Family Leave

Sunday's New York Times Magazine includes a compelling article by Eyal Press on workers' ability to care for their families. It tells the story of Karen Deonarain whose employer fired her after she endured a difficult pregnancy and premature delivery. Deonarain was fired despite having been assured by her supervisor that "the company understood she would need time off after the pregnancy." After recovering from her initial shock, Deonarain contacted the D.C. Employment Justice Center which helped her find an attorney. "Her lawsuit, which charges that she was fired for complications related to her pregnancy, amounting to a form of sex discrimination, is in the discovery phase." In the past, such lawsuits were rare, but since the mid 1990s, "the number of workers who have sued their employers for supposed mistreatment on account of family responsibilities...has increased by more than 300 percent." And many of them have been successful. Press links the growing number of cases to the growing number of women in the workplace and to the greater difficulty many Americans have in "balancing the demands of work and family." Professor Joan Williams of the University of California's Hastings College of the Law discusses this issue cogently in her 2000 book, Unbending Gender. In Professor Williams's view, these lawsuits are fundamentally about family values, not gender discrimination. For this reason, they unite people on both sides of the political divide. The Times article is definitely worth a read, especially for those of us who have wrestled, and continue to wrestle, with balancing our commitments to our employers and our commitments to our families.

Can't post anything but tiny posts

AAARGH!

Lawyering in Second Life

Legal Times
July 31, 2007
See the article linked in the title above for an interesting piece.

Uh-oh! Brain Spasms

Here we are floating in the luke warm end of summer. The bar exam is either under way or just past for most jurisdictions (check here at National Conference of Bar Examiners to see if -- Oops! You slept through the bar exam!).

Things are mostly pretty quiet. People are trying to finish up the projects that seemed to have plenty of time back in May. Getting repairs and renovations underway, too, in that short window of time where the library is not full of completely stressed-out humans.

This peaceful time of year grows shorter and shorter. Way, way back, there were really 3 months worth of quiet. There may be a few schools that still shut down over the summer. But more and more, schools run summer programs, host conferences and have planning meetings scheduled over the summer months. A few schools already have schedules that run right around the year - quarter systems that never allow a shut-down, or starting 1-Ls every semester, right through the year.

One of the things I always liked about academia was that sort of tidal rhythm, where the tide rolls out every spring and pauses that little bit, over the summer, before rolling back in with students in the fall. It's a pattern, a pacing thing, that I cherish. It harks back to a slower day, when there was time to contemplate and think philosophical thoughts instead of (or in addition to) multi-tasking trainings, meetings, classes and service. I hope we never completely lose that aspect of librarianship. We need time to think. Our faculty and our students need time to think, and space to do it, too.

Back to business: Psychology of Lawyers

Wow, now that I've gotten that off my chest, let's go back to OOTJ business. The ABA Journal has an interesting article interviewing a lawyer with a psychology degree about what the "attorney" personality profile is like, and how it helps or sometimes hinders, a practitioner.

What has been remarkable is how very stable the personality data have been over the past 25 years. I am still seeing basically the same profile that I saw back then. The only change appears to be that more people with a "Feeler" (as opposed to a "Thinker") preference on the MBTI seem to be entering the law and staying in the law. This change may be a reflection of what has often been written about Gen Y – that they are more interpersonal, more interested in collegiality, relationships, climate, etc.

Interesting read. Many years ago, I was involved in a project to administer the Myers Briggs Personality test to people across a library. The results were interesting, and were compared to the law faculty and attorneys over-all personality type. Librarians in general have a different profile that lawyers, and even law librarians who have worked as lawyers tend to have a different profile. Nearly all the people in the library test project came out with very nearly the same sort of profile. The differences were just in how extreme to one type or another people ranged. It felt spooky.

The other thing about the test is that I have taken the Myers Briggs several times. Each time, I had a distinct feeling that my responses had changed over time, and that if I had taken it in my 20s or younger, it would have changed even more. There seems to be some useful and valid data that the Myers Briggs brings out, but it did make me wonder if there was some part that adjusted for the passage of time. Or maybe I'm just weird. Here is one more snippet from the ABA article:

You have developed innovations to help leaders at law firms attract, retain, develop and motivate legal talent. What are the best practices for supporting talented lawyers?

The answer would take a book. I suppose I can summarize this by saying that there are a few evergreen principles that will help here:

Capitalize on strengths, rather than trying to fix deficiencies (unless you have a "fatal flaw" that must be addressed)
Seek out feedback. Self-awareness is key for anyone in a leadership position and for anyone who makes a living interacting with other people
Work on improving your emotional intelligence skills. Lawyers are weak in this area – which may represent a "fatal flaw" for many. Poor EI skills can hurt you, and good EI skills can make a huge positive difference in terms of talent retention, getting the right people to work for you, coping with change, and the other intangibles of the legal profession.

In your opinion, what are the characteristics that make a lawyer successful?

In addition to the obvious – high integrity and consummate mastery of the legal skills in your practice area – I return to emotional intelligence. Research increasingly demonstrates the importance of emotional intelligence skills in many industries. Research shows that the best lawyers generally have higher emotional intelligence scores when tested than their average counterparts. ”Emotional Intelligence” includes skills in self-awareness, empathy, regulating your own emotional reactions, and building and maintaining healthy relationships.

Please see the whole article for more info.

MSNBC Editorial on Bush and Iraq

I want to cheer, but I keep wondering how come it took so many years for the press to stand up!

He is here to help Grandma get to heaven

Oscar the cat, raised at an advanced care unit for dementia patients at a Rhode Island nursing and rehab center, makes a specialty of visiting the dying. Ordinarily not an out-going, cuddly cat, Oscar will curl up next to a patient who has mere hours left of life, and purr, purr, purr. Link in the title to the story in the Boston Globe, but you can also read a more in-depth story (not full of techy words either) from the NEJM, New England Journal of Medicine.

A nurse walks into the room to check on her patient. She pauses to note Oscar's presence. Concerned, she hurriedly leaves the room and returns to her desk. She grabs Mrs. K.'s chart off the medical-records rack and begins to make phone calls.

Within a half hour the family starts to arrive. Chairs are brought into the room, where the relatives begin their vigil. The priest is called to deliver last rites. And still, Oscar has not budged, instead purring and gently nuzzling Mrs. K. A young grandson asks his mother, "What is the cat doing here?" The mother, fighting back tears, tells him, "He is here to help Grandma get to heaven." Thirty minutes later, Mrs. K. takes her last earthly breath. With this, Oscar sits up, looks around, then departs the room so quietly that the grieving family barely notices.

On his way back to the charting area, Oscar passes a plaque mounted on the wall. On it is engraved a commendation from a local hospice agency: "For his compassionate hospice care, this plaque is awarded to Oscar the Cat." Oscar takes a quick drink of water and returns to his desk to curl up for a long rest. His day's work is done. There will be no more deaths today, not in Room 310 or in any other room for that matter. After all, no one dies on the third floor unless Oscar pays a visit and stays awhile.

from the NEJM article. The cat is more accurate by far than any of the doctors, nurses or other human staff at predicting when it's really time to call the family to come.

And as with any feline, a hefty portion of Oscar's days are given to zzzzs. He likes to sleep on stacks of patient reports. Or on the desk at the nurses' station. Or in the linen closet.

When awake, however, and strutting about, Oscar the cat projects something very much like the quality that ancient Romans called gravitas -- a solemn dedication to duty.

"He seems to take very, very seriously what he does, for whatever reason he does it," said Dosa.

Oscar makes regular "inspection" rounds of the unit, sauntering in and out of patient rooms -- as if checking on the condition of the occupants. But he never joins them for a snooze.

Until.

"He only shows great interest in individuals when they are about to die," said Dosa.

(from the Globe article)


Image is from the Globe article. You can see another photo of Oscar at the NEJM site.

Library Furniture Standards

Since I was thinking about space standards for carrels, I remembered my joy and surprise to find that there are separate standards for library furniture. ALA's Library Technical Report, vol. 31, no. 2, March/April, 1995 features library chairs. The report explains a test method and reports on 30 chairs, which report is pretty well out of date now. But know that there are separate, and much more rigorous standards and tests than the office furniture tests that many manufacturers cling to. Very important, because furniture that seems fine in an office environment or home, will not stand up in library use.

In Chair Wars, 5 AALL Spectrum 31-32 (April, 2001), I told the adventures I went through with public use chairs at my then-new library. What I discovered, after much calling around, is that one of the biggest stress points for chairs is a lateral scoot. Our armless, wooden chair legs were splitting vertically. I had imagined people leaning the chair back and then letting it bang to the floor while they sat. But Carl Eckelman, who wrote the Library Technology Report above for the ALA, explained that it was much more likely that the chairs broke when a person sat down, and then scooted the chair sideways, to center it, while sitting in the chair.

Arms gave a good deal more strength to the chairs, and so we weren't seeing armed chairs break, just ones with no arms. Our architects had decided on handsome wood chairs, but the university skimped a bit on cost and got them without stretchers. These are the bars that stretch between chair legs. It turns out they are pretty important little additions. The stretchers strengthen the chair legs against the stresses of these little sitting scoots. We finally had to retrofit the armless chairs with stretchers, as well as adding good glides to reduce the friction of scoots in any direction. Since then, our chair mortality rate has been much lower, thank heavens! Don't let them skimp on stretchers!

Bar Exam time in Boston

It’s that time of summer again, and I’m reliably informed that the hotels in Boston (site of the only bar exam in Massachusetts) are refusing to rent rooms unless you take them for 3 days. Wow! Skin them law puppies!

Let us have a moment of silence for all those poor souls who are facing the bar, and being socked in the wallet at the same sad time.

How much space do law students need at desks or carrels?

Earlier this summer, I thought I might try to write something about how much space law students need at study tables or carrels now that laptops are so common. I went first to Leighton and Weber's Planning Academic and Research Library Buildings, my 2nd edition from ALA. This venerable book (tome, actually -it's BIG) is the 1986 update of the even more venerable original by Keyes Metcalf. It's a classic. I see on the ALA website that there is a 3rd edition, here from 1999.

I was just stunned at the foresight of these authors! In 1986, they were already looking into the future to a time when computers would become portable. They imagined students not only wanting space to spread out several books, but also to have notes and a laptop computer in front of them! They discuss accommodations for handicapped users, including specifications that a certain percentage of tables be set high enough for wheelchairs, and separate rooms for readers.

If you need advice or citations to support your requests for certain size tables or carrels, see this book! Look in the index under carrels or tables, and look to "size" as a subheading. The authors differentiate between undergraduate use and graduate student use, granting the graduate students a larger size. They give specific dimensions, and recommended layouts, with in-depth discussion about the pros and cons of each option. This book seems to be everything a librarian -- or architect -- could need for space planning and renovations. The discussions on seating repeat all the wisest things I have heard at meetings or online discussions of the issues as well. I heartily recommend the book - to write anything new would just be to repeat what they have already said!

Quick answer: they give 40 sq. feet as the recommended size allotment for a "research carrel" and 25 sq. feet for "open tables" (from Table B.1, formula C of size allotments at page 565). I really recommend reading the book itself, though, for lots of commentary and illustrations of solutions to problems posed by building design: columns, bays in stacks, etc. For instance, the size allotment for open tables is considerably smaller, because students do not like to sit side-by-side at tables, and will use 2 out of 4 seats at a table, sitting catty-corner when they have a choice and must share a table. So, as we see every day in our libraries, they spread out beyond the actual allotment for that seat.