Ostensibly exploring the practice of law before the internet. Heck, before good highways for that matter.
Thursday, October 19, 2023
Wednesday, August 30, 2023
UW Class Law School Class of 2026 . . . dressed up.
Incoming University of Wyoming College of Law class (Class of 2026).
Wow, look at all those suits and ties.
These students are a nice looking bunch. A colleague of mine, who works in another firm, has a kid in it.
I didn't meet my law school classmates until the first day of law school. This group was apparently brought in early, and told to dress up. The first time I wore a tie in law school was actually after it, at my bar exam interview, back when Wyoming had a real bar exam rather than the Universal Locally Un-iformed Bar Exam.
I'm impressed. This is what a law school entering class should look like, and I hope it bodes well for the future.
Friday, September 3, 2021
Some recent legal observations
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.
Tuesday, June 15, 2021
Wednesday June 15, 1930. Bessie Coleman receives a pilots license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.
June 15, 1930. Bessie Coleman receives a pilots license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale
On this day in 1921, Bessie Coleman received a pilots license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, making her the first black person to be a "licensed" pilot. As her grandparents were Cherokee, she was also the first licensed Native American pilot.
The event is a real milestone, but it's somewhat deceiving. The US didn't require pilots licenses at the time and the global requirement was far from universal. Pilots licenses would be introduced in the US in 1927. This is significant here as Coleman's international pilots license was a real license, but one that was not recognized everywhere and, moreover, she was not the first black or female black pilots as is sometimes suggested.
She was a pioneering aviator however and earned her living as a barnstormer after taking up flying. In that career she was also an advocate for African Americans. She tragically died in 1930 at an airshow when her aircraft had catastrophic failure.
Monday, June 1, 2020
COVID-19 prompts ABA to urge limited practice for law grads, or how to make a bad situation for the public and the practice of law worse in one easy step.
But, broadening admission to the law, which has already gotten pretty broad in general, doesn't make long term sense.
Monday, April 15, 2019
Monday at the Bar: Kim Kardashian to become a lawyer?
Kim Kardashian's Bid to Become a Lawyer Faces Long OddsThe 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.
Abraham Lincoln read the law.
Monday, December 31, 2018
One Lost Life and What That Tells Us About the Practice of Law in the early 21st Century.
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.
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Wednesday, September 5, 2018
Labor and the conglomeration of everything.
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.
Mandy Burton from her article in the Casper Star Tribune, quoting from the late Charles Schultz's cartoon, Peanuts.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…”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.