Recorded March 2023. We sit down with Nebraska State Bar Association's Tenant Assistance Project staff (Lia Bies, Sarah O'Neill, Ryan Sump, and Cass Ward) to discuss the work they are doing to facilitate pro bono opportunities for attorneys to assist people facing eviction, and impact the program has had in the community. TAP is the 2023 recipient of the Laurie Smith Camp Integrity in Service Award from the Omaha Bar Association. We will be recognizing them at the Law Day Lunch on May 2nd. More info at www.omahabarassociation.com.

"Bar Talk" Ep. 47 - Law Day 2023 - Tenant Assistance Project

We talk with Trish Bergman and Kailey Edelman of the Eastern Nebraska Office on Aging (ENOA), our 2025 OBA Public Service Award recipient. ENOA is an agency located in Omaha that focuses on helping the aging. Most known for their popular "meals on wheels" program, ENOA also coordinates assistance for in home medical care, has a network of ombudsmen to ensure high quality of care at area nursing homes, and engages active seniors in volunteer and mentoring programs. 

"Bar Talk" Ep. 67 - Law Day 2025 - Eastern Nebraska Office on Aging (Public Service Award Winner)

Attorney Stu Dornan (Dornan Law Team) is the 2025 recipient of the Omaha Bar Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. We sit down with Stu to talk about his life, career, and family.

"Bar Talk" Ep. 68 - Law Day 2025 - Stu Dornan, Dornan Law Team

Execution by lethal injection is seen by many Americans as a less barbaric alternative than older methods like hanging, firing squads and electrocution. It is easy to assume that the process must resemble euthanasia procedures for terminally ill people or pets. The reality is very different, says Corinna Barrett Lain, a law professor and death penalty expert.


Lain didn’t initially intend to make the death penalty her primary area of study, she tells the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles in this episode of the Modern Law Library. A former prosecutor in Virginia, Lain did not begin her work out of opposition to the death penalty. But the more she discovered about the realities of the administration of lethal injections, the more she was compelled to demystify the process.


In Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, Lain upends a lot of conventional wisdom about lethal injections. For example, the three-drug protocol used by most states was not a drug cocktail arrived at through scientific research. Rather, in 1977, after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed executions to resume after a 10-year hiatus, Oklahoma medical examiner Dr. Jay Chapman was asked by a state legislator to come up with an alternative to the state’s rickety electric chair. Though Chapman admitted he was “an expert in dead bodies but not an expert in getting them that way,” he proposed combining sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride. “You wanted to make sure the prisoner was dead at the end, so why not add a third drug,” the book quotes Chapman as saying. “Why does it matter why I chose it?” In contrast, an overdose of a single drug, pentobarbital, is what is commonly used by veterinarians in animal euthanasia.


“Lethal injection is not based on science,” Lain writes. “It is based on the illusion of science, the assumption of science.”


In this episode, Lain and Rawles also discuss botched executions, shady sources used by states to procure the drugs used for lethal injections, and how Lain’s scholarship has impacted her views of capital punishment as a whole.

‘Secrets of the Killing State’ exposes realities of lethal injection

We interview Education Rights Counsel CEO and Founder, Lauren Micek Vargas. ERC is our 2025 Robert M. Spire Award recipient and will be recognized at the Law Day Lunch on May 1, 2025.

"Bar Talk" Ep. 69 - Law Day 2025 - Lauren Micek Vargas, Education Rights Counsel (Spire Award Recipient)

Remarks made by Stu Dornan at the 2025 Omaha Bar Association Law Day Lunch on May, 1st, 2025.

2025 Law Day - The Rule of Law & “Civic Duties & Public Service: A Call to Action” - by Stu Dornan

For nearly 30 years, Richard Susskind has written books asking lawyers to envision the future of the law and the legal profession in ways that stretch the imagination. Susskind has been one of the foremost proponents of the transformative potential of technology in legal services. Now, he's asking us to imagine larger transformation still: a world in which AI reigns and humanity faces being sidelined. 
Susskind was an early and enthusiastic booster of the development of artificial intelligence, he tells the ABA Journal's Lee Rawles in this episode of the Modern Law Library. He first became enamored of its potential as a law student in the 1980s, and wrote his doctorate at the University of Oxford on AI and the law in 1986. But the speed and direction of recent advances have given him pause. Will AI be a tool for humanity, or its destruction?
 In his new book, How to Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed, he hopes to help the layperson navigate the issues raised by artificial intelligence, and provoke a global discussion about the ethical and legal implications. Technology is too important to be left only to the technologists, he says. 
While most people are able to see the promise of AI for professions other than their own, Susskind sees a phenomenon he calls "not-us thinking" when most people are asked if their own work could be taken over by an AI system. Lawyers should be careful not to overestimate clients' attachment to having a human lawyer if their goal is simply to avoid legal pitfalls and they can rely on an AI system to accomplish that.
 In this episode, Susskind discusses the promise of AI for increasing access to justice, and talks about some of the ethical decisions that will have to be made with Rawles, who is more of an AI skeptic.


Perplexed about AI? Richard Susskind wants to help

“How Did I Get Here?” is a series on the MassBar Beat podcast exploring the path from new lawyer to partner through in-depth interviews with lawyers at law firms, solo practitioners, in-house counsel and government employees about their unique path to a partner-level position.

In this episode, host Michael D. Molloy, who is chair of the Massachusetts Bar Association Civil Litigation Section, talks with attorney Adam C. Ponte, a shareholder with Fletcher Tilton PC who chairs the firm's Litigation Department and also manages the firm's Boston office. Ponte recalls his journey from law school to law partner, discusses the value of mentors, and explains his responsibilities as a member of the firm's management committee.

How Did I Get Here? Ep. 11: Adam C. Ponte, Fletcher Tilton PC, Boston

Law firms acquire or merge with one another all the time. But when it comes to technology companies, firms usually keep it in-house or enter into a partnership with an outside vendor. They rarely go ahead and just buy a tech company. So when Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton announced in March that it had acquired artificial intelligence products developers Springbok AI, it made headlines.

To buy or not to buy? For Cleary Gottlieb, acquiring an AI company was a no-brainer

Matthew Dixon, co-founder of DCM Insights, is a researcher who’s spent the bulk of his career looking into the shared characteristics and behaviors of successful B2B salespeople. In 2011, he released a study called “The Challenger Sale.” when giving a keynote on his findings at an annual partner retreat, when an audience member stood up and challenged him.

“He said, ‘Dr. Dixon, you’ve been talking now for 45 minutes about sales effectiveness and salespeople and selling and sales process, and it’s all very fascinating and I’m sure our clients would be very interested in this,’” Dixon recounts to the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles in this episode of The Modern Law Library. “‘And after all, we do a lot of consulting work around go-to-market strategy. But what maybe you don’t recognize is that we are partners at our firm. We are not salespeople. In fact, there’s not a single salesperson in this audience. I might go so far as to say we don’t sell anything here.’”

Dixon was taken aback. “What I realized was this world of partnerships, of professional services, of doer-sellers is actually quite a bit different from the world of sales and what we had written and all this research we’d done over the years.”

In 2022, he tackled this population with the Rainmaker Genome Project, a study that became the basis for The Activator Advantage: What Today’s Rainmakers Do Differently, co-written by Dixon, Rory Channer, Karen Freeman and Ted McKenna.

The Rainmaker Genome Project surveyed 3,000 partner-level professionals in 41 firms from the fields of law, public relations, accounting and investment banking. About 39% of respondents were lawyers. Each received a score for their effectiveness in business development and were analyzed for how they provided client services. And it turns out that partner was correct: What makes a lawyer an effective rainmaker is not necessarily what makes a salesperson an effective seller.
After doing a vector analysis on the data, “what we found was that every one of those 3000 professionals could be placed into one of five business development profiles,” says Dixon. The five profiles were the expert, the confidant, the debater, the challenger and the activator.
Dixon stresses that the five categories are not about your personality. While personalities are immutable, behaviors can be changed.
“These are about the things that we can all learn to be better at,” says Dixon. “It’s about the way we spend our time, it’s about the way we engage our clients, it’s about how we use resources, about how we collaborate with our colleagues, and those are things we can all get better at with the right training, coaching and support from our firms.” In this episode, Dixon expands on each type, but the most effective performers in terms of business development were found to be the activators.


What today’s rainmakers do differently

Hsu Untied interview with Charlotte De Géry

Voluntary association of attorneys, judges, and law students in Omaha, Nebraska. Est. 1875. More information at www.omahabarassociation.com.

"Bar Talk" Ep. 47 - Law Day 2023 - Tenant Assistance Project

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