simplify

High-tech, high-touch.
I figure that if someone is in my office, it's because their life is basically in the crapper. My electronics and desk are all glass and black, so I quite deliberately added a few calming touches to my lair.

My favorite touch is the little tabletop fountain directly behind my desk. One of my partners inspired me to do this, and we in turn have inspired a third partner to add a tabletop fountain in her office. I have added to mine a rock that has the word "Simplify" carved directly into the rock. How this will help me I don't know, but hey! it's a goal to aspire to.

I dropped the Treo in the fountain while taking this picture, but although it did not improve the picture it also did not appear to harm the Treo.

On the other hand, since I am after all a lawyer, perhaps I should add fog.

b-rate me!

Scales-of-justice streetlight at the RJC

After over two decades of flying under the radar of Martindale-Hubbell, I have received my first peer review rating. In order to display the service mark of the ratings indicating that I have been bestowed a rating, I would have to execute this horrendous acknowledgement. Presumably, everytime I display the service mark. Hm. This shows signs of promise. They do say I can use it on a "lawyer home page." Interestingly enough, I can indicate that I have a rating, but I can't tell you the reader, because you might not be a lawyer, what that rating is. Notice that I have not done so. I also have to tell you this:

"The Martindale-Hubbell Peer Review Icon is a service mark of Reed Elsevier Properties Inc., used under permission from Reed Elsevier Properties Inc. in accord with the terms and conditions established by Martindale-Hubbell."

in order to show you this:




I have never been asked to provide rating information on another lawyer, nor did I personally request this rating. It looks like they have Field Representatives to do their scouting.

Too strange.

street cred

The courtroom is a world where telling the truth can be a Machiavellian strategic move.

My client was being cross-examined today on a minor point, using his bank records to establish an embarrassing expense. My learned colleague asked my guy to admit that he began incurring this expense in May 2004, which he did readily.

After my client was safely and completely off the stand, I noticed that the bank records actually established that the minor but embarrassing expense began in March 2004. Neither my client nor the OC had noticed this.

I immediately insisted that I disclose to the court the earlier date. In fact, I stood up and offered a stipulation to "correct the record."

Now, when OC started flogging this expense later, and exclaiming about the earlier date, I leaned back, believing that my client was immunized from harm on this point.

As I read my state's Rules of Professional Conduct, this disclosure was technically unnecessary because the fact was not material.

However. I determined this only after the fact. In my world, my credibility is always material. And there is a relationship, although it is not direct, between my client's credibility and mine.

Update: When I checked my horoscope for today after dragging myself home, it said:

"Today is a 7 - You're gaining respect, even from people who don't agree with you. This is because you stand up for your principles. You have some good ones."

Well. There you have it.

client better behavior wheel

With a few minor modifications, this shows signs of promise.

trial skill sets

A better view of the RJC, through its garden in the front.

It is striking to me how much different the process of eliciting direct examination answers is from eliciting cross-exam answers. Because the product, ideally, should look and sound much different, the process of its creation is or should be different.

In direct examination, I set my ego aside (yes, it can be done). The witness becomes the star, and I fade into the background. If I can get my witness to feel like he or she is having a conversation with me, and show traces of actual personality (difficult in the highly stylized world of the courtroom), my work is done.

The best description I have ever read of the process of prepping a witness was written by a layperson:

And so I learned about the wide gulf that separates the facts from the truth. Rader and I had a dozen similar conferences over the next five months. "Preparing testimony," it was called. WIth each session, my admration for Rader's legal skills increased. * * * I was fascinated by the testimony that was produced by our Socratic dialogues. Rader had it all written on yellow legal tablets, and I observed that no one word of it was perjured. There were qualifying phrases here and there . . . but there wasn't a single lie in it. And yet it wasn't the truth.

my litigation trifecta

In the last month I have been in trial in three different courthouses in King County where Superior Court trials are conducted. The lousy photograph above is the backside of the Regional Justice Center in Kent. It has lovely artwork inside, and it was a lovely day. Possibly one more day of trial on Monday.

fred's trailer?

First inkjet faxes, now this. Scroll down, I'm towards the bottom. Image maintenance is so difficult over the Internet.

faust and the buddha

For light reading while I have been in trial I have been reading Mark Epstein's Open to Desire, which is a book arguing that a close reading of Freud and the Buddha on desire (of all sorts) supports a proposition that desire is good, in contrast to conventional Western AND Eastern religious thought that desire is bad and renunciation the path to salvation.

That's a pretty quick summary of the book, but my purpose here is not to review the book but reflect on whether the distinction between desire and craving might be a valid one.

As I understand Buddhist thought, particularly as described by Epstein, the ability to tolerate unsatisfied desire, and the ability to tolerate the disappointment one feels following the satisfaction of desire, can constitute the path to enlightenment. Epstein advocates applying mindfulness and equanimity to desire in the same way that one applies them to any other object of meditation.

And that makes sense, because the object of contemplation is ultimately the world. One can crave the world, or one can reject the world, but the Middle Way--the hardest--is to enjoy the world, and then to let it go.

And that put me in mind of Faust.

My recollection of Goethe's version of the story of Faust, which I've never really liked, is that Mephistopheles and Faust make a bet that Faust can never be presented with an event in life that makes him say, "Oh, moment, stay! You are so fair!" My recollection was that Faust says this as an old man when he catches sight of Gretchen, but that Gretchen ends up redeeming him in the way of many old stories.

The truth about the Faust story is more interesting, although hopelessly muddled (talk about your loose baggy monsters). Faust never does reach the point, it appears, where he utters that statement.

My question, upon reflecting on this story, is: using Epstein's analysis, were Faust to say, "Oh, moment, stay!" would he be experiencing craving, at that point? Or would he merely (I say ironically) be fully experiencing desire? And does an attitude of "appreciative joy," or mudita, counteract craving? Is mudita, therefore, an aspect of desire?

More to the point: in composing an email tonight I inadvertently wrote "persistent meditative state" when I meant "persistent vegetative state." Perhaps it's time to go to bed.

what's the big idea?

Here's a presentation coach who writes about identifying the Big Idea for your presentation in a way that is readily applicable to trial practice.

I think it's a bad idea to go trial with a Big Idea that boils down to "Mom Bad, Dad Good" or "Dad Bad, Mom Good" as the case may be, but some of my opponents' thinking doesn't appear to get much beyond this.

now this is truly strange

A webpage called Goddess of Fax Machines has linked itself to my blog.

What I find strange is that the link implies that I might be a goddess of inkjet fax machines. I won't go quite so far as to say that I find this insulting. Anyone who knows me, however, will confirm that my heart belongs to Laserjet.

a corrective

After too much Radical Honesty you can enter the Forgiveness Project.

appealing to the brat in me

The local New Age tabloid has an article about Radical Honesty as espoused by the inimitable Brad Blanton. Blanton is self-described as "white trash with a Ph.D" (U. Tex, 1965--we're not talking about Summit University here, folks).

To be honest, this concept fascinates me. Blanton says:

You can't be "secretly" honest. Being "honest with yourself" is simply not separable from being honest with another. A person who says, "I was honest with myself, but decided not to tell..." is just another miserable liar and will have to suffer the consequences. Sharing honestly, with others present, is the way we can have an authentic relationship with another person.

Blanton believes that " the best way to reduce stress, make life work, and heal the past" is to tell the truth. Of course, telling the truth can reduce one's own stress but increase someone else's, and you may end up making your own work at the expense of another. I wonder if Radical Honesty fans function in society as enfants terrible, happily leaving destruction and suffering their wake. There is further a difference (to be fair it's one that Blanton himself draws) between honesty and what I might call "vicious venting."

My experience with many years of actually saying what I think is that, even when people are paying me a princely sum in order to ask me what I think, they don't seem to be able to hear it. Some of the most difficult moments I have had in my career have been situations in which I have told clients that they wanted me to take positions that I felt had no merit and that therefore they had to find themselves new counsel. I've probably shocked a few people by handing them their money back, but lawyers are not for sale as much as the general public thinks.

Go ahead. Ask me what I think. But for Heaven's sake, don't argue with me when I answer. I will be honest.

stats

So far "too dumb to be trusted with email?" has driven the most traffic to my site.

zen and the art of superscalar maintenance

In this month's issue of the ABA Journal, Steven Keeva addresses "A Meditative Perspective" in a how-I-spent-my-summer-vacation article on a lawyers' meditation retreat at Spirit Rock. This would be a little too far afield for me; my usual stomping ground is Cloud Mountain.

The best thing about this superficial article was a reference to Dennis Warren, a Sacramento-based lawyer who has thought deeply about stress and performance. Here's a quote I pulled out from that link:

We are frequently unable to control the way our cases develop or their outcomes. But we always have the ability to choose how we respond to these developments, rather than merely reacting automatically and unconsciously. If we can make conscious and skillful judgments and choices, rather than mechanically responding from habit and emotion, the results will naturally take care of themselves.

I suppose Keeva is trying to educate the unmindful lawyerly masses about basic concepts of meditation, but the article failed to satisfy me.

I was chatting today with an expert witness who happens to be a psychologist and found myself struck by the peculiar insight that litigation practice encourages living in the future--monitoring deadlines--and not the present moment. He thought was pretty funny that being in the present moment could detract from the practice of law. I haven't decided yet whether technology returns me to the present or plants me even more firmly in the immediate future, so that I am always slightly ahead of myself. In either case, however, I strive always to make conscious and skillful judgments and choices, no matter the pain that inheres in a situation.

advanced time matters

Today's cheesy artwork emerges from TimeMatters's internal workings, picked up by Picasa's scan of my entire hard drive.



TimeMatters has a feature that I've been mulling over for the last eighteen months or so. No need to rush into these things. Actually, it's two phone features: the first is an autodialer for any phone number entered into the DB. Just click on the little telephone icon next to the phone field and away she goes. It can also be configured to pop up a new Phone Form with timer running to make it easier for me to take electronic notes on all my phone conversations.

The second phone feature is a bit more complex. When an external call is transferred to me from our switchboard, Caller ID information displays briefly. There is said to be a way to get TimeMatters to capture the Caller ID information in DDE form, match the phone number with the phone number string and, if there is a match, pop up a new phone form with the Contact name and, if one is associated, the Matter name already filled in and that magical timer running.

That at least is the theory. The practice is that I had two phone guys at my desk for about four hours the day before yesterday, and they couldn't get either direction of this alleged productivity enhancement up and consistently running. I have over seven hundred bucks invested in telephone guy time, a bunch of zip files and folders all over my computer desktop, and nothing to show for it so far.

But it sounded like such a good idea.