Finding New Clients

Episode Notes

Transcript

Dave Scriven-Young:

Hello everyone and welcome to Litigation Radio. I’m your host, Dave Scriven-Young. I’m a commercial and environmental litigator in the Chicago office of Peckar & Abramson which is recognized as the largest law firm serving the construction industry with 115 lawyers and 11 offices around the us. On the show, we talk to the country’s top litigators and judges to discover best practices in developing our careers, winning cases, getting more clients, and building a sustainable practice. Please be sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcasting app to make sure you’re getting updated with future episodes. This podcast is brought to you by the Litigation section of the American Bar Association. It’s where I make my home in the ABA. The Litigation section provides litigators of all practice areas, the resources we need to be successful advocates for our clients. Learn more at ambar.org slash Litigation. Well, happy New Year and I hope you’re doing well with your New Year’s resolutions.

I know that I’ll be trying to get healthier, becoming more present in my daily life, and of course achieving business development goals In my practice, studies have shown that the best way to stick to resolutions is to plan and create new habits that will last. So what are some new business development habits that we should be thinking about going into this new year where our guest on today’s show will answer that question and help us to plan our year? And our guest is of course, Merrick Gross known to many of our listeners. As Rick, who is a rainmaker and longtime leader in the ABA Litigation section, he’s currently acting as co-director of Division five working with challenge committees, getting them to function at a greater level. Rick Gross is a shareholder in the Miami office of the law firm of Carleton Fields and has more than 36 years of legal experience serving a variety of business clients. His multifaceted commercial Litigation practice includes aspects of banking, real estate securities, business torts and creditors rights, including bankruptcy, Rick Litigates cases in federal and state courts in Florida and throughout the United States. He has been a leader in many organizations, including as an ABA section of Litigation, council member, president of the Dad County Bar Association, chair of the Florida Bar Business Law section and chair of the Florida Bar Constitutional Judiciary Committee. Rick, welcome to the show,

Merrick “Rick” Gross:

David. Thanks for having me.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Well, let’s just begin with a distinction that I think everyone, including our young lawyers need to recognize. What’s the difference between developing our internal clients and developing external clients,

Merrick “Rick” Gross:

Internal clients? That involves getting work from the lawyers within your own firm, whereas developing external clients, meaning getting referrals from lawyers outside your firm or getting business directly from clients. And there are different ways to achieve both those goals in your practice.

Dave Scriven-Young:

And I think most young lawyers or most lawyers, I think about getting those external clients. I want to bring in that big whale client, Microsoft, some big organization, but I think for me, I always tell young lawyers to kind of develop those internal clients. We’re getting work from lawyers within your firm. So what are some great ways to kind of develop our internal clients as lawyers?

Merrick “Rick” Gross:

I would start out by saying internal clients are almost as important as external clients, especially if you’re with a firm that has multiple offices like yours or mine. Mine’s also a national firm. We have about 350 lawyers all around the United States. The best way to do that is to get to know the colleagues in your various offices and to do that, go visit them. Take the time to do that. It’s a great way to develop business internally so the lawyers in the other offices when they have a matter that comes up in your region, they know to call you and you get the first call from someone in your own firm and you can move forward with it. And it’s just a great way to get business internally the way that originations work out. That’s very specific to every firm, but over time it all works out.

When I joined Carlton Fields a little over 15 years ago, I had come from another national firm, but I didn’t know many of the lawyers at Carlton Fields before I joined only a few through the section of Litigation. I made it a point in the first three or five months that I was with Carlton Fields to go visit those other offices and find out what my partners did and let them know what I do because you’ll also find out that it’s a two-way street. So when you get a call from a client or a friend or another lawyer asking if you can handle a matter in another part of the country, you’ll know who the lawyer, the best lawyer will be for that matter, and you’ll be able to move that along. So it’s a two-way street. In terms of internal clients,

Dave Scriven-Young:

Really great advice. I think many young lawyers specifically think that if I’m going to another city, my colleagues don’t want to visit with me, they don’t have the time to visit. I recently had, my older son goes to school in Washington DC and I reached out to a friend of mine who’s at my firm’s office in dc just wanted to see if she wanted to go to lunch or just kind of connect. She ended up saying, well, we actually have our office lunch together on a Friday. And it ended up being a great kind of event to reconnect with a lot of folks. And it’s interesting, they wanted to know who I am and they want to know what my practice is. And I think it’s just a great way to get to know people because just like outside clients, internal clients, people that are in these other offices want to refer matters out, but only want to do it to people that they know, like and trust. It’s a great way to get to know folks is just when you’re in that area of the country, go visit folks at the offices. And Rick, what was your way of doing that? Was it mostly like lunches or just going in the office and doing work there and meeting folks at the office? What were some of your techniques to do that?

Merrick “Rick” Gross:

It was both of those things. David, I would go work out of the office. We have an LA office. I have a lot of clients in California. I attend a lot of conferences out there. I make it a point of going out to our LA office at least once or twice a year, and I’ve really developed great referral relationships through that. Same thing with our New York office, with our DC office. I work in practice in South Florida. I go to our Atlanta office probably six to seven times a year because I have a number of clients in the city of Atlanta and I laugh. I tell people the Delta flight is a flying bus because it’s an hour and a half. I jump on Marta and I’m in my office. You got to do those sort of things. The other thing that’s important about all this is cross marketing.

Knowing what your colleagues do outside of Litigation, even within Litigation, when you need to do a pitch for an external client, we’ll talk about that in a minute. Who should be on your team to make that pitch? And sometimes you’ll have the contact to get your foot in the door at a client, but it’s not in your bailiwick. You bring your colleague along and that’s how you close the deal. And I always say to people, half of something is better than a hundred percent of nothing. So even if you’ve got to share originations and things like that, it’s to everybody’s benefit.

Dave Scriven-Young:

And you’re also continuing to develop relationships within your firm, which is extremely important, especially for young lawyers who want to make their way up because. Talk a little bit about the partnership process, Rick, in terms of young lawyers who want to make partner, obviously one of the ways, one of the factors is do the other lawyers in those other offices know you to give you a leg up or a recommendation? Yeah, I worked with Rick. I worked with Dave. I know that he’s a good lawyer. I’ve met him on a number of occasions. I trust I like him. I’ll give him that recommendation. Talk a little bit about why that would be important, especially for young lawyers who want to make partner

Merrick “Rick” Gross:

For the reasons you just said. I sat on our firm’s new shareholder committee for a number of years, and when a associate would come up for the ability to become a shareholder within our firm, we go through a huge interview process. The associate pulls together a self-evaluation. We then reach out to every lawyer that the associate lists as someone they have done work for within the last two to three years and go and interview them, whether it’s Vieth Zoom or sometimes they’re live before Covid. We did all of these interviews live, so we would travel to the various offices to try to do that. And it’s very important because when the firm is looking at in terms of making recommendations a cross section of a number of lawyers in different offices from around the firm, it just strengthens the younger lawyer’s case. I mean, as a young lawyer, the first thing you need to do is become the best lawyer you can be. And then it comes into the marketing aspects.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Love that. Great tips there. And so let’s transfer over and talk about developing those external clients. Talk about some habits that we should be creating coming into 2024. Let’s talk first about referral sources. So for you, Rick, what are some of your best referral sources for external clients

Merrick “Rick” Gross:

That’s changed over time? When I first moved to Florida 36 years ago, not many national firms had offices in the Southeast. That has completely changed. David, your firm has an office here. We don’t have an office yet in Chicago, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we do. But I would say as litigators, our best referral sources used to be other lawyers, and I think to some extent they are. But now I find that going and joining trade associations, trying to speak at conferences on subjects that may not be specific to the law, but about the legal issues involving a specific business is a very good way to get your name out writing articles in that area. And it’s very easy now. There are so many different avenues within the internet and within communications to get information out for people to find you. And so doing a lot of that is important as well.

And then it’s just meeting people at these conferences and sharing a drink with them, finding out what they do, finding out more about them personally. The first thing you do is not just ask for the work. The first thing you do is develop a personal relationship with a person or two or three, and you just continue to expand that over time. And you see the same people similar to theBar conferences that we go to. You see the same people at these conferences over and over again and they get to know you and you get to know them and that’s when the work will flow.

Dave Scriven-Young:

So let me follow up on a couple of those great tips. One is industry and trade conferences. What are some examples of industry and trade groups that you’re associated with that you’ve been able to develop these relationships at?

Merrick “Rick” Gross:

So the MBA, the mortgage bankers, Association, because a lot of my clients are in the banking industry or the loan servicing industry. That’s an important organization. The commercial Real Estate Finance Council, another cref C as we call it, another important Association. And in that over time, I’ve entered into leadership roles, but it’s mostly because people got to see me. They saw that I was willing to put in the effort to speak on a panel, to put together a program and like those type of organizations which have multiple conferences around the year, over the year, excuse me, it’s easy to meet people and continue to grow and then you follow up the next time you’re in one of the cities where one of your contacts is if you have a deposition, go in a day early or stay a day late on your own dime, but meet with the people and follow up with them.

David and I were talking during December, three weeks of my month in December and I do a lot of business development now, was going and visiting clients and taking them to holiday slash client appreciation events. We did a pickleball event or two, we did a bowling event or two, we did a top golf event or two. One was a formal luncheon that we did. But those sort of things with clients is very important. The other thing you find is you’re going to find people similar to you, other lawyers that you can cross market with that are not in your regional area. So there’s no conflict there. And clients like to see that their Counsel know each other and work together.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Love that. And talk about how lawyers can use their firm’s marketing department to help out with these things because obviously you can do a lot of internet research on your own, but for me, I don’t really want to reinvent that wheel. And most of the time our firm’s marketing department does a great job in helping us figure out, okay, these are really the trade groups that you want to get involved in, or here’s a group that maybe we don’t have a presence in, but we could use a presence. Talk a little bit about your relationship with the marketing folks at your firm and what’s the sort of best practices there?

Merrick “Rick” Gross:

Everything that you just said, David, I use our marketing department for all of those things to help me research clients in a specific area to try to focus on. I will get a list of attendees to a conference I’m attending and then sit down with our marketing folks and get almost a dossier. I’ll pick a couple of people I want to meet, get a dossier on them to the extent you can. There’s a lot you can find over the internet now, so it gives you a leg up when you’re talking to people and meeting with them. And then if you see there’s a common interest, you don’t have to talk about the business. You start with something that you’re comfortable with. David, you and I have known each other a long time, so I’m a sports junkie. So I have found over the years speaking about sports, whether it’s individual sports, team sports or whatever, you find out where someone went to school, I have a lot of friends that are huge Alabama fans that are probably very crestfallen today because of what happened yesterday.

And a number of my clients are also in Texas, so a lot of Longhorn fam and I was sending text messages out last night, yesterday afternoon, and this morning condolences great season, et cetera. It’s those sort of personal touches to the point where a lot of us have holiday cards. I used to do the individual cards and sign everything. I’ve gotten to know so many people that I have gone on to use our firm’s e-card, which has very different designs and I figure out which design is best for the message I’m trying to send. And then I always send a personal message within the e-card as well as on the email that goes out to which the card is attached. There’s a personal message from me. Those are just the little personal touches that you’re adding that people remember knowing birthdays, knowing anniversaries, knowing how the kids are doing, remembering people’s children’s names and spouses names. These are all important little things that add up to successful rainmaking.

Dave Scriven-Young:

How do you remember those things? Is it as simple as like an Excel spreadsheet? Do you send notes to your marketing folks? What is the practical tip there on how to go about gathering that information?

Merrick “Rick” Gross:

This is going to sound very simple. It’s also because technologically challenged, I add all that information into the contacts that I have in my outlook, so I can always in the notes. So even from my phone, I can always pull it up and have it available easily.

Dave Scriven-Young:

That’s really smart. Love that. And we talked a little bit about staying in touch with our clients and referral sources and potential clients. Any other tips that you might have in order to stay in touch with folks over the year?

Merrick “Rick” Gross:

If there’s an interesting thing that you write or you see someone else’s written that is important to a client, they don’t want to be inundated with material, but if you know there’s something important, send it along. If you read something, repost it to them, things like that. Just little simple things. But also understand the client’s practices. What’s most important now is understanding the client’s business and how they do things because that’s what they’re looking for in-house lawyers, business people. They need you to be the problem solver. They need you to come up with the ideas to help them resolve the disputes that they have or help them get the deals that they want done. This is again, another reason why you need to know the internal folks within your own firm to help your client get to those goals.

Dave Scriven-Young:

And I think one other thing that you might’ve mentioned is client appreciation events is something that your firm does on a regular basis or that you do as a practice?

Merrick “Rick” Gross:

I do it. The firm supports me doing it. I usually do it with three or four or five other people within the industry. I do a lot of commercial real estate, distressed debt work. So I have a number of friends who are not only lawyers, but they’re forensic accountants, they’re receivers, they’re property managers, and we all have mutual clients. So we group together and five or six of us will go to a city, meet with multiple clients in that city. We’ll do breakfasts, lunches, dinners, et cetera, and spend three or four days there doing that and just focus solely on that. And that’s why I was saying the events, it depends on what the clients are looking for. Some of them like formal dinners, but other than more casual settings. And so this year pickleball became a hot thing. Pickle ball’s become a hot thing around the country. Topgolf, there are so many people that love doing that, even if they’re not golfers because it’s simple, it’s easy. You’re eating and drinking at the same time and just being cordial with people and in a friendly environment.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Love that. Alright, so let’s turn now to business development practice for young lawyers. Everyone wants to develop practice early on, develop clients early on, but let’s just take a little bit of a step back and talk about just a couple of tips for young lawyer business development.

Merrick “Rick” Gross:

Number one tip, become the best lawyer you can be that’s going to help you internally and externally. Secondly, develop relationships with folks. Even if you’re in your twenties, thirties, early forties, the people that you develop relationships with there, whether they are local groups like your United Way or a charity or like or your church group or your synagogue group, whatever. Just make those relationships, become friends with these folks because when they’re in a position to give business, they’re going to think of you. I came to Florida from the northeast. I didn’t have a lot of background from school here, so I stayed in touch. It’s going to be funny, but I’ve gone to almost all of my high school reunions. I go to my law school reunions, I go to my college reunions. I stay in touch with people that I grew up with and that has led to business over the years. All of those things are very important. And as a young lawyer, those are things that you’re going and meeting your friends, but those friends at some point may have work for you and they’ll think of you to give that work to.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Yeah, I think very important tip that you gave Rick is when you’re joining an organization, you’re doing great work, but then you also have to remember the relationship component of it because to me it’s helpful to do great work with the United Way or whatever organization, but if you’re also not developing the relationships with folks that you’re working with, it’s not as helpful in terms of business development. Can you give us an example of how that has worked in your practice?

Merrick “Rick” Gross:

Yeah, I mean doing work on these committees and the like, that’s all important, but take those folks to lunch, make dinner plans with them, meet them for a drink after work, all of those things. That’s where the added step is, but that’s the added step that leads to business. You can do great work within a committee, but you need that personal attachment as well and that’s how you get it. And it’s not that hard. We all have to go to lunch, we can all get a drink or go to dinner. Once you develop those relationships, you and your significant other with them and their significant other. So it’s easy to do. And then those family relationships, again, they’re going to think of you when they have an issue.

Dave Scriven-Young:

That’s really smart. And let’s talk about obstacles though, because I think some lawyers, some of our listeners might be thinking, okay, so there’s a couple of problems here. One is maybe I’m an introvert, I had performance anxiety, going to a high school reunion is the last thing on my mind. I didn’t like high school, I didn’t like the people there. Why would I do that? It sounds like the worst thing in the world. Talk about even for introverts or folks that kind of have some anxiety going to these social situations, how to deal with that and how to improve your practice, improve your business development practice.

Merrick “Rick” Gross:

It starts by just having conversations with folks. You’re not, as I said earlier, and I’ve said multiple times, you’re not asking for business the first time out. You’re just trying to meet folks, find out what they’re about, let them find out what you’re about. And as I said, there’s multiple different ways of doing that. As funny as it sounds, I was an introvert. Anyone who knows me now will laugh when they hear that, but I was not easy. It wasn’t easy for me to go and speak to spokes except for subjects I was comfortable with. So when it came to sports, when it came to music, things like that, I could easily converse on those subjects. There’s always a subject that you feel comfortable with and there’s always another person that has the same sort of interest that you do. You end up finding each other. It’s surprising.

Dave Scriven-Young:

And the other thing, the other obstacle might be time or money. So if someone who has a family, maybe they’re thinking, well, I don’t know if I want to come in a day earlier from that deposition to take out a client or maybe the firm doesn’t necessarily support business development efforts, so it’s coming out of your pocket. Talk about, I don’t know, what are some of the answers that you would give for someone who would raise those obstacles?

Merrick “Rick” Gross:

I’m luckily now at affirma, we do support this and we understand there’s a time commitment and it’s not an instantaneous return, but even if I wasn’t at a firm like that, I’ve been at firms in the past that didn’t support it. It’s banking on yourself. Sometimes you have to just use your own funds to get a foot forward and end. The end of the day it will result in success on the time issue. We’ve all been through having young kids and the like and sharing the responsibilities as parents or if you’re a single parent it’s even harder. But as I said, you can always go to lunch so early on, all you can do is local work. Go to lunch with folks, take the hour to go to lunch even if you have to work an extra hour during the day. One of the benefits that we have now that we didn’t when I started practicing in 1987 is you can take work home easily. You don’t have to be in the office to do everything you have to do. Even if you take an hour for lunch when you get home later after you’ve dealt with the family and the like, you can put in the hour then and it’s going to end up in results. Positive results.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Well, great tips. Rick. Investing in yourself I think is maybe the biggest tip or best tip that you have given. So we are coming to the end of our time together. Any last thoughts in terms of business development, AXS for young lawyers or for more experienced lawyers?

Merrick “Rick” Gross:

David, you said it best. It was the term I couldn’t remember. As a young lawyer, you have to invest in yourself and as an older lawyer, just get out there and meet people and get to know them. Develop relationships. Developing business evolves from developing relationships. Business development is all relationship driven. Obviously you’ve got to be the best lawyer, you have to have the skills, but you’ve got to differentiate yourself in a certain way and the relationships that you create, that’s the way you do it.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Outstanding. Well, I think you’ve given us a lot of food for thought and great practical tips going to the new year. Rick Gross, thank you so much for being on the show today,

Merrick “Rick” Gross:

David. I appreciate it. Anytime.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Thank you to disco for sponsoring Litigation Radio Disco makes the law work better for everyone with cutting edge solutions that leverage AI, cloud computing and data analytics to help legal professionals accelerate e-discovery and document review. Learn more csdisco.com. And now it’s time for our quick tip from the ABA Litigation section. So, let’s please welcome back Darryl Wilson to the show. Darryl is the ABA Young lawyers Division speaker for the 20 23 24 bar year. In this role he serves as the chief policy and legislative officer overseeing the YLD assembly. It’s great to see you again, Darryl.

Darryl Wilson:

Great to be back, Dave.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Well, I understand you’re going to be giving us tips about avoiding email anxiety. So what’s your quick tip?

Darryl Wilson:

Absolutely. As many of you have probably returned back to your jobs from your Christmas holidays and the breaks, you probably had some fear of whether or not you were going to have millions of emails in your inbox. And so as we go into this new year, I want to provide some tips to everyone how to avoid the anxiety that may come with an overfilled inbox. I actually was reading the ABA Litigation Journal and saw an article by Elizabeth Fenton who’s in the ABA section of Litigation’s Mental Health and Wellness Committee and also an attorney at Ballard Spar. And she provided a lot of tips that I thought that were really good. So I want to bring those to light for our listeners today. The first tip that I will say is to unsubscribe to the unwanted emails. We all get those emails that are advertisements and they clog our email inboxes and we really just look at them and just probably mark them as red often.

So I want to give everybody the tip to when you see those emails. If you don’t want to get them, just look at the bottom of the email and look for the word unsubscribe and simply unsubscribe so that you won’t clog your emails. With those advertisement emails. The next tip that I will give is to use the rules feature in Outlook to have the emails go directly into a folder instead of clogging your inbox. I’ve found that using the rules feature and telling emails where to go and creating those different folders is very helpful because you can see certain emails go to those folders and you can check them as you need to and definitely label them in there how important they may be and when you need to read those emails at given times of the day. I think I find that that is another way to declutter your email inbox because you use those specific rules feature.

The next one that I have, and we all probably fall victim to this, is when we get an email with a lot of people in the two line, we sometimes will reply all before you reply all. I think you should really determine whether everyone on that email list or listserv should get your reply. And if you have individuals that the reply should be targeted to maybe just simply reply to those individuals and avoid, I guess, cluttering up everyone else’s email inboxes with the reply that may not be important to them. The next one that I will say is to set your notifications to silent. Sometimes when you’re working throughout the day and you may be on an important task and you get that email buzz, it may throw you off track because you feel like you have to open up your Outlook or your Gmail and look to see what that email says and then feel obligated to reply.

And that may throw you off track from the important project that you may have been working on at that time. So if you set your notifications to silent, you will not get that buzz, but you can always look at the icon on your computer and it will give you an indicator if you have any notifications or any unread emails. And then you can tackle those emails at that time or at the time that you have taken a break from whatever important project that you’ve worked on. The next one that I will provide is that sometimes we get those emails from individuals and it just simply says, please call me before you get into the feeling that that email may be something that’s negative or anything of that nature and you get that, please call me. Sometimes you just really just take a break and reset and refocus and really just kind of retrain your thought of thinking because maybe they just may be that person may just need to have a conversation and it may not be anything negative.

So before you just kind of jump to the conclusion that the email is something that’s negative or some negative connotation, just have that moment to reset before you actually make the call. The next one that I will provide, and I’ve seen this many times, is really to kind of manage the expectations on your response time. If you are that person that just responds quickly or as soon as you get an email, you have to sometimes remember that everybody does not do that. I’ve seen in my working career and even as outlined in the article, some individuals may provide a response in their email or maybe out of office response, or it may be at the bottom of the email near their signature that says, my working hours and your working hours may be different. Please do not feel obligated to reply outside your normal working hours.

And I think that is a good clear way of setting an expectation set in a boundary to show that maybe if you’re a night owl and you’re working, you don’t expect the individual that’s receiving that email to respond to you that night. You’re providing a courtesy in that response by telling people that they can respond within their working hour. But you’re also maybe alleviating some of that anxiety that people may feel when they get an email in the middle of the night and they feel that they have to immediately respond to your email. That simple phrase will help eliminate that anxiety and let people know that you are setting an expectation that you don’t expect them to respond immediately. Or if there is a need for an immediate response, maybe in the subject line, put immediate response required or immediate response needed so that individuals can determine how important the email is.

But I will caution you not to abuse that phrase line, immediate response required because if you do abuse it, some people may feel that if they see that immediate response required, that an immediate response is in fact not required. So be very cautious when you use those, but definitely set that expectation of what you expect when you are emailing colleagues or friends or other individuals. The next one that I will say is if you do get an email that makes you angry or stressed, disappointed, defensive or frustrated, resist that temptation to immediately respond. Take a moment to take a break that may look like walking down the halls or taking a block at work. And maybe you could also set out and start to draft your reply and reply to yourself. So if you accidentally hit seeing, it goes back to yourself. And so you may take the opportunity to draft up an email response and then just let it sit for a second and then go back once you’ve had a time to calm down and regroup and reread that email and determine if your tone may be offensive to the recipient of that email.

And sometimes that can help avoid any negative situation that may occur. Vieth email. Text me to my next tip that if you do receive those types of emails that you may want to reassess the tone of the email if it may be short or it may be a short email. Sometimes we may confuse the tone that may be coming across in the email as one that may be rude or insensitive, but in fact, you don’t actually know what that person had going on at that time. They may have been in a rush, and so they may have sent a very short email to you in hopes that you can respond or hopes that you can get on a phone call. So definitely when you read emails, assess the tone before you immediately respond to those emails that may become a part of your inbox. The next thing that I will say is actually sometimes it’s okay to actually pick up the phone instead of sending an email.

Sometimes the tone may get confused or the recipient may feel a different way than what the tone you have been trying to provide. So sometimes it’s okay to pick up the phone and to make that phone call and discuss whatever situation that you may need. And if you need that conversation in writing or there may be some tasks that were provided in that conversation, follow up the phone call with an email so that at that point when the recipient of that email receives the email, they know the tone that’s intended from that email because you all were able to get on a phone call. And the last tip that I will provide, and this is one that I utilize, is it’s okay to have two devices. You have your personal telephone that receives emails, and then you may have your work or professional phone that receives emails.

That is a sure way to alleviate some of the anxiety if you are possibly on vacation and receiving emails on your personal device that you have dubbed now is kind of your dual device for personal and professional. If you receive those emails, sometimes you have the desire or the need or you feel that you have the immediate respond even on vacation. But if you have those two different devices, not only is it a way to separate your work from personal emails, it’s also a way that if you are on vacation, that it allows you to take that break and maybe check that work phone periodically throughout your vacation if you just have to be plugged in. But it’s definitely another way to alleviate the anxiety that may come with an overfilled email inbox. And so as you go about your work, these are tips that I would like to provide to you that would help you alleviate that anxiety that may come with having an overfill email inbox as you return back from the holidays or as you go on vacation. So those have been my tips today for avoiding or alleviating the anxiety that may come with an overly cluttered email inbox.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Great tips, Darryl. Thanks so much for being on the show today.

Darryl Wilson:

Thank you.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Well, that’s all we have for our show today, and I’d love to hear your thoughts about today’s episode. If you have comments or questions you’d like for me to answer on an upcoming show, you can contact me at [email protected] and connect with me on social. I’m Ad Attorney Dsy on LinkedIn, Instagram X and Facebook. You can also connect with the ABA Litigation section on those platforms as well. But as much as I’d like to connect with you online, nothing beats meeting you in person at one of our next Litigation section events. So please make plans to join us at the 2024 Environmental and Energy Mass Torts and Products liability Litigation Committees joint regional CLE program in Colorado, taking place January 31st through February 2nd. Join us for eight plenary presentations on Hot Litigation topics including committee specific content, broader Litigation interests and ethics. In addition to an agenda of diverse educational sessions, there will of course be time to enjoy outdoor activities and network with your colleagues.

To find out more and for registration information, go to ambar.org/joint. If you like the show, please help spread the word by sharing a link to this episode with a friend or through a post on social and invite others to join the show and community. If you want to leave a review over at Apple Podcast, it’s incredibly helpful. Even a quick rating at Spotify is super helpful as well. And finally, I want to quickly thank some folks who make this show possible. Thanks, Michelle Oberts, who’s on staff with the Litigation section. Thank you so much, Michelle. Thanks. Also goes out to the co-chairs of the Litigation Section’s audio content committee, Hailey Maple and Tyler True thank you to the audio professionals from Legal Talk Network. And last but not least, thank you so much for listening. I’ll see you next time.

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