Image © 2010, Franczek Radelet P.C.

I just wanted to write a quick note to welcome labor & employment attorneys Jeff Nowak and Bill Pokorny to the blawgosphere, and to point you to their new blog, FMLA Insights.

Jeff is a trusted source on labor and employment law in general, and a veritable expert on FMLA issues.

The blog already has posts up on the new Administrator’s Interpretation extending parental leave to gay partners, analysis of case law and pending legislation, and even podcasts.  There’s even some reassurance for employers about the new FMLA regs.

If you or your business ever have to deal with the the Family Medical Leave Act, you should add this site to your RSS list now. I have.

Photo by Venn Diagram (Flickr)

Hey, everybody! Long time! Good to see you again – you’re looking good. What do you think of the new digs?

Sorry to take up so much space on housekeeping matters. Now that I’ve got things pretty much how I want them design-wise, I wanted to dedicate one quick post to fill you in on my decisions about content. Then it’s back to business! I know all 3 of my regular readers are super-excited.

As I said earlier, I’ve been taking the past few months to figure out what I can and can’t do with the blog while working as a judicial clerk. This deliberation was partly because of the ethical issues involved in me pumping out posts on issues that may end up before my judge, but that’s not the only thing that held me up. To be honest, the ethical stuff wasn’t that hard to work out: I’m going to eliminate any advice from my posts, obviously, but I can still write about cases and events (you know, “facts”), and I’ve always been careful not to get too personal or biased.

Once I really started thinking about it, though, I had another problem: there’s other stuff that I wanted to write about – things unrelated to substantive labor and employment law, having to do moreso with being a lawyer. I thought about starting a second blog, but that seemed stupid. God knows I hardly keep this one going; two blogs with no content is like two wallets with no money.

Plus, all the marketing and social media advice and blogs-about-blogs that I’d read said not to deviate from your site’s laser-focus, or you could destroy your online brand and lose credibility with your core demo.

I went back and forth on this for too long, and then realized the following:

1. Right now, this isn’t actually my business. I’m not practicing, or trying to win clients, or market myself or anything; and
2. I didn’t start the blawg as a marketing tool! I actually wanted to add to the discourse, not just float a running advertisement for Tim, Employment Lawyer on the internet.

After these epiphanies, I decided that most of the people who read this site are lawyers, and I was probably over-thinking the whole damned thing and should just write whatever I felt like writing.

So that’s what I’m going to do. While the site will always be focused on employment law, when I need to fill in the gaps, I’m just going to write. About being a lawyer, especially a young lawyer. Or about being a dad lawyer. Or a lawyer with a blog and a Twitter account and a LinkedIn profile.

I am also planning on writing some (carefully-worded, fully approved) posts on being a judicial clerk; this job is giving me a front row seat to see how lawyers deal with judges and each other, and I don’t want to waste that vantage point.

So, there you go. Back to work – mine and everybody else’s.

Big boy posts start tomorrow.

“Delay is preferable to error.” – Thomas Jefferson

Well, it’s been a while.  Sorry to disappear for so long without leaving word of my forwarding address.

As many of you know, I have been on the hunt for a full-time legal job for some time.  I haven’t posted much on CE during these months; every time I sat down to write, I felt like I was betraying my job search (and, in turn, those who relied on my income).  I always assumed that when I found my next job, I would give it a few weeks to settle in, and then dive back into CE with a newfound enthusiasm.

Well, in January, I found my next step.  I am currently clerking for a judge in the Chancery Division of the Cook County Circuit Court.  It’s a phenomenal experience. (Emergency TROs to enforce noncompetes, administrative review of public-sector employment issues, analysis of every type of contract known to man… stop me when you’re jealous.)

A downside, though, is that I’m just not sure what this unexpected position means for the blog.  Suddenly, I have to worry about things that never were an issue before. Like impartiality. While CE has been purely informational (at best), much of it is tailored to specific types of clients, and occasionally meanders into legal advice.

I cannot practice while I’m clerking, for obvious reasons , and I need to make sure that my work out here in the wild west of professional responsibility that is legal blogging doesn’t affect my ability to appropriately do my job.

I don’t think that CE is dead, or that my blogging days are over.  I love this blog, and my twitter account, and all the people I have e-met because of them. I just don’t know exactly what direction CE can or will take in the near term, and am therefore taking the preferable route to error and holding off for now.

While I figure it out, please enjoy these other labor and employment blogs that were always much better than mine, anyway:

Gruntled Employees

Ohio Employer’s Law Blog

Work Matters

Connecticut Employment Law Blog

Delaware Employment Law Blog

HR Lawyer’s Blog

Quick – who’s your favorite guitarist? Your favorite song?  Turn on the radio and flip around the stations for 30 seconds. Chances are you will hear a guitar. But not just any guitar. Chances are very good that you will hear a single style of solid-body electric guitar, pumping warm tones through double humbucker pickups, a guitar that has been manufactured by Gibson since 1952.  That guitar, named after its inventor, is called the Les Paul, and it is the most important single instrument in the history of rock and roll.

Les Paul, a jazz guitarist and inventor, redefined modern American music.  He created the guitar that gave Eric Clapton, Duane Allman, Eddie Van Halen and Jimmie Paige their fame.  He also invented modern multi-track recording, without which all modern recording would be impossible.  But he didn’t make a guitar for Clapton.  He made it for Les Paul.  When he was frustrated with his inability to get a sound he liked, he would simply invent whatever sound or recording device he needed.

Why am I taking time out of labor & employment law to talk about a guitarist?  Les Paul was a lover of music, and he was relentless in his pursuit of perfection.  His passion, filtered through his inventions, spread like a current and continues to provide us a world of music that could not have existed without him.  You don’t have to be a musician to learn something from a man like that. Besides, without Les Paul, I would have never seen my son spinning around with a plastic guitar, losing his mind to “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”. 

Les, thank you.  Thank you for keeping thousands of irresponsible, tatooed people out of regular jobs and touring the world.  Thank you for giving us working mopes something to do at home that makes us feel like heroes.  For getting me through law school (are you listening, kids?  Seriously – an electric guitar is better than Adderall in the middle of an all-nighter). 

Les, thank you for loving what you do so much that everyone around you loves it, too. You are my hero.

As much as anyone of Paul’s stature can, he died today from complications of pnuemonia. But come on. Les Paul is immortal. 

If you don’t believe me, turn on the radio.

Last week, CLE-Pro and blogger Sean Carter issued a challenge to the online legal community to enter into a no-holds-barred-blog-posting cage match called “Blawger Survivor“.  The rules were simple:  For the next three weeks, everyone has to publish at least one post per day, and that post has to link to or mention another blog in the competition.  Miss one day of posting, and you’re out.  Make it through the grueling process, and you will be rewarded with the coveted title of “Blawger Survivor” and maybe a copy of Sean’s book, which I didn’t know existed but now really, really want.

So, to anyone who has visited this blog more than once (which in my view makes you a regular), please do not be alarmed by the new ferver with which my posts go up.  I promise that it’s not that labor and employment law information exploded or anything (though that would be nice, if that happened).   I’m participating because I’ve been looking to tweak the focus of this blog a little, and there have been a lot of stories that I’ve just passed up because I was too busy/lazy to write about them.  I’m hoping Blawger Survivor will give me an opportunity to cover some of these issues and maybe branch out into some areas I wouldn’t otherwise hit.

Oh, and this post notwithstanding, I promise not to sacrifice any quality for quantity.  Unless I’m really tired, or busy.  Or it’s 11:50 and I realize I forgot to post anything.  Or I want to watch TV.

So, if you have any ideas for blog posts, please let me know.  Three weeks is a lot of weeks, as far as blogging goes, and the competition is crazy.  Dan Schwartz at CT Employment Law Blog, whose “I’m-at-a-convention-and-can’t-write-a-post” posts are link-filled novels, already has two substantive posts up today. 

While you’re waiting for me to write something worth reading, why not click on the link to Sean Carter’s blog  and check out some of the other participants?  There’s a list of us in his sidebar.

Wish me luck…