Blog Posts: Law Blog

That’s the thing, you walk out your front door and you have no idea what will happen. You don’t know who you’ll sit next to, who you’ll be introduced to, or whose path is about to cross yours for thirty seconds that turn out to matter more than a year of scheduled meetings. Most professionals treat this uncertainty as a reason to stay home, to skip the even...

Early in my career I noticed that whenever I was avoiding a decision, it usually wasn’t because I didn’t know what to do. It was because I knew exactly what to do and didn’t want to do it. The hard conversation with a client about a case that isn’t going the way they hoped. Telling a partner their strategy has a problem. Cutting ties with someone who isn’...

I have watched people mistake civility for softness many times, and it is one of the more expensive misreading’s a professional can make. Being kind to a colleague, a partner, or opposing counsel does not mean you have surrendered your judgment, your position, or your resolve. It means you have chosen a way of operating that will cost you nothing and often buys y...

I ask a version of the question “what lights you up?” to younger attorneys, friends, and clients all the time. This is not what pays the bills, not what your resume says you’re good at, not what your parents or your professors told you made a respectable career. What actually lights you up. Most people don’t initially have an answer to the question because ...

Making the right decision feels like the finish line, but it’s really just the starting gun. I have watched attorneys agonize over which case strategy to pursue, which path to recommend to a client, as if the correctness of the choice itself was the whole job. It isn’t. The decision is only half of it. What happens after you decide, how you execute, how you com...

Dolly Parton passed away at 80, and by last night my feed was already full of thoughtful quotes her fans refer to as “Dollyisms, repeated so many times they are remembered. That happens with people who spend seven decades telling the truth in a way nobody minds hearing. You don’t get quoted that much by accident. You get quoted that much because you kept saying...

We tell ourselves a story about limits, and the story is almost never true. It holds you back even when you have talent or are in the right circumstance. This happens because of people’s fears. Fear is clever that way. It rarely announces itself. It shows up disguised as “I’m just being practical” or “now isn’t the right time,” and because it sounds s...

A few weeks ago, I was standing inside a restaurant by the front door, waiting to be seated with my daughter and extended family in front of me. A man who looked like he might be homeless rode up on a bike, stopped, walked in, and came up quietly behind me. Before I even knew he was there, he put his hand on my shoulder and whispered, “Be the difference you want ...

I learned so much from reading. Which sparks ideas. Try it. That’s really the whole thesis, and I could stop right there, but the old ad line deserves better than a one-sentence drive-by. Reading Is Fundamental was a public service campaign decades before anyone worried about attention spans and doom-scrolling, and it turns out the slogan undersold itself. Readin...

People love to talk about reinvention like it’s some kind of magic trick, like you disappear one day and come back as somebody new. That’s not how it works. You don’t need to become somebody else. Instead, get loud about who you already are. There’s a difference, and it took me years to see it. Reinvention means you must dig past everybody else’s opinion ...