All in ABA
A year ago, my colleagues and I sat around the conference table, trying to parse what health authorities were saying and what it might mean for law practice generally and our work specifically. We discussed what would happen if people needed to quarantine, and whether we should make sure everyone was set up to receive email remotely, or what might happen in a worst-case scenario, if we had to shut down for a few weeks.
Almost a year ago (wow), I wrote a bit about the State Bar Car Crash Symposium Heckler, who spent some quality time during my presentation lecturing us about the fact that sometimes plaintiff’s counsel and defense counsel are friendly with one another. (He also cornered me after my presentation, which dealt broadly with dealing with emotional situations, and complained that I didn’t consult with religious authorities about breaking bad news to a client. Oh well.)
And it does happen—sometimes I do see my existing friends on the other side of the caption, and sometimes I become friends with people on the other side after the litigation is over.
Three years ago, aspiring 1Ls at the other 235 or so law schools in the United States started their first year and assumed they’d be sitting for the bar exam this summer, in person, in a stuffy hotel ballroom (Virginia test-takers in full court dress, no really).
Now, those same new graduates are wondering what, if anything, is going to happen, given that we are still in the middle of a raging pandemic and putting hundreds of panting, coughing, sweaty people in a room together, even six feet apart, is the opposite of social distancing.
I learned later that I was probably suffering from vicarious (or secondary) trauma, which is the subject of a recent ABA Journal article (and other good ones in the past). To summarize briefly, lawyers can be surrounded by their clients’ traumas and sometimes internalize them, to the point where they exhibit symptoms similar to those of PTSD.
It’s January so everyone is setting goals and making predictions for the year ahead, and forgetting all about those goals and predictions for last year that didn’t actually materialize. If you are of the ilk where you have written these things down, dig last year’s out and take a look. I did that recently. My goals for 2019 were adorable.
Lawyers leave their firms (voluntarily) and go to others for a variety of reasons—relocation of a spouse, better offers, jerk bosses, bad coffee. And I suspect the worse the current situation (I mean, certain coffee must violate some Geneva Convention provision, right?), the quicker the lawyer may want to say goodbye and move on.
But, not so fast. They’ve got some important ethical obligations.
There are more than 15,000 lawyers in Wisconsin (5,400 in Milwaukee County alone) and I think we all know each other. Our legal community may seem outsized for the state—possibly thanks to diploma privilege—but it’s really pretty small.
