The Timesheet: June 2006

Rees, an honors graduate of Harvard Law School, spends two-thirds of his time cartooning and devotes one-third to his law practice, in which he represents over 300 cartoonists. Pladek, who will be contributing his comic, Juris (which is drawn by German graphic artist Reinhard Calieb) as well as humorous articles (in a column aptly entitled "Oddservations"), is a "recovering lawyer," Special Sections Editor for New Jersey Lawyer and folk singer. Rees\' website is at www.Stus.com; Pladek\'s is at www.JurisComic.com.

Says the irrepressible Rees, "I\'m excited to be part of The Timesheet, but even more excited that I no longer have to fill out timesheets." Pladek, not to be outdone, observed: "They asked for a pithy comment. I asked if everyone at Billable Hour had a lisp."

So check out Stu's views, Juris Comic and Bob's first piece, Hi-Tech and the Future of Legal Gigs. We're sure you'll get a kick out of them!

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No? Well, too bad. That is just what you need and I am here to tell you. Because when we can't balance our work and personal time, at least we can make them a little (or a lot) better.

First of all you need more flow. What's that? That is the joy that comes while doing activities that totally engage your mind and soul. If you don't believe me, read psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's books Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement With Everyday Life (Masterminds Series).

Stop and think about it: when do you feel completely in tune with what you are doing? When do you lose track of time because you are lost in your activity? When you figure out what it is that you most enjoy doing, organize your life so that you get to do more of it.

Lawyers are only human
See to it that you are meeting your basic human needs. Oh sure, you need food, water, rest, and sunshine. You also have basic social needs as a human being one among others: autonomy, celebration, integrity, interdependence, physical nurturance, play and spiritual communion. Not all in one day, but be sure to get some every month.

Be tolerant and flexible
Perfection is humanly impossible. Repeat after me: Perfection is statistically impossible. I cite W. Edwards Deming, the father of quality control and management, for this premise (www.deming.org/).

Excellence is possible. Quality is achievable. "Professional" is quality and excellence. What will it feel like to stop pushing yourself beyond your endurance in the insane rush to perfection? Learn to savor. Bask. Be thankful. Give thanks. Marvel. Luxuriate.

Now, not later.
Nurse and coach Cathy Hart (www.harttweb.com/empowerissues) tells us:"To savor is to be fully alive in the moment. When we savor, we use all of our senses to fully perceive what we are currently experiencing. Though being present in the moment is part of savoring, we savor not only in the moment. We savor when we anticipate sharing something we relished with someone else."

Savoring can be experienced in four dimensions:

• Basking: receiving praise and congratulations
• Thanksgiving: expressing gratitude for blessings
• Marveling: losing the self in the wonder of the moment
• Luxuriating: indulging the senses

Cheryl Stephens, Mentor/Muse, is a retired lawyer who can't seem to stop teaching, writing, and bouncing around to speaking engagements. She can be reached at email@cherylstephens.com.

If you\'ve ever done this yourself (and I don\'t recommend it), you know that reading through your cell phone bill is like reading through a novel by Dostoevsky. By the time you make your way through it, you are bored, confused and suicidal. That was certainly the case for me as I unsuccessfully tried to determine which calls were "peak" and which ones were "off peak" and why my "free anytime minutes" seem to be anytime other than when I actually use my phone.

Perhaps, even more confusing was the fact that my bill seemed to indicate that I had actually "saved" money last month. I received a "shared usage adjustment" (whatever that is) of $187.60. Without this adjustment, it appears that my bill would have been more than $450. However, somehow I didn\'t feel like very lucky, considering that, in addition, to being billed for each call, I also paid a "monthly recurring access charge" and three separate "national team share add-on" charges. Now, don\'t get me wrong. I like to be a team player, but not when it costs me $139.30.

Finally, my cell phone seems to come with an inordinate number of built-in taxes; a federal excise tax, a federal universal service assessment, a federal programs cost recovery assessment, state and county excise taxes, a state 911 tax, a state PUC user fee, and a state universal service fund charge. After charging all of these taxes and assessments, I can\'t believe that the federal and state governments have the nerve to ask me to fill out an income tax return. What could I possibly have left after paying my cell phone bill—the loose change in the ashtray of my car?

I must confess that, after reading through my statement, my initial inclination was to boycott paying my cell phone bill until my provider sent over a comprehensible bill (or loaned me the money to pay it). Yet, considering that past "boycotts" against my mortgage lending, the cable company and VISA were unsuccessful, I decided to pay the bill (well, most of it). I also decided that I would take a cue from my cell phone company and start sending my clients equally incomprehensible bills.

Let\'s face it. The only thing more annoying than having to deal with our clients is getting them to pay their bills in a timely fashion (i.e., within our lifetimes). I suspect that one reason for this difficulty stems from the fact that our clients can actually understand their bills. As a result, they are apt to question why it took you 2.3 hours to review a trust indenture or why they were billed for an entire conference call. "Hey, I\'m not paying you for the whole call! We spent the first ten minutes talking about the Pistons game."

This wouldn\'t happen if they received bills containing variable charges for "peak" and "off peak" legal services, miscellaneous charges and adjustments, and various obscure taxes, like the "Federal Res Ipsa Loquitor Tax" or the "State Habeas Corpus Relief Tax." After spending the better part of a morning reading through one of your bills (and popping handfuls of Excedrin tablets like popcorn), your client would decide that it was easier just to pay your bill without further question.

If you make your bill confusing enough, your clients will probably insist upon flat-fee billing. In fact, you\'ll probably receive a call from a client saying, "Rather than sending me a bill each month, why don\'t you just go in and empty out my bank account on the first of each month? It will be easier for all involved and save me tons on Excedrin!" And without the hassle of sending out monthly bills, you will have more time for the really important things in life, like spending time with your family, friends and those delightful people in the mall who will gladly help you to switch your cellular service plan.

Sean Carter, Humorist at Law, is a syndicated columnist and popular speaker who presents Comedic Legal Education programs for law firms, in-house legal departments and bar associations across the country. Sean is also the author of If It Does Not Fit, Must You Acquit? Your Humorous Guide to the Law.

Now, some issues of The Advance Sheet will also feature special limited-time offers on Billable Hour^TM timepieces. It could be $5 off your order, or free shipping, or maybe a special bonus gift. Each special offer will last for only a few days, so make sure you read The Advance Sheet as soon as it hits your e-mail inbox!

In the meantime, you can take advantage of our Moms, Dads and Grads promotion if you order any time before June 18:

In 1981 I bought the Sinclair Z-81, a 2K machine. Or, as we\'d say today, a stupid watch.

It utilized a then state-of-the-art Z-80A processor, weighed 12 ounces, was upgradable to 64K (I had the 16K upgrade), hooked up to the television and had both memory and cassette ports. You could even get a thermal printer for the thing, if you could stand the faint aroma of burning plastic. Its operating system: ROM Basic. Its cost: $99.

I was thrilled learning the rudiments of programming, creating a loop and watching my screen fill with "BOB IS A FRIGGIN\' GENIUS BOB IS A FRIGGIN\' GENIUS BOB IS A FRIGGIN\' . . . ." A practicing attorney at the time, my $99 investment (plus $49 for the memory upgrade) and subsequent reading of most of the accompanying manual made me the computer expert in our 25-person corporate law department. I could talk the talk. I could even type the talk.

Now a tech maven, I talked the general counsel into setting up our first document management system, naming it the Legal Information and Retrieval System (LIARS). They saw the humor, but like so many of my other borderline-professional suggestions, rejected it, renaming it "PLIARS," the P being the first initial of our company, a large life insurance giant headquartered in Newark

Times changed. Quickly. Somewhere after Commodore\'s 64 unit and shortly before IBM\'s PC-junior—around 128 RAM—I lost my edge, and any understanding of how computers worked. My best friend who spent years as a COBOL programmer, software engineer (including a stint at Timex creating the famous color 48k Timex-Sinclair product—what, you never heard of it? Join the club), director of computer operations and working under several other, similarly bogus titles, tells me I\'m hardly alone: he doesn\'t really know how they work, either. Apparently there are about eight people in the world that do. For our sake, we better hope that\'s all they know.

Computing power, per Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel, follows an empirical exponential law, doubling every 12 to 24 months. Through it all, lawyers have been one of the slowest groups to embrace the change.

In one of those in-between careers, I worked hawking yet another simple document management system to small- and mid-size firms. To their faces, I\'d empathize in kindly terms, understanding their privacy, security, control and management suspicions. Those were code words for "You\'re pretty stupid when it comes to technology, aintcha? And as lawyers, you hate being stupid, dontcha?" Stupid myself, I knew from whence I spoke.

So it\'s most interesting to watch the profession forced to move from voice and paper-based communications to instant messaging and e-mail attachments. By 2010 virtually all courts, at all levels, will require pleadings, briefs and electronically attestable exhibits be submitted electronically. Mock jury trials can be and are conducted online, saving considerable cost. It\'s not far-fetched to imagine real online juries handling real cases, web-ex seminar-like, power-pointed and viewed through split screens, questions typed in text, or reduced to text through sophisticated voice-recognition systems, submitted through a designated foreperson. With that kind of setting in the offing, advocacy will require very different skill-sets than today. Physical presence, a booming voice, an attitude—some of this will survive. But organizational skill, dazzling tech demonstrations and the arts of oral and written persuasion may be just as or more important.

Lawyers and judges alike will fight these changes, especially taking the court case out of the courthouse, but in the end they will lose, because infrastructure costs, security costs, travel, parking and lost-time costs, back-of-the-court snoozes and crummy cafeteria sandwiches won\'t be counterbalanced by a noticeable loss of justice. More than 95 percent of cases never make it to court anyway. We\'ll be voting online, for real and for major offices.

I suspect large firms will eventually collapse of their own bloat; at least large physical repositories of lawyers will. Firms may employ thousands, but seldom will more than 10 actually get together. And that will be space rented by the hour. As voice, video and text merge, there will be more fee-splitting, more specialization, more multi-firm involvement. An entirely new form of the practice is being created.

That\'s my 2 bytes worth, anyway.

Bob Pladek is Special Sections Editor for New Jersey Lawyer. This article is reprinted with their permission which wasn\'t overly begrudgingly given. Bob\'s views, thankfully, are entirely his own. You can reach him at Robert.pladek@njlnews.com.

To view Juris Comic, click here

The last two books we featured, (The Firm of the Future: A Guide for Accountants, Lawyers, and Other Professional Services and Transforming Practices: Finding Joy and Satisfaction in the Legal Life) are pretty serious stuff. We thought it was time to feature something lighter.

As described on Amazon.com:

By turns hilarious and horrifying, Double Billing is a clever and sobering expose of the legal profession. Writing with wit and wisdom, Cameron Stracher describes the grueling rite of passage of an associate at a major New York law firm. As Stracher describes, Harvard Law School may have taught him to think like a lawyer, but it was his experience as an associate that taught him to behave—or misbehave—like one. Double Billing is a biting glimpse into the world of corporate law from the perspective of the low man on the totem pole.

In Double Billing, Cameron Stracher reveals a shocking nonfiction account of the ordeal of a young associate at a major Wall Street law firm. Fresh out of Harvard Law School, Stracher landed a coveted position at a high-powered corporate law firm and thus began his grueling years as an associate, a dreaded rite of passage for every young attorney. Only about five percent survive long enough to achieve the Holy Grail of partnership in the firm.

As the author vividly describes, law school may teach you how to think like a lawyer, but it's being an associate that teaches you how to behave like one. Or misbehave. Stracher doesn't mince words about the duplicitous behavior and flagrant practices of many lawyers in his firm, which is one of the premier partnerships in America.

In a stylish and witty manner that has earned him comparison to an early Philip Roth, Stracher does for the legal profession what Michael Lewis's Liars' Poker did for the financial industry. The result is a tell-all glimpse into the cutthroat world of corporate law from the perspective of the low man on the totem pole.

The facts were these: A grandmother backing her car out of the driveway hit and injured her nine year old granddaughter. The grandmother was the sole custodian of the child. The mother had previously had the custody of the child taken from her, and the child had no other living relative.

A lawyer attempted to sue on the mother's behalf, but ultimately the Supreme Court, Ulster County declared that the mother had no standing. The attorney to whom the headline referred had obtained a retainer from the grandmother, to defend her against the mother's claim and to assert a claim on behalf of the granddaughter as her legal guardian. The Supreme Court opined that the grandmother's lawyer "wore too many hats." But the grandmother, not the lawyer, was the one with dual (or dueling) chapeaux—being both the guardian of the child and the tortfeasor. A woman can't be too thin or too rich according to conventional wisdom,¹ but apparently she can have too many hats!

Actually, the lawyer had too many ties—his tie to the grandmother and his tie to the granddaughter. The lawyer understood that he had a conflict, so he asked to have a guardian ad litem appointed for the granddaughter, which the judge ultimately did. However, the lawyer asked, when he was stung by criticism for his tactics "How do you bring this lawsuit?" Only the legal guardian of the child can bring the action, but she is the only defendant, too.

The lawyer was perplexed because if you can't sue yourself who can you sue? Recently, Al Goldstein, publisher of the pulp philosophical journal Screw, was convicted of harassing his longtime secretary, prompting the parallel inquiry "If you can't harass your own secretary, who can you harass?"

The case of the grandmother with dos sombreros raises some perplexing questions. How do you get into court if not with the grandmother as the moving party? Where the ultimate bearer of the loss will be some insurance company, is the suit against public policy because of the likelihood of collusion between the grandmother and her ward? If you represent the plaintiff and defendant in the same action, how do you structure your fees? If clients can waive jurisdictional defenses, can they waive conflicts of interest as well?

Perhaps the grandmother said to the attorney she wanted to cross claim, and he replied "Suit yourself," and she just misheard him. How would you bring this action on behalf of the granddaughter? Readers' replies are invited.

¹Or in the case of Imelda Marcos, never have too many shoes.

James M. Rose is an attorney and legal humorist in White Plains, New York. The Supreme Court Jester is a collection of Mr. Rose's articles in book form.