The Creative Lawyer: A Practical Guide to Authentic Professional Satisfaction
Product Type: Book
Product Price: $39.95
Manufacturer: American Bar Association
Purchase
Description
The Creative Lawyer is a self-help and career-management book for lawyers of all levels of experience. Written by Michael Melcher, one of America's leading career coaches who is himself an attorney, the book is a step-by-step method for imagining and realizing your path to personal and professional satisfaction.
Brilliantly written, consistently practical, and filled with scores of illuminating exercises, The Creative Lawyer is the book that the profession has been waiting for.
If you're a young lawyer, The Creative Lawyer will give you a template for envisioning and managing your own professional development, whatever path you choose.
If you're an experienced lawyer, The Creative Lawyer will help you to reassess and renew your career. It will aid you in understanding how your own values and passions might have changed over the years, and what to do if they have.
If you are unhappy or stuck in your career, The Creative Lawyer will help you figure out ways to ameliorate your problems and gradually get to a place where your work is in synch with who you really are.
If you are happy in your career, The Creative Lawyer will help you to manage your career so that you can stay happy.
If you are not sure what you think about your career, The Creative Lawyer will give you a framework for sorting things out and moving forward amidst ambiguity.
Reviews
Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2010-09-01
Summary: "Applying Self-Analysis to Legal Analysis"
I began reading this book right at the beginning of studying for the bar exam, so I needed some self-reflection to target my strengths at the start of my legal career while retaining a sense of my own creativity that I felt I had forgotten during law school.
This book really gave me a new perspective on inherit talents I had and that I could use to build a career that I felt conformed to my personality and life, rather than conforming myself to a career that wouldn't fit. I feel as if I have been reaping such benefits ever since completing Mr. Melcher's book.
I had a good deal of interesting revelations about myself while reading this book. During law school, we get conditioned, and its easy to stop paying attention to our own habits, rhythms, and best styles/methods of working. The interactive exercises in this book encourage us to pinpoint our lost, forgotten, or unrealized goals or interests, possibly buried beneath the burdens of the legal lifestyle we've grown accustomed to. The book also helps readers identify their own best time management practices by allowing us to recognize our most/least productive time periods of the day, best working environments, and triggering factors that might cause distraction and block our creativity and top production.
Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-05-26
Summary: "Solid Resource For Lawyers With Career Issues"
Melcher's The Creative Lawyer was a hugely helpful resource for me in my ongoing process of adding dimension and meaning to my career paths. I am a Harvard-trained lawyer who worked in a couple of large firms for several years. I found this book as I was investigating new avenues and directions to take my career. Melcher's ideas and insights were inspiring yet practical and grounded in reality. I've since learned that it is a key resource used by pretty much all career coaches that work with attorneys.
In short, if you're a lawyer questioning where you are with your career, how to uplevel it, whether to change it, etc. - this is a very solid read. Highly recommended.
Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-05-02
Summary: "A great read for any professional"
Michael Melcher is insightful and funny. Open your mind to a different way of being a professional.
Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-04-15
Summary: "Not just for lawyers!"
Although I am not a lawyer, I found this book to be very insightful. I am in my 40's, moving on from my first career, and contemplating what to do next. Doing the exercises is a wonderful investment of time as it gently helps you drill down to what is important in your life. You cannot help but assign weight to both tangible and intangible elements of satisfaction whether you take the time to do the exercises or just read through them. I do feel that the more you put into the exercises, the more you will get out of the book. Kinda like life.
The book is easy to read and I enjoyed the personal stories of others. I also appreciated the reading list at the end of each chapter. This is the perfect book for anyone who has already spent some time in the trenches because you will have real experiences and feelings to draw upon as you paint a clearer picture of who you are and what you want.
Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-04-12
Summary: "Great Content/Lousy Title"
Michael Melcher's book, The Creative Lawyer, is both an inspirational guide and a toolkit on how to find job satisfaction. The approach he outlines works: start with your values to create a personal vision statement, determine your areas of competencies, identify what you need to learn and explore new areas of growth, then craft a positioning statement to present yourself to the market. Melcher lays this out as a process and one that should be on-going. He also gives effective ways to network and use your pool of friends and colleagues to help you in your pursuit of a fulfilling job. At the end of each chapter is a reference list of articles and website that were very helpful. As an executive coach who works with people in career transition, I found the book extremely useful - the exercises work. However, I am not a lawyer and most of my clients are not lawyers, nor do they want to become one. So, why the title when the content appeals to anyone in search of a new career? In spite of this, The Creative Lawyer is just what it says it is: A Practical Guide to Authentic Professional Satisfaction.