Bookends

I probably should have guessed, but I didn't.

I'd never met him before, and couldn't even place him in the set of people related to people I knew.  He was, or is rather, the grandson of a rancher I've known for eons, but I'd never seen him at a rural gathering.  He was dressed in a rural fashion, with the clothes natural to him, but wearing a ball cap rather than a cowboy hat.  I probably was too.  It was unseasonably cold, I remember that.

He was holding forth boldly on what was wrong on higher education.  All the professors were radical leftist.  

I figured he was probably right out of high school, in part no doubt as I'm a very poor judge of younger ages.  It was silly, so I just ignored him, although I found his speech arrogant.  The sort of speech you hear from somebody who presumes that nobody else has experienced what you have. ¹  I.e., we were a bunch of rural rubes not familiar with the dangerous liberals in higher education.

I figured he'd probably get over it as he moved through education.  

Yes, there are liberals in higher education. Frankly, the more educated a class is, the more likely that it is at least somewhat liberal.  That reflects itself in our current political demographic.  The more higher education a person has, the more likely they are to vote for the Democrats.  It's not universally true, but it's fairly true. And the Republicans, having gone populist, which is by definition a political stream that simply flows the "wisdom of the people", is a pretty shallow stream.  Conservatism isn't, but it's really hard to find right now.

I heard earlier this year that he'd obtained a summer position in D.C. with one of our current public servants there, and thought that figured, given the climate of the times.  Recently, his grandfather told me he'd just taken the LSAT.  

I didn't quite know what to say.  

I didn't have any idea he was that old.  And I didn't realize that was his aspiration.  I asked his progenitor if being a lawyer was his goal, and was informed that it was.  I did stumble around to asking what his undergraduate major was, thinking that some have multiple doors to the future, and some do not.

"Political science".

"Well, he doesn't have any place else to go then".²

Not the most encouraging response, I'm sure.

I've known a few lawyers that were of the populist political thought variety, but very, very few.  Of the few, one is in office right now, but I didn't know that person had that view until that person ran.  One is a nice plaintiff's lawyer who holds those views, but it's not his defining characteristic, like it tends to be with some people, and he's friends with those who don't.  One briefly was in the public eye and has disappeared.

He's going to find that most law professors, if you know their views at all, and most you won't, aren't populists.  Some are probably conservatives, and most are liberals.  A defining characteristic of the Post GI Bill field of law is that it's institutionally left wing.  As I've often noted before, there are in fact liberal jurists, but there really aren't "conservative" jurists in the true sense, in spite of what people like Robert Reich might think.

I suspect politics is the ultimate goal. By the time he's through with law school, and has some practice under his belt, the populist wave will have broken, a conservative politics will have reemerged and liberals will be back in power.³

So I hope that he likes the practice of law, as that's what law school trains you to do.  Not to save the world.  Not to "help people".  Not to provide opportunities for people who "like to argue".⁴ 

I'm not holding out a lot of hope.

Recently, I ran this:

June 25, 2024

An article on Hageman's primary challenger in the GOP:

Democrat-turned-Republican challenges Wyoming’s Harriet Hageman for U.S. House seat

Helling has a less than zero chance of unseating Hageman.  What this item really reminded me of, however, is just how old these candidates are.  Helling is an old lawyer.  His bar admission date is 1981, which would make him about 70.  Hageman's is 1989, which I knew which would make her about 61, old by historical standards although apparently arguably middle-aged now.

Barrasso is 71.  Lummis is 69. John Hotz, who is running against Barrasso, has a bar admission date of 1978 which would make him about three years older than Helling.  Seemingly the only younger candidate in the GOP race this primary is Rasner.

This isn't a comment on any of their politics, but rather their age.  Helling is opposed to nuclear power, a very 1970ish view.  With old people, come old views, quite often, even if they're repackaged as new ones.

Right after I ran it, I went to a hearing where one of the opposing lawyers is approaching 70 and supposedly is getting ready to retire, but doesn't seem to be.  Right after that, I was in a court hearing in which there were two younger lawyers, but a host of ones in their late 60s or well into their 70s.  One of the late 60s ones appeared to be stunned and noted that there was at least 200 years of legal experience in the room.

I was noticing the same thing.

Lawyers have a problem and that's beginning to scare me, not quite yet being of retirement age.  I'm not sure if they don't retire, can't retire, don't think they can retire, or something else.

It's not really good for the profession, I'm sure of that.  While it's a really Un-American thing to say, a field being dominated in some ways by the elderly pushes out the young.  And it's also sad.

It's sad as it's usually the case that younger people have wide, genuine, interests.  Lawyers often, although not always, give a lot of those up early on to build their careers. Then they don't go back to them due to those careers.  By the time they're in their late 50s, some are burnt out husks that have nothing but the law, and others are just, I think, afraid to leave it.

I think that's, in part, why you see lawyers run for office.  Maybe some are like our young firebrand first mentioned in this tread.  But others are finding a refuge from a cul-de-sac.  A lawyer who is nearly 70 should not become a first time office holder, and shouldn't even delude themselves into thinking that's a good idea (or that it's feasible).  They should remind themselves of what interested them when they were in their 20s.  The same is true of office holders in general who are in their 70s, or older.  

Footnotes:

1.  I've often seen this with young veterans and old ones.  Some young veteran will be holding forth, not realizing that the guy listening to him fought at Khe Sanh or the likes.

2.  That wasn't the most politic thing to say, but I was sort of hoping that the answer was "agriculture" or something, that had some more doors out.  

Political science really doesn't.  Maybe teaching.  But if our young protagonist graduates with a law degree and finds himself not in the world of political intrigue making sure that the American version of Viktor Orbán rises to the top, but rather whether his client, the mother of five children by seven men gets one of them to pay child support, which is highly likely, he's going to have no place to go.

3.  Bold prediction, I know, but probably correct.

Right now, I suspect that Donald Trump will in fact win the Presidential election, and the country will be in for a massive period of turmoil.  By midterm, people who supported Trump will be howling with rage about the impact of tariffs and the like and demanding that something be done.  The correction will come in 2028, but by that time much of the damage, or resetting or whatever, will have been done.  The incoming 2028 Democratic regime will set the needle more back to the center.

4.  Being good at arguing, in a Socratic sense, makes you a good debator or speaker.  Liking to argue, however, just makes you an asshole.

Lex Anteinternet: The Uniform Bar Exam, early tell of the tape. And now the late one.

Lex Anteinternet: The Uniform Bar Exam, early tell of the tape.: One of the threads most hit upon here is the one on the Uniform Bar Exam .  As folks who stop in here will recall, Wyoming's adoption of...

It is, quite frankly, a freakin' disaster. 

We've had this now for years, and the quality of new lawyers had declined noticeably.

And recently, the list of bar admittees featured something interesting.  The vast majority of new admittees aren't located in Wyoming.  And they don't want to.  They only want to take Wyoming work, and the work of other states, remotely, while not really appreciating the state they're practicing in.

It'd be supremely easy to fix.  Just add a Wyoming component, like we used to have.

But we're not going to do that.

Related threads:

Labor and the conglomeration of everything.

Oh great. . .as if the Colorado flood wasn't enough. . .

Monday At The Bar: Lex Anteinternet: The Uniform Bar Exam, early tell of the tape. Revisited Again.

So. . . why doesn't the ABA oppose the Uniform Bar Exam?

Monday at the Bar: The ABA and the UBE

Wyoming Adopts the Uniform Bar Exam, and why that's not only a change, but a bad idea

Blog Mirror: LSAC Will Eliminate Logic Games From LSAT In 2024!

 

LSAC Will Eliminate Logic Games From LSAT In 2024!

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.

Some recent legal observations

LSAT Baloney Sliced Thick

I don't pay much attention to Quora, and I don't know why anyone else does either.  A lot of the questions on it are stupid, quite frankly, and the answers can be as well.

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

 Extraordinarily well dressed lawyer, W. Morgan Shuster, in New York in 1914. Shuster's impeccable dress is emblematic of the well dressed businessman of this era.  He's wearing a three piece wool suit and carrying a cane he almost certainly doesn't need to use.  And, he's wearing a bowler.

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.

Wednesday June 15, 1930. Bessie Coleman receives a pilots license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.

The Aerodrome: June 15, 1930. Bessie Coleman receives a pilots l...:   

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.

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.

Yes, the pandemic is bad.

But, broadening admission to the law, which has already gotten pretty broad in general, doesn't make long term sense.

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

Byron White Courthouse in Denver Colorado.

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.

Ewing T. Kerr Federal Courthouse in Casper Wyoming.

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?

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.  

My husband took his life—our life—on Sunday, Oct. 14, one month to the day before our 10-year wedding anniversary.* We had been planning a trip for over a year in anticipation of celebrating. 

I’m beyond lost and I don’t know how I’m going to get through the rest of my life. Gabe was my best friend, my partner, my lover, and my constant. I turned to him for everything, and he was always there with the most perfect advice and words. He was my world, and after losing him, I can absolutely say, my better half. Gabe and I did not have children (except for our dog Ivy) and we made that deliberate choice so we could focus solely on our life together, because we were happy.** And now he’s gone. He saw no other choice or path. 

I never thought in a million years that he could or would do that. And I keep going back to one thought: “Big Law” killed my husband. ***

We met on our first day of law school (he graduated third in our class). We had every class together and sat next to each other for two bars because of our last names. He was the smartest person I had ever met. He was also the kindest, most selfless person I’ve ever met. 

I know in my heart that overall, more than anything, we were happy. I would find myself during the day thinking how lucky I was to have him and our life. No one made me feel more special and loved— everything he did, he did for us. And that’s why I have this overwhelming need to tell our story, his story. I don’t want anyone else to experience the utter shock and pain I am in. 

Gabe and I worked hard at our marriage. Marriage isn’t easy and I would never pretend it was.**** Our most serious problem revolved around Gabe’s struggle with binge drinking. It wasn’t on a daily basis, but maybe three or four times a year there would be some event or function where he drank too much. I was hard on him for it—it made me so uncomfortable and mad and sad when he would cross that line. I didn’t have much compassion or realize his drinking was masking a deeper pain and I made him feel very guilty. As a result, he would stop drinking for a month or two and be OK for a while, but then there’d be a lapse. 

He saw someone professionally a few times, but that was it. In his way, he was working on it— and that meant a lot to me, so we stayed together. 

Then there were a series of ill-fated events at work. First, his mentor and confidant suddenly announced he was leaving the firm. This had a huge impact on Gabe personally. It also caused a big shake up at the firm, and another of his treasured partners left to take early retirement. 

Gabe, thrust suddenly into an important leadership role, was told in no uncertain terms that the firm was not going to hire any lateral support. Shortly thereafter, the last partner who was senior to Gabe decided to leave, and an associate whom Gabe spent a lot of time mentoring also left. The Los Angeles bankruptcy group Gabe had so deeply cherished and relied on for support had fallen apart. 

It was also during this time that Gabe was asked to chair the summer associate program. Sidley’s position in some rankings had fallen and Gabe poured his heart and soul into that program. I know there were many others that helped him, but he passionately assumed responsibility for all 13 candidates, wanting to make sure they had the professional summer experience of a lifetime and wouldn’t hesitate to accept an offer from the firm. The success of the program was overwhelming and he didn’t even tell me. I found out from someone after he died that the associate reviews were glowing. 

Finally, Gabe started working on the Mattress Firm case—a huge bankruptcy. It was a little over a month away from filing a Chapter 11 petition, and I had never seen him so stressed out and anxious. He was trying not to burden me with what was going on, but he wasn’t sleeping, I hadn’t seen him smile in weeks, and most everything he said was negative. 

He told me he had experienced stress during cases before, but it had never been this bad. I didn’t know what to do. I tried to be positive and encouraging and just make our home as pleasant a place to come home to as possible. 

The Sunday before leaving to file in Delaware, he spent all day at the office. When I finally called him that evening, it was clear he was in distress and had been working himself to exhaustion. He told me his body was failing him. I picked him up and we decided he should go to the emergency room. He actually said to me on the way there, “You know, if we go, this is the end of my career.” 

I’ve never felt so helpless in my life. I didn’t know whom to reach out to or to tell my husband was in crisis. I called his closest colleague and asked if she had noticed anything unusual with his behavior at work. She said he was working more with his door closed, and then she said something I’ll never forget: She said his sense of humor had been gone for a while. I asked her to keep an eye on him at work and then I just brought him home. I tried to make sure he slept and was rehydrating and eating so he could make the trip to Delaware. 

About a week later Mattress Firm publicly filed. I sent an article announcing the bankruptcy to my mom and a couple of close friends with the exact words, “This is the case that is killing my husband.” 

Gabe came home from Delaware late Tuesday evening. I was hoping the worst was over, but he wasn’t any better. I convinced him to skip a conference in Los Angeles that he was supposed to attend that Wednesday and Thursday and we stayed home together. I thought this would do him some good, but what I found out later was that he had stopped responding to work emails. And when he told me he was going into work that Friday, he instead spent the day at his biological father’s grave—a man he never met—a couple of hours away from our home. 

During this terrible spiral, I told him to quit. I told him we could sell our beautiful house and move to Mammoth, our happy place, and snowboard all winter and then figure it out. *****He said he couldn’t quit in the middle of a case. The irony is not lost on me that he found it easier to kill himself. I thought after this case was over, we’d find a path back to being happy. 

Suicide has now become my new world and I am desperately searching for answers. Because to those that knew him best, his family, friends and colleagues, this came without warning. Though it’s only the beginning stages of trying to figure out why this happened, I came across a concept, maladaptive perfectionism, that combines unrealistic standards of achievement with hypercriticism of failing to meet them. 

Gabe displayed most if not all of the characteristics. Simply put, he would rather die than live with the consequences of people thinking he was a failure. 

Looking back on the things Gabe confided in me, I now know I missed a lot of signs. He told me he felt like he was doing the work of three people—and I think that’s being generous. He told me the deal to resolve the bankruptcy kept changing. He also felt that while a senior partner in Chicago was heading the case, a lot of pressure fell directly on him. 

We spoke a handful of times about how he should just try to care less about the work, but knowing the kind of person my husband was, that was never going to happen. He said he felt like a phony who had everyone fooled about his abilities as a lawyer, and thought after this case was over, he was going to be fired—despite having won honors for his work. 

On the morning he killed himself, he said he got an email and had to go into work to put something together. I wanted to ask if I could go with him and just sit there, but instead, I simply offered to make him a sandwich for lunch. And without any hesitation, he said, “No baby, I’ll be fine—I won’t be long.” I’ll be haunted by those words forever. He gave me a few kisses, and tried to get Ivy to come cuddle me. 

And then he left, taking his gun with him, and shot himself in the head in the sterile, concrete parking structure of his high-rise office building. 

I feel like I lost my husband so quickly—within the course of a month—but I’m now starting to realize how hard he must have been on himself all the time. The constant striving to be perfect at work, to be the perfect husband, son, uncle, brother and friend. And then living with this deep unbearable shame that he wasn’t performing to the impossibly high standards he set for himself. He said a few times how he couldn’t turn off his head, but again, I didn’t understand the severity of that statement. 

Maladaptive perfectionists lack self-compassion. I should have held him just a little longer, loved him a little harder, and told him way more often how proud I was of him and how much I loved him—exactly as he was. I’ll make penance for this for the rest of my life and for just not seeing the depth of the sorrow and pain he was going through. 

Then came Sidley’s handling of Gabe’s suicide—“damage control” that included a last-minute invitation for me and my mom to attend a service at the firm. We went because I needed to see what kind of narrative they were creating. There were a handful of attorneys there, but in the immense receiving line of people who patiently waited to tell us about their unique story of Gabe, most were support staff. One told me that after working at the firm for years, Gabe was the only attorney to take the time to know her name. 

I heard story after story about Gabe’s encouraging nature and how he made people feel like they could succeed at anything they put their mind to. One close colleague said she wished “Gabe had his own Gabe.” 

Finally, packing up his office, I was handed a gift left by someone who just missed saying goodbye to him. He had decided to go to law school after numerous discussions with Gabe. The gift was a leather plaque; on it was inscribed, “It Can Be Done.” 

Gabe lived his life with integrity and treated those around him with sincerity, kindness, and a genuine sense of presence. Unfortunately, I know my husband died not knowing the impact he had on so many people. I believe he died feeling overworked, inferior and undervalued. And I know he died with a lot of shame. 

So as I write our story and think about it more and more, I know “Big Law” didn’t directly kill my husband—because he had a deep, hereditary mental health disorder and lacked essential coping mechanisms. But these influences, coupled with a high-pressure job and a culture where it’s shameful to ask for help, shameful to be vulnerable, and shameful not to be perfect, created a perfect storm. 

I don’t have any immediate solutions, but for the sake of retaining people like Gabe in these important professions, something needs to change. 

We need people like him walking this earth; they make it a better place. My husband was impeccable with his word, and actually cared so immensely about the job he did and how people viewed him. He wasn’t focused on the bottom line or lining his pockets with more money. He cared about his clients and the hundreds and thousands of people impacted by a corporation filing bankruptcy. Not to mention, he was really good at what he did. 

I was having a hard time getting older. I’m 41 and would think about how time was flying by. We weren’t as young or vibrant. I feel like I’ve answered the age-old question how do you make time slow down. You lose the love of your life. Now, there’s just so much time left, and infinite sadness. I’ll live the rest of my life trying to fill his shoes and help anyone from having to go through this horrendous, needless experience.

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.