It seems like it wasn’t that many years ago that I used to brag the only people I knew who didn’t seem to age much were Michael Landon, Dick Clark and me. Michael’s been gone a long time now on that “Highway to Heaven” and Dick Clark has taken his final trip to the bandstand. So I admit, I’m getting a little concerned.
I’ve been a lawyer for over 30 years now, and 30 years of having the other side try to take advantage of me and my clients can wear a guy down. Still, my concern is not so much for me, it’s for all those lawyers that were so young when we all started practicing. It seems like whenever I go to court these days, I see a lawyer who was a classmate of mine, and I just don’t know why they look so old, when I still look so young.
Maybe it’s the motions to compel or those troublesome motions for summary judgment that are aging them so quickly. Maybe the long hours that have worn them down. Most likely it’s the strain of never wanting to disappoint the client, but doing so nevertheless. There might be other explanations, such as too many steak dinners and bottles of wine while entertaining clients, or perhaps too many second wives, but that’s a different column.
In addition to their aging faces, I’ve noticed my law friends are a lot fatter than they used to be. I don’t know if that bothers them, but it bothers me. They should be more considerate. It seems like they ought to take better care of themselves so I don’t have to worry about them.
Even though I look pretty good for my age, or so my kids tell me, it’s hard to ignore that more and more younger lawyers call me “Sir,” and that infuriates me. It could be they’ve noticed my fingers have gotten a little crooked. That happens when you have arthritis, and I blame my mother for that. Her fingers are a mess.
Actually, fingers have been a problem for me for awhile. I kept breaking them in weekend pick-up football games, and eventually my wife refused to take me to the hospital for such ailments. After the football afflictions began, I started suffering crippling injuries during friendly softball games. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I managed my first law firm’s softball team, although the calendar says otherwise. When we started the team in my current firm, I told them I was just going to root them on from the stands. Upon learning I had declined the invitation, a senior partner chided me by saying, “Come on, Mark, we really need a pitcher.” I asked him how he knew I was a pitcher, and he told me he’d played against me when we were both young lawyers. I didn’t recall that. I guess the first thing that goes is the fingers, and apparently my memory is a close second.
As I was writing this column, a young lawyer came in to ask me how to do a replevin. That’s an action where the plaintiff has a right to possess something that somebody else (we’ll call him “the bad guy”) had a right to possess, but lost that right – probably because the bad guy didn’t make his payments. The once and future owner wants the item back, and is afraid it will disappear, or get destroyed, so the owner seeks the power of the court to enable him or her to go out and get it. The associate asked me a lot of procedural questions I just couldn’t answer. You see, despite the wisdom that I claim comes with years, I don’t actually recall ever doing a replevin, but I did read about them when I was studying for the bar exam. Since that’s been a while now, I called a judge friend to get the skinny. He told me exactly what to do and I passed it along. I then cleared a few things off my desk, sent a draft of a lawsuit to a client for approval, and told my legal assistant (who, by the way, keeps telling me young lawyers call me “Sir” as a form of respect, which is just her way of trying to keep me in a good mood) I was leaving for the afternoon, and I headed off to the ball game. In the third inning, I got a text that said, “The property in question is worth a ton of money so the client was wondering if you could go see the judge instead of me.” Well, so much for the perfect game I was watching. What the heck, I’m still ahead of Michael Landon and Dick Clark.
©2012 Under Analysis LLC Mark Levison is a member of the law firm Lathrop & Gage LLP. You can reach Under Analysis LLP in care of this paper or by e-mail at comments@levisongroup.com.