Mark Levison, The Levison Group
My law firm is more than 100 years old. Its main office is in an old bank building. The building is not quite as old as the law firm, but it's old enough to house two giant walk-in vaults (one of which functions as the firm's library), molded plaster ceilings and old wooden teller windows. Since there is no underground parking in an old bank building, I park in a garage down the street.
As I was walking from the garage last week, I caught up with Bill, another lawyer with my firm. He has been practicing for a while. Bill noticed that besides a briefcase I was carrying a plastic milk bottle. He said, "So, what have you got there? 2 percent? 1 percent?" I said, "No, nowadays I use skim milk in my coffee." Nodding knowingly, he told me he remembered when the Pevely Dairy Company used to deliver milk to his home in a horse-drawn wagon. When I was very young, I remember the milkman bringing bottles to our back door and placing them in a metal-I guess somewhat insulated-box. Laughing about my skim milk, Bill told me that the milk bottles delivered when he was young contained vitamin D, whole milk, and had a glass bubble at the top for the cream to rise. I told Bill I didn't remember anything like that, and had certainly never thought about milk being delivered by a horse! Bill said, "Oh yeah, Mark, if he had a really good horse, the milkman could tote the wire basket containing milk for three houses, drop off the milk, and then whistle. His horse would catch up with him so he could restock the basket for the next three houses."
I often see Bill in our lawyer's lunchroom reading the newspaper. I mean an actual, physical newspaper. No laptop, websites or blogs. He still touches the paper and print. Bill's a gentleman lawyer in the traditional sense. He is understated, calm and knowledgeable. Some of that may have come with age, or maybe he has always been that way.
Later that night, I mentioned to my wife that I'd walked to work with Bill Buckley that morning and he had told me a story about milk being delivered by horses. Since she grew up with horses, and far prefers them to people, she enjoyed Bill's story, but countered with her own memory of Mr. Buckley.
"When I was a girl, my father was the CFO for one of St. Louis' best known local companies," she said. "I remember the name of Bill Buckley being spoken with reverence. It seemed like every time there was something important going on with the business, the word came down, '[G]o ask Mr. Buckley'."
My wife paused in reflection for just a second, before continuing. "When we went to see Mr. Buckley, we all got dressed up. It was a very important thing, going to see your lawyer back then." These days, people don't necessarily get dressed up to see their lawyer.
I defended a deposition in a large commercial case last week. The lawyer taking the deposition didn't have on a tie. In fact, he was wearing blue jeans and hiking boots. It generally seems to be younger lawyers that apparently think clothes don't matter. Well, clothes may not matter, but how we carry ourselves, what we think about our roles in the justice system, and how others view us as a professional does matter. In fact, when we visited our oldest son, a first-year lawyer in Madison, Wisconsin last week, even he preferred to work in khaki pants and a casual shirt. That got me thinking, so the next day I asked Bill about differences in the law between now and then.
He was quick to respond, not surprisingly, that the number one difference was when he started practicing law you could take almost every lawyer at his word. He said there were a few you couldn't, but you knew who they were. Bill said in those days, cases were settled on the phone, and he surprised me by saying that often checks would come before anything was finalized on paper. He added, there was no lawyer advertising and lawyers didn't "steal" clients from other lawyers then.
When Bill graduated, in 1957, he got a better job than most lawyers in his class. He was billed out at $25 an hour - then a high hourly rate - and was paid a whopping $500 a month. Other lawyers were getting paid $350. Of the 45 people in his day law school class, 22 graduated. Bill estimated St. Louis University Law School had a faculty of 12 or 13 teachers and that all the courses being taught were "bread and butter." He said there were no fluff courses such as "the legal aspects of pornography".
Neither were there legal services programs, so every year each lawyer would get one or two State court appointments, one juvenile court appointment, and one or two Federal court appointments. Bill said it was a lot of work, but everybody received them and nobody really minded. It was how young lawyers got experience.
Bill then told me some things weren't all that different. When he graduated, it was nearing the end of the Eisenhower administration, and since the economy wasn't too good, jobs were hard to come by - kind of like now. Since there were no department stores where he lived in the suburbs, you traveled downtown by streetcar or calling a "service car." The service cars drove around and picked up other people along the way. Shoppers were dropped at 7th and Olive and the driver was given a pick-up time. He said it was the same thing as the new concept: Uber or Lyft, minus cellphones.
In today's world, where an increased amount of law schools each graduate lawyers by the hundreds, not the dozens, and where advertising is commonplace, competition and lack of personal familiarity can breed disharmony. Personal fighting among lawyers doesn't really serve clients, nor is it much fun. It is not uncommon to hear older lawyers complain about younger lawyers, and pine for more civil days. This may be a phenomenon that has gone on for generations. It could be that Abe Lincoln's boss, John Stuart, told him he ought to mellow out - or whatever it was they said in 1837.
Of course, our system of conflict resolution is partially based on fighting. When there is a lawsuit, there are a minimum of two sides. It is very seldom that one side has no legitimate argument at all, and needless to say, clients are very good at seeing the particular perspective of their own lawsuit.
I try to explain to clients that the opponents have their own arguments and perspectives, because if they didn't, there probably wouldn't be a lawsuit. Sometimes the clients get that, sometimes they don't. Part of being a valuable lawyer is vigorously prosecuting, or defending, your client's interest, while at the same time being able to explain the other side's position to your client. That's an art, because we don't want our clients to think we believe the other side is right. That is unless we do believe the other side is right. Then we ought to tell them.
The dynamics of dealing with opposing counsel takes some finesse as well. Nobody wants to be viewed as a pushover, or worse yet, to act as a pushover, but letting opposing counsel know you understand, at least some of their perspectives, might actually serve everybody well in the long run. Bill Buckley is not the only lawyer left who recalls the days when we could talk to one of our fellow lawyers and get a deal done with a handshake. Still, it makes me wonder. Maybe each of us should try to get back in touch with the dignity and importance of the profession-before there is nobody left who remembers.
Under Analysis is a nationally syndicated column of the Levison Group. Mark Levison is a member of the law firm of Lashly & Baer. Contact Under Analysis by e-mail at comments@levisongroup.com.
© 2015 Under Analysis L.L.C.
Published: Fri, May 08, 2015
