Let me tell you a story about implicit bias. In 2009, I married a man I met the first day of law school. He is white. I am black. We live on Chicago’s North Side. I often walk around my…
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Stop asking what the answer is, be the answer.” Toussaint Romain, former Assistant Public Defender of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Public Defender’s Office, challenged all attendees with this statement at the end of the third annual Illinois Supreme Court Commission on…
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Let me tell you a story about implicit bias. In 2009, I married a man I met the first day of law school. He is white. I am black. In 2010, we moved to Chicago. By various measures, Chicago is…
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QUESTION: I have finally embraced email as my primary communication tool with clients as well as most of my opposing counsel and even the court. As I tend to serve the new generation of clients more and more, prompt email…
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Remember the old adage that those who chose to become lawyers are people who didn’t like blood so they didn’t want to go to med school, and didn’t like numbers so they didn’t want to go to business school? Forget…
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Recently, we swore in a new class of lawyers in Illinois. Many of these new lawyers were Millennials — people born between 1980 and 2000 — who have had a tremendous effect on the legal workplace. A recent American Lawyer…
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Last month, I had the pleasure of speaking at Legalweek 2018. The conference, sponsored by ALM, is a re-imagining of LegalTech, an industry conference that began in 1982. Its new incarnation, Legalweek, started in 2017 and now includes sub-conferences focused…
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From #MeToo to Hackathons – New Ideas for Programming By the year 2044, the United States will officially become a majority-minority nation. More than half of our population will belong to a minority group. By 2060, one in five Americans…
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QUESTION: During a recent jury trial, counsel was provided with completed jury questionnaires including names, ages, home addresses and places of employment. In addition to using traditional research techniques found in public records, to what extent may we use social media…
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Something to Think About Soon to be our newest Illinois lawyers will trade their backpacks for briefcases at the upcoming November 9 admission ceremonies.  In their academic years, they have had many questions and strived to find the answers. They…
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Helping Lawyers Overcome Substance Abuse We are a self-regulated profession. That means that we have a duty to protect the public, including from impaired lawyers. We also have an obligation to help our colleagues who may be suffering from alcohol…
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The future may be unknowable, but it’s not unthinkable. That line from the introduction to Bruce MacEwen’s book “Tomorrowland: Scenarios for Law Firms Beyond the Horizon” really stuck with me. As lawyers, we should think about what is coming around…
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