Archive for the ‘soapbox’ Category

Honoring the sacrifices of D-Day veterans

Today – June 6, 2024 – is the 80th anniversary of D-Day – the Allied landing in Europe to liberate the continent from Hitler and Nazism. Every June 6, I pause to think about those who fought and the many who died on the beaches of Normandy and during the campaign that followed, and I always experience […]

Now THIS is interesting…

I was browsing — okay, I admit it, I was on Twitter — and came across an ad for a new, privacy-respecting web browser called Brave. Intrigued, I went to look at it. It’s based on Chromium (Google’s open-source code behind the Chrome browser) but has a whole different (better) approach to privacy. Interestingly, it […]

Time to reign in the Internet-era robber barons

I have recently been listening to the tech investor Roger McNamee (most recently of Elevation Partners) on radio interviews and podcasts publicizing his new book, “Zucked,” in which he chronicles the evolution of Facebook, and which he argues, along with Internet and mobile giants Google and Instagram, threaten the integrity of our democracy and are […]

Bike messenger or angel investor?

As some of you know, my preferred mode of transportation is my Brompton (best bike ever, hands down), and that’s generally how I arrive at my appointments. I am amused by the fact that people here in Chicago consistently assume that I am a bicycle messenger. I have a feeling that if I were in […]

Taking green legal practice to the next level

I deal with as little paper as possible, but as everyone knows, the “paperless office” is still a far-off land. However, I am making the most of my waste paper. It gives me tremendous satisfaction to turn verbose or contentious legal documents into … compost. Yes, after shredding documents, I feed them to goodcounsel’s cracker-jack […]

400

On a mini-run of non-legal posts here, but I have opinions and I have a blog, so look out… The news of the day is 400 — carbon dioxide (CO2), the main “greenhouse” gas responsible for the warming the earth, has surpassed the 400 PPM milestone. As the New York Times notes, it’s really an “odometer […]

Turn it off (or: now I remember why I don’t watch local news)

Having nothing at all to do with the practice of law… I finished watching something on TV at about 10 last night, and before I turned off the TV, I happened to tune by all of the major local newscasts – WBBM, WLS and WMAQ – right as they were coming on with their top […]

Yes, you saw that right

Was that the goodcounsel logo on the back of that dude’s bike shorts? Yes it was. I’ve previously written about why everyone should hire lawyers that ride their bikes to work. So perhaps it won’t come as a surprise that goodcounsel is now a proud sponsor of the Play It Again Sports amateur cycling team, […]

Facebook’s road not taken

I would like to use Facebook more. Without a doubt, there is great utility in a social platform that everyone is on, can be used as a universal identity for logging in or commenting on other sites, etc. But because of their customer-unfriendly privacy practices, I use it rarely and with great caution. I know there […]