Valerie A. Fontaine earned her JD from UC Law San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings) and her BA, Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, from UCLA. She was on the Editorial Board of COMM/ENT, a Journal of Communications and Entertainment Law. Valerie practiced law with a prominent Los Angeles law firm and entered the legal search profession in 1981. Valerie is Secretary to the Board of Directors of the National Association of Legal Search Consultants (NALSC) and Chairs its Newsletter Committee.
You need a vacation. You’ve earned it. But can you manage to get away? A March 2023 Pew Research Center survey shows that only 48% of U.S. workers use all their allotted vacation days each year. It’s a good bet that the percentage is even smaller for lawyers. According to a July 12, 2022 Forbes article, the benefits of…
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Describing your firm and differentiating it are two very different things. The key to successful recruitment and retention lies in understanding how your firm is different from its competitors, clearly communicating that difference in the marketplace, and then finding the audience that appreciates those differences. Every organization has a wealth of information embedded in its…
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Lawyers pride themselves on being good communicators, but there’s more to effective communication than choice of words. Like just about anything you ask a lawyer, the answer to the question, “Which is the best way to communicate your message?” is, of course, “It depends.” The phrase, “The medium is the message,” was popularized by Marshall…
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A recent study published in February 2023 suggests that you need to set boundaries to save your sanity—and maybe even your life. Lawyers are more than twice as likely to have suicidal thoughts than the U.S. population of working people over age 18 as a whole according to a survey of almost 2,000 lawyers in…
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