Calling All Unemployed Lawyers

If a Tree Falls. . . .

Unemployed — Mon, 18 May 2009 20:18:00 GMT

The silence has been deafening for me, too. My own silence probably has sounded louder to me over the past two months than it has to anybody else. But I have had nothing to say.

I still don’t have much to say. Especially for such an opinionated person. I seem to be watching in shock and awe (Mr. Bush finally achieved it here, at least) as everything the way I knew it seismically shifts around me.

I started this site to help you, whoever you are reading this. The truth is that I don’t know how to help you. I can’t even help myself. I don’t think that links to law firms that are actively decimating their ranks is useful to you. They weren’t doing it quite like this when I started. I don’t know what to put up here that would do anybody any good.

If anybody has any ideas and wants to share them, I would be pleased to take suggestions. The site is paid for and I have a lot of time on my hands, just like you do. I’ll leave it like it is until I have some reason to change it. I can only hope that it will be a change for the better, if it ever comes.

Lifeboat [1]

Unemployed — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 01:30:00 GMT

I have long past the point where I communicate more frequently with strangers than I do with people I know. This strikes me as eerie. Among the people I talk to through this website, through Twitter, and through Facebook (although not as the Unemployed Lawyer), almost everyone is a stranger. Certainly, almost all my correspondents started out that way.

Some of them have now become friends, even though we have never met, through the regularity of our correspondence or our shared interests. They are not friends that I’d go for beer and pizza with—for one thing, they are all in different states and countries. They are internet friends and we generally restrict our “conversations” to specific topics and communicate only through specific channels. We have never seen each other and likely never will. Even so, I value them highly and feel cheered and happy when I hear from them. They have become part of my world.

What’s eerie to me is also what comes as routine when you do what I am doing now. When you write for public consumption, you don’t have any idea who is going to read it, or why. I’m just happy anyone reads my work at all, if they read it at all. The difference between writing on the internet and writing for publication in some hard-copy form is that I have no idea if anyone reads what I write, while if copies of a book, magazine, or newspaper are selling, it stands to reason that someone is buying and reading them. It’s true that I have a hit counter on the site, but it only tells me how many times the site has been opened. It doesn’t say anything about which parts have been used or read.

I’m not complaining. I knew this would be so when I started the site.

But I can’t help wondering what you are thinking. I sometimes feel as if I’m drifting in a very small boat at sea in a very deep fog. I just can’t tell if there is anyone out there or not. I can peer and halloo all I want, but unless you light a lamp and ring a bell, I will never know that you are there. We are all hiding out here.

I am further fascinated by those who reveal themselves to me. I am filled with delight each time someone shows an interest, but sometimes I have to wonder why. I desperately want to know the back story. Why does the Unemployed Lawyer interest a purveyor of Italian ice, a gentlemen’s fashion consultant, a private detective, a healthcare professional, and a travel agent, to name a few Twitter followers? Believe me, I am very happy to have your interest; I’m just curious where it comes from.

This afternoon, I answered a request from an unknown woman for free legal representation. That one, I believe I can figure out. The comment was either a hoax posted by spammers bored with posting plain spam or a real request from a needy person who reasoned that a bunch of unemployed lawyers might need something to do. For the record, I don’t believe that the request was a hoax and I offered the best advice I could on how to seek representation. Either way, it did me no harm and the advice I posted was sound. It might be of use to someone in the future and I hope it helps a person in need right now.

But I’m still at sea, drifting in my little boat. I wish I knew if I have done anyone any good. I wish I knew if I depress you beyond measure and you wish that I would just go away. I wish I knew whether you think movie footnotes are stupid. I really, really wish I knew why my Corporations links keep changing colors on me. I wish I knew a lot of things. I wish I knew you.

___________________________________________________________________

[1] Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp., 1944, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Tallulah Bankhead, William Bendix, Walter Slezak.

Fall and Rise

Unemployed — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 19:52:00 GMT

Your Unemployed Lawyer has spent a great deal of time over the past two weeks in a rather frantic state over the breakdown of the Corporations pages. I still don’t what happened or why, but I do know that it is slow, steady, tedious work to repair them and get them back on line. I feel like the breakdown makes me and the website look bad, but I comfort myself with the thought that not only can I restore the pages, I can return them to use in a new and improved condition.

It is not quite so with our “industry”, I think. (Have you ever wondered why the business of law is called an “industry”?). And then I think that even though I think it is not so; it may be so or similar. Similar. Yes. Definitely similar.

I believe that there has been a breakdown in the business or industry of law. For that matter, I know that virtually every industry in the country has suffered some degree of breakdown, many far worse than in the legal world. But it is our purpose here to discuss the world of lawyers, law firms, legal education, the practice of law, the business of law (two very different things in my mind) and the condition of lawyers in general. So, we will talk about the legal industry.

Like those infernal Corporations pages, it just doesn’t work the way it used to do. As with the Corporations pages, I am struggling to understand what happened and why. Similarly, I have the same uncomfortable feeling that I may never fully know but that I must take all possible steps to prevent it happening again.

I have a very bad feeling that whatever happened to the Corporations pages was my fault, though. I blame myself. I need to improve my scanty HTML skills.

I know that what happened to the legal world was not my fault. I can’t say that it wasn’t anybody’s fault, because I’m not a believer in spontaneous combustion; but I think that the blame is so widespread and nebulous that it can’t attach to anyone identifiable. This leaves no focus for blame, which, to me, is the equivalent of having nobody to blame at all. This is useless, since the good in blame is present emotional catharsis and the hope of future prevention.

Like the Corporations pages, the legal industry is still broken. We all read the news every day. Some of us wonder if we will someday pass the point when there will be more unemployed lawyers than employed lawyers. It’s a silly pastime but a little black humor never hurts.

Now we come to some differences.

First, I don’t know whether anybody but me cares at all about fixing the Corporations pages. I labor at it link by link until my back hurts so much that I have to stop. I’ve promised these resources and I feel guilty and responsible that they are missing. I want them to help someone.

On the other hand, I think everyone even remotely connected to the legal industry desperately wants to fix it. I think there’s a lot of guilt and shame and sorrow floating around out there. There’s fear and worry and uncertainty. Everybody wants to stop reading about lawyers and staff getting the axe.

Second, I know that if I keep slogging away I can put the Corporations pages back the way they were before the crash.

This is not going to happen in the world of law. It will never be the same. We have to accept this and let go. We don't have a choice.

As I read the news and talk to my friends, I feel a strange sense of history happening. Something is going on that will make our world, both in the overall and the specific, shift off its former track and become something that it never was before. I think I like this. It's a heady feeling.

Life has become unpredictable because the past no longer feels like an accurate reference. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I feel frightened and excited. We are all like settlers moving into new country. We don’t know what lies ahead, but we’re going because we hope it’s good. We’re also going because in this case it beats the alternative.

Finally, to come full circle, we fall back into sync.

I know that when I am finally finished with my slow, steady work on them, the Corporations pages will be better than they were before the crash. I have discovered that I can’t do it all at once, but I know that I can, indeed, do it.

I know that I cannot fix the legal industry. I can and do hope that these, my small contributions, may provide a tiny bit of help. But, because I am at heart a naïve and foolish optimist, I have to believe that same kind of slow, steady work will eventually make the legal world, including both users and providers, better than it was before. Obviously, this model no longer works. We need new things.

The possibilities are endless. Just think of history happening.

Big Mess

Unemployed — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 01:26:00 GMT

Please accept my deepest apologies. I know that both pages of Corporations are useless. I don't know how or why they became so, but I assume I did something wrong. I have been rebuilding them for the past three days and have just re-completed Georgia. So that leaves everything through Wisconsin, including (shudder) New York. I'm going as fast as I can and hope at least to have A-M up and running by the end of the day tomorrow. I'll keep you posted.

UL

The Birds [1]

Unemployed — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:35:00 GMT

Twitter is a fun and interesting networking site where you “hear” or “tweet” the most amazing things: people tell you exactly what they’re doing at any given moment; advertise and promote their own work; lend support to others; discuss ideas or others’ publications; and take firm stands, either for or against the ideas of others. I enjoy singing with these twittering birds. I laugh, I'm bewildered; I'm torn, which makes me think. And it's all in 140 characters or less.

Your Unemployed Lawyer has had three such interactions over the past two days; and, as they’ve all struck me so differently, I’d like to write about them here.

First, there was an exchange between me and a most delightful seeming enterprise out of New Jersey, known as Little Jimmy’s Italian Ice, which, for reasons I cannot fathom, signed up to “follow” the Unemployed Lawyer on Twitter. How intriguing! I still don’t know why an Italian Ice company wants to receive all the notices an out-of-work attorney posts on Twitter, but I was happy to tell Jim, when he wrote to me directly, that my favorite flavor was lemon. I’m still smiling about it.

Then there’s Susan Cartier Liebel, long a supporter of this website and a champion of the solo practitioner. In addition, she is getting ready to open Solo Practice University. Susan “tweeted” that she “didn’t understand how a lawyer could be unemployed”. Susan is a bold and enterprising spirit, with seemingly endless energy and a true passion for what she does. And she does it extremely well. Of course she doesn’t understand.

She doesn’t understand that some of us are afraid to practice alone or would simply miss the presence of colleagues and the excitement of brainstorming. She doesn’t understand that, even for those who have overcome this obstacle, the banks which have received so much money are not exactly putting it back in circulation right now, and that some lack the start-up funds to get an office going. Some can’t find partners that make them feel comfortable. Some have practiced for 10-15 years in areas that simply don’t transfer to solo practice (e.g., M&A, corporate bankruptcy, securities, corporate governance) and have no idea how to do a real estate closing, a will, or any of the more personal tasks a sole practitioner likely performs. I won’t say such are not more personally rewarding; but I am saying that to take them up means throwing your entire prior career away.

Add to this mix that small firms, including solo practices, are no different from BigLaw firms, in that they have to bring in business or fold. It seems to me that if every unemployed lawyer (and they number in the thousands with widely varied levels of experience) now opened a solo practice, we’d soon have a glut on the market, Darwinian selection would begin, banks would call in loans, and we would soon be back to a large number of unemployed lawyers. Just my opinion.

Finally, there is the great debate over a new public law school to be opened in Dallas, Texas at the University of North Texas. This school is due to begin classes in Fall 2010.

Your Unemployed Lawyer has been mulling over a piece on law schools for some time, but Brian Cuban (The Cuban Revolution) and Chuck Newton (Chuck Rides the Rides the Third Wave) have gotten the first licks in. I am extremely interested in this debate because I can’t imagine why anybody would willingly matriculate at any law school at this time. Not only are BigLaw firms getting rid of people, but mid size firms, and small firms, too. They just don’t get as much attention.

Brian writes persuasively, but painfully, that the proposed public law school will create only more unemployed lawyers from the minute that the first graduates receive their diplomas. He reasons that if Yale, Harvard, U of C, etc., graduates are presently unemployable, then graduates from the supposed public school will, per se, be unemployable. Unfortunately, I agree. Why make more of what nobody wants, either at Yale or at UNT?

Now, the automatic distinction between UNT and Harvard or Yale is one to which I take great exception. I have worked with many stupid, sloppy, careless, indifferent lawyers from “top” schools. Some could not even spell or write a normal sentence. I will, however, save that for another day.

Chuck writes that the UNT Law School will offer “the opportunity for a good, more cost effective, legal education in a major metropolitan area that is not served by a public law school”. I agree with that as well. I agree that education should be available to all who wish to receive it. I agree with Chuck that, in principle, this new law school, the only one of its kind in a major metropolitan area, is likely to do much good. At another time. We don’t need more lawyers right now, when many of the lawyers we have are already suffering. My opinion.

I have had the fantasy that we could put all law schools on hiatus for three years, and instantly thought of the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, let alone how many statutes, common law precedents and other legal barriers. However, if we could swing it, we could put the professors to work determining what has happened to get us here and why. They could make recommendations for change. There would be no more heartrending letters from recent grads fired before they even started work. Law firms might develop openings that would have to be filled by lawyers already out there. We could contemplate the professorial findings. My friends and I could pay our bills. Life wouldn’t have to feel so sad. We could all go out for Italian Ice at Little Jimmy’s and eat our treats on a sunny day with our feet paddling in the blue Atlantic. We could even try the blue ice. I wonder what that tastes like.

_____________________________________________________________________

[1] Universal Pictures, 1963, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren.

Rashomon [1]

Unemployed — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 21:26:00 GMT

I can’t get a certain buzzing out of my head. It’s been there all week and I just can’t stop thinking about it. The buzzing is caused by a sizeable group: Ben Stiller, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, ABC, Joaquin Phoenix, David Letterman, CBS, David Letterman again, CBS again, and myself from the airing of the Academy Awards on Sunday night to the present moment.

I will tell you the story as I experienced it, because I think I learned some new lessons about context and point of view. During the course of the Oscars, Natalie Portman and Ben Stiller came on stage to present an award. She, as usual, looked lovely. He, on the other hand, wore an obviously fake and extremely shaggy beard, a matching shaggy wig, and dark glasses. His tux looked fine, but he was chewing gum and he gave the appearance of being disoriented. I instantly gathered that it was an act and, as he played it out, I began to think it was really very funny. This was unusual for me, since he usually just annoys me.

I thought he was doing a clever routine called something like “Everything Nobody Wants to Get Caught Doing at the Oscars.” I liked it well enough to order a copy of Tropic Thunder², wanting to give old Ben another shot. I even liked it well enough mention it to my spouse again, two days later.

This produced a not-uncommon spousal reaction of bouncing up and down on the sofa and crying, “Ooooo, ooooo, ooooo, I’ve got something to show you”! Of course, having raised my curiosity, the spouse then insisted that we watch What Just Happened³ (funny, BTW) before showing me what produced the bouncing ooooos.

Trusty laptop in hand, I was told to go to David Letterman’s website and watch a video of a recent Joaquin Phoenix appearance. This I was happy to do, being an admirer of Mr. Phoenix’s work, even though I was puzzled about what it had to do with Ben Stiller at the Oscars. As I’m sure you know by now, what I saw shocked me.

I understand that Letterman was in something of a fix, unless the whole thing was a pre-planned hoax (which would be bad enough). I cannot understand why he didn’t get Phoenix off the stage when it became apparent that something was very, very wrong.

Seeing the video produced a radical about-face in my opinion of Ben Stiller’s performance. It was no longer funny in the least. It certainly wasn’t clever. For some sad reason, everyone learns to mock the weak, the sick, the poor, very early on. Any child can do it. Only after outgrowing it can you become witty and clever.

I am angry. Ben Stiller wanted to go, and did go, on stage cruelly to mock an extremely fine fellow actor while he was down. It’s pathetic and disgusting and ugly. Worse, the Academy and the ABC network allowed him to do it. What were they thinking?

Then, as if the original Letterman broadcast was not enough, Letterman and CBS decided to air the program again, four days after the Oscars. The video has been running on the internet for a couple weeks. What are they thinking? Actually, I know what they’re thinking: money and ratings. Everybody wants to watch the king turned village idiot. They’re motivated by unadulterated greed, and I can at least understand that.

Context and point of view are everything if you want to understand anything. Ignorance may feel sweet for a while, but it certainly isn’t bliss. As long as I had the Ben Stiller Oscar routine in the wrong context (i.e., a clever original skit) I liked it and it made me feel happy. But I was looking at the routine in a vacuum. Once the oooooing and bouncing stopped and the video put the routine in its proper context (i.e., mocking a colleague in trouble), I hated it and it made me feel angry and unhappy. I traded my innocent point of view for a sadder but wiser one.

I say that ignorance is not bliss because it can lead you and others into so much trouble. Suppose that I had never learned about the Phoenix/Letterman interview. Suppose I continued in my misapprehension that I had under-appreciated Ben Stiller all this time. Suppose, to ease my guilty feelings, I then ordered every Ben Stiller movie I could find and, worse, watched them all. Suppose that, in my ignorance, I began to tell everyone I know how funny I thought the Oscar routine was. I would, at the least, be condemned to hours and hours of (for me) agonizingly bad movies and an extremely bad reputation among my friends, because their point of view would then be that I liked to laugh at people with disabilities. Their context would be wrong, but there you go. Since my context was wrong as well, I wouldn’t know enough to correct them. My ignorance would also enrich Ben Stiller and reward him for bad behavior. But I wouldn’t know that. It just goes on and on.

Everything in this world depends on your context and your point of view. Have you ever listened to witnesses at a trial?

I think every trial lawyer should see Rashomon⁴. It involves four characters who each gives his or her own account of the same series of events involving sex and death. When the characters are finished, each account is so different from the others that you’d think they had been in different quarters of the globe. And yet each is recounting what he or she thought took place. It’s all context and point of view.

I think all unemployed lawyers should think a lot about context and point of view. Think very hard about how others perceive you. If you are lucky enough to get an interview, gather context about the job, the firm, and, if you can, your interviewers. Understand the Business of Law; not just the Practice of Law. I know that it seems like any of us should snap like a fish at any offer that comes our way; but we need to consider the conext of the firm making it. Check where you can for the context of the firm. You don't want to go down again.

This week’s events have helped me to understand that everything is not what it seems to be. You can’t take anything at face value. You must find out where it came from to know if it’s safe. Context and point of view change everyone’s perceptions of events. To be more certain of understanding, you must try to master both.

¹ Daiei Motion Pictures, 1950, directed by Akira Kurosawa, starring Toshirô Mifune, Machiko Kyô, Masayuki Mori, Takashi Shimura.

² Dreamworks SKG, 2008, directed by Ben Stiller, starring Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey, Jr, Nick Nolte.

³ 2929 Productions, 2008, directed by Barry Levinson, starring Robert de Niro, Robin Wright Penn, Sean Penn, Catherine Keener, John Turturro, Bruce Willis, Stanley Tucci, Michael Wincott.

⁴ Rashomon.

Something Worth Publishing

Unemployed — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:18:00 GMT

Yahoo! An unemployed friend just got a job offer after months of looking! Congratulations, Susan!

The Sorrow and the Pity [1]

Unemployed — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:11:00 GMT

The headline of this morning’s The Wall Street Journal, always a cheerful read these days, has given your Unemployed Lawyer pause. Stocks are now down 50% from their peak 16 months ago. It’s very hard to take in and it reduces me to a kind of stunned pity.

I imagine it will only wreak havoc at already havoc-ridden law firms and am certain that it’s likely to create even more unemployed lawyers. It will certainly drill even deeper the pit of misery in which we all are floundering. Think it through like a trial plan.

Start with the corner-office partners. If you have a corner office, you have likely spent most of your life working to get it. You’ve worked day and night for twenty, thirty, forty years to support your family and to provide for your retirement. In many firms, retirement is inevitable; your partnership agreement brings your earnings to a halt when you reach a certain age. You have planned or are planning for that, so you can live comfortably when it happens. You have carefully nurtured your 401(k) as a pillar of support for that plan. Now that pillar has been whacked in half and all your plans are in free-fall. You may not have enough money to retire. Seriously.

That’s a horrible place to be after working all your life. It’s a betrayal of everything you believed: work hard and you will succeed. Now, if you’re lucky, the best thing you can do is to keep working to make up the money gap. It’s a big gap. You’re worth only half what you were worth last year. You might have been better off keeping the money under your mattress.

So you need to keep your earnings up in a time when clients are few and hesitant about payment. You can’t take less because you have that 50% to make up and a relatively short time to do it in. You don’t have another thirty or forty years. You start thinking very hard about shrinking firm earnings and PPP. Let’s face it: you need the money.

You then have to think about where to get it. You can try to get it from clients, but that would be a circular attempt, since profits are down because they aren’t paying or playing in the first place. Further, you don’t have any control over your clients. You can only control yourself and yours.

That means you have to look around your own house. Your own house is the one place you have control, but it’s also the place you live. And you live there with all those others you have invited in: other lawyers, secretaries, PR people, paralegals, couriers, accountants, everybody at the firm, sheltering under your roof. You invited them in because you wanted and/or needed them. They’ve lived alongside you and worked to further your goals. You don’t personally know all of them, but you know that you are still personally responsible for them. You are at the top of the firm that issues everybody’s checks.

You feel trapped and you know that you have been betrayed again. You are going to be forced to do something extremely painful. You know that you can’t let the firm go down and you know that you can’t let yourself and your family go down. Even in your own house you really have no control when disaster makes push come to shove.

After all your work, circumstances have reduced you to a survival position. It’s you or them. There’s really no consideration necessary. Any business owner would do the same thing: save the business and save yourself. Here come the layoffs. Here come more unemployed lawyers.

But it still hurts. It hurts on a general level because you can’t help feeling that you’ve failed your business and your employees. You know that you’re condemning them to a terrible fate. Most of them will remain jobless for a very long time to come. You know that your decision will destroy some lives, but you cannot help but make it.

And then there are the absences that pinch your heart every day. The one associate who lit up with happiness every time she saw you, just because she truly liked you and truly liked her work. The IT guy who came to your office and kidded with you about your level of technical competence. The girl from the mailroom who seemed to float in and out of your office, never disturbing you. The brash, entertaining PR manager who could talk about branding in his sleep. They’re all gone; they’re all suffering; they’re probably blaming you; and your house will never feel the same.

This is the stuff that grief is made of. You have to inflict and endure all this pain and it only begins to solve the problem that set everything in motion. You’re still not back where you were. The firm is still not back where it was. There is lots of whispering in the halls and even more behind closed office doors. People are afraid to look at you. You can’t even feel at home in your own house. You're a Stranger in a Strange Land [2].

I’ve presented my trial plan and what I think I could prove. Now I’ll tell you that the only outcome I foresee is further sorrow, all around.

________________________________________________

[1] Television Rencontre, 1971, directed by Marcel Ophuls.

[2] Robert Heinlein, Putnam Publishing Group, 1961.

The Paper Chase [1]

Unemployed — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 18:25:00 GMT

My correspondence with career counselor Ron Fox (Career Planning for Lawyers) and the endless stream of news about law firms punting new hires out of the stadium has your Unemployed Lawyer thinking about law school days. I remember that I enjoyed them. I thought law school was fun! I know, I know. I’m really weird, but there you have it.

When I graduated, I knew how to state a problem clearly and then analyze it. I knew sundry and scattered things about codes and statutes. I even knew that a tort was a civil wrong for which a defendant may be held liable (not found guilty) and for which the plaintiff seeks money or equitable relief (as opposed to the punishment of jail time).That was about it; and I was one of those law review cum laude folks, so it wasn’t that I’d been doing nothing for three years.

I didn’t know anything about either the business or practice of law. Everything I know about being a lawyer, I learned on the battlefield. I was so naïve that I believed that top law firms attracted top lawyers because they were top lawyers. I had never heard of PPP. I thought firms wanted top minds and thinkers; I didn’t even think about top earners. I didn’t know anything about hourly billing rates. I thought all you had to do was to be good.

I remember being frightened of the copy machine. I didn’t, in those days before ECF, know how to file anything; paralegals and Docketing took care of that for me (that was after I learned what Docketing was). I didn’t know why I was writing all those memos; I just knew I hated them. I didn’t know anything about anything and I imagine most new lawyers still don’t. I had spent three years learning fun and interesting things, but I had done so in a vacuum. It seems to be the nature of law school.

I didn’t know how to choose a job from among the offers I received. Nobody in my school career center really knew me. My professors were of some help, but in the end, I chose on gut feeling. That means I liked the people I met at Firm A better than the ones at Firm B. It was all very scientific and well thought out.

I think a bigger problem was that nobody at school was there to work with me on what kind of choice might be best for me. I never even considered any option but a BigLaw firm. In all fairness I have to say that I am hardheaded and it might have been impossible to turn me; but nobody even showed me what else was out there.

Since I have become the Unemployed Lawyer, it has never crossed my mind to return to my school career center for help. I know it won’t be there. I am friendly with both the dean of the school and the Board President and they know it isn’t there. I believe that some schools supply more support than others, but my school is not high on the list.

Further, I’m not really any use to my school anymore. While I was working, I was great for its statistics and its pockets. My job at BigLaw was another notch in the school’s placement belt and the school could refer students to me for references and networking. My school could ask me for donations because it had a fairly good idea of what I earned, at least at first. I have worked for a few not-for-profits and you have to realize that fundraising is the life blood of those institutions.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but feel annoyed and frustrated when I receive fundraising letters about twice a month. I don’t have anything to give you; you don’t have anything to give me. Let’s just formalize it and walk away in peace.
___________________________________________________________________________

[1] Twentieth Century-Fox, 1973, directed by James Bridges, starring John Houseman, Timothy Bottoms, Lindsay Wagner.

Lost in Translation [1]

Unemployed — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:18:00 GMT

Your Unemployed Lawyer may finally be smart enough to understand that it really is better to be lucky than smart. Hard work, talent, skill, and ability may add up to nothing in the face of pure, blind luck. Luck will win out every time. The luck of the lazy, the luck of the low-key, the luck of the charming, the luck of the good-looking, the luck of being in the right place at the right time will all kick the pants off the honest and earnest. Think of Lana Turner at her legendary Schraft’s lunch counter..In the world of theatre, films, actors, coaches, and casting agents, there’s a much-used line: “It’s not you; it’s IT”. This is not at all the same thing as “It’s business, not personal.” [2] That, I have come to the conclusion, means “It’s completely personal; we don’t want you in our business; and if somebody’s going to take the fall, it’s you”. Or something to that effect. At any rate, “it’s personal enough that I have no compunctions about swatting you like a bug”. We don’t always say what we mean and we don’t always mean what we say. And we frequently hear only what we want to hear.

No. “It’s not you; it’s IT,” is a tip of the hat to the lucky and an acknowledgement that, at least for today, you are not one of them. IT means that you may have given a brilliant audition, but the director wants a small blond surfer-type while you are tall and dark. IT means that you are unconnected, while your rival for the role is the daughter of the hottest cameraman in Hollywood. IT means that, as a young actor, you get lucky enough to perform On the Street Where You Live [3] in the movie of My Fair Lady [4], but that you fly under the radar for about twenty years until you burst back on the scene as the best Sherlock Holmes the world has ever seen. IT means that you “can’t sing—can dance a little”. IT means a lot of things.

Just to clarify—IT and talent are not mutually exclusive. Think of all the very successful actors you like. They have or have had both. Think of all the employed lawyers you like. It’s the same thing. At one point or another in their careers, IT allowed them to put their talents to work. IT is a very powerful force..I suspect that a lot of unemployed lawyers today have heard the “It’s not personal; it’s business” line recently, and that they’ve heard what the speaker meant to say and, in fact did say. I suspect equally strongly that many have heard it, and that they’ve heard what the speaker actually said, while what the speaker meant was “It’s not you; it’s IT”. Some people may have even thought they heard the business/personal line, when what the speaker really said and meant was, “It’s not you; it’s IT”.

When firms let entire real estate and M&A groups go right now, it’s IT. If you’re the last one left from a group that has already sailed away, it’s IT as far as the firm goes, but probably “B not P” [5] as far as your former group. If you’ve been searching for a job for months or years, it’s IT in this environment. If you’ve recently been offered a job, it’s IT in this environment. Make sure you hear what the speaker means to say, not what you fear or hope he is saying.

Having IT is a wonderful thing. I think that everybody gets to have IT at least once in a lifetime. Maybe you’ll never be a movie star or corner office partner; but maybe your wife chose you over any other man. Maybe you pulled a drowning girl out of a frozen lake. Maybe you have friends who always stand by you..You never know when IT is going to come calling. Think of Jeremy Brett (from Freddy to Sherlock). Think of Fred Astaire; need I say more? I can’t really advise whiling your time away waiting at Starbucks. I can’t really advise just waiting for anything, even if you can still find a lunch counter. But, hey, it certainly worked for Lana.

_________________________________________

[1] Focus Features, 2003, directed by Sophia Coppolla, starring Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson..

[2] The Godfather, Alfran Productions, 1972, directed by Francis Ford Coppolla, starring Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton.

[3] My Fair Lady, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1964, directed by George Cukor, starring Audrey Hepburn, Rex Harrison.

[4] Id.

[5] Godfather.

Defection

Unemployed — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:49:00 GMT

What do you do when the general stops being your general? [1] Quite a few bankruptcy associates in New York and Chicago have to be asking themselves that question right now. Although you may not have paid much attention to the news, while hundreds of associates have lost their jobs, several prominent bankruptcy partners at several prominent firms have been playing an intricate game of hopscotch. Over the past few months, several bankruptcy partners, some of them department heads and global department heads, have left their former firms for what your Unemployed Lawyer can only assume are greener pastures (Kramer Levin to Gibson Dunn, Gibson Dunn to Milberg, Mayer Brown to Orrick, Kaye Scholer to Herrick Feinstein, Cadwalader to Greenberg Traurig, DLA Piper to Neal Gerber, and Winston to Proskauer Rose, to name a few).

As far as your Unemployed Lawyer can tell, all of the defecting partners left someone behind. From what I can gather, most of the moves in New York were individual moves that left departments more or less intact. I don’t state this as a fact—it is just what I understand based on my readings.

There is a different story in the Chicago offices. The DLA defectors traveled in a group of five, but a few of the group that was there six months ago remained at DLA, either from choice or from lack of choice. Now DLA has just laid off 80 lawyers. I don’t know if any of the bankruptcy group was affected, but I wonder if they felt like prime targets with the global department chair and most of their co-workers off on new adventures. Did DLA view them as a rag-tag group that it might as well cut or did it view them as a foundation for something new? I don’t know. I don’t work there, obviously.

Now comes the news of the Marwil/Thomas/Possinger defection from Winston & Strawn to Proskauer Rose. It’s all over the legal headlines. They’ve been doing this rather frequently and publicly over the past few years. The story begins when they made a surprise move from Katten Rosenman to Jenner & Block, bringing several people (almost their entire department), with them and jumping at least one associate to partner as part of the deal. A few years after that, they left Jenner for Winston & Strawn, leaving behind a few of their former Katten crew, some of whom shortly jumped back to Katten, taking a few Jenner associates along. Those Jenner associates then jumped from Katten to Winston, to work with Marwil and Thomas.

Now Marwil and Thomas are gone again, this time to the Chicago office of Proskauer Rose, bringing the total number of attorneys there up to twelve, the stories say. I’m not an insider, but that seems to leave at least a few Jenner-Katten followers and a few Katten-Jenner followers all alone in a Winston department that seems to have been built entirely around the presence of Marwil and Thomas. There doesn’t seem to be much chance that any of them will become Jenner-Katten-Winston-Proskauer followers or Katten-Jenner-Winston-Proskauer followers unless Proskauer intends the Chicago outpost to become a bankruptcy office. That seems unlikely because, like it or not, although bankruptcy is supposedly “hot” right now, almost all the chapter 11 filings are in Delaware.

What does it feel like to be these people? Are they blithe and carefree because they know something that we who read the papers and collect gossip do not? Are they scared to death because their department is crumbling and it might be cheaper to cut it altogether than rebuild it? They can’t help thinking that 700-800 people in the legal profession lost their jobs yesterday. They can’t help thinking what we all think: that the worst is yet to come.

As I have said, I don’t know. It just feels bad to your Unemployed Lawyer. I can’t help wondering how to react in such a situation. You can look for lateral positions, certainly; but those are very hard to come by. You can stay and hope. You can singly or jointly approach management with a proposal to run the department as is. You can ask to move to a different practice area.

Although I am using the Marwil/Thomas move as an example because it has drawn so much attention, there must be hundreds of parallel examples these days. Entire departments get cut. People jump ship in anticipation of cuts. Department sizes are reduced. In any economic situation, another firm can always make a better offer to a key player. Unless you are the key player, it’s not you that gets to decide.

Maybe that’s what I hate about this whole mess: the seeming total lack of self-determination. These days we all seem to be in someone else’s hands.
________________________________________

[1] See, White Christmas, Paramount Pictures, 1954, directed by Michael Curtiz, starring Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Danny Kay, Vera-Ellen.

Mathematics

Unemployed — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 19:47:00 GMT

I wish I had paid more attention in math classes. If I had, I might be able to explain why nothing makes sense. As it is, I am struggling. Suppose, arguensis, that A≠0 and that B≠0. Further suppose that A+B=0. It seems to me that A and B must always be opposites (e.g., 1+(-1)). As I remember it, A and B , or one and negative one, are both considered to be “real” numbers. So, we are faced with the problem that two real, substantial things that each has quantifiable value actually turn into nothing, or zero, when added together. That’s a good trick. Everybody loses. Not even the dealer wins.

As I said, I was not the best math student in the world, but I think that my equation applies to all of us unemployed lawyers and all the unemploying law firms. I’ve been thinking about this since (talk about a twist of fate) I decided to take down my Wall of Shame for large layoff law firms. I said layoffs were now the norm instead of the exception. Then McDermott laid off close to 150 people, 60 of them lawyers. For some reason, that one hit me hard. I have been trying all week to figure out why, and what I think and feel about it. I have only one answer for all three questions: grief.

I mourn the lost and the losers; both the lawyers with nowhere to go and the firms whose offices feel more and more empty and full of fear. I mourn so many opportunities lost on both sides. I mourn because no one could come up with a different equation; one that added up to more than zero.

Let us start with A, a Large Law Firm (“LLF”). LLF is peopled both by Hearts of Stone and softer people, who care and try and help and mentor and encourage. I can’t see any direction from which mass layoffs look good to either party. Bad publicity, a degree of public exposure of firm financial condition, and loss of worker bees for the Hearts of Stone. Anxiety, sorrow, guilt, loneliness for the others. Many of them will continue constantly to worry about the fate of at least one lost employee, the “B” of my equation.

Let us now take B. B is my very good friend. B is intelligent, amiable, diligent, enthusiastic—in short, he is a good lawyer who is very easy to like. B did everything right; he graduated from a good college, took a year off and then went to a good law school. Following that, he clerked for a time; then he accepted a job with a BigLaw firm. Then he got married. Then they bought a house. Then they had a baby. She felt that they needed a bigger house in the suburbs and so they bought one, as well as an extra car. He began to commute more than an hour each way to get to work. He never complained. Then they had another baby. Then he decided that he really needed to find a new job and accepted one with a slightly smaller firm. After that he got divorced, and being a wonderful father, bought a small townhouse in the suburbs to be handy for his kids at all times.

The divorce decree awarded the big house to his ex-wife, on condition that she sells it, but ordering B to pay the mortgage until a sale closed. In addition, B pays the mortgage on his own house. B’s ex-wife continually takes him back to court so she can ask the judge to give her more money, so B has to pay his attorney as well.

B gets laid off. B gets laid off with no severance package. B has been looking and looking and cannot find a job. The big house is still for sale. B still needs someplace to live. B’s ex-wife has just taken him to court again; she wants a percentage of his income! I can tell that B feels lost and sad. I can tell that he is struggling to keep up hope. He tells me that every day he feels less intelligent. He’s a fighter, but we both wonder if he’ll ever get another job. He doesn't want to leave the state because his kids are here. A solo practice is not really possible with his specialty area of practice. He would have to start all over again. I can tell that he hates the firm that laid him off. I hate the firm that laid him off.

Over the years, B made several solid friendships at A. B was a loss to A, but A was seeking a merger and wanted stronger books. B’s department was fairly easy for A to cut, and so B was set adrift with nothing but his problems. A has to live with that. A and its individuals have to remember what they have done to a living, breathing person who served it well for many years. A has to engage in the business and practice of law without B’s assistance. It is a sore loss for both of them.

I may hate the LLF that fired my friend, but I do not have a standing hatred for all LLFs. As I have tried to convey, I believe they suffer deeply in this mess, if not as personally as all the unemployed lawyers they have created. One thing I am sure I remember form math class is that equations cannot lie and that each equation has only one possible answer. There is comfort in the certainty of numbers, but I can’t stop thinking that there must be a better equation than A+B=0. If we could only think of a way to change one of the variables, we might get A+B=100, rather than ending up with everyone a loser.

Twenty Questions

Unemployed — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:27:00 GMT

1. Before you were grown up, what did you want to be when you were grown up?

2. When you were grown up, did you ever take the chance to do it?

3. If yes to question 2, why did you stop?

4. If no to question 2, why didn’t you take the chance?

5. What did you study in college?

6. Did you enjoy it?

7. When did you first decide to go to law school?

8. Why did you decide to go to law school?

9. Did you enjoy law school?

10. When you were in law school, what did you hope to do when you got out?

11. Did you get to do it?

12. Did you like it?

13. Are you still doing it?

14. Are or were you happy doing it?

15. If no to question 13 or question 14, what would you rather be doing?

16. Do you see any realistic way to make the answer to question 15 happen for you?

17. If yes to question 16, what are you going to do about it?

18. If no to question 16, what are you going to do about it?

19. If no to question 13 and yes to question 14, what is the next best thing?

20. What are you going to do about it?

True Crime[ 1]

Unemployed — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 18:23:00 GMT

The democratising possibilities of the internet are in the process of speeding the degeneration of the public sphere into a proliferation of insular nodes, each fighting a war that can never be won. Battles cannot be won on the net nor can they be lost. What remains is a solipsistic politics of ME, ME, ME: my views, my truths, my facts, my pain, my anger. Convincing others and changing the world is forgotten in favour of the perpetuation of one's own perspective. . . . The message-board and the comment-thread rarely encourage users to listen to each other, to share deeper (which usually means more complex) feelings rather than shouting at each other. To be sure, the possibilities for dialogue are there in the technology but the temptations of monologue usually prove too tempting. [2]

I intended to offer my ideas, feelings and experiences as those of one Unemployed Lawyer among an ever-increasing number of unemployed lawyers. I wanted it to be helpful. I hoped that we would find some points of identity and some points of disagreement. I admit that I wish to change the world, even if it means making one person’s day a little less troublesome; or even better, helping even just one person to find a job.

Then over the months, particularly this last month, the news became worse and worse. The unthinkable became ordinary. Lawyers now lose their jobs every day, in substantial numbers. We have come to expect it. There’s not much left to say about it. I don’t need to convince you that it’s miserable. You know it already.

I am afraid that under the constant bludgeon of unanswerable outside news, I have turned too far inward and made this blog (oh, how I hate that word) all about me, me, me. I have been bouncing around from frustration to writer’s block to monologue. I am guilty as charged. You see--even now, it is all about me.

Your Unemployed Lawyer will try to do better. My first idea is to ask those of you who read this to write to me telling about your thoughts, feelings, and experiences. You can do so in reply to this posting, or better still, send me an email (confidentiality guaranteed) and I will post your story instead of mine for a day. I don’t care if you’re an unemployed lawyer, an employed lawyer, a judge, a recruiter, somebody who loves lawyers or somebody who hates lawyers. Please help solipsistic ME make this site more and more about all of US.

_________________________________________________

[1] Malpaso Productions, 1999, directed by Clint Eastwood, starring Clint Eastwood, Isaiah Washington, Lisa Gay Hamilton, James Woods.

[2] Keith Kahn-Harris and David Hayes, The Politics of ME, ME, ME, January 9, 2009, openDemocracy: freethinking for the world.

Heart of Stone

Unemployed — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 22:46:00 GMT

“This is business; not personal.”[1] How many times have I quoted that line? How many times have I heard it? How many times have I stupidly offered it as comfort, just like the imaginary killers with whom it originated? Have I become part of a 37-year generation of schizophrenics and multiple-personalities to whom this statement truly deep-down makes sense? Take it from the Unemployed Lawyer—things do not happen randomly in law firms. Most of what happens to you happens because you are you. How much more personal can you get?

And yet, consider the most successful lawyers you know. The corner office guys, because they are mostly guys. The Management Committee. The Executive Committee. These are the guys who say, “Get me an associate,” the same way they would say, “Get me a stapler”. These are the same guys who: a) never look you in the eye; or b) always look you in the eye so that you won’t think that they’re the kind of guy who never looks you in the eye. The top operators can coo and cluck over your poor little tragedies fifteen minutes after signing the papers that will kill your career. These are the guys who rise and rise while you lie bleeding in the dust. These are the guys who make headline news. These are the guys who control the Business of Law. These are the guys who really don’t care as long as business is good. “The reason the above-named folks are better than you is because you got feelings. Feelings get you killed”.[2]

'"A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections--a mere heart of stone”.[3] The really successful lawyers personally known to your really unsuccessful Unemployed Lawyer seem to have managed, not the true Heart of Stone, but belief in the slippery, crazy duality of, “This is business; it’s not personal”.[4] I know some former colleagues who would say that the Really Big Guys have completely mastered the Heart of Stone, but I disagree. The Really Big Guys go home at night and love their families and friends like anybody else does. They have the whole gangster thing down pat: Heart of Stone in the Office and Vito Corleone playing among the tomato plants with his grandson when at home. Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang.[5].

Where does that leave those of us who can’t manage the juggling act; who simply can’t develop multiple personalities? We’re certainly at a disadvantage in the Business of Law because we can and do get hurt. Feelings get you killed? We want to please and want friendship and affection in return. This is deadly, because those things are generally not on offer and not to be trusted when they are. Worse, people will think you’re crazy if your feelings show, so you have to contain, contain, contain. For all BigLaw’s concern with racial, religious, and ethnic diversity, it is still, and seemingly always will be, a private club. Its doors are open to those who can conform and contain. On the surface, every firm looks different, but on the inside they are all the same—and they like it that way.

Maybe this chill continuity is a good thing. I am not able to judge. I take everything personally. I take it personally that I can’t find a job, when I know that somewhere, somebody has just found one. I take it personally that I don’t have a job in the first place. I take it personally that the Really Big Guys and the Business of Law will never really like or want me—just because I take it personally that they don’t.

“There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought has been ‘Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself,’ while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have any chance to look out for themselves.”[6] The jungle atmosphere at many law firms; the kill or be killed attitude fostered, I believe, by taking nothing personally, by giving nothing personally, has brought the Business of Law to its present state of failures, layoffs, and firm closings. It’s much harder to fire someone you care about. It’s much easier to ask everybody to take a pay reduction if they actually care about the people whose jobs might be otherwise lost. When you’re playing for the team, you’re giving from the heart. When every man’s for himself, then there is no strength in numbers. You’ll have only a melee, and not a sound battle formation. “Things fall apart; the center will not hold”.[7] Not that there was any center to begin with; not that you can start building one on a Heart of Stone.

___________________________

[1] The Godfather, Alfran Productions, 1972, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton.

[2] Appaloosa, New Line Cinema, 2008, directed by Ed Harris, starring Ed Harris, Viggo Mortenson, Renee Zellweger, Jeremy Irons.

[3] Charles Darwin, Letter to T.H. Huxley, July 9, 1857.

[4] Godfather.

[5] Warner Bros. Pictures, 2005, directed by Shane Black, starring Robert Downey, Jr., Val Kilmer, Michelle Monaghan.

[6] Woodrow Wilson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1913.

[7] William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, 1921.

Starting Over [1]

Unemployed — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 21:31:00 GMT

What do I say? What do you want to hear? You’re probably sick of me. I am sick of myself. I am sick that for days I have not been able to cull out one hopeful or happy piece of news to dwell upon. I have not seen one thing from which an Unemployed Lawyer may draw hope.

Everything that has come my way suggests that there are no jobs and won’t be any jobs. Everything whispers that this profession will never be the same, which certainly some would see as a bright spot. I don’t know. I’m not certain that flattening the shore with a tidal wave is the best way to start rebuilding. What about all those set adrift or washed out to sea? I think many of us will have to find a new island and start over, because we simply can’t get back to where we came from.

Some of us may feel liberated. I hope so. I hope someone finally has the chance to write a novel, go on the stage, study Spanish dancing, ride the rodeo, join the circus, join the Peace Corps. I hope this is somebody’s chance to do what he or she always really wanted to do, but wrote off in favor of stability and practicality. There’s might little of either left in the business of law, so you might be better off to get your headshot and start hanging around agency offices. At least, that’s full time employment.

I know you didn’t choose to be in this position. No more did I. In that, we are all unfortunate.

The lucky and exciting corollary is that having been dumped on the shores of nowhere, we get to choose where we will go from here. What do we have to lose? A good job in a stable profession?

___________________________________________________________

[1] Century Assocs., 1979, directed by Alan J. Pakula, starring Burt Reynolds, Candice Bergen, Jill Clayburgh.