Called upon to give advice to an excited 27 year old who had just heard she had been offered her dream job and wanted to give her current boss a piece of her finely educated mind, I believe I was able to prevail upon her that that particular approach is almost always doomed to ultimate failure however satisfying the moment of delivery is at the time.
I said to my young friend that she should remember the rule that, if possible, you should always try and leave a job in as positive and friendly a way as possible as you never know when you may want or need the help of someone there in the future.
Put another way, you should always be careful of the toes you step on today as they may be connected to the feet you have to kiss tomorrow.
Numbers can often be fascinating. While on the subject of work, it is important always to give 100%, as long as it is 12% on Monday, 23% on Tuesday, 40% on Wednesday, 20% on Thursday and 5% on Friday!
And remember that when you are having a bad day it takes as many as 42 muscles to frown and 28 to smile but only 4 to extend your arm and smack someone in the mouth; which brings me full circle to the advice at the outset; don’t do it if you can possibly help it!
Numbers which are truly terrifying are, of course, all around us. Take the latest Facebook statistics which reveal via Gigaom that there are 2.5 billion content items shared, 2.7 billion “likes,” 300 million photos uploaded and 500 + terabytes of new data ingested DAILY!
How to manage it all? That is the question of the moment with which lawyers in this jurisdiction, and increasingly around the common law world, are having to grapple.
It is, therefore, timely, that one of the judges most closely involved in efforts to ensure that pratitioners understand and learn to love the new CPR rules relating to e-disclosure, costs management and budgeting has produced materials to assist with our understanding of what it all means.
I urge my readers to click on the link at http://www.lexislegalintelligence.co.uk/intelligence/Jackson-reforms
If you do, you will find two short videos starring His Honour Judge Simon Brown QC and two others starring Eversheds partner, Mark Surguy, which cover:
- what you should be asking a client prior to the first CMC,
- what happens when you fail to cooperate with the other side on costs budgets,
- what you should be saying to the other side about costs prior to the first CMC, and
- how the court will deal with costs budgeting when the parties have co-operated and sought to agree aspects of the proceedings where costs are key eg disclosure.
There is a wealth of other useful information and comment on the new rules here for practitioners to consider. My guess is that with the new readiness in the courts to impose sanctions for failures in this area, there is much to be gained from at least watching the videos.
I am off to California at the end of this week to the Spring meeting of the Litigation Counsel of America where my colleague, Naj Bueno, and I will be talking to US attorneys about the new dawn in predictive coding, one of the tools the courts there are looking to in the fight to manage the increasing amount of data and the costs of discovery.
I will report back upon my return when I hope to have more numbers to amuse you!