Nicole Goluboff And The Carpet Commute

Nicole Goluboff is considered by many the expert on "telecommunicating" in the United States.  Her book, Telecommuting for Lawyers , is offered by the American Bar Association and is recommended reading for any attorney wishing to practice out of his or her home or work for a Third Wave law firm.

Nicole Belson Goluboff earned her J.D. from the Columbia University School of Law. She was a litigation associate for several few years with Kronish, Lieb, Weiner & Hellman in Manhattan.  She then successfully pitched an arrangement involving full-time telecommuting to Kostelanetz & Fink, also in Manhattan, with whom she worked until the fall of 1994. She is the Chair of the Subcommittee on Telecommuting of the ABA Young Lawyers Divison Women in the Profession Committee (YLD WIPC). In that capacity, she designed and conducted the ABA YLD WIPC telecommuting survey, authored the committee's Report on Telecommuting, and authored its "Guide to the Topics a Telecommuting Policy Should Address." She is also a member of the New York State Bar Association Committee on Citizenship Education, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York Committeeon Lawyers in Transition, and the LAAWS Network (Lawyers Advancing Alternative Work Solutions).

In short, Nicole Goluboff has been a carpet commuter, working from her home in the practice of law.  A big Third Wave to her.

The premise of her book is that with today's advanced software, E-mail, laptop computers, and cellular phones, telecommuting is a viable work solution for legal professionals. Her book covers many issues involved with telecommuting from the perspective of the large law firm as well as from the perspective of its attorneys and employees.  Ms. Goluboff shares how you can turn telecommuting into a profitable solution.

As valuable as Ms. Goluboff's book can be to a carpet commuter and Third Wave law firm there is a big difference in telecommuting and managing your law practice from your home.  To often telecommuting represents a high tech solution to keep lawyers not so much at home, but online and in touch while in court, in transit, while at home and while at play.  In the meantime, the Third Wave concepts of demassivication, decentralization, deconcentration, desynchonization and the ending of big firm bureaucracies.  The technology is used to often not to decrease the cost to law firms, but to increase the number of billable hours that a lawyer can bill.  Large firms are too often revenue centric and expense neutral.  This is not so much a critism of Ms. Goluboff's book, but a realization of its appeal to larger firms of her work.

Technologies and the Third Wave principals have the ability to transform the practice of law in which large law firms are but a clearing house and marketing organization for many home warriors.  While deliberating the benefits of telecommunication, consider the possibility of completely collapsing the infrastructure of the large law firm away from large office complexes and centralized organizations.

The only real critism of Ms. Goluboff's book is that it cost nearly $50.00, it typically takes 2 to 5 weeks for the book to ship upon ording it from Amazon.Com, and one would think that a book dedicate to the possibilities of modern technologies would make this work available in ebook form.