The Insurance Edition, featuring Mike Mooney, a senior vice president of Professional Liability Practice Leader at USI Affinity, on the malpractice insurance market in New Jersey and what attorneys need to look for when shopping for coverage: New Jersey, unfortunately, is one of the tougher states as it relates to legal malpractice, and really for two reasons. One, New Jersey has a longer statute of limitations than most states, six years. And we also have fee shifting in New Jersey … the plaintiff can recover fees in a legal malpractice claim from the defense side's insurance carrier … and that drives up the rates. A lot of carriers feel that they can't make money in New Jersey because they have that added expense. So there's not a lot of competition … the carriers can really control the market from a pricing perspective. In New Jersey, typically, there's probably a handful of carriers that write in New Jersey and I do a lot of work in New York and there are 30 or 40 … significant difference. The Mindfulness Edition, with Cheyne Scott, a lawyer with Chasan, Lamparello, Mallon & Cappuzzo and founder of the website and podcast The Spiritual Litigator, on the benefits of practicing mindfulness and how to incorporate it into the busy attorney's life: I really love what I do and I was doing too much of it. I was pushing myself too hard to try to do too much work at once. I was taking orders from judges personally if I didn't win a motion. Anytime I didn't necessarily get along with an adversary I would take it personally. I just really worked myself to burnout and I got really, really sick …. I realized that was due to the stress I was putting on myself. I decided I'm not going to go through this again and I need to find a way to deal with the stress and deal with the anxiety. I started looking and googling what to do if you're stressed out as an attorney and I saw that a lot of the results said, 'Leave the law! Get out of here!' I did not want to do that. I wanted to continue to practice, and I wanted to continue to practice with my firm because they had been so supportive through the time that I was sick and I knew that this was the place that I needed to stay and the practice area I was working in was exactly where I wanted to be. So then I started finding mindfulness …. It wasn't overnight, but gradually I started to see that my attitude changed and that I no longer took things personally, that I no longer completely immersed myself into work to the point it was detrimental to my health … for me, mindfulness is just observing what's going on and not judging it and being able to detach in a way that is helpful to your health and helpful to your practice and to your personal life. The Solo and Small-Firm Edition, featuring former Solo and Small Firm Section Chair Ayesha Krishnan Hamilton, on strategies for success when you work for yourself: I think of my practice as my baby, and you do what you need to do because this is all yours. You have to be strategic about things in terms of making sure you're outsourcing the right things. I don't like the bookkeeping part of it; I outsource that. I know others have decided that they wanted to take the step to hire paralegals because the nature of their practice needed more support in that area. I think you have to be very conscious of the business end of your practice to make sure that you're working efficiently, making sure that you're maximizing your billable hour for stuff that you can actually bill for, because otherwise you drive yourself crazy. My sense is that a solo is very much more a business person than traditional big-firm attorneys like to think of themselves.