method with medical patients to ease their symptoms, taught mindfulness at a high-stress biotech company; these beginners meditated for 30 minutes a day for eight weeks. Davidson’s measures showed that after the eight weeks they had begun to activate that left prefrontal zone more strongly — and were saying that instead of feeling overwhelmed and hassled, they were enjoying their work. So while the Calvinist strain in American culture may look askance at someone sitting quietly in meditation, this kind of “doing nothing” seems to do something remarkable after all.

Of course, there’s no guarantee of greater happiness from meditation, but the East has given us a promising path for its pursuit.

Click to read the rest of Sitting Quietly, Doing Something (Happy Days Blog - New York Times).

Last line of this article? "For a lawyer, it's almost embarrassing to say that you want to do something else."

Here's another non-practicing lawyer showing others the way out of the profession. Read Casey Berman's take on life after law in "Hastings Grad Tells Lawyers How to 'Leave Law Behind'" (The Recorder). Excerpt:

He maintains that anyone can go into business for themselves, provided they know what they want and don't want out of life. ...