The Curmudgeon's Guide to Practicing Law [with Bookmark] [With Bookmark]

Don't let the price scare you - this book was worth every penny. It is a short, relatively easy read, and EVERY new lawyer should read it and re-read it when necessary. It is full of practical, usable advice, and a good reminder to do the very best we can for the sake of the client.

Mark Herrmann has provided an extraordinary gift to the legal community. The Curmudgeon's guide is well written and precise in its well-informed commentary. The author, a partner at Jones Day, has a sense of humor and a gift for succinct, valuable insights, the likes of which professors and senior lawyers rarely divulge. To read this book is to stumble on such secrets of the temple as to refashion the mind of a young law student or lawyer. To give but one example, I had wondered, during my summer, why, when I had provided my partner with some useful and succinct legal analysis and fact finding, I was rewarded with a terse "Good work," and a lot more work and why, when I had rushed through a job and provided him with a rambling memo, I would not hear from him for a week. Now I know. Feedback on assignments is so scarce in law firms, it is difficult to parse the code that your superiors traffic in. Curmudgeon resolved my confusion immediately: he notes that when he gets good product from associates, he rewards them with more and better work. When he doesn't, he simply ignores them. Work is the life blood of a lawyer, and the better quality work you can get assigned, the better your work experience and your career will be. Curmudgeon's guide resolves so many questions before they are asked, it really should be a bible for anyone starting their legal career. I am certain that the great lack that this book meets is the result of a lack of time and not malicious intent on the part of our would be mentors, but it doesn't undercut the extraordinary generosity of this tough love book. The tone may be grumpy, but an avuncular grumpiness that is very welcome. Please read this concise tome of invaluable wisdom. Or don't. My own career is not established, so I can ill-afford the informed competition that the reader of this book would present. But if you do read it, you'll find it useful, fun, and too damn short.

This book is fairly expensive, especially for being so small. (Almost pocket sized, and only 135 pages.) But it is work the money. With a hint of humor, Herrmann the Curmudgeon gives great advice, and very succintly. It cannot be retierated about how much his advice is on point. I plan to recommend the book to all the new attorneys that I know.

Every first year law student should read this book before they clerk for a law firm. The curmudgeon is dead on in laying out exactly what is expected of new associates and summer clerks.

I don't know Mark Herrmann, but I feel his pain. Every attorney over 40 will recognize him/herself in Mark's curmudgeonly advice to the next generation. Hopefully, every attorney under 30 will take heed and follow unless they have a better mousetrap to offer (and those of us over 50 shouldn't doubt that they do!). In the absence of that mousetrap, no young attorney could go wrong picking up this book and heeding the advice from a very successful (and funny!) lawyer in his, ahem, middle years; one who is generous enough to donate the proceeds from the sale of this book to the American Bar Association. That said, here are my favorite "bits." THE C: Rule No. 10 from "How to Fail as an Associate" -- So long as it's clearly marked "DRAFT," no one will care if its incomprehensible MY COMMENT: Nor, may I add, spell-checked. A memorable moment in one of my own associate's short careers was this response to "why are there so many spelling errors in this?" "Because," the associate replied, "I knew you'd revise it anyway so why should I bother?" THE C: "What They Didn't Tell You in Law School" -- To be on the wire is life; the rest is waiting. MY COMMENT: And don't think this applies only to the law. One of America's finest poets, W.S. Merwin, passes along the following advice from one of his mentors, the great John Berryman: he suggested I pray to the Muse get down on my knees and pray right there in the corner and he said he meant it literally . . . . I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write W.S. Merwin, Berryman, from Flower & Hand THE C: The Curmudgeon's Law Dictionary: Objection -- An attorney-client communication made during a deposition for the purpose of ensuring favorable testimony. THE C: Seven Hours Locked in a Room: Beginning lawyers also sometimes worry about how they will work with exhibits when taking depositions. This is the process. Mark. Identify. Authenticate. Then, ask whatever the heck you want. MY COMMENT: And if you don't know how to authenticate a document, look it up! It's right there in the Evidence Code. Take a cheat sheet with the statutory language to the deposition with you. If you manage to properly authenticate all exhibits to a deposition, you'll be better than 99.9% of the lawyers taking pre-trial testimony every day of the week. If you also establish the business records exception to the hearsay rule, you might achieve associate heaven -- the partner in charge of your case will be so delighted with your work that he'll excuse you from spending four weeks in a storage shed in Plano, Texas, reviewing documents. THE C: The Curmudgeon Argues -- If the judge poses a question to you, there's one rule: Answer it. Answer it directly, in a single word, if possible. "yes" or "no" ar