While stress management may sound like the impossible dream, many lawyers are able to find a balance between their legal careers and their personal lives without experiencing stratospheric levels of stress and anxiety.
Many external conditions are making it harder and harder to experience calm and peace of mind, such as the rocky economy and trying to keep up with rapidly advancing technology (thank goodness for the Lawyerist to help with that!) With all of these changes on top of our already busy professions and lives, the need for effective ways to deal with stress are increasingly important.
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Being a lawyer is hard work, but being a lawyer and a parent sometimes feels impossible. While there is a lot of information out there for “working mothers,” I believe that the same advice is just as applicable for “working fathers.”
So what can we “lawyer parents” do to survive and (maybe, just maybe) thrive as both lawyers and parents? Here are some tips:
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Even though all of us send and receive dozens of e-mails each and every day, many are still guilty of breaking e-mail etiquette rules that, if followed, could help us present ourselves more professionally.
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Mentoring programs are the hot new thing at law schools, bar associations, and law firms. Even if your organization or employer doesn’t have a program, you can go out and find yourself a mentor who you respect and who is where you want to be professionally.
These are a few tips for getting the most out of a mentoring relationship:
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It is a tough legal market out there. Firms are getting hundreds of applications for every position they post. The same holds true for judicial clerkships, governmental, in-house, and non-profit jobs. It’s tough.
As a career counselor at a law school, I get questions every day from nervous students and alumni about how they can set themselves apart from the vast competition. Even though they might have a stellar resume and rank highly in their class, they are still coming up empty in the job market, and they cannot figure out what to do.
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We’ve all heard about the importance of doing pro bono work. But, as busy attorneys, how is it a “win-win” for us? How can it benefit the pro bono clients (which is fairly obvious) and benefit us professionally and personally (which is what we sometimes forget)?
Of course, doing pro bono work is a kind, good, and noble thing to do. We have skills as lawyers that can serve the good of those who could not otherwise afford legal services, and there are solid ethical imperatives and reasons for which to use some of our time providing pro bono representation.
Yet we can learn a great deal about ourselves as attorneys and individuals by taking the time to do pro bono.
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With the current focus on social media and the best etiquette for this (relatively) new way of communicating, we often forget about good, old-fashioned face-to-face etiquette.
While many of our connections with others have moved online, we still function each day with other people. These may be colleagues or coworkers. They may be clients or new acquaintances. But we still need to know how to act around them in order to not embarrass ourselves or our firms.
Here are a few basic etiquette tips to remember (there are many, but these ten are some of the most frequently abused):
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Over the course of our legal careers, we need to make many transitions. It all starts as we move from being a law student into the “real world” of being an attorney (whatever that really means.) Then we make lateral moves, we change practice areas, or we leave the practice altogether.
Whatever our transitions look like, there are particular skills, behaviors and habits that will help those transitions be as smooth as possible. Here are a few tips I offer law students and lawyers that I work with who are making significant career changes:
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You’ve got a new associate position at a firm. First of all, congrats! That’s a big deal in this challenging legal market. But don’t get so excited that you screw it up by making some very typical new associate blunders in the first few days, weeks, or months on the job.
Working with lawyers and law firms, I get to see the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to new associates and how they integrate themselves smoothly (or not so smoothly) into the law firm culture. Based on my observations, here are ten of the most significant mistakes I see new associates making (though seasoned associates and partners could learn a few lessons here as well.)
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While there is some terrific advice on how to maintain a romantic relationship during law school, what about life after the bar exam?
My husband and I got married about 10 weeks before law school started for me. Has it been easy? No, we work at it every day. But it’s incredibly worth it.
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