Randall Kiser

This book depicts a legal system jeopardized by lawyers' and judges' mental distress and shows how regenerative altruism could simultaneously improve their well-being and repair this broken, dysfunctional system. Emphasizing altruism and correlated traits like courage, compassion, and meaning, the book presents proven concepts to quickly and reliably elevate individual well-being and promote justice. It links mental health, altruism, professional identity formation, legal reform, and justice to form a compelling model of professionalism.

Professional Judgment for Lawyers analyzes decision making by lawyers, clients, juries, judges, arbitrators, and mediators. Both scholarly and practical, the book shows how race, gender, age, experience, personality, perception, memory, and emotions affect cognition and outcomes. It also explains how professional expertise, wisdom, and foresight are acquired and identifies concrete methods to improve personal and group decision making. The book includes a self-assessment tool, enabling readers to evaluate their own decision-making styles. Viewing law through the prism of professional judgment and decision making, the book presents an original, incisive, and comprehensive analysis of legal philosophies, policies, conventions, procedures and practices.

American Law Firms in Transition: Trends, Threats and Strategies takes a sweeping, incisive view of law firms' uneven progress after the Great Recession and analyzes the five elements that will determine their success or failure in the next decade: culture, character, practices, systems and leaders. Studying every critical aspect of law firms from income trends to attorney attrition rates and from gender bias to leadership development, this book shows how law firms have struggled to adapt to rapidly changing conditions – clients' "more for less" demands, the expansion of corporate legal departments, demographic changes in the legal workforce, and technological innovations transforming law practices. Through its careful analysis of law firms' evolving role in the legal services industry, the book guides attorneys, law students, and law firm leaders in developing new, evidence-based perspectives, practices, and strategies.

Beyond Right and Wrong analyzes 11,000 attorney-client decisions in actual cases and summarizes decades of research regarding judge, jury, litigant and attorney decision making. To explain why many litigation outcomes are suboptimal, the book describes the psychological and institutional factors that impede sound decision making. The roles of attorneys and clients in legal decision making and the legal malpractice and disciplinary consequences of ineffective legal representation also are discussed. To rapidly promote better financial outcomes in civil litigation and to assist attorneys and clients in becoming expert decision makers, the book presents more than 65 ideas, methods and systems for improving personal and group decision making.

In How Leading Lawyers Think: Expert Insights Into Judgment and Advocacy, 78 attorneys in California and New York describe how they evaluate, negotiate and resolve litigation cases. Selected for their demonstrated skill in predicting trial outcomes and knowing when cases should be settled or taken to trial, these attorneys identify the key factors in case evaluation and share successful strategies in pre-trial discovery, client counseling, negotiation, mediation, and trials. Integrating law and psychology, the book shows how skilled attorneys mentally frame cases, understand jurors’ perspectives, develop persuasive themes and arguments and achieve exceptional results for clients.