I Love Bureaucrats
I get teased by the other lawyers in my office but
my favorite way to figure out any kind of license or
tax or permit issue is to call the folks at the state
or federal authority. I know you can't rely on their
word and you need to confirm everything independently,
yes, I know all that, but still I find that they are
largely friendly, helpful, indeed eager to assist, and
they save a lot of fumbling around and blind searching
by directing me right to the pertinent statutes or regulations
quickly, and by talking me through how the rules actually
work in the real world.
I'm surprised at how rarely other lawyers just pick
up the phone and ask. In my office I'm the designated
sweet talker. (It's because it's not hard for me to
play dumb on the phone... it comes naturally, you might
say, along with the blonde hair. And because I'm interested
in most everything.) Sometimes I call from a caller
ID blocked number and pretend to be someone else and
pose a hypothetical (e.g. an employee who wonders if
he/she can file an action and how to do it under certain
circumstances, to make up an example off the cuff) but
mostly I explain that I'm a young attorney charged with
figuring something out and would they mind telling me
what they do and what they know about it, or who in
the office knows the most about it and would they be
willing to talk to me. More than 85% of the time I get
pushed along much further than I would have gotten on
my own starting from scratch and Google and a blank
Westlaw query screen.
Sometimes you get flat wrong answers and sometimes
you get ignorant shrugs or other dead ends, but I'm
surprised at how often people will bend over backwards
to explain and help. I think it saves me and my clients
lots of time. Say what you want about big government,
but as long as we're paying them, I consider the regulators
and administrators great resources. I guess nobody ever
asks them about their jobs.
Whose Problem Is It?
Sometimes a client's anxiety and hope can get to me,
making me nervous and dejected if I can't find a scratch-free
way out of the client's particularly thorny thicket
of problems. Older, wiser attorneys remind me, "Remember,
YOU didn't get them into this situation." (So far,
thankfully, that's true at least.) I generally like
my clients and I like their problems and sometimes I
am able to be very helpful in picking a path out of
a yucchy place. But when the way out is bumpy, it is
hard to remember that these bumps and brambles along
the road to a better situation were there all along,
and aren't my fault. Or are they? Maybe if I were just
a little more clever, we could find a way out of this
mess that wouldn't hurt even a little bit?
Sometimes my clients have really unrealistic expectations.
Sometimes I do. Sometimes I can't tell, and that's the
worst of all.
Math Phobia
I've begun to notice something about certain other
lawyers. I'm not ready to generalize about the size
or composition of this group, but I've observed that
there is some subset of lawyers who, I think, chose
the law perhaps partly because of a fear of math. These
are the lawyers who try really hard not to look too
closely at numbers, who accept the accountant's numbers
blindly, whose eyes glaze over at spreadsheets and balance
sheets.
This seems to me to be an extraordinary, glaring weakness.
I mean, puh-leeez, people. NUMBERS MATTER A LOT. And
the method you use to get to those numbers MATTERS THE
MOST. And that's the stuff that you need to look closely
at to figure out – see the assumptions that are
being made, the discount rate being used, etc. How the
heck will you know if you're being bamboozled if you
check out when the financials are being discussed?
I've played along with it from time to time, when I
think it suits my client's interest. "Well, gee
whiz, you know, a lot of what these accountants say
goes way over my head but essentially I think the difference
between your numbers and our numbers is this, although
don't take it from me because heck I'm just an attorney....."
I've been surprised at how readily some attorneys will
jump right in and basically say, heck, no, let's leave
all that complicated number stuff to the accountants,
if they say that's the right number it must be, great,
I don't really want to look at the math, thanks.
I think that's a lousy way to represent your clients.
Progress?
I can't decide if it's a good sign (of how much smarter
I'm getting) or a bad sign (of how very ignorant I was/am)
but sometimes looking at things I did a year or even
a couple of months ago I sort of cringe because I could
do them so much better today. Occasionally I am impressed
but more often I think, geez, was I ever that dumb?
Pot of Gold
My first year as a lawyer I was on one of my first
unaccompanied phone calls ever with opposing counsel,
doing something that in retrospect seems boring but
that at the time had me anxious and nervous. I can't
remember the details but it was, if not contentious,
at least adversarial. I was looking out my window while
on the phone, as I always do, and suddenly interrupted
the other lawyer by bursting out with, "Oh, boy,
are you near a window?! There's a beautiful rainbow
outside – it's so pretty, you've really got to see
it." It was, too. But the lawyer was totally nonplussed.
He paused for a moment, said nothing, and then went
on. I felt a little bit like a dope but mostly sorry
for him. He must not be near a window, I figured.
Today I was on the phone with different opposing counsel
proposing a deal and fielding his questions, most of
which were over my head. I was looking out the window
watching a rain cloud move its way across the harbor
away from me, and as it did so a perfect shimmery rainbow
materialized in front of it, clean and small and lovely,
over the water and the buildings and almost perfectly
framed by my window.
I didn't say anything, just kept negotiating, as I
watched it shimmer and slowly fade away.
Get 'Real'
Today I got a call from a client who's struggling to
fill out the client worksheets listing assets and claims,
etc. in preparation for a personal bankruptcy. "What
does this question mean -- list all real property? I
think all my property is real, isn't it?"
That used to drive me crazy too, but like a lot of
things in law I just got used to it and I'd even forgotten
how silly it is to distinguish between "real"
property and "personal" property. As though
those descriptive adjectives mean ANYTHING whatsoever
to lay people. Both the adjective "real" and
the adjective "personal" have street meanings
so far removed from their legal meanings that it is
unnecessarily obfuscatory to continue to use them. But
we march along throwing around those terms as though
they make perfect sense.
"Real property is your house or any land you own.
Personal property is your stuff, anything that you could
take with you if you moved," I explained, kicking
myself for not having thought about telling her that
before I sent her home with the forms. "There's
no reason that you should have known it – just
dumb legal terms." Nothing about personal property
is any less "real" than real property. And
nothing about real estate is any less "personal"
than personal property.
It's just another way in which we lawyers make the
regular people who want to use our services feel dumb
when there's no reason they should.
On Task
I recently added a kitchen timer to my desk. It's
not for billing clients -- I have a computerized timer
that works pretty well as my official timekeeper. This
is an attempt to defeat procrastination attempts. The
reasoning is that I will force myself to turn to an
unwanted task for a 45 minute block of time. The kitchen
timer keeps me honest. I notice that when I switch matters
from something I really like doing to something I like
less, I tend to wander. The kitchen timer lets me postpone
the wandering, not forever, but for enough time to let
me get a tangible chunk of work done, even while it
lets me see that I get to take a break in 10 minutes,
and then switch for a little while back to something
more fun.
I suspect that associates at BIGLAW don't face the
switching problem we little guys have. A big part of
my professional life is about juggling a whole lot of
clients, prioritizing the tasks I have for each of them,
and being responsive to unpredictable interruptions
by telephone or even drop-bys. I'm lousy at it, although
getting better. There are very few days when I work
all day on one or two matters. There are NO weeks when
I work only for one client. There are always phone calls
where I'm deep in the midst of one thing and have to
take a minute when the secretary announces who's calling
and go "Who is that again? And what was I working
on for him/her?" I wonder if this is the case when
your clients are HUGE and your cases are all-absorbing?
I find the "switching" skill-set is elusive
and am jealous of folks who can become totally absorbed
in just one thing, although I think I probably like
this better in truth, if I can only figure out how to
do it more gracefully. One of the hard parts is that
the squeaky wheels and the fires get most of my attention,
and it's hard to build in time for the ongoing research,
or the "no rush, but could you get back to me when
you've attended to this" matters. Those of you
who have tips, let me know.
Top
Scheherazade Fowler
is a young attorney practicing in Portland, Maine. She
graduated first in her class from the University of
Maine School of Law in 2001, and joined a small firm
where she did transactional and bankruptcy work for
small and medium-sized business clients. She left her
firm in 2004, and after some soul-searching, has joined
a friend in a two lawyer shop. She hopes to help small
businesses and to build a consumer bankruptcy practice.
Her blog, Stay of Execution, details her thoughts and
experiences, and can be found at www.scheherazade.org.
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