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What has long been standard market practice in many jurisdictions is becoming more and more mainstream in Germany, too: compensating counsel in arbitration cases on an hourly basis, and being entitled to have the defeated party pay for it.

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In preparation for the European Society of International Law (ESIL) 12th Annual Conference, we asked some of our authors to reflect on this year’s conference theme ‘How International Law Works in Times of Crisis’. What are the major challenges facing the field, and is international law effective in addressing these issues? What role do international lawyers play in confronting crises, both old and new?

The post How does international law work in times of crisis? appeared first on OUPblog.

Back when I was practicing law, I had a sign hanging in my office that said: Perfectionism is an elegant defense against real life.

I kept a separate note inside my desk that read:  If I don’t win your case, I’ll eat a bug. I leave it to you to decide how those two things matched up.

(And for more adventures of being a law student and lawyer, you can read my lawyer romance LOVE PROOF. It’s lots of fun.)

The issue of perfectionism haunts a lot of us. We’re never quite there. Wherever “there” is. And sometimes that feels like a moving target.

It’s why I was interested in this TED talk by Sarah Lewis about success versus the “near win.” About success versus mastery. I loved her stories of artists and writers who knew their work was never complete, but who put it out there anyway. (Or who ordered their friends to burn everything after the artist died, but too bad–friends hardly ever obey those crazy wishes.)

It’s why even though I know some of my novels aren’t perfect, I still let you read them. Because I like the stories and want to share them with you, even though sometimes when I look back at them I might wince at this line of dialogue, that awkward scene, some weird way of putting something that at the time I thought was cool. Oh well. I did my best. And I’m going to keep moving forward and write the next one, rather than constantly mess around with one I’ve already “finished.”

Which is my way of saying that if you don’t love every single word I write, that’s okay–I probably don’t, either. But overall I’m happy with the idea that you and I sat around a campfire one night and I told you this story from start to finish. And we had fun. There were marshmallows. And then the next night we moved on to some new story instead of me saying, “You know last night when I told you the girl in the story’s name is Rose? It’s Giselle instead. And that part about her hating her mother? Forget it–her mom died.” Etc. Etc. BORING. Move on. We already got to The End on that one–give me something new.

With that, I give you Sarah Lewis and her talk “Embracing the Near Win”:

Now that I’ve outed myself as the secret author of books by Elizabeth Ruston, I can freely talk about one of the concepts in the book Love Proof.

We writers always hear “Write what you know!” Well, I’ve known many of the things I wrote about in Love Proof, including the life of a striving law student, the beginning uncertain years of practicing law, the sometimes disgusting personalities of some of the lawyers you have to deal with, and yes, even the unexpected excitement of accidentally falling in love with your opposing counsel. Yeah, that happens.

But I’ve also known the kind of poverty Sarah Henley experiences in the book. And that was really interesting for me to write about, because I know I still have some vestiges of that poverty mentality deep inside my brain. And I have to actively make choices to move myself past that way of thinking.

One of the things Sarah does in the book to deal with her own poverty mentality is to create a Flourish List. It’s an idea that came to me a few years ago, and something I tried for myself before ever putting it into my fiction.

The name comes from both definitions of flourish: “an extraneous florid embellishment” (or as Sarah puts it, “something I want, but don’t actually need”), and “a period of thriving.”

I don’t know about you, but at times I am MUCH too stingy with myself. I call it frugality, but sometimes it’s just being harsh for no great reason. Perfect example from last night: I was down to maybe the last half-squeeze on my toothpaste tube, and I could have forced out that last little bit, but I decided to make a grand gesture of actually throwing it away–that’s right, without it being fully empty (call the frugality police, go ahead)–and treated myself to a brand new tube. I’ve had to give myself that same permission with bars of soap that have already broken into multiple parts that I have to gather together in a little pile in my palm just to work up a decent sud. Lately, out they go, fresh bar, and if I feel guilty, I know it will pass.

So where did this new radical attitude come from? A few summers ago while I was backpacking in a beautiful section of the South San Juan mountain range in Colorado, I had an afternoon to myself when I sat out in a meadow, my faithful backpacking dog at my side, while my husband took off to fish. And as Bear and I sat there looking at the small white butterflies flitting over the meadow flowers, the thought occurred to me that those butterflies were not strictly necessary. Not in their dainty, pretty form. They could have been ugly and still done the job. Or they could have left their work to the yellow and brown butterflies–why do we need the extra? But having pretty white butterflies is a form of nature’s flourish.

And that led to the companion idea that if flourish is allowed in nature, wouldn’t it be all right to have some of it in my own life?

So right then and there I pulled out pen and paper and started making my Flourish List. Spent an hour writing down all the things I’d wanted for years and years, but never allowed myself to have. I’m not talking about extravagances like a private jet or a personal chef, I’m talking about small pleasures like new, pretty sheets (even though the current ones were still in perfectly good shape); new long underwear that fit better; a new bra; high-quality lotion from one of the bath and body shops; fancy bubble bath. The most expensive item on my list was a pillow-top mattress to replace the plain old Costco mattress we’d been sleeping on for the past twenty years.

I gave myself the chance to write down everything, large or small, just to see it all on paper. And you know what? It wasn’t that much. I had maybe fifteen items. Then, still sitting out in that meadow, I did a tally of what I thought it would all cost. I knew the mattress would probably be very expensive, so I estimated high (no internet connection out there in the wilderness, otherwise I could have researched actual numbers). I think I ended up estimating about $3,000 for the whole list. And that sounded pretty expensive to me. So I just put the list away and promised myself I’d start buying some of the cheaper items when we got home.

And I did. New underwear. Vanilla lotions and bubble baths. New sheets. And finally, a few months later, a pillow-top mattress, on sale, less than $400. By the time I checked off the last item on my list last fall, I had spent less than $1,000. That might still sound like a lot, but in the greater scheme I felt like it was too small an amount to have denied myself all those little pleasures all those many years. Especially if I had bought myself one of those items every year–I know I never would have noticed the cost.

So that’s my suggestion for today: Create your own Flourish List, just like Sarah and I have, and give yourself the pleasure of writing down every small or large thing you want for yourself right now. All the little treats. Maybe they’re not so little–maybe this is the year you need a new car or some other big-ticket item. But that’s a “Need” list. This is your Flourish List–everything you want but don’t necessarily need.

And then? Treat yourself. Choose one item every week or every month, and give it to yourself. And if you feel strange about replacing something you don’t like with something you know you will, then remember to pass on that other item to someone else who might love it more than you did. I’ve done that with clothes, kitchenware, books: it feels so good to take everything you don’t want and give it to a thrift store where someone else can be happy to have found it, and found it so cheaply. Maybe there’s someone out there with a Flourish List that includes a pair of boots like the ones that have just been gathering dust in your closet. Stop hoarding them. Move them on to their new, appreciative owner.

And by doing that, you make room in your own life for things you’ll appreciate and enjoy. It’s hard to invite abundance when you’re chock full of clutter. Make some room. Make your list. And then start treating yourself the way you deserve by no longer withholding those little items that you know will make you smile.

I felt pretty great throwing out that nearly-empty tube of toothpaste last night. It doesn’t take much to make me happy. But I didn’t really realize that until I sat in a meadow and enjoyed the simple sight of some unnecessary butterflies.

Maybe I’m never supposed to admit this in public, but here goes:

When I was in high school, there was a soap opera called Ryan’s Hope.  And on that soap opera was a beautiful, smart, tough, sexy, overdramatic character that a LOT of things happened to, because it was a soap opera, and she had awesome hair and she was beautiful and smart and she was a lawyer.

I went to college and majored in English.  Then Philosophy, then Management Information Systems (the old-fashioned name for Computer Science), then Secondary Education, then Elementary Education, back to English, then Accounting very briefly (it was close to my senior year, and I knew very soon I’d have to support myself and needed a practical degree), then back to English (because forget being practical, this is ME!  I love books!  I might be an English professor!  Shut up!  I just want to read!), and by then I just needed to graduate, so I stuck with English.

And because I still needed to support myself, I thought what the hey, let’s take the LSAT  (the admissions test for law school) just for fun, and then I scored really high, and my course was set.

But really it was because of that character on Ryan’s Hope.  She made it all seem so cool and glamorous.  I’m really impressionable that way.

And now today I saw this.  And I’m telling you, if I’d seen that back when I was in high school or college, there’s no doubt in my mind I still would have become a lawyer.  Because Amy Poehler nails it:

And also this:

By Richard Susskind

The uncharitable might say that I write the same book every four years or so. Some critics certainly accuse me of having said the same thing for many years. I don’t disagree. Since the early 80s, my enduring interest has been in the ways in which technology can modernize and improve the work of the legal profession and the courts. My main underpinning conviction has indeed not changed: that legal work is document and information intensive, and that a whole host of information technologies can and should streamline and sometimes even overhaul traditional methods of practicing law and administering justice.

What have changed, of course, are the enabling technologies. When I started out on what has become a career devoted largely to legal technology, the web had not been invented, nor had tablets, handheld devices, mobile phones, and much else. As new technologies emerge, therefore, I always have a new story to tell and more evidence that suggests the legal world is shifting from being a cottage industry to an IT-enabled information sector.

The evolution of my thinking reflects my own technical interests and career activities over the years. My first work in the field, in the 1980s, focused on artificial intelligence and its potential and limitations in the law. This began in earnest with my doctoral research at Oxford University. I was interested in the possibility of developing computer systems that could solve legal problems and offer legal advice. Many specialists at the time wanted to define expert systems in law in architectural terms (by reference to what underlying technologies were being used, from rule-based systems to neural networks). I took a more pragmatic view and described these systems functionally as computer applications that sought to make scarce legal knowledge and expertise more widely available and easily accessible.

This remains my fundamental aspiration today. I believe there is enormous scope for using technology, especially Internet technology, as a way of providing affordable, practical legal guidance to non-lawyers, especially those who are not able to pay for conventional legal service. These systems may not be expert systems, architecturally-defined. Instead, they are web-based resources (such as online advisory and document drafting systems) and are delivering legal help, on-screen, as envisaged back in the 1980s.

During the first half of the 90s, while I was working in a law firm (Masons, now Pinsent Masons), my work became less academic. I was bowled over by the web and began to form a view of the way it would revolutionize the communication habits of practicing lawyers and transform the information seeking practices of the legal fraternity. I also had some rudimentary ideas about online communities of lawyers and clients; we now call these social networks. My thinking came together in the mid-1990s. I became clear, in my own mind at least, that information technology would definitely challenge and change the world of law. Most people thought I was nuts.

A few years later, to help put my ideas into practice, I developed what I called ‘the grid’ – a simple model that explained the inter-relationships of legal data, legal information, legal knowledge, as found within law firms and shared with clients. I had used this model quite a bit with my clients (by this time, I was working independently) and it seemed to help lawyers think through what they should be doing about IT.

In the years that followed, however, I became even more confident that the Internet was destined to change the legal sector not incrementally and peripherally but radically, pervasively, and irreversibly. But I felt that, in the early 2000s, most lawyers were complacent. Times were good, business was brisk, and the majority of practitioners could not really imagine that legal practice and the court system would be thrown into upheaval by disruptive technologies.

Then came the global recession and, in turn, lawyers became more receptive than they had been in boom times when there had been no obvious reason why they might change course. Dreadful economic conditions convinced lawyers that tomorrow would look little like yesterday.

With many senior lawyers now recognizing that we are on the brink of major change, my current preoccupation is that most law schools around the world are ignoring this future. They continue to teach law much as I was taught in the late 1970s. They are equipping tomorrow’s lawyers to be twentieth century not twenty-first century lawyers. My mission now is to help law teachers to prepare the next generation of lawyers for the new legal world.

Richard Susskind OBE is an author, speaker, and independent adviser to international professional firms and national governments. He is president of the Society for Computers and law IT adviser to the lord chief justice. Tomorrow’s Lawyers is his eighth book.

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Image Credit: ‘The Grid’ courtesy of Richard Susskind. Used with permission. Do not reproduce without explicit permission of Richard Susskind.

The post The future of information technologies in the legal world appeared first on OUPblog.

Author Mindy Klasky is testing a “reader-supported serialized novel” model with her new book, Fright Court. The author will publish her novel by chapters online, asking for PayPal donations at the end of each post.

Donors will receive a variety of gifts, ranging from a magnet to a personalized signed poster of the Fright Court book cover. Klasky has already published several books through traditional channels.

Here’s more about the book: “Sarah Anderson has found her dream job: Clerk of Court for the District of Columbia Night Court. Dream job, that is, until she’s attacked in the open courtroom by a vampire defendant. And until she’s forced to take self-defense lessons from her boss, the enigmatic vampire James Morton. And until she learns that she can’t share the truth about any of that with her best friend, Allison Ward – even over delectable cupcakes from the Cake Walk bakery.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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There was a period in my life when I was a consultant. There was an old joke about how if you ask a consultant the time he’ll borrow your watch so he can tell you.

That stings a bit. But the fact is that a consultant who doesn’t listen to their client in order to find out how his (or her) consultantly experience can best be applied isn’t much of a consultant.

To give a good answer about what time it is you need to understand what time the client thinks it is. This means listening to the client. Then when you figure out what to tell the client it’s kind of nice if they listen to you. But as long as they pay you they can listen to you or not, that’s their business.

Etymologically it wasn’t always this way. As we go back into the history of the word client we find that long ago your client had to listen to you. Listening was what made them clients.

As a consultant the word client is synonymous with the word customer. The sense of client as the person hiring a professional to help them out appeared around the time of Shakespeare 400 years ago. This meaning evolved because for almost 200 years before that the professionals being hired were invariably lawyers.

Although we can fire lawyers the fact someone has a lawyer usually means that they are actually in need of that lawyer and as such are pretty likely to listen to their advice.

It’s no surprise that a lawyerly word like client comes from Latin and the sense it had before the lawyers got hold of it was a kind of master/servant relationship with the client being the subordinate, which I’m sure suited the lawyers just fine.

Latin words of course usually originated back in Roman antiquity and in that context a client was a plebeian under the patronage of a patrician. The patrician protected the client but the client was pretty much a slave who had to come at the beck and call of their patrician. This was so literally true that the etymological meaning of client is “one who listens to be called” since cluere meant “to listen.”

To experience some of the joy of this holiday, read When the Circus came to Town by Laurence Yep.

Welcome, Year of the Rat!

To help you celebrate, here are a couple of new books we can recommend…

Grace Lin has a sequel just out to her delightful Year of the Dog - called, appropriately enough, Year of the Rat. We’ll have our own review of it soon, in the meantime, you can read what Grace herself says about it here.

You can read here about another new book by Grace, this time a picture-book called Bringing in the New Year. There are some good “Lunar New Year” links on this post from Wild Rose Reader too.

And here are some more Chinese New Year picture books reviewed by PaperTigers:
The Year of the Rat: Tales from the Chinese Zodiac by Oliver Chin, illustrated by Miah Alcorn,;
The Great Race / The Story of the Chinese Zodiac by Dawn Casey, illustrated by Anne Wilson;
The Day the Dragon Danced by Kay Haugaard, illustrated by Carolyn Reed Barritt.

Do you have any special favorites you’d like to share with us?

…And a PS - do have a look at Grace Lin’s blog to read about her trip to China last month - there are some great photos too.

The Lunar New Year starts fresh on February 7th as we welcome in The Year of the Rat. It's been said that those born in The Year of the Rat are respected and considered courageous and enterprising. Rats know exactly where to find solutions and can take care of themselves and others with ease. They use their instinctive sense of observation to help others in times of need and are among the most fit of all the Animal signs to survive most any situation.

This all can also be said of Riley. He is, of course, a rat and one who inspires and makes readers smile. He's found in The Short and Incredibly Happy Life of Riley (by Colin Thompson & Amy Lissiat of Australia) and encourages us all to be more observant, patient, accepting and courageous.

Another suggested title, of course, is New Clothes for New Year's Day, by Hyun-Ju Bae of South Korea, which honors the Korean celebration of this annual holiday.

This was originally intended to be a "What I am Reading" entry with a short list of rat faves, when I made the connection that 2008 is indeed the Year of the Rat. So how fitting that the first novel tucked away in the new year is Judy Cox's The Mystery of the Burmese Bandicoot. This is the first of, what will presumably be many, Tails of Frederick and Ishbu (yes, 'tails', not simply 'tales'.) Cox tells the story of two ratty brothers who escape (only as a matter of self-preservation) from their home in a fifth-grade classroom. In an absolutely fantastic sequence of events they find themselves traveling half-way around the world in search of the fabled Burmese Bandicoot, a jeweled figurine said to hold great powers and able to destroy mankind. The action is pretty much non-stop from start to finish with short chapters to keep the attention of reluctant readers. Cox's knowledge of rats is evident from the very start, and her detailed Author's Note reveals the extent of her research into all things ratty. Of course, as a school teacher herself, she has plenty of first-hand experience.

While Children's literature is sometimes unkind to rats (Brian Jacques' Redwall comes to mind,) there are plenty of titles which show rats to be the clever, sensitive animals that they are. Among them:

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh (O'Brien, Robert C)
Space Station Rat (Daley, Michael J)The sequel, Rat Trap, is due out in March.
Vasco Leader of His Tribe (Bondoux, Anne-Laure)
The Christmas Rat (Avi)
Ratspell (Mounter, Paddy)