About six months ago, I changed my e-mail sign-off.  This may seem like a trivial thing that many people wouldn't notice, but sometimes the small details about how you manage your practice have a big impact. After reading an article entitled 57 Ways to Sign Off an Email , I decided to change my e-mail sign-off from the formal "very truly yours."  "Very truly yours" was an e-mail sign-off I never thought about until I read this article.  It was just part of my signature on letters, and therefore e-mails as well.  It came from a partner at the first firm I worked at, and I never thought about what it said about me or my brand.  It didn't mean that I was "true" or "yours".  It just meant "this is the end of the e-mail." When I decided to make the e-mail sign-off my own, it went from something trivial to something I obsessed about.  How could I convey "who am I" in one to three words at the end of an e-mail?  I worried...

Robin shoots with sir Guy by Louis Rhead 1912 Mediation, as a service option, has grown significantly over the last 30 years.  This is one of the topics of an upcoming article in the ABA's Dispute Resolution Magazine for which I was interviewed.  We discussed how it is easier for practitioners to be trained and for clients to find mediators today than it used to be.  However, there is still one place where mediation continues to lag behind resolution of disputes through court litigation: the price. Lower cost is often a motivating factor for people seeking to resolve disputes through mediation.  Because less time (and therefore money) is spent on court dates, discovery and positional negotiation, the financial cost of mediation is often less than litigation.  For practitioners this means that we make less on a mediation case than a litigation case, and in order to succeed, mediators often have to be better at the practice of business and marketing than li...