ABA Journal

How reckoning with trauma can help you, your clients and the legal profession

Trauma-Informed Law: A Primer for Lawyer Resilience and Healing seeks to suggest not only how lawyers can provide better client service to traumatized people but also how lawyers, law students and judges can deal with their own traumas.

Oct 25, 2023 3:06 PM CDT

Did the ‘BTK Killer’ have more victims? Oklahoma sheriff and district attorney spar over cold case

Imagine your child disappears. The authorities get involved, but your baby is nowhere to be found. Days go by without a word. Days turn into months. Months turn into years. Years turn into decades.

Oct 25, 2023 12:00 PM CDT

Making It Work for Working Moms (and Dads): How law firms can support new parents

There are few events in life more pivotal and significant than becoming a parent, especially for the first time. Yet even in today’s era of post-COVID-19 extravagant employee wellness initiatives that focus on mental health, many employers fail to recognize the importance of providing their workforce with the one benefit that will enhance both employee retention and job satisfaction: a robust parental leave policy.

Oct 24, 2023 2:30 PM CDT

Navigating the future of knowledge and know-how with generative AI

Ari Kaplan recently spoke with Kelly Lake, the CEO and executive director for CEB: Continuing Education of the Bar, a California-focused provider of legal research and continuation legal education.

Oct 23, 2023 8:58 AM CDT

Streamlining Legal Billing: An overview of online payment-processing tools

Updated: This article is the third in a series that explores legal tools for law firms to increase profitability. Previously, we discussed time-tracking software for lawyers and legal billing software.

Oct 23, 2023 8:19 AM CDT

The ABA Well-Being Pledge Turns 5: Progress made, progress needed

Mark Twain once said "action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often." While that general sentiment applies in almost limitless contexts, one centrally relevant to the legal profession is the push to improve mental health and well-being among lawyers and law students.

Oct 23, 2023 8:13 AM CDT

Long-lost trial transcript answers many questions about ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson and baseball’s ‘Black Sox Scandal’

In Joe Jackson, Plaintiff, vs. Chicago American League Baseball Club, Defendant—Never-Before-Seen Trial Transcript, its editors promise that the unearthed testimony settles many persistent questions in baseball’s “who killed Kennedy.”

Oct 18, 2023 8:13 AM CDT

How generative AI is already changing contract review

The potential is there for lawyers to save tons of time when it comes to contract drafting, review and analysis. And as the technology continues to improve, who knows what it might be capable of?

Oct 18, 2023 8:10 AM CDT

Transform your negotiations with a ‘win-win-win’ mindset, says author

An author and associate professor of conflict resolution proposes that we can and should adapt our framing to encompass a “win-win-win” mentality. “A win-win-win model requires paying attention to those usually not at the negotiation table.”

Oct 11, 2023 8:14 AM CDT

Screen Rant: True-crime cable shows can be long on repetition and short on authoritative sources

Recently, I wrote a blog post about 65 artificial intelligence-powered automatic license plate reader cameras in the Oklahoma City area. I try not to be a conspiracy theorist, but it’s hard to think these cameras are solely used to track and observe vehicles instead of the people driving them.

Oct 5, 2023 1:55 PM CDT

A lawyer looks at 100

It’s rare to meet a 100-year-old lawyer. It’s perhaps even rarer to sit with that lawyer and listen as they reflect on their life and career. Alexander Forger, who joined the centenarian club in February, recently gave the ABA Journal that opportunity.

Oct 5, 2023 8:26 AM CDT

Bring some brio to your writing to add clarity, says Bryan Garner

There are many obstacles to clarity: fuzzy thinking, wordiness, abstractness, inept phrasing and plain dullness. It’s often said that an unclear mind cannot produce clear prose. That’s true enough. But the very techniques of good writing can reinforce clear thinking. The more lucidly you write, the more sharply your ideas will come into focus, both for your readers and yourself.

Oct 1, 2023 3:00 AM CDT

Florida lawyer creates the role models he didn’t have through a children’s book

“It’s been my goal to try to change the imagery of what attorneys look like to kids,” says Okoye Morgan Jr., founder and general counsel of The Black Law Company in Tampa, Florida.

Oct 1, 2023 2:40 AM CDT

Former NSA and CIA general counsel has made it her mission to strengthen national security through civic education

Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker has spent decades dealing with national security. Today, Parker’s focus isn’t spies, surveillance or foreign governments. It’s education—specifically, inadequate civic education from elementary school to graduate school. When Americans don’t understand the foundations of their democracy, they are susceptible to misinformation and manipulation, she says. In her view, civic education is a national security imperative.

Oct 1, 2023 2:30 AM CDT

New book explores how qualified immunity protects police in brutality and wrongful death cases

High-profile cases like the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police have led to further growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, calls for defunding the police, police reform and greater police accountability. In her new book, Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable, Joanna Schwartz, a professor at the UCLA School of Law and an expert in qualified immunity, tells the stories of people who have been wrongly harmed or killed by police.

Oct 1, 2023 2:20 AM CDT