This  New York Times article about how a 13-year old’s interview with an Olympic hopeful motivated him to snag one of the last berths on the 1976 U.S. Olympic swim team is a reminder of the role of serendipity in our journey in life or law and the power of a genuine thank-you.

Back in 1976, Karen Krouse was a shy middle-schooler and avid swimmer assigned a school project to create a fictional magazine. Krouse selected swimming as her focus, and identified 19-year old Mike Bruner, a super-star on her swim team as the subject of her interview.  Bruner graciously answered all the questions, and Krouse later gave a copy of her assignment to Bruner and his coach.

The following month, Olympic trials rolled around, and Bruner floundered, missing out on the team during his first few races.  Just before his best event – the 200 butterfly – his coach presented Bruner a copy of Krouse’s interview, where he read his own words on the importance of a strong mental attitude in a race.  Motivated by his own words, Bruner went on to break the two-minute barrier and secured a spot on the Montreal-bound Olympic swim team, where he later won the gold.

After the preliminary rounds, the media asked Bruner how he came back from the earlier losses, he credited Krouse’s interview for “bringing him back to reality” and reminding him about the power of having the will to win. Bruner’s coach showed that article to Krouse who decided then and there that:
“This is what I want to do when I grow up. I want to write about people and positively affect their lives.”

One of my readers, a 3L who’s planning to solo on graduation recently emailed this  [paraphrased] question:
What are your thoughts on a law student starting a blog in preparation of starting a firm? I understand that I’ll need to include disclaimers that I am not an attorney or giving legal advice, but can blogging be useful to establish a presence on the web and network with other lawyers and potential clients in my area?
I can list  at least five reasons why blogging can produce huge benefits for law students, whether they’re thinking about hanging a shingle after law student or finding traditional employment.  First, blogging on a regular basis (at least twice a week for the first six months) about almost any law related topic shows commitment to the profession, interest and most of all initiative.  Those traits will catapult you to the front of the line when it comes time for interviews or referrals from colleagues.

Second, a blog can also help to open doors by offering an online introduction to lawyers in distant communities where you hope to wind up or to role models whom you’d like to emulate or meet.  Although to be sure, not all lawyers blog or read blogs, the blog can serve as a conversation starter in other fora – for example, if you’ve blogged about a case you just studied in contract law that’s relevant to dialogue on Twitter, you can offer it up without feeling like you’ve rudely butted in.  Likewise, if you attend a law school event where a famous judge or legal figure or tech CEO is speaking, you can summarize their talk in your blog and send them a link — a much better introduction than fighting with a dozen other law students to ask a question after the event.

Third, though a blog done right can take time, it can earn you money too.  Despite a high unemployment rate, as I’ve said before, law school doesn’t make it easy for lawyers to hire their students. Instead of waiting passively for law school to help you find a job, put yourself out there with your blog and you may find lawyers approaching you, asking you to take on short research projects or help them research blog posts.

Fourth, blogging improves your analytical and writing skills.  Seriously.  Since readers don’t have short attention spans and many RSS readers only pick up the first sentence of what you write, blogs require you to get right to the point with a seductive headline, strong lede and cogent analysis (I know, I don’t always follow those rules). Also, just like judges and their clerks read hundreds of mediocre briefs that fade into oblivion, so too blog readers are inundated with stuff.  So formulaic posts (Five top reasons that law professors should be more like Lady Gaga) no matter how over the top won’t cut it, nor will “Here’s an interesting bit” followed by a lengthy quote.  Use the blog to experiment with different voices and different styles and practice to reduce the time needed per post  (still working on that also!)

Fifth a blog can serve as the centerpiece of a broader presence on the web by disciplining you to produce content that you can repurpose in multiple sites.  I discussed that concept several years back here  and if you click on the embedded video, you can see how it works in practice.

Alternatively, you can include your blog along with other briefs and papers you’ve written in an online portfolio, a concept recently recommended in the New York Times  for job seekers.

My first permanent office, a sublet space in a marble-column-ed Class B building down the street from the White House,  was hardly the fanciest in Washington D.C., particularly back in the mid-’90s when big law firm partners still tried to impress clients with mahogany conference room tables and ginormous corner offices.  Furnished with cast-offs from a previous tenants and windows overlooking an alley and another office building, the best thing that the place had going for it was that it was in a great location, well-maintained, cheap and odor-free.  Still, once I decorated the office with my knick-knacks and bar certificates and diploma, the office felt like a palace because it was mine.  I frequently spent late nights, working to the tinny sound of oldies from my red plastic radio (a freebie with my business cards) and even came in to work there on the weekend. That office made my heart sing.

Ever since I gave up the space when my daughters were young, I’ve bounced nomadically between home offices, virtual spaces and most recently, a space near my home in Bethesda. After years of looking, though, I’ve finally moved into another space – brightly lit, modern in a bustling part of D.C.  It’s also located just 10 blocks off the bike path that runs from D.C. to a spot near my home (also an intentional choice), and I’ve been biking the ten mile route to and from my a few times a week.  But what’s most important is that it’s a place I want to go to – and when I’m there, I’m productive and content.

In the ongoing discussions over the nuts and bolts of starting a law practice — office in the home versus out of the home, ipad or no ipad or do you need a business card, there’s lots of analysis of which choice makes the most sense for business or is necessary to serve clients or conveys the best impression.  Lost in the process though is any thought to how these choices affect us: whether they make us proud of what we do or make us want to keep working long after the 9-5 day has ended. 

Depending upon where you live, you may have seen William Shatner shilling for law firms like Alabama-based Slocumb Law Firm on television.  Poor production quality notwithstanding, Slocumb’s television advertising comes with a hefty price tag.  According to the Washington Legal Times, Mike Slocumb is suing solo D.C practitioner, Michael Wilson for $197,000 in unpaid fees and $1,000,000 in unjust enrichment resulting from Wilson’s alleged breach of an advertising agreement under which Slocumb placed ads on “for the benefit of Wilson.”

Slocumb’s  Complaint  teaches some important business and marketing lessons, while raising interesting ethics and contract law questions. By way of background, the Complaint states that Slocumb placed ads for Wilson’s benefit for the period March 2011 through February 2012.  Calls generated from the ads would go to Slocumb’s office which would gather basic information and forward the cases to Wilson for additional screening.  During the term of the contract, Slocumb forwarded 300 prospective clients to Wilson.

In exchange for receiving these pre-screened referrals, Wilson agreed to pay a flat fee of $25,000 per month to purchase the ads and $3750 per month for production and licensing; a total of $28,750 per month or by my calculation,  $345,000 for the duration of the contract ($28,750 * 12 months – note – I rounded up and just assumed the contract was for a year).

So how much does Wilson owe under the contract?  That’s where things get weird.  According to Paragraph 14 of the  Complaint, “Wilson remitted five separate payments of $119,220” which totals $596,000.  So if Wilson’s obligation was $345,000 under the contract and he paid $596,000, it seems that Slocumb owes money to Wilson, not the other way around (unless the Complaint is somehow wrong?) But no, Slocumb is seeking $197,000 plus attorneys fees for unpaid amounts under the agreement. (Complaint Para. 15).

And it gets worse. In the next count, Slocumb alleges that Wilson was unjustly enriched by the referral of the 300 prospects.  For this, Slocumb seeks $1 million.

This month’s issue of the Atlantic brings yet another voice in the endless, evolving discussion of  Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, and what can we do about it?  Although I appreciated the honesty of the piece, I don’t understand why people as smart as the author, Ann Marie Slaughter, a former honcho in the State Department currently “slumming” as a professor at Princeton University so that she can spend more time with her teenage boys, are so myopic in their view of what constitutes success and having it all.

Both Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg, whose TED Talk  on the lack of women leaders in the tech world is frequently referenced throughout her piece, seem to think that women will “have it all” only when they’re partners at big law or sit on the board of Fortune 500 Companies.  In doing so, they slight the achievements of many of my female colleagues in my solo and online communities, many of whom are parents or caretakers. They may not have it all in Slaughter’s and Sandberg’s view because they don’t head huge organizations, but they nevertheless, have worked just as hard to carve out a niche for themselves (I don’t want to name names because I’ll leave at least a dozen off the list, but you women know who you are!).  I’m not saying that we need a personal shout out, but once in a while, it would be nice for women lawyers who who run their own practices to be included in one of these having it all articles.

The absence of solos from the work life balance debates is a personal peeve though. What really gets me about Slaughter and Sandberg is that rather than encourage women to create and build a structure where we can succeed, instead, they seem to suggest that change must come from others.  Slaughter, for example, writes that she encourages women to participate in her classes and suggests that other professors do the same.  Why?  I can’t imagine that any of the women who I know online or who speak on the circuit or forums like Ignite are timid about speaking up.  Do we want to perpetuate the dangerous stereotype that women are shrinking violets who need extra protection? 
As for Sandberg, her proposals for women to advance in the tech world is for women to act more assertively or not to “leave until it’s time to leave.” (meaning that women shouldn’t stop taking first-rate projects just because they’re merely thinking about getting pregnant and eventually going out on maternity leave) That’s good advice, but quite honestly, doesn’t it make more sense for women to get to the top the way that Larry and Sergei and Mark Zuckerberg did — not by working or waiting for promotions, but inventing something amazing?

With a torrent of information streaming through our email, social media channels and RSS feeds daily, most of us have become regimented in filtering.  We eyeball headlines, prioritize links from designated Twitter followers, strain articles without a particular tag or search term and use the delete key without mercy.  While our compulsive filtering immunizes us against information overload,  it also deprives us of the benefits of browsing; the tidbits of wisdom or incredible connections we make while aimlessly paging through a newspaper or book or strolling through a library aisle.

We see the same phenomenon in legal research.  Rarely do we discover; instead we search – by natural language terms, by keywords, by boolean connectors.  It’s efficient yes, but sometimes by happenstance (reading Supreme Court decisions, as I did when I blogged at  Legal Blogwatch or coming across rulings at other blogs) I often find the best turn-of-a-phrase or source of argument in cases from entirely unconnected industries.

Of course, I rarely have the chance to make it over to the library to scroll through recent cases. So I was thrilled to learn that my favorite legal research company, FastCase has just announced that it’s making Advance Sheets available in ebook format (reported at FastCase blog and also Bob Ambrogi’s Law Sites.  Although as Greg Lambert discusses, Advance Sheet volumes (which were published about 50 times a year at a cost of $850) are used less frequently by lawyers (particularly the younger generation that’s grown up on LEXIS/Westlaw or solo/small firm lawyers who can’t afford them), by putting them into e-book format, more lawyers are likely to revisit Advance Sheets, taking some time each month to scroll through and see if there’s anything new or relevant they might discover.

No, you’re not experiencing a bout of deja vu.  You’ve seen these photos or some similar iteration before.  The clay figures. The guy or gal sketching business charts on the glass board.  The inspirational road signs.  Fish jumping from one bowl to another.  Perhaps you stumbled across them online while browsing Google Images or in a Powerpoint presentation or as an illustration at a blog post or as a front page graphic on a website or worst of all, on a web design website  (since if designers are using it for their own site, you know they’ll use it to develop yours).  While a few years back, many of these same stock photos were entertaining or interesting, now that millions of users have tapped into the stock photography trough, these consistently used stock photos are dull and banal; the hobgoblins of crappy websites (H/T to Ralph Waldo Emerson).

Of course, just as there are different levels of Hell, so too, some uses of stock photography are more tolerable than others.  I’ve used stock photos in  slide presentations,  not so much because they’re the best option, but because they’re the safest choice in a time-pressed situation.  Since I typically put my presentations together within hours or even minutes of the deadline with the intention of posting them on slideshare, the last thing I want is to grab a copyrighted image off of Google or neglect to include appropriate attribution for a Flickr photo  and find myself hit with a cease and desist letter or copyright action after it’s discovered online.

Moreover, at least with my  most recent slide decks , I’ve tried to use my extremely limited design skills to display stock photos as part of a montage or to change the tone or color to minimize the stock-like features.   In any event, a presentation is a one-time event where the speaker is the main attraction and in that regard, use of stock photography isn’t an enormous sin.

Likewise, stock photography is also forgivable on a blog post which only runs for a single day.  Though truth be told, I rarely include photos in my posts at all because I don’t see the point of re-using the same old tired photos for my site that are already available at fifty other places online.  My blog posts don’t read like anyone else’s so why should they look that way?

But what simply isn’t tolerable is the use of stock photos for websites.  I can spot stock photos a mile away and as soon as I see one of them used on a legal website, I feel pity for the lawyer (who didn’t know, or couldn’t afford any better) and disrespect for the designer who lacked the creativity or the skill to come up with a work around.