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ABA Journal: Modern Law Library

ABA Journal: Modern Law Library

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 Listen to the ABA Journal Podcast for analysis and discussion of the latest legal issues and trends the first Monday of each month. Also hear discussions with authors for The Modern Law Library books podcast series. Arte Ciencia Política Economía Exito Profesional Historia y Crítica Literaria Política y Gobierno
Episodios
  • What today’s rainmakers do differently

    What today’s rainmakers do differently
    May 21 2025
    Matthew Dixon, co-founder of DCM Insights, is a researcher who’s spent much of his career studying the shared characteristics and behaviors of successful B2B salespeople. In 2011, he released a study called “The Challenger Sale.” While giving a keynote on his findings at an annual partner retreat, an audience member stood up and challenged him. “He said, ‘Dr. Dixon, you’ve been talking for 45 minutes about sales effectiveness and salespeople and selling and sales process, and it’s all very fascinating and I’m sure our clients would be very interested in this,’” Dixon recounts to the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles in this episode of The Modern Law Library. “‘And after all, we do a lot of consulting around go-to-market strategy. But what maybe you don’t recognize is that we are partners at our firm. We are not salespeople. In fact, there’s not a single salesperson in this audience. I might go so far as to say we don’t sell anything here.’” Dixon was taken aback. “What I realized was this world of partnerships, of professional services, of doer-sellers is actually quite a bit different from the world of sales and what we had written and all this research we’d done over the years.” In 2022, he tackled this population with the Rainmaker Genome Project, a study that became the basis for The Activator Advantage: What Today’s Rainmakers Do Differently, co-written by Dixon, Rory Channer, Karen Freeman and Ted McKenna. The Rainmaker Genome Project surveyed 3,000 partner-level professionals in 41 firms across law, public relations, accounting and investment banking. About 39% of respondents were lawyers. Each received a score for effectiveness in business development and were analyzed for how they provided client services. And it turns out that partner was correct: What makes a lawyer an effective rainmaker is not necessarily what makes a salesperson effective. After doing a vector analysis on the data, “what we found was that every one of those 3,000 professionals could be placed into one of five business development profiles,” says Dixon. The five profiles were the expert, the confidant, the debater, the challenger and the activator. Dixon stresses that the five categories are not about personality. While personalities are immutable, behaviors can be changed. “These are about the things we can all learn to be better at,” says Dixon. “It’s about how we spend our time, how we engage clients, how we use resources, how we collaborate with colleagues—and those are things we can all get better at with the right training, coaching and support from our firms.” In this episode, Dixon expands on each type, but the most effective performers in business development were the activators. “The reason we chose the term ‘activator’ instead of ‘connector’—people have asked—is that they’re not about collecting business cards and letting them collect dust or just hoarding LinkedIn connections,” Dixon tells Rawles. “What these folks do is try to turn these relationships into paying client relationships. They activate those relationships by proactively bringing new ideas—ways to mitigate risk, make money, save money—to clients.” Dixon offers practical advice on how to behave like an activator, including the most effective ways to use LinkedIn. Lawyers and other client-servicing professionals can’t just sit back and wait for business to find them, he warns. “Whether we like to admit it or not, clients are less loyal today than they once were,” he says. “They’re less likely to come back automatically to their incumbent provider. No matter how great the relationship or the value you’ve delivered, they’re forcing us to compete in ways we didn’t have to in the past. So activators want a backup plan. They know today’s great client might not be a client tomorrow, no matter what you’ve done. So you need a backup plan.”
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    51 m
  • Perplexed about AI? Richard Susskind wants to help

    Perplexed about AI? Richard Susskind wants to help
    May 7 2025
    For nearly 30 years, Richard Susskind has written books asking lawyers to envision the future of the law and the legal profession in ways that stretch the imagination. Susskind has been one of the foremost proponents of the transformative potential of technology in legal services. Now, he's asking us to imagine larger transformation still: a world in which AI reigns and humanity faces being sidelined. Susskind was an early and enthusiastic booster of the development of artificial intelligence, he tells the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles in this episode of the Modern Law Library. He first became enamored of its potential as a law student in the 1980s, and wrote his doctorate at the University of Oxford on AI and the law in 1986. But the speed and direction of recent advances have given him pause. Will AI be a tool for humanity, or its destruction? In his new book, How to Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed, he hopes to help the layperson navigate the issues raised by artificial intelligence, and provoke a global discussion about the ethical and legal implications. Technology is too important to be left only to the technologists, he says. While most people are able to see the promise of AI for professions other than their own, Susskind sees a phenomenon he calls "not-us thinking" when most people are asked if their own work could be taken over by an AI system. Lawyers should be careful not to overestimate clients' attachment to having a human lawyer if their goal is simply to avoid legal pitfalls and they can rely on an AI system to accomplish that. In this episode, Susskind discusses the promise of AI for increasing access to justice, and talks about some of the ethical decisions that will have to be made with Rawles, who is more of an AI skeptic.
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    50 m
  • ‘Secrets of the Killing State’ exposes realities of lethal injection

    ‘Secrets of the Killing State’ exposes realities of lethal injection
    Apr 23 2025
    Execution by lethal injection is seen by many Americans as a less barbaric alternative than older methods like hanging, firing squads and electrocution. It is easy to assume that the process must resemble euthanasia procedures for terminally ill people or pets. The reality is very different, says Corinna Barrett Lain, a law professor and death penalty expert. Lain didn’t initially intend to make the death penalty her primary area of study, she tells the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles in this episode of the Modern Law Library. A former prosecutor in Virginia, Lain did not begin her work out of opposition to the death penalty. But the more she discovered about the realities of the administration of lethal injections, the more she was compelled to demystify the process. In Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, Lain upends a lot of conventional wisdom about lethal injections. For example, the three-drug protocol used by most states was not a drug cocktail arrived at through scientific research. Rather, in 1977, after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed executions to resume after a 10-year hiatus, Oklahoma medical examiner Dr. Jay Chapman was asked by a state legislator to come up with an alternative to the state’s rickety electric chair. Though Chapman admitted he was “an expert in dead bodies but not an expert in getting them that way,” he proposed combining sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride. “You wanted to make sure the prisoner was dead at the end, so why not add a third drug,” the book quotes Chapman as saying. “Why does it matter why I chose it?” In contrast, an overdose of a single drug, pentobarbital, is what is commonly used by veterinarians in animal euthanasia. “Lethal injection is not based on science,” Lain writes. “It is based on the illusion of science, the assumption of science.” In this episode, Lain and Rawles also discuss botched executions, shady sources used by states to procure the drugs used for lethal injections, and how Lain’s scholarship has impacted her views of capital punishment as a whole.
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    45 m
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