Showing posts with label Uniform Bar Exam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Uniform Bar Exam. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Mid Week At Work: Endings.


I posted this the other day:

Sigh . . .

And depicted with a horse too. . . 

Kroger retires after 35 years of service 

Bart KrogerCODY - Worland Wildlife Biologist Bart Kroger retired last month, bringing his 35-year career with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to a close. 

“Bart has been referred to as the ‘core of the agency’, meaning through his dedication and continuous hard work, he has significantly and meaningfully impacted wildlife management within his district and throughout the state,” said Corey Class, Cody region wildlife management coordinator. “Throughout his career, he has been a solid, steady and dependable wildlife biologist, providing a foundation for wildlife conservation and management in the Bighorn Basin.”

Through his quiet and thoughtful approach, Bart has gained the respect of both his peers and the public. Bart is best known for his commitment to spending time in the field gaining first-hand knowledge of the wildlife and the habitat that supports them, as well as the people he serves in his district. 

 Found this old draft the other day

RETIREMENT ELIGIBILITY

Vesting Requirements

After obtaining 72 months of service, you are eligible to elect a monthly benefit at

retirement age. The 72 months of service do not have to be consecutive months.

Retirement Eligibility

You are eligible for retirement when you reach age 50 and are vested. There is no

early retirement under this plan. You must begin drawing your benefit no later than

age 65.

Which means, as a practical matter, if you are to draw retirement as a Wyoming Game Warden, you need to take the job no later than the beginning of your 59th year.

Of course, if you started at age 59, you wouldn't be drawing much, if anything.

That doesn't mean, of course, that you couldn't be hired after age 59.  You'd just draw no retirement.

The actual statute on this matter states the following, as we noted in a prior thread, from 2023, quoted below:

2. Wyoming Game Wardens were once required to retire at age 55, but a lawsuit some decades ago overturned that. It, in turn, was later overruled, but by that time the state had changed the system. Since that time, it's set it again statutorily, with the age now being 65 by law.  There aren't, therefore, any 67-year-old game wardens.

Statutorily, the current law provides:

9-3-607. Age of retirement.

(a) Any employee with six (6) or more years of service to his credit is eligible to receive a retirement allowance under this article when he attains age fifty (50).

(b) Effective July 1, 1998, any employee retiring after July 1, 1998, with twenty-five (25) or more years of service may elect to retire and receive a benefit upon attaining age fifty (50) as described in W.S. 9-3-610.

(c) Repealed by Laws 1993, ch. 120, §§ 1, 2.

(d) Any employee in service who has attained age sixty-five (65), shall be retired not later than the last day of the calendar month in which his 65th birthday occurs. 

Age limitations of this type are tied to physical fitness.  But what about mental fitness?  As mentioned here before, Gen. Marshall forcibly retired most serving U.S. Army generals, or at least sidelined them, who were over 50 years of age during World War Two, and that had to do with their thinking.  We now allow judges to remain on the bench until they are 70.  Would 60 make more sense?  And can the same argument be made for lawyers, who are officers of the court?

This differs, I'd note, significantly from the Federal Government.  The cutoff there is age 37.  That's it.

Have a wildlife management degree?  Spend the last few years in some other state agency?  Win the Congressional Medal of Honor for single handled defeating the Boko Haram?  38 years old now? Well, too bloody bad for you.

Anyhow, I guess this says something about the American concept that age is just a number and the hands of the clock don't really move.

They do.


On a somewhat contrary note, I was in something this week when a 70-year-old man indicated he might retire in order to take a job as a commercial airline pilot.

He's never been employed in that capacity, but he's had the license for 50 years.  It wouldn't be carrying people for United or something, but in some other commercial capacity.  

He's always wanted to do it, and has an offer.

Well, more power to him.

I did a lot of what this lawyer is doing here, when first practicing, in front of barrister cases just like this.  No young lawyer does that now.

I spoke to a lawyer I've known the entire time I've been practicing law, almost. He's four years younger than me, which would make him 56 or so.  He's worked his entire career in general civil, in a small and often distressed town, in a firm founded by his parents.  When I was first practicing, it was pretty vibrant.

Now he's the only one left.

He's retiring this spring.  This was motivated by his single employee's decision to retire.

I was really surprised, in part due to his age.  I'm glad that he can retire, but it was a bit depressing.  We're witnessing, in Wyoming, the death of the small town civil firm.  Everything is gravitating to the larger cities, and frankly in the larger cities, they're in competition with the big cities in Colorado and Utah.  That's insured a bill in the legislature to try to recruit lawyers to rural areas.*

It's not going to work.

The problem has been, for some time, that it's impossible to recruit young lawyers to small rural areas.  The economics don't allow for it.  The economics don't allow for it, in part, as the Wyoming Supreme Court forced the Uniform Bar Exam down on the Board of Law Examiners, and that resulted in opening the doors to Denver and Salt Lake lawyers.  It's been something the small firms have been competing against ever since.

And not only that, but some sort of demographic change has operated to just keep younger lawyers out of smaller places, and frankly to cause them to opt for easier paths than civil law in general.  I know older lawyers that came from the larger cities in the state, and set up small town practices when they were young, as that's where the jobs were and having a job was what they needed to have.  I've even known lawyers who went to UW who moved here from somewhere else who took that path, relocating from big Eastern or Midwestern cities to do so.

No longer.  Younger lawyers don't do that.

Quite a few don't stick with civil practice at all.  They leave for government work, where the work hours are regular, and the paycheck isn't dependent on billable hours.   And recently, though we are not supposed to note it, young women attorneys reflect a new outlook in which a lot of them bail out of practice or greatly reduce their work hours after just a few years in, a desire to have a more regular domestic life being part of that.

I guess people can't be blamed for that, but we can, as a state, be blamed for being shortsighted.  Adopting the UBE was shortsighted.  Sticking with it has been inexcusable.  I'm not the only one who has said so, and frankly not the only one who probably paid a price for doing so.  The reaction to voices crying in the wilderness is often to close the windows so you don't have to hear them.  Rumor had it, which I've never seen verified and have heard expressly denied by a person within the law school administration, that it was done in order to aid the law school, under the theory that it would make UW law degrees transportable, which had pretty much the practical effect on the local law as Commodore Matthew Perry opening up trade with Japan.

Wyoming Board of Law Examiners bringing in the UBE.

The lawyer in this case is worried, as he has no hobbies and doesn't know what he'll do with himself.  I'm surprised how often this concern is expressed.  To only have the law, or any work, is sad.  But a court reporter, about my age, expressed the same concern to me the other day.

Court reporting has really taken a beating in this state, more so than lawyers.  When I was first practicing, every community had court reporters.  Now there are hardly any left at all.  Huge firms are down to just a handful of people, and people just aren't coming into the occupation.  It's a real concern to lawyers.

It's always looked like an interesting job to me, having all the diversity of being a lawyer, with seemingly a lot less stress.  But having never done it, perhaps I'm wildly in error.  We really don't know what other people's jobs are like unless we've done them.

A lawyer I know just died by his own hand.

I met him when he took over for a very long time Wyoming trial attorney upon that attorney's death.

The attorney he took over for had died when he went in his backyard and put a rifle bullet through his brain.  He was a well known attorney, and we could tell something wasn't quite right with him.  Just the day prior, he called me and asked for an extension on something.  I'd already given two.  I paused, and then, against my better judgment, said, "well. . . okay".  

I'd known him too long to say no.

He was clearing his schedule.  If I had said no, I feel, he wouldn't have done it, and he'd be alive today.

The new attorney came in and was sort of like a goofy force of nature.  Hard to describe.  A huge man, probably in his 40s at the time, but very childlike.  He talked and talked. Depositions would be extended due to long meandering conversational interjections, as I learned in that case and then a very serious subsequent one.

He was hugely proud of having been a member of a legendary local plaintiff's firm.  That didn't really matter much to me then, and it still doesn't.  My family has always had an odd reaction to the supposedly honorific.  My father never bothered to collect his National Defense Service Medal for serving during the Korean War, I didn't bother to get my Reserve Overseas Training Ribbon, or my South Korean award for Operation Team Spirit, I don't have my law school diploma's anymore. . . It's not that they aren't honors, it's just, well, oh well.  We tend to value other things, which in some ways sets standards that are highers than others, and very difficult to personally meet.

Anyhow, the guy was very friendly and told me details of his life, not all of which were true.  He was raised by his grandmother, his grandmother had somehow encouraged him to go to law school,  Both true.

He was from Utah and grown up there, but consistently denied being a Mormon.  His wife was Mormon, he said.  He was an Episcopalian.  As I'm very reserved, I'm not really going to talk religion with somebody I only casually and professionally know, as opposed to one of my very extroverted and devout partners who will bring it up at the drop of a hat, and his religious confession didn't particularly matter to me, given the light nature of our relationship.  As it turns out, and as I suspected, that wasn't even remotely true.  He was and always had been a Mormon.  Why did he lie about that?  No idea.

I suppose this is some sort of warning here, maybe.

The first lawyer noted in this part of this entry had suffered something hugely traumatic early in his life and never really got over it. Some people roll with the punches on traumas and some do not.  We hear about combat veterans all the time who live with the horrors they experienced, and which break them down, all the time, but I've known a couple who didn't have that sort of reaction at all, and who could coolly relate their combat experiences.  Others can't get over something that happened to them, ever.

With the second lawyers, there were some oddities, one being that he jumped from firm to firm, and to solo, and back and forth, all the time. That's unusual.  Another was that he seemed to have pinned his whole identify on being a lawyer.  It's one thing, like the retiring fellow above, to have worked it your whole life and have nothing else to do, it's quite another to have that make up everything you are.  He'd drunk deeply of the plaintiff's lawyer propaganda about helping the little guy and all that crap, and didn't really realize that litigators often hurt people as often as they help them, or do both at the same time.  Maybe the veil had come off.  Maybe he should never have been a lawyer in the first place.  Maybe it was organic and had nothing to do with any of this.

Well, the moral of this story, or morals, if there are any, would be this.  You don't have endless time to do anything, 70-year-old commercial airline pilots aside. You probably don't know what it's like to do something unless you've actually done it, but you can investigate it and learn as much as possible.  The UBE, which the Wyoming Supreme Court was complicit in adopting, is killing the small  town civil lawyer and only abrogating it, or its successor, and restoring the prior system can address that.   The entire whaling for justice plaintiff's lawyer ethos is pretty much crap.  And, finally, you had some sort of identify before you took up your occupation.  Unless that identity was what you became, before you became it, don't let the occupation become it.  It may be shallower than you think.

Footnotes:

The bill:

SENATE FILE NO. SF0033

Wyoming rural attorney recruitment program.

Sponsored by: Joint Judiciary Interim Committee

A BILL

for

AN ACT relating to attorneys-at-law; establishing the rural attorney recruitment pilot program; specifying eligibility requirements for counties and attorneys to participate in the program; specifying administration, oversight and payment obligations for the program; requiring reports; providing a sunset date for the program; authorizing the adoption of rules, policies and procedures; providing an appropriation; and providing for an effective date.

Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the State of Wyoming:

Section 1.  W.S. 33‑5‑201 through 33‑5‑203 are created to read:

ARTICLE 2

RURAL ATTORNEY RECRUITMENT PROGRAM

33‑5‑201.  Rural attorney recruitment program established; findings; program requirements; county qualifications; annual reports.

(a)  In light of the shortage of attorneys practicing law in rural Wyoming counties, the legislature finds that the establishment of a rural attorney recruitment program constitutes a valid public purpose, of primary benefit to the citizens of the state of Wyoming.

(b)  The Wyoming state bar may establish a rural attorney recruitment program to assist rural Wyoming counties in recruiting attorneys to practice law in those counties.

(c)  Each county eligible under this subsection may apply to the Wyoming state bar to participate in the program. A county is eligible to participate in the program if the county:

(i)  Has a population of not greater than twenty‑five thousand (25,000);

(ii)  Has an average of not greater than one and one‑half (1.5) qualified attorneys in the county for every one thousand (1,000) residents. As used in this paragraph, "qualified attorney" means an attorney who provides legal services to private citizens on a fee basis for an average of not less than twenty (20) hours per week. "Qualified attorney" shall not include an attorney who is a full‑time judge, prosecutor, public defender, judicial clerk, in‑house counsel, trust officer and any licensed attorney who is in retired status or who is not engaged in the practice of law;

(iii)  Agrees to provide the county share of the incentive payment required under this article;

(iv)  Is determined to be eligible to participate in the program by the Wyoming state bar.

(d)  Before determining a county's eligibility, the Wyoming state bar shall conduct an assessment to evaluate the county's need for an attorney and the county's ability to sustain and support an attorney. The Wyoming state bar shall maintain a list of counties that have been assessed and are eligible to participate in the program under this article. The Wyoming state bar may revise any county assessment or conduct a new assessment as the Wyoming State bar deems necessary to reflect any change in a county's eligibility.

(e)  In selecting eligible counties to participate in the program, the Wyoming state bar shall consider:

(i)  The county's demographics;

(ii)  The number of attorneys in the county and the number of attorneys projected to be practicing in the county over the next five (5) years;

(iii)  Any recommendations from the district judges and circuit judges of the county;

(iv)  The county's economic development programs;

(v)  The county's geographical location relative to other counties participating in the program;

(vi)  An evaluation of any attorney or applicant for admission to the state bar seeking to practice in the county as a program participant, including the attorney's or applicant's previous or existing ties to the county;

(vii)  Any prior participation of the county in the program;

(viii)  Any other factor that the Wyoming state bar deems necessary.

(f)  A participating eligible county may enter into agreements to assist the county in meeting the county's obligations for participating in the program.

(g)  Not later than October 1, 2024 and each October 1 thereafter that the program is in effect, the Wyoming state bar shall submit an annual report to the joint judiciary interim committee on the activities of the program. Each report shall include information on the number of attorneys and counties participating in the program, the amount of incentive payments made to attorneys under the program, the general status of the program and any recommendations for continuing, modifying or ending the program.

33‑5‑202.  Rural attorney recruitment program; attorney requirements; incentive payments; termination of program.

(a)  Except as otherwise provided in this subsection, any attorney licensed to practice law in Wyoming or an applicant for admission to the Wyoming state bar may apply to the Wyoming state bar to participate in the rural attorney recruitment program established under this article. No attorney or applicant shall participate in the program if the attorney or applicant has previously participated in the program or has previously participated in any other state or federal scholarship, loan repayment or tuition reimbursement program that obligated the attorney to provide legal services in an underserved area.

(b)  Not more than five (5) attorneys shall participate in the program established under this article at any one (1) time.

(c)  Subject to available funding and as consideration for providing legal services in an eligible county, each attorney approved by the Wyoming state bar to participate in the program shall be entitled to receive an incentive payment in five (5) equal annual installments. Each annual incentive payment shall be paid on or after July 1 of each year. Each annual incentive payment shall be in an amount equal to ninety percent (90%) of the University of Wyoming college of law resident tuition for thirty (30) credit hours and annual fees as of July 1, 2024.

(d)  Subject to available funding, the supreme court shall make each incentive payment to the participating attorney. The Wyoming state bar and each participating county shall remit its share of the incentive payment to the supreme court in a manner and by a date specified by the supreme court. The Wyoming state bar shall certify to the supreme court that a participating attorney has completed all annual program requirements and that the participating attorney is entitled to the incentive payment for the applicable year. The responsibility for incentive payments under this section shall be as follows:

(i)  Fifty percent (50%) of the incentive payments shall be from funds appropriated to the supreme court;

(ii)  Thirty‑five percent (35%) of the incentive payments shall be provided by each county paying for attorneys participating in the program in the county;

(iii)  Fifteen percent (15%) of the incentive payments shall be provided by the Wyoming state bar from nonstate funds.

(e)  Subject to available funding for the program, each attorney participating in the program shall enter into an agreement with the supreme court, the participating county and the Wyoming state bar that obligates the attorney to practice law full‑time in the participating county for not less than five (5) years. As part of the agreement required under this subsection, each participating attorney shall agree to reside in the participating county for the period in which the attorney practices law in the participating county under the program. No agreement shall be effective until it is filed with and approved by the Wyoming state bar.

(f)  Any attorney who receives an incentive payment under this article and subsequently breaches the agreement entered into under subsection (e) of this section shall repay all funds received under this article pursuant to terms and conditions established by the supreme court. Failure to repay funds as required by this subsection shall subject the attorney to license suspension.

(g)  The Wyoming state bar may promulgate any policies or procedures necessary to implement this article.  The supreme court may promulgate any rules necessary to implement this article.

(h)  The program established under this article shall cease on June 30, 2029, provided that attorneys participating in the program as of June 30, 2029 shall complete their obligation and receive payments as authorized by this article.

33‑5‑203.  Sunset.

(a)  W.S. 33‑5‑201 and 33‑5‑202 are repealed effective July 1, 2029.

(b)  Notwithstanding subsection (a) of this section, attorneys participating in the rural attorney pilot program authorized in W.S. 33‑5‑201 and 33‑5‑202 shall complete the requirements of the program and shall be entitled to the authorized payments in accordance with W.S. 33‑5‑201 and 33‑5‑202 as provided on June 30, 2029.

Section 2.  There is appropriated one hundred ninety‑seven thousand three hundred seventy‑five dollars ($197,375.00) from the general fund to the supreme court for the period beginning with the effective date of this act and ending June 30, 2029 to be expended only for purposes of providing incentive payments for the rural attorney recruitment program established under this act. This appropriation shall not be transferred or expended for any other purpose. Notwithstanding W.S. 9‑2‑1008, 9‑2‑1012(e) and 9‑4‑207, this appropriation shall not revert until June 30, 2029.

Section 3.  This act is effective July 1, 2024.

Monday, August 26, 2019

On taking and not taking vacations.

No travel?  Maybe you should.

vacation (n.)




late 14c., "freedom from obligations, leisure, release" (from some activity or occupation), from Old French vacacion "vacancy, vacant position" (14c.) and directly from Latin vacationem (nominative vacatio) "leisure, freedom, exemption, a being free from duty, immunity earned by service," noun of state from past participle stem of vacare "be empty, free, or at leisure," from PIE *wak-, extended form of root *eue- "to leave, abandon, give out."  


Meanings "state of being unoccupied," "process of vacating" in English are early 15c. Meaning "formal suspension of activity, time in which there is an intermission of usual employment" (in reference to schools, courts, etc.) is recorded from mid-15c. As the U.S. equivalent of what in Britain is called a holiday, it is attested from 1878.

vacation (v.) 



1866, from vacation (n.). Related: Vacationed; vacationing.

From:  Online Etymology Dictionary. *

Recently I attended an excellent series of seminars put on by a legal organization of which I am part.  These were part of a convention, and were put on for the purpose of education in the special interests of the group, which in turn generates Continuing Legal Education credits.  In my state, as in many others, a lawyer is required to have 15 hours of Continuing Legal Education every year, including at least 1 hour in ethics.

Most of the topics directly pertain to our declared area of practice focus, but one was on a two part seminar on ethnics.  Half of that was on lawyer well being.

It'll surprise no one whatsoever if they do any research on the law that lawyer well being has reached a point of discussion such that it is regarded as a matter of crisis within the profession and even without.  Just last week a study was published on things to avoid if you didn't want to be unhappy, and one of the four things on the list was "being a lawyer".**  It may be that lawyers were once like the Finns were once. . . expected to work  hard, shut up, and die because of the triumph of the conditions of our lives over our own well being.***  But probably not.  Things have probably gotten worse for us over the years.

In my view, and of course I could well be wrong, the negative transformation started in the 1970s when the Baby Boomer generation entered the practice and slowly influenced it such that it became focused on economic return as its purpose rather than its professional nature, something that professional organizations such as the American Bar Association had struggled to build for years.  But that didn't cause that to occur alone.  The flood of additional lawyers that started coming into the field in the 1960s and lasted all the way into the 2000s put a emphasis on economics in a way that the prewar field lacked to the same degree.  The deregulation, moreover, of lawyers, which commenced with the elimination of some practice restrictions and advertising restrictions was brought about by the United States Supreme Court, to the entire fields detriment.  The modern evolution of admission to the bar has made things even worse with the Uniform Bar Exam, which has separated lawyers from the law of their own states and opened up the floodgates of lawyers from large cities practicing across state lines in spite of their routine lack of knowledge of the law in those states.

All that has created an atmosphere that isn't universally nifty, and I suspect that translates itself into a perception of blueness, if you will.

Well, anyhow, one of the topics that's been addressed by some as this has come about is whether or not people who enter the law are inclined by their pre law natures to get into a funk.  This seminar discussed a study that showed that, nope, they aren't.  That's good news for lawyers, really, as it means that they weren't drawn to the profession as it attracts melancholics or something.

Of course, it's also bad in that it means that something else is causing that blue mood in the profession, assuming that its really there.  It might not be.

There's been who have studied this and claim that all the data on it is really false as it relies on statistical self reporting, which is unreliable.  Indeed, it suffers from an odd sort of confirmation bias that really sets all such data way off.  It may be, indeed, that not only is the population of lawyers no different in psychological make up than anyone else, but that the entire concept that they're more prone to the funk isn't correct either.  I've seen at least one lawyer argue that in a state bar journal somewhere.

Having said that, what statistical data we can really actually draw suggest that there is something going on.  Lawyers definitely, according to statistics (again) are more likely to suffer from depression and a host of actual psychological ailments, such as alcohol and drug addiction.  If lawyers mental make up isn't any different from anyone else's, that suggest something about their line of work is. Frankly, that's fairly obvious.

Anyhow, the person who did the seminar reported that the number one thing that seemed to make lawyer well being better was. . . vacations.

Lawyers are like everyone else in this respect as well, although a lot of the ones I know are very good about taking vacations.  Americans as a whole, however are not, even though its one of our main industries.  Statistically Americans leave a lot of vacation days on the table every year.  They just don't think they can afford to take them.

And there is indeed something really wrong about that.

So, anyhow, the simple but apparently effective solution for lots of folks, and I dare say it would include Americans as a whole, who are depressed at record numbers, is. . . take your vacations.

Naniwa no bessō akebono no zu (Sunrise at the vacation cottage in Naniwa).

________________________________________________________________________________

*Etymology is the study of word origins.

It may be just me, but I love it.  It's fascinating.  Particularly for a language such as English, which is derived from so many others.

**The value of such studies is frankly questionable.  One of the other things it questioned was owning a house. Well, I've rented and I've owned and owning is definitely much, much better.

***This was the Finnish ethos up until probably the 1950s, and it reflected the harsh economic conditions of the time.  Finnish men, but not women, died accordingly at relatively young ages.

Monday, April 15, 2019

Monday at the Bar: Kim Kardashian to become a lawyer?


Kim Kardashian, known principally for her bust and rear end, has declared that she's reading the law and intends to take the bar exam in her state in 2022.

She's drawing skepticism on that, as in this headline:
Kim Kardashian's Bid to Become a Lawyer Faces Long Odds
The reality star has said she plans to take the bar exam in 2022 without attending law school, but few who go that route pass the test.
Well, skeptics aside, the more power to her.

Reading the law is basically self study for the bar exam.  Bar exams have been around for a lot longer than most law schools, and indeed early law schools were of a different nature than today's.  Originally it was widely assumed that nearly all lawyers had read the law.  Law schools started as largely private affairs where a lawyer offered his services to help those reading the law.  They then evolved into what we have today.  Over time, the ABA stepped into regulate them privately and, as they became common, the ABA pushed for state bars to require law school attendance in order to take the bar, arguing that this showed that a student was more prepared to become a lawyer.  Over time, they pushed for state bars to require ABA certification for such law schools.

But not all states have gone along, and some will still allow an applicant to sit for the exam with that applicant not having attended law school at all.  According to Wikipedia that number is down to California, Vermont, Virginia and Washington with, it's claimed, Wyoming, Maine and New York allowing it after the applicant has studied in a law office and have spent some time in law school. At least as to Wyoming, that's in error as Wyoming applicants can still sit by motion, which is effectively the same thing, but it requires permission of the state supreme court to take the exam.  Indeed, I knew one lawyer who had been a law school graduated by who was admitted by motion without passing the exam, which he'd failed a couple of times.

Okay, having said all of that, what's "reading the law".

Self study. That's what it is.

Or self study under the tutelage of a lawyer you are working for, which in the older days meant that you were apprenticed to that lawyer.

Plenty of famous lawyers became just that by reading the law.  

John Adams read the law.  


Abraham Lincoln read the law.


Locally, long serving and well known legal figure, the late Federal Judge Ewing T. Kerr read the law, and the local Federal Courthouse is named after him.


Now, this isn't to suggest this would be easy.  But at the same time it is to suggest that this may not be as hard for Ms. Kardashian than the skeptics may suppose.

First of all, while she's made a career so far by partially prostituting her image, in the form of selling photographs to fuel illicit dreams of juvenile males, there's no real reason to suppose that she's dumb.  Indeed somebody in her family pick up early on the fact that the Kardashian girls, with their exotic half Armenian features, were very good looking and could make money in their youths based on that.  The way it was done was not admirable at all, but it was cunning.

And signs of her further intelligence may be revealed by this proposed change in careers.  Her assets have a shelf life, and they will expire.

After all, you don't want to advance into middle age trying to look youthful and come out scary, a la Lisa Vanderpump or Cher.

And maybe you don't want to go to your grave remembered for your butt and chest.  

And recognizing that shows some real intelligence.  Not all who rose to fame in that manner survived that frightening realization.  Saying she wants to take the bar exam is a lot smarter than doing what Marilyn Monroe did, which was to face the whole thing badly.

And skeptics aside, her father was a lawyer.  Often the family members of lawyers get legal educations whether they want them or not.  They're reading the law, more or less, all the time.  Sit around the dinner table of most families in which their is a lawyer and you'll get some some sort of legal education, or at least an education in debating, whether you like it or not.  And by all accounts, her father was a good lawyer at that.

And, quite frankly, it doesn't take near the smarts to be a lawyer that the general public believes and that lawyers like to imagine.  I'd guess that the vast majority of lawyers measure no more than average in that department, including some hugely financially successful ones.

Indeed, that's been the dirty little secret of the modern practice of law for a long time.  Lawyers like to rely on their reputation as a "learned profession" to pose as a class of great intellects, and certainly there are lots of lawyers who are just that.  But there are a lot more who are not.  The entire ABA supported move towards requiring law schools in the first place was to combat the fact that a lot of lawyers just weren't all that professional, and in the 19th Century law was a very common American occupation filled by those who didn't want to be farmers but who had no other skills to fall back on.  Most weren't college graduates and indeed there were few colleges for anyone to attend. The entire American image of the crooked lawyer came up in that time, and indeed lawyers moving from town to town to evade their reputations and take advantage of frontier opportunities was pretty common.  

Bar exams meant to address that, but bar standards have been dropping like a rock for some time.  The Uniform Bar Exam has accelerated that.  I don't know if the UBE is the one that Kim Kardashian would be taking, but the fact that it is a uniform exam sort of speaks for itself in some ways, and at least by observation, the amount of knowledge that's required to pass it is considerably lower than the old NBE and local exam system that used to prevail.  You'd think the ABA would oppose such an evolution, but on the contrary they seem solidly behind it.

So I hold out a lot more hope for her to pass the exam than others.

Indeed, I hope she passes it and frankly I hope she redeems her reputation.  

Armenians in the United States and around the world have a really well deserved reputation.  The Kardashian's are an embarrassment to it.  The culture is a really old one, and the country was the first Christian nation in the world.  The Armenian diaspora in the United States has untold numbers of members who have contributed greatly to American society.  The Kardashian girls cut against that hard working conservative set of values by rising to fame through what amounts to, at best, their appearance.  

One of the things that holds women back in real terms is that fame based on selling your appearance, let alone appearing on the cover of magazines naked, or in sex tapes, reinforces a pagan view of women. That's a lot to make up for.  I hope she does.

Indeed, I hope she does and that she actually practices, and in some future year that when people speak of Kim Kardashian, it's in that context, with few remembering when she was just a barely clad, or not clad at all, public figure.

John Wesley Hardin.  If Hardin could become a lawyer, why couldn't Kim Kardashian?

Monday, December 31, 2018

One Lost Life and What That Tells Us About the Practice of Law in the early 21st Century.

I don't often lift an entire article, but I'm going to do so here as this one is so remarkable.  My commentary comes mostly at the end.

I've done the unusual thing of footnoting some things in this and commented on them, although I think that this stands to be rude an offensive, I don't mean for it to be.
Joanna Litt’s husband, Gabe MacConaill, a 42-year-old partner at Sidley Austin, committed suicide in the parking garage of the firm’s downtown Los Angeles office last month.  




There's a lot to unpack in this very interesting post and I've put it up as it is interesting in part, both for what it assumes and what it doesn’t.  Keep in mind, additionally, that I don't know these folks and therefore anything I may be saying in connection with this story may not actually apply to them.

Now, let me also note, I have a long draft post on the topic of suicide in our modern era that’s been stewing for some time in a nearly completed, but still incomplete, form.  So this post will be rapidly supplemented by that one, but the other one came first.

Anyhow, the suicide rate for lawyers is high (but not as high as that for dentists, at least as of the last time I looked).  As  this is usually looked at specifically by the legal profession, there’s a common concept in the legal profession that this means there’s something specific to the practice of law about this, and there is, but I suspect it’s part of a larger societal problem.

Getting to this item, however, the first thing I’d note that I think is in error is blaming this on “Big Law”.  I'm not sure there really is a "Big Law" in the way that "Big Law" believes that there is, although there is something that is indeed called Big Law.

The Big Law organizations, i.e., outfits that track what’s going on in Big Law assumes that there is a Big Law.  There is, but frankly Big Law bleeds into regular law and varies little from it in most ways.  The biggest single distinction about Big Law form regular law is that Big Law is mighty impressed with itself and thinks that its unique in every fashion, when the only thing really unique about it is that it’s big and reflects the common ills associated with large entities entities.  Big Law is getting bigger and hurting the overall legal profession in my view, but many of the ills attributed to it are widespread indeed.

Anyhow, when the ills associated with the Big Law practice are addressed, in the contexts of what it is like to practice in front of Big Law, most lawyers would just recognize that stuff as the law.  Big Law doesn’t, because its impressed with itself.  People who work for Big Law don't realize that as they are self isolated as a rule.  Big Law tends not to impress people who aren't in Big Law unless they are just impressed by Big, and therefore those in it don't realize that those outside of it face much the same daily factors that they do, and frankly that lawyers outside of Big Law are every bit as good as those within it.

Which goes to this, if something about the profession killed this lawyer, it wasn’t Big Law, it was just the Law.

Or more accurately, perhaps, the way the law has become and the way it is continuing to develop.

Which goes to the next thing.

There’s lots of hand-wringing in the profession about conditions which cause its members to become depressed, drink, take drugs, chase skirts and in some cases, commit suicide. And nothing is being done about it.  Nothing that really matters, however.

Indeed, the profession is actually seeking to make things worse, at least in terms of its big organizations.  The conditions that cause the law to become unbearable for some are encouraged by the developments that organizations like the ABA are taking and which state bar associations have been taking which serve principally, Big Law, intentionally or not.  That is, in spite of all of their declarations of sympathy and angst, the profession is actually working towards the consolidation of bars in a fashion which serves bigness.  And where Ms. Litt may well be correct, although not in the way that she may have intentionally meant, is that this consolidation makes the conditions she observed worse.

Now, each state, probably, has some state bar program for distressed lawyers.  But that treats the lawyer and not the cause.  I.e., these are basically emergency rooms that take in the badly wounded the same way that a big city ER does.  ERs in Chicago treat a lot of gunshot wounds.  That’s great, but it doesn’t do anything whatsoever to stop people from getting shot.

Put another way, my bar card just came for 2019 and attached to it was a sheet going out to every lawyer in the state with their new bar cards that says something like "Feeling stressed" and then makes reference to the bar's service for lawyers who are having a  hard time.  There's no real effort to find out why lawyers are having a hard time and if something should be done about that.  None.

And that’s what this topic is like in the law.

Something about the practice is getting after people.  What is it? 

Well, it has to be something in the conditions of practice and nothing is being done about that whatsoever.

The law has never been a perfect profession, if there ever was such a thing, but the conditions of practice have undeniably gotten worse over the past half century and the trends towards that are accelerating.  Prior to the revolution in communications most practice was highly local. As communications have gotten bigger and bigger, the law has reacted in a direction that’s the opposite of efficient and logical.  It’s concentrated and become more and more inhuman.  Lawyers used to work with and against those they know.  Now they do that less and less.  And as that’s become the case, and things have scaled towards the big, pressure has been put on lawyers in big firms to be, as one lawyer I know has put it, “rented mules”, with all the dignity accorded them that a rented mule will have.  In litigation a premium has been put on results at any cost, with the collateral effect that lawyers in larger venues are  highly aggressive.

The problem with being that way is that its difficult to turn off.  A lawyers who has perfected the role of being the designated aggressive  person in a case probably tends to be that way everywhere else.  And to the people who work with him, particularly those who are just rented mules to start with, the conditions are worse  and worse.

And human behavior towards the aggressive is age old.  People come to hate people who act that way and resent them permanently.  Ultimately they'll resent the conditions that bring these people to them, whether that condition is the work, or the firms that act that way.

One legal blogger has made the extreme claim that being a lawyer in the trenches is worse, psychologically, than being a soldier in the trenches, as wars end and careers basically don't.  That is extreme, but there's something to it.  If a person's work has become unrelenting day in and day out combat, they'll begin to have problems with it.

The author here claims that she learned her husband had a "maladaptive personality".  I don't doubt that there's something to that, but there's been in the past few months an argument developed by a figure who spent most of their lives on antidepressants that in fact what is going on is that doctors are medicating modern life.  If he's correct (and I'm not in the profession, but I suspect more than a little that there's something to that), the "maladaption" may mean as little as "just not suited for".

That concept used to be more popular before modern society became so daft as to actually believe "you can do anything you want to". Some people are just not suitable for some things.  I recall in Basic Training meeting a soldier awaiting discharge. He was a nice kid, but the service had found him simply unsuited for military life, so it was letting him go.  There's no reason to believe that there aren't people who are unsuited for a life in the law.

If that's the case, however, that would have to be determined at some point early in their careers.  That's not going to happen.


Nothing is done by law schools, which are desperate to find students, to sort out those who will thrive in an environment of constant human contact form those who will not.  Many who are drawn to the law on introspective introverts with a flare for analysis.  Those people may say that they want to “help people” or “argue”, but what they really want to do is analyze and read.  Law schools don't bother with trying to discern anything about a person's talents to practice law.  If a person has passed the LSAT, even if they took a few times to do it, and they have the cash, they're in.

And certainly nothing is done by state bars either.  Indeed, less is done for admittance now than at any time in recent history.

As recently (granted it isn't that recent) as when I took the bar exam, you had to take a state exam combined with the national exam and be interviewed by the bar examiners themselves.  Now, most of this is a thing of the past.  The state exam is gone as is the interview.

Indeed, at that time you also needed a sponsor who was a practicing member of the bar.  You still need that, but basically you just take the national exam, the Uniform Bar Exam, and you're in.  This only shows you know how to take a test of that type and I'd wager that anyone who takes test well should be able to study on the UBE and take it, irrespective of whether or not they've gone to law school (which is of course a requirement) and irrespective of your actual qualifications to practice law.

Could something be done?  You bet.  But we're not going to do it.

First of all, the entire LSAT should simply go.  The LSAT was created to test your ability to think logically. That's great, but people study for it and take it more than once.  If it was to work, it would have to at least a one and done type of deal

But combined with that probably should be some sort of psychological test, and nobody is going to want that.  And maybe there should be references required to simply be admitted to any law school that are submitted to somebody other than a cash hungry law school.  And those references should probably have to include people who will vouch for you not becoming a jerk later on (which I'm not saying that this guy was) or collapsing under the stress.  I.e., if you are on of those bookish shy people who are attracted to the law because you are a polymath maybe somebody who is your friend might confidentially note that.  Or not.

And perhaps state bars ought to start acting like gatekeepers again by demonstrating that they know that there is a gate.  Relying on the UBE instead of doing state tests is a bad idea. The opposite would be a better approach. And with that, they could reinstate interviews.  If somebody seems too wired to get through the interview, maybe that says something

Beyond that, however, perhaps they could enforce the requirement that lawyers actually have an office in the state in which they practice, rather than simply a mail drop.  Or make that a requirement if they don't have one.  If a lawyer is going to practice in State X, he should probably be in State X at least 50% of the time (and yes, I have done out of state work).  What's that have to do with this, you ask?

Well, that operates towards making firms smaller and actually your work more local, and that matters.  I.e., that operates against Big Law and its bigness.  The smaller the law horizon is the more likely it is that somebody is going to catch you before you fall.

And taking that one step further, maybe it would be a good idea to take a page from the English and require lawyers to be admitted to a single practice area, rather than the fiction that all lawyers are admitted to do everything.  English lawyers have traditionally been barristers, who do courtroom work, or solicitors, who do not (in Quebec the latter are "notaries").  Making lawyers make that choice forces them very early on to make a choice on what they want to do, rather than simply making them scramble for a job anywhere and then end up where they shouldn't be.  Just because a lawyer has courtroom skills doesn't mean that he's able to psychologically carry that weight for the long haul, and chances are a lot of the lawyers who are in that spot know it before they ever fill out a job application.  Making them choose early on might keep a guy who is ill suited for the pressures of trial work opt for it.

And taking that one step further yet, the English traditionally did not allow barristers to form firms.  With practice being what it is in the United States, that couldn't be strictly applied here, but something like it probably could be.  Firms of barristers could be modified in some fashion to keep them small.  There's a lot of courtroom talent out there and this would be good for the practice and clients in general, but it would also operate to keep that class of lawyer from becoming grossly overburdened and also from being converted from courtroom lawyers into "trial warriors" or some such thing as their economics became more concentrated and local.

Finally, emphasis should be placed on the concept that if the law is a vocation, any good lawyer has a decent avocation.

No matter what state bars like to pretend, the way things are developing emphasizes creating a situation in which bright young polymaths are put in a situation where  they do nothing other than work.  Most young lawyers have varied interests.  Anyone who has been around older lawyers knows those who have had every single non law interest burned out of them.  The best lawyers I know and have known all had very strong interests in something else.  Some were pronounced outdoorsmen, some where agriculturalist, some were painters, some were writers, some were deeply religious and active in their faiths, and so on.  I think, frankly, that a person can't be a decent lawyer unless they have some other strong interest.  But the profession operates night and day to keep that from occurring.  Indeed, I recently had it suggested to me that being a rancher in addition to a lawyer was a disqualifying factor for being a judge as it "took too much time", which by extension suggests that all of a lawyer's time as a lawyer should be devoted to the law.  That's wrong.

Perhaps that should be a topic of inquiry by state bar committees for new applicants.  "What else do you do?", with some proof you do that.  If the answer is "I love the law so much I only study it", you aren't qualified to be a lawyer.

And that's because at the end of the day a meaningful life has some deeper connection to something.  A profession that things the profession itself gives that meaning has lost sight of that.  Lawyers shouldn't.

And individual lawyers will have to carry that ball. The profession isn't going to do anything about it.

________________________________________________________________________________

*My first comment.  Ms. Litt has that right, it was "our life". 

I'm back to the point that I made here recently on a post on abortion, but our lives aren't really our own.  We have a collective nature and the entire individualist concept that modern society, and Americans in general, espouse, is frankly shallow and wrong.  And this is particularly the case with married couples, whose lives, by law and by nature, belong to each other and their children. Two do truly join together as one flesh.

**I hear this a lot, but I think that what people do by choosing deliberately to eschew children is to close part of their lives entirely to something deeper.  I realize that this is a popular modern choice, but it gets back to that strong sense of individualism that runs so strong through modern life.  When Ms. Litt finds somebody else, and she will, I hope that this isn't part of her second calculation.

***And this is what my post is really about, and what the text I've put in is about.  

****Here's another modern comment I hear all the time.  "Marriage isn't easy".

An old clear thinking friend of mine who married earlier than I did once told me, after he'd been a married a few years, "marriage is easy".  And frankly, having been married now for over two decades, it is.

It is at least if you viewed it as a life time commitment and never considered that it had any out, and you didn't expect everything life to be perfect.  Life isn't perfect no matter what.  Marriage won't make it perfect.  

But marriage itself frankly isn't hard, at least in  my experience.  Based on my observation, people who live single lives live ones that are much harder.  Much.  And beyond that, people who insist on complicating their marriage with drama by never really being committed to it. . .well they make their lives difficult and their marriages difficult by extension.

But marriage itself?  If a person, like most people, was meant to live with another of the opposite sex. . it isn't hard.

*****Litt deserves a lot of praise for this offer.

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Labor and the conglomeration of everything.

Grocer, 1944. This guy wouldn't be working for himself, in this occupation, anymore.

One show that does capture a little of the high school experience many of us had is “Freaks and Geeks,” to which I’ve devoted a few evenings lately. One character is a guidance counselor who’s a little over-invested in his students’ lives. He’s always around, questioning the kids’ decisions and reminding them that the choices they make in high school will echo down the hallways of the rest of their lives.
This is a pretty common theme, and one that today’s students are likely to hear as classes kick off this week in the state. Even Linus from “Peanuts” gets in on the action. He tells Charlie Brown: “I think that the purpose of going to school is to get good grades so then you can go on to high school, and the purpose is to study hard so you can get good grades so you can go to college, and the purpose of going to college is so you can get good grades so you can go on to graduate school, and the purpose of that is to work hard and get good grades so we can get a job and be successful so that we can get married and have kids, so we can send them to grammar school to get good grades, so they can go to high school to get good grades so they can go to college and work hard…”
Mandy Burton from her article in the Casper Star Tribune, quoting from the late Charles Schultz's cartoon, Peanuts.

Pretty observant article, but not true so much anymore.  Today, Schultz's characters would have to say:
“I think that the purpose of going to school is to get good grades so then you can go on to high school, and the purpose is to study hard so you can get good grades so you can go to college, and the purpose of going to college is so you can get good grades so you can go on to graduate school, and the purpose of that is to work hard and get good grades so we can get a job and be successful move to a city you are not from and have no connections to so that we can get married and have kids, divorce and abandon them, so we can send them to grammar school to get good grades, so they can go to high school to get good grades so they can go to college and work hard and move on to where they have no connections…”
Grim view, I know. But a realistic one in the modern American economy.

I've posted a lot on this blog about the disappearance of various small businesses.  I haven't posted as much on those that have persevered so far, as its always easier to ignore that, although I do have one in the hopper on bars.

As part of what we're observing here this week in regards to Labor Day and the American celebration of labor, we might want to take a look at the conglomeration of absolutely everything.  Indeed, to my way of thinking, it's one of the worst things that's happened to the United States, and indeed the world, in the past century.

Americans are fond of thinking that they live in a free market, but they really do not.  A free market, in a pure sense, is a market in which every individual competes on a level playing field.  But that sort of market, to be truly free, would exist in the absence of corporate entities.  Ours clearly does not.  Indeed, it emphasizes them.

Now, the reason that matters is that corporations, in a state of nature so to speak, would be partnerships, which are assemblies of individuals who are still individuals.  Partnerships, if they are conventional partnerships, exist in a much different legal environment than corporations do.  Corporations may be assemblies of people, and of course are as people are behind all entities and things at the end of the day, but corporations are creatures of the state, created by the recognition of whichever state entity they are formed subject to, and recognized at law as a "person".*

That last thing is a profound legal concept.  Walmart, General Motors, or British Petroleum, for example, are all people in the eyes of the law. You know that they aren't, but at law they are. That means that under the law nearly everywhere they are legally liable as people for their torts, as compared to conventional partnerships in which every partner can be held individually liable for the acts of the partnership.  If that was the law in regards to shareholders and the liability of corporations, there's no way that they'd have grown so large and so predominant.

Additionally, in the United States, thanks to a ruling by the United States Supreme Court, corporations have the same right of speech that individuals do. That's an almost shocking proposition, but it's the law.  It's hard to believe, for example, that every shareholder of Amalgamated Amalgamated holds the same view as the board of directors, but that board can decide what the corporation thinks and how it spends its money on getting its message across.   That's the corporations speech, even if Mrs. Anon Jones in Passedonby, Florida, who is a shareholder, disagrees.

Corporations have been around for a long, long time and there's legitimate reasons to be sure for big and small ones.  The oldest one is debated as to that status.  Some claim the Dutch East India Company, which disappeared in 1799, was the first one, but that status is certainly challenged.


Logo of the Dutch East India Company.

Some claim that status for the Hudson's Bay Company, which has the advantage over the Dutch East India Company in that it is still around with popular stores in Canada now commonly nicknamed "The Bay".

The flag of the Hudson's Bay Company.

While the Hudson's Bay Company hasn't folded in, like the Dutch East India Company, it isn't what it once was, sadly. None the less the company that could and should claim that it made it to the what would be come the American Pacific Coast well in advance of Lewis and Clark was formed on May 2, 1670, a long while back.**

Both of those corporations are sorts of exceptions to the early rule, which is interesting in that they were both retail and manufacturing, with HBC being particularly that way.  The manufacturing aspect of them is what caused the need for their corporate status to exist.  A giant financial enterprise on that scale simply couldn't exist as a partnership, and we won't pretend otherwise.  Corporations are not only the backbone to the Corporate Capitalist system we actually have, but a necessary element of it. The question explored here is a bit different than that.

Before we move on, determining the oldest corporation in the United States would be a little more difficult, although I'm sure it could be done.  There are some really old ones to be sure, with some old businesses that were not incorporated (at least originally) dating back to the 17th Century.  The oldest corporation, oddly enough, appears to be a perfume company, still in existence, but it's hard to tell that for sure.

What something like this tends to show us is that corporations really arrived on the scene for really large commercial trading operations in the 1600s and have been with us ever since.  And over time, they've come to predominate in all sorts of ways more and more.

It's easy to pretend this is a really modern trend, and it is if we take a long view of modern. But it didn't occur within just the last couple of decades.  Certainly big manufacturing came in with the Industrial Revolution.  Big retail came in shortly after that.  Department stores, which are the immediate predecessors of all big box retail, date back to the early 19th Century.  Macy's, which is in every American burg of mid size and up, was founded as a dry goods store in 1858, two years prior to the Civil War.  A whole host of companies that some would recognize now and some would not, followed.  All of them no doubt incorporated early on.

Indeed, at some point some of the older department stores yielded to the newer ones like Target.  Anyway you look at it, the most emblematic of the modern American giganto stores is Walmart, which is absolutely everywhere.

Its with Walmart that it gets tempting, although it would probably be a bit deceptive, to start to claim everything changed.  Before Walmart, for example, there was K Mart, and certainly at one time K Mart seemed like a big deal. But Walmart was exceptionally aggressive in moving into every single market and every single niche that seemed to exist.  At least at our local K Mart (which I haven't been in since the kids were small) you can now buy groceries, for example, but that's only because Walmart did it first.

Walmart has a business model which basically sets to sell everything on earth for the lowest possible price.  It does that by a variety of means, but one of the means is that, once it grew large enough, it pressured manufacturers to lower their costs.  The manufacturers had no choice and in order to do that they've had to do what any manufacturer in a global market has had to do under price pressure, manufacture overseas and with the cheapest parts that the consumers can tolerate using.

As this has happened its been devastating to local retail.

Walmart's backers like to pretend that its "low low prices" benefit everyone but that's very far from true.  What low low prices have done is meant that certain entire sectors of the local economy have closed.  It used to be the case that things like radios, televisions, stoves, and appliances, as well as clothing and the like, were typically bought by local vendors.  I'm in my mid 50s and I can well recall all of that being the case.  Maybe you'd also look at Penney's, Sears or K Mart, but chances are that the local prices weren't far off and were competitive.  Not any more.

And that has meant, by extension, that occupations that people once held in small retail have died.  A person would have to be willing to endure a lot of economic risks to open up a small dry goods store, or an appliance store, or a jewelry store today.  Indeed, a person would have to be willing to endure a whole lot of risk to open a conventional grocery store.

Now, not all of that can be blamed on Walmart, but on the overall trend.  Through the corporate vehicle, size and mass have spread into everything.

Take the popular television advertisement we see in which we're informed that "He want to Jared's" symbolizes undying love.  It might, but Jared's is owned by Sterling Jewelers, a company that was founded in 1910 and which is now owned by Signet Jewelers Ltd, a British company. The parent company has stores all over the globe and just purchased an internet based jewelry company.

 https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5H7oHpeKg44/UT-ZRtX05DI/AAAAAAAAI4M/pRIJSifxzBE/s640/2013-03-12+15.02.08.jpg
 Sidewalk clock of a former jewelry store.  The store closed when the owner retired.  It was a family business that had been in that family for at least two generations.  I'm not saying that big national chains killed it or anything, but if I were entering the business today I'd surely consider my national and international competition before I did so.

Now, I'm  not saying that either of those business entities is bad in some fashion, but let's be fair. Jewelry stores used to almost exclusively the domain of families, which made a decent middle class, and independent, living on them.

 

So were grocery stores, although that's long ceased to be the case.  All groceries used to be local but just over a century ago Piggly Wiggly moved into with a different business model and now almost everyone buys their regular groceries from a grocery store that's a huge chain.


Now in fairness to those chains, and fairness is due, a strong grocery union means that the jobs at grocery stores actually are generally good middle class jobs with benefits and retirement.  But they aren't small locally owned as a rule anymore.  Oh, sure, you can find a locally owned store, but it will likely be a specialty store.  And perhaps that's both the model and the exception to the rule.  And as noted, in recent years grocery stores, which at least were generally single purpose in mind, have had to compete with Walmart and the like, which now include groceries in them, thereby removing the connection with the local and the course more and more.


And there's hardly anything that hasn't succumbed to this model, or which isn't in danger of of falling to it.  There are still local book stores and record stores, but they struggle against national chains, or increasingly, the Internet.***  There are still local automotive garages, but think of the easy service end of that chain, such as lubrication, and once again you have the chains.****

 
And even industries which don't have a giant big box store to compete with face the problem of conglomeration.  Even in the legal field, which is generally a model of modern guild practice, we now see larger and larger firms in big cities planting roots in the mid sized ones, and giant ones based in huge cities moving into the big cities.  The trend is obvious.

You can, if you look hard enough, and live in a town big enough, find local businesses.  But if you stop to consider what the big box stores are offering and then compare that to the town in which you live, you'll get a clue as to what you'll find in the first instance. And then as you drive down the street and look at the national chains its all the more apparent.

Now, I'm not saying that everything local is gone. Indeed, just a couple of months ago, while working on one of our trucks, I was reminded of how many local industrial mechanics shops still remain and indeed, in order to rebuilt the batter connectors for our 1997 Dodge D1500 we had to go to those local shops as the big national chain batter shop here that had just opened a large new store didn't have what we needed. The small one catering to garages did however, along with a lot of helpful advice that proved critical to the enterprise.

But more and more this is an exception to the rule.

The question is, of course, whether or not this is bad.

And it is.

The problem with this gigantic conglomeration of everything is multi fold, but at least in part what it has done is to take middle class occupations and shoved the former owners of them down into lower wage brackets.  Local grocery stores that supported a family of owners, for example, are gone, and that family has had to do something else, probably a couple something else's, in order to support themselves.  Or at least, they are supporting themselves directly through what they own.

Likewise, families that would have owned any number of local enterprises to support themselves now must work for other enterprises quite often. Sure, there are multiple exceptions, and of course a lot of chains are actually franchises, which is another matter entirely.  But there can be no doubt that a young couple that might wish to open an appliance store and support a young family has to really question their decision.

Beyond that, there's a certain center of mass, or gravitational pull, aspect to this.  I've noticed this in the legal field for a long time.

The practice of law used to feature a lot of very broadly practicing lawyers, many of them absolutely excellent, located throughout a state.  I've detailed it before already, but the practice of law began to shift in the 1970s when the Baby Boomers came into it as they shifted the business model to emphasize making money over everything else.*****Coincident with this, large firms began to increasingly expand into multiple states. The money aspect of this drew off a number of graduates of local law schools to the bigger markets, but the majority of graduates of state schools still went on to practice in their states, very often in the communities they were from.  This is no longer true.

Now, the gravitational pull had caused a cycle in which bigger and bigger firms sought to penetrate smaller and smaller markets, to the detriment of the local practitioner.  This created a crisis in employment for those just graduating law schools which in turn helped bring about the disaster of the Uniform Bar Exam, which allowed "transportability".  That transportability became a vehicle to accelerate the penetration by big firms, but ironically big regional firms have become the victims of giant national firms that seek to do the same thing.  The local lawyer has increasingly gone from a general practitioner skilled at everything to a specialized one occupying the markets that are suited for only the local.  But the practice hasn't improved at all.  Indeed, it's gotten increasingly unbearable for the practitioners and the overall quality certainly isn't any better.

The irony of all of this is that it doesn't have to be.  The concept of incorporation was never really meant to lead to the conglomeration of everything, and in prior eras when conglomeration grew too extensive, at least in the United States the law, in the form of the Sherman Anti Trust Act, stepped in to address it. Now things are far, far, more extensive than they ever were.  But only because we allow it.

During the recent primary election the GOP candidates all came around to how local business could and can be helped.  I doubt that anyone is really going to do anything, but here's an area that certainly could be done.  Large scale manufacturing is certainly a different animal, but retail and the service industries have become conglomerated simply because we chose to allow it to occur, or even encouraged it.  We ought to ask, at least a bit, if in doing that "for" our communities, we instead "doing" something to them, and it wasn't a pleasant thing to do.

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*Indeed, one of the really bizarre ironies of Capitalism v. Socialism is that modern Capitalism, which is really Corporate Capitalism, strong favors the big, but not as much as real Socialism, which doesn't work and which is pretty much extinct, which favors the biggest.  Socialist don't think of it that way, but real Socialism favors the creation of a giant monopoly in which a giant Corporation, if you will, the state, owns and controls everything with the people as the theoretical shareholders, if you will (but in reality, the government is and doesn't care much about its patrons, the people).

**It's odd to me that real backers of Capitalism so rarely cite the example of the Hudson's Bay Company which is the one real example we have a giant corporation serving its interests by basically ruling the northern half of a continent and successfully enforcing the peace while enriching its more or less subjects.  It's a Capitalists success story of epic proportions really.

***Indeed, Internet retailers are posed to be the next step in this, wiping out even big entities in favor of remote cyber ones.  It is, of course, happening.

****Garages themselves, however, hold on.  Perhaps their work is too individualistic to fail.

*****It was at that point that the "billable hour", much discussed in legal circles, came in and began to dominate.