In-House Counsel

The study of the mind ? psychology ? and the mental state of in-house lawyers

By Rees Morrison

Almost three years ago I pulled together several terms from psychology that are relevant to the operations of legal departments (See my post of July 21, 2006: psychology and several of its concepts, all blended into this post.). Thereafter, repression must have set in and I forgot to update the metapost. Guilty through and through, my ego bruised by the omission, dealing with the neurosis of blog silence, I decided to remedy id.

I would not shrink from citing eight metaposts that bear on psychology.

Cognitive biases and malfunctions (See my post of March 15, 2009: cognitive traps with 21 references.).

Decision-making (See my post of Feb. 16, 2008: decisions with 42 references.).

Emotional intelligence(See my post of Dec. 3, 2007 #4: EI with 5 references.)

Happiness (See my post of June 20, 2007: happiness with 10 references.).

Intelligence (See my post of Sept. 21, 2008: IQ with 16 references.).

Psychometric instruments (See my post of Nov. 9, 2007: psychometric tests with 17 references.).

Risk aversion (See my post of Aug. 24, 2008: lawyers and risk averse behavior with 11 references.).

Stress (See my post of June 11, 2008: stress with 18 references.).

A crowd of single posts introduce psychological terms (See my post of April 2, 2005: choice theory; April 5, 2007: cognitive dissonance; Jan. 27, 2006: endowment effect; June 30, 2007: narcissism and demographic groups; Jan. 22, 2009: narcissistic GCs; April 19, 2006: psychology of choice; Oct. 21, 2005: neuro-linguistic programming; Jan. 17, 2006: passive aggressive; Feb. 8, 2006: quantrophrenia; and Jan. 23, 2008: reactance.). Many more terms are probably laced throughout my posts.

Other posts offer psychological explanations for managerial situations (See my post of Dec. 19, 2007: hourly billing survives because of relative not absolute costs; Jan. 16, 2006: long survey questions trigger long answers; April 19, 2006: systems and software appeal more than personal efforts; May 16, 2006: left brain, right brain notions; Dec. 16, 2005: ethnographers? patterns in behavior; and May 1, 2005: employee satisfaction.). Other concepts from psychology that crop up in law departments include incentives, variable reinforcement, motivation, and stimulus/response (See my post of April 23, 2008: bad behavior by managers with 10 references.); and March 31, 2009: nine more posts.).

Full post as published by Law Department Management on April 22, 2009 (boomark / email).