Create Rules that Make You Feel Successful, Not Unsuccessful

I attended a private high school named Cranbrook-Kingswood. There was a lot of competition to get accepted. A couple of years before I started there, the founder of Little Caesar’s Pizza, Mike Ilitch, made a large donation to the school with instructions to build an indoor hockey rink. Mike loved hockey, and his son had also been very good at the sport. I believe he may have also “required” the school, as part of his gift, to have an exceptional hockey team. The school went out and recruited the best hockey players from all over the [Read more]

The Job Search Market in a Bad Economy

I recently had a discussion with a manager of Legal Authority, my favorite job search company for attorneys, about exactly what happens in the market when there is a recession.  Specifically we discussed what occurs in the job market for attorneys—who gets hired and who does not get hired.  Since I have been witnessing this process take place for years, I thought learning the dynamics of it would be interesting. On its most basic level, what happens during an economic recession is that the growth of jobs in the legal community involving transactional work slows down for the most part, while the growth of jobs involving litigation speeds up.  Litigation tends to increase when the economy gets bad, because people are more aware of losses in their business dealings caused by the wrongdoing of other parties, and they sue. Growth in corporate, securities, and real estate-related jobs all typically slows down dramatically during a recession.  This may also be the case for patent law, although there is typically a greater lag time.  Patent work already in the system [Read more]