My partner Sid was great at remembering names and faces. At one networking event, 15 people introduced themselves, spoke about their area of specialty, and shared something about their personal lives. After everyone had spoken, Sid said something like, “Let’s see if I have got this right,” and then repeated the details that everyone had provided. Sid was a great rainmaker.
Frank Ramos, a Miami litigation lawyer, writes intelligently on LinkedIn. Recently, he posted that potential legal clients are moving away from using Google searches, and toward AI, to find lawyers. His conclusion is that lawyers should stop worrying about SEO and start writing intelligent commentary so that AI will identify them as an expert and recommend them.
An American poet and critic named James Russell Lowell once said, “The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.” He forgot someone: Big Law lawyers.
Allow me to elaborate.
I once had a client who told me that what he really wanted was a one-armed lawyer, because he was fed up with lawyers saying, “on the one hand everything is going to be peachy keen, but on the other hand, the world is going to end.”
Newly qualified lawyers are not known for being mature, confident, well-rounded, and psychologically sound. And why should we expect them to be? Most of them are young, having just emerged from years of student life. Few have had a significant prior career. They have likely graduated, with substantial debt, from schools that have not adequately trained them to practice law.
I am just back from a two-month cruise, which started with a few days in Santiago, Chile.
You may not know this, but in Chile, when you use a foreign credit card, you have to select an option on the machine to indicate that you are a foreigner. It has something to do with taxes. If I had known that, and/or my Spanish was any good, I would have chosen the correct option, my card would not have registered that I had tried my pin too many times, and I would not have been locked out. But I did not know that, my Spanish is not very good, and so, just like that, on Day 1 of my vacation, I was no longer able to use my TD First Class Travel Visa Infinite Card, for its intended purpose, being travelling.
I am not one of those people who rail against the Banks. But I do wonder whether they have a department in charge of making things difficult for their customers.
Today I will tell you about CIBC. Next time, it will be TD’s turn.
Back when I was practicing law, I was so clued out about physical work that I thought that Manual Labour was the President of Mexico. After I became a lawyer, the only work that I did with my hands was typing. For many years I was thoughtful, creative, and strategic. I hired people to do the physical work that I needed done, so that I could devote myself to what I arrogantly thought were more sophisticated pursuits.
Vicky was my associate many years ago. She was bright and ambitious. She wanted to learn and she worked hard. If you taught Vicky how to do something once, she would get it right every time after that.
Do you remember the old stories about coal miners forced to rent their homes from the company they worked for?
The tech industry is pulling the exact same scam on your firm today. We happily traded ownership of our software for the convenience of the cloud. We are stuck renting our own data back from tech monopolies who change the rules, raise the prices, and take zero responsibility.