All in My weird brain
We in Wisconsin are in the middle of the State Bar Annual Meeting & Conference, right here in Milwaukee. The venue is a couple of blocks from my office so I’ve been and will be popping out.
So far, I’ve seen a few of my clients who I’ve never met in person before—I caught their name tag out of the corner of my eye, or recognized their voice from phone calls. I did not stop and approach them. I waited for them to approach me. If they didn’t, we didn’t talk at all.
As I write this, I’ve spent the last two weeks preparing for and then actually in trial, with a two-day interruption for a nerd friend conference. I am finally done, and am using the one functioning brain cell I have that isn’t devoted to keeping me upright to write this, while it’s fresh.*
This post is directed at anyone who needs to deal with a lawyer after a major project is over, so I am going to write directly to those people. They may be people who are married to or partnered with lawyers, who are close friends, or who live with lawyers.
I was in California this week for a family funeral, and I was prepared to write this blog entry about all of the grace and understanding colleagues and adversaries have shown. Extensions, offers to cover, and forgiveness for delays were free-flowing. And that’s true, and maybe I will write about that at some point, because this profession is a whole lot less horrible when we can acknowledge each other’s humanity.
No, today I’ll write about that time (today) someone walked off with my laptop at LAX and it did not break my ethics brain.
I remember at the end of the George W. Bush administration, some comedians said that the Obama administration would put them out of business, what with Obama’s lack of propensity for scandal or gaffes. While of course that didn’t happen (the comedy world survived Obama’s tan suits and fancy mustard just fine), I’ve been asked (once) whether I am worried I won’t have blog fodder after all of the ridiculous election and Trump-related litigation is over.
That’s right, if you can believe it, Ethicking.com launched one year ago, on October 24, 2019.
…so, what a year, huh?
Like anyone who set out to do anything a year ago, this did not go as I’d planned. Sure, I did manage to keep up with the blog generally, updating every couple of weeks or so (and sometimes more often, though not quite at the weekly frequency I’d hoped). I thought I’d be writing about ABA opinions, nerd friends, and best practices, and I did that. And, sadly, I knew at this time last year, barring some very rapid advancement in medical science (or, as he called it, “a meteor crashing to Earth with the cure”) I would be posting a eulogy for my dear friend and mentor at some point.
I know a couple of lawyers who have presumed or confirmed cases of COVID-19. Happily, all of them are doing well, even if it was bumpy for awhile. None of them have posed this question to me, but I’ve seen it elsewhere as a hypothetical—what are lawyers’ duties if they have become ill with COVID-19?
Pop culture makes it seem like lawyers are constantly in court, or at the very least, catching up with our attorney friends while briskly walking down courthouse steps. It really looks more like the graphic accompanying this blog entry, but with a coffee cup balanced precariously in there (and in my case, more paper despite being promised a paperless office by the year 2000, a comfortable new office chair just sitting in the box, taunting me while waiting to be assembled, and a room in dire need of new paint).
All of this tech means that most of my job, like most of most lawyers’ jobs, can be done from home.
