From Debra Gerardi: “Wholeness is not a place you can get to. Wholeness is a kind of attitude or approach to the whole of life. It’s a way.” David Bohm The University of California Hastings College of the Law held a two-day symposium last month entitled, The Integrated Lawyer: A Symposium on Well-Being and the … Continue reading Notes from Hastings’s Symposium on The Integrated Lawyer
In a recent post, I described the intense stress that individual and organizational litigants often undergo as a result of litigation. The legal system attracts and magnifies stressful conflicts, which affects everyone in its ambit. In addition to litigants, this includes law students, lawyers, and legal academics. This post provides excerpts from my research summarizing … Continue reading Legal Stress
I was really pleased to meet Randall Kiser at last year’s ABA conference. I was very impressed by his important study (co-authored with Martin Asher and Blakeley McShane), Let’s Not Make a Deal: An Empirical Examination of Decision Making in Unsuccessful Negotiations. The top-line finding was that in 85.5% of cases, parties went to trial … Continue reading Kiser’s Soft Skills for the Effective Lawyer
Have you ever felt really excited when you had an “aha” moment of insight? I bet that virtually all readers of this blog have had that experience numbers of times. This post in the Stone Soup mini-course describes how Stone Soup assignments and activities can be a hoot, triggering lots of “aha” moments. Sometimes this … Continue reading Stone Soup Mini-Course: The Joy of Learning
From my colleague, S.I. Strong: Young OGEMID will be hosting its next “virtual symposium” as of March 20, and you may want to sign up (if you are untenured) or pass the information along to your students. This one is interdisciplinary in nature and should be quite interesting. More information shows below on the topic … Continue reading Young OGEMID Virtual Symposium: Alt-Facts and the Post-Truth Society Through an Arbitral Lens
FOI Jean Sternlight announced that 19 (count ’em) articles are available online from UNLV’s great-looking symposium, Psychology and Lawyering: Coalescing the Field. (Click on the title of the post to access the link.)
You might like to read the cover story in the November 2015 issue of the ABA Journal, “Lawyers Shackled by Fear, Fear Not: While Feelings of Dread May Be Endemic to the Legal Profession, They Can Be Transformed to Positive Effect,” which features my article, Escaping from Lawyers’ Prison of Fear. (Click on the title … Continue reading Escaping Lawyers’ Prison of Fear in Litigation and Negotiation
Money can’t buy me love. – Paul McCartney As a corollary to psychologist McCartney’s insight, money can’t buy lawyers (much) happiness. That’s one of the key findings of Lawrence Krieger and Kennon Sheldon’s impressive study, What Makes Lawyers Happy?: A Data-Driven Prescription to Redefine Professional Success. This post includes excerpts from this article, sans … Continue reading What Makes Lawyers Happy? – And How Can You Help?
An article in the New York Times, The Rationality of Rage, summarizes the findings of several studies about when expressing anger can be productive. Despite the catchy title of the article, expressing rage generally isn’t helpful. But expressing anger can be useful in some situations. The article distinguishes three types of negotiations – primarily cooperative … Continue reading Good Anger
Life can be darn irritating. In a NYT op-ed piece, Arthur Brooks argues that “When I am working for myself, any disappointing outcome is a stressful, unpleasant reflection on me. When I am serving, on the other hand, the work is always intrinsically valuable because of its intention. Adopting a service mind-set guarantees some measure … Continue reading Satisfaction Through Service
