By Murray Gottheil | December 18, 2024 Husband: “Green Acres is the place to be . . . keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside.” Wife: “New York is where I’d rather stay. I get allergic smelling hay. I just adore a penthouse view. Dah-ling, I love you, but give me Park Avenue.” – Lyrics by Vic […]
By Murray Gottheil | December 10, 2024 Way back in 1997, my firm had an existential crisis when our three largest rainmakers decided to ditch private practice to chase the really big money. And of course, they all wanted their capital back. At the same time. So, brilliant lawyer that I was, after surviving that crisis, […]
By Murray Gottheil | December 9, 2024 This is Part Four of my series on retiring from the legal profession. In the first three parts, I did not even mention “the Number”. We all know what the Number is: the amount of investments that you supposedly require so that you can retire. I spent many years […]
By Murray Gottheil | December 7, 2024 In Part One, I told you to figure out what you want your retirement to look like. In Part Two I advised you to get to know yourself. This time, a cautionary note. You need to figure out if you really want to retire or whether you are just […]
By Murray Gottheil | December 5, 2024 In Part One of this series on retirement, I defined retirement as a time “when you are doing exactly what you want to be doing,” and I wrote about needing to figure out exactly what that is. In order to do that, you need to know yourself. For some […]
By Marcel Strigberger | December 4, 2024 The following is an excerpt from Marcel Strigberger’s new book, First, Let’s Kill the Lawyer Jokes: An Attorney’s Irreverent Serious Look at the Legal Universe Big Law, Small Law… Big difference? If size mattered, the elephant would be king of the jungle – Rickson Gracie, Brazilian mixed martial artist What is Big […]
By Murray Gottheil | December 3, 2024 I look in the mirror and wonder who the little old lady staring back at me is. – Doris Gottheil, age 95 What a strange title. Everyone knows that it is only old lawyers who have to worry about retirement, not young ones. Right? I think not. Life is […]
By Murray Gottheil | October 10, 2024 Let’s talk about deadlines. Here are two quotes to get started: From Douglas Adams, we give you the light-hearted associate’s perspective: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” Don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security, because the truth […]
By Murray Gottheil | September 10, 2024 A junior associate at a law firm called me the other day to complain. There is nothing unusual about that. Associates complain a lot, often with good reason. Her complaint this time was that she had told H.R. that she needed to take a day off for personal reasonS and […]
By Murray Gottheil | August 19, 2024 Photo by Cottonbro Studio at Pexels According to the fictional Professor Kingsfield in the movie The Paper Chase, law students “come in … (to law school) … with a skull full of mush and … leave thinking like a lawyer.” I have often wondered whether I would have been […]