Transforming Practices : Finding Joy and Satisfaction in the Legal Life - Hardcover

Keeva, Steven

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809225042 ISBN 13: 9780809225040

Publisher: McGraw-Hill, 1999

Synopsis

From law school to the law firm, lawyers are taught and encouraged to win, with little regard to the emotional consequences. After years of being obsessed with winning, racking up billable hours, and fishing for clients, many lawyers lose sight of why they initially joined the ranks of the legal profession.

This landmark book explains how to reconnect with the spiritual side of law practice. It presents profiles of firms and lawyers who have transformed their practices from heartless and cold professional endeavors into kinder, gentler operations, with more emphasis on the clients'--and their own--emotional and spiritual needs.

About this title

From the Publisher

Spirituality and law practice may sound like an oxymoron, but a quiet quest to find deeper meaning in life and work as a lawyer and to cure the ailments of today's cutthroat law firm environment is well underfoot within the legal community. Transforming Practices: Finding Joy and Satisfaction in the Legal Life is the first book to explore this movement toward bringing one's soul to the practice of law and returning to lawyering from a healing perspective, rather than an adversarial one. Filled with inspiring profiles of lawyers who have successfully changed their work habits and attitudes and who have healed the split between inner and outer, "us" and "them," and individual and community, Transforming Practices makes it clear that the opportunity for transformation exists for every lawyer, in every kind of law practice. Through the use of narrative, interviews and anecdotes that draw upon the experiences of lawyers from a broad spectrum of practice areas, the book demonstrates that it is okay for a lawyer to be human, to care, to let the values and priorities that matter at home also matter at work. Interestingly, Steven Keeva is not a lawyer himself. Rather, as a senior editor for the ABA Journal, the most widely read legal publication in the world, he has written about lawyers and the legal profession for nearly a decade. (Danielle Egan-Miller, Business Editor, NTC/Contemporary).

From the Back Cover

Steven Keeva's Transforming Practices Is Changing Lives

"Every lawyer and law student in America [should] read this book, study it, savor it, and make it a constant companion."
--Texas Lawyer

"If you don't like what you've become, if your life seems empty, sterile or diminished . . . and if you've ever desired a more fulfilling life in the law, then read this book!"
--The Pennsylvania Lawyer

"Goes back to the fundamentals of our humanity to describe a better way to be a lawyer. It actually does more than that. It describes how to be a better human being. Everything else flows from that."
--Corporate Legal Times

"An amazing little book that has the potential to significantly affect the lives of lawyers and their families. . . . Rather than write another book aimed at improving what we do, Keeva has written a book that can help improve who we are and what we are."
--Trial magazine

". . . Provides a needed resource for lawyers seeking to wrest their lives from the often implacable maw of corporate life."
--New York Law Journal

"[Transforming Practices] should help all lawyers recover the integration of life and work that alone makes a day's work worth it."
--Boston Bar Journal

Transforming Practices presents a revolutionary vision to America's nearly one million lawyers, many of whom have become disillusioned with their careers. Author Steven Keeva, assistant managing editor of the influential ABA Journal, shows how by cultivating a vibrant inner life, any lawyer can find profound satisfaction, pleasure, and joy in his or her work.

Through the use of narrative, interviews, and anecdotes from lawyers who have found ways to bring renewed meaning, fulfillment, and a deep sense of pleasure to their law practices, Keeva demonstrates that it is absolutely OK for a lawyer to be human, to care, to let the values and priorities that matter at home also matter on the job. Transforming Practices makes it clear that the opportunity for transformation exists for every lawyer, in every kind of law practice.

New to this edition is a foreword by Jan Schlichtmann, the lawyer whose extraordinary story was told in Jonathan Harr's bestseller, A Civil Action.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGraw-Hill
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0809225042
• ISBN 13: 9780809225040
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352