Interested in improving lawyer well-being? I’ll be interviewed on Clubhouse this Wednesday evening (3/24/2021) at 5:00 pm PDT/8:00 pm EDT by Kevin Kian Hosn, Host of the Employment Law Club. Here’s the official announcement:
Dr. Larry Richard
LawyerBrain LLC
Where to Find Good News — and Why You Should Look for It
by Dr. Larry Richard, LawyerBrain LLC — Monday, April 20, 2020
This morning I joined Cecilia B. Loving as a presenter in a webinar that we presented as part of the NYC Bar Association’s Mindful Mondays series. We called our session Tips…
Tips for Coping with Coronavirus-Induced Anxiety[1]
by Dr. Larry Richard, LawyerBrain LLC
As I’ve spoken with my clients this week, the most frequent request has been for concrete actions that their lawyers and staff can take to cope with coronavirus-fueled anxiety.
Here is a baker’s dozen of self-help tips that I hope will help.
Hello to all my readers. I haven’t posted on this blog site for a couple of years because I’ve been so busy with consulting. The CoronaVirus crisis has given me some breathing room. Here’s an article about how you as a leader can incorporate some important psychological principles into the way you respond to the…
More advice has been written about leadership than just about any other topic in the social sciences. My clients often ask me if I can distill this leadership wisdom into a very short synopsis that’s tailored to lawyers in senior leadership roles. I’ve resisted doing this because there are so many good books on leadership (although very few of them address leadership in law firms). If you want to dig into that literature, start with The Leadership Challenge by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, which in my view is the best and most well written evidence-based summary of the practical principles of how to successfully lead others. For those with less time on their hands, here is my attempt to reduce what we know to a “one-pager”.
…
Continue Reading The Essence of Leadership for Lawyers
These two podcasts were originally published at the Legal Executive Institute website, a ThomsonReuters site. Podcast #1 discusses why change is hard for lawyers, and Podcast #2 discusses what you can do about it.
I was recently interviewed by Gregg Wirth, the Content Manager for the LEI blog site. On July 18th, 2016, he interviewed me about the psychological consequences of incessant change on lawyers and their performance. Here is the introductory blurb from the LEI website for this interview:
“Change is never easy, especially the type of systemic and dramatic change the legal industry is experience in the current market. And lawyers — not known for being open to change to begin with — are sometimes having a very difficult time with how their profession is evolving and how to envision what the lawyer and law firm of the future may look like.
…
Continue Reading Podcasts: The Stress of Change . . . and What To Do About It
In talking to law firm leaders these days, what I am hearing most frequently are their concerns about disruptive change and its impact on their ability to maintain a profitable and competitive firm.
One consequence of this increased focus on change is that rank-and-file partners are being asked to do more with less—to take on…
As I’ve talked with law firm leaders over the past six months, increasingly I’ve heard them describe a troubling list of symptoms that they’re seeing in their lawyers. In their own words, here’s what they’re observing:
…
I’ve posted before about lawyer negativity and low Resilience. Today I want to address a related topic–How stress affects people in general and lawyers in particular. When we experience a stressful situation, we each react differently. Some people cope really well with stress, take it in stride, aren’t knocked over by it, and recover quickly…