When her career was getting started in the 1970s, a partner interviewing Roberta "Bobbi" Liebenberg for an associate position asked if she would cry when things went south in court. "Why, do you want me to?" Liebenberg quipped.
One of many lawyers’ worst fears is that a client, opposing party or even a random stranger may try to physically hurt them, often for nothing more than the attorney doing his or her job. In this episode of the ABA Journal's Asked and Answered, Stephanie Francis Ward speaks with Ty Smith, a retired Navy SEAL who founded Vigilance Risk Solutions, a security consulting business that focuses on workplace violence prevention.
The authority to impeach and remove a U.S. president is one of the legislative branch's most powerful weapons. But in the country's history, despite many periods of open hostility between Congress and the executive branch, no president has been removed from office through the impeachment procedure. Why is that?
There are some issues that people with opposing views may never agree on, particularly when one group has significantly more power than the other. But sometimes when an issue is brought to authority figures’ attention, they can be convinced to do the right thing, says Cruz Reynoso.
What do you know now that you wish you’d known at the start of your career? It’s a question that ABA Journal podcast host Stephanie Francis Ward loves to ask, one that can prompt incredible stories. It’s the question that inspired her to create a special series of her Asked and Answered podcast, titled Asked and Answered: Lived and Learned. In this episode, Ward speaks with Andrés Gallegos.
In more than 20 years of talking to well-known attorneys who love their work, I’ve learned that some have great advice on matters both in and outside of the law, and are happy to share what they’ve learned when they think it might help others.
You may be confident of your ability to act with courtesy and professionalism in your home country. But with the array of cultural differences, social mores and business traditions you may encounter while traveling, how can you be sure you’re not offending clients and alienating foreign judges and arbiters?
Lisa Scottoline, C.E. Tobisman and Scott Turow have at least three things in common: They’re all novelists, attorneys and nominees for this year’s Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. In this special episode of the Modern Law Library, the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles speaks with all three authors about their nominated books, their creative processes, and the role they believe lawyers play in society.
Since the late 1990s, Joyce Raby has spent a career bringing technology to legal aid. While a booster and believer in technology's potential to improve America's legal system, her experience is tempering.
"We've been saying for a very long time that technology was going to be the saving grace for the justice ecosystem," she says. "I don't think it is."
This August, lawyers from around the country will come to Chicago for the ABA Annual Meeting. Wondering whether to make the trip yourself?
In this special bonus episode of Asked and Answered, we’re joined by ABA President Hilarie Bass and Marty Balogh of the ABA meetings and travel department.
From 1873 until his death in 1915, Anthony Comstock was the most powerful shaper of American censorship and obscenity laws. Although he was neither an attorney nor an elected official, Comstock used an appointed position as a special agent of the U.S. Post Office Department and legislation known as the Comstock Laws to order the arrests and prosecutions of hundreds of artists, publishers, doctors and anyone else he felt was promoting vice.
Lawyers' mental health has been a topic of increasing discussion and awareness, combined with efforts to help lawyers deal with anxiety, depression and addiction issues. But an aspect of mental health that is sometimes overlooked is body image, and the consequences of body dysmorphia and eating disorders.
After losing both the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 California governor’s race, Richard Milhous Nixon vowed at a press conference: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” and seemed to have written the epitaph to his political career. He left for New York and became a partner in a white shoe law firm. Yet six years later, he would win the White House, in no small part because of that firm.
For litigators accustomed to conducting discovery inside large warehouses surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands, of cardboard file boxes, combing through several forests' worth of paper to find the few relevant documents was like trying to find the needle in the haystack.
Studies have shown that implicit bias is something that affects everyone to some degree. So what steps can legal professionals at all ranks take to make the justice system fairer and more equitable?
In this episode of the Modern Law Library, the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles speaks with Judge Bernice Donald of the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and professor Sarah E. Redfield of the University of New Hampshire School of Law about Enhancing Justice: Reducing Bias, a book published by the ABA.
Newly minted law grads will soon be entering the job market, but where are they most likely to find employment? In this episode of Asked and Answered, the ABA Journal's Stephanie Francis Ward speaks with Valerie Fontaine, founding partner of the legal search firm SeltzerFontaine, about which in-demand areas of law have open job positions—and how law grads can secure them.