Mixed Media Dress from Jones of New York Collection Line

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area the weather just went from cool and rainy to 86 degrees overnight forcing me to think about my wardrobe. Here are some of my favorite online shopping sites and what styles and fabrics lend themselves to these steamy summer months:

Au Natural

My favorite summer staple is a natural fiber dress (cotton, silk, rayon). I wear it with sandals and a cotton cardigan to the office and keep a pair of shoes and a lightweight blazer in the office to top it off for a last minute court appearance or meeting. Jones of New York has a buy one at full price, get one 50% off as of this writing. This Mixed Media Dress is a nice option. (more…)

Down here in South Florida, we’re still licking our wounds after the Heat lost to Mavericks in the NBA Finals. Alas.

One thing is certain. Jason Terry, of the Mavs, certainly turned some heads with his prescient (some would say arrogant) bicep tattoo of the NBA’s championship trophy.

Granted, Terry said he would remove the tattoo if they lost, but then he’d be left with a scarred memento of his hubris.

Terry’s tattoo represented a hell-bent commitment to an accomplishment, and reminded me of Chapter 11 of Sun Tzu’s Art of War:

At the critical moment, the leader of an army acts like one who has climbed up a height and then kicks away the ladder behind him… He burns his boats and breaks his cooking-pots…

By kicking away the ladder, burning your boats, or tattooing a victory symbol on your arm, you’re eliminating defeat as an option. When you have no retreat, you fight with a survivor’s dedication to win.

Lawyers continuously deal with concepts of probability.  Understanding probabilities can be an extremely useful way to persuade, craft useful analogies, and – in some cases – either create or disprove reasonable doubt.

Probability concepts can be particularly powerful when they yield couterintutive results. One such example is the “birthday paradox.”

Quick – how many people must there be in a random group before we can expect that at least one pair shares the same birthday? (more…)

That's "Ms. Anthony" to you.

The big Casey Anthony trial, what some have called the trial of the decade, has been underway now for some time.  It’s being broadcast live on the Internet and archives are also available with a little digging.  At this writing, the prosecution is still presenting its case.

When I practiced law I worked primarily on corporate and business matters, with a few opportunities to be in court.   Nonetheless, once and awhile I’d invest some free time in observing trials that litigation partners were handling.  I always admired the unique combination of legal knowledge, psychological acumen, and communication ability that great trial lawyers possess.

While watching some of the Anthony trial, I picked out a few practices that I found particularly interesting, each of which have nothing to do with the facts at issue.  I’m curious as to what the trial lawyers out there think about these observations. (more…)

Bonobos

Summer is officially here, no doubt about it, with 90 degree temperatures in the Northeast. And let’s face it, wearing business attire in the warm months can be not only stifling, it can be confusing to know your fashion do’s and don’ts.

So I recently called Bonobos, the hipster-professional Internet clothing company which is kinda like Zappos for pants, and sought some advice for warm weather duds. Mr. Brad Andrews, their VP of Merchandising, offered very helpful advice: (more…)

Last month the Centers for Disease Control issued a tongue-in-cheek blog post: Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse. The idea is to talk about emergency preparedness, using the rise of the undead as an example crisis.

As hurricane season officially kicks into high gear in the United States, and with devastating floods, tornadoes, and earthquakes plaguing much of the world, it seems as good a time as ever to go over your plans on how to handle an emergency situations.

And really, it doesn’t matter whether your enemy is a destructive storm or a flesh-eating monster looking to feast on your paralegal’s brains. (more…)

"The Bar is drasss-tic, but fantasss-tic!"

It’s Friday and the productivity theme of our blog notwithstanding (he writes, lawyerly), it’s the official day dedicated to non-productive use of the interwebs.

When I was in law school we didn’t have laptops, let alone YouTube.   However, the absence of YouTube most assuredly gave me the advantage of simply not being able to record and upload whatever my knucklehead law school friends and I likely would’ve, had the technology existed.  Thankfully, today’s law students have no such limitations.

So, without further delay, I offer the following law/law-school themed videos as my suggested contribution to your non-productive Friday video surfing:
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Thinking about new ways to approach difficult problems is something we enjoy, and something we have in common with our lawyers.

Whether it’s a different way of measuring key metrics, a cool use of game theory, or just a novel way of challenging a long-standing established practice, thinking through problems from different angles is a big part of finding innovative solutions.

One particularly interesting technique is the “Gott Principle”, a simple method for estimating the remaining life of something knowing only how long it has already survived at the time it is observed. It’s about making estimates with virtually no information at hand.

Developed by physicist J. Richard Gott, his method accurately predicted the expected run of Broadway shows, the survival of the Berlin Wall, and many other things.

To use a specific example, we could ask a question such as:  Whose music is more likely to be listened to 100 years from now – Bach or Britney Spears?

Expressed mathematically, Gott says that there is:

• A 50% chance that your particular observation, when made, is occurring somewhere in the middle 50% of the true full lifetime of the what you’re observing (i.e. Britney Spears’ music popularity);
• A 60% chance that it’s in the middle 60% of the true full lifetime; and
• A 95% chance that it’s in the middle 95% of the true full lifetime.

If we assume we know only one fact about both – specifically, how long their music has been around at the time we’re asking this question – we can answer the question with Gott’s principle.

Again, we’re assuming that we know nothing about the underlying facts surrounding this question i.e. we’re not a music teacher, a music afficiando – we may not have heard of either Bach or Spears at all). The analysis works like this:

Bach’s music has been popular for about 310 years; Britney’s music for about 12.

Using Gott’s Principle and a 60% confidence interval, we could estimate Bach’s music to be popular for another 77.5 – 1240 years.  Britney’s music between 3 – 48 years (arithmetic is calculated below for the hardcore math attorney).

So, whose music is more likely to be around 100 years from now? Bach, by far. And we don’t need to know anything about music to make that conclusion. (If we were music experts, we may better use other methods to come to these estimates. The point is that we’re assuming we’re not experts, and we have no better information available to us.)

Now, of course, as the confidence interval increases, Gott’s method can result in very wide ranges. However, it’s important to reiterate that this is a method best used in situations where no specific facts or knowledge is available.

Gott says we can approach such a situation, and instead of simply throwing our hands up and saying an estimate is impossible because we don’t know enough about the other operative facts, come up with a reasonable, defensible framework for analysis.

The method itself is useful, but the concept is much bigger.

That is, skills that great lawyers work with everyday – creative thinking, analogy, and logic – can go a long way in developing workable solutions for problems that initially appear to be completely inestimable, too complicated, or having too many moving or unknown parts to solve.

That’s a skill that many lawyers are terrific at, and the type of skill that clients will value long after document assembly, and other “commodity” type services have lost most of their value.

FOR THE HARDCORE MATH ATTORNEY:

Using Gott’s rules, we’ll construct some simple parameters.  We’ll use the letter ‘t’ to stand in for the age of the observation at the time observed (i.e. how long Britney Spears has been popular).

50% confidence level: Minimum duration = t /3;  Maximum duration = 3 * t
60% confidence level: Minimum duration = t /4;  Maximum duration = 4 * t
95% confidence level: Minimum duration = t /39;  Maximum duration = 39 * t

Using Gott’s Principle and a 60% confidence interval, we could estimate the continued popularity of Bach’s music.
t=310
Minimum = (310/4) or 77.5 years.
Maximum = (4 * 310) or 1,240 years.

The same math gives us Britney’s paltry popularity ranging from 3 to (please let it be the minimum! please please please!) 48 years.

Over the weekend a colleague finally caved in to iPhone mania and replaced his Blackberry with a 3G model for the lovely little sum of $49.00. Within a few hours, he dropped it to the ground, shattering the screen.

My colleague, who shall remain anonymous, returned to the AT&T store who sold him the device. A salesperson tried to help. A manager joined the conversation. A third person, a supervisor weighed in. The verdict: for a cool $450, they would replace the device. (more…)

"I'm a victim of soi-cumstance"

Thankfully law firm departures don’t resemble the action in Reservoir Dogs, the ridiculously violent (and terrific) movie from which that lyric was borrowed, but they’re not always smooth either.  Especially when lawyers leave with the intent to carry on their existing practice elsewhere.

In the face of all the tricky separation issues, the client’s interests need to be at the forefront.  While the idea of categorizing clients as “assets”  in a “book of business” may be easy for most lawyers to intellectually compartmentalize, it can be a very uncomfortable and unsettling one from the client’s perspective.

Recently, I hired a firm of licensed professionals.  Not a law firm, but educated, licensed professionals. I had no pre-existing relationship with either the firm or the professional to whom I was assigned.   I’ll call the firm “Failco” and my contact professional “Shirley” (As in, surely you can’t be serious.)

Everything was going along fine with Shirley.   Then I got a call one evening on my personal cell around 8:45pm, and things got weird.
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