Evan Schaeffer's Legal Underground

Vincent Van Gogh . . . The Comic Novel Sacré Bleu Versus Van Gogh: The Life

Did Vincent Van Gogh really commit suicide? Christopher Moore's new comic novel Sacré Bleu proposes an alternative theory about Van Gogh's death. From Jeremy Lott's review of the book in the Washington Times--

The book is really a murder mystery that might have been called “Who Killed Vincent van Gogh?” History tells us that van Gogh killed himself, but Mr. Moore writes in the book’s spirited afterword, “So, Now That You’ve Ruined Art,” “I have stood in that spot [where van Gogh shot himself], and walked from there to the doctor’s house… and I thought, What kind of a painter does that? Who tries to kill himself by shooting himself in the chest, then walks a mile to seek medical attention? It made no sense at all.”

So he decided to tell a story about it and have his say about famous French painters of the late 1800s while he was at it.

Moore's book is entertaining (I read it), but it doesn't claim to be historical fiction. I wouldn't call it a murder mystery either. Van Gogh's death is really more of a frame that's central only at the beginning and end of the book. Moore's account of the way Van Gogh died, which involves supernatural characters, isn't meant to be taken seriously. Nor is Van Gogh even a major character. Most of the book deals with invented characters and other painters from history.  Sacré Bleu--a comic novel--certainly doesn't offer any serious new theories about Van Gogh's death.

But such theories do exist. In 2011, authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith proposed in their biography Van Gogh: the Life, that Van Gogh didn't kill himself but was shot accidentally by two teenagers. Van Gogh later claimed otherwise, they wrote, in order to protect the boys. Here's more from The Telegraph: "New book claims Vincent Van Gogh did not commit suicide."

Although scholars haven't made up their minds about the new theory, Van Gogh: the Life is a great new Van Gogh biography that's filled with fascinating details about the painter's life. (For more details, see The Persona and the Palette, from the New York Times.) While Moore's Sacré Bleu is certainly fun reading, anyone who's seriously interested in the questions surrounding Van Gogh's death should take a look at the biography.  

NOT SO FAST! . . . In an engaging blog post, Walter Olson rebuts a claim -- in a Daily Caller story by reporter Patrick Howley -- that law firm Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan "has strong Obama connections."

The Daily Caller headline: "Embattled IRS official Lois Lerner’s husband’s law firm has strong Obama connections.” Olson, who has a good understanding of the way large law firms actually work, points out why the headline and accompanying article miss the mark.

Worth reading.

THE TRIAL LAWYER'S PRAYER

Dear Lord: Here I am, back in Church. It's been awhile, I freely admit, and I apologize for the long string of Sunday absences, but as you know, the demands of my busy practice often require me to work all weekend, Sundays included. That's true even today, Lord, but today is a special Sunday. So special, in fact, that to skip Mass today would be malpractice, more or less, if you know what I mean, which, of course, you do.

Tomorrow is the big trial. Not only is it big, Lord, but as you know already, it's huge, the most important trial of my career to date, the trial at which my client stands to collect millions of dollars, in addition to a sizable punitive damage award.

Continue reading "The Trial Lawyer's Prayer" in the archives . . .

AND IN CLASS-ACTION NEWS . . . Weekend reading from the New York Times: "Corporations Find a Friend in the Supreme Court," by Adam Liptak.

In the article, Liptak analyzes recent class-action rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court; a recent study finds that business rulings by the Roberts court have been "far friendlier to business than those of any court since at least World War II."

The take-away:

Jason M. Halper, a lawyer at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in New York, said the collective message of [the court's recent cases] was clear: “When you take all of them together, the effect is certainly to make the use of class actions much more difficult.”

For consumers and plaintiffs' lawyer, there's also this slightly-more-optimistic view:

Others are wary of generalizations. Jonathan H. Adler, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, said the Roberts court was “not particularly welcoming to efforts by plaintiffs’ lawyers to open new avenues of litigation, but it has not done much to cut back on those avenues already established by prior cases.”

Finally, I apologize in advance for being unable to resist a link to some of my own published writing about the class actions: "Class Actions Deter Corporate Wrongdoing," from the Roanoke Times, and "The Best Defense Against Class Actions", from the Alton Telegraph.)

THE CIRCLE OF ADVISORS, ONE OF AN ONGOING SERIES OF ESSAYS ON "THINGS IMPORTANT TO EVERY LAWYER"

Part I: Considering Drake

There’s a story about a lawyer, well known in my part of the country. I’ll call him Drake. A born entrepreneur, Drake ran a successful personal injury firm. Drake’s practice was so successful, in fact, that his biggest problem was where to purchase his next vacation home. He couldn’t decide between Aspen or Hartford, Connecticut. It was an important decision, but not the sort of lives-hanging-in-the-balance decision to which Drake had become accustomed to making as a big-time personal injury lawyer. As he played one realtor off another, negotiating like the pro that he was, Drake reported to his friends that he was becoming bored with his life. He made this unexpected claim with just a hint of self-pity, tipping his head slightly to the left and then looking down at the floor. It wasn’t an easy thing to watch.

It was at about this time that our local federal court announced a job opening for U.S. Magistrate. ...

Continue reading "The Circle of Advisors, One of an Ongoing Series of Essays on 'Things Important to Every Lawyer'" in the archives.

Review: The Price of Justice, by Laurence Leamer

In Laurence Leamer's new work of narrative non-fiction, The Price of Justice: A True Story of Greed and Corruption, two lawyers file and prosecute a wide range of lawsuits against Massey Energy Co. and its CEO, Don Blankenship. One of these lawsuits, Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co., eventually ends up in U.S. Supreme Court. (The issue: whether an appellate judge should have recused himself after having received campaign assistance from a litigant.)

Loosely organized around the Caperton case, Leamer's book condenses more than a decade of litigation against Massey into a fast-paced, suspenseful read. This couldn't have been easy for Leamer, given that lawyers and their lawsuits are generally far from entertaining, especially for 400 pages. It's why you have to excuse the sometimes souped-up, over-heated prose found in The Price of Justice and other books of its type, which publishers are now calling "non-fiction legal thrillers." 

The two principal protagonists are the lawyers for the various plaintiffs, Dave Fawcett of Buchanon Ingersoll and Bruce Stanley of Reed Smith. In an early scene, Fawcett and Stanley become frustrated after Massey's representatives show up at a mediation with no good-faith intention of settling. The two react by making a "blood oath" that they'll "never settle, never stop" until they've brought the Massey CEO, Don Blankenship, to "justice."

Good idea? Readers can decide. But as the book ends, Fawcett has left Buchanon Ingersoll and joined Reed Smith in order to continue fighting Massey and Blankenship; the two firms have expended at least $8 million in "unpaid billing"; and Blankenship has retired from Massey with a $39 million retirement package (though facing "possible criminal indictment" following a mine explosion).

If you're looking for trial scenes, there are plenty of those in The Price of Justice. Some of the procedural details that might interest lawyers have been omitted or simplified for the general reader. Even so, the details that remain will have anyone with experience in these matters shaking his head: the trial judge in Caperton, for example, who takes two and half years to rule on post-trial motions, or the court reporter who hasn't prepared the transcript after four.

Readers will also be amazed by the parts of the book dealing with the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, the exception to the rule that lawyers and judges can't be entertaining. These justice are, albeit in a circus clown sort of way. Since the Caperton case passes through the Supreme Court of Appeals a number of times, a pretty significant chunk of the book deals with the court's assorted shenanigans. Here's Leamer, bringing readers up to date on the justices at a later point in the story:

The five justices continued to wear their black robes and to act with studied dignity, but the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia was a bickering, ludicrously dysfunctional institution in which the Mad Hatter would have fit right in as chief justice.

The Mad Hatter would probably have brought some order to the court. A favorite part of the book for me, though much too short, was the section quoting from the "private diary" that Justice Larry Starcher gave to Leamer to aid him in writing the book. Here's a sample:

We decided the now $75 million Massey Energy case in less than 60 seconds. (HONEST!) The Massey case obviously was pre-decided by the 'evil three.' Benjamin and Maynard are buddies with Don Blankenship and Robin kisses their butts . . .

The "evil three" are Starcher's colleagues on the court, Justices Benjamin, Maynard, and the butt-kissing Robin Davis. No judicial restraint in Starcher's diary! 

The book's two lawyer-heroes are also depicted as being occasionally human. Examples:

• When faced with a liar on the witness stand, Fawcett "was sometimes so abruptly caught off guard that he froze with surprise."
• Before a deposition, Fawcett "was so nervous that when Blankenship and his attorneys walked into the room he broke into a cold sweat."
• During trial, Fawcett "had prepared each question of his cross-examination with precision, lining them up one after another. But those queries had all been used, and he didn't know where to go."

I could have picked on Stanley too; the point is, Leamer's discussion of the lawyers' occasional failings adds verisimilitude to his account. The Price of Justice, which will be released on May 7, is available for pre-order on Amazon. 

AN INTRODUCTION TO LAWYERS FOR THOSE WHO HAVE NOT YET HAD THE PLEASURE OF BEING INTRODUCED: AN ESSAY IN FOUR PARTS

Part I: An Introduction to the Typical Lawyer

First and foremost, a lawyer is a professional, although probably not the kind you’re thinking. Take Smith. Smith was a lawyer, yet he could never be counted on to arrive on time. Usually, he was always at least ten minutes late. While ten minutes is in keeping with the standards of most professionals, Smith would also routinely show up at the wrong place. Frequently, that place was a bar. While it could have been any bar, and often it was, it was almost always a bar that was quite a distance from Smith’s scheduled meeting.

At this point in the essay, it might be appropriate to consider how far we have come. Unfortunately, we haven’t come far. What we have at this point in our “introduction to lawyers” is nothing but a lawyer named Smith—dressed in a sports coat and a stained red tie, loosened at the neck—who happens to be sitting in a bar. He’s having quite a time, too, winking at the waitresses, high-fiving all his buddies (many of whom he just met), and ordering another round “for the house.” He’s completely forgotten his meeting. But as is typical of most lawyers, it was only with the best of intentions. Smith, after all, always demands the best for his clients, just as he does for himself. That’s why for Smith, it’s nothing but single-malt Scotch or, in a pinch, Johnnie Walker Black Label.

Continue reading "An Introduction to Lawyers" in the archives.

RECENT PAINTINGS . . . Because, you know, why not?

Here's my giant lemon--on a gesso board that's 24 inches tall.

 

Giant Lemon

 

For these pears, I used a limited palette: just white, black, vermillion (red), and yellow ochre.

 

Five Pears

 

ADDENDUM 5/6/13: Something else with a dark background I did over the weekend--

 

Yellow Pot

THE RISE OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL . . . There's more to the story than . . .

. . . Moby Dick, at least according to Philip F. Gura in Truth's Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel.

In a review at the Washington Post, Michael Dirda calls Gura's book "an enthralling work of literary recovery"--

You might think that a study of early 19th-century American fiction, focusing largely on half-forgotten books, should be the natural purview of a university press. Why, then, would Farrar Straus & Giroux publish a work of seemingly arcane literary history as a trade title? After all, outside of upper-level university classes, who now reads George Lippard’s “The Quaker City” or W.S. Mayo’s “Kaloolah” or Frank J. Webb’s “The Garies and Their Friends” or Elizabeth Stoddard’s “The Morgesons”? The answer may be surprising: Even before you finish “Truth’s Ragged Edge,” you’ll be searching your library, bookstore or the Internet for copies of them all.

Link from Arts & Letters Daily.

ADVICE TO LAW FIRM PARTNERS #1

Dear Mr. Schaeffer:

In two weeks, I’m scheduled to give a presentation to more than 500 lawyers. The title of my presentation is “You’re a Partner Who’s Fallen in Love With His Associate: What Should You Do Now?” In preparing my talk, I learned that it is often advisable to begin a presentation with a joke. Although I know an awful lot about love, I know very little about jokes. Can you help?

Signed, Humorless on the Hudson

Continue reading "Advice to Law Firm Partners #1" in the archives.

SEX SELLS . . . When I linked last week to a sex-themed post from the archives--Advice to Young Lawyers #18--I experienced a surge in sales of my book, How to Feed a Lawyer (and Other Irreverent Observations from the Legal Underground).

I'm not surprised. Nobody cares about my highfalutin, pretentious stuff. It's all just "Give us more sex! Give us more sex!"

If you bought a book, I hope you're suitably ashamed. Not that I'm above trying it again, of course. Since I used to write about sex all the time, I can keep at it for days.

I'll link to another sex-themed post from the archives soon.

Some of the Books I've Reviewed and Recommended on This Blog

I've reviewed and recommended a number of books here at Legal Underground over the years. Some of my reviews can be found in the following posts--

Thoughts from a Rock 'n' Roll Dilettante on Zappa, by Barry Miles

Zappa: A Biography, by Barry Miles (Grove Press, 2005)

Anonymous Lawyer, a Novel Coming Soon

Anonymous Lawyer, by Jeremy Blachman

For Civil Trial Enthusiasts

A Measure of Endurance: The Unlikely Triumph of Steven Sharp, by William Mishler (Lindisfarne Books, 2008)

Lawyers: Want Some Variety in Your Career?

One Person/Multiple Careers, by Marci Alboher (Business Plus, 2007)

Law Professor Writes Novel About Lawyers

In the Shadow of the Law, by Kermit Roosevelt (Picador, 2006)

Freud Takes Center Stage in New Thriller by Yale Law Professor

The Interpretation of Murder, by Jed Rubenfeld (Picador, 2007)

The Monday Morning Books Blogging Post: A Brief Review

Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam, by Paul Clayton.

Also of interest: the posts in the "Between the Covers" category, which frequently focus on lawyer-writers. And at my other blog, the Trial Practice Tips Weblog, there's another post like this one listing the other book reviews I did there.

ADVICE TO YOUNG LAWYERS #18

Dear Mr. Schaeffer:

Back when my new girlfriend Kristen and I were both associates at a large firm in San Francisco, we didn’t want to have anything to do with one another. She thought my fondness for brand-label clothing was snooty, and I thought her fake blonde hair looked cheap. For three years, we hardly said a word to one another. But one night we were brought together unexpectedly. As the only two associates still on the 49th floor at 7 p.m., a high-level partner assigned us to spend the night wading through ten banker’s boxes of client documents. Our task: to find the evidence needed to convince a judge to issue a temporary restraining order against our client’s competitor. The motion was scheduled for hearing the next morning. The first two hours of document review were tense and uneventful.

But then I remembered the bottle of Scotch I kept in my office for emergencies . . .

Continue reading "Advice to Young Lawyers #18" in the archives.

HOW MANY HAVE YOU READ? . . . "10 Great American Novel Contenders From the Past Decade," by Emily Temple at Flavorwire. The top five--

• Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill
• These Dreams of You, by Steve Erickson
• A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan
• Shadow Country, by Peter Matthiessen
• I, Hotel, by Karen Tei Yamashita

TREES IN THE BACKYARD, TWO STYLES . . . More sketchbook drawings--

 

. . .with a thick line

 

. . . and with a thin line

I'm still enjoying putting together these small pen-and-ink pieces (like these here and here), although I've moved on to oils too--just like George Bush! Maybe I'll put some of those up later . . .

 

OPPORTUNITY . . . Learn a new word today (I did) -- MOOC.

THE LEGAL UNDERGROUND'S TORT REFORM GLOSSARY . . .

In this lawyer’s opinion, the debate over tort reform has bogged down as the result of too much legalese. As an aid to non-lawyers everywhere, I’ve prepared a short glossary to help keep track of the terms used most often in the tort reform debate.

Advocates of tort reform may not agree with some of my definitions. This illustrates an important feature of the tort reform debate: It’s impossible to please everybody.

1. Trial Lawyer. A trial lawyer is any lawyer who appears in court, no matter whether he’s appearing for the plaintiff or the defense. In the tort reform debate, however, the term is often used pejoratively to refer only to those lawyers who file lawsuits, that is, “plaintiffs’ lawyers.”

2. Plaintiffs’ Lawyers. Plaintiffs’ lawyers are a subset of trial lawyers who always appear for the person who has brought the lawsuit. The use of the word “person” is intentional, since lawyers representing corporations that bring lawsuits, though technically lawyers for the plaintiff, are not plaintiffs’ lawyers. They may, however, be “class action lawyers.”

3. Class Action Lawyers. These are lawyers who are trained to work on class actions. The term can refer to the lawyer appearing either for the plaintiff or the defense. In the tort reform debate, however, some exclude from the definition any lawyer who appears for the defendant in a class action. This exclusion is made most often by “tort reformers.”

Continue reading "The Legal Underground's Tort Reform Glossary" in the archives.

AT MY TRIAL-PRACTICE BLOG . . . "Free Legal Books from James Publishing."

"DON'T LISTEN TO THE FOOLS" . . .

 

"Don't listen to the fools who say that pictures of people can be of no consequence, or that painting is dead. There is much to be done." --

--R. B. Kitaj, whose "If Not, Not" (1975-76) is shown above (plus more here from the blog Felt Images.)

TYPES OF LAWYERS #4: THE LAWYER WHO CARRIES ANOTHER LAWYER'S BRIEFCASE

It always begins innocently enough. “You’re coming with me to court,” the partner says to the associate. The associate, of course, cannot believe his good fortune. But then the partner completes his thought. “I need someone to carry my briefcase.”

Can you blame the associate for being confused? The partner is heading towards the elevator with empty hands, and the briefcase is sitting on the floor. Should the associate pick it up? He’s not sure. Though he received good marks at his last review for being a “team player,” he’s never thought of himself as a pack mule. What a dilemma! Figuring he has no choice, he picks up the briefcase and dashes for the elevator.

Continue reading "Types of Lawyers #4: The Lawyer Who Carries Another Lawyer’s Briefcase" in the archives.

BACK FROM SPRING BREAK . . . Places visited: Nashville, TN; Athens, GA; Blue Ridge, GA; Tellico Plains, TN; Chatanooga, TN.

My intermittent blogging will now resume, intermittently.

PYNCHON NEWS . . . Pynchon reviews David Foster Wallace.

That's one's a fake, but I enjoyed the comparison of Wallace to Axl Rose.

In other news, Pynchon has a new novel, Bleeding Edge, which will be out in September.

ANOTHER SET OF SNOWMOBILING PHOTOS . . . I spent some time in Montana recently. Here's a typical scene--

This photo was taken in Idaho near West Yellowstone, Montana. There are more photos in this flickr group. An even more dramatic set from a few years ago (when the weather was better) can be found here.

A Fictional Account of Big Firm Pro Bono Work

The following brief vignette is a work of fiction. It was cut from a longer work that’s still in progress (and has been for a long, long time, though it's now at the point that I'm cutting with abandon). The firm of Ellison & James is fictional. The unnamed narrator—the “I” and “me” of the vignette—is also fictional. I’m publishing this little piece on my blog for no special reason other than the beast demands to be fed . . . Evan Schaeffer

All the large law firms touted their commitment to pro bono work. And why not? It was good for the image of the firm, good for the firm’s lawyers to think of themselves as giving back to the community. At Ellison & James, the requirement that young lawyers work on pro bono assignments was sacrosanct. There were ways around the pro bono work, but these were not spoken of, even with office doors closed, and especially not to new associates. If you tried to use an assignment for a paying client to bail on your pro bono obligations, you would get a response like this. “Absolutely not, Mr. Junior Associate. The poor person you are helping expects exactly the sort of representation we give to our largest clients. You will just have to work a little late tonight. What sort of pro bono case are you working on? Landlord tenant, you say? An eviction? Court in the morning? Well take care of that one first—because we can’t have one of the firm’s clients getting evicted!—and then turn to my new assignment, which involves responding to this summary judgment motion. I expect you to polish it off in five or six hours overnight. I’ll see you back here in the morning when you return from court.”

This little lecture would be delivered at around, say, 6 p.m., just about the time your new wife was arriving home from work and starting to cook dinner. (You cooked dinner on the weekends.)

Such was the life of Mr. Junior Associate. It would have been verboten to point out to Mr. Partner that the type of representation the firm’s largest clients expected was something far different than what the pro bono client was receiving. The firm’s best clients got the best advice their money could buy from partners with years of experience. If you were one of the firm’s best clients, your projects were staffed by layers of associates, some researching, some writing, some reviewing, who would hand in their work to the junior partners upstairs, who would tear it apart and put it back together and then pass it off for some final review by a team of old dinosaurs who’d brought the client to the firm thirty years before. Meanwhile, the client whose eviction was being handled pro bono was being represented by a recent law school graduate who was more than a little hamstrung by the fact that in law school, no one had taught him how to practice law. And he still didn’t know. So he’d find the Oracle, a helpful associate named Hank Garland, who’d be leaning back with his feet on his desk with his dipping cup in front of his lower lip, ready to receive his next overflow of tobacco juice.

PROUST AND ART . . . Here's the painting Lost Illusions by Charles Gleyre--

 
And Proust in Swann's Way--

Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would creep up, white as a cloud, furtive, lustreless, suggesting an actress who does not have to come on for a while, and watches the rest of the company for a moment from the auditorium in her ordinary clothes, keeping in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself. I enjoyed finding its image reproduced in books and paintings . . . It might, for instance, be some novel by Saintine, some landscape by Gleyre, in which it is silhouetted against the sky in the form of a silver sickle, one of those works as naively unformed as were my own impressions . . .

Post suggested by the great book Paintings in Proust, by Eric Karpeles.

A PLUG FOR MY BOOK . . . Here is what some readers have said about my book How to Feed a Lawyer (and Other Irreverent Observations from the Legal Underground)--

"The book is excellent and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it" -- Dennis Kennedy at DennisKennedy.com, who gave me one of his "Blawggie" awards for "best writing on a blawg."

"Seasoned lawyers and recent grads alike will – or should – chuckle when reading such gems as 'The Legal Underground’s Tort Reform Glossary'" -- Helen Gunnarsson at Law and Conversation.

"The perfect gift for lawyers, clients and actual humans" -- JD Hull at What About Paris?

What should you do? Buy it and read it, of course, in either the paperback or Kindle format!

TYPES OF LAWYERS #7: THE MODEST LAWYER . . .

Is the modest lawyer a myth? That’s the conventional wisdom. Yet once or twice each year, rumors begin to circulate of yet another sighting of this silent and mysterious man. Three years ago, he was spotted emerging from a portable restroom at a county fair. Another time he was seen helping a small child unhook a bluegill at a lake in Mississippi. Once he was seen high on a mountain in Colorado, searching for a pass during a thunderstorm.

Continue reading "Types of Lawyers #7: The Modest Lawyer" in the archives.

SUSANNA AND THE ELDERS . . . by Thomas Hart Benton, 1938--

The painting caused controversy when it was displayed in 1939 at the St. Louis Art Museum (then called the City Art Museum of St. Louis). Details from Thomas Hart Benton: A Life, by Justin Wolff--

The director of the museum, Meyric Rogers, threatened to ban the painting from the show on the grounds that it was "much too nude." Rogers acquiesced, however, and exhibited the painting, though with a rope around it to prevent viewers from taking too prurient an interest in its details, such as Susanna's pubic hair. Nevertheless, some local viewers expressed outrage: Mary Ellis, for instance, a sixty-five-year-old pastor, exclaimed, "The nude is stark naked. It's lewd, immoral, obscene, lascivious, degrading, an insult to womanhood and the lowest expression of pure filth." Benton, though, pretended to be unperturbed; upon hearing about Ellis's comments, he responded, "That's funny as hell."

The painting now hangs at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

A NEW BOOK ABOUT DUKE ELLINGTON . . . The Ellington Century, by David Schiff, is reviewed by Kevin Stevens at The Dublin Review of Books--

Like the great European modernists, Ellington believed that form was inextricable from content. However, by sticking to the concepts and ensembles of jazz, he distinguished himself critically from Gershwin, Copland, and other American composers who used European models. Yet the difference is not simply formal. The essence of jazz is improvisation; no other music relies so much on the art of composing in the moment, and Ellington’s music builds not only on the sonorities of his band’s instruments, but the character of the men who played them, expressed in their unique patterns of improvisation.

Link from Arts and Letters Daily.

COLOR, THE TASTE-MAKERS From The Smart Set: "Colored Consumerism: After the Industrial Revolution the world found something new to mass-produce: color," by Nathaniel Popkin (a review of The Color Revolution by Regina Lee) (link from Arts & Letters Daily).

A LAWYER WHO DIDN'T COME CHEAP . . .

Walter Olson suggests it might be the ultimate Overlawyered story: "Lawyer billed client 'for time they spent having sex.'"

Read the story and judge for yourself . . .

 TYPES OF LAWYERS #1: THE BIG FIRM SUMMER ASSOCIATE

There is a certain type of lawyer who is not a lawyer at all. At best, he’s a fictional lawyer, a make-believe lawyer, a pretend lawyer. Though skilled at imitating a lawyer in dress, language, and attitude, he is no more a lawyer than the miserable sad sack who’s failed the bar exam seven times. If this type of lawyer offered legal advice to a corporate client, he would likely be sued; if he appeared in court to argue a motion, he would likely be arrested.

Continue reading Types of Lawyers #1: The Big Firm Summer Associate in the archives.

FORGET THOSE E-BOOKS . . . Regular books are back.

The Wall Street Journal reports here.

Link from Arts & Letters Daily.

CEZANNE'S APPLES . . .

"With an apple I will astonish Paris" -- Paul Cezanne.

The painting is Cezanne's "Still Life with Dish Glass and Apples" from 1879. Here's testimony about Cezanne from the movie Manhattan from the Woody Allen character Isaac Davis--

Why is life worth living? It's a very good question. Um... Well, There are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. uh... Like what... okay... um... For me, uh... ooh... I would say... what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing... uh... um... and Wilie Mays... and um... the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Symphony... and um... Louis Armstrong, recording of Potato Head Blues... um... Swedish movies, naturally... Sentimental Education by Flaubert... uh... Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra... um... those incredible Apples and Pears by Cezanne... uh... the crabs at Sam Wo's... uh... Tracy's face...

Not my list, exactly, and probably not yours--but interesting to think about all the same . . .

THE 2012 BLAWGGIE AWARDS . . .

Dennis Kennedy has published his 2012 Blawggie Awards, in which he graciously named me the winner of the "The Sherry Fowler Best Writing on a Blawg Award." I'll quote--

This fall, longtime blawgger Evan Schaeffer sent me a copy of his new book, How to Feed a Lawyer: And Other Irreverent Observations from the Legal Underground (Disclosure: link is through my Amazon Affiliate account and may generate income to me), which is a collection of some of his blog posts over the years and includes many of his classic blog series about traits of lawyers. The book is excellent and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It was great to revisit those early posts and re-experience them.

It also made me think about how many of the early blawgger were/are excellent writers. Evan is a classic example. I often tell people that my blog was an “experiment in writing” where I could try new things. Evan always took an experimental and writerly approach and it’s fascinating to see the posts collected together and remember the buzz at the time when I would be reading these great posts on a regular basis from Evan. The Legal Underground blog (as it was formerly named) became quite popular, especially with law students. The humor in the posts is still very funny.

It’s also interesting to see how today the advice to bloggers is to stay on topic, think carefully about what you post, follow standard formats, keep posts short and the like. In the early days of blawgging, those rules definitely did not exist. Yet, blawgs became quite popular even though they broke all of today’s rules. Something to think about, no? You definitely have to check out Evan’s blog. And he’s another St. Louis blawgger.

That's some high praise. Thanks, Dennis!

Read his full post about the winners of the other awards, which include Best Overall Law-Related Blog, Best Law Practice Management Blog, Best Law Professor Blog, Best New Blawg, and more.