One of the hardest skills to develop as an in-house lawyer is knowing how to prioritize your work. It certainly was for me. In the in-house world, everything is urgent, and everything is important, and everyone needs their project done yesterday. We have all heard this “the sky is falling” plea from the business yet deep down we all know it’s bullshit. Not everything is urgent nor important and people need things done in a hurry usually because they screwed around and waited until the last minute to dump it on you – so now it’s your problem and not theirs (and you are the bad guy if it’s not finished on time). This has been true since lawyers first crawled out of the primordial ooze to go in-house. And it will be true long after everyone reading this has left the stage. Which means you have two options: bitch about it or try to fix it. While bitching about it feels good for a few minutes, it does not advance the ball much, i.e., you are still left with too much to do and not enough time to do it. So, my plan (after a little bit of bitching) was to figure out how to solve this ancient conundrum. And as usual, I failed a lot but over time I figured out that the key was learning how to prioritize properly. If I could learn to do that, I could spend most (but not all) of my time working on the right things at the right time. For me the “a-ha” moment was realizing that setting priorities in a vacuum is problematic. For in-house lawyers, prioritization requires a holistic approach with input from lots of sources other than your own inner monologue. Sounds hard, right? It is. But that should not discourage you from trying to crack the nut. If you have 15 minutes or so, you are in luck! This edition of “Ten Things” takes on the challenge of discussing how to prioritize your work:
productivity
Ten Things: The Best Blogs, Podcasts, and Other Media for In-House Lawyers (2025 Edition)
Hello everyone and welcome to the end of 2025. It’s been a jammed packed year for me and the blog. As usual, I like to end the year with my list of the best blogs, podcasts, and “other media” for in-house lawyers. And, no surprise, there is a lot of great content – and a lot of great content generators – out there that deserve your attention. This is a far cry from what was available when I started the “Ten Things” blog back in 2014. It was pretty bleak to be honest. There were few, if any, specific resources for in-house lawyers then. Generally, there were law firm client alerts (meh…) and the Association of Corporate Counsel (not bad, but you have to pay for it…). This in-house counsel “wasteland” was a driving factor in my creating the blog. And, looking back, I have been able to stay pretty true to my goals at the time: free, practical content covering issues that matter to in-house counsel written from the perspective of someone who has sat in the chair. I continue to be source agnostic, i.e., if someone has something good out there, I will share it with you. I am happy to promote anyone’s content that helps get my points across to you or otherwise deserves your attention.
But what was a wasteland in 2014 is now a rain forest! And seeing how in-house lawyer-focused content has exploded is pretty incredible. I hope to occupy my small sliver of this space for a while longer but, as I have said before, my shelf life will expire at some point and I will simply hang up my cleats and enjoy all of the new voices coming online every week. That time is not now and I know I have at least one more year of “Ten Things” in me, so stick around for a bit longer! But enough about that, let’s get onto today’s topic. I am going to structure this post a little differently than my typical list of ten because (as I look over my notes) it just makes more sense to do that – and if there is one thing I firmly believe it is not staying wedded to a particular way of doing things if something else might work better. Similarly, in the past I tried to avoid picking my “best of” from blogs and writers whom I selected in the past. But, I realize that each year is different and someone who is an excellent writer should be recognized in 2025 just as much as in 2023 or 2024.
Lastly, before we start, keep in mind that there is nothing stopping you from making your voice heard. Starting a blog or a LinkedIn newsletter has never been easier. Write about what you know and what you love, do it consistently and, over time, your audience will find you. In other words, if you have something to say, say it (just be respectful and courteous because we need way more of that in the world today). Okay, time to get off the soapbox before it caves in and I get carted off to the hospital. Without further ado, here is my list of the best blogs, pods, and other media for in-house lawyers for 2025:
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Ten Things: An Index to All the Posts (November 2014 – August 2025)
Hello again everyone. I have been working on my annual “cool tech” post, but it’s not ready for prime time as I am still sifting through things. The amount of tech out there (cool or otherwise) is amazing. And since I want to give you my best recommendations, I am going to work on it for another week or so. Instead (and because I am a big believer in keeping to a regular publishing schedule), I thought I would put out a current index to all of the “Ten Things” posts from post number one in November 2014 to last month’s post about things to think about before hitting send. There are a lot of posts and this edition of Ten Things lists them all (which is kind of the point of an index but I digress):
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Ten Things: What to Do When You Are Feeling Overwhelmed at Work
I have been practicing law for a long time. And even now, 30+ years into the game, there are still times when I find myself overwhelmed by everything on my plate. And it’s just as shitty a feeling now as it was as a young associate at a big law firm or as general counsel dealing with – literally – bet-the-company litigation. Fortunately, getting older comes with some advantages (besides the prospect of getting 50% off if I go to IHOP at 4:00 pm for dinner). The biggest (non-IHOP) advantage being that I have developed a lot of different ways to cope with feeling this way. And that’s good because one thing I hear a lot from the in-house lawyers I speak with is that they are having an increasingly hard time dealing with the incredible amount of work that keeps rolling down the hill – like a boulder crushing Wile E. Coyote when his ACME products backfire for the nine thousandth time. Okay, that sounded better in my head, but I know you get the picture because you’ve all been there (and some of you may even be there as you are reading this).
Given the increasing number of in-house lawyers edging ever closer to burnout, I thought I would spend some time talking through what you can do when feeling overwhelmed at the office. I am going to focus on some practical, short-term solutions to help you get out of the muck and onto solid ground in the near term – as that is typically the most pressing need.[1] What I am going to set out is all tested and true, and some combination of these ten things will very likely help you.[2] How much they will help depends on how far you are willing to go to gain some control over the situation (and I know that is not always easy to do). But hear me out and stick with me. Today’s edition of “Ten Things” takes you through what you should do when you feel overwhelmed at the office:
