Category: News Feeds

(Christopher Scalia, son of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, commenting on Sen. Josh Hawley’s tweet about the loss of his book contract following the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that he helped to incite. Hawley has been condemned by former supporters, and many are now calling for his resignation.)

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

The week began with an explosive audio recording of Donald Trump pressuring Georgia election officials to accept debunked conspiracy theories and “find” enough ballots to allow him to win the state. While most of the country marveled that Trump was caught on tape seemingly committing the requisite acts of attempted election interference — query whether he’s capable of mens rea at this point — the legal world marveled that three lawyers sat in on a call like that.

And then the Capitol was ransacked by a violent mob and election fraud seemed somewhat quaint by comparison.

One of the lawyers, Cleta Mitchell, was a partner at Foley & Lardner as the week began. As the firm scrambled to respond as clients protested the firm’s involvement in the dubious election effort and groups began to agitate for clients to boycott en masse, the firm indicated that Mitchell had gone rogue and began offering professional succor to the president’s quixotic QAnon quackery. A day later, Foley & Lardner announced that Mitchell was out — resigning in a letter that blamed “leftists” and not the problematic business and ethical morass she’d tried to drag her firm into.

Alex Kaufman of Fox Rothschild didn’t speak on the call, though was introduced as one of “the attorneys that represent the president.” He remained unidentified for a few days before we revealed his involvement yesterday morning. The firm informed us last night that Kaufman and his father, Emory Law Alumni Board member Robert Kaufman, had agreed to leave.

And while Mitchell blames “leftists” for pressuring Foley & Lardner, this bellyaching is just a sad reflection of the culture of irresponsibility that’s grown up around the conservative movement. In both cases, the respective firms refused to get involved in election challenges as a matter of policy… and the lawyers went ahead anyway. The firms made their decisions based on an assessment of both professional and business concerns. To be dragged into asserting claims that had already been rejected by courts across the country  (and are triggering sanction motions against other lawyers) hurts the reputation and business of every other partner in the firm. But these two, whether they thought about it in these terms or not, put themselves ahead of all that.

Just like the anti-mask brigade puts their convenience ahead of public health. And how the rioters put their delusions ahead of the safety and the sanctity of the American government. And, now, how Lindsey Graham is trying to blame Portland for the mob he spent four years whipping up. Nothing is ever these people’s responsibility. They can do whatever they want and if not, it’s the fault of leftists, or Dominion, or Hugo Chavez, or China, or Fauci, or the Woke Crowd, or AOC, or Pelosi, or Portlandia reruns.

But instead of casting about for some third-party to blame, in the immortal words of Ice Cube, if you take a moment to check yourself, you can often avoid wrecking yourself.

Earlier: Cleta Mitchell Out At Foley & Lardner After Troubling Donald Trump Call
Donald Trump Drags Biglaw Firm Into Middle Of Election Interference Effort
There Was ANOTHER Biglaw Firm Partner On The Donald Trump Call With Georgia Election Officials

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

As we write, people—very rich people—are being actively solicited to hand over between $1 million and $30 million to Mick Mulvaney, a man who’s never before managed money professionally. Why would they do so? Well, of course, for the “advantage over everyone else” provided by Mulvaney’s penetrating insights into “how Washington works,” like this one:

We are all still processing what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, and people far better at it than I have already been meticulously laying out the story of the insurrection. But there is one small piece of this disgusting segment of American history that I do feel equipped to talk about.

Admitted lawyers, supposedly in good standing, played a prominent role in this coup attempt. Some served as deranged foot soldiers and rightfully lost jobs as a result. I don’t want to talk about them, though. I want to talk about Rudolph William Louis Giuliani.

Even before urging that a mob engage in “combat” during a coup attempt, Rudy Giuliani was an embarrassment to the legal profession and was clearly incompetent as an attorney. In fact, there’s a good case to be made that Giuliani, after an exemplary early career, eventually became the most incompetent attorney in the history of the legal profession. He repeatedly butt-dialed important people. He left rambling voicemails after accidentally calling the wrong person. He let his hair dye, which frankly wasn’t going to be fooling anyone even had it stayed on his head, run down his face at a public event. He booked a news conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping instead of at the Four Seasons hotel. He doesn’t know what strict scrutiny is. After first refusing a COVID-19 test, he let Borat trick him into “tucking in his shirt” in front of a woman so far out of his league astronauts could probably hear those warning bells going off from the vacuum of space. He didn’t go into federal court for nearly three decades, and then somehow thought he should be the go-to election litigator for the president of the United States. Oh, AND HE REPEATEDLY PUSHED DEBUNKED CONSPIRACY THEORIES TO UNDERMINE DEMOCRACY AND TO TURN AMERICA INTO A DICTATORSHIP!

Before the mob of angry and armed pro-Trump domestic terrorists descended on the U.S. Capitol, Giuliani stood before them and urged them to engage in “trial by combat” to change the legal election results. I’m looking at Giuliani’s Attorney Detail Report on the New York State Unified Court System website right now, and at the moment, he has no record of public discipline. We should change that.

Since I first wrote about Giuliani being a national disgrace, I have received many emails from readers asking how to go about getting him disbarred and/or how to lodge an ethics complaint against him. Pretty much uniformly I thanked them for reaching out and explained the basics of how to lodge a complaint with an attorney disciplinary body, but discouraged them from taking further action, as it was my assumption that nothing would be done about an ethics complaint filed by some random member of the public who wasn’t the client of the lawyer and didn’t directly work with him.

Well, I’ve changed my mind. Rudy Giuliani is the definition of unethical, and he is a danger to democracy, just one step below Trump himself. Giuliani has no right to go on calling himself an attorney, and every moment he continues to have a law license is doing irreparable harm to the legal profession. The more ethics complaints lodged against him, the better. If you want to file an ethics complaint against him, here is a helpful article from the New York State Bar Association that nicely lays out the process. The gist is, you must file a written complaint with the appropriate grievance committee, and then, if the conduct complained of is serious enough, that grievance committee may refer the matter to court for action following an investigation, up to and including disbarment. Giuliani’s given business address is 445 Park Ave., Floor 18, in Manhattan, making the Departmental Disciplinary Committee for the First Department the appropriate committee to address any complaints you may have to. Here is a link to their webpage.

Giuliani did halfheartedly condemn the violence the day after the coup attempt, while failing to apologize for his role in inciting it. That’s not good enough though. Before we can heal as a nation, there has to be a reckoning for what happened at the Capitol. Frankly, a law license is a small price to pay for trying to destroy democracy. But it’s a start.

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Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

New Technology Without Adoption Is Worse Than Doing Nothing

New Technology Without Adoption Is Worse Than Doing Nothing

Rohit Parekh – Matter365

New Technology Without Adoption Is Worse Than Doing Nothing

New Technology Without Adoption Is Worse Than Doing Nothing

Rohit Parekh – Matter365

‘Tis the season for a massive copyright opinion. In the run up to the new year, the Ninth Circuit issued its decision in the long-gestating Dr. Seuss Enterprises, L.P. v. ComicMix LLC case. Its clear-eyed analysis brilliantly ventilates the “fair use” defense, which has recently become one of the most misapplied (and thus popular among infringers) doctrines in all of copyright.

Dr. Seuss, while not a holder of an M.D., wrote and illustrated some of the most iconic stories of all time, each of which are dappled with his unique and fanciful language and imagery. One of the good Doctor’s best books, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, is an evergreen work that has been widely popular for decades, and not just with those looking to give a thoughtful but whimsical graduation gift. It has repeatedly graced the The New York Times Best Seller list and, along with other Seuss works, made Seuss the number one book brand of 2017. 

An obscure company named ComicMix thought they could cash in on the popularity of Seuss by creating a Seuss-y book that was not actually authored by him. To do so, ComicMix copied verbatim a number of original illustrations from Go! and other Seuss works, reproduced the structure and overall look and feel of the Go! story, and then sprinkled in some characters and references they copied from another work, Star Trek. The end result was Oh, the Places You’ll Boldly Go!, a book that the Ninth Circuit found to be no more than a “repackaging” and “copying” of Seuss’s work. As such, ComicMix’s attempt to target Seuss’s market and profit from this book was decidedly unfair.

This appears to be such a clear and obvious case of copying and infringement that you may wonder why the Ninth Circuit’s decision is so important. Chiefly, it is due the Circuit’s savage dismantling of ComicMix’s ultimately misguided Section 107, or “fair use,” defense. As we will discuss, this defense was credited by the District Court and has recently emerged as a massive area of confusion for the courts. The ComicMix decision greatly clarifies the application of the doctrine and will remove some of the uncertainty from the litigation process.

There is a four-part test that, while nonexclusive, is meant to guide the Section 107 analysis. When an infringer has copied an artist’s work without consent but then claims the copying was fair, the court, under 17 U.S.C. § 107, should look at (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The Ninth Circuit applied these factors to the ComicMix knockoff and easily found that Section 107 defense provided no safe harbor. Indeed, it concluded that not a single factor favored a finding of fair use and reversed the District Court’s finding to the contrary.

The Ninth Circuit begins its analysis by concluding  that ComicMix made an “indisputably commercial use” of Go!, which cuts against “fair use.” While not dispositive, a copied work is less likely to be found protected by fair use when the copying was done to make money as opposed to a more altruistic reason. Then, the Ninth Circuit found that the infringing work was not educational or for purposes of critique or transformative given that it “merely use[d] what Dr. Seuss had already created[.]” And the Circuit found “completely unconvincing” ComicMix’s “post-hoc characterization of the work” as a transformative parody or commentary, which was helpful because it is quite common for infringers’ attorneys to simply fabricate fair use bases long after their clients committed the infringement. 

ComicMix also argued that its addition of “extensive new content” to the Seuss material — which, ironically is also copied, from Star Trek — makes its use fair. But, as the Ninth Circuit notes, the addition of new content is “not a get-out-of-jail-free card” and instead impinges on an artist’s right to create derivative works. In the end, this factor heavily favored Seuss because ComicMix, in repackaging the work of Seuss, “merely recontextualiz[ed] the original expression by plucking the most visually arresting excerpt[s]” from his work. And that is simply not “transformative.” What is transformative and whether we should even be considering the question given that the word transformative does not appear in Section 107, will be more fully vetted in the coming paragraphs. In the end, the first factor was decided in Seuss’s favor.

The second factor looks at whether a work is functional or creative, with the latter being closer to the core of the type of creativity protected by the Copyright Act, and as a result less likely to be “fairly” used. The Ninth Circuit found Seuss’s work highly creative and decided this factor in plaintiff’s favor. 

The third factor also favored Seuss. It examines the amount and substantiality of the copying at issue. The more copying, the less likely it is to be fair use. Here, large swaths of the “heart” and “highly expressive core” of Seuss’s work were copied. For example, as the Ninth Circuit held, ComicMx “replicated, as much and as closely as possible from Go!, the exact composition, the particular arrangements of visual components, and the swatches of well-known illustrations.” And the Circuit laughs off ComicMix’s claim that it “judiciously incorporated just enough of the original to be identifiable” as Seussian, finding it to be “fake math” and flatly contradicted by basically the entire record. 

The final factor, which considers “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work[,]” also heavily favored Seuss. The Ninth Circuit begins its analysis of this factor by concluding that the District Court erred in forcing Seuss to shoulder the burden of proof, which “led to a skewed analysis[.]” Noting it as one of the few absolutes in the fair use analysis, the Circuit established that an infringer bears the burden of proof on all factors. In addressing the substance, the Circuit chastens ComicMix for failing to address the fact that it “intentionally targeted and aimed to capitalize” on the same market as Seuss. It also concludes that allowing works like the ComicMix knockoff would curtail Seuss’s right to license others to create derivative works and finds that ComicMix’s argument as to this factor “falls flat.”

In the end, the Ninth Circuit found, with ease, that not a single one of the Section 107 factors militated in ComicMix’s favor. The fair use defense here appears so obviously frivolous that one wonders why ComicMix and its attorneys would even advance it in the first place. But, given the confusion regarding the application of the factors, and the widely disparate rulings on the issue, infringers’ counsel now raise the fair use defense in even the most blatant cases of infringement and in situations where it is wholly applicable. 

And, well, the District Court here found the Section 107 defense applicable as a matter of law at the summary judgment stage despite the fact that, as the Ninth Circuit panel unanimously notes, “ComicMix created, without seeking permission or a license, a non-transformative commercial work that targets and usurps Go!’s potential market.” 

Infringers’ counsel have fomented the confusion that led to this District Court and many others wrongly applying this defense primarily by exploiting the uncertainty around the definition of transformative in the Section 107 context. Courts have found all manner of things transformative and excused infringement as fair use on that basis, resulting in havoc and unceasing appellate practice. But, as the Ninth Circuit notes, “the term ‘transformative’ does not appear in § 107, yet it permeates copyright analysis” because the Supreme Court in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. noted that courts should examine “whether and to what extent the new work is ‘transformative.’” As the Ninth Circuit later acknowledges, though, transforming a work by adding new content will often rub up against or outright infringe the artist’s statutorily prescribed exclusive right to create derivative works under Section 106. With this ruling, in the Ninth Circuit at least, future infringers will less likely be able to exploit the Section 107 defense by claiming their knockoffs to be”transformative.

Artists and copyright holders, as well as those looking to engage in actual fair use of other’s work, now have a lucid and thorough opinion to guide them and the courts in future disputes. The Ninth Circuit’s clear application of the Section 107 factors and its acknowledgement of the importance of the market harm factor and derivative right will be of assistance to all as copyright litigation continues apace in 2021.

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Scott Alan Burroughs, Esq. practices with Doniger / Burroughs, an art law firm based in Venice, California. He represents artists and content creators of all stripes and writes and speaks regularly on copyright issues. He can be reached at scott@copyrightLA.com, and you can follow his law firm on Instagram: @veniceartlaw. 

In news akin to a wedding announcement jointly issued by the Hatfields and the McCoys, two longtime competitors in the legal research market, Casemaker and Fastcase, have merged, creating a single company under the Fastcase brand that has an estimated subscriber base of more than three quarters of all lawyers in the United States.

Just over a year ago, the two companies were in litigation against each other in federal court in Atlanta over Casemaker’s claims of copyright in Georgia administrative regulations. Early in December 2019, the companies stipulated to dismissing that litigation after reaching a settlement on undisclosed terms.

The rivalry between them extended back to both companies’ early years, as each competed to win the business of becoming the preferred member benefit of state and local bar associations. For years, one of my most popular posts remained an article I wrote in 2009 in which I did a head-to-head comparison of the two research services.

Now, the combined company’s subscriber base will include the bar associations of all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and four-dozen metropolitan, county and specialty bar associations, for a total number of users of more than 1 million lawyers, out of an estimated 1.3 million lawyers in the country.

(Here are the lists of Fastcase’s bar partners and of Casemaker’s bar partners.)

“Starting today,” Fastcase cofounder and CEO Ed Walters said, “every member of a state bar in the country has access to legal research through our blended company.”

No Immediate Changes

In the immediate term, the merger will have no impact on those subscribers, as both the Casemaker and Fastcase research platforms will continue to operate in their present forms and under their former brand names.

Behind the scenes, however, the two companies will combine their teams and technologies with the goal of further innovating the research, analytics and workflow products they offer. All employees of both companies will remain with the merged entity, including Casemaker president and CEO Satish Sheth, who joins the Fastcase board of directors, and Fastcase cofounders Walters, CEO, and Phil Rosenthal, president.

Walters told me last night that no decision has been made about the fates of the two companies’ research platforms. Over time, the decision will be made whether to keep one or both or possibly even combine the best of each into a new platform.

Walters said he is most excited about the potential that comes from combining the editorial strength of Casemaker with the “innovative DNA” of Fastcase and the other brands under its umbrella, docket and analytics company Docket Alarm, bankruptcy platform NextChapter, and, its most recent acquisition, legal research company Judicata.

“Now every time we innovate, virtually every lawyer in America gets it right away,” Walters said.

One Plus One Equals Three

Talks leading to the merger began almost immediately after the companies settled their lawsuit in December 2019 and the merger became official on Jan. 1. Now, Walters said, they will go through an extended period of analyzing how best to take advantage of the companies’ different research libraries, data sources, and other assets.

“This is really one of those places where one plus one equals three,” he said. “Everybody’s services will get better, and all at the same time.”

Walters said that the bar associations with which it has affinity relationships will play a critical role in helping to define the future course of the company and the shape of its products.

“We have a lot of hard work ahead, but the benefit now is that we can talk to all the state bars about it, we can get their advice and guidance,” he said.

“It is clear how much more we can do together for our bar partners and firms,” Fastcase President Rosenthal, said in a company statement. “We have long admired what Casemaker has done for bar associations and their members. We have great appreciation for Casemaker’s editorial and production excellence and their deep understanding of the bar market.”

Although rivals in the marketplace, the two companies have long shared mutual respect, as I can personally attest to through conversations over the years with the leaders of both.

The companies also differ in their products and scope. Fastcase has diversified beyond legal research, launching its Full Court Press publishing arm and acquiring Docket Alarm and Law Street Media in 2018, NextChapter in 2019, and the technology and team of Judicata in 2020.

Casemaker, meanwhile, has built up a strong editorial arm for updating statutes and regulations, has a case law collection that includes more historic materials dating further back, and has its own caselaw citator in CaseCheck+.

“The combination of our two programs is long overdue, and now the fun really begins,” Casemaker President Sheth said in a statement. “The first thing we’re going to do, is what we always do, we’re going to put our customers first.”

Bottom Line

Casemaker was founded in the late 1990s when a Cincinnati attorney partnered with the Ohio State Bar Association to create a searchable database of Ohio cases. Walters and Rosenthal were associates at Covington & Burling when they left the firm to found Fastcase in 1999.

If you had asked me when Casemaker and Fastcase would ever merge, my answer would have been, “When hell freezes over.” Well, good thing I brought an overcoat.

The bottom line is that this is huge news. Not potentially huge. Huge now.

As much as I’ve portrayed this story as about the competition between Casemaker and Fastcase, the fact is they have both been competing against the legal research duopoly of Thomson Reuters (with Westlaw) and LexisNexis. Love them or hate them, Wexis, as some call the duo, have dominated the legal research market to an almost monopolistic extent.

In what might once have seemed a quixotic quest, both Casemaker and Fastcase have been gaining greater and greater traction over the years in becoming viable alternatives to Westlaw and Lexis, refining the sophistication of their research tools and rounding out the breadth and depth of their libraries.

Now, as a single company with a built-in subscriber base of more than three quarters of all U.S. lawyers, this new Fastcase is, more than ever before, a force to be reckoned with in defining the future of the legal research and publishing market.

LawNext Episode 45: As Fastcase Turns 20, Founders Recount Its History and Predict Its Future

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Claire E. Parsons back to our pages. Click here if you’d like to donate to MothersEsquire.

Do a Google image search for the word “mindfulness” and pictures will appear of beautifully kempt women, swathed in pastels or sepia tones, sitting serenely near a lake, in a field, or on some mountaintop. Then do a Google image search for “lawyer mom” and up pops the ubiquitous lady in a suit, often in a messy kitchen, juggling a baby and a briefcase or laptop. Based on this, it would seem that mindfulness just isn’t for the lawyer-mom. We aren’t those ladies in soft colors who have the time to sit around in nature. We’re the ones in dark suits with too many demands, too little help, and — implicitly the images accuse — too much ambition.

But I’m a lawyer-mom and have an active meditation practice. In fact, I went so far down that path that I’m now a certified meditation teacher. I didn’t start a meditation practice in spite of my dual roles as mom and attorney. I started one because of them. I’ve written here before about my difficult pregnancy with my first daughter and how my firm helped my practice survive by supporting me through that pregnancy. The rest of that story is how a mindfulness practice helped me heal from that experience and undo the mental frameworks that caused it, so I could grow and thrive.

I had read about mindfulness practices before I became pregnant with my daughter, but I never was able to establish a regular practice until it became so clear that I needed it. The year after my daughter was born, I had a two-week wrongful-death trial coming up. My husband and I still had not gotten our daughter to sleep through the night. I had so many things to do that I struggled to decide what to do next. I was so tired that I was seriously considering going part-time or even changing careers because I felt like I was bad at everything. I can’t even remember why, but one day I just decided to try meditating.

I had no lake to sit near or mountaintop to climb, but in increments of one to two minutes I found serenity in my closet (the quietest spot in the house). At first it was startling to watch the churning in my mind, but it also felt good to stop for a second and sit in silence. Over time, I upgraded to a real meditation cushion, gradually extended the time I could sit, and found guided meditations and books to help me along. As I advanced, I noticed that I didn’t get bogged down in thoughts so much, wasn’t rushing all of the time, and had far fewer stress-induced headaches.

When I explored other kinds of meditation, loving-kindness in particular, it was like a damn broke open. My Catholic school education had stressed kindness and compassion, but never explicitly and systematically for me. Traditional loving-kindness practices, rightly so, start by wishing yourself well before you even think about anyone else. It was this that helped me see where I had gone wrong with my first pregnancy. I had let my overthinking run wild with worries about whether I was good enough as a mom. So lost in the thoughts and judgment, I made no time to feel and care for my own pain, and I certainly didn’t ask for help because I was too ashamed.

Meditation helped me get out of that cycle because it helped me see the thought “am I good enough?” and critically examine it by asking “compared to what?” or “what is good enough anyway?” Once I was able to let go (at least a little bit) of these worries, I could handle more skillfully the times when I felt like a mess. Instead of launching into judgment about not meeting standards, I could acknowledge I was hurt, or scared, or confused, or frustrated. I could experience that and offer myself care by encouraging myself, taking a breath or a walk, or asking for support.

And once I healed, the logical next step was to grow. I found risks and new ventures, like blogging or leadership roles, weren’t so hard to take now that I had a softer way of handling setbacks and adversity. I found handling tasks much easier now that I knew ways to manage my energy, monitor my signs of stress and fatigue, and take breaks. I found that stressful situations in my life and law practice were easier to manage when I was able to take a pause, choose a response instead of always reacting, and fix the problem instead of making it worse.

Over the years, it has often been hard to find the time to practice. There have been many days and even one long period where I missed. I was often frustrated by distractions and interruptions or exhausted and fell asleep. I regularly trailed off in thoughts about useless things and wasted whole sessions in fantasies about the future that never came to pass. I repeatedly went through phases where I didn’t “feel like” meditating because I just wanted to ignore what I was feeling. After more than seven years of consistent practice, I have only had brief snatches of time where I felt anywhere near as serene as those lovely women on the mountaintops.

But I kept going, and I keep going today because I don’t live on a mountaintop. I don’t live in sepia tones. I live as a lawyer in a dark suit and a mom in a messy house, and I juggle too many things and — maybe it’s true — I have too much ambition. But with my mindfulness practice, I have heart and wisdom and compassion and stability, too. And all those things are necessary if I am to be the lawyer and the mom I want to be.

So here’s my advice to you. If you are thinking about a meditation practice, let go of those Google images of what mindfulness allegedly looks like. Remember, you aren’t meditating just to make a pretty stock picture. You are meditating to make a beautiful life. That doesn’t come to most of us in prepackaged sepia tones and curated nature scenes. It comes from finding comfort and offering care to ourselves, over and over and over again, as we sit in the mess.  As lawyer-moms with too many demands and too little help, we are experts of the mess and making order out of chaos. So, if you are starting a meditation practice, don’t try to be like that serene lady on the mountaintop. Be you, because, in my opinion, she could learn a thing or two from us.

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Claire E. Parsons is a Member at Adams Law, PLLC in Covington, Kentucky where she focuses her practice in local government practice, school law, and civil litigation. She is the mother of two girls and the Content and Communications Chair for MothersEsquire. She completed her meditation teacher training with The Mindfulness Center and writes about mindfulness for lawyers on her blog, Brilliant Legal Mind. You can follow Claire’s blog on WordPress or social media and you can find more of Claire’s content or connect with her on LinkedIn.