Pay attention to not only to what you say but also how it looks.

Typography might sound like the kind of thing that only skinny hipsters with thick rimmed glasses would talk about with words like kerning, and en dash, and pica--not a fuzzy critter that lives on rocky slopes--but it is really a useful thing for everybody to be aware of.  If it hurts to look at what your write, no one will pay attention long enough to get your point.  This is a battle in resumes and cover letters as well as legal pleadings and documents.

Fortunately, the internet has come to the rescue in the guise of attorney Matthew Butterick with Typography for Lawyers (also available in dead tree version). I cannot say I agree with everything he says, but then I have been known to wear thick rimmed glasses...

(via Swiss Miss)

Success and Happiness

Why I don’t care about success

"So forget about “success”, and just find joy, passion, love, awesome-ness right now, in this moment. *That* is a success you can achieve, without any self-help course, without any method. Just go out and do it."

via: Zen Habits

Grammar can be fun!

Bad grammar is the bane of pedantic internet trolls and the source of 47%* of those soul-sucking blog comment that I detest.  Grammar can also be the bane of the cover letter and the cause of your application promptly reaching the soul-sucking recycle bin**, so it is important to pay attention and, when in doubt, check the rules.

Fortunately, sometimes the internet gives something back; when it comes to grammar those gifts from the internet can be lovely.  You can check out some fun web comics from theoatmeal.com where you can learn about grammar along with information about kittens riding goats, bacon hats, hairy knuckles, out-drinking pandas, the dangers of leapfrogging a unicorn, and bears:

• learn about semicolons,
• learn about i.e.,
• learn about words you might be misspelling, and
• learn about apostrophes. 

If you are after grammar advice on a variety of topics, I like

• Paul Brian's Common Errors in English Usage*** and
• Grammar Girl.

*Not scientifically verified.
**The recycle bin only sucks souls when your application ends up there, at all other times it is the source of light and joy in the universe, much like a double rainbow or kittens.
***Also available in book form. I remember when all we had was the internet in book form, we called it the library, and we used Ethel the reference librarian instead of Google...oh days of yore.

Interviewing skills, or "This one time I ..."

The hot trend in human relations for at least the last decade has been using behavioral questions in interviews. Those are questions that get at your skills and experiences by seeking information about a specific time you encountered difficulty or managed a heavy work load or showed whatever skill the employer is looking for. Reports are starting to arrive that law firms have begun to rely on behavioral questions more in order to confront a growing applicant to position ratio.

Many businesses adopted this practice years ago, and the trend applies to the public sector as well. I once participated as part of a panel interviewing candidates for a state investigatory position, and behavioral questions were among the bureaucratically generated questions we had to ask in an identical manner of each applicant.

So, what should the hopeful interviewee do? As always, prepare. Prepare to answer questions about planning and organizing skills, decision making and leadership, taking calculated risks and sometimes failing, and effective communication and working with people from disparate backgrounds.

While you are at it, pay attention to how your answer is formed. The more specific you can be the better; employers are looking for an example of an event that happened to you and not a broad overview of best practices. Focus your attention on the context, your actions, and the results, or if you like the word what: what was going on, what you did, and what came of it.

Keep in mind that some behavioral questions ask for situations where things did not go your way. It is important with these questions about negative situations to end with a positive; there is always a lesson to be learned, and if you find that lesson, even a story of a bad experience can be an example of building character and skill.

For more information, check out the ABAJournal story and follow the link in that article to a 2005 reprint from the NALP bulletin.

Everybody does it, even the judges, so why don't you?

Last week in an article on the Law.com Legal Blog Watch Blog, they reported on a number of judges with LinkedIn profiles, including five US Circuit Court Judges. Like it or not, between Facebook and LinkedIn more and more social and professional interaction is taking place online, so why not just dive in, talk to people, and share your life online?

Well, as an earlier article on the Legal Blog Watch Blog shows, even the best of us, judges included, can get carried away with the social networking. There are, of course, the issues of sharing too many of your youthful indiscretions too freely. (I am personally thankful that, even though photos of me--both strangely messianic and less flattering--are freely available online, I came of age in the era before ubiquitous camera phones and Facebook; otherwise I might regret some of my wilder days, or that toga party when I was in law school...) But beyond unseemly photos of your last kegger, there are more complex social networking considerations for lawyers and law students.

The judge who got reprimanded for using Facebook fell into the trap of commenting without enough thought. You see the Judge's Facebook Friend was an attorney who had an active case in front of the judge, and Facebook comments can be ex parte communications; hence, a trial no-no and a reprimand. The judge did some other mis-deeds like Google a litigant and read the litigant's online poetry into the record, but this story is about caution in social networking...

So you might do well to network in the electronic world possibly even finding a judge to be your friend, but you should not leave your reason and ethical considerations at the keyboard.

William is wondering if he will be destroying his career with his status message

The weblogs and even the NY Times have been all Henny Penny concerning a beta and possibly broad changes to how people can control privacy on Facebook, but the reality sounds much more subdued than the initial end of June panic. Despite reality being less frightening than some have predicted, this is a good time to do a social networking privacy checkup.

What is going on with Facebook and privacy?

Fecabook rolled out a beta of the new publisher (that box where you enter your status message, links, and other things) that allows people to select the privacy level they want on a per post basis. A combination of the fact that one of the options is to make your post visible to everybody, and the fact that the beta was only provided to people who previously set their status to visible by everyone caused some fear that we would all be soon living in a brave new Facebook naked of privacy settings and having to remember to lock away every single post. From what I can tell, past the hype, your default settings will remain if/when the new publisher goes beyond the beta tests. So let us checkup on your defaults.

Defaults?

In Facebook you can control your default privacy settings on several elements of your profile. You can even partition your friends into lists and specifically block certain profile elements from certain friends; this can be useful for separating things you want professional colleagues to see from all your friends/acquaintances/angry towns people who remember that wicked awesome toga party you once threw--no matter what you think, there are photos, and they will be posted one day. Facebook has detailed help on privacy settings. Pay attention to friends of friends and network settings thinking hard about who this might include.

Do not forget the search settings.

Separate from your default privacy settings are your search settings. These control what shows up when people search for your name. It is worth noting that one of the items you can turn off in your search settings is the listing of the pages you are a fan of. If you tighten down all of your other privacy settings and forget this one, everyone will be able to see that you are an enormous fan of Emo Sponge Bob and judge you based on that revelation.