Time for a Radical Sabbatical?
June 20, 2006 | Filed Under General
I’m slowly emerging from six weeks of infrequent posting and even less frequent working.
This is what Wikipedia says about sabbatical.
Note that these typically year-long work-outs :
“… are often taken by professors, cartoonists like Gary Larson and Bill Watterson, and musicians like Bobby McFerrin.”
No mention of lawyers. I missed the so-called gap year between undergrad and law school. This was perhaps closer to the more obscure hiatus.
Anyhow, I heartily recommend it.
Back to normal subject matter tomorrow.
Apologies to Mr. Larson.
Takes One to Know One
March 25, 2006 | Filed Under General
Publisher and author Cameron Stracher left Taste at the door and laid the gavel to legal bloggers in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.
Summarized here in the WSJ Law Blog, the piece is not apparently link-worthy, even for us loyal subscribers (see if this trick works); Peter Lattman provides some great excerpts.
For those of you who missed it, here’s the substance: legal bloggers are largely frustrated lawyers who want to be the next Grisham, Turow or Scottoline. And writing a book is far different from tapping out a blog:
Quotidian blog entries succumb to what the late author Frank Conroy called “abject naturalism,” the agglomeration of details devoid of larger structure. Without a clear narrative thread, a blog is simply sound and fury, signifying nothing but misplaced ambition.
Ouch. Yes, I had to look it up.
That would have been enough to make the meek among us crawl back into our cubicles. Mr. Stracher, however, can’t resist the full court press:
Good writing, contrary to the advice of your creative writing teacher, is about more than what you know. The world these writers are trying so desperately to flee is not a world any of us would want to visit for more than five pages: the overbearing boss, the dehumanizing office, the mindless drudgery. It might have worked for Kafka, but only after he turned himself into a cockroach.
The mini-bio at the end of this legal blogging steamroller discloses that:
Mr. Stracher is publisher of the New York Law School Law Review and author of “Double Billing: A Young Lawyer’s Tale of Greed, Sex, Lies and the Pursuit of a Swivel Chair.”
Missing from this is that Mr. Stracher more than a law review publisher, he is a Professor at the same law school. My law review didn’t have a publisher, but we did have our own coffee maker.
Given the slant of Professor Stracher’s WSJ blog-bluster, another fact would have been relevant: he is a blogger himself. Maybe not technically a legal blogger, since his blog is entitled “Dinner With Dad.” The subtitle, “A Blog for Hungry Parents,” lets us know that it’s not for everyone. Here’s an entry from yesterday, after putting the WSJ op-ed to bed:
No cooking for me this week — not since the gnocchi. I’ve been traveling for a conference, and an out of town dinner. It’s actually the second week I have failed to make my commitment of dinner at home 5 nights a week. As with the first failure, however, I don’t feel badly; rather, it makes me realize how important these dinners have become, and how diligent I’ve been (for the most part) in making them happen. So I won’t lash myself with a wet udon noodle tonight.
Then the other meatball drops. This is really a blog on its way to a book (like Scoble?):
Meanwhile, as chachlilmum noticed, I have another Taste piece in the Journal today, this one about lawyers and bloggers, of which I am one. What I have found, as I write the book, Dinner with Dad, is that it’s completely different from this blog, and uses almost no material from it. Rather, the blog is a diary filled with the signposts of this year to remind me where I was as I try to create and shape a book based on that year. Will I be successful? Who knows. But at least I’ve had a lot of good dinners.
Welcome to the club, Cameron. Here’s an alternate title for your upcoming book:
“Kafka in the Kitchen.”
The Wired GC — Unscripted
January 30, 2006 | Filed Under Legal Resources, General
Broc Romanek, editor of TheCorporateCounsel.net, has interviewed yours truly on his “Inside Track With Broc” series. I like the concise and straightforward approach Mr. Romanek takes with his “subjects.”
The podcast is here, and Broc also finds time to blog as well.
RIM’s Real BlackBerry Problem
January 10, 2006 | Filed Under In the News, General
Sometimes you can’t win for losing.
Late last year, I was looking at trading up from my beloved “Zoolander” Samsung a530. I went to a local Verizon store to examine the current offerings. As I looked at the new Research in Motion BlackBerry 7130e, two customers in the space of five minutes walked up to me and told me not to get a BlackBerry. The first conversation went something like this:
“Don’t get one of those,” my new special friend sneered.
“Why not?” I asked, “Did you have a bad experience?”
“No, they’re fantastic–work great for email.”
“You didn’t like the phone itself?” I asked.
“It’s a little big for a call; great for sending messages.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“BlackBerry is going out of business next week,” the person said.
“Uh, I don’t think so,” I offered gently. “They are still fighting in court. I hear they even have a workaround if things go bad.”
“No, they’re gone. I’m getting the new Windows Treo when it’s released.”
With that, the person walked away and out of the store.
Sometimes lawyers can fall into the trap of looking at business issues solely in legal terms. We read the latest updates on a dispute, and note with precision how a matter could go on appeal or a retrial. In the BlackBerry imbroglio, we can discern how NTP seems to be gaining the upper hand in court, and yet observe that RIM seems to have the USPTO on its side.
But most current or future BlackBerry customers don’t live in our legal world. They live in a different place. It’s called reality. And there the message that’s being pushed out is that the BlackBerry network is in real danger of being shut down. Maybe soon.
Now I’m a JD, not an MBA, but I have a hunch that this perception can’t be good for BlackBerry.
NTP knows this, and that’s why they are putting the screws to RIM. And RIM’s senior management is very smart, and at some point have to view a distasteful settlement as potentially better than a drawn-out “victory” that results in a consistent drumbeat of IP (and thus network) vulnerability. (See The Economist for an excellent viewpoint).
A GC who has been through a bet-the-company dispute will likely tell you that it’s invigorating for awhile–who doesn’t want to be on the legal cutting edge for months or years on end, and see your every move recounted in the news? (One side benefit is that your outside counsel will probably send you a holiday fruitcake).
But what that same GC sees after a while is that they are counsel to a business that exists to serve customers. And the longer customers hear news of a major legal problem, they may start to look elsewhere before spending serious dollars. And let’s not dismiss the Mystery Shopper’s comments as consumer drivel about what is really an enterprise product–even the higher-end markets are starting to get jumpy.
Give RIM credit, though, their third quarter results still showed market strength. Competitors aren’t standing still, however.
I’d buy a BlackBerry today, even without a settlement (which I expect in the next few months). But I’m not a normal person. I’m a lawyer.
Update (12 Jan 06): The WSJ reports ($) on RIM’s troubles with a story entitled “Bye-Bye BlackBerrys?” Ouch. Mentioned therein is that law firm Dechert LLP is doing a demo using handhelds from HP, that use software from Good Technology via Cingular.
The VC’s Lips are Moving
January 6, 2006 | Filed Under New Services, General
It’s early in 2006, and thoughts of many in business turn to new ventures. And of finding the money to finance them.
So who ya gonna call? One option is your friendly neighborhood venture capitalist. For those of us a long way from Sand Hill Road, we can spend a lot of time looking.
When you finally meet one, you might want to really listen closely to what is said. It may be one of the Top 10 Lies of Venture Capitalists, courtesy of Guy Kawasaki.
Here’s #7:
“This is a vanilla term sheet.” There is no such thing as a vanilla term sheet. Do you think corporate finance attorneys are paid $400/hour to push out vanilla term sheets? If entrepreneurs insist on using a flavor of ice cream to describe term sheets, the only flavor that works is Rocky Road. This is why they need their own $400/hour attorney too–as opposed to Uncle Joe the divorce lawyer.
At the end, Mr. Kawasaki notes that he writing this blog entry from Hawaii. I am very jealous. Never feel sorry for a man who owns a plane–or one who blogs from Hawaii.
Updates (08 Jan 06):To be clear, there are some shining examples of VCs in the blogosphere. Brad Feld is one, and Fred Wilson is another. Mr. Feld had a great series on term sheets last year. As Rob Hyndman notes, Mr. Wilson has a devastating view of the recent disclosure that some telcos may be trying to charge extra for iTunes or Google downloads that go through their systems. Hugh Macleod is also a fan of Mr. Wilson, and offers a great sign-off on the view initially raised by Mr. Kawasaki:
Jason Fried also agrees (with 10 more of his own); Jeff Jarvis dissents.
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