I was telling my wife about the recent post by Frank Ramos about LinkedIn having an AI product to help us write our posts. Those of you have followed me for a while know that I think that I am kind of smart, but I know for a fact that my wife, Maureen McKay, is way smarter than me. She has a great ability to look at a fact situation and see where things are going to end up. Here is her take on the use of AI to write posts:
Most of us consider ourselves to be lucky if we have a handful of real friends. Usually these are people who we know from way back. They know who we really are, and they want nothing from us. If we need them, they will be there for us. When we get busy with our careers, we sometimes do not speak to them very frequently, but when we see them again it is like no time has passed.
I was a super-fantastic lawyer. Really, almost everyone says so. And yet, there were a few clients who did not appreciate what I did for them or what it cost to have me do it. Luckily for me, during most of my career Google Reviews were not much of a thing. And until they were, those few and far between ignorant and unappreciative ingrates who did not like me did not have much of a public forum for spreading their lies.
I was a socialist at age twenty. I went to law school because I wanted to help the poor and the oppressed. By the time that I was thirty I was a business lawyer. Stuff like that happens to people.
This morning someone remarked that much of my writing about the legal profession is a tad negative. She said, “you practiced law for a long time; you were good at what you did; you made enough money to retire and travel the world. Surely you must have liked something about being a lawyer, didn’t you?”
Susan and Bob are unhappy spouses who own and operate a business. Sue enacts some resolutions to remove her husband as a director and officer of the corporation. Then she goes to the office before business hours, changes the locks, tells Bob that he is fired, and hires a security guard.
Bob shows up for work and is refused entry. He calls the police. The cops come and tell him that they are just there to keep the peace, which they will do by preserving the status quo. Since Sue is on the inside, she gets to stay there. As Bob is on the outside, he has to stay there.
There is currently a great deal of talk about mental health issues in the legal profession. It remains to be seen whether the profession will finally take mental health seriously, or whether the topic is simply the ‘flavour of the month’ and useful material for recruiting and marketing.
This is for the young folks looking for jobs in private practice early in their careers. Here is what matters and what does not matter so much. Ignore this at your own peril (and I am sure that a great many of you will both ignore it and eventually be in peril.)
I speak to many lawyers who strike out on their own soon after being called to the Bar. They have various reasons for doing this. Some cannot obtain positions at established firms. Others get positions that come with no mentoring and abominable working conditions and decide that they would be better off on their own. And then there are those who are entrepreneurial by nature, distrusting of established law firms (often for good reason) and eager to build something for themselves.
One of the many nice things about being retired is that I feel free to write about topics that I would not have had the guts to speak up about back in the day. So, here we go again!
The year was 1995. It was one of my first forays into law firm management. I helped develop our firm’s first ‘maternity leave’ top-up policy and presented it at a partners meeting. We were getting a bit of buy-in, but that ground to a halt when one of our partners said, “let me get this straight. The people who come to work every day are not earning nearly enough (author’s note- we were never earning ‘nearly enough’) and you want us to earn even less so that we can subsidize people who are not coming to work at all? Seriously? You are all f**king crazy!”