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Melissa at the Great Wall

In June of this year (2010) I went to China to visit for the first time.  For context, I should mention that I am married to a man who was born and raised in Malaysia and we go back to visit family there every few years.  Simon is of Chinese ancestry and speaks lots of languages.

Having a Mandarin speaker was very useful when we were in Beijing.  I am sure our experience was much easier than it would have been without our family member speaking the lingo.  It was a fantastic experience in many ways and I am very glad we went.  My mom and our ten year old son were with us and we stayed in a lovely apartment-type hotel.

I want to tell you what intrigued me the most.  It was the bicycles.  Although Beijing is a huge city with fantastic modern infrastructure and constant construction, I was drawn to look at the bicycles.  Many more people than before are able to get cars and there was plenty of evidence of prosperity around us, but the bikes were everywhere.

You see cars plus a lot of small motorbikes in Malaysia cities and almost only new vehicles and great public transit in Singapore (which is a city).   Beijing had many people on bikes.  A lot of folks have their entire business on the back of their bicycle and large numbers of people use them as their mode of transportation.  Books I read about the days of old always talk about rickshaws.  We did ride around some oldest parts of the city (from Mongolian days) on bicycle rickshaws, but I did not see any walking running rickshaws (thank heavens – seems demeaning).

For some reason, those bicycles are symbolic to me of how Beijing and China has so very many people who have been jostling with each other for so very long.  Living in a place with so many to compete with and over the bones of thousands of years has weight.  Some people would think I am insulting or demeaning the modernization of China by focusing on the bicycles.  I am not.

The very modernity juxtaposed with the mass of humanity who struggle and strive where so many have before is fascinating.  Bicycles straddle time and circumstance and bring it all together for me.

Melissa on Rickshaw

Recently, on Twitter, I saw a comment from a person in the field of psychology about whether therapy can be accomplished over the telephone. The implication was that such a thing might well be impossible.

In my work as a lawyer, I have had quite a few clients who lived far away and with whom I interacted only by phone and email. While we lawyers are called “Counselors at Law,” I don’t think that our work is impossible when we can’t meet face to face. It is harder, though.

As you are probably aware, the majority of communication is not the words we choose to say.  Quite often, a client will ask a question in an email that really can’t be answered without a phone or in person discussion to find out what it is they really want to know and to get enough facts to give a good answer.  Many times you need to think out loud together.

Communicating by telephone  is much better than just using written words. An in-person meeting to start off the relationship is most always very desirable if it is possible. On the telephone, at least you can hear the timbre of a voice, the hesitations, and the words stumbled over.  In person, you add even better perception of these things and extremely valuable body language for more effective communication.

When Advantage Denton lawyer finders seek out the right lawyer for you, this is one of the issues they most assuredly take into consideration. If it is possible for you to meet in person with the lawyer, we try to set that up because you get more valuable communication from it. We evaluate which lawyer is right for you from a lot of pieces of information, often including talking with the lawyer on the phone. Your free meeting with that lawyer should get you valuable advice and assurance that the lawyer will be the right person to help you. When you are deciding to get legal advice, I highly recommend that you make the effort to attend a personal interview. You will be glad you did.

Are you angry? It seems that the press is consistently telling us that everyone is angry right now. All of us are going to vote in an angry way against someone. We all are fearful, angry and ready to blame someone.

Perhaps this is true, but I suspect it is not. A lot of folks are too busy or too apathetic to focus on anger. That is why the few angry people who shout about it get so much attention. The people who are working hard to build something don’t seem so interesting to the press. Since the days of the saber toothed tiger, humans have paid attention to the noisy and dangerous more than to the placid or toiling. It may be natural to pay attention to angry people, but it is not productive.

Just as the constant alerts after 9/11 made us anxious and not any safer, the frequent references to tea party anger and to elections where people must have been very angry get very tiresome. While it is true that a lot of people are very stressed from our economic downturn, I don’t believe that most of us are scavenging around for someone to be angry at or blame. Many people are making the best of difficult circumstances and finding the good things they can make out of the bad parts.

The people who are so angry and the folks who insist on shoving those few immature actors into our faces need to learn a lesson in civility. Tough times call for improving your game, not wallowing in the mud. Finding systemic ways to prevent future abuses is far more productive than vilifying the people who made messes. Thoughtful discussion of how to make things better and showing compassion, even towards those who make mistakes, is a better path to follow. Focus on punishment is wasteful but prevention of further bad acts is very desirable.

In my humble opinion.

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I am sure that you have noticed the large number of earthquakes occurring lately. These have been horrific events with terrible consequences for the folks affected. Are we going to get burned out with all of the news of disasters so that we don’t even help each other out anymore? I hope not.

With predictions (hopefully completely wrong) of a worse than usual hurricane season and oddities in weather, earth movements and volcanoes, we humans are sure being put in our place. What is our place? Should we be contemplating all of these things happening and trying to formulate a reason why or a generally appropriate reaction?

The global warming crisis is one way people are finding an explanation for weather extremes. Folks are coming up with some types of actions we can take to hopefully have an effect on our planet (in good ways rather than more damage and pollution).

Some people are turning to religious explanations, as they have since the dawn of humanity, when they can not control or understand nature. Fortunately, a lot of smart people are working proactively to be prepared for when the next crisis impacts our area – but a small portion of the world has and uses resources this way.

Most of us go through our daily life just trying to keep up and trying to cope with what we already have on our plates. It is a burden to add on disaster planning as a task and resource demand when life contains precious little leisure and comfort. It is much easier not to worry about big disasters when we are avoiding so many little ones every day.

I suggest that the “preventative law” “preventative medicine” and other preventative planning should be even higher in priority than usual when we have so much evidence of the earth’s unrest. We are here to help you with taking care of business on the legal front. Be sure to call on Advantage Denton to help you find the right lawyer to handle those legal issues that will be an even bigger mess if you leave them untended. As for all the other disaster planning, I am going to write lists and take action.

You?

I just returned from the culture shock that is Las Vegas. This was our first time to visit that place and perhaps our last, though it was really interesting. Right before Las Vegas, we took a few days to visit Zion National Park and a lovely smaller state park called Snow Canyon in St. George, Utah.

The canyons and physical structures of nature were huge and awe inspiring. The casinos and physical structures in Las Vegas were huge and awe inspiring. Nature was majestic; casinos were less so. The air quality was sure better in nature. Since I don’t smoke, drink, gamble, stay up late, or participate in some of the other adventures available in Las Vegas, one could say it was wasted on me. I did like seeing the spectacles once as an education. My 10 year old boy also seemed to get an education, but it will be interesting to see what kind of education over the long run.

One thing I noticed in Las Vegas was the billboards advertising legal services. Several of them offered to go to traffic court for you or to help you if you had been in an accident. I have not researched those lawyers (if lawyers were really involved, since none were apparent). I am guessing that calling a number off of a billboard is one of the worst ways you could find an attorney.

If an attorney is good at what they do, they do not need to advertise on billboards. If they care about their professional reputation, they are unlikely to associate themselves with billboard advertising. If they don’t care about their reputation, why would they care about the needs of clients? It would be interesting to see a researched book or news article about the folks who put up the biggest and tackiest ads and the quality of work that they do.

Maybe my perception is wrong that they would not care about client needs and wants. I doubt it, though. Such lawyers have to funnel a really large number of cases or some really big dollar cases through just to pay for the ad. When you run a high volume mill, it seems to me that it is harder to provide personalized quality work for individual client needs.

If you need a lawyer, you would be much wiser to use a lawyer finder from Advantage Denton than you would be to hire a lawyer because they paid for a billboard or the biggest advertisement. Advantage Denton saves you money up front by getting that first half hour interview with the lawyer for free and we save you far more from anguish and overspending when we get the right lawyer for you.

Melissa Denton

I sometimes have to apologize to clients for the lack of compassion exhibited by another lawyer.  “They didn’t teach us bedside manners in law school,” I say.  Since I practice law in the area of family law, the folks I work with are at a most vulnerable moment in their lives and lawyers deal with some of the most delicate parts of the person’s life.  Most clients are relieved to finally be dealing with painful issues that have been getting worse for too long, but they do have to contend with their deep emotions and the unkind things family and former family members do to each other at such transition times.

It is quite true that we lawyers did not have a class entitled “How to be Compassionate toward Clients”.  As I recall, doctors used to not have those classes, either, though I hope that has been remedied.  Many attorneys are very intellectual folk.  We live more in our heads than in our hearts.  Just like for anybody, it is a challenge for attorneys to really understand people who are seeing the world from a vastly different place than us.  Most lawyers feel a great deal of pressure to responsibly handle the legal issues in a client’s case because that is what we are trained for and what we are interested in.  Those messy emotions are often seen as an obstacle to efficiently completing the tasks at hand.  Those messy emotions are very frequently the overwhelmingly most important influence on the client’s satisfaction with the lawyer.

The best thing we lawyers provide is a sense of relief.  When you have hired a lawyer or learned crucial information from one, you have a great burden lifted from your shoulders.  You have access to reliable information, a guide through the scary court system and paperwork, and someone on your side who is responsible to tell you the truth. Progress is made on clearing up an awful mess.

The great relief you feel upon getting a lawyer’s help is seasoned by the large amount of money you pay to get that help and by how that help is rendered.  The relief is utterly spoiled if you come to believe that the lawyer is not performing competently or if the lawyer is actively unkind.  These two problems are found together far more often than you would think.

Lawyers who are insecure or who know that they have made a mistake are more likely to bluster and bully, just like other people do in those circumstances.  The client thought that they were getting real help when they hired a lawyer. Instead, the client finds that they have jumped from the frying pan into the fire with their original problem plus lawyer problems.  Original problems are made worse by committing a lot of money to pay for poor lawyer services.  The client is often vulnerable and the attorney’s power position and bullying prevents the client from self defense.

It is easy to say after the fact that the best way to not have a problem is to avoid it in the first place.  How many of my divorce clients would thank me for that advice? Not many.  With finding a lawyer, though, there are ways to avoid getting a poor quality attorney.  Other places on this web site and prior blog entries here give some information about how to find the right lawyer (and therefore how to avoid the wrong one).  While we try to provide a comprehensive education on this issue to our lawyer finders, it is not something that we could teach members of the general public.  It is also a darned silly skill set to try to learn right at the crisis time when you need to use a lawyer.  You also don’t embark on an extensive course in advanced plumbing while your basement is flooding.

Advantage Denton was created for this reason.  We are glad to help you by finding and evaluating the lawyers who would be right for your needs.  Because we evaluate the information available about the attorney and the needs you have, Advantage Denton lawyer finders do a great job finding the right lawyer.  While you might be lucky and stumble upon the right lawyer, this is too important a decision to leave to chance.

Information about your right attorney is handed to you with the appointment.  Our appointment email provides you with web site links giving information about the lawyer. If you ask your lawyer finder after the fact, they will tell you what the guiding focus was for their search for you, though this focus may have changed during the search depending on information you provide and data found about lawyers.  We can not evaluate “bedside manner” thoroughly, but you will find that the high quality lawyers found by Advantage Denton are far more likely to satisfy your needs than a lawyer selected by someone who is not a professional lawyer finder.

Best wishes to the attorneys who always need to work on having good “bedside manner” and work with messy emotion in clients.  Best wishes to those folks going through the stress of needing a lawyer.  I hope you let us reduce the stress of finding the right lawyer. Have us find the right lawyer for you.

Lately, I ended up out of my comfort zone on three different work projects I was handling, all at the same time.  This stretch hurt,  not in a good way, because it was too many directions at once.  Good stretching is when you grow by branching out where you want to with good support.  Suddenly stretching too far in too many directions, physical or mental, is not a good idea.

One of these tasks, assisting with the remodel loan for my church, was completed last week.  I was blessed that the other professionals and volunteers that I was working with were top notch.  It was stressful only because of the large amount of time it took, the tight deadline, and the large amount of money and importance to my Unitarian Universalist Congregation.  What a relief for it to be finished!  By itself, performing this volunteer work would have been a very good stretch.

The other two stretching tasks are types of cases/litigation that I don’t usually work with.  Both of them have hearings set for this week.  Like my normal family law area of practice, the issues are extremely important to my clients.  In one of the cases, I should have used Advantage Denton’s services to send these folks to a lawyer who handles this rare type of case far more often (and the clients know it, because I told them of my mistake).  The other case is just unusual, but I don’t think that anyone else would be more qualified than me to handle it.

The way I dealt with the stress of these three situations coming to a head all at once was extra exercise.  I have now learned that using an elliptical machine for over an hour a day for five days in a row is not easy on the hips.  Heaven knows what would have given next if I hadn’t taken a couple of days off from that one form of exercise.  In the future, I sure hope that stretching my professional expertise will occur under less stressful circumstances.  It seems odd to me that I handle monumentally important issues for family law clients all the time, but usually don’t find it uncomfortably stressful when it is the type of work I normally perform.  Each client and each case is different and there are no guaranteed results, but work I know and like is a good stretch.

The exciting adventure of hunting for just the right lawyer is also a good stretch.  Advantage Denton lawyer finding presents unique challenges with each person’s needs and wants as we search for and set an appointment with the right lawyer for them.  Like with my church’s financial transaction, we work with fantastic people.  We connect  a client who is often not sure what type/location/experience level of lawyer they need.  Then we evolve a process each time to find and set an appointment with the right lawyer.  It is a win/win situation because the client is much better off for having the appointment made with the right lawyer rather than a wrong one,  and the lawyer is getting a client who is right for them.

One stretch that I quickly backed off from recently was trying to find a lawyer for someone who realistically just could not afford to pay for the legal services that they need.  It is wonderfully challenging to find the right lawyer in type/location/experience but unacceptably difficult for our business model to find a lawyer to agree to be underpaid for services.  It was a much better idea to refund the Advantage Denton client’s money with an apology than to perform this herculean task.  Many, many blessings on the heads of the lawyer bar association and other organizations who attempt this difficult work.

I will complete my other two “stretching” experiences fairly soon and look forward to the positive stretches of always learning more about lawyer finding and working as an attorney and business person.  May you learn as much as I do from my rather painful experience of taking on too much in too many directions at once.  Quickly deciding to not do the impossible was the best decision made during this time.  Next time, not taking the wrong type of case will be a much wiser course of action.  It would also be nice if we could do new stretching work at comfortable intervals, but that is just asking too much.

Maybe I am missing something important.  I certainly am missing a lot of entertainment.  Perhaps someone can enlighten me about why so many shows are popular when they primarily show people being unkind to each other.

Immensely popular shows have been around for quite a few years now showing house wives and other persons in a neighborhood being truly cruel to each other, showing people working together in a horrendous office situation, and “reality” tv shows people voting against each other and undermining each other in unkind ways.  Candid camera was like this, too.  It entertained by embarrassing people.  I heard about a popular Japanese game show where people were filmed at the moment someone screamed in their face.

Why do people enjoy watching immoral unkind acts?  Why is this funny or scintillating?  It reminds me of cruelty like making fun of someone based on a disability or race.   The reality TV aspirants who pretended their son might be aloft seem a natural consequence of this entertainment.

I do get why a stand up comedienne’s shtick is funny when she deflates the balloons  of false pretense.  I understand that political humor can be clever and sarcasm is a worthy art form (within reason).  Of course great literature and film is full of stories about how people deal with adversity.  It just seems to me that watching pointless cruelty is not fun.

You are most welcome to leave a comment.  I would appreciate any illumination you might shed on this issue (or even commiseration is welcome).

Melissa Denton

Don’t believe everything you hear.  Don’t believe everything you read.

One of the major advantages that Advantage Denton lawyer finders bring to folks looking for a lawyer is that we don’t take everything we come across at face value.  In finding a lawyer as well as in other important decisions, much of the data you come across can not be considered reliable by itself.  I am not saying that lawyers lie.  It is just the nature of advertising for lawyers to only say what the audience wants to hear.  If you are trying to sell something, it is foolish not to pick and choose which morsels of information to put before the person who stumbles over your advertisement.  Most lawyers are not foolish and their ads do say things to get you to buy.

When looking for information, the easiest thing to find is the advertisements that someone is paying for you to find. You can learn a lot from a lawyer’s ad if you know how to evaluate the information they serve up and compare it to other lawyer advertisements.  What someone chooses to say about herself or not to say about himself is very telling when you compare.  How desperate for business is the lawyer who has the biggest ad?  This is influenced greatly by which area of law the ad is for.  Even better to evaluate is extensive writing from the lawyer, say in a blog like this.  It is quite difficult to hide your personality and motivation if you write extensively on a variety of topics.

Other sources of information can tell you:

Has the lawyer been sanctioned by a bar association?  What kind of reviews are out there about them? Extremely important – how did they react to negative reviews?  Who are they associated with?  What outside of work activities do they engage in?  If you know how to evaluate the quality of their writing, review of briefs submitted to court or other legal work can be very helpful.

I have talked about this issue of gullibility and not believing what you read/hear within the context of finding the right lawyer for you, a topic near and dear to my heart.  These concepts do apply more broadly.  It is wise to always consider the source of information and the motivation of the source in providing that information.  Making decisions about important things when you are emotional about the subject and you have limited information at hand and limited tools to evaluate that information is not the best way to go.  Comparing information from different sources is a really good idea if you want reliable information.  If you want to influence what others think about you, you need to see what is out there about you and do what you can to make different sources say what you want them to say.  Be aware that a malicious person can do a lot of harm by reverse engineering this advice.  A negative review doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about the attorney but how the attorney responds tells you volumes.

No, lawyer ads are not just lies.  They are, however, very misleading (like all ads) unless you know how to evaluate them.

Melissa Denton

The term noblesse oblige brings to mind the wonderful middle ages history class I had in college.  We learned about how persons born into the nobility were trained from an early age that they were expected to behave in accordance with their status in life.  With the blessings of being wealthy and powerful came the responsibility to be just and generous, to give back and care for those who have fewer blessings.

I started thinking about this concept again because I recently went to a mainstream movie where the major movie stars glorified the smoking of marijuana.  Perhaps it makes me sound like a prude and it probably makes me sound weird, but I never tried the stuff.  It is illegal, it stinks and it is bad for your body.  I also dislike the notion of altering my perception.  Maybe this bizarre status of mine is why it struck me so forcefully how very irresponsible it was for major movie stars to portray an episode of smoking pot as totally delightful and without any negative consequences.  Yes, these middle aged folk clearly indicated that they did not smoke pot when they had little children and it was clear that they knew it was illegal.  Yet, the delight with which they indulged and the line “Having fun is not overrated” glorified pot with no reservations.  If I were more impressionable, I might have been persuaded that smoking marijuana is well worth doing.

This bothers me quite a bit.  I think that the individuals involved in making that movie were wrong to do this.  Back in the day, movie stars were used to promote cigarette the glamor of smoking with great success.  Now they are allowing themselves to be used to promote an illegal type of smoking that is also very harmful to one’s health.  That isn’t right.

Perhaps the movie stars and the producers/director/promoters will all say “we have artistic license” just as a few privileged and blessed athletic stars have said that they don’t believe that they have any responsibility to behave with decorum.  Most of us are not born with silver spoons in our mouths, but it is my opinion that those who have power and influence have a duty to use it well.  Yes, many of us who are successful worked hard to achieve success.  I can assure you, though, that no one “makes it” on her or his own.  People don’t really pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.  We are all standing on the shoulders of those who came before and who provided positive opportunity in our lives.  We all have the duty of noblesse oblige and those who live up to that responsibility are far more worthy of respect than those who do not.

It is such a shame that the movie contained such a terrible flaw because it was otherwise a true delight.   I hope that no impressionable viewers of that film will decide to embrace smoking marijuana just because it looked fun and glamorous when the movie stars did it.  That absolutely did happen when smoking cigarettes was glamorized in movies and TV.  Be careful what you say, someone might be listening.