“Lead, follow, or get out of the way” is an expression which some attribute to Thomas Payne. Tommy died in 1809, so this is hardly a new turn of speech.
And yet, back in my law firm (and I suspect in many others), there were partners who never came to terms with it.
It is virtually certain that every lawyer with real intelligence who plans to stick around the profession for at least another five years is going to use artificial intelligence in their practice. (Unfortunately, so will every lawyer without real intelligence, but that is a topic for another day.)
I recently wrote an article titled “Hate Everything or Risk the Consequences,” in which I lamented that law firms restrict the social medial activity of their lawyers. But then I spoke to Tony Albrecht, who knows a lot about this stuff and I now realize that I understated the problem.
A holocaust survivor who I know once asked me, “who says you are supposed to be happy?”
I would have to guess that at the law firm where I toiled for 34 years, some people like what I write on LinkedIn, and some do not. The reason that I have to guess, is that with the very occasional exception of one Associate, none of them ever react or comment. Now you might think that the flaw in my logic is the underlying assumption that they are reading my stuff, but the LinkedIn analytics tell me that a good number of them do.
In the mid-90’s, someone called a recession, and everyone showed up. We had one lawyer who did nothing but enforce mortgages for a Bank. I was a junior partner who fancied myself as a business promotor, and I suggested that we use the slogan, “[name of our firm], kicking more people out of their houses in Peel Region than any other law firm.” For some reason, the senior partners did not agree.
I met a lawyer named Alice the other day, who does a lot of unsophisticated work, as well as a bit of higher-end work. Through her looking glass, Alice does not spy Wonderland. Instead, she fears that much of the work that she is doing will become a commodity, and her competitors will flock to low-cost service providers who use technology to produce legal documents.
There have now been several reports in Canadian media about travellers being asked at the border what they think of the U.S. President and being denied entry when they did not express their unqualified approval of Mr. Trump. (Apparently, American citizens returning from abroad have also been asked this question, which is even more shocking.)
A brave articling student once quipped about me that, “if you say, ‘pro bono’ near Murray, you’d better be talking about Sonny and Cher.” Now that was a tad unfair. It was not that I was against our firm doing pro bono work, but I did want us to be doing it for people who could not afford a lawyer, as opposed to people who were just cheap and did not value what we did.
My neighborhood was hit hard by the ice storm. We have been without power for eight days now and counting. Some of my neighbours have generators. Some don’t. Some have heat and water. Some do not.