Law And More

Watts' House Auctioned Off in April - Is It Haunted?

In foreclosure, the house in which Chris Watts and his family lived will be auctioned off this coming April. It had been purchased in May 2013 for $392,709. There remains almost a $350k mortgage on it. Watts, now in prison, has been notified of the auction. Here are more details from the Daily Mail. 

Those interested in the purchase have to submit bids on April 17th. 

One wonders, though, how many bids there will be.

Some could perceive the property as haunted. Those believing in the paranormal have been known to have property "cleansed" by ghostbusting types to rid it of toxic forces.

It depends on the state what has to be disclosed. For example, in California, Alaska, and South Dakota even a non-violent death within a certain time period has to be made known. Usually, murders and suicides which took place on the property have to be disclosed to potential buyers.

If the house is very old, what deaths took place inside might not be known. After the purchase, there could be strange goings-on. The new owners might be advised to all in a ghost cleansing team. 

It will be interesting to monitor how many bids, if any, are made for the house. Or, will the structure have to be torn down as was the school where the children were murdered in Sandy Hook, Connecticut?

Get amazing results through out of box communications strategies/content. Complimentary consultation janegenova374@gmail.com. I help, not sell.

Mindfulness & Doritos - So 1st Decade 21st Century

LinkedIn Update, it turns out, is the Land of No Spin. Those tightly scripted (as well as the tightly wound) have few followers. Often their posts go without any likes or comments.

Those who flash raw sincerity are the ones who pull in the attention. And keep it. We keep our eyes open for what they will share next.

Who are they?

There's New York Metro area adjunct communications professor and lover of grammar - Don Heymann. He reminds us baby boomers of our fourth-grade teacher who never let a misplaced comma or too many of them get by her red pen. The era was the 1950s. That was before the self-esteem movement in education eliminated that kind of editing of any student behavior in the classroom.

Another is editor in chief of Odwyerpr.com Kevin McCauley. Most recently he turned the eulogy into an art form. The grabber? The person whose spirit he keeps recapturing for us is his late boss Jack O'Dwyer. There wasn't a boss I didn't have a long-festering resentment for.

However, the Pied Piper on all social networks is Elie Mystal. He heads out of the box legal news site Abovethelaw. With total cool, he mixes advocacy about all sorts of justice with the ethos of a daddy blogger.

Meanwhile, those BigBrandnames who rule over prestigious law firms and public relations agencies go unfollowed. Actually, they turn us off with links to what they consider seminal articles in the Harvard Business Review or Axios. Some of us are tempted to leave a comment: Hey, I surf the web too.

Consuming raw sincerity is analogous to doing a whole package of raw chocolate chip cookie dough in one sitting on a very bad day.

We flip the channel in our heads from despair to hope. That often pans out (no pun intended) better than mindfulness - or Doritos. 

Get amazing results through out of box communications strategies/content. Complimentary consultation janegenova374@gmail.com. I help, not sell.

Yesyesyes, Love Yourself As You Are

The plot line was complex. 

Last night's episode of "Law & Order SVU" began with a distraught young woman running barefoot, ringing doorbells, asking for help. She claimed she had been raped. Medical staff reports physical signs of either that or rough consensual sex.

The number-one suspect is a twosome: a high-profile plastic surgeon and his off-the-cover-of-beauty-magazine companion. They assert the woman was up for a threesome.

That contention is hard to shake. Then the SVU finds an encrypted video of the suspect, when a medical student, having sex with a minor. Eventually, a body is found in the basement of the house in which the medical student was staying. It's not that of the minor, who had disappeared from the area.

An interview with the minor's father turns out that she was distraught because she didn't see herself as pretty. No surprise, she fell under the spell of the man who had the training to make her beautiful. 

SVU gets her to crack and rat out the medical doctor. Justice is done. 

The takeaway is how vulnerable human beings become to whomever and whatever if they don't feel good about themselves. 

Meanwhile, Amanda has decided not to terminate the pregnancy and is growing large carrying her second child.

Get amazing results through out of box communications strategies/content. Complimentary consultation janegenova374@gmail.com. I help, not sell.

"The Inventor" Explores Psychology of Deception - Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos

How so many were duped by Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes still remains a mystery. They range from Henry Kissinger to Rupert Murdoch.

Yes, the dynamics and details of the elaborate con were provided by The Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou.

He broke the story in that newspaper.

That was despite how hard Holmes' celebrity lawyer David Boies huffed and puffed to not have the first expose published. Eventually it seemed to tarnish the Boies brand to have been associated with Holmes. Yesterday, he announced he was stepping down from leadership of the law firm he founded Boies Schiller. Here is the coverage in Law.com.

Eventually Carreyrou published the book "Bad Blood." A feature film derived from the book could be released in 2019.

But, the hunger to understand still exists - so much so that a second feature film will also be released about that saga. It's "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley." The movie will have its debut at Sundance in Utah in 2019. Directed by Alex Gibney, it will explore the psychology of deception. Here are more details from TechCrunch.

A third probe into this kind of collective delusion has been Dan Lyons' book "Disrupted."

Fifty-something Lyons was laid off from his journalism job at Newsweek. To provide employer-paid health insurance for his wife and two young children he grabbed any job he could.

It turned out to be another example of tech startup magical thinking. More a cult than a contrived fraud it made no business sense. 

His next job stop was Gawker. And we all know how "Hulk Hogan v. Gawker" represented the beginning of the end of digital native hipster fun and profit, posing as journalism. 

Will all this analysis prevent the next tech con? The odds are against it. When I was interviewing sources for a book on tech entrepreneurship I asked why was so much money being risked. Most of the time there was no guarantee of reward.

The answers ranged from the anticipation of fast wealth to wanting to be close to the action. Those needs cast spells. That kind of voodoo has become standard. 

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The Jell-O "Curse" - Bill Cosby as Spokesperson Was Least of It

Public relations representatives and marketing communications experts warn clients about the downside of human spokespeople and influencers. 

The human kind, as opposed to a made-up mascot, can get involved in all sorts of scandals.

The classic example had been Bill Cosby. America's Dad had been the face of Jell-O.

However, that actually was a small part of the "curse" which has plagued Jell-O.

In the new book "Jell-O Girls: A Family History," Allie Rowbottom chronicles how the purchase of the Jell-O patent in 1899 had brought down extreme suffering to her family. 

It had been her great-great-great uncle who bought the patent for $450. Twenty-six years later it was sold for $67 million.

Along with the wealth that created for her family in LeRoy, New York, there has been a sustained history of premature deaths, suicide, alcoholism, drug use, sexual abuse, mental illness, and a predisposition to cancer. In connecting the dots, Rowbottom theorizes that the boredom generated by privilege helped bring the family down. 

It was Allie's mother Mary who began a memoir about the curse. But she died relatively young from cancer before getting all that organized. So, Allie took that up as a mission.

When a child Allie's mother had been sexually molested by teenage friends of her brother, raped by a cousin, essentially ignored by her parents, and did lose her own mother to cancer when very young. Later she suffered from hysteria, had bouts of drug use and alcoholism, spent time in a psychiatric facility, and was betrayed by her husband.

As Allie tells it, Jell-O has also inflicted a cultural curse on America. After World War II, its commercials reinforced the role of women as stay-at-home housewife and caretaker. Serving creative versions of Jell-O was positioned and packaged as helping those women be perfect in that role.

Later, low-calorie Jell-O was part of the ethos of extreme body consciousness by females. Allie herself got caught up in that and had to receive treatment for an eating disorder. 

In addition, the one-time corporate home for Jell-O - General Foods - also became cursed in complacency. After Philip Morris purchased it to diversify into food, eventually The General, as it was called, was gutted. Later the parts of it which were marketable were merged with Kraft. 

Of course, this isn't the only chronicle of the peril of wealth. In fact, with all the recent suicides in BigLaw, one might wonder if there is any correlation between the high compensation and self-destructiveness. 

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That Laser-Like Focus on Outcomes - Smirk, Smirk

Success usually comes in through some back door. Not from careful planning of goals and then methodically tracking them.

The same goes for happiness.

That's why it would be a useful experiment for law firms, lawyers, and law students not to set goals this New Year.

Instead, just commit to be totally engaged in your little life. Or, if you are a partner, your outsized life. 

Essentially that's the thinking embedded in the 2016 book "If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?" Here 2018 is almost over and the book continues to rank high on Amazon: 5,537. 

Its author is University of Texas business school marketing professor Raj Raghunathan. His observations are counterintuitive. The one which is the major stunner is that focusing on goals will not necessarily:

• Generate success
• Bring happiness. 

It's such as shocker because from the get-go our mindset is trained for the goal-orientation box.

We are to identify goals and continually measure progress being made.

The lack of adequate progress demands course correction. Yeah, hire an executive coach. Or, if you are a corporation, bring in McKinsey. 

Those not playing in that sandbox will be labeled losers - that is, until they become our bosses or billionaires. And, unlike most of the goal-setters, they don't wind up depressed and preoccupied with suicidal ideation.

Raj provides the analogy of how children master their little worlds and simultaneously experience joy. They don't approach the cardboard box just unpacked in a move, determine that by sitting in it they will develop skills in X or Y, and then monitor achieving all that. Instead, they simply totally engage with the box. Recall that we all learned in developmental psychology how rapidly children get a hang of how to navigate their universes.

It's that same childlike wonderment that frequently characterizes those entrepreneurs who will make it big, lawyers who are in demand, and nobodies who become influencers in social media.

In contrast are those pain-in-the-ass plodders who keep measuring their supposed progress. When they wind up stuck, which is almost to be expected, we can't suppress the smirk.

The classic example of a non-goal-setter who bumped into amazing success, along with a happy family life, is Abovethelaw's editor-in-chief Elie Mystal.

Probably he didn't start out that way. After all, it takes careful planning to get into and complete Harvard undergraduate and Harvard Law School. That he did do.

Then, it turned out that he hated his practicing law. That's when he had to stop doing what he was told he ought to be doing. He knocked around, working at this and that. 

Along the way, he tried out for a journalism job at Abovethelaw. Effortlessly he made it to the top of that food chain. He also has become a prominent commentator in other media outlets. And he's the loudest voice on the internet combatting racial discrimination. 

Takeaway: Engage, with all your mind and heart. Don't plan outcomes. Success and happiness then will come to you. 

Attention is the currency of the 21^st century. Jane Genova helps you get it for products, services, points of view, causes, branding, careers after-50, and college admission.

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Gabe MacConaill - His Widow Joanna Litt Talks from the Heart about "Maladaptive Perfectionism"

On October 14th, brandname  BigLaw bankruptcy attorney Gabe MacConaill took his own life with a gun. He was 42 years and at a partner at Sidley Austin.

At the time he was immersed at Sidley Austin with the bankruptcy of the Mattress Firm. In addition, as his widow Joanna Litt confides on Law.com, he was emotionally and physically overwhelmed.

The umbrella term she uses is "maladaptive perfectionism." That is a syndrome known to destroy high achievers, especially in law and medicine. 

Essentially, maladaptive perfectionism is the loudest voice inside professionals such as MacConaill.

It shouts that good-enough is failure and failure is the end of the world, or at least their professional life.

That inner voice was screaming at MacConaill, discloses his widow, to manage matters at the Los Angeles branch of Sidley Austin which had been hit with partner departures and the exit of one key associate.

There was pressure to up the rankings of the law firm so he assumed he had to do everything right in overseeing the 13 summers.

And, of course, the Mattress Firm legalities were demanding and involved travel from the West Coast to Delaware.

Like so many lawyers, MacConaill would now and then surrender to binge drinking. As we in recovery programs know from experience, in itself, that behavior can trigger the slide into the darkness of clinical depression.

When Litt suggested that her husband deal with the stress by going to the emergency room, he observed that would be the end of his career. Tragically, he decided to end his life instead. Amid the twisted value system of maladaptive perfectionism, ironically that made sense.

May MacCaill enjoy eternal rest and this blog passes along wishes of strength and hope for his widow Joanna Litt.

The author of this blog has experienced a number of suicides in her own extended family. In 2003, West Hartford, Connecticut cognitive therapist Amy Karnilowicz helped rescue her thinking from maladaptive perfectionism.

The mind can be an evil trickster, casting fatal spells.

Litigation Communications

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Lawyers, Law Students - When It's Time to Take Your Cushion/Mat & Flee

Meditation, yoga, and prayer.

All of these have been and continue to be useful for self-calming, insight, tapping into the unconscious, and even overcoming addictions. 

Media sites for those in stressed out professions such as law regularly post articles on them. 

And, from way back in the 1930s, the 11th step of global Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) hammers how essential meditation and prayer are.

But, there is a stern warning about spirituality overindulgence in the November 2018 issue of OUT. In the Wellness section, the commentary's title is "A Divine Road to Nowhere" (not online). The author is Alexander Kacala. 

The beef is that too many have come to expect spirituality as the total fix-it. Somehow they got the message that a guarantee of everything good comes with the meditation cushion or yoga mat.

In a sense, 21st-century spirituality has become as much a closed system or a seeming cult as Roman Catholicism, Freudian psychoanalysis, the hardening of the philosophy of AA, or America's success ethos.

The classic example is those who bet the ranch on their "spiritual practice." They will even pony up the funds and take a week from their lives for a meditation retreat. Their objective is to land a job after a period of unemployment.

The obvious error is not investing enough resources in figuring out the dynamics of a search for work in 2018. In this year's edition of "What Color Is Your Parachute?" the front part of the book explains how much that game has changed. 

Just last month I had to take my cushion and flee. The premise of the meditation group was that a certain school of Buddhism had all the answers. In addition, I picked up on a threat that not conforming to the tenets would bring down destruction on not only this life but also my next when I am reincarnated. 

I had joined to be able to think more clearly about how to position and package a niche business I was launching. What I wound up thinking was how much the meditation leader reminded me of the nuns in the front lines of the Roman Catholic education system in the 1950s. 

Also, I noted that everyone in the group, with the exception of myself, was unemployed or underemployed. 

Takeaway: Spirituality is a tool. Not a way of life. 

Attention is the currency of the 21^st century. Jane Genova helps you get it for products, services, points of view, causes, branding, careers after-50, and college admission.

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Robert Bowers, et al. - They Know Massacres Will Deliver Their Message

Mass shootings have become a platform for delivering a statement. Plus, they confer instant celebrity on a former nobody. 

That could be reduced if members of the media did not provide comprehensive coverage of the person, the supposed motivation, and the record of previous aberrant remarks.

Robert Bowers understood the power of promotion. Before the massacre of 11 and wounding of six more in a Jewish house of worship he had been a busy bee on social media. Now, his negative perception of Jews dominates headlines around the world. In addition, he is a somebody.

It's possible that those in the media could agree to provide minimal details about alleged mass murderers. In itself that could be a deterrent. 

Meanwhile, given all the media devoted to Bowers, there are bound to be copy-cat attacks on both Jewish centers and Jewish individuals. Those could fizzle out quickly if members of media just mention them in passing. 

Lives would be saved. The level of anxiety in Jewish communities would lower.

And, perhaps, the epidemic of mass murders could end.

Attention is the currency of the 21^st century. Jane Genova helps you get it for products, services, points of view, causes, branding, careers after-50, and college admission.

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Will Legal Sector Turnaround Go in Reverse? - Stock Market Blows Up All Gains in 2018

Will it be Bye-Bye to many positive developments and optimistic planning?

Among what can vanish is the emerging turnaround in the legal sector. That includes, of course, the rebound of enrollment in law schools.

In addition, partners considering retirement might have no choice but to stay-put.

Those searching for a lateral might also stay-put.

Both those clog the pipeline for upward mobility for junior lawyers.

And, how many of those will be cut loose? As part of the carnage after the crash, 6,000 lawyers were put on the street. 

The Drudge Report says it all. Today, Black Wednesday, its headline reads: Red For Year. It links to the CNBC coverage of the 608.01 point drop in the Dow and the 3.1% drop in the S&P 500. For both that plunge blew up all the gains in 2018. 

Clearly investors are spooked. That, in turn, throws public corporations off their game. Given that frame of mind, they could decide not to file those bet the ranch lawsuits or initiate other kinds of "elective" legal action. That will be a body blow to litigation practices, which finally have been recovering. 

The JD Class of 2019 should become very jittery. Will there be a re-run of 2009 when the start date for job offers was deferred and in some cases those offers were rescinded? 

Meanwhile, here in the marketing communications industry, when darkness falls we prosper. Professional service players, be they law firms or management consultants, have to market more and smarter. 

Attention is the currency of the 21^st century. Jane Genova helps you get it for products, services, points of view, causes, branding, careers after-50, and college admission.

In addition, this blog welcomes sponsored content.

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