As I read Sarah’s post about time spent outside the office, a flood of different thoughts passed through my mind.

First, I always feel like I have no time for anything. Second, bar associations? I can’t even figure out why I am always going to bed at 1 a.m., when it makes the morning extra-uber miserable. Third, why did I go to law school again?

I keed, I keed. Sort of. The desire to strike an ideal work-life balance has been a struggle for me since day one of my associate’s career. I am not at a crazy and scary BigLaw firm, but my firm does expect its associates to make their goals.

As one of the few associates in one of the smaller branch offices, I know it is easy to feel like you are on a very depressing island, churning away at a thankless career. As I see young attorneys, especially my fellow bloggers who seem to find the time and energy to help the community, participate in bar or professional organizations, be a supportive spouse AND raise kids, I want to hang my head in shame (and I’m neither married nor have kids).

I have been making headway where I can — participating in this blog, getting more involved in a professional organization catering to corporate defense counsel and… oh yeah, the small task of trying to make my associate goals.

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One of the partners at my law firm is a walking legal database. Whether I need to know a case dealing with fiduciary duties of a prior owner of a company or the last case in Maryland dealing with notices for mechanic’s liens, there is a high probability that he will know the case (or have information to quickly locate the case).

We all know of these individuals (and some of the readers of this blog may be those individuals). I’ve heard of stories about recently retired Court of Appeals judge who could not only cite cases regarding various legal topics but provide footnotes and pin cites.

Alas, I am not one of those individuals. To make up for my inability to recall the specific passage and verse of every single case I have ever read, I needed to develop a system to ensure that I was up to date with each new opinion pertinent to my practice. Fortunately, as a business attorney with a focus on construction law, I do not need to read every single opinion that is drafted and published (though I enjoy reviewing some of the criminal law opinions because they made for some good story telling).

So, I’ve developed a personal law library. In order to keep track of new opinions, I initially review the Maryland Lawyer section in Monday’s Daily Record, which provides a list of all of the previous week’s cases and a handy summary for each case. I circle cases I deem important for my practice and then have my legal assistant download them from the Judiciary’s website (a process that is free and environmentally friendly).

After I review the case and make electronic notes (I’ve only scratched the surface of PDFs’ wonderful features, though John Cord has written about this), I save the electronic version of the case in a folder in my Dropbox account (a cloud account that is free for the first 2GB).

Over the past few years, I have created an online, readily-available personal law library for myself. If a legal issue comes up, I can quickly determine if it’s something I already have researched. Obviously, I make sure the law is still good, but its the start that saves me time and our client’s money.

While this method works for me, are there any other methods that you use to help organize relevant cases you use?

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Earlier this month, I participated in the American Bar Association’s Midyear Meeting in New Orleans. Aside from the obvious benefit of being in a great location I’ve never been to before, the meeting was a perfect example of some of the benefits of being active in the bar.

Of course, there were excellent CLEs and panel discussions. Not only did I attend an educational event put on by the ABA Criminal Justice Section, but I also participated in one at Tulane Law School.

There, I had the honor of discussing careers in criminal justice alongside a sitting U.S. District Court judge and the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, which gave me an opportunity to learn and to hopefully impart something helpful to a room full of law students.

The ABA meetings are also an opportunity to recognize those attorneys and judges who are doing great things nationally and back in their home states. A member of Maryland’s delegation was awarded as a finalist for the ABA National Outstanding Young Lawyer Award. Recognitions such as these are important not only for the recipient but also for those in attendance as inspiration to do better in our profession and communities.

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I attended the Baltimore County Bar Association’s Bowling Bash at Hillendale Bowling Center over the weekend. The event featured duckpin bowling, beer and food. Participants included judges, assistant state’s attorneys, lawyers in private practice, court reporters and family and friends of the legal community. Laughter and excited shouts echoed throughout the lanes;  it was a welcome diversion from the daily legal grind for most of us.

My firm encourages its associates to join committees and associations and to take on leadership roles in local and state bar associations. We are encouraged to attend the events put on by the bar associations — for instance, we had 18 lawyers and family members signed up to bowl.

But, as a young lawyer, I often struggle with striking the balance between a busy practice and all of the “extracurriculars.” There never seems to be enough time to do everything.

I still am not clear on how to “do it all,” but there have been no regrets thus far when I’ve put the red well aside for a bit to attend a bar association meeting or event. I have never left an event, meeting or presentation wishing I hadn’t attended and stayed at the office instead. There is something that goes on when we connect with our colleagues outside of the court room that is incredibly refreshing.

Plus, I’ve noticed (and experienced first-hand) that attorneys who know each other on a personal level from bar association interactions tend to be more civil and willing to work out their differences when they are opponents in court.

So, my humble advice is to get involved. Set aside time to join a committee or section of a bar association. Attend both substantive events and the just-for-fun events. Participate in the volunteer opportunities hosted by the bar associations.  The balance is important, and you never know when the connections you make at a bar association event are going to be advantageous.

(Photo by Sam Holden/Urbanite)

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After approximately 10 years of teaching, a profession in which being a good colleague means showing up at an occasional department meeting, maybe cracking a few jokes and not offering any substantive comments that force the meeting to last any longer than absolutely necessary, I found myself in the legal world, where colleagueship has a completely different meaning.

All of a sudden, there was work to be done on deadline and I wasn’t the only one who would be doing it. Where I used to mark up students’ papers with abandon and be the final (and only) arbiter of quality and subpar work, I would now actually be working with other people who would mark up my work product (gasp!) and make suggestions for improvements to opinions, briefs and everything else I drafted.

Do I now know what it means to be a good colleague after a couple of years following this somewhat uncomfortable transition into the legal world? To see how much (or how little) I knew, I asked several attorneys I know — one government attorney, one at a large national firm, and one at a small firm — what they believe makes a good colleague.

Surprisingly, all of us (yes, even me) produced similar answers. So, with spring training right around the corner — Orioles pitchers and catchers report Feb. 18 — I have craftily compiled the main measures of attorney colleagueship into measurable statistics based upon familiar baseball stats. These can be used to evaluate all attorneys — new associates, senior counsel and even partners.

1. ERA (Earned Run Average) = meets Expectations, is Reliable and Accountable

In the feedback I got from almost every attorney I asked, these three traits appeared the most. Just like the baseball stat (which, yes, I know, is already a thing of the past) measures a pitcher’s reliability, this colleagueship statistic measures how well you do what you say you are going to do so that others can rely on you.

An implicit part of this aspect of colleagueship is actually understanding what you’re going to be able to accomplish over a specific time period and communicating that effectively to other colleagues. Unlike baseball, a high ERA as a colleague is a good thing. It means your colleagues can count on you, which means they will like to work with you.

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Why some people take pride in the fact their Facebook profile emulates an episode of Tosh.0 is beyond me. (I am not saying that I don’t watch the show and laugh hysterically. But, simultaneously, I do wonder why people put some of this stuff up on the Internet for the entire world to see.)

While Facebook has been in the news recently for its upcoming IPO, another story, about Facebook privacy, caught my attention on the radio as I was brushing my teeth this morning. Apparently, Facebook is still working on deleting photos from its servers in a timely manner nearly three years after the issue was brought to Facebook’s attention.

Have you ever deleted a horrific photo on Facebook that was posted by a “friend?” Well, you may not have really deleted it. Photos “deleted” from Facebook seemingly never go away if you have a direct link to the image file on Facebook’s servers. Just imagine the joy felt by those individuals who had the common sense or foresight to delete photos because they didn’t want retaliation from an employer, wanted to avoid family drama or uploaded a photo of a friend without permission, to name a few reasons, when they discovered the photo would remain accessible for an indefinite amount of time as long as someone had a direct link to the .jpg file in question.

A few months ago, I had to research the discoverability of information and data on a Facebook (or other social media) account and profile. From the limited guidance published by a few jurisdictions, it seems that a party would likely succeed in requesting Facebook information and data during the discovery process. The court’s interpretation of federal Rule 26(b)(2)(c) allows for an extremely broad scope of relevancy.

While Maryland courts have not ruled on this broad scope of relevancy as it pertains to social media discoverability pursuant to Rule 26(b)(2)(c), it has ruled on its reliability and authentication. In April 2011, the Maryland Court of Appeals reversed the conviction of Antoine Griffin, which was based on evidence gathered from a MySpace profile of Griffin’s girlfriend. The Court of Special Appeals had ruled the police officer proffered by the state as an authenticating witness was sufficient to authenticate the MySpace profile printout. (A law professor from Chicago gave a great summary of this case on his blog and I will highlight some points here.)

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