Legal Talk Network

What are privacy policy best practices?

What are the differences between privacy policies, cookie policies and terms and conditions?

How can you ensure you’re compliant with the correct policies in your country?

Donata Stroink-Skillrud is an attorney licensed in Illinois and a Certified Information Privacy Professional. She is the President and Legal Engineer behind Termageddon, a SaaS that has generated thousands of website policies and kept them up to date with changing legislation. Donata is the Chair of the American Bar Association’s ePrivacy Committee, SciTech Liaison to the ABA Cybersecurity Legal Task Force and Chair of the Chicago Bar Association’s Privacy and Cybersecurity Committee.

What story should you tell?

What makes you a great storyteller and communicator? How do you get your story across while keeping your audience’s interest and speaking to what they want to hear from you?

Joining me for this conversation is Karen Eber.

Karen Eber is an international consultant, author, and keynote speaker. Her talk on TED.com: How your brain responds to stories – and why they’re crucial for leaders, has almost 2 million views.

As the CEO and Chief Storyteller of Eber Leadership Group, Karen helps companies reimagine and evolve how they build leaders and teams, transform culture, and tell stories. Karen works with Fortune 500 companies and universities like General Electric, Microsoft, Facebook, Kate Spade, MIT and London School of Business.

She has inspired many through her articles published in Fast Company. Karen has 20+ years of experience and has been a Head of Culture, Chief Learning Officer and Head of Leadership Development at General Electric and Deloitte. She is a four-time American Training and Development winner. She is writing a book on storytelling, to be published with HarperCollins in 2023.

Is balance realistic for lawyers?

How can lawyers create space in their lives for work, family, vacations, and living fully, with clients and scaling their practice?

Joining me for this conversation is Steve Fretzin.

Driven, focused and passionate about helping attorneys to reach their full potential, Steve Fretzin is regarded as the premier coach, skills trainer and keynote speaker on business development for attorneys. Over the past 17 years, Steve Fretzin has devoted his career to helping lawyers master the art of business development to achieve their business goals and the peace of mind that comes with developing a successful law practice.

In addition to writing four books on legal marketing and business development, Steve has a highly rated podcast BE THAT LAWYER and has been featured in the Chicago Tribune, Crain’s and Entrepreneur.com. He has appeared on NBC News, WGN Radio and has written articles for Legal Business World, Attorney at Law Magazine, the National Law Review, the American Bar Association, and the Illinois State Bar Association. You can also find his monthly column in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin.

For some academics, researching, writing, editing and publishing a scholarly piece of work can take months, if not years, of painstaking effort, diligent commitment and rage-inducing frustration. In December, Andrew Perlman, the dean of the Suffolk University Law School, authored one in less time than it takes to watch an episode of the Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon.

Lawyer and author James Grippando made a name for himself writing legal thrillers, including the bestselling series of novels featuring Miami criminal defense attorney Jack Swyteck. He wanted to try something a little different for his new novel, Code 6, and explore the dangers of big data and tech.

Attorneys often expect incarcerated clients to lie and vice versa, says Derrick Hamilton, who served more than 20 years of a second-degree murder sentence. Those outlooks don’t help build good attorney-client relationships, according to Hamilton, who now works with students at the Yeshiva University Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law’s Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice.

Since childhood, Wendy Tamis Robbins experienced debilitating anxiety and panic attacks. Her perfectionism pushed her to achieve in sports and academics, and her high level of achievement masked her mental anguish from public view. While she found success in her legal and political careers, Robbins was negotiating with her own brain to get through her days, minute by minute.

Robbins began writing her memoir, The Box: An Invitation to Freedom from Anxiety, while still in the process of recovery. It began as a series of writing exercises she used to make sense of her meditation practices. But it became an investigation into the mental and emotional barriers she constructed since childhood to protect herself–and a blueprint for dismantling the barriers that no longer served her.

In this episode of the Modern Law Library, the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles talks to Robbins about dealing with anxiety in law school and law practice; the positive reaction at her law firm when she opened up about her mental health struggles; and what Robbins finds unhelpful about self-help books. They discuss the difference between being "productive" and being mentally well, and how Robbins overcame her aversion to mindfulness as part of her healing process. They also talk about how people with anxiety respond when the dangers they perceive are real, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the months since the 2021 publication of The Box, Robbins has also dealt with a cancer diagnosis and many career changes, and she shares updates on her progress and projects.

Legal operations handle a lot of the business and technological stuff that many lawyers either aren’t trained to handle or don’t want to deal with. All so lawyers can focus on practicing law and representing their clients to the best of their abilities.

In our annual Year in Review episode, Lee Rawles speaks to her ABA Journal colleagues Blair Chavis, Julianne Hill and Stephanie Francis Ward to find out how they spent their downtime in 2022.

We cover the usual lineup of our favorite books, movies and TV shows, but each participant also provides more niche content. Hill, who recently joined the Journal full-time after freelancing for the magazine, has a background in film, and she shares her favorite documentary projects she watched in 2022. Chavis, a dedicated home cook, shares her favorite recipe sources for making meals with her partner. Ward, the host of the Journal's Asked & Answered podcast, has podcast picks for those who like a little gossip and spice to their stories. And Rawles, who has been on a mystery kick, shares the series of audiobooks she's been listening to for the past few months.

Do you have own favorites, or suggestions for what the Modern Law Library should be reading in 2023? Email them to us at [email protected], and you may hear them featured in a future episode.

Miriam Aroni Krinsky worked as a prosecutor in Los Angeles County in the 1980s and 1990s as the War on Drugs was waged. Mandatory minimum sentences and tough-on-crime laws sent prison populations soaring and ripped apart families and communities. Krinsky believed that change was needed–and that it could come from prosecutors themselves.

In 2016, she tells the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles, there was enough of a political movement behind the idea of reform prosecutors that the nonprofit Fair and Just Prosecution was founded to help elected local prosecutors promote "a justice system grounded in fairness, equity, compassion and fiscal responsibility." Krinsky became its executive director.

Over the course of two years, Krinsky interviewed 13 elected prosecutors from a variety of different backgrounds who share the dream of reforming the criminal justice system. These oral histories were then paired with portraits of those prosecutors created by formerly incarcerated artists thanks to a partnership with Mural Arts Philadelphia. It became the book Change From Within: Reimagining the 21st-Century Prosecutor.

In this episode, Krinsky discusses insights from the election cycles FJP has observed; the difficulty of producing a book like Change From Within during the COVID-19 pandemic; and some of her favorite anecdotes she learned from the prosecutors she interviewed. She also responds to critics of the concept of reform prosecutors from both the tough-on-crime advocates and abolitionists who object to the carceral system entirely. Krinsky explains how prosecutors' discretionary power can be used to avert injustice in the system, and urges young lawyers and law students to consider that career path in addition to public defense positions to battle injustice.