Out-of-the-Box Lawyering

MARKETING: How to enhance client relationships and perhaps even get new clients

The National Law Journal (subscription required) this month had an article with the subtitle: “Many large firms lend lawyers to clients; it builds business.”

The article detailed that law firms who were outside counsel for corporate clients were lending attorneys to their clients. The firms found that this was beneficial both to the clients and to the firms:

“Many large firms routinely loan associates, and sometimes partners, to their clients. The practice — dubbed secondment, after a British military term for temporarily transferring someone from one regiment to another — has been going on at many large firms for years. But it's attracted little public attention since firms don't publicize the practice.

“Law firms, in-house counsel and the lawyers who get loaned out all say it's an invaluable way for firms to better understand their clients and bolster their relationships. ‘A person on the inside gets to know the company in a more substantive way,’ said Mark Brazeal, deputy general counsel at Broadcom Corp., which has twice borrowed attorneys from outside counsel. ‘When they return to the firm, they tend to be more efficient and to give better advice.’ ”

And here’s another reason why firms loan out their lawyers: As the article put it: “Loaning out lawyers can also have another benefit: bringing in new business.”

Source: National Law Journal, December 20-27, 2004, p. 13.

For the holidays (and after): Here’s a way to have great deserts, save calories, and help someone else out

You may ask, “What’s this posting on saving calories during the holiday season doing in a lawyer blog?”

This is my response: I think that the posting is interesting and from time to time I will wander from just lawyer stuff. Lawyers are people too -- in spite of what some lawyer bashers claim.

I’m also including this because whether or not you apply creative problem solving to your problems depends on your attitude. If you apply creativity to solving problems in your daily life, you may be more likely to apply that same creativity in your law practices.

Thus, once you start asking, “How can I be more creative in reducing calories,” you may be more likely to ask, “How can I be more creative in overcoming my opponent’s defenses.”

Now, here’s that way to have great deserts, save calories, and help someone else out. (I hope that this will be helpful not only for the holiday season but for the rest of the year as well.)

Let’s assume you’re at a party or a buffet and you see these great deserts laid out. Calories, calories, calories. You’d like to try a couple of different precut slices of the cakes or the pies, but your limit is just one slice. What to do?

Here’s what I’ve been doing: Just take a portion of the slice -- a half or a third of the slice. Iif you’re being served in a line, just ask the server to cut off a portion of the slice. Then you also can get a portion of a slice of something else, thereby tasting two delicacies for the calorie cost of just one slice.

At first I was a little embarrassed doing this, but I did it recently, telling the server why I wanted just a portion of a slice of chocolate cake. Interestingly, the woman who was behind me in line laughed, realizing what was happening. Then, expressing gratitude for the idea, she took the remaining half of the slice.

So, I helped me - - and I helped her.

After you try this, go back later to where you took the portion to check whether the remaining portion has been taken by some grateful fellow calorie saver. It’s amazing how often your remaining portion has somehow disappeared!

Here's an out-of-the-box way to increase your bottom line

Here's a suggestion from a legal consulting firm as a way to increase your net profit:

“A Great Way to Make More

Money Is To Turn Down Business.”

How's that for what is for some a counterintuitive out-of-the-box approach! Over the years, I've seen many articles about the wisdom of refusing cases, but this is the best short summary that I've seen.

Source: This was in an ad by the legal consulting firm Altman Weil, Inc. It was in the November/December 2004 issue of Law Practice magazine. Law Practice is a publication of ABA's Law Practice Management Section. (Don't go to the Altman Weil site just to see a copy of the ad. As of now at least, the ad is not on their site.)

Google Groups (in Beta) - It's potentially an out-of-the-box way for lawyers and others to communicate — It's the old Usenet, but it's Usenet on steroids

The Google search screen has “Groups” above its search bar. It's had that for a long time, and, with it, you could search the old Usenet articles which it obtained in 2001 from Deja.com.

You could, for a long time, search and add articles to the various Usenet groups. (For more information on Usenet, you can go to http://www.ibiblio.org/usenet-i/intro.html.)

In any event, the “Groups” tab is now followed by “New” — and it really is new. Now, people can easily set up their groups, the groups can be public or private, they can be searchable by anyone with a normal Google search, or the searching can be limited to only authorized members of the group.

Here's how Google starts out its 14 pages of FAQs:

“What is a Google Group?

“A Google Group is an online discussion group or mailing list that helps groups of people communicate using email and the web. Every group has a Google-hosted homepage where members can start new discussions or reply to existing topics. Every group also has its own email address, which lets members interact with the rest of the group.

“Creating your own Google Group is fast and easy. Just click the ‘Create a new group’ link on the left side of most pages. You can customize your group to suit your needs. For example, a group can be restricted (only group members can read and participate in discussions) or public (anyone can read and search group content). You can also create custom group types. For instance, you might want an announcement-only group, which enables you to send announcements to the group while preventing members from posting their own topics and replies.

“Finally, members can choose how they want to be notified of group activity. Members of time-sensitive groups may choose to receive email every time a posting is sent to the group. Members of less time-sensitive groups might prefer to receive a daily summary email or no notification emails at all.”

There is also a shorter version of the FAQs.

In addition to the FAQs, Google also has a “What's New” article which is only three pages, and, together with other information, it has screen shots of how to create a Group.

You may be worried about getting spam, spam and more spam if you start or join a Group. Here's what Google says about that:

“Is my email address visible on the web when I post to a group?

“When your message is posted to a group, Google Groups masks your email address on the web to prevent automated computer programs from harvesting it for spamming purposes. If, however, you send out your post via email or to Usenet, your email address will be visible to anyone who receives it.
"To protect your anonymity, you may want to use a web-based email account for posting to Google Groups. You can find a list of such services by conducting a Google search or by visiting http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/E-mail/Web-Based/”

I haven't tried Groups yet. But it looks fantastic for setting up ways for people to communicate.

Let me know what you think if you have tried it. (My comments will be open until the spammers learn that they can hit the archive for this posting. If I have closed the comments, you can send your comments to me. My e-mail address is under the “About” box on the right side of this blog.)

And for more information, you can go into Google and search on “google groups beta” (without the quotes) and then do the same search in Google News.

An alert for attorneys who handle personal injury cases: Caregivers may age faster due to the stress of their caregiving - Is this a potential item of damage for the spouses and perhaps the parents of victims of trauma?

According to an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, stress, even at a cellular level, affected mothers of chronically ill children. This was from a study that examined 58 healthy pre-menopausal women, 19 of whom were biological mothers who had healthy children and 39 of whom were “caregiving mothers” who had chronically ill children. (The study is published in the December 7, 2004 issue, volume 101, no. 49, pp. 17312–17315.)

The Washington Post started its November 30 summary of the article (registration required) as follows:

“Study Is First to Confirm That Stress Speeds Aging

“Scientists have identified the first direct link between stress and aging, a finding that could explain why intense, long-term emotional strain can make people get sick and grow old before their time.

“Chronic stress appears to hasten the shriveling of the tips of the bundles of genes inside cells, which shortens their life span and speeds the body's deterioration, according to a small, first-of-its-kind study involving mothers caring for chronically ill children.”

The lead researcher, Elissa S. Epel, Ph.D., is from the University of California, San Francisco, which issued a press release about the report. The headline of the release was “UCSF-led study suggests link between psychological stress and cell aging.”

This is a portion of the release:

“ ‘Numerous studies have solidly demonstrated a link between chronic psychological stress and indices of impaired health, including cardiovascular disease and weakened immune function,’ says lead author Elissa Epel, PhD, UCSF assistant professor of psychiatry. ‘The new findings suggest a cellular mechanism for how chronic stress may cause premature onset of disease. Anecdotal evidence and scientific evidence has have [sic] suggested that chronic stress can take years off your life; the implications of this study are that this is true at the cellular level. Chronic stress appears to have the potential to shorten the life of cells, at least immune cells.’ ”

The article itself, which is in the Proceedings of the Academy, has a very interesting beginning:

“People who are stressed over long periods tend to look haggard, and it is commonly thought that psychological stress leads to premature aging and the earlier onset of diseases of aging. Numerous studies demonstrate links between chronic stress and indices of poor health, including risk factors for cardiovascular disease and poorer immune function (1, 2).”[Citation 1 is to McEwen, B. (1998) N. Engl. J. Med. 338, 171-179. Citation 2 is to Segerstrom, S. and Miller, G. (2004) Psychol. Bull. 130.]

We know that caregiving can be stressful for the caregiver. But the findings of this study may also apply to others who are subject to psychological stress. The last sentence of the article puts it this way:

“[A]lthough the exact pathway of events from perception of stress in the brain to somatic cell longevity is unclear, the results reported here now implicate shorter telomeres in the adverse health sequelae of prolonged psychological stress.”

The New York Times has a November 30 article entitled “Too Much Stress May Give Genes Gray Hair.” The article (registration required) includes the following:

“Now a team of researchers has found that severe emotional distress - like that caused by divorce, the loss of a job, or caring for an ill child or parent - may speed up the aging of the body's cells at the genetic level.

“The findings, being reported today, are the first to link psychological stress so directly to biological age.

“The researchers found that blood cells from women who had spent many years caring for a disabled child were, genetically, about a decade older than those from peers who had much less caretaking experience.”

The findings of the study tie in with a previous posting in my blog: “An alert for victims of traumatically-caused chronic back pain and their attorneys.” That posting begins “Chronic back pain can shrink the gray matter in a sufferer's brain.”

More and more, science is helping document the non-obvious effects of serious trauma — effects not only to the obvious victim of the trauma, but also the potentially severe effects to the caregiving victims.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: MSNBC has a two-minute video clip that includes comments by Dr. Epel, the lead researcher. Go to www.msnbc.com, search on Epel in the search bar on the left side of the screen, and follow the appropriate links. (You will need to accept cookies and use Microsoft Windows Media Player to run the clip.)

LINKS:

Article: “Accelerated telomere shortening in response to life stress”
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0407162101v1.pdf

New York Times article (free registration required)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/health/30age.html

Outoftheboxlawyering article on “Chronic back pain can shrink the gray matter in a sufferer's brain.”
http://www.outoftheboxlawyering.com/archives/000065.html

Press release from University of California, San Francisco
http://pub.ucsf.edu/newsservices/releases/200411227/

Washington Post article (free registration required)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20394-2004Nov29.html?sub=AR