• Legal Practice

    Mastering the Business Lunch

    One summer I participated in a program where I interacted with a lot of private attorneys. This resulted in a lot of business lunches, which was fun, but there were also some cringe-inducing moments. I remember one lunch where a coworker’s main focus seemed to be figuring out how many glasses of wine he could drink. This wasn’t a lunch among friends or even same-level staff, but rather with clients and supervisors! Needless to say his behavior ended up being super awkward. Now that it’s summer (though it’s constantly raining here in Chicago), there are more opportunities to step outside the office for networking lunches, and of course, if you…

  • Issues,  Legal Practice

    Promoting Yourself in Performance Evaluations

    Filling out evaluations is usually no fun.  It can be time-consuming, anxiety-inducing, and can result in criticism you weren’t expecting.  But some C-level executive decided evals were a good idea, and now most of us have to do it.  Let’s just be happy that Microsoft’s former method of evaluating on a curve (!) hasn’t gone mainstream.  When you have a chance to do a self-evaluation, it’s really important that you take advantage of highlighting your accomplishments as much as possible. The reason being that you’re likely the only one that is best suited to describe everything you’ve done well. Sometimes it’s difficult to do it, but we have to get used…

  • Issues,  Law School

    Slaying Goliath: Paying for Law School

    The biggest hinderance to applying, attending, graduating from law school is: money.  It is ridiculously expensive.  unnecessarily so, and I do believe a huge reason why the cost is so high is an attempt to keep the status quo in order. Because who suffers more by not having all types of capable and intelligent people earn these degrees?  Not just the students that can’t afford to attend the school, but also those communities in which the people reside–but that is a post for another day. While there is no excuse for the high cost, there doesn’t seem to be any real movement to make this an affordable degree.  If you’re going to start law…