| August 2008 | e-Newsletter |
Subscribe to The Timesheet's RSS feed 
|
I am Owed a Summer: A Rant
by Mark Solomon
|
For all intents and purposes, summer lasts for three months (June, July and August for those if us living in the planet’s northern hemisphere). One quarter of a year, the same as any other period of time measured by three month. So, why does there seem to be a law of physics that accelerates time’s passage during those three months? And why does the inverse of that physical law govern the universe when I’m at work?
My kids attended school until about a week before Independence Day. So much for Memorial Day marking the unofficial beginning of summer. So much for a family getaway in June. Within the first week of August, I can look forward to the "back to school list" of classroom supplies that my school taxes fall short of covering, like pens, pencils, erasers, and paper. It’s not that I mind subsidizing public education with stationary store swag. But really, I bought the damn pencils for you—do you think maybe you could sharpen them yourselves?
I have heard marvelous tales from lawyers in practice longer than I, that in glorious days of yore the courts actually closed in August, giving litigants and litigators alike a month-long respite from their disputes. They actually took weeks off at a time, with no e-mail, blackberries, or cell-phones, and no massive towers of mail stacked on their chairs to greet them upon their return. Oh, to have been a lawyer in those heady days! August is now a time for catching up on paperwork, attending depositions, and if you’ve drawn the ire of the wrong judge, perhaps a jury trial or two. Let’s be brutally honest. When a judge schedules a trial during the summer, that’s as good as a sanction.
So this summer, I’ve taken several cruises between the waterfront at Yonkers and Pier 11 in lower Manhattan, being my ferry commute, with the occasional excursion to exotic Staten Island. I’ll be trying a case in mid-August. I’ll be relaxing at home with a box of number 2 pencils and a pencil sharpener. And I’ll be making travel plans for my summer vacation—in November.
Freedom of Expression
by Julie Fleming Brown
|
While describing an assessment I often use to a lawyer-client, I mentioned that it provides feedback about one’s natural tendencies and those tendences as adapted to work, explaining that almost everyone wears a "mask" of some sort at work.
"You got that right," my client chuckled wryly.
We went on to discuss the discomfort this client feels in the workplace. She chooses not to be herself in the office, to rein in the zany and hilarious side of herself in an effort to show up as the cool, calm professional whose judgment is above reproach. And, frankly, it’s hard to blame her or any of the others who make a similar decision. Especially in a competitive world in which reputation may be built on first impressions and damaged in a moment, playing it safe may be an appealing choice.
That said, when there’s too much of a gap between one’s "real" self and one’s "work" self, going to work may become unbearably stressful. A great deal of energy can be consumed by molding oneself to expectations, and everyone I’ve known to be in such a situation gets worn down by maintaining a false persona. Even more troublesome, authenticity is generally regarded as a key leadership attribute. People often sense inauthenticity, and when authenticity is lacking, it’s tough to build or maintain relationships.
I’ve always enjoyed the quote, "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind." (Attributed, variously, to Walt Disney, Dr. Seuss, and Bernard Baruch.) Of course, those who employ or retain you do matter. So, what if you feel required to present yourself as someone you aren’t?
- Change positions. Sometimes it’s a "fit" issue. A firm’s "culture" will define what is and isn’t acceptable, and a baseline fit between lawyer and firm is important. While it’s unlikely that you’ll find a firm that allows you to be exactly who you are at home on a weekend morning among family or close friends, it is possible to find a firm where you can be more or less the same person. If the "fit" is wrong, you’ll likely have the metaphorical sense of wearing a suit that’s too tight: constriction at work followed by the renewed ability to breathe when you’re elsewhere. If you’re happy with your professional self, then the suit has to go. Just be sure to note the areas of constriction so you’ll know what atmosphere would be a better fit.
- Practice allowing your personality to show. Sometimes the issue is one of comfort: personality might be welcome, but you need to develop a certain comfort level to believe that’s true. Try cracking a few jokes, mentioning your interest in feng shui, or hanging that unusual painting in your office. And measure the reaction you get. Assuming a reasonably good fit, you’ll probably begin to relax a bit (when the situation is appropriate for relaxing) and allow your slightly quirky self to show. Treading slowly is probably a good idea: no one appreciates the colleague who lets the freak flag fly a little too high. But personality is part of what will draw other lawyers and clients to you. No one wants to work with an automaton.
- Express yourself in covert ways. One of my good friends (not a lawyer) served as a consultant for several years for one of the big companies that functioned remarkably like a law firm. She bought a toe ring that reminded her of her "outside" life and the trip to the Bahamas where she bought the ring. I’ve known lawyers who relished having a navel piercing, living in an unusual part of town, or playing in a rock band on the weekends—none completely secret, really, just private enough to share with a select few.
- Act in integrity with your values. On occasion, I’ve known lawyers who felt they were required to conform in distasteful ways. Choosing to laugh at jokes that conflict with deeply held beliefs, for instance, puts a higher value on conformity than on the deeply held belief. Integrity requires finding some way to reconcile belief and action, whether it’s ignoring or challenging the distasteful view. Sometimes it’s an opportunity to educate, and sometimes it’s a sign that the firm/lawyer fit is wrong.
How closely do your home and work personas match? Do you want or need to make a change?
|
Julie Fleming Brown, J.D., A.C.C. provides attorney development coaching and consulting to law firm associates and partners, focusing on topics such as leadership, client, and professional development; career strategy; and work/life integration. A certified leadership coach (Georgetown University), Julie publishes the weekly email newsletter Leadership Matters for Lawyers and posts often on the Life at the Bar Blog. Learn more at www.LifeAtTheBar.com or by contacting Julie by telephone at 800.758.6214 or by email to jfb@lifeatthebar.com. |
|
©Stu Rees. All rights reserved.
Like this cartoon? Send it to friends, clients or colleagues on greeting cards. To order, or to see more cards especially for new lawyers, visit The Billable Hour Card Store.
Did you know that Stu also licenses his artwork for use in newsletters, presentations, print publications and on websites? He even offers special rates for student and teacher use.
You can also purchase original artwork and custom prints (framed or unframed) from Stu.
Timesheet readers get 15% off all licensing orders, original artwork and custom prints (use coupon code BILLHOUR). Click here for information on licensing or purchasing "Golf Club Threat" or one of the hundreds of other images Stu offers. For more information on original artwork and custom prints, click here.
New Research Shows Monkeys More Popular Than Lawyers
by Paul Brennan
|
Law & Disorder Ezine reports:
Last month our readers were offered the opportunity to find out about four topics by clicking the link to each topic. Here are the selection results:
Cutting your spouse out of your will: 24%
Legal articles: 4%
IP law: 5%
Videos featuring monkeys: 64%
What does this tell us lawyers? Well:
- Understandably, you had considerable interest in cutting your spouse out of your will. Any married person would see this as obvious. Why then, do lawyers and their marketing advisers keep pushing under-attended seminars on conveyancing and trusts when the real interest is in useful legal topics such as "How to murder your spouse—and get away with it"?
- You are not as interested in intellectual property law as we lawyers thought. This will be a big shock for intellectual property lawyers but they are a pretty dull lot and will get over it.
- A low 4% response to legal learning, in general, will ruffle many legal feathers. Lawyers tend to think that people (especially their clients) are interested in the law’s many twists and turns. Could we really be wrong? Could this mean that your lawyer should spend less time explaining the law to you and just get on with it? The effect would be that you would be less informed and lawyers would earn less money. Surely this can’t be right. If this is really true, why didn’t you just say?
- Now I turn to the most groundbreaking result. It suggests that people, if given a choice, prefer to watch a video featuring monkeys rather than learn about the law. This is useful feedback, indeed. I doubt if bankers or accountants would fare any better; however, some financial planners would give them a run for their money.
Young lawyers have complained for years that law firms pay peanuts; this may have been part of a deliberate recruitment strategy, after all.
|
Paul Brennan is a legal cartoonist, author and speaker. He is the author of The Law is an Ass . . . Make Sure it Doesn’t Bite Yours and A Legal Guide to Dying . . . Baby Boomer Edition (both coming soon to The Billable Hour Co.), which are intended for a worldwide audience. He blogs at www.101reasonstokillallthelawyers.com. In his day job, he is the principal of Brennans Solicitors, a law firm located in Mooloolaba, a Queensland, Australia seaside town, where he practices in the areas of business law (including franchising), intellectual property, trusts and estates, immigration and real estate. For more information on booking Paul as a speaker, visit www.lawanddisorder.com.au. |
|
©Dan Rosandich. All rights reserved.
Like this cartoon? Send it to friends, clients or colleagues on greeting cards. To order, visit The Billable Hour Card Store.
|
Video of the Month: Tips for Avoiding Legal Mistakes
|
We're thrilled to introduce you to Paul Brennan, our new "renaissance lawyer":
By the end of August, we'll be selling Paul's books, The Law is an Ass . . . Make Sure it Doesn’t Bite Yours and A Legal Guide to Dying . . . Baby Boomer Edition in our Games and Books department and featuring his cartoons in The Billable Hour Card Store.
Watch more hilarious videos from Paul and from around the web, join us at The Video Venue!
Special Book Excerpt: Forms Follow Function
by Adam Freedman
|
Now that formbooks were coming hot off the printing press (post-1500), every lawyer had ready access to a common set of precedents, or presidents, as the word was sometimes spelled. A precedent literally means "that which came before," and it is pretty much the key to the way lawyers think. Courts in the English-speaking world follow the precedents laid down by earlier decisions. And lawyers, when drafting documents, always prefer to use a precedent rather than writing something from scratch. This is not merely a matter of convenience, but one of caution. Any form that has found its way into a book must be one that "works."
The formbooks were smash hits with the legal profession. As a result, all of the linguistic oddities discussed above, and many more, became set in stone, carefully preserved, and passed on from one generation to the next. When the British colonized North America, English law and English formbooks came with the package.
Until the late eighteenth century, American lawyers borrowed from British formbooks, but after independence, they began to clamor for something a little more homegrown. In 1797, New Jersey lawyer William Griffith promised to give them just that with his Scrivener's Guide—the title alone gives one goose bumps. It turns out the book was only a slightly-changed version of an English book of the same name, advertised as being "Useful for all Gentlemen, especially those that Practice the Law."
The same was true of Joseph Story's A Selection of Pleadings in Civil Actions (1805), which promised to give "American" precedents but consisted mainly of recycled English forms. The fact was that American practice was so closely modeled on the British that uniquely American forms, although appealing to the patriotic spirit, scarcely existed.
Later in the nineteenth century, legal publishers realized that they could vastly increase sales by pitching their books to the general public. Thus Everybody's Lawyer and Book of Forms, written by a Philadelphia lawyer in 1869, promised that every man could be his own lawyer—provided he bought the book. Everybody's Lawyer also made the bold claim that "[i]n no instance has injury or loss resulted to anyone from [this book's] use." Which may well have been true, but it is also unlikely that the book caused anyone to get a four-hour erec'tion.
"Superstition" would be the best word to describe the law's attitude toward forms. Like a gambler unwilling to wash his lucky shirt lest it lose some of its magic, the average lawyer wouldn't change a comma in a trusted boilerplate form. In Australia, a corporate executive once tried to rewrite one of her company's standard form contracts. Where the existing contract said:
The Agreement shall commence on __________ and expire on _________,
the executive wanted to replace commence and expire with start and finish. The company's legal department objected to the proposal, contending that start and finish "do not yet have established meanings" in law.
In a 1999 law journal article, a Michigan lawyer named David Daly proposed improvements to a standard indemnification clause, by which one person promises to compensate another person for loss. The standard provision stated that "the indemnifying party [may select] counsel satisfactory to [the] indemnified party." Daly proposed to replace that with a sentence saying that the indemnifying party "may select counsel satisfactory to the other party." Although there could be no doubt as to the identity of the "other party" in the context, another lawyer wrote to the editor of the journal protesting that Daly's revisions had upset the "legal relations" described in the document.
Academic law journals feature scientific-sounding studies of boilerplate forms—and with titles like "Standardization and Innovation in Corporate Contracting" to choose from, why should anyone suffer from insomnia? The results of these studies are often blindingly obvious. One journal declares "[d]eletions generally must meet a high threshold of justification . . . [b]ut inclusion of new boilerplate . . . requires much less justification." In other words, lawyers tend to add new language to existing forms without deleting any of the old language. The ones who add the most boilerplate end up with a reputation for being "precise."
What's more, lawyers often preface a new bit of boilerplate with the phrase "anything else in this agreement to the contrary notwithstanding" or words to that effect, meaning, "this clause trumps any other clause in the contract that is inconsistent with it." If you use that phrase more than once in the same form, things get very complicated.
If they can send a man to the moon, why can't they fix boilerplate? The Precision School argues that cutting out boilerplate will lead to fatal ambiguity. Others claim, ingeniously, that clients are to blame because they expect their lawyers to produce documents bristling with legalese. If they don't, the clients think they haven't got their money's worth. Although this may be true in some cases, the majority of clients would probably be happy with plain language. The problem is, they don't want to pay for it. Writing a plain English contract from scratch takes far more billable hours than cutting and pasting boilerplate. Few lawyers have the gumption to ask their clients to pay extra for plain English contracts when the boilerplate versions will get the job done.
|
It may be that lawyers earnestly plan to clean up the forms, remove the excess verbiage, and make their documents more user friendly just as soon as they have some free time. Although that doesn't sound like a very appealing weekend project, one Chicago law professor reports that "many lawyers" "fantasize about the perfect form." They ought to get out more.
Excerpted from the book The Party of the First Part: The Curious World of Legalese by Adam Freedman. ©2007 by Adam Freedman. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, L.L.C. |
|
Lawtoons
by Suzan Charlton, Esq.
|
click here to enlarge (large file; please be patient)
©Suzan Charlton. All rights reserved.
Like this cartoon? Send it to friends, clients or colleagues on greeting cards. To order, visit The Billable Hour Card Store.
Suzan Charlton is a professional cartoonist who is rumored to practice insurance coverage law as a hobby for a major Washington D.C. law firm. Her cartoons cover a wide range of law-related topics, from law school grades to law firm romance.
Song of the Month: My Lawyer's Back
by Bob Noone and the Well Hung Jury
|
(sample)
Available on Second Helping of Chicken Suit for the Lawyer's Soul
My lawyer’s back and you’re gonna be sorry
Hey la, hey la, my lawyer’s back
Look out my lawyer’s back
You rang?
Look out my lawyer’s back
My personal defender
Your lawyer’s back pinstripe and black
Just in case you ever get on the wrong track
That’s me, your attorney
Hey you’re in a jam again and you’re needin' free
You’re caught red handed and it’s just because
Honey, stupid is as stupid does
Your transaction was an infraction
And now you need a little court action
So they got your name
They got your fingerprints
They even think they know how the money’s spent
The cop says you’re a tough nut to crack
Well put down the donut, Smokey, his lawyer’s back
Look out my lawyer’s back
My personal defender
Look out my lawyer’s back (yes he is)
He will not surrender (just chill)
The jury hangs on my every syllable
And I am good ‘cause each word is billable
The courtroom is filled with gloom
There’s a sense of doom and you must assume
You look deceiving and no one’s believing
You start to plead but I intercede
I give the cop cross-examination
Now the jury’s got reservations
I wake the state trooper from his stupor
Warrantless seach, now what a blooper
No jurisdiction, his case is fiction
Hey no way gonna get a conviction
I’m your first, last, only solution
When they trample on your constitution
So when your rights are under attack
Don’t you worry fool, ha ha your lawyer’s back
Look out my lawyer’s back
My personal defender
Look out my lawyer’s back
He will not surrender
Just bounce a check with me, bounce with me c’mon
Sidestep the issue
Oh, just slide
Jump to the conclusion, uh huh
Put your neck on the line
And trust me
Look out my lawyer’s back
My personal defender (it’s nice to be needed)
Look out my lawyer’s back
He will not surrender (reality check)
So let me say in closing
Just in case your tired butt was dozing
If I’m around it’s an once of prevention
Trust me bub, it’s for your own protection
Cause I do things that you need not do
And I’m suing people that you need not sue
So don’t put up with all that legal crap
Don’t worry your head: your lawyer, your lawyer’s back
Look out my lawyer’s back (oh yeah)
My personal defender (where would you be without me?)
Look out my lawyer’s back
He will not surrender
Just one of the hilarious songs on
Poeticus Lex: The Closing
by Fred C. Russcol, Esq.
|
A closing on a house can be
Very near insanity,
As those presiding seem to speak
A foreign language (maybe Greek?)
And your bit part upon this stage
Is signing each and every page,
Wherever your attorney "X"es
(You'd think that you were buying Texas!)
Your pen hand starts to cramp and ache-
Was this transaction a mistake?
Your lawyer guides you through the maze
Of legal terms from ancient days,
Explaining, with the greatest ease,
Just why you must pay all these fees.
The title closer leads the way,
Negotiating every fray,
So all the problem points are cured,
And you get title that's insured.
(If I's weren't dotted or T's weren't crossed,
Your lovely new home won't be lost!)
But finally, it all is done,
The closing battle has been won,
And as your heart with pleasure fills,
You wonder how you'll pay the bills!
Fred C. Russcol, Esq. is Of Counsel to Castro & Remer, P.C. in Ossining, New York. This poem was originally printed in the Westchester Bar Journal and is reprinted with the permission of the Westchester County Bar Association.
|
