Posts Tagged: "Advice for Attorneys"

Law firm partners are no longer safe in their positions once they attain equity partnership.   That security is a thing of the past.   If you are a law firm partner, I provide below 7 questions that you can answer that will help you determine if you are about to be de-equitized. This article discusses how to determine whether you are at risk of losing your partnership interest and if so, some steps to strengthen your position.   My next article will give you ways to protect yourself should you be in a situation where your equity partnership share could be taken away.

Giving a lawyer a critique of their work can be difficult. Yet, you cannot improve lawyer performance or achieve quality work product goals without providing feedback. In this article, I will share with you some of the things that I have learned about giving effective feedback in my years of managing lawyers with staff sizes ranging from 10 to over 2,000.

Lawyers are constantly bombarded by challenges that naturally create fear and anxiety. Many lawyers don’t recognize these fears and fail effectively to deal with them. This causes many lawyers to be unhappy and to provide less than outstanding service to their clients. I identify many of these looming fears and present some practical tips for dealing with them… The consequences of these fears include drinking too much alcohol to relax, being snippy or yelling at people at work, eating too much and getting poor sleep.   You can deal with this stress in much more productive ways and be happier doing so.

Lawyers often wonder how to enhance their marketability and in the process, generate more revenue or improve their image.   After all, success at a firm is about “revenue generation.”  Success in a corporation or in the government also depends on your credibility and your ability to be a “go-to” person within the company or government agency.   To be a successful lawyer, you need to have a brand.  I explain below 6 easy ways to make your mark… Law firms are fighting for a smaller pool of work and as a result, are required to compete for that work at more competitive rates. If you want to get the work and charge higher rates, there must be a reason for the client to hire you. In other words, it’s your brand that counts.

Core values are key to avoiding ethical violations. This is because most ethics violations are not intentional. They occur because decisions are being made based on the wrong values (i.e., increased revenues alone) or on emotion (i.e., fear that taking more time to evaluate will be disastrous). Establishing sound core values and strong decision making emotional intelligence skills will help ensure that you do not commit an unintended ethics violation.

Patent lawyers are labeled as science geeks and somehow that has been associated with us having less interest in the emotional side of things.   As a former USPTO general counsel, I have seen more than a few patent lawyers get emotional about topics ranging from the meaning of inequitable conduct to the ability of the USPTO Director to raise fees.   However, in interactions with other people or in responses at meetings or public events we all need a healthy dose of emotional intelligence to be persuasive.