All decisions, including those made by in-house attorneys, are based on values and involve an implicit or explicit trade-off of values. That being true, attorneys will make better decisions if they have a methodology for addressing the values inevitably present in a situation. According to MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol.…
If you are in in-house litigator and you sit down to hammer out a settlement with your opponents over a meal, be sure to serve plenty of tryptophan. It turns out that levels of serotonin, a brain chemical that seems to control our reactions to unfairness, depends on tryptophan levels,…
MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 49, Summer 2008 at 11, offers some good ideas about brainstorming (See my posts of Nov. 28, 2005: mind-map software helps with brainstorming sessions; Dec. 9, 2005: the Delphi technique; Oct. 30, 2006: suggestions and two other points: have rules and push participants to prepare…
You may feel smarter just from reading this post! Much research is underway regarding how our brain operates and what that means for how we can effectively use them (See my posts of Aug. 20, 2006: neuro-economics; and Aug. 16, 2006: another aspect of brain physiology.). I predict that neuro-lawyering,…
We learn from the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 85, May 2008 at 52, that stress causes the body to produce hormones called glucocorticoids. Those hormones over time wreak particular damage on cells in the hippocampus, a part of the brain that is deeply involved in learning. For example, stressed people…
If you need to know something from a person who is more knowledgeable than you, such as a highly specialized partner at a law firm or your colleague in the law department, there is some pointed advice from Intelligent Life, Spring 2008 at 27. Don’t waste your time gathering reams…
How much and how quickly you can recall facts is one way to distinguish yourself as an in-house lawyer. Along with your time, your memory is your stock in trade. Fortunately, techniques exist that let you sharpen your memory (See my posts of April 22, 2008: cognition-enhancing drugs; April 18,…
Sleep researchers have found that power-napping, and even dozing for as little as six minutes, is enough to significantly enhance memory. “Several recent studies of sleep and sleeplessness show that slumber is especially important for doing clever stuff with information, such as extracting the gist of what has been learned,…
The fewer the lawyers in a law department the more likely they are to be generalists. Yet specialization is the trend today, a trend that some investigators argue has neurological underpinnings. Research presented in the Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 31, Summer 2007 at 82, shows that the more people know, the…
Quantitative approaches to case evaluation have many proponents (See my posts of Oct. 24, 2005: decision-tree risk analysis software; Feb. 8, 2006: a step to prepare for mediation; Jan. 17, 2006: decision analysis; and June 18, 2007: belief nets compared to decision trees.). To estimate the risks of winning and…