You've Come a Long Way, Baby

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the trend of trading dollars for a better lifestyle.  I thought of this as an equal opportunity choice.  Seems I was wrong. Apparently, I missed the big story.  It seems men are actually looking to balance their work lives with their home lives.  This trend even has a catchy new name, the Daddy Track. OK, so I guess we deserved that.  And I am (no doubt to the delight of women attorneys everywhere) properly disgusted by this derogatory term.  I've been for work-life balance since before it was cool.  Like women accused of being on the "mommy track," I want to have my cake and eat it too.  Or more to the point, I want to share my kid's birthday cake and a career too.  

That's why I like the trend.  Not only is it healthier for law firms and lawyers alike, it makes it easier for me to say goodbye to the office on Fridays-- for the whole weekend.  As more attorneys demand this, it will become the culture for everyone.  But to get there, it's going to have to be OK for men and women. Let's start with a name change.  No more Mommy Track and no more Daddy Track.  To me, it's more like the total package.    

I've got Your Number

If I've seen it once (1), I've seen it one hundred (100) times: lawyers spelling out numbers then following them with the Arabic digits in parentheses. Why would anyone do that? I've heard some suggest it makes things clearer. My guess is the only reason they do that, is they've always done it that way. I want to know who's really going to confuse "one hundred" or "100" if either one is written by itself? As a general rule, a contract will be enforced as long as the intent is clear, and what's more clear than just saying "100." On the other hand, writing something twice is tempting fate. I'll bet people make mistakes doing that about two percent (1%) of the time.

Winning is the Best Revenge

If you practice in the Circuit Court of Cook County, you meet all kinds of interesting people. A lot of these characters are sour, grumpy grinches who like nothing better than sharing their disposition. Litigation, which is really just a long series of different activities, gives them lots openings. These folks pick their battles by picking anything that presents itself and opportunities inevitably arise. Try to schedule a deposition, and you might get a nasty email with personal attacks disputing the date, place, time, order, whatever.

These make my bile rise as much as the next guy, but I intuitively refuse to engage. People will either play nice or they won't and I'm not going to waste my energy returning snide remarks in kind. I'd rather lose ten petty battles and win the war. And when the battles aren't petty, I spend my energy positioning for a win, instead of sparring with the other guy. There's nothing they hate more than being ignored, it throws them off balance. Couple that spending billable time preparing (instead of swearing) and more times than not, you win. And isn't that the best revenge?

Legal Staff 2.0

Back in the olden days (or so I’m told) lawyers did a lot of their work by talking into tape recorders. They were assisted by secretaries, who spent a lot of their time turning these recordings into briefs, letters and memos. Like professional athletes, secretaries had stats, WPM, which told you how fast they did this all important job. Like professional athletes, this stat played a major role in their salary, team, batting order and trading status.

Now, lawyers have assistants and the difference is more than just semantic. More and more lawyers came of age using word processors. I couldn’t dictate a brief if I tried. I need to sit down, write, edit, write some more, edit. You get the picture. My support staff needs a completely different set of skills. I need help maintaining the files, sending letters I write, assembling briefs, filing and serving things like pleadings and discovery.

Not only do my assistants need different skills, I make different demands on their time than lawyers of a different era. I don’t need a steady stream of help. My need comes in fits and starts. I also do a lot of things myself that other attorneys relegate to support staff. The biggest one is probably time entry. I enter my time directly into our billing system and have from the moment they first gave me access.

People like me are forcing changes. Lawyers are becoming more self-sufficient and changing the ratios. The days of one secretary to one lawyer are long gone. I share with three others and we rarely bump into one another. Some have suggested this changing demographic has already led to reductions in legal staff. To thrive and survive, staff will have to get versatile, get technological and get out of their comfort zones.

Uncivil Procedure

When I joined the Bar, I had this romantic idea about working with other lawyers. We would "strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends." During a summer of depositions in Waterloo, Iowa, we actually did that. A group of defendants would question witnesses by day then have dinner with plaintiff's counsel each night. To this day, I've never been on a large case where things ran more smoothly. No games, no sniping, everybody finished what they needed to do and our clients spent less money.

Much more often, practicing law looks like professional wrestling. Lawyers trade nastygrams and use other bully tactics. A few years back, I had an attorney bellow into the telephone, "this is not Law School 101! I Want Indemnity!"

Lawyers are competitive people. Much of what we do is a competition. But like any any good sport, the competition works better with collaboration. In your face tactics like screaming for indemnity are more likely to inspire a smack down than a back down. Letter writing campaigns take valuable time and rarely accomplish anything useful. Worse, they contribute to a "gotcha" atmosphere: things get harder to schedule, phone calls go unreturned, simple stipulations die on the vine.

Lawyers fighting these little battles lose the bigger picture. Before long, you've spent twice what you should have fanning the resentment that blinds everyone to compromise. If a case should be settled for $30,000 then don't run up $3,000 sparring over your place or mine for the deposition. You'll get a better result, for less money and you might just get better dinner conversation.