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Side Bar: One Year
I haven’t done a side bar in a while. Things are just so routine, working from home, and also tumultuous, that it’s hard to keep track! But I did want to take a moment to acknowledge this milestone. I survived one year in city hall! And holy wow–what a year. I can’t even get into the nitty gritty of it, but just the growth (along with the growing pains) has been tremendous. Early on, a colleague who has been there for a really long time told me the work would flow between the ridiculous and the sublime and I think that captures exactly what it is like to be in…
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Summer Series: Trusting Yourself
Wow. In what I hope is the wildest summer of our lives (because no one needs a 2020 repeat), I am still sad to see this year’s Summer Series come to an end. But the end of something isn’t always bad, especially when we get a gem like today’s guest writer. Genesis Palma is a law school grad who planned to grow this summer. And she did just that. I am so excited to share her piece, which discusses coming to terms with the damage law school can cause, taking a moment to reflect on what is best for you and our mental/financial help, and always, always recognizing the strength…
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Harnessing Growth Mindset to Advance your Career
Happy New Year (and yes, this isn’t a mirage, it’s actually a new post)! I’m hoping everyone is having a great start to the month and is easing back to work/preparing for the new semester nicely. Because January is always all about new beginnings and progress, I wanted to talk about the importance of your mindset and how you view your abilities and skills. Likely, many have heard about growth mindset and the importance it plays in your ability to succeed in school and career. I probably first heard about this in undergrad as a Sociology major, but it didn’t really resonate with me until many years later when I…
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Summer Series: Learning from the Past
Our Summer Series continues! This series highlights different Latina students and law grads as they embark in their summer jobs and/or bar prep all across the country. We hope to provide a variety of work experiences, options for a healthy work-life balance, and general motivation through different guest contributors to help you to take charge of your summer and professional goals! Today, Linette, a rising 2L in California, describes how she’s using lessons learned from her internship last summer to start her current children’s rights focused internship on the right foot! Before starting law school, I had a lot of fears and insecurities about my abilities. I had heard “horror” stories of people having…
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Sidebar: Where to Even Start
The title says it all. I have been hemming and hawing since the beginning of the year about work. I didn’t really know where I was heading and I was a little nervous about the outcome. Let me start at the beginning. For New Year’s I made getting a new position one of my goals. I had hoped it would be something new at work, but wasn’t sure and I was pushing myself that if nothing was coming I would start looking for other work outside my agency. I wanted to stay but knew that even though I loved my agency, my clients, my team, and the work that I…
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Play to Win: Using Respectability Politics as a Tool
I think one of the biggest things I struggle with here is how much I seem to push assimilation and accepting business norms. I dislike that I do it because when we abide by certain business norms set by those in power, we may end up believing (or portraying to others) that those norms are better than our own cultural standards. Or worse, we fall into a trap of believing that we’ll be accepted by those in power. I try to find a balance of discussing how most norms and ideals are created and enforced to advance those in power while at the same time, I take up a lot…
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Working Goals
Not to add more things on your plate, but if you’re on the resolution bus then I strongly encourage adding goals for work on your to-do list. When you start practicing, it is so easy to get into a day-to-day routine. Actually, that’s normal and what most people want! But the risk in this is that there is nothing that breaks up this monotony and suddenly you find yourself three or four years in with only minimal increase in skills or progress on your career goals. It bears repeating the career growth requires active participation, so why not take the opportunity of a new slate to figure out what you…
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What Kind of Lawyer Will You Be?
Some of us know going into law school what we want to do, but many others just know we want to be a lawyer without a specific idea of the area or type of law we want to practice. And going through law school can make things even blurrier because suddenly we’re so overwhelmed with feeling miserable that we just want to get through it. But regardless of whether you’re in school with a laser-like focus about what you want to do or are just kind of going through the curriculum, hoping something sticks–there are two things you have to do to help form the lawyer you will be: 1)…
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Make Yourself Heard: Increasing Your Skills as a Litgator
This article about a 96 year old judge making a rule to help encourage women attorneys to speak up more often in court is making the rounds. It’s a great piece and great example of how people in power can use their position to make a difference. Lost in the discussion (maybe ironically) is that the catalyst for this was a mentor/friend of the Judge’s; retired judge, Shira Scheindlin. Judge Scheindlin wrote an Op-Ed earlier this month about just this issue: the dismal percentage of women litigators speaking before the court. Judge Scheindlin discusses a study she conducted in New York that asked judges to observe when and how often…
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Old & New: Balancing Your Idealism with Your Senior Colleagues’ Experience
I joke that I am #foreveryoung and will always attend young alumni events (though I think in all honesty I probably have one more year left on that 🙁 ). Regardless, of how I feel, the truth is that I’m not a super young attorney. Yes, I’ve been practicing for less than ten years, but I’ve done enough of the same thing to really know what I’m talking about, which has led to an interesting situation when I interact with younger attorneys. Often new attorneys will come, bright-eyed and idealistic, and present ideas that I know will not work. And it sucks to be a Debbie Downer; to lay out…