If you’ve found yourself in frustrating contract negotiations with foreign lawyers, read on for some tips about how to effectively handle such negotiations without losing your head. In particular, you will learn about:

• How to manage bizarre behavior and emotions in the conference room,

• How to respond to requests for suspicious provisions, and

• How to deal with overly-complex provisions from your counterparts.

Stefanie had it all. She was recently promoted to partner. She had a wonderful team of dedicated associates. And, the ranking agencies were describing her as some sort of up-and-coming überlawyer.

But then, things got weird...

Dear Slavic Colleagues,

Over the years, I’ve often been asked by Slavic lawyers to help with the problem of omitting articles in their writing. If you find an associate struggling with this issue, let me recommend some software solutions.

Read on for five tips on how to coach your associates to achieve meaningful improvement in their writing.

The Problem

Lawyers oftentimes torture clients by hiding their actions outside of verbs. For example:

Dear New Associate,

Let me begin by congratulating you for not only successfully escaping from law school but also for landing a job at your new law firm! You’ve worked hard to reach this stage, and I’m sure you would like to continue on your path of achieving excellent results.

To help you on your way, let me share with you some survival insights on how to use your writing as a tool for impressing your supervisors.

In this post, you will learn how to stand out in online meetings by (i) using your eyes to comfortably connect with your audience, (ii) leveraging the value of your facial mimicry to avoid sending mixed messages, and (iii) utilizing your upper body gestures to convey energy and confidence towards your audience.

In this article, you can learn about how to harness the power of Chat Gpt to define ambiguous legal terms precisely, avoiding potential disputes and ensuring clarity for all parties involved.

In our Precision Pitching course, the students learn to effectively pitch themselves in meetings with clients. Although our students are enthusiastic with our consultative approach to pitching, they frequently raise questions about how to actually get meetings with clients. Or, to be more blunt, they say the following:

Why would clients want to meet with lawyers? We tend to be boring and have little interesting to say.

If you find yourself facing the same problem, you can find below some tips on how to be interesting for clients.

Tom felt like his law firm was driving him crazy. Despite his attempts to make everyone happy, nobody was, including him.

His supervisor kept tearing up Tom’s contracts with a red pen to highlight all his stupid mistakes.  So, Tom tried to please his supervisor by slowing down and being more thorough.

But, his practice head kept warning him that he was spending too much time on his drafting and that this was causing the firm to lose money from write-offs. So, Tom tried to please his practice head by speeding things up.

But then, he got the red pen again. And then, he got the lectures about write-offs again. And now … you got the picture.

How can lawyers make their writing more sophisticated by taking advantage of the Apple Effect?

What can lawyers learn about selling their services from Alec Baldwin’s famous “brass balls” speech?

It’s bad enough that most lawyers hate the concept of networking. But, even worse, when we drag ourselves to sit through a networking event, we oftentimes fail to capture the value of such events by not following up effectively with our new contacts. (And, NO, sending a lazy Linkedin request to connect is not effective networking.)

In this post, you can read about how to use Chat Gpt to help you capture the value of your networking.

On November 16, we held our Profitable Pricing course. In this course, we encouraged lawyers to embrace Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs) not only to escape the downward pressure against billable rates but also to uncover cool projects with clients (e.g. becoming an outsourced legal department).

For your convenience, we’ve summarized some key takeaways - both from us as well as from our students.

Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ve probably figured out that Chat Gpt might be an awesome solution for the complex and time-consuming process of drafting contracts. I use the word “might” because some serious contract drafting experts are warning to stay away from Chat Gpt.

As law firms face shrinking profitability due to their focus on billable hours in a world where AI makes hours disappear, maybe it’s finally time to seriously embrace alternative fee arrangements (AFAs). Although you may have concerns that AFAs are just a scam driven by clients to push down on law firm income, in reality, you will discover that AFAs are a major tool for driving law firm profitability due to their ability to enhance efficiency, boost client satisfaction, and promote revenue predictability.

You can find below 10 reasons why AFAs can help you with your profitability challenges:

If you’ve spent time on Chat GPT, you’ve figured out that it’s important to provide AI with the right kinds of instruction prompts. Otherwise, you just end up with a bunch of nonsense that looks good, but is worthless in practice.

Why is it that we haven’t learned the same lessons when working with flesh AI (a.k.a. associates)? I am frequently amazed by the supervisor instructions given to associates that simply don’t work. As a result, the supervisors end up doing the writing tasks of the associates, and later bitch about it to us.

In the first part of this series, I explained how to identify problematic run-on-sentences as well as two tech tools for identifying them (Microsoft Word’s Style Checker and Expresso).

In this second part, I will explain how to quickly fix these sentences as well as a tech tool to help you speed up the process.

When I set up a legal writing course for associates, I am frequently asked by US or UK partners to make sure that the course addresses “run-on sentences”. These are the types of sentences that exhaust readers by running on, and on …. and on.

When I tell my students about this request, they sometimes get a confused look on their faces because:

• the concept of run-on sentences does not exist in their native language; and/or

• their culture’s legal tradition embraces long sentences.

In this article, you will learn about (i) how to identify run-on sentences in your writing and (ii) some tech tools to help you identify them more easily and quickly. (In Part Two, I will explain (i) how to fix these sentences and (ii) some tech tools to help you with the process.)