The lawyers of Addleshaw Goddard, Berwin Leighton Paisner, CMS Cameron McKenna, Keating Chambers, Lovells and Nabarro will test their guitar-wielding skills in what is being referred to as “the legal profession’s first battle of the bands”. The whole idea is to organise an event in which, for charity purposes, rock bands comprising lawyers of the afore-mentioned law firms will perform in the same legendary venue as The Rolling Stones, Sex Pistols or Joe Strummer.

This is proof that lawyers, perhaps more than any profession, remain faithful to the saying “work hard, party hard”. I’ve seen a lot of Romanian lawyers with a lot of “hidden” (and sometimes unusual) talents so far, so I can only hope that it won’t be too long before some of the more important players on the legal services market in Romania decide to step forward and do something different for a noble purpose.

Now the WOW factor is pretty much compulsory with every presentation, regardless of the topic, the environment in which it’s given or the audience that receives it. Without a reasonable amount of WOW factor, chances you’ll get your message accross the table are pretty slim. Nonetheless, too much WOW factor means too little science and “real” information. So getting things in the right proportion, just the right amount of WOW and just the right amount of scientific data, makes a good presentation and, perhaps, in the long run, makes a difference.

TED is about people sharing ideas with the world. Some presentations are built on personal experiences, others on years of studies and research, but what they all have in common is that they are produced by some of the most creative and insightful minds of our time. And they’re all fun.

So here’s the most interesting one I’ve seen in the past few days.

Now I’m still not sure that I really believe in learning leadership (as opposed to practicing leadership) and so on, but I figure it might be worth a try, particularly since the line-up of speakers is quite impressive: Florin Pogonaru, Marius Ghenea, Bogdan Baltazar and John Potter, just to name a few.

I’ve been waiting for almost 24 hours for an e-mail from the organizers to clarify certain aspects, which raises some questions as per the seriousness of the whole enterprise, but I reckon it’s not something I can’t move past, so it’s a safe bet I’ll be there, at least on the second day (Innovative Concepts in Business with Bogdan Baltazar, John Potter, Peter Ostveen and Thomas Gabriel). The detailed schedule can be found here.

Although developed by a Romanian company, eRepublik has quickly reached a global size, gathering almost 200.000 players in almost 50 countries. Your options are limitless. You can get a job, start a newspaper, create or join a political party, run for Congress or for Presidency, join the army and fight bravely in countless wars and so on. From hard workers to media moguls and from field marshals to corporations, this game has it all. It’s the most complex simulator I have ever tried, with a living and breathing economic module, a very deep political module and a fun and diverse mass-media module.

There’s nothing that you could do in real life and not in eRepublik, only in a virtual environment, everything is cheaper and, if you fall, it doesn’t hurt. However, every detail is crafted carefully enough that, at the end of the day, eRepublik is, in equal proportions, a game, a learning experience and a socialising opportunity. This is why I’m running for Congress on Saturday

While I do not defend either side of this conflict (the content of the codes made available via mass-media indicates certain lackings but, then again, the media is seldom completely honest and NGOs aren’t always driven by goodwill), I cannot help but notice one particularly disturbing aspect. Today, 21 representatives of local NGOs were invited by the President at the Cotroceni Palace for a discussion on the codes and the civil society’s observations, comments and ammendments. Those representatives went to meet the President without as much as a written presentation of their main ideas or points of view, let alone comments by article or solid, clear ammendments to the codes. They were invited to sit at arm’s length with the President and have a saying in a matter of utmost importance for everyone and everything that the civil society stands for, and all they could produce was a plump lady reading 3 sentences off a scrap of paper in front of the President and the media, because she probably couldn’t be bothered to memorise them before the meeting.

This was a sorry picture of a civil society that should be one of the prime guardians of democracy, that should safeguard the interests and views of the many against the contempt or the disinterest of the few. And this strengthened my belief that, at least for the time being, it bears on each of us to be socially responsible and act when we feel threatened. It’s extremely unlikely that you’ll make a social, political or media impact when all you can do to present, support and defend your opinion is to read a couple of paragraphs from a piece of paper in a formal meeting with the Chief of State.

Perish the thought of me ignoring the environment altogether, no, I just didn’t believe that the current approach to these issues was the right one. Fund raisings are always suspiciously looked at, people seem to want to get rich off environmental NGOs and a lot of “green activists” i know drive SUVs. Which basically meant I took it up myself to save energy, sort my garbage, use less water and plant a couple of trees.

This is why I have a driver’s licence for 3 years now, yet I refuse to buy a car. This is why I have 3 different trash cans in my house, a back yard full of trees and bushes, dozens of economic lightbulbs and energy class A household appliances. This is why am outraged at the fact that alternative energy sources (such as solar panels or wind power plants), alternative transportation (green cars, bicycles) or, generally speaking, alternative, eco-friendly lifestyles, see little to no promotion or media space. And this in an European capital which has the lowest green space per citizen ration in the entire EU, where people steal decorative plants from the streets and where, every day, almost 100.000 cars choke up around 2 million citizens. And this is why I think that Corporate Social Responsiblity (CSR) is yesterday’s news – the situation is dire enough to require responsibility and action from each and every one of us, regardless of wealth or social standing, which means Personal Social Responsibility (PSR) should become today’s news.

With this train of thought in the back of my head, I’ve decided to look into one of the most notorious green NGOs in Romania. Created and led by a charismatic Dragos Bucurenci, it brought together a team of involved people who want to make a difference. Like the motto says, they want to leave their children the four seasons, good drinking water and clean air, rather than a bank account and a four-room condo. So I’ve recently enrolled in MaiMultVerde.

I’ve never done volunteer work before, I have no idea whatsoever what kind of efforts or time investment such an activity would require, but I’m enthusiastic enough to choose a new NGO to which I’ll donate 2% from my incomes.

The bottom line is, my kid has the right to know the feeling of walking bare foot on grass. It’s about as easy as it gets to go out for a weekend and plant some trees or pick up some trash. So I’m looking forward for MMV’s next planting trip. In the meantime, have a look at this video.

For those of you who don’t know, Wikipedia says that Schrödinger’s experiment consisted of a cat, along with a flask containing a poison, being placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If an internal Geiger counter detected radiation then the flask was shattered, releasing the poison which killed the cat. Quantum mechanics suggests that after a while the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, not a mixture of alive and dead.

In a similar fashion, the Romanian lawyer must strive to be simultaneously alive and dead because, being either alive or dead, prevents you from achieving real success. I will explain.

When I say a lawyer must be alive, I envisage 3 aspects of this livelihood. First of all, a lawyer must be socially active and responsible, must create and maintain a network of friends and contacts, must proactively influence the business and social environment he has access to. All this in order to get the visibility and notoriety needed to promote his personal brand, his previous successes and his professionalism. Second of all, a lawyer must find a balance between his career and his personal life. He works with people and living, breathing organisations, not with files and scraps of paper and it is only by maintaining an adequate social life that he will not forget this. Third of all, being a lawyer is about being part of a team, is about developing people skills and using them not only to seduce your clients, but also to build a pleasurable work environment for all the team’s players. Success is not about imposing your views inside that team, being its leader or making the most money, but rather about letting the team help you find yourself and become the best you can be.

Why should a lawyer be dead every now and again? Well, sometimes because the system doesn’t work as it should, but sleepless nights chewing on these frustrations won’t help anyone. Sometimes you make mistakes and some other times you do your part of the deal perfectly, yet others blow it all to smithereens, but you have to find within the power to move on, learn the lesson and, at the end of the day, emerge a better person and a better professional.

The important thing is, when you draw the line, that you’re getting ready to embrace a profession regarding which most people settle for talking the talk. The difference between bottomfeeders that make money off the misery of others and real lawyers that bring a contribution to the betterment of their community is that the latters don’t just talk the talk, they also walk the walk.

Because the collective view on lawyers in Romania is that they are an isolated caste, almost a discrete (if not secret) society, who reluctantly allow others to join them and most of the time only care about making obscene amounts of money. In their minds, people put together corrupt officials or illicit enterprises with the vile lawyers that defend them and the submissive judges that let them walk. Hence, the obvious statement that being a lawyer is just a job has no value here.

So, if one is perceived to be as corrupt, vile and despicable as the corporations or murderers whose interests one represents, why does one become a lawyer? The reason I chose this profession is that being a lawyer means so much more than litigation / dispute resolution or any other proceeding that ends up with a potentially guilty party walking free.

Being a lawyer is about finding within yourself the drive to be a better professional at the end of every day. It’s about thinking one step ahead of everyone around you, of your direct competitors, of your client and of your client’s competitors. It’s about coming up with solutions to problems even before most people actually realise there is a problem. It’s about finding the shortest and cheapest way from A to B, so as your client’s business will run smoothly and profitably.  And, most of all, being a lawyer is about determination to innovate and take the ever more intertwined business and legal environments one step farther.

When we draw the line to all this, one question still remains – who am I? At the moment, I’m almost a grown up with a plan. Five years from now, I will have turned into a real asset for any law firm. First of all, because I am in love with what I do and this gives me the motivation I need to permanently improve my skills. Second of all, because I value “WE” more than “I”. And third of all, because I am a child of the Twitter revolution, I’ve grown up in a perpetually shifting world and this gives me the flexibility and vision needed to bring an added value to the legal and business communities alike.