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How successful have firms been in handling the stress of adjusting to the needs of the market, knowing how to present that message to clients, and understanding how a sustained firm culture plays a critical role in their ability to cope? Barbara Malin, Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer at Jackson Walker, LLP, and Jennifer Johnson, CEO of Calibrate Legal discuss the critical role marketing, business development, and firm culture play in times of crisis. Our guests tackle some very tough questions about whether firms know and embody their culture and if cultural bias hampers their ability to succeed. They also highlight how firms have adjusted their business development plans to support clients in light of COVID and anti-racism movements.

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Information Inspirations

Are you feeling inspired this August? We certainly are. From identifying songbirds via neural networks to Deloitte Legal’s AI pro bono project in the UK to pornography suits in Martha’s Vineyard, we share our thoughts on the news of the week.

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Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.

Continue Reading The Geek in Review Ep. 82 – Law Firm Culture and Marketing, and How to Market Law Firm Culture – Barbara Malin and Jennifer Johnson

We’ve been off for a month and we come out swinging for this #Barpacolypse #Diplomaprivilege episode. Each July, thousands of law students and attorneys are required to sit for and pass the bar exam in their states if they wish to practice. The fairness, bias, and necessity of the test has been called into question in the past (Note: the exam is a relatively recent method to determine attorney competency to practice), but COVID 19 may finally force states to do away with the bar examination. The public has called administration of the test into question, due to COVID 19 health concerns, and the response from state and national bar examination boards and state courts have been a hodgepodge of confusion and guarding the status quo.

Today’s guests, Professor Cat Moon from Vanderbilt University, Brian L. Frye, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky College of Law in Lexington, and recent Georgetown Law School Graduate, Stefanie Mundhenk are digging deep to expose concerns and implications surrounding the 2020 bar exam and to examine creative approaches, such as Diploma Privilege and supervised practice, that not only will protect their health but may prove to be a better gauge of attorney competency. And if you think the bar exam is a good gauge, please see an excellent My Cousin Vinny tweet thread.

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Continue Reading The Geek In Review Ep. 81 – #Barpocalypse – Cat Moon, Brian L. Frye, Stefanie Mundhenk

Since Justice Antonin Scalia was not available to be on the podcast, we reached out to Northwestern Law School’s John Paul Steven’s Professor of Law, Andrew Koppelman, and Jackson Walker Labor & Employment attorney, Sara Harris, to fill in. Justice Scalia believed in the concept of textualism when it came to the Court interpreting the law, without allowing one’s personal political bias to play a role. According to Merriam Webster, textualism is “a legal philosophy that laws and legal documents (such as the U.S. Constitution) should be interpreted by considering only the words used in the law or document as they are commonly understood.” The problem, according to Koppelman is that textualism has to be balanced with context. If a Justice were to apply or misapply the context of the issue, then textualism could be made to fit the outcome the Justice wants, regardless of what the text of the law says. In the Bostock v. Clayton Co., Georgia decision, the five conservative judges split 3-2 on how textualism applied to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Title VII issue of “because of sex” discrimination, and gave the LGBTQ+ community a win in the process. We dive deep into the text, and the context of the decision.
Andrew Koppelman is also the author of the recently published book, Gay Rights vs. Religious Liberty? The Unnecessary Conflict (2020).

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Information Inspirations
After a bit of a hiatus, we bring back a few items that inspired us this week, and we hope to inspire you as well.
Greg may be retiring his In Seclusion Podcast at the end of this week (awwww), but there are plenty of legal podcasts to fill the void. Here is a couple.

Continue Reading The Geek In Review Ep. 79 – Text, Context, and SCOTUS’ Textualism in Bostock – Andrew Koppelman and Sara Harris

This upcoming week will be the final week for the In Seclusion Podcast. It’s been a great run, and I hope that you listen to the final episodes. Last week I had a fantastic and diverse group of guests who shared their stories of life during a pandemic from the perspectives of race, changing jobs,…

On March 23, 2020, I launched what I thought would be a three or four-week project. A daily podcast, called In Seclusion, asking legal professionals how they were dealing with the changes resulting from working from home during a pandemic. My fifteen to twenty-episodes ballooned into 60+ episodes. Lawyers, law librarians, law students, law…

I had a chance to talk with a number of people for the In Seclusion Podcast recently who have been holding down the fort, in one way or another, to make sure the wheels of Justice and the economy keep turning. Some of us had to look out for those still caught in the justice system. Some remained in the office to make sure others didn’t need to. Some of us found new ways to provide training and professional development processes. Some of us leveraged the crisis to try new experiments. And some of us made sure that the stories of those struggling are heard.

Monday June 1 – Now’s the Perfect Time To Experiment – Maya Markovich

Maya Markovich, Chief Growth Officer at Nextlaw Labs, thinks that the current environment within the legal industry is the perfect time to rethink the old ways of doing things. The time is ripe to try new processes as well as experiment in ways that we might not normally try because we have somewhat of a safety net to try and fail with less judgment. For those with an entrepreneurial mindset, this might be the opportunity you’ve been waiting for to put your ideas into action.

Tuesday, June 2 – Those Who Kept Our Offices Running – Clare Hart, CEO Williams Lea

Not all of us left the office back in March. Many of our office services staff remained to make sure that the workplaces most of us left behind, were still operational and ready for when we make our way back to a physical office. Clare Hart, CEO of Williams Lea, provided many of the people who were designated the essential employees who kept the lights on in our offices these past few months. I asked her to talk with me about how she worked with her clients to make that happen, all while keeping everyone safe.

Wednesday, June 3 – Will COVID-19 Be the Great Equalizer for the Legal Industry? – Vivia Chen

Vivia Chen is Senior Columnist at ALM, and Chief Blogger for The Careerist. She talks with me about how the pandemic may finally be the impetus to break large law firms from their vanity. With the cultural and societal changes that will most likely come out of the pandemic, there will be no need for lavish law offices or high-end client events to impress those who no longer want to come to your offices or attend your events. There may be a balancing of the scales between competing law firms based more on the substance of the firms’ quality of service than in the quality of their coffee bar. We cover this as well as how women’s needs are handled as we begin reopening offices, and what the real metric of success will be for law firms in 2020.

Continue Reading Holding Down the Fort