Reflections of a Boston Lawyer

There's a blue moon tonight.  I saw it hanging over the Cape Cod bay like a giant, illuminated baseball, just daring us to take a swing. It reminded me of the band Cowboy Junkies and their version of the song "Blue Moon" on the Trinity Sessions album released in the 1980s.  I remember hearing it at a party, played by some of the cooler people from the church we belonged to at the time, a group that included one of the young, female associate pastors who was married to a young corporate lawyer from my alma mater.  Like his wife, he had a Harvard Divinity degree and preferred classical music but was intrigued by these strange new sounds.  And that memory reminded me of a night in the early 80s when I hung out with some law school friends who lived in Boston at the time, and one of them brought a copy of Julia Fordham's first album, and as it played he danced by himself in some bizarre but innocent way.  These are the things I remember, quiet but edgy music played at n

Sometime last year I was approached by an ambitious student at my alma mater .  She was organizing a TEDx program at the college on the topic of integrity , and asked if I would be one of the presenters.  I gladly agreed to do it, although I had no immediate ideas of what I would talk about.  After thinking about it for several months, I came to recognize an opportunity to brag about the good work lawyers do, in contrast to the negative public image our profession has earned.  Having served as President of the Boston Bar Association , I was privy to a number of worthy projects that many volunteer lawyers engage in every day.  So I enlisted the help of one of the marketing directors at my law firm and the communications director of the BBA to put together some slides for a talk about lawyers with integrity.  I also followed the advice of someone at my firm that I needed to make at least part of the talk personal, yet I didn't want to boast about myself, especially when I knew so