While replying to an email in gmail today, one of the ads along the side of the post touted: “Accurate VooDoo Spells.” Of course I had to check out the website. Turns out she will help with “whatever problems [I’ve]* been having” and provides a “100% guarantee.”
Any thoughts on where that falls in the Rules of Professional Conduct?
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*Yes, I’m such a grammar & punctuation nerd that I had to square-bracket the VooDoo lady’s ad quote.
We lawyers have to sit through hours of sanctimonious crap about professionalism. Crap not because professionalism is crap. Crap because what we’re sitting through is generally a lot of theoretical hand-wringing and brow-furrowing by Leading Lights of the Bar — for whom professionalism means kissing the right behinds over G&T’s at The Palm — and judges and magistrates who would prefer it if we all played better together but are so afraid of appearing partisan that they won’t admonish obviously unprofessional behavior.
Memo to judges and magistrates: There would be a lot more civil behavior in the legal profession if you increased even slightly your level of knuckle-rapping. When one party argues the law and the other presents briefs full of underlined, italicized, bolded, legally-irrelevant ad hominem arguments, say something. You can even rule in favor of the font-abusing jerks — if, counterfactually, they were ever right — but damn, lawyers are not going to get any more civil unless you are willing to call them on their incivility. In real time, too, not theoretically at later hand-wringing professionalism lectures.
Of course, judges and magistrates are not generally party to lawyers’ emails, so we’re sort of on our own there. In that medium, to steal a phrase from my step-brother Duncan, we* are often like a classroom full of five-year-olds with guns and liquor. We recently endured over a month of bold/italicized emails from opposing counsel to schedule a single deposition, the highlight of which was the accusation that we were “playing games” by not disclosing our witnesses a week before the deadline.
In every state, there are rules governing lawyer behavior, for example, in Colorado we have the Colorado Rules of Professional Conduct. These rules tell you helpful things like don’t steal money from your clients or disclose their secrets. Things that we’d never figure out if they were not written down for us.** The CRPC don’t teach you the important stuff, though. So herewith the ARPC: Amy’s Rules of Professional Conduct.
1. Don’t be a jerk.***
2. Respect, or at least act respectfully toward, other lawyers. Older lawyers in fact know more than you do. Younger lawyers are learning how to behave; if you act like a jerk to them, you contribute to the replication of jerk lawyer culture.**** And most important, (she says hopefully) acting like a jerk to opposing counsel in court just makes you look like a jerk. And desperate. And wrong.
3. Don’t be sarcastic, at least not outside your own litigation team. That means, when your OC claims he couldn’t find ten names in a searchable 300-page document over the course of almost two years, do not send an email that reads:
I have one question: does anyone in your 1,200-laywer firm know how to use the “Control-F” function in a pdf document? Because if you had such advanced technical capabilities, you would have discovered those ten people using that complex combination of two of the keys found on all modern computer keyboards sometime in the 18 months since you received our disclosures. Just sayin’.
It was fun to write, but — on sober reflection — I should not have sent it. At least not to OC — that’s what the blog is for. This is clearly the ARPC rule that I violate most frequently. For example, I also once sent an email to an OC the entire content of which was, “Oh, snap!” Luckily, that OC has a sense of humor, so the offense was not as grave. It was a violation, nonetheless.
4. Italics are for case names. Bold text is for celebrity names in gossip columns. Neither font is appropriate as a written representation of raising your voice in briefs and correspondence. Bolding and italicizing the same chunk of text makes you look desperate. And wrong.
5. There is such a thing as deadline karma. Say “yes” to at least the first few requests for extensions if they do not actually imperil your client’s interests. Someday, you’ll need an extension, maybe even in an unrelated case. If you gratuitously refuse a reasonable extension, deadline karma will kick your ass.
6. Learn synonyms for the world “lie.” The judge doesn’t want to hear that your OC is lying, even when he is. In one of our cases, OC asserted to the judge that his client was unfamiliar with the way an expert took measurements. We produced a photo of OC’s client watching the expert take measurements. The judge was completely uninterested in photographic evidence of OC’s lie. Instead of “lie,” I have learned to say, “that argument is incorrect,” or “that assertion is inaccurate.” Same idea; less emotion.
7. Do not attempt to bond with a party or lawyer who is different from you by telling stories about relatives you imagine they have something in common with. If your client violated the ADA, I don’t want to hear about your aunt who uses a wheelchair.***** If you’re a sexist windbag, I don’t care that your daughter just graduated from law school. In a fair housing case, please don’t tell me your son dated an African-American woman. All of these examples are true, several of them repeatedly.
8. Do not send aggressive or offensive correspondence on Friday evening. I know you’ll want to do this to get your desk clear for the weekend. Right? That’s why you want to do it, right? Not that you’d ever think about doing that intentionally to ruin your opposing counsel’s weekend? We have found that our most annoying OCs also have this habit and that, if you’re not careful to shut down your email program on Friday afternoon (or, back in the day, avoid the fax machine), you end up with a sour stomach the whole weekend. Don’t be that guy.
9. Have a sense of humor. The pompous ass quotient is law is, statistically speaking, the highest of any profession except right-wing talk show host.****** Do your part to reduce pomposity by regularly laughing at yourself, your arguments, (privately) your opposing counsel and (privately if you’re wise; publicly if you have a blog) our entire self-important profession.
10. Oh yeah, and don’t steal from your clients or divulge their secrets, you doorknob.
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* By “we” I mean, of course, the other guys.
** That’s a joke. Be polite and just pretend you knew that was a joke.
*** Careful readers will observe that this is closely related to Rule 1.5 of the Revised Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
**** I’m operating under the assumption that we all share the goal of eradicating jerk lawyer culture. This assumption, alas, does not have a lot of empirical support.
***** My favorite example of this was an OC whose brother was quadriplegic, telling my husband (a quad) and co-counsel (also a quad) that fact and adding something like, “yeah, we visit him in the nursing home.”
****** And Keith Olbermann. I never got the attraction of hearing what was more or less the political truth from an ass almost as pompous as the conservative asses he was refuting.
Tim and I spent three lazy days in South Beach, defrosting after a long, cold Denver winter. This is sort of a photoblog of our trip. Enjoy — and at least have the decency to be a little jealous!
We stayed at a hotel right on Ocean Avenue.
with a very hip lobby
The first day brought a very unusual event: Tim and Amy eating breakfast at 10:30.
Tim chose the restaurant. Wonder why?
The great thing about breakfast at 10:30 is that there is very little elapsed time between breakfast and happy hour. Say, 20 minutes.
After our first night, when we had the pleasure of finally meeting Matt and Debbie Dietz for dinner, but the misfortune of sitting in causeway traffic to get there, we decided to ditch the van and just goof around South Beach. This mostly involved rolling/roller blading around, soaking up sun, and people watching.
We connected with some great food, including the famous Joe’s Stone Crab. Mmmm! Curry aioli, where have you been all my life?
While New York may have the Met and Washington, the Smithsonian, South Beach apparently has its own intellectual life.
So sorry Laura Hershey is not around to see this, though I would have had to confess to her — and she would have gotten to make fun of us for — the fact that we didn’t, um, take a tour.
I’m not at all sure what this museum is about:
or these excellent public murals:
The water was gorgeous
Though as we’ve previously established, I don’t swim.
Saw some local wildlife
And the city was obviously trying to make Denverites feel at home with a random blue bear statue:
I loved the architecture, especially against the blue sky.
So very sorry that we ever had to come back to reality!
“Are y’all some kind of thrillseeker?” That was the question to litigants who were stupid or ballsy enough to defy Judge Richard Williams’s courtroom procedures or, God forbid, direct order. I had the honor to clerk for him the year after I graduated, and Tim and I were lucky enough to persuade him to marry us in 1993. Now, with deepest sadness, I mourn his passing.
I can’t begin to list all the things I learned from my clerkship year with Judge Williams. He was a brilliant jurist, a gentle and good-humored teacher, and a hilarious storyteller. Late last year when my friend Laura Hershey passed, I explained how she was part of my Mental Greek Chorus. Well, Judge Williams is right there in my head every time I stand up before a Court or sit down at my computer to write a motion or brief. I aspire to be both smart enough and professional enough that I would not risk his good-natured admonition.
Herewith some random photos and memories.
Chambers the year I clerked: Randy; Spence; Maria; Skip; Mark; and of course, The Judge.
Others will do a better job of telling his story; even the outline is amazing. Raised on a peach orchard in rural Virginia and educated in a one room schoolhouse, he joined the army and ended up surviving the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the war, he benefited from (in his words) “the biggest affirmative action program of all time,” and attended the University of Virginia and UVa law school on the GI Bill. He was in private practice in Richmond, then served on the state bench before being appointed by President Carter to the federal bench.
Learning from the Judge went far beyond the courtroom. In chambers, we heard stories from his practice and his tenure as a judge that were generally hilarious and ultimately provided an education toward the legal Holy Grail: how to be a good advocate, while being professional to your colleagues and opponents, and keeping a sense of humor about the whole business of law. My only complaint is that he completely spoiled us. I left my clerkship after a year expecting the practice of law to be as fair, learned, efficient, and humorous as I had experienced in Judge Williams’s chambers. Alas, this turns out not to be the case.
He was also a learned naturalist, and both during the clerkship and during later visits to Denver, we had long, educational hikes with the Judge and his wife, Gene. I became very comfortable answering the Judge’s Socratic questions about my bench memos. What I didn’t realize is that this this mode of interaction would extend to the natural world, as well. When we hiked near Richmond,
I was happy to learn (= internalize briefly) the names of the local flora and fauna. When we hiked Waterton Canyon near Denver,
it turned out I was actually supposed to know things about the natural world near my adopted home town. The dialog went something like this:
Judge: What is that?
Me: A bird.
Judge: And that?
Me: A tree.
I think he came away very relieved that I had only been his law clerk, and that he had not had to rely on me for Birding Memos. During that visit, we also took the Judge to a Rockies game
and, if memory services, convened an “investment opportunity” — of the seven-card variety — in our apartment with former clerk Sunhee Juhon and her husband, Arthur Hodges. We called the judge “Judge.” Once during an “investment opportunity” at the Judge’s cabin, my co-clerk Mark Batten called him “Coach.” Although it didn’t stick (and probably would not have been preferred) it was accurate. He was our coach, during our clerkship year and after.
Judge Williams was also — for some unknown and, for us, heartwarming reason — a big John Elway fan.
When we sent him a jersey one year, we were very pleased to get back the photo above, which remains one of my favorites of him. But my all time favorite is this:
Of all the wonderful things Judge Williams brought to my life, marrying Tim and me was the one for which I am the most grateful.
Today we attended his funeral and met and heard stories from many of the people whose lives he had touched. It’s hard to believe I’ll never again hear his gravel-inflected voice telling us a rip-roaring tale of the cast of characters who populated his practice and his courtroom.
We’ll miss you, Judge. Thank you.
Here is our existing business plan:
Here is my Alternative Business Plan
My alternative plan comes from our recent experience with document software. We’ve had one program — rhymes (almost) with Mummification — since we started our practice, dutifully shelling out $2,500 per year for a supremely annoying program that, for us, is basically a flat Excel file attached to a bunch of document images. We decided not to pay last year; this year we find ourselves needing the software again and have to pay a penalty to start up again: all fees in arrears plus one year going forward. That’s right, our reward for 15 years of faithful patronage is to be charged twice what we’d be charged if we were signing up for the first time.
Did I mention how annoying Mummification’s software is?
Their chief competitor wants $6,000 just to get started. Won’t name them either, but in the spirit of Talking Back to Westlaw, I’ll just say: nothing says cutting edge legal software like a middle aged white guy in a bowler hat apparently literally being put out to pasture.
And the supposedly small-firm-friendly upstart enthuses over the phone that the “software is free! it’s all web-based! you just pay for storage!” That’s right, $1,600 PER MONTH to store the documents in our biggest case on their servers when we just paid several thousand dollars for a two terabyte* server, not to mention the Citrix server that lets our beloved co-counsel have the privilege of hating on Mummification as much as we do working on the case remotely.
So seriously, my computer-nerd friends — and you know who you are, especially the one I’m married to — this just can’t be that hard. Database + Images = Bonbons. Let’s get to work!
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* We have terabytes right there in our office! Isn’t that cool!? I love that word!
Took Tim out for dinner for his birthday, and decided to try a new steak joint. We’re generally devoted fans of the bar at Sullivan’s. Excellent steaks, copious side dishes, live jazz, and sports on TV. It’s so therapeutic we’ve come to call it “Dr. Sullivan’s.”
But last night we decided to try the Capital Grille. While the steak was fantastic and the dessert one of the best ever, I’m not sure how I feel about the ambiance. This was the view from my seat:
That’s right, moose nostril. Mmmmm! Tim’s view was even scarier: a much-bigger-than-life portrait of Adolph Coors.** And just to underscore that we are definitely not in DC anymore, Toto, we had the opportunity to take in some uniquely Denveresque culture:
For those of you too lazy to click on the photo, it says:
Art of Winter: An Outdoor Gallery of Ski and Snowboard Art
So ha! you coastal types who ridicule our art scene. Do YOU have ski and snowboard art at MoMA? at the National Gallery? at the de Young? Didn’t think so. Did I mention the dessert? It really was incredible!
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*Not Safe for Vegetarians.
**Sorry, no photo – I had just made a major dork of myself with the moose nostril photos.
Christopher Buckley’s Losing Mum and Pup is a wonderful book for many reasons. For example, anyone who has kept a vigil for a loved one in the ICU will not want to miss Buckley’s hilarious updates from his father’s hospital bed. But the part that rang the truest for me was his description of his father’s devotion to WordStar. Remember WordStar? William F. Buckley was apparently an early user of this ancient word processing program, and would be goddamned if he was going to give it up, even as it required extensive and increasingly energetic technical support.*
My father, too, was an early-adopter/never-let-goer.
Throughout our childhood, he always talked about wanting to be the first kid on the block to have a Buck Rogers Ring. I think that was something related to a comic book that came in a cereal box or something. Bruce and I did what we always did with pronouncements like this: ignored it. Turns out it would not have been a bad thing if he had actually gotten a Buck Rogers Ring and, say, held onto it so he could bequeath it to his kids: http://www.hakes.com/item.asp?Auction=199&ItemNo=86752
Anyway, Dad led the pack in buying things like a Polaroid camera. The first one looked like this:
and required him to apply some vile smelling chemical** to the photo with a tiny squeegee. The final Polaroid camera looked like this:
and produced color photos that would develop before your eyes. I think that was the last camera he owned.
Dad was also a very early adopter of the cell phone. He was a big telephone talker, which was really annoying when we had kid activities on his agenda and he just had to finish up a few more words with, say, Al Blumrosen, but a huge boon when I was living in Taiwan and he was willing to ignore the killer international phone rates to call up and chat. The cell phone opened up vast new parts of his life during which he could talk on the phone, though it often seemed that its primary use was calling us from the driveway to help him carry things into the house.
Kids today probably barely remember roaming charges; back when my Dad bought his first cell phone, there were roaming numbers. To contact a cell phone owner who had traveled away from home, you’d have to dial some sort of access number first. As Dad drove from Washington to New York — a trip he made often — we’d have to guess where in the journey he was and call the appropriate number:
My favorite example of his early adopting/not let going was his word processing . . . machine. Dad had a very early word processor called a Lexitron, and in my memory it had green text on a black screen and was approximately the size of an upright piano. A Google Image search reveals that I was only slightly off on the size:
Dad started using this beast sometime in the late 70s or early 80s. As I recall, the only advantage the Lexitron had over a typewriter was that you could draft your document on the screen before printing it. While that was a huge advantage, you had to do all the formatting manually: hard returns; footnotes; pages; etc.
When he passed in 1997, the machine was still in his office. While his secretary had kept up with PC technology, he had never moved on from the Lexitron’s green and black screen. She later told us that when she showed him how to put a music CD in her desktop PC, he exclaimed, “the typewriter is playing phonograph records!”
From time to time, I try to imagine what he would think of the technological world as we now know it. The summer before he passed, he sent his first email and looked at his first website. He just couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about until I found a copy of the Code of Federal Regulations online in a click or two. Government nerd catnip!
I’m guessing he would be a staunch defender of books printed on dead trees rather than streamed to a tablet, Kindle, or iPad*** and that the world of Facebook and Twitter would have been lost on him. But I think he would have been a world-class texter. He loved his cell phone primarily because he loved to stay in touch with people and he was a big writer of long, newsy letters to my brother and me, and to other family members. I’m guessing the ability to write to his kids and grandkids from his cell phone would have been irresistible.
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* This is not comparable to my continuing use of WordPerfect, which I do not because I am an aging conservative political commentator incapable of keeping up with technology, but because WORDPERFECT IS A BETTER PROGRAM. Think of it this way: Word is McDonald’s; WordPerfect is your local farmer’s market.
** Who are we kidding? I LOVED the smell of Polaroid developing chemicals, almost as much as I love the smell of magic markers!
*** He often opined that if God had intended baseball bats to be made of metal, He would have made metal trees. I’m guessing the response to the Kindle would have been similar.
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UPDATE: My brother has a “camera museum” of Dad’s old cameras and reminded me that one of his real early adopter feats was the Minox:
I’m guessing he got this in the 50s or 60s sometime. Maybe we really were a Russian spy family!
Bruce also had a photo of the actual original Polaroid:
I would also like to note that we have a history of museums in our family. None of us is very good at getting rid of things, even when we replace them. For example, the kitchen in our summer house featured a toaster museum:
After two weeks without posting, I figured I owed you all at least a random dog photo.
This is what it looked like driving from Denver to Vail yesterday:
This is what it sounded like in my car:
You in the Subaru! With the functional snow tires! Kiss my DC-born, Virginia-raised, 20-mph-driving, 2d-gear-using, single-lane-occupying, 88-Honda-encased ass! And an even less desirable activity for you, the guy in the Hummer who came behind me and flashed his high beams.
By the time I got to Vail Pass, I was a one-woman traffic jam, my faithful Honda trailing a long line of impatient Subarus, the interior of the car a constant stream of inspiring epithets.
All worth it for a gorgeous day of skiing followed by an awesome dinner with good friends!
Thought Snax 