Legal Profession – Page 24 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Want to Have a Strong Legal Career? Find a Good Mentor.

Post author:Melissa Love Koenig
Post published:December 17, 2014
Post category:Legal Practice Legal Profession Public

This article in the ABA Student Lawyer Magazine discusses the benefits of having a mentor. A mentor can help you acclimate to your new role as a lawyer. A good mentor will make your life easier both at your office and in external venues. Your mentor can teach you how to communicate effectively with clients, can show you how to handle technical and procedural matters that may otherwise be hard to learn on your own, and can introduce you to top management at your place of employment. Having a mentor can speed up how you learn to be effective in your job.

Chasing Happiness

Post author:Melissa Love Koenig
Post published:September 12, 2014
Post category:Education & Law Legal Practice Legal Profession Public

A July 2014 article in the Wisconsin Lawyer magazine describes a nationwide study about the happiness of lawyers. This study shows factors that correlate with lawyer happiness, as well as those that don’t correlate. Those factors that correlate most strongly are what the article calls internal factors, and the factors that are least likely to correlate are external factors. The internal factors relate to how well a person is able to communicate and interact with others, and the external factors relate to points largely outside one’s immediate control.

The article highlights the following internal factors, which positively influence lawyer happiness:

•Autonomy, or being authentic and having a sense of control over one’s choices (0.66)
•Relatedness to others (0.65)
•Feeling competent in performing one’s job (0.63)
•Internal motivation at work (0.55) – that is, finding the work itself meaningful, enjoyable, and so on, rather than being motivated by external factors, such as pressure from others or needing to impress others
•Autonomy support at work (0.46)
•Intrinsic values (0.30) – these may include personal growth, helping others, and so on, in contrast to such extrinsic values as power, affluence, and others

Of Trump Cards and Lawyering

Post author:Joseph D. Kearney
Post published:August 20, 2014
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Legal Practice Legal Profession Pro Bono Public Seventh Circuit

King of Spades Some of the best and the worst of the legal profession can be seen through Socha v. Boughton, No. 12-1598, decided by the Seventh Circuit this past week. The substance of the case involved the court’s applying — for the first time — the doctrine of equitable tolling to excuse a late filing by a state prisoner in a habeas case. This required a conclusion that the district court had abused its discretion in concluding otherwise, including the catchy characterization that “[t]he mistake made by the district court and the state was to conceive of the equitable tolling inquiry as the search for a single trump card, rather than an evaluation of the entire hand that the petitioner was dealt” (slip op. at 19).

Yet it is the lawyering that I want especially to note.