I’m tired of Office 2007

So, apparently, the Court system switched over to Microsoft Office 2007 sometime around the 1st of the year. So all of the schedules I receive from Johnson County are in docx format. I have Office 2007 on my work computer, but I have a Mac at home with Office X (2004). For those who don’t know, Office 2007 documents are not automatically compatible with earlier versions of Office. This means that I’m not able to open documents in the docx format from my home computer, which makes posting the schedules a little difficult, at times. So, I apologize for that. I imagine there’s a competition or antitrust lawsuit out there somewhere because of this and I am totally on board with that.

Family Ties

I have a cousin who is the police chief of a suburb of Des Moines. His brother (also my cousin, of course) got married last Saturday, so I had a chance to see the whole family. My police chief cousin likes to refer to criminal defense as the dark side, which is fine. I can take a little ribbing about representing the underbelly of society (not all of them are, but a good portion of them, in my experience). One of the funny things about my conversation with him over the weekend is that he told me I shouldn’t be too hard on the police officers I have to question.

I’ve met a lot of very nice police officers. My cousin is one. I represented one in a civil matter last year and she was very nice. The officers I’ve deposed have all been somewhat sheepish during the deposition. Wondering what I might be trying to get them to say, I suppose. But police often have a reputation of being bullies and preying on the defenseless. I get sucked into that frame of mind, sometimes.

I get to play the other side, too, prosecuting traffic violations for North liberty. I see a whole different side of police officers in that capacity. Sometimes bravado, sometimes astonishment at the idea that someone would plead not guilty to the citation they wrote. I get sucked into that, sometimes, too.

It makes me tired.

Termination of Parental Rights and Absentee Clients

I sat through a whole day of termination of parental rights trial yesterday. My client is the father of one of the kids and he was in federal prison for most of the child in need of assistance action. I finally met him a couple weeks ago when he showed up for an in-court review. This was after the termination petition had been filed.

He thought he might try to fight the termination at that time, but very quickly dropped off the face of the earth after that day. Actually, I guess his parole was revoked and he’s heading back to prison, but I never heard from him after that review in February.

So, I was stuck in this trial. I asked no questions of any witness, made a short professional statement concerning my understanding of my client’s situation and otherwise sat. Not really a fun time in the basement of the Linn County Courthouse, but, hey. The State will pay me for it.

Ouch

So, I’m having all four of my wisdom teeth pulled tomorrow afternoon. The procedure starts at 1:30 and I can’t eat for six hours beforehand. I like to tell the story about how the dentist told me when I was 15 or so that I should consider having them out. That was two days after my sister had her’s out and she was at home lying on the couch, still in agony. So, I put it off.

Fifteen years later, I’ve decided to do it. I scheduled it for a time that I didn’t have anything on my calendar for a couple of days, then I’d have the weekend, too. Of course, two things were scheduled for me on Friday and I’ve had to find people to cover for me. I had one person lined up to do everything, but she ended up getting something scheduled at the same time. Then I had a different person lined up, but he ended up with something scheduled during one of the times. So, now I have two different attorneys covering for me on Friday.

Besides that, I’ve been trying to get as caught up as possible before having the procedure. That doesn’t always work out, does it? Now I have a new felony client and I scheduled a bond review for tomorrow morning.

Medical appointments and procedures have basically become a necessity for humans. How do they fit in with the practice of law? The answer: They don’t. One of the partners in my firm had emergency back surgery last fall. He ended up rescheduling one trial from October until December, and another one until May of this year. Not real great or the client, but necessary.

So, I’ll have my laptop and a number of files with me at home the next few days. I’ll be checking my email and voicemail occasionally. And I’ll be trying to get things done. I just hope none of the work I need to do interferes with my recovery. I’ll have to be sure to make time to put down my work and watch Oprah or Days of Our Lives or other such ridiculous things, just so I don’t lose sight of what’s most important – my health.

If I post anytime between 3:00 and 6:00 tomorrow afternoon, please disregard it. It will most likely be gibberish induced by the drugs.

Trial Recovery

It’s been a week since I had a full-day trial. I wasn’t exactly on the ball about getting ready for it, so I was scrambling at the end. That scrambling made me put off other things that I needed to get done. So, I was way behind when I got o the office on Friday morning.

Today, one week after the trial, I am finally feeling like I’m caught up. I’ve talked to one of the partners about being ahead of things in the practice of law. He doesn’t believe it’s possible. He says he’s always behind and when he started practicing he asked his dad, also a lawyer, how to deal. His dad’s response: “Get used to it.”

Moral of the story: If there’s a way to be on top of things in the practice of law, I have not found it.

I’m Terrible at Evidence

So, I learned something today during my trial. I’m terrible at evidence. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, but I had issues with a few items of evidence. Oh well. The trial went and I think we did OK, so I guess that’s what matters. Now comes the catching up on everything I put off over the last week. Fun.

Trial Preparation

You know, trial preparation is pretty tedious. I’m a seat-of-the-pants kind of guy and I have a hard time sitting and reviewing everything, deciding what I want to use, figuring out how to get it into the record… There’s no question that it helps to be organized, but I’ve never been an organizer and when I try to get organized, I just get more disorganized. The point is that I don’t like trial preparation. Someday, I’ll just have some underling do all the legwork for me. Right now, I’m the underling, so I get to do all of my own stuff, plus whatever anyone else tells me.

Magistrate Court

Our firm represents a number of City’s and is responsible for prosecuting traffic violations and other violations of each City’s Code of Oridinances. So, I spend plenty of time in magistrate court. Today, I was there for over three hours and presented my one case in a matter of about 10 minutes. The rest of the time I watched the show.

Usually, each case takes 15 minutes or less with the City or County Attorney presenting the testimony of the officer and the defendant making a statement. With a lot of the cases, the defendants don’t even show. But, there are times when people are there to duke it out. Today was one of those days. It was exceptional entertainment and I even stuck around for a while after I was done to watch how it continued.

One case (a simple assault bench trial) had an attorney on the defense side and began aroun 9:20 this morning. They had a break around 11:15 to try to get a witness there. The first two hours was full of objections, a couple of admonishments from the magistrate to the defense attorney for being rude and argumentative. One time the defense attorney told the magistrate he hoped that she wasn’t trying to be the prosecutor in the case. All sorts of fun stuff.

They started again around 12:00. In the 45 minute break, I thnk the State had three more trials, and two cities had one trial each. I got done around noon and decided to stick around for a while to see if the tenor had changed. It was much quieter, but there were still numerous objections (does it matter in a bench trial?).

I didn’t stay until the end, but I’ll be checking ICIS later this week to find out the result. It was interesting stuff.

Another trial involved a woman who got a citation for running a red light. Her defense was basically a question: “Why did it take the officer so long to pull her over after she ran the red light?” It always amazes me that defendants will go into court and admit that they did the thing they were cited for, then tell a story about why they shouldn’t be found guilty. For instance, this young lady said, “I can see by the video that I did run the red light, but why did it take so long for the officer to activate his lights and pull me over? Why did you have to wait until I was at work to do that?”

I find watching other people try cases is vastly educational for me. Even in magistrate court. Whether or not I think they did a good job, I have never come away thinking, “I would have done the exact same thing.” I think that’s good. And I often try to remember if I was as ignorant about the duties of a judge or magistrate before I went to law school as many people seem to be. I don’t recall it, though I probably was.

What work am I supposed to do?

One thing that I think a lot of modern young attorneys need to think about is delegation. Coming out of law school, most of us did our own typing, all our own research, making our own copies, basically everything. When I opened my solo practice, I was doing all of those things plus general and trust accounting, answering the phone, and everything else that goes along with running a small business.

Since joining NPET, the partners pushed me to delegate as much as possible to staff. I got pretty good at it. I had an assistant that I trusted without question, a pretty good system of time management and really got into dictation. After the partners decided to expand, I was assigned a different assistant, I was eventually moved to Iowa City and had all new equipment to deal with. Now, I know that the assistant I have now is just as good as my old one, but I’m in Iowa and she’s in Cedar Rapids.

I got to thinking about this because I was dealing with trial exhibits yesterday and a lot of stuff I ended up doing I know I should have delegated to my assistant. But, when we’re 20 miles apart, that tends to be a little difficult. So, I ended up making copies, compiling opposing pro se party’s copies and going to the post office to mail them. Now, I face the question of whether to continue that work, or haul everything up to Cedar Rapids and let my assistant create a trial binder for me.

I’m torn, but I think I’ll try the latter. I have other things to do and I’d rather carry 10 pounds of paper out to my car (I try to get as much exercise on the job as I can) and then into the Cedar Rapids office, than spend another two hours putting everything together.

Getting back to the original point, though, with the advent of computers over the last 10-15 years, I think a lot of young lawyers are pretty tech-savvy and are able to and used to doing everything themselves. It can be difficult to hand things off to other people when it feels like it will just be quicker if I do everything myself. Believe me, if you have good support staff that’s located in the same office as you, it’s better to let them do it. As far as my situation goes, the jury is still out.

Birthdays

For some reason, my birthday often ends up being a busy, difficult day. A few years ago, when I was still in law school, I got sick on my birthday. I don’t get really sick very often, but that time I did. And my wife had to be out of town for the evening, so I was home alone, having to take care of the dog in between trips to the bathroom.

Today is a big birthday for me. I am turning an age that ends in zero. Most of you who know me can probably figure out which one it is. It has not been an easy day. I got an order I was hoping would never come. I had to deal with discovery for a good portion of the day. And I had to deal with things that I haven’t been organized enough to get done prior to the due date. And it’s Monday. Happy Birthday to me.