When will we cross the point of no return? When we become too tired, too depressed, too inured, to be appalled, and simply accept that all our friends and colleagues are losing their jobs? How are we going to handle the fact that many of them likely will not come back? There simply doesn’t seem to be enough room anymore. Will we just accept it all with a shrug and say, “That’s business”?

Maybe. I hope not.

We don’t allow ourselves much latitude in our professional thinking to begin with, which is probably how we got here. But we could. I can’t think of any reason, especially with the world in flux, that we can’t change our outlook and our thinking.

Are polo shirts a means of self-expression? How many lawyers do we really know? How many lawyers have you seen wear purple or green to the office? Fire-engine red? Why haven’t you?

Why don’t lawyers ever write in sentence fragments? Forbidden? By whom? Passive voice? Certainly some of our greatest English-language writers have used it. But employed lawyers? It’s as much as your precarious hold on your job is worth.

Why can’t a lawyer be clever or witty? One of the best lawyers I’ve ever known once wanted to use A Mouse’s Tale by Lewis Carroll to illustrate just how frivolous a lawsuit was. His client recoiled in horror. Why?

I recall a law student who adapted the lyrics of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” as a preface to a law review note. I leave the consequences to your imagination. But why?

Why so many rules? Law is law; not rules. Rules are organizational when they’re good, and petty and restrictive when they’re bad. Where did unspoken lawyer-rules come from and what are they good for? Why is it good to shop at Brooks Brothers and bad to buy Versace?

Why can’t we quote a song, a play, a poem, or a movie, if it helps explain?  Why can’t we do something completely extraordinary to find and keep a job? It seems sometimes that the only thing we can to do is to be completely ordinary—no excitement, no freshness, no creativity. Those frighten employers away. But what do you get when everyone is the same? Blind adherence to senseless rules doesn’t help anyone, that I can see. Why must we be so stagnant?

Law is without doubt a profession based on tradition and history, but why history without development or change? I don’t know the answer, but I see the profession falling into a very bad way. I just can’t help thinking that “when an irresistible  force. . .meets an old immovable object. . .you can bet as sure as you live, something’s gotta give, something’s gotta give, something’s gotta give.”

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[1] Universal Pictures, 2006, directed by Alfonso Cuaron, starring Clive Owen, Michael Caine, Julianne Moore.