This month, we're revisiting some standout conversations from our archives. In this episode, three seasoned trial court judges reflect on the cases that have stayed with them throughout their years on the bench.

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All judges have cases that stick with them and linger in their memories. Sometimes it was because of the high profile of the case, and sometimes an obscure case had personal resonance because of the people or issues involved. In this episode of the Modern Law Library, the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles speaks with Judges Russell F. Canan, Gregory E. Mize and Frederick H. Weisberg, who all sit on the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. The three judges were contributors to and the editors of “Tough Cases: Judges Tell the Stories of Some of the Hardest Decisions They’ve Ever Made.” Canan, Mize and Weisberg share their own stories, including why Canan’s well-meant gesture to avert an injustice in a gun case still troubles him. Mize explains why a child-custody case haunted him for decades, and what happened when he tracked down the now-grown child as he was deciding whether to write about it for “Tough Cases.” Weisberg talks about dealing with the emotional fallout from overseeing a case where a mother had murdered her four children.

Laura Cowan started her career in finance, earning a CPA and working at Ernst & Young and Goldman Sachs. When she decided to go to law school at 35, she knew that she wanted to launch a boutique firm with a practice area that complemented that financial background. Estate law seemed a good fit—but fate threw her a curve ball just as she launched her firm.“I had to turn my entire practice virtual overnight in 2020 in New York City because of COVID,” Cowan tells the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles in this episode of the Modern Law Library. “I moved to Rhode Island to shelter in place with my dad. During that couple of months that I was sheltering in place, I still had to get my law firm running. I had a business to run and bills to pay. So I made everything virtual, and I really streamlined everything. And what I found was that I could make pretty easily $10,000 a month, working just a couple of hours a day.”

She has now leveraged the experience of launching an all-virtual estate-planning practice into a coaching program, 2-Hour Lifestyle Lawyer, to help other lawyers launch similar practices. Her new book, Lifestyle Lawyer Revolution: Live a Life You Love (Without Leaving the Law), is full of tips and advice for building a personalized practice to provide work-life balance for attorneys.

“Now, what we found is that there’s a lot of lawyers who are happy working a lot more than that and are happy earning a lot more, but the name of the business really comes from just this idea that you can still be a really great attorney without working 10 hours a day, and you can make a nice living without working 10 hours a day,” says Cowan.

A key part of not working too many hours is to hire appropriate assistance, even as a solo just starting out, says Cowan.

“What I see a lot of is lawyers that spend too much time in the weeds of executing and doing all these different things that an admin could be doing, and not spending enough time doing what the lawyer should be focusing on,” says Cowan. “So they’re both working too much and not making enough money, which is the worst possible combination.”

Cowan encourages estate attorneys to hold community workshops to help people understand the importance of wills and trusts. She says it’s an excellent way to establish connections that can lead to further business.

“The real reason that people hire us is because of the connection,” Cowan tells Rawles. “And I firmly believe this. People don’t hire you because you’re the best drafter in the world. They hire you because of the way that you make them feel. So use AI and technology behind the scenes to help you get your work done and deliver a really great client experience, but never forget that it’s going to be that that makes them hire you.”

In this episode, Cowan also discusses the benefits of value-based pricing versus the billable hour; attracting the client base you want to target; and how to deal with your biggest frenemy: technology.

Since it was seized from the Knights Templar in the 14th century, the Inner Temple in London has housed acolytes of a different sort: men (and eventually women) who serve as advocates of the law. Sally Smith spent her legal career—and now is spending her retirement—inside the 15 acres that comprise the Inner Temple, now one of the four Inns of Court. Smith has previously written non-fiction books about historical crimes and legal figures. When she decided to turn her hand to writing fiction, the familiar setting of the Inner Temple was the perfect setting for her new mystery novel, A Case of Mice and Men. Set in 1901, mere months after the death of Queen Victoria, A Case of Mice and Men introduces a new (and very reluctant) sleuth to the literary scene. Sir Gabriel Ward KC is happiest either when holed up in his Inner Temple lodgings with his books, or when making a compelling case in front of the High Court judges. A solitary, particular and cerebral man, Ward is not looking for excitement beyond the intellectual. But he finds it early one morning when he trips over the body of the Lord Chief Justice of England, which has been left on the doorstep of his professional chambers. The ancient privileges afforded to the Inner Temple mean that no policeman is allowed to enter without permission, and an aghast Ward is told he will conduct the investigation himself or be at risk of being kicked out of his lodgings. Unused to the world outside the Temple walls, or of conversing with any women apart from his old nanny or his mother, Ward must stretch himself to discover who killed Lord Norman Dunning. All the while, Ward is also wrestling with a knotty legal issue involving the rights to a bestselling children’s book, and will need to exercise all his skills on behalf of his client, the publisher of Millie the Temple Church Mouse. Written by a mysterious author, the book has been a runaway success, bringing throngs of children to the Temple Church and spawning toys, games and an American publishing deal. Now that the author has reportedly surfaced and is demanding her share of the money and control of the intellectual property, what will happen to Millie the Temple Church Mouse? In this episode of the Modern Law Library, Smith and the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles discuss the launch of this new series, which will contain at least three books following Ward’s adventures. Smith describes her own career as a barrister, and why she chose to set the series at the beginning of the Edwardian era. She also discusses the issues of class, gender and the complex world within the walls of the Inner Temple.

In Chambers v. Florida and the Criminal Justice Revolution, historian and former ABA Journal reporter Richard Brust lifts the veil on a case that laid the groundwork for some much more famous civil rights victories. On May 13, 1933, shopkeeper Robert Darsey was robbed and murdered in Pompano, Florida. Four Black migrant farm workers—Izell Chambers, Walter Woodard, Jack Williamson and Charlie Davis—were seized and pressured by the local sheriff into confessing to the murder under threat of lynching. Their appeals eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court through the efforts of some dedicated African American attorneys, and succeeded in 1940. In Justice Hugo Black’s written opinion for the majority, the justice drew parallels between the Jim Crow regime in the American South and the rise of authoritarianism and fascism in Europe. Chambers v. Florida forbade the use of psychological coercion—such as threatening to turn prisoners over to lynch mobs—as well as physical abuse to extract confessions. The court’s ruling declared that the protections of the Bill of Rights extended into states’ criminal cases, and began to change the kinds of cases that made it onto the Supreme Court docket.Brust sees it as part of a trio of cases, which includes Moore v. Dempsey (1923) and Brown v. Mississippi (1936), that led to a “criminal procedure revolution,” he tells the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles. In this episode of The Modern Law Library, Brust discusses the lawyers who worked on the case, most prominently Simuel D. McGill, a Black attorney in Jacksonville. He delves into the generational differences between the Floridian defense lawyers and the attorneys of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund who would go on to win key civil rights battles. He explains why Justice Black would have been considered an unlikely author for this opinion. And he shares what he could discover about the fates of Chambers, Woodard, Williamson and Davis after the trial.

Matthew Dixon, co-founder of DCM Insights, is a researcher who’s spent much of his career studying the shared characteristics and behaviors of successful B2B salespeople. In 2011, he released a study called “The Challenger Sale.” While giving a keynote on his findings at an annual partner retreat, an audience member stood up and challenged him.

“He said, ‘Dr. Dixon, you’ve been talking for 45 minutes about sales effectiveness and salespeople and selling and sales process, and it’s all very fascinating and I’m sure our clients would be very interested in this,’” Dixon recounts to the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles in this episode of The Modern Law Library. “‘And after all, we do a lot of consulting around go-to-market strategy. But what maybe you don’t recognize is that we are partners at our firm. We are not salespeople. In fact, there’s not a single salesperson in this audience. I might go so far as to say we don’t sell anything here.’”

Dixon was taken aback. “What I realized was this world of partnerships, of professional services, of doer-sellers is actually quite a bit different from the world of sales and what we had written and all this research we’d done over the years.”

In 2022, he tackled this population with the Rainmaker Genome Project, a study that became the basis for The Activator Advantage: What Today’s Rainmakers Do Differently, co-written by Dixon, Rory Channer, Karen Freeman and Ted McKenna.

The Rainmaker Genome Project surveyed 3,000 partner-level professionals in 41 firms across law, public relations, accounting and investment banking. About 39% of respondents were lawyers. Each received a score for effectiveness in business development and were analyzed for how they provided client services. And it turns out that partner was correct: What makes a lawyer an effective rainmaker is not necessarily what makes a salesperson effective.

After doing a vector analysis on the data, “what we found was that every one of those 3,000 professionals could be placed into one of five business development profiles,” says Dixon. The five profiles were the expert, the confidant, the debater, the challenger and the activator.

Dixon stresses that the five categories are not about personality. While personalities are immutable, behaviors can be changed.

In this episode, Dixon expands on each type, but the most effective performers in business development were the activators.

Dixon offers practical advice on how to behave like an activator, including the most effective ways to use LinkedIn. Lawyers and other client-servicing professionals can’t just sit back and wait for business to find them, he warns.

“Whether we like to admit it or not, clients are less loyal today than they once were,” he says. “They’re less likely to come back automatically to their incumbent provider. No matter how great the relationship or the value you’ve delivered, they’re forcing us to compete in ways we didn’t have to in the past. So activators want a backup plan. They know today’s great client might not be a client tomorrow, no matter what you’ve done. So you need a backup plan.”

For nearly 30 years, Richard Susskind has written books asking lawyers to envision the future of the law and the legal profession in ways that stretch the imagination. Susskind has been one of the foremost proponents of the transformative potential of technology in legal services. Now, he's asking us to imagine larger transformation still: a world in which AI reigns and humanity faces being sidelined. 

Susskind was an early and enthusiastic booster of the development of artificial intelligence, he tells the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles in this episode of the Modern Law Library. He first became enamored of its potential as a law student in the 1980s, and wrote his doctorate at the University of Oxford on AI and the law in 1986. But the speed and direction of recent advances have given him pause. Will AI be a tool for humanity, or its destruction?

 In his new book, How to Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed, he hopes to help the layperson navigate the issues raised by artificial intelligence, and provoke a global discussion about the ethical and legal implications. Technology is too important to be left only to the technologists, he says. 

While most people are able to see the promise of AI for professions other than their own, Susskind sees a phenomenon he calls "not-us thinking" when most people are asked if their own work could be taken over by an AI system. Lawyers should be careful not to overestimate clients' attachment to having a human lawyer if their goal is simply to avoid legal pitfalls and they can rely on an AI system to accomplish that.

 In this episode, Susskind discusses the promise of AI for increasing access to justice, and talks about some of the ethical decisions that will have to be made with Rawles, who is more of an AI skeptic.

Execution by lethal injection is seen by many Americans as a less barbaric alternative than older methods like hanging, firing squads and electrocution. It is easy to assume that the process must resemble euthanasia procedures for terminally ill people or pets. The reality is very different, says Corinna Barrett Lain, a law professor and death penalty expert.

Lain didn’t initially intend to make the death penalty her primary area of study, she tells the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles in this episode of the Modern Law Library. A former prosecutor in Virginia, Lain did not begin her work out of opposition to the death penalty. But the more she discovered about the realities of the administration of lethal injections, the more she was compelled to demystify the process.

In Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, Lain upends a lot of conventional wisdom about lethal injections. For example, the three-drug protocol used by most states was not a drug cocktail arrived at through scientific research. Rather, in 1977, after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed executions to resume after a 10-year hiatus, Oklahoma medical examiner Dr. Jay Chapman was asked by a state legislator to come up with an alternative to the state’s rickety electric chair. Though Chapman admitted he was “an expert in dead bodies but not an expert in getting them that way,” he proposed combining sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride. “You wanted to make sure the prisoner was dead at the end, so why not add a third drug,” the book quotes Chapman as saying. “Why does it matter why I chose it?” In contrast, an overdose of a single drug, pentobarbital, is what is commonly used by veterinarians in animal euthanasia.

“Lethal injection is not based on science,” Lain writes. “It is based on the illusion of science, the assumption of science.”

In this episode, Lain and Rawles also discuss botched executions, shady sources used by states to procure the drugs used for lethal injections, and how Lain’s scholarship has impacted her views of capital punishment as a whole.

Jorge Goldstein entered the fields of science and law at a time of immense change for them both. In the 1970s, huge strides were being made in biogenetics and microbiology, and in the 1980s, the intellectual property community was being asked to answer some giant questions they raised, like: How can you describe life, legally? Can a living being be patented? Who owns the material from your body?

The 45 years since the groundbreaking 1980 case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty, in which the U.S. Supreme Court decided that living organisms could be patented, have been an intensely busy time for microbiologists, biochemists, genetic researchers, and the patent lawyers who serve them. Goldstein, who holds a PhD in chemistry from Harvard University and a JD from George Washington University Law School, has been on hand to witness and help shape many of the resulting debates.

In Patenting Life: Tales from the Front Lines of Intellectual Property and the New Biology, Goldstein weaves stories from his own life and practice with the fascinating histories behind some well known medications, lesser known scientists, and groundbreaking court cases that will shape future scientific ventures. In this episode of the Modern Law Library, he and the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles discuss the book and the fascinating career he’s had.

In the book, Goldstein explains many of the scientific developments behind technologies like CRISPR in a way that lay people can understand, while offering humanizing looks at the quirky and sometimes flawed scientists who made those discoveries. Large moral and ethical questions are raised about how technologies are developed, commercialized and put into practice, and he does not shy away from the discussions. He also offers his perspective on how patent law can be improved to fund further scientific advancements while also protecting innovation.

Goldstein and Rawles discuss key cases that helped shape genetic research, and some of the major changes he’s seen in legal theory over his career. They also discuss tikkun olam, a concept in Judaism about how our actions can repair and improve the world. It’s something Goldstein feels is a proper focus for science and for law, and they discuss two of the pro bono projects he has worked on with indigenous communities in which he can use patent law to protect their rights.

Finally, Goldstein offers advice to young scientists and attorneys who are interested in practicing in these fields, and shares his opinion on what artificial intelligence could mean in the patent law sphere.

Peak performance in high-stress environments. It’s the goal for the basketball players taking the court during March Madness, but just as much for players on a different kind of court. Lawyers can and should learn a lot from elite athletes, says Dr. Amy Wood.

In this episode of the Modern Law Library, Wood shares her insights with the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles. Wood, a clinical psychologist, has focused her career on attorney wellness. She is the author of the new book Lawyer Like an Athlete: How to Up Your Game at Work and in Life, published by the ABA’s GPSolo Division. Wood first developed Lawyer Like an Athlete as a CLE program, sharing tips on achieving physical and mental wellness, as well as preparing lawyers to maximize their work performance.

There are four characteristics Wood identifies as being shared by star athletes and star attorneys: exquisite self-care, a grounded perspective, “nourishing diversions” and thriving relationships. Without attending to those elements, she says, it’s difficult for lawyers to sustain themselves in a high-stress profession.

Many lawyers enjoy extreme solo sports, like marathon running. But don’t forget about team sports. There’s much you can learn about personal performance from elite athletes, but it’s just as important to integrate lessons about team performance, Wood says. Are the people on your “team” helping you perform at your peak?

Wood and Rawles also discuss the importance of striving for a “fan’s perspective”; the importance of visualization; the cycle of workouts and recovery days; and five signs that it’s time to reach out for professional assistance.

What if we are asking the wrong questions when selecting American judges? Mark Tushnet thinks our current criteria might be off.

“We should look for judges who are likely to display good judgment in their rulings … and we shouldn’t care whether they have a good theory about how to interpret the Constitution as a whole—and maybe we should worry a bit if they think they have such a theory,” the Harvard Law professor writes in his new book, Who Am I to Judge? Judicial Craft Versus Constitutional Theory.

In looking at what qualities were shared by great Supreme Court justices, Tushnet identified five he thinks were of especial importance:

In this episode of The Modern Law Library, Tushnet and the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles discuss how he thinks people should be evaluated for judicial positions; his experience as a clerk for former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall; what makes a well-crafted opinion; and why he thinks any overarching theory about the Constitution will fall short.