in-house lawyer

Ten Things: Best Blogs (and Other Media) for In-House Lawyers (2024 Edition)

Hello everyone and season’s greetings from Dallas, Texas!  I would like to wish you all a terrific holiday season and all the best for 2025.  If you are looking for some fun in January (22-24), please join me and a host of others who will be presenting at Laura Frederick’s (of How to Contract fame) ContractsCon 2025!  I will be there discussing data privacy clauses, but the agenda is stuffed with lots of great speakers and topics. I hope to see you in person in Las Vegas in January (and please find me and say “hi”).

So, here we are in year 11 of the “Ten Things” blog.[1]  Like always, my last post of the year features all the other people you should be reading (or listening to) as part of your day-to-day in-house life. The hard part is choosing just ten to highlight for you.  And I have made it even harder on myself because, unlike past years, I have decided to weave in a few previous winners because they have consistently held up year after year and I want to make sure anyone reading this post is aware of them.  But, if you are interested in all of the past winners, you can start by reading last year’s edition of “Best Blogs (and Other Media) for In-House Lawyers.” I do, however, generally try to feature mostly new voices for you to check out and this year is no exception.  In case you were wondering, there is no particular order to my list (number ten is just as good as number one – I am just typing this up in whatever order I have jotted things down in my notebook or various scraps of paper lying around the “Ten Things” world headquarters).

I know you are excited to find out who made this year’s list so let’s get on with the 2024 edition of Best Blogs and Other Media for In-House Counsel!

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Ten Things: Solving Problems (It’s Different In-House)

One of the reasons I wanted to become a lawyer was to solve problems.  The added bonus was the expectation that someone would pay me (a lot) to read and write stuff to help solve those problems.  How cool is that?[1]  Law school and then working at a law firm for a number of years post-graduation were both fantastic training for how to solve problems.  Well, how to solve legal problems.  When I finally got my chance to go in-house, I learned pretty quickly that all my “legal-problem-solving-skills” were useful but many of the problems I was called upon to help with involved only a small amount of legal-ness and a lot of “other stuff” – I’ll just call that other stuff “business issues” to save time (but if you work in-house, you know exactly what I am talking about).  Unfortunately, this meant that a lot of what I thought I brought to the table was useful only part of the time, i.e., solving problems as an in-house lawyer is very different from solving them as an outside lawyer.  Skip forward a few centuries, and I can proudly say that I have been a lawyer for a long time with most of that time spent in-house – I survived the crucible of fire and walked away with my sanity (and all of my toes).  Some don’t.[2]  Why?  Because, even now, one thing I consistently see from many in-house lawyers is an inability to grasp the very real difference between what the company needs from them when it comes to solving problems vs. what it needs from outside lawyers.  Many lawyers (in-house or law firm) tend to fall back on the mind-numbingly rigid dogma[3] of treating every problem like a law school exam.  More troubling, even when they know it’s not a legal problem they are trying to solve, they simply don’t know the way forward and fall back into the same pit of despair and anguish.  Fortunately, I screwed this up enough times over the decades (and am still coated heavily in despair and anguish) that I can share a little knowledge with you here today.  That’s right.  This edition of “Ten Things” discusses something I bet no one has raised with you before — how to solve problems as an in-house lawyer:

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Ten Things: How In-House Lawyers Can Survive and Thrive in Times of Uncertainty and Change

I do a lot of speaking with and presenting to in-house lawyers and legal departments.  It’s something I really enjoy doing because I get to share my “wisdom” with everyone (which is just a fancy word for “oldness”).  By this I mean I have been around a while and have spent most of my working years as an in-house lawyer.  And, like anyone who has completed the solar elliptical as many times as I have, I’ve dealt with a lot of different things as an in-house lawyer – some good, some bad, and some still defying categorization years later.  On the bad side of the continuum, I was there for the first internet tech bubble (and the second), along with the mortgage meltdown crisis.  I was in the travel business right after 9-11.  I have been through natural disasters, multiple layoffs, budget cuts, reorganizations, mergers, acquisitions, sales, going private, going public, and all the rest of it.  I oversaw bet the company litigation, where literally the livelihoods of 10,000+ employees depended on my team not losing a piece of litigation.  And most terrifying, I had a front-row seat for the incredibly shitty ending to Game of Thrones.  That is a season of television I can never get back.  Damn you, HBO.  Damn you to hell!  Sorry, I got off on a rant there.  Allow me to (cough) refocus.

So, here we are again.  Things feel shaky with the economy and there is a good bit of unease out there in the business world and, therefore, in the in-house legal departments that serve those businesses.  I wrote about some of it last month in my post on things to watch out for in 2023.  But even more so, over the past few months, I have been consistently asked to talk about/present on how in-house lawyers can succeed in an environment of change and uncertainty.  So much so that a couple of nights ago (as I was NOT watching HBO), I started putting some real thought into the question and realized that I have a lot to say about it (shock!).  So, this edition of “Ten Things” will discuss some of the things in-house lawyers (and legal departments) can do to survive and thrive in times of change and uncertainty:[1]

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Ten Things: In-House Lawyers and Imposter Syndrome

A while back, I wrote about how in-house lawyers can reduce stress in an otherwise pretty stressful job.  I picked the topic because it was an issue that had come up several times when speaking with in-house lawyers.  I am going to continue that trend and take up another topic that comes up frequently.  The topic is “imposter syndrome.”  I can imagine that a lot of you reading this instantly took note and said, “I know exactly what he means!”  Others may be thinking that I am going to discuss all those cool fake masks in the Mission: Impossible movies.  Regardless of which side of the line you fall, it is an important topic and one worth discussing because, as you will see, almost everyone deals with it at some point in their career.  I certainly did.  The important thing, in my opinion, is recognizing what’s going on when it hits and knowing how to escape its clutches.  This edition of “Ten Things” does just that, i.e., what is it and how do you move past it:

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