Where did the individualist go? The old bastards who thumbed their noses at convention have disappeared. We are becoming gray, for color makes us a target of the middle class, and if we aren't propitiatve to that mass of nothingness, we could be exiled and not make money.
This is an old rant which I have rewritten on September 18, 2007.
Where are the rascals?
One of the problems with law business is there aren=t any rascals left. It seems they have either died or been killed off by the scourge of mediocrity. When I started in the law in 1960, the law was a real art, practiced by a wide variety of men. I say men, for a woman lawyer was an anomaly. There were two women in my class of 125 who started law school in 1957, and we graduated only 25 of that group (there was no bar exam for the years after WWII and schools did the thinning out), and no women graduated in my class.
These men grew up in times before the great leveler, TV and economic necessity, had squashed the livingness and life from the youth, before the drug industry created Ritalin and a disease to be treated by it, before people drugged themselves rather than confront their problems, before there was so much noise in the environment when people could actually observe what was around them and found important things to see and feel in the day, the night and the morning. They seemed to be more aware, and unafraid of being themselves, and unafraid of being different.
There were ragged, tough men, and I mean ragged in the sense of living lives of their own, on the edge, individual, non-conformists, who shook their fist at the system and did it their way. There were men who laughed at themselves and at the pathetic efforts of climbers whose lives were spent in pursuit of money and conformity, which seems to be the norm of todayCpursuing conformity and money. There were men who cared less how they looked, as long as they were free to be and do it their way. Fear had not overtaken the profession as it has now.
Fear owns the lawyer of today, though most may deny it, but it is there, a sickly, flickering warning to those who can see it. Most are afraid of being found out that they are not brilliant immortals, all knowing, able to handle everything. Afraid of being different, looking different, talking differently for they may miss an opportunity, with the idea that opportunity only comes if one looks like, talks like and smells like everyone else. The mantra of today=s boomer lawyer is to avoid being different rather than just the opposite as it was in my day.
Yes, there were ragged men, ragged in dress and disposition for nobody felt it necessary to look slick or patterned after one another. Now you can=t tell the plaintiff from the defense lawyer, criminal defense lawyer from the prosecutor, or bank lawyer. They all look like the three piece, dark suited men and women who have read Dress For Success or have been told they cannot succeed if you wear something that makes you look different. If you look different you better be damn good to justify it, for you are an immediate target, just as a different feathered bird in the chicken yard will be pecked to death. If you look and act different today, you better be able and above the pack in ways that will protect you, and give you advantage, for they cannot abide the colorful and the talented for they will categorize and exile you.
Ragged and rugged, the old rascals I knew when I started in the profession were like left-overs from the wild west; they had a singularity of purpose and that was to be themselves for there was no choice. They never considered they must be someone else or like someone else. They were themselves and never thought of such alien and wayward thoughts. I knew many of them, for everyone in those days were in the general practice doing everything that needed to be done. There were few fancy bank lawyers who may have stayed in their offices and never went to court, but everyone else went to court on everything. A lawyer was a real lawyer in those days, representing people or prosecuting for the state. Everyone wore ties all day in their offices, knowing a lawyer dressed down was going fishing or off for the day. But it may be the only tie he had.
When I got out of the Army in 1963 I went to Natchitoches, (pronounced nak’-uh tush), a little city in NW Louisiana, to be close to my home in Castor, fifty miles away. I went to work for Johnny Makar, an anomaly in himself, being sharp edged sharp tongued Yankee from Detroit having moved South after the war. He had bought up slum properties in tax sales and was generally disliked in town because of his brashness and his unmitigated gall of moving into a Southern town where he was not wanted.
He had a relationship with the Teamsters in Detroit and was friends with Jimmy Hoffa. His one steady companion was one of the first rascals I met during my formative years as a lawyer. You might say I was in the larvae or pupae stage as a lawyer…He was John Gibbs, at the time around 75, with snow white mane, deep wrinkles and twinkling blue eyes. He was one of those left over cowboys.
The old man said when he went to the court of appeals he practiced with his mind and wit, when he went to District court he practiced with his mouth, and when he went to city court he practiced with this, displaying his fist. He said something that I didn=t understand at the time but later truly received the meaning of: AEthics is what the rich old lawyers use to starve the young lawyers to death.@ I wish I had spent more time with him, receiving more of his experienced wisdom, but he scared me a little, for I had just gotten out of the Army where I had received some heady and painful lessons about not sticking your head up and keeping your mouth shut and pants zipped, which went totally against my grain, but I found myself feeling really incompetent in the law and not daring to stick my head up again.
Over the years I befriended many of these renegades, but they thinned out over time and now I look across the battalions of lawyers who attend these CLE=s and they all look the sameChungry eyesCjealous and fearsome that the diminishing prey may be snatched by a larger and more well heeled predator, for the big prey never makes it onto the veldt to be chased down and fed upon, for these choice morsels are sought out and ensnared under cover of darkness while the rest know it is happening but simply turn their heads and wish it was they who had this advantage. I am referring to choice injury cases where the injury is profound and the facts make liability a piece of cake and it is only a question of how much money, not if you are going to settle. Some lawyers have runners out and about in the police, wreckers, hospital attendants, offshore helicopter operators, using police band radios like scavenging hyenas, ready to pounce on any freshly injured case and get the contract. But these attorneys usually are well connected politically and never are touched by the Bar.
Lacking basic courage and personal integrity, as possessed in large measure by the old rascals who now have died or been killed off, the present day lawyer has become a rubber stamp, worrying about the light bill, waiting for the phone to ring, the plaintiff spending his fortune trying to out-promote another, finally being so consumed with survival he doesn=t look up to see what is happening in the world around him, suffering a kind of death without dying, hoping the carousel will, next case, bring him closer to that elusive gold ring to be snatched on the next turn around. The defense lawyer groups into a hive of other lawyers of like thought and multiple bill their insurance or corporate clients and hold onto the issue until it is drained and has become offensive. The gold ring they all are reaching for is not only illusive, it is illusion. And the real illusion is the justice derived at the end of the day.
Those old rascals would tell these milquetoast lawyers who are actually terrified, to “get outta my face,” regardless of the consequences. Today, they would be targets of the great mediocrity that has homogenized our society. These men were not criminals. They weren’t even borderline. They said what they wanted to say and had the attitude of “if you don’t want me walking on you then get up off the floor.”
I miss that. I have lived through the end of an era of the rascals into the great blandness of lawyer hunger. When I got out of law school and went in the Army at Fort Benning, I got to know a bunch of lawyers in Columbus, Georgia, who called themselves the “younger lawyers club,” a bunch of rascals as it were, who got together weekly for libation, music and fun. There were some guitar players, and one was almost as good as Chet Atkins, and we would sing and get drunk and have a great time. There was no jealousy or competitiveness in those days. It was before the great surge of big money being made through personal injury cases, which in my opinion has polarized the profession into a herd of greedy, seedy little men and women trying to make lots of money and selling their souls in the process. They don’t even know they are selling out.
I wrote a rant about an old rascal Southern lawyer which is in this Blog called Circumstantial Evidence. It was funny. Read that one.
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