LSAT Baloney Sliced Thick
In the latter category was a recent question from some poor soul along the lines of whether only studying for a couple of years for the Law School Admissions Test was too little. Some law prof came in and said yes, and not only that, but that you had to have been studying for it basically since grade school.
Bullshit.
I didn't study for it at all and scored high on it.
I'm not the only one. I heard of one instance in which a fellow took it (and didn't go to law school after being admitted) even though he didn't study and spent the prior night partying rather heavily.
Frankly, the test is supposed to test your ability to think logically. If you don't have that, maybe you can train your mind to it, but studying for the test probably isn't the best way to do that.
Anyhow, study away. Probably you should. Most people seem to. But you don't need to be doing it during recess at Public School 97.
Of note, one of the Ivy League schools recently dropped the LSAT as an admissions requirement, and I don't blame them. When a test like this, which tests your mental process, is studied for, people are studying to defeat the test. And they're probably accomplishing that to a large degree. Hence, it no longer has any real meaning.
Out of Jurisdiction
I recently tried a case out of state. I've done that once before, but that was in Federal court, not state court, and it was a trying experience in more ways than one. I've had other out of jurisdiction state court cases, but this is the first one that's gone all the way to trial.
One revelation was that the positions associated with the court are different, which surprises me. Here, judges used to have a Judicial Law Clerk, who was a recent law school grad who served as a lawyer for the bench, and during trial a representative of the Clerk of the District Court always sits in the trial. In quite a few courts the Judicial Law Clerk is now the Permanent Law Clerk, i.e. a lawyer for whom that is a career option. A bailiff sits in the trial as well.
Where I was, however there was a "Clerk" during the trial. We also had to hire our own court reporter. There was no bailiff, the clerk sort of acted in that role. On the last day, a representative of the Clerk of Court's office was there for the verdict.
I was sufficiently confused about it later that I looked the "Clerk" up, and it's clear that the clerk is a Judicial Law Clerk. I don't know if it's a permanent position in that court or not.
It might be. The reason I note that is that in doing that I was surprised that the young lawyer had moved around in the lawyer's infant career a lot. That lawyer has only been licensed for about two years (a little less) but had already clerked somewhere else, had been an associate with a large multi state law firm for a year, and then had moved on to the court.
That's remarkably different from when I was first a lawyer. Lawyers who went on to be clerk's did it as a career move knowing that they'd occupy the position for only a year. It was normally their very first job out of law school. Very rarely did a practicing lawyer leave practice to become a clerk, although I do know of two who did that to become Federal clerks for a year. There were no full time career clerks, which now are common. Federal clerks are pretty much all career clerks, I think. Those who entered private practice didn't leave it after just one year, and if they did leave their first jobs rapidly, it was because they went to work as public defenders and had planned on other employment to start with.
Differences in views towards employment and employers have been noted by older lawyers for quite a while, but in some ways this is something that's always the case. When I was young, which seems like just yesterday but which is actually quite a while ago now, it was extremely common for the Baby Boomers to comment on how everyone below them in age had no work ethic and expected to move up the ladder as an entitlement. I always thought this the height of irony coming form a generation which actually had an enormous sense of entitlement and which was actually given a massive amount of everything by their parents, whom had endured the Great Depression and World War Two and who accordingly didn't really know, to a significant degree, what real life was actually like. That generation, which Tom Brokaw mislabeled "the Greatest Generation" in his hagiography devoted to them, knew crisis and suffering and wanted their children to be spared that. As a result, we got the generation that Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, etc., are in that won't let go of anything. They actually were allowed to skip entire rungs on the ladder, and then later on kept people from climbing up it, imaging that they'd pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps when, to a significant degree, their doting parents were there tying their shoe laces the entire time.
Clearly, I'm painting with a broad brush, and unfairly, and this doesn't apply to every member of the generation.
Anyhow, when the Millennials and the older Gen Y folks started to enter work, including the legal field, there really was something different about them. The Gap Generation folks, like me, who fit in between Gen X and the Boomers pretty much felt we had to find a job and plug on. It was our only option in life, really. Gen Xers and older Gen Yers, like what is described about the generation that fought World War One (the "Lost Generation"). had much less job loyalty and pretty much took the view that they had to fend for themselves. Boomers repeatedly accused them of being unrealistic and lazy, but they were neither. They were highly realistic and far from lazy, they just didn't have dog like loyalty to an employer master. Indeed, they didn't really expect anything, including employment, to last.
Now, however, we're seeing the younger Gen Y and older Gen Z people in the workplace and their views truly are different, at least it seems to me. Hardly any prior generation would have skipped through that many employers right off the bat, in the example of the Clerk, but I don't think that's uncommon.
I'm not sure what that means, but again, I don't think they're lazy at all. I think their view towards work is much different, and they don't expect anything to really last, employment wise. I don't know what their views are, as a whole, on much else.
While I find that rapid employment change a little distressing, as a now older lawyer who hopes that people will stick around, I think I get it a bit, and that their views may be much more realistic than the Boomers really. Indeed, I think we're seeing a retrograde attachment to work that takes us back to prior generations over a century ago. If the Gen Xers were like the Lost Generation, the current 20-year-olds in the law and everything else seem more like those workers from the 19th Century, whom you'll often find went through quite a few jobs in a course of a lifetime, or if they were professionals went through quite a few positions.
I hope some other trends reflect that as well. For one thing, I'm sick of the uber bloated massive law firms that have become a feature of American law. The fact that younger lawyers bolt pretty readily should operate against that, as those firms depend upon a stable supply of sheep to be corralled to mow the grass of the company pasture. If the sheep are wild, and take off, that sort of corralling can't occur.
Money, Time and Life
Related to this, I've recently had the odd experience of watching a person on the cusp of the Gap Generation, but from a different region of the country, try to reconcile his mental image of work with that of the reality of others views. Said person isn't really accomplishing it.
This comes up in the context of said person speaking to a younger Gen Xer about that person's work, which is with a legal agency. The older Xer treated the younger one's work as surely a stepping stone on to other work for "more money". The younger person didn't see it that way at all.
Indeed, the younger person liked their job, which had relatively low stress, okay wages and really good hours. He couldn't see whereas he was suffering, as the older one thought other work, in the private sphere, offered a "chance to make more money".
What was clear in the conversation is that the older of the two viewed making more money as the be all and end all of any job. That was the whole point, and the only point, of employment. . a chance to make more money. The younger one saw his job as a job and was content with that.
I'm seeing a lot of that with younger workers, particularly the younger Gen Xers and the Gen Yers. Again, they're like the Lost Generation that way. They want to have a job, have a family of some sort (that hasn't completely returned to the Lost Generation view. . . yet), and to be able to enjoy life, often in a small way. These younger folks feel that the ability to go fishing after work or watch a ball game is as important as the Dollar.
And they're right.
The March of Technology
I lasted tried a case in February, which was the first post pandemic trial I've done. In that Wyoming bench trial, neither side used anything high-tech. The case just wasn't that suited for it, sort of, although there were photographic and text exhibits.
In this recent trial, however, all the exhibits were shown to the witnesses electronically and they were all published (shown) to the jury in the same fashion. A technician attended the entire trial in order that this could be seamlessly accomplished.
The technician was fantastic and did a super job with pointing out the text and going through the electronic exhibits. While I've done a lot of trials, this was the first one I've ever done that was 100% high-tech in this fashion.
I'll admit that I've been skeptical, or perhaps just reluctant, to acknowledge the effectiveness of this, but it's now clearly here and that's the standard.
Like automatic transmissions being in everything, I guess I can accept reality, however, without liking it. I don't like it.
But that's where we now are.
Going on and on
One thing that I really liked that the other jurisdiction did was to limit opening statements and to constrict voir dire (questioning of the jury).
Various Wyoming courts take different approaches to this. Most ask the lawyers "how much time do you need for openings?" and then debate how much time will really be given. I just had a proceeding in which that question was asked, and the plaintiff's lawyer said he needed 1.5 hours.
In the other jurisdiction the court simply informed us that we had 20 minutes. No debate, you have 20 minutes. And this was in a highly technical case.
I'm really good at public speaking, and frankly I was relieved. Anything over 20 minutes is an exercise in hubris and boring the jury. It might have been in the case at the time of the Gettysburg Address that people were ready for an hour-long speech, but that was in a day in which people had spent half the day getting there, were going back tomorrow, had no phones to check, and weren't getting back to their work right away, and weren't used to 30 minute television shows. No modern audience is going to listen to an hour-long speech from anyone, let alone a lawyer. Even if you have super wonderful graphics in which the entire accident is reenacted by Kate Upton and Billie Eilish with background music from Iris Dement are they going to do that. Just forget it.
None of which keeps lawyers from asking for all kinds of time. We're stuck in the past that way.
Suiting up
As a Wyoming lawyer, but a lawyer, I've watched the slow decline in clothing standards while participating in it.
At my first day of work in 1990 I reported to work wearing a double-breasted Brooks Brothers suit. The first partner who came in was wearing wool khaki trousers and a blue blazer, and he was dressed down. He told me that I didn't have to wear a suit every day.
For years and years, however, I normally wore a tie and clothing appropriate for a tie. Then COVID 19 hit.
For much of the prior spike of the disease (we're in a spike now, of the unvaccinated, but of course the entire state disregarding that) I kept coming in the office. I was often the only one there when we were at the point where the staff didn't have to come in. I pretty much quit dressing in office dress at the time as there wasn't much of a reason to do it. Nobody was coming in, I was there by myself, what the heck.
I've not made it back to normal, and not everyone else has either.
And of course normal in 2019 was not the same thing it was in 1999, or 2009. We'd already slid down the dressing scale in the back of the office, where I am. I never used to wear blue jeans in the office, but by 2019 I already was a fair amount. Starting with COVID 19, I am all the time.
One of the things about that is that in 2019 I already had a selection of older dress clothes that were wearing out I hadn't replaced. Probably the inevitability of their demise would have caused me to replace them on in to 2020. But I didn't have to. Additionally, the long gap in time meant that I pretty much didn't do anything about the fact I'm down to two suits now.
Two suits isn't much if you are a trial lawyer.
Well, running up to the trial I was going to go down to Denver and get new ones. But I ran out of time. I still haven't done it.
I need to.
I'll confess that part of my reluctance to get new suits is that I'm 58 years old. I don't wear suits daily at work, and I'm not one of those guys who is going to claim "I'm going to work until I'm 80". Any new suit I get now will still be in fighting shape when I'm 68, and that's reasonably enough, but to my cheap way of thinking, emphasized by the fact that I have two kids in college, its something that is both easy for me to put off, and in the back of my mind I tend to think "maybe I won't really need those if . . . "
Well, I probably better remedy that.
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