legal sanity

About a year ago, I took a business and personal empowerment course that - among other significant lessons – taught me how to take action in the face of uncertainty, fear and negativity. One of the course mottos that I’ve embraced as my own is “ready, fire, aim.” It’s my reminder that the changes I seek in my business only happen when I stop pondering and talking about them, and start acting on my ideas and intuition.

The notion that action speaks louder than words is embedded in a thoughtful post by Thom Singer  called Thinking Too Much ??? In it, he recounts how one lawyer he knew invested so much time and energy in weighing the details of a marketing plan that “he spent no time doing.” A similar cautionary message runs through a lawfirmblogging.com post titled Don’t Argue Over Where To Put The Unicorns. It relates what happens when we become so fixated on the possible results and implications of a project that – “dwelling on what could possibly, remotely, maybe, potentially happen” – we become frozen in our tracks.

Considering the same subject from a slightly different angle is a Brains on Fire post about Control Issues. Although many business people crave control and believe they have it, the post notes, control is just an illusion. An illusion and obsession that keeps us from seizing opportunities for real business progress. To lift this veil and embrace reality, we’re given this no-nonsense instruction: “quit thinking about it. Talking about it. Having meetings about meetings about. Or pretending to do it when you aren’t acutally [sic] doing it. Just freakin’ do it.”

For many lawyers, the task of getting unstuck and taking action is easier to accomplish with the help of a mentor or other trusted advisor. This is a point I covered in a recent post on positive law firm leadership. You’ll find David Maister’s recap of, and commentary on, that post among others he’s culled for a very insightful Blawg Review #76.

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I'm very pleased to announce that my wife and blog production partner, Lori Herz, is launching a freelance business writing venture – LH Wordsmith.

Her goal is to evolve the legal sanity brand and mission she co-created by helping lawyers and other professional service providers produce clear, concise and powerful written work.

Lori has played a major role in legal sanity’s day-to-day operations since its inception in 2004. She’s overseen the blog’s physical and content design and taken the lead on researching and drafting its posts. Her role at legal sanity complements, and draws support from, the extensive business experience she gained through a federal clerkship, criminal and civil appellate practice and work in nonprofit governance.

The writing at legal sanity reflects Lori’s ability to clearly and succinctly organize, synthesize and communicate ideas and information from diverse sources. Largely as a result of this ability and her passion for her work, legal sanity has developed a wide audience and online visibility that’s grown with its recent inclusion in the law.com network’s Legal Blog Watch. 

With her work at legal sanity, Lori has cultivated in-depth knowledge of today’s professional service marketplace. She closely follows important trends in the law and other service industries and understands the enormous business value of adept educational-promotional writing.

Marrying her business experience, knowledge and wordsmith skills, Lori has written articles for legal trade publications. She’s also created content and collateral materials for legal industry training and development programs. Topics covered by Lori include: business development; career contentment; client relations; communication skills; employee engagement; leadership; marketing trends; and work-life synergy. 

Lori imports this depth of marketplace knowledge and writing experience into her offerings at LH Wordsmith. In her new role, she’ll help busy service providers stand out in the competitive marketplace by producing high-quality written work that showcases their expertise; engages and educates their business prospects, clients and employees; builds their reputation and visibility; and fosters success, satisfaction and sanity in their work life and beyond.

If you would like to learn more about Lori’s business writing services, you can contact her at lori@loriherz.com or (516) 655-6955. Her business Web site will launch soon. In the interim, you can sample her written work at legal sanity’s main page and via its sidebar menus.

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It’s been a hectic but rewarding few weeks in the office. The matter I’ve been working on has given me ample opportunity to consider and do what I most enjoy in my legal practice. It’s great to have the chance to reflect on why we do what we do. So, I was glad to come across a few articles that team to provide some nice fodder for those reflective times.

The first of the trio is a commentary piece by Jenner & Block lawyer Gregory Gallopoulos. Asking Why Do We Work?, Gallopoulos responds that lawyers do indeed work for money, but we also work for “sanity.” And that sanity derives from compensation in “psychic gratification.” These gratifiers take different forms, but Gallopoulos identifies several of them. They are: ongoing opportunities for intellectual growth; autonomy of professional judgment; celebrating a “superlative work product;” and supporting public service efforts.

The next article, sub-titled An Essay on Money and Happiness, questions What Is Success, Anyway? About midway through, it states: “No matter how fancy the title or how big the paycheck, we soon learn that it isn't worth joining an organization full of jerks, morons or crooks.” The piece also recognizes that our career desires and definition of success change as we age. In midlife, we tend to place more importance on “intangibles like autonomy and personal expression” as well as “freedom and fulfillment.” Yet, in some professions – and the law is cited among them – honoring that call for fulfillment comes at a very real price since “the highest-paying opportunities are likely to gouge deepest into people's hopes of enjoying a balanced life.”

Rounding out the triad of reflections on this topic is a blog post called Who Really Matters? penned by Thom Singer of Some Assembly Required. In it, Singer shares a little self-test based on the wisdom of famed cartoonist Charles M. Schulz. The exercise brings home the very important point that the “people who make a difference in your life are not the ones with the most credentials, the most money, or the most awards. They are the ones that care.”

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Earlier on, I wrote a series of posts on positive psychology  - the scientific study of human happiness – and the related field of Positive Organizational Scholarship (pdf) - a branch of the organizational sciences focusing on “the dynamics in organizations that lead to the development of human strength, foster vitality and flourishing in employees, make possible resilience and restoration, and cultivate extraordinary individual and organizational performance.”

This topic duo has kept my attention over time and I often question how law firms might employ some of the relevant field work in redressing employee disengagement, discontent and depletion. As it’s done before, Harvard’s Working Knowledge forum again sheds some significant light on this question. In an article called The Power of Ordinary Practices, researchers share the results of a recent study on the ways business leaders “can influence the motivation, creativity, and performance” of the “knowledge workers who are carrying out the [day-to-day] work of the organization.”

According to the piece, a key discovery the researchers made is that workers’ performance is tied to their “emotions, motivations, and perceptions about their work environment.” These feelings, in turn, are “powerfully influenced by particular daily events” on the job. Positive feelings generated in the workplace lead to “more flexible, fluent, and original thinking” that “can carryover, [via] an incubation effect, to the next day.”

Because of their regular interactions with the knowledge worker population, leaders are the linchpins for generating or squelching the positive sentiments underlying employee happiness and productivity. So, the researchers advise, leaders need to understand how “ordinary, trivial, mundane” things they do in the regular course of business “can have an enormous impact” on an employee’s daily experience and performance.

The article goes on to cite “five leader behaviors that have a positive influence on people's feelings.” Among these five positive reinforcers are: providing emotional support; giving positive feedback on their work; and publicly recognizing people for good performance.

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In previous posts on Working with Meaning and Lawyers in the Conceptual Age, I discussed a recurring theme in business and marketing forums these days: how can people infuse their work, product or service with meaning? The theme has a broad reach. I’ve seen it thread through expert commentary on creating meaningful customer experiences, employee engagement and work-life synergy, among other topics.

I recently came across another interesting take on this theme in a Brains on Fire blog post called Marketing that’s Meaningful. Highlighting winds of change in the marketing and advertising worlds, the post notes that people today are looking “to be a part of something bigger than themselves.” So, when trying to connect with consumers or clients, service providers need to shift their perspective and strive to make their company meaningful. And, according to the post, forging this kind of consumer-meaning nexus is all “about empowerment. Ownership. Starting a real, honest conversation. Making friends instead of customers. And making your company or product relevant.”

David Maister and co-author Lois Kelly also pick up on this theme in a Law Practice Today article titled Marketing is a Conversation. Maister suggests that it’s high time “we stopped thinking of marketing as a one-way propaganda campaign.” Instead, marketing is best viewed as a conversation in which we openly invite our business prospects or clients to share their “ideas, beliefs and perspectives” with us person-to-person. In terms of existing clients, Maister doesn’t see this as a one-shot proposition. Rather, there needs to be an ongoing exchange that compels clients to regularly share their core “concerns, issues and needs.” Maister notes, however, that this person-to-person dialoguing doesn’t have to be face-to-face. It can be promoted and nurtured through company-sponsored online client communities, interactive Web sites and blogs.

Meaningfully connecting to clients in these ways helps businesses stand apart from the competition; competition that blogger John Jantsch attributes to a marketplace tendency to see all businesses as indistinguishable commodity providers. In a thoughtful post from Duct Tape Marketing called The Business You Are Really In, Jantsch asks us to step out of the commodity-provider mindset and reclassify our business offerings in terms of four key values: “information, community building, experience and transformation” – values all driven by our clients’ and employees’ hunger for meaning in their lives.

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The latest issue of my alma mater’s quarterly magazine, Michigan Alumnus, provides some interesting commentary on a topic I've covered here a few times before: happiness. Giving the graduation 2006 highlights, one piece recounts how commencement speaker Christiane Amanpour - the respected journalist and correspondent – advised graduates to “find something that sets you on fire, that gives you passion and joy, something that you love and believe in so much that it makes you want to work all day and all night, something that will make you willing to sacrifice, something that instills in you a deep sense of commitment and a sense of mission.”

Another of the magazine’s articles briefly discusses a recent study examining people’s ability to remember or predict happiness over their lifespan. The study showed that young and older people alike believe that “young people are happier than older people, when in fact research has shown the opposite.” Fuller coverage of the study can be found in a press release leading with the familiar lyrical line Hope I die Before I Get Old.

Our ability to predict and find what makes us happy is also explored in a new group of CareerJournal.com articles. The one that really grabbed my attention comes from blogger and former lawyer Gretchen Rubin. Considering the money-happiness connection, Rubin proposes that, when spent the right way, money does help buy happiness. And what’s the right kind of spending? According to Rubin, people should spend on things “that promote the components of happiness. The hedonic treadmill means that loading up on stuff, though gratifying for a moment, isn't a lasting source of happiness. Instead, spend money on your relationships, your health, and your experiences.”

If you want to read more on the subject, Fast Company's blog offers a happiness self-assessment tool for those of us who look at our legal careers and larger lives as an "If only _____, then I'd be happy” proposition. According to the piece, this is a misguided way of pursuing happiness because it takes us out of the present moment. With this point in mind, we're advised that, “if we want to be happy, we must come to grips with an important fact. That we've been fooling ourselves. Contentment, it turns out, is not a destination. Rather, it's a manner of traveling. And if we can't feel it today, we won't find it tomorrow.”

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To commemorate the events of Sept. 11th, this morning at 8:45am, I shut my office door, closed my eyes and placed my hands on my heart for a few minutes. The resulting positive shift in my energy state, thoughts and emotions was palpable and profound.

This simple act, which I've repeated a few times, has enabled me to stay focused and connected to others throughout the day. It’s also given me some much-needed insight into how I can gain perspective and rebuild my energy stores when they’re depleted by the stresses and uncertainties of work and life.

Because it’s so simple and portable, I’m adding this exercise to the set of tools I use to help myself and others better understand how the XE Factor – the dynamic of human energy depletion, generation and management – plays out in our professional and personal lives.

Please feel free to give the exercise a try and share your experiences with me.

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A couple of months ago, I discussed an emergent business trend called Customer Experience Management (CEM). Evolving in tandem with the new experience economy, the CEM model considers a customer’s relationship with a product or service from the vantage point of the user experience. It asks providers to glean how customers’ lives are enhanced or depleted as a result of consuming their goods or services.

Another way to look at CEM is through the lens of storytelling. People often translate their consumer experiences into stories they readily share with others. A great example of this comes by way of a recent Fast Company article in which some “customer service champions” convey their own “stellar customer experiences.” Here, Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy describes his monthly outings to a local junk store where the proprietor understands that his customers thrill at hunting for buried treasure. There’s also the anecdote about exceptional book store service relayed by Build-A-Bear Workshop founder Maxine Clark. In sharing her story, Clark refers to something she calls the “Cheers facor." She says, “People don't have to know your name, but there has to be that connection and recognition of your value as a customer and a person.”

These stories on peak customer experience reminded me of the importance of creating passionate legal consumers – or client evangelists. But, as Patrick Lamb underscores in a thoughtful post from In Search Of Perfect Client Service, many lawyers and law firms seem to lack the connection to, and recognition of, their consumers that’s prerequisite to fostering such an evangelical clientele.

Those of us interested in turning our clients into raving fans should check out the ongoing series of posts on the subject offered by Jim Hassett of the Legal Business Development blog.

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A New York Times editorial on The Rise of Pessimism in our country caught my attention because it echoes much of the statistics and understanding lawyer life coach Ellen Ostrow shares in an informative and comprehensive interview she gives in The Complete Lawyer (hat tip to Stephanie West Allen of idealawg).

Addressing whether lawyers are healthy, Ostrow cites study findings that “the most successful law students were the most pessimistic. And it’s the most successful law students who are going into the big firms.” She goes on to link profession-wide pessimism to “depression, poorer health and shorter lifespan.” On the flip side, Ostrow contends that lawyers can counter their pessimistic tendencies, and the related side effects, through learned optimism.

This education ideally takes place on both the individual and institutional levels. We can up optimism for ourselves by carving out some “sacred time” each day to “maintain strong, supportive relationships with others, do work that engages [our] strengths and has significance beyond [our] income." Law firms can also counter pessimism in their midst through employee engagement initiatives that “give lawyers the greatest possible latitude to decide how, where & when work gets done.”

Also instructive on this last point is a Gallup Management Journal piece on The Impact of Positive Leadership [flagged at The Practice of Leadership blog]. It discusses the influence of "positive-to-negative interaction ratios (PNR) in our work [ ] life.” Research has found that “work teams with a PNR greater than 3:1 were significantly more productive than workgroups that did not reach this ratio.” The article goes on to highlight what leaders can do to raise workplace PNR through an infusion of positive emotions.

To jumpstart our focus on the bright side of life in the law, blogger Stephanie West Allen and consultant Don Hutcheson of the Complete Lawyer have teamed to survey our views on What’s Right About The Profession Of Law?

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