Mark Bennett refers to them as “letter lawyers”; they are the lawyers who, with the hopes of securing new clients, send out advertising materials to the people whose names and addresses have been listed on public arrest records. A friend of ours was charged recently with a misdemeanor traffic offense and received over 20 letters in the mail. She …
One of the things I liked best about the Philadelphia public defender’s office – in addition to the camaraderie and sense of shared mission — was the support you got from other lawyers. If you had a legal question or wanted feedback on a possible trial tactic, you could step out into the court hallway or into the office next …
I am pretty good with faces and with names. I have always been impressed — almost flattered — by people who remembered my name after a single meeting, and at one point early in my career, I decided to make a more concerted effort to learn people’s names upon meeting them and to commit those names to memory. The problem, …
Mark Bennett and Brian Tannebaum both announced last week that they have been practicing criminal law for 15 years. While I have nowhere close to this level of experience, I recently celebrated an anniversary of my own. As of this past month, it has been six months since I opened my D.C. law office and one month since I began …
In an entry today called “Don’t Blame Clients For What Lawyers Do,” Scott Greenfield writes of the “huge rift” within the legal profession “between those desperately seeking business and those desperately seeking to provide clients with excellent representation.” As an example of the lawyers on the “seeking business” side of the divide, he cites lawyers who offer free consultations to …
My niece attended her first baseball game when she was four or five years old. After the first inning or so, she announced that she was done with baseball. I am done with Avvo. As reflected on the ABA listserv for solo practitioners, Solosez, other lawyers seem to have all sorts of concerns about this legal networking and referral service, the …
Scott Greenfield of Simple Justice wrote a complimentary piece about this blog earlier this week. While I was very flattered to be described as “one of the newest and brightest additions to the blawgosphere,” Greenfield continued to encourage me to change the name of this blog. Wrote Greenfield in a postscript: “Jamison, attempting to straddle the marketing blawgosphere and the …
There are many things you need to do when setting up your own law firm, from securing business licenses, malpractice insurance and bank accounts to buying furniture, legal research materials, and computer software and equipment. Of all the tasks involved, selecting a logo for my new firm was by far the most enjoyable task. That’s one of the perks of …