Stopping at nothing

Is there nothing that Hillary Clinton will not do or say to get the Democratic nomination? Obama’s was a measured reaction to her quite extraordinary remark that she was continuing to run because of what happened to Robert Kennedy,

“I have learned that when you are campaigning for as many months as Sen. Clinton and I have been campaigning, sometimes you get careless in terms of the statements that you make. . . And I think that is what happened here. Sen. Clinton says that she did not intend any offense by it and I will take her at her word on that.”

But we now have (see Clinton Camp stokes RFK Controversy by blaming Obama in The Huffington Post) the riposte,

“The Obama campaign … tried to take these words out of context,” Clinton campaign chairman Terence R. McAuliffe said on “Fox News Sunday.” “She was making a point merely about the time line.”

And so it goes on. All that is certain is that whatever rage drives her, she is showing herself to be a deeply flawed person. There has been much about her determination, and husband Bill has been railing against the way she is being treated by the media. Sarah Amos on ABC News (quoted in The Huffington Post) reported

“Former President Bill Clinton in South Dakota today delivered a harsh critique of how his wife has been treated during her presidential bid, telling the crowd that he has “never seen a candidate treated so disrespectfully just for running,” and that, “she will win the general election if you nominate her. They’re just trying to make sure you don’t.”

As it all starts to unravel, where best to throw blame?

Words matter?

It is not just lawyers in the UK that are concerned about their professional standing (see my recent post Whither the legal profession? The same is true in Canada.

A recent post by Jordan Furlong a little over a week ago in his blog Law 21 took me to Law Times ,

“Toronto immigration and criminal law lawyer Mary Boyce submitted the motion at the [Upper Canada] law society AGM. It states that “it is demeaning to lawyers to be treated as a class of licensee.”. . . Boyce told the meeting that she first noticed the use of the term “licensee” in her member’s annual report. “For some, it seemed to be a lowering of the bar, a demeaning of the bar,” she said. “Words matter; they are our stock and trade.”

Many lawyers at the meeting voiced their concern with the change in language. Karen Andrews said she keeps a copy of the barristers’ oath at her desk. “This is fundamental to who we are and how we practise, and now it’s gone,” she said.

A lawyer who identified herself as a provincial offences prosecutor said she’s been disturbed by a recent trend of justices of the peace referring to paralegals as “officers of the court” or “friends of the court.” “We are no longer a profession,” she said. “I think it’s a mistake.”

Like Jordan Furlong

“I’m far more interested in the language used by the lawyers to describe their concerns. What’s at play here is more significant than semantics — it’s an illustration of the visceral reactions provoked when members of a group long accustomed to exclusivity and privilege suddenly find those characteristics slipping away.”

Just what will Hillary not say to be President?

She may be a clever woman, but her judgement (or her speechwriters) is singularly troubling. Hillary’s latest argument, reported in The Huffington Post , is that there is some sort of equivalence between what is happening in Zimbabwe and the refusal of the DNC to count the Florida and Michigan primaries. As reported by Fernando Suarez for CNS News

Desperate to get attention for her cause to seat Florida and Michigan delegates, Hillary Clinton compared the plight of Zimbabweans in their recent fraudulent election to the uncounted votes of Michigan and Florida voters saying it is wrong when “people go through the motions of an election only to have them discarded and disregarded.”

“We’re seeing that right now in Zimbabwe,” Clinton explained. “Tragically, an election was held, the president lost, they refused to abide by the will of the people,” Clinton told the crowd of senior citizens at a retirement community in south Florida. “So we can never take for granted our precious right to vote. It is the single most important, privilege and right any of us have, because in that ballot box we are all equal. You’re equal to a billionaire. You’re equal to the president, every single one of us.”

She may want the nomination but it is remarks like these which should ensure that not only does she not get it but that Obama does not entertain the idea, which is gathering some steam, that she take the junior position on the ticket.

What are you? A Boomer, Generation X, Millenial or Silent retiree?

At a dinner earlier in the week, the host (Chairman of a Business Angels Network) and I realised that we were probably the oldest two in a room of 50. It is not that we are that old (mid-50s) but that in the work we do clients and colleagues are getting younger. Law 21, one of the blogs I regularly read, has had a series of interesting posts in the past few days on the issues both of employing Generation Y and having Generation Y as clients. Law 21 is Canadian law blog, but the problems either side of the Atlantic are the same, and there is little difference in the way we approach the issues (or, as is often the case, don’t), and it is certainly not just technology but culture as well. Graduate Divas as lawyers.

We measure out our lives in 6 minute units

A follow on to my post on The tyranny of time. Today in the FT, Megan Murphy asks whether it is Time to stop the lawyers’ clock, and cites BDO Stoy Hayward’s 2007 survey,

“According to a survey released last year by accountancy firm BDO Stoy Hayward, 97 per cent of company lawyers still use the hourly billing method when paying their external legal advisers. Yet 82 per cent of those surveyed said they believed hourly billing provided “no incentive” for those advisers to work either quickly or efficiently.”

For those of us in the corporate law market, this is not news. What struck me, however, is the fact that Herbert Smith’s expected costs for advising the government of Tajikistan on an alleged corruption dispute

“would represent 2.7 per cent of the central Asian nation’s gross domestic product, where the average monthly wage stands at a paltry $63 (£32).”

I take it that that is GDP before adding back the leakage from corruption.