In My 60 Years
By Jacob A. Stein
Years ago I envied lawyers who stood up in court and announced, with
great indignation, “In my 30 years of practice, I have never heard
anything like what my opponent just said to the court.” Here was
a dramatic closer that compelled attention and demeaned that young upstart
who was citing all those cases.
Well, October marked my 60th year of practice, and I think I have earned
the prescriptive right to stand up and declare, “In my 60 years
of practice, …” for whatever effect it may have. However,
I have yet to do so.
I was speaking with a friend who also is a member of the 60-year club.
We questioned whether age denies us what it takes to read documents,
court rules, fine print, and appellate opinions that run more than 10
pages. Do we still have that vigor of mind?
This friend referred me to Justice Felix Frankfurter’s diary
dated December 9, 1947. Frankfurter wrote that he had just visited with
Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. The chief, although advanced in
years, impressed Justice Frankfurter with his vigor of mind, prompting
Justice Frankfurter to note: “He speaks with force, he marshals
his argument with power and his old habit of precision of detail is
evident and when he has occasion to refer to a book or an argument,
he produces it, he is sure and precise.”
My friend still has his vigor. He says he was trained very early to
make no statement of fact without documentation. He was taught to divide
lawyers into two groups. There are those who, when they undertake an
assignment, enable you to cross off that item from your list. And then
there are those who, when they make a similar commitment, require you
to make a notation to follow up.
My friend and I wondered whether we could identify a pattern as we
recounted the day-to-day business of meeting with clients, filing papers,
making deadlines, missing deadlines, having some luck, and missing some
opportunities.
I offered up a comment by British journalist and author Malcolm Muggeridge.
In his book The Sun Never Sets, Muggeridge writes about the events
in Britain in the years leading up to World War II, looking for a pattern
that explains how and why things happened as they did:
The present is always chaos, its prophets always
charlatans, its values always false. When it has become the past, and
may be looked back on, only then is it possible to detect order underlying
the chaos, truth underlying the charlatanry, inexorable justice underlying
the false values. That man had to speak and that man to be silent, that
man had to rise to power and that man fall, that victory had to be won
and that defeat suffered. Looked back on, the past makes a pattern,
every element of which, however trivial, is necessary to the whole;
each incident, each word spoken, the tilt of each hat, the modulation
of each voice, falling into its place. Then it is apparent that nothing
takes place aimlessly, no one exists aimlessly; that truly the hairs
of each head have been numbered, and the fall of each sparrow to the
ground, foreseen.
Lawyers look for patterns. There is one pattern we identify that commenced
in the early 1960s. It was the creation of the professional corporation
statutes, adopted state by state. These statutes gave us the right to
incorporate so that we may receive a tax benefit that only was made
available to corporations. However, there was an interesting throw-in:
corporate protection against personal liability. As the years went by,
those few words put an end to the civility of the general partnership.
This mindset gradually moved the practice of law into the culture of
the marketplace.
We went from IBM Selectrics, carbon paper, five onion-skin copies,
and low overhead to computer technology, 65 percent overhead, and 200-page
partnership agreements, providing for the expulsion of a partner “for
no reason.” The only action that remains to complete the pattern
is a public offering. I read somewhere that law firms in Australia have
done something like that, and the solicitors in Great Britain are looking
into it.
There continues to be a thriving practice that is separate from the
marketplace. It is made up of lawyers who vindicate the constitutional
rights of people, lawyers in small firms who practice in the counties
surrounding the big cities, and specialty lawyers in domestic relations,
personnel matters, and probate matters. However, it is the marketplace
firms that define the big-time practice.
What does one learn from years of practice? Is there advice that can
be passed on to those on the way up, apart from a few platitudes? The
only advice I have come up with is that you must make your own mistakes
and you must learn your own limitations.
Perhaps the following advice may also work for you:
–Marcus Aurelius
(Stein’s translation from the Latin)
And my favorite:
–Oliver Wendell Holmes
Reach Jacob A. Stein at jstein@steinmitchell.com.
