Legal Grounds | Conversations on Life, Leadership & Law Mike H. Bassett

The obligation that attorneys have to zealously represent their clients is, as my guest today puts it, “like walking a razor’s edge between perfection and disaster.”For the first 15 years of his career it was a job that Jeff Kichaven excelled at, but as he himself admits in our conversation today, it is incredibly taxing.After discovering his passion lay in the negotiations of his own cases, Jeff has since become one of the most sought after mediators in the country.We discussed topics rangin...

While both are unavoidable, when it comes to Death and Taxes a majority of us never have to navigate bureaucracies when it comes to the former. For me, Capital Punishment has always been an interesting choice of language in that it implies that the act of dying is a punishment in & of itself; “capital” simply acts as a modifier for how and by whom this “punishment” is dispensed. Now, when thinking about these things, I would be remiss to point out that I have the luxury of doing...

This week my guest is author, coach, and corporate veteran, Sherry Buckley-Brown.Having just released her memoir, "Who Will Take Care of Me Now", Sherry and I discuss the tragic loss of her mother, the beautiful relationship she developed with her grandmother, and the ups and downs in between. After earning an MBA and working in leadership roles at IBM, Bank of America, and HCSC, Sherry came to the realization that what she enjoyed most about every job she held was working WITH people.&n...

My guest today has been preaching about the potential power of tech in the legal sphere since the earliest days of social media. Nicole Black began her legal career as a Public Defender, conducting countless hearings, jury trials, bench trials, and depositions, in matters both civil and criminal.But in 2008 she began covering the intersection of technology and law as a journalist for publications like The American Bar Association, Above the Law, and The Daily Record.In 2012 she jo...

In 2021, the Bloomberg Law Survey reached a sobering milestone. For the first time, attorneys reported feeling stressed about their workload more than HALF of the time. Setting aside the very serious and very real consequences to one’s health, when your profession is one that bills by the hour, spending half of that time in “damage-control” mode is less than optimal. But as my guest, Courtney Redman, points out, what’s more troubling is that while many of these attorneys know this i...

If you’ve ever found yourself pulling into your driveway only to realize you meant to stop at the grocery store on the way home, you know how easy it is for the brain to run on autopilotAnd while forgetting you needed to pick-up a couple of ingredients for dinner is always a bummer, when leaders find themselves running on autopilot, there’s suddenly a lot more at stake… and for A LOT of other people as well. We talk plenty on this podcast about the less-admirable traits of leadership and...