Modernism is out of date in terms of today’s law department design A fad in the mid-20th century for rational design by an omniscient planner, as evidenced by Le Corbusier’s view that “a house is a machine for living in” and the elaborately laid-out but sterile cities of Canberra and…
The teleological fallacy improperly infers causes from outcomes. A good or bad outcome of an initiative by a general counsel does not derive, necessarily, from a good or bad cause, be it an idea, design or implementation. A loss at trial doesn’t mean the legal work done was shoddy. A…
A letter to the editor of the ABA Journal, Aug. 2011 at 7, lambastes the deplorable writing of in-house lawyers. The writer teaches technical writing to corporate employees. He claims that “universally, the people I teach say that they understand all the points I make and try to write this…
To the degree managers don’t make distinctions between concepts, they lose some ability to understand and respond to what is happening. For that reason, value vocabulary – each new word sharpens just a bit one’s ability to discriminate between concepts. The truth is, I relish lumping and splitting: joining concepts…
Well-run legal departments should have goals that have cascaded from corporate headquarters. A mission statement announces some of the durable goals, others might vary from year to year. A practice in a law department is a means to achieve one or more of those goals. To illustrate, a goal is…
Non-stop activity at work – meetings and conference calls end to end with no respite – wears people down. One reason proposed by sleep researchers is that “we oscillate every 90 minutes from higher to lower alertness.” An article in the New York Times, July 24, 2011 at BU8, likened…
Logical positivism, a philosophical movement in the 1920’s and ‘30’s, held that a “proposition not reducible to a simple enunciation of fact can have no intelligible meaning.” The quote comes from Bruce Mazlish, The Riddle of History: the great speculators from Vico to Freud (Harper & Row 1966) at 204.…
A review in the Economist, July 2, 2011 at 74, of a book by William Rhodes, a prominent banker, picked up on Rhodes’ methods to bring a roomful of disparate interests to a consensus: “keeping people awake until they will agree to just about anything, for example, or forcing everyone…
Many people may have heard about Ben Franklin’s T: to help reach a decision, list pros and cons and then cross off those that balance each other out (See my post of April 2, 2006 – Franklin T’s and other decision aids.). Some variations on it appear in Len Fisher,…
A heuristic is a simple rule or set of rules for making acceptable decisions from partial information or in a limited time span. People use heuristics all the time (See my post of Sept. 9, 2008: economics of information explains why we rely on heuristics; March 15, 2009: the affect…