the Zealous

Software coder Eric Suh writes, in a piece entitled, Writing code and prose:

One of the most important qualities for effective programming in large codebases is good writing ability—not writing code, but writing prose for other humans.
 
Undoubtedly, this is not a surprise to long-time industry veterans (after all, we don't often program in machine code anymore), but it's a quality I often find is overlooked by engineers that arrive straight out of college. Those that I see write the cleanest, most maintainable code are those who write prose well, whether in documentation, in emails, or in their everyday lives.
 
Many aphorisms about writing style translate fairly well to coding. Consider the following selection of principles from The Elements of Style by Strunk and White:

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In 2011 a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in an article entitled Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions by Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav, and Lioria Avvan-Pesso, (the "DLA" study) alarmed many of us by calling into question the supposed wisdom and impartiality of judicial decisionmakers.

Are judicial rulings based solely on laws and facts? Legal formalism holds that judges apply legal reasons to the facts of a case in a rational, mechanical, and deliberative manner. In contrast, legal realists argue that the rational application of legal reasons does not sufficiently explain the decisions of judges and that psychological, political, and social factors influence judicial rulings. We test the common caricature of realism that justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast” in sequential parole decisions made by experienced judges. We record the judges’ two daily food breaks, which result in segmenting the deliberations of the day into three distinct “decision sessions.” We find that the percentage of favorable rulings drops gradually from ≈65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to ≈65% after a break. Our findings suggest that judicial rulings can be swayed by extraneous variables that should have no bearing on legal decisions.

I started my own law practice in October of 2006. I left my GC job hoping my contacts at that time would be sufficient to ensure a steady flow of work.
 
Before taking this leap, I was in-house counsel for nearly 9 years at two different companies. Before that, I was a law firm associate for two-and-a-half years (following a two-year federal judicial clerkship). So, at the time I launched my solo practice, my understanding of what a private firm practice should be was quite dated – particularly with respect to legal research.