Practice Management

It is a condition that I believe I am suffering from more and more both in my case analysis and in my practice wants.  I have attempted to build a highly niche practice to avoid it, but I have been trying to adventure out a little of late.

Attention spam is a condition resulting in a failure to process facts or comprehend common knowledge, due largely to having a mind full of useless information.

I have run into attention spam of late in two regards.  First, I have run into a few cases of that I am prosecuting in which the defenses raised are many, fast and furious (most without real substantiation) that trying to focus on drafting detail pleadings gets rather difficult.  Much like a law school exam where you first have to wade through all of the extraneous and immaterial facts to answer the call of the question, this process becomes rather difficult as well.  When multiple cases of this type hit at the same time it can really get confusing and I have trouble then processing the basic facts.  I deal with this a little better now than I would have when I am younger because I think and draft more in a linear fashion than I sue to do.  I guess it is from all of that outlining I did in law school years ago.  I am not sure.

Second, is that I have had an interest in doing a number of different things the last year or two.  The Internet and blogs are wonderful research tools.  The problem is that as you read through all of this stuff your mind gets increasingly cluttered due to all of the useless information you pick up along the way.  It interrupts the calculus in a way in that you have to consider all of the useful and non-useful facts together and in different combinations before you can discard it.  This sensation is greater with new endeavors or ventures.  I guess the problem is that with something new you have a hard time deciding what is useful and what is not.  For example, in my current practice area I might get snookered by some of this stuff for a while but I have been with it long enough to know and understand the most common elements and law from which to gage the arguments.  Not so with new categories.

Then, of course, it might just be old age, but I doubt it.  My sense is that I can sit down and concentrate longer on issues than I could when I was younger.  I might be slower at it, but it is more than made up for with my dedication to sticking with it.