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Leaving the Jury All Atwitter

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I'm not sure what to think of this.

I received a press release from Dr. Noelle Nelson today arguing that attorneys should take the style of Twitter tweets into account when writing their opening statements to juries.  Dr. Nelson argues that juries of today are used to a different way of communicating than juries that attorneys became used to 10 or 15 years ago.
Whether you're stressed out because you don't have enough work these days, or harried by too much work rushing in from clients fleeing BigLaw, a little humor during the day can help ease work pressures and help you to relax and get your

Sometimes humor can be educational, too, especially if you appreciate the quirkier parts of the law.  Enter West's Headnote of the Day, a free newsletter that scours the millions of those useful headnotes that we all know and love to find the strange, the bizarre, the downright weird points of law that make you laugh and ask yourself "how did that ever become part of the American jurisprudence?"

Think Your Debt Is Bad? Talk to This Guy

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We all know what it's like to get out of law school with a mountain of debt looming over our heads.  For most new lawyers, it's simply a matter of working the loan payments into our monthly budgets and hoping that we remain employed the next thirty years or so.

For Robert Bowman, however, student loan debt presented an entirely new set of problems.

First of all, there was a lot of it.  Bowman came up through the foster care system, and he had to borrow heavily to pay for college, graduate school and then law school.  The loans, including penalties, totaled over $400,000.

You're Fired. Oh, and You're Welcome.

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Dan Slater, the former writer of the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, has an interesting piece in today's New York Times called "In Praise of Law Firm Layoffs".  In the article, Slater makes the argument that the current wave of layoffs that is currently sucking thousands of attorneys down in the undertow is actually the best thing to happen to the legal profession in a long time.

Slater first lists the benefits to corporate counsel who have long suffered through law firm compensation models that emphasize the quantity of billable hours over the quality of the work product.

Attorney's Million Dollar Dare Comes Back to Haunt Him

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On this blog, I try to pass along tips for running a small law firm.  Essentially, ways to plan and operate your firm so that you will meet your goals (the blog is called the "Strategist," after all).

Well, here's one Florida attorney whose story offers an example of a strategy not to pursue.

Cheney Mason went on Dateline and offered a million dollars to anyone who could prove that his client, Nelson Ivan Serrano, was actually able to travel across two states and kill four people in the time that prosecutors had alleged.
Look upon your loans and do not fear them, class of 2009: the federal government is going to help you make those payments, and could even wipe the slate clean after, oh, a decade or so.

If you qualify, that is.

Under a federal law, the College Cost Reduction & Access Act, that will kick in on July 1 of this year, the federal government will cap the loan payments for qualifying graduates and forgive the loans of lawyers who choose to go into public interest work.
There's been much discussion about student loans ever since the economy tanked.  Many students leave school with debt payments they find impossible to stay current on with their postgraduate salaries.  This phenomenon only increases in tough economic times as recent graduates take jobs they are overqualified for, or are unable to find work altogether.

Some feel that the rising cost of higher education, and the consequent increase in the amount of student loan debt the average student is forced to shoulder, is an unfair burden for those seeking to enhance their education with a college or advanced degree.
As you expand your firm, you may discover the temptation to structure your operations like one of the top 100 firms, especially if you are a refugee from BigLaw yourself.  It's what you know, after all.

A piece in the June issue of The American Lawyer suggests that the real model for a successful, fulfilling law practice isn't in New York, Chicago or LA - it's in the Rocky Mountains.

While most of the piece is a scathing assessment of BigLaw, the author, Susan Beck takes a moment at the end to extol the virtues of a relatively unknown firm, Holland & Hart LLP.

ABA Makes Its Suicide-Prevention CLE Freely Available

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Hopefully, yesterday's post about the state of the legal market in the first quarter of 2009 only strengthened your resolve to roll up your sleeves and drum up some business. 

If, on the other hand, you or anyone you know has been feeling down for economic or professional reasons, you may want to take a look at this: "What Lawyers Need to Know About Suicide During a Recession" is a free download available from the American Bar Association that covers what employers should know in order to help employees or clients who exhibit signs of suicidal behavior.
We all know that the job market for lawyers is, how shall we say, not-so-good right now.  But how bad does it have to get before a JD/MBA resorts to taking up the world's oldest profession and becomes a lady of the night? 

Nina C. Baccala decided that the chances of finding work at a law firm were sufficiently low to justify making the switch to prositution.