How Two Lawyers Embraced Their Right Brains
The declining economy is forcing employees who used the analytical left side of their brains to embrace their creative right-brain skills. Two lawyers are a case in point.
USA Today profiles their stories.
Gordon Chin saw his billable hours shrink at a large Washington, D.C., law firm—identified as Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell in a previous post by Above the Law. Chin got laid off, according to Above the Law, and he turned a side business in interior design into a full-time occupation.
“I always had a passion for decorating but just did it for friends,” Chin told USA Today. “This was a daunting leap of faith. But where I was a happy cog in a large firm, now I get to use my creativity with immediate, gratifying results.”
Another lawyer, Shu Kim, was an in-house counsel at failed brokerage firm Lehman Brothers. Now she and another former Lehman Brothers colleague, Khanh Pham, have launched a marketing website for small businesses called Shustir.com.
“Being laid off from Lehman Brothers was a gift,” they wrote at the Huffington Post. “It forced us to think hard about what would truly make us happy professionally.”
The USA Today story quotes Daniel Pink, author of the 2005 book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. He contends that computers are turning traditional left-brain work into a commodity that can be outsourced. “Our children will no more be doing routine white-collar work than we were likely to inherit the blue-collar jobs of our grandfathers,” he told the newspaper.
Legal Blog Watch notes the USA Today story.
