Original anecdotes, commentary, rumination, and occasional pontification.
JANUARY 31, 2024 – (Cont.) The arbitration took place in a room of the old Minneapolis City Hall, a massive structure built of Cyclopean granite blocks to withstand a direct hit by a nuclear warhead, even though its construction was completed 60 years before the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the building was deemed …
JANUARY 30, 2024 – As I explained to a non-lawyer recently, my half dozen or so jury trials (and a couple dozen court (judge as trier of fact; no jury) trials and various evidentiary hearings in between) represented but a small fraction of my entire practice over 40-plus years. Yet it was those jury trials …
JANUARY 29, 2024 – (Cont.) My case-in-chief took a day. For the rest of the week, the defense fired a Gatling gun of spitballs into the courtroom. I had to bite my tongue on my principal objections to the lawyer’s unorganized evidence: lack of foundation and irrelevance. In a trial, you always have to be …
JANUARY 28, 2024 – (Cont.) Seasoned jury trial lawyers will tell you that to prepare your case for the crucible of trial, you need to work backwards, starting with jury instructions. These are proposed and negotiated between counsel and the judge, then finalized and presented by the judge to the jury after closing arguments and …
JANUARY 27, 2024 – It’s safe to say that if I live to be 100 and practice law till I’m told I shouldn’t, I won’t see another day of head-to-head combat in front of a jury. I’m too well entrenched in my future—writing about my past. Besides, I never considered myself a trial lawyer despite …
JANUARY 26, 2024 – Something I learned early during my year-long rotation in the firm’s litigation department was that full-bore jury trials were a rarity among the high-powered lawyers who surrounded me. For the most part the department’s clients were business concerns, and successful businesses are about principal (and interest), not principle. This isn’t to …
JANUARY 25, 2024 – I remember my very first client. Actually, the “remember” part is an overstatement. She didn’t make much of a lasting impression one way or the other. Over four decades later I wouldn’t be able to identify her in a police line-up, and if her name appeared with one other name on …
JANUARY 24, 2024 – Blogger’s note: Having concluded three posts ago my series, The Sales Job, I now commence another series of job-related posts under the rubric, War Stories. For the most part they are light-hearted, but in the course of amusement, some tales will offer my observations about law, business, politics, and more general …
JANUARY 23, 2024 – By sheer will I came to terms with the undeniable fact that what I’d wanted to believe was the bat was nothing more than a black sock. Meanwhile, Beth called me from back home, safe from nature. Nonetheless, she is our veteran cabin mouse killer and bat battler. Some eight years …
JANUARY 22, 2024 – In our part of the country, a family tradition is owning a lake cabin (Minnesota) or cottage (Wisconsin) “up north.” It’s where we urban folk can fish, swim, marvel at sunsets, watch the stars come out, and roast marshmallows for s’mores. It’s where we commune with nature and, ironically, where we …
JANUARY 21, 2024 – Almost everyone I know who is a grandparent shares the same sentiment: grandparenthood is bonus land, where the grandparents get a second chance to correct all the mistakes they made as parents. I say that facetiously. You’re fooling yourself if you think that in your capacity as a grandparent you’re going …
JANUARY 20, 2024 – I walked overland to the nearest westbound freeway entrance to hitch-hike to Moore’s Lane. It didn’t take long before a driver stopped. He said he was headed for the next exit after Moore’s Lane, but after he heard my story, he was kind enough to take me to the front entrance …
JANUARY 19, 2024 – In the same letter to Cynde I continued the saga of . . . my quitting. At 3:45 p.m. my landlady gave me a ride into the city to the bus station. The day was hot and the air heavy with humidity. And I was headed south. We drove past the …
JANUARY 18, 2024 – The letter to Cynde continued with the next chapter in my most challenging part of the job: quitting. Saturday. I slipped into a phone booth off Bailey Avenue in Buffalo. The windows were all broken and the traffic made hearing difficult. I dropped a dime in the slot and waited for …
JANUARY 17, 2024 – A key to Southwestern’s business model was making it difficult for any salesman to quit. In the first place, the only way you got paid was to work all the way to the end of the summer. During the third week of August the company would ship books to a centralized …
JANUARY 16, 2024 – My family and friends cautioned me to be wary when they heard that I’d been hitch-hiking deep into inner-city Buffalo in the morning and back out in the evening. If I had reason to worry, I was never afraid. Ironically, where I faced the most imminent threat—by far—was in the wilds …
JANUARY 15, 2024 – Early one evening I was making my way through a neighborhood when I came upon two couples sitting on folding chairs at the head of a driveway but not far from the street. I’d enjoyed a degree of success that day and was feeling more upbeat than usual. I called out …
JANUARY 14, 2024 – Despite the fear of failure that always accompanied me—sometimes out of sight in the shadows, sometimes writ large upon the door slammed in rejection—now and again I surprised myself. Three weeks into the sales job, I hit a gold vein in an otherwise desultory sales territory. I felt as though I’d …
JANUARY 13, 2024 – Early in the afternoon two hot days later, I turned down another old retail section of town not far from where I’d found the Chinese shop. Except all the action, as it were, wasn’t inside a mom and pop store but in the street—curb to curb—in front of a furniture store …
JANUARY 12, 2024 – The human brain has a way of softening, diluting, and covering up past miseries. In the context of the sales job, for example, I remember the fact of my afflictions—psychological and physical—but the memories of them don’t cause me current pain. Take the wicked sore throat I had the second week …
JANUARY 11, 2024 – Each day brought memorable encounters with the people of Buffalo. Going door-to-door, you meet all kinds of people—happy, sad, smart, dumb, kind, mean, guileful, guileless, short-tempered, tall-tale-tellers, people mad at the world and folks at whom the world is mad—and once you’re invited to cross the threshold, you see all kinds …
JANUARY 10, 2024 – During my sheltered life leading up to the sales job, I’d had little interaction with Black America. What encounters I did have with Blacks were either superficial or not at all instructive. At the superficial end, when I was in kindergarten our family took a road trip to Florida via the …
JANUARY 9, 2024 – My running and skiing marathon phase was still a few years ahead of me, but by 1974 I’d run and skied my share of long distances. The salient features of these sports is that even when you’re on a team, you’re always on your own. You sink or swim alone. The …
JANUARY 8, 2024 – No element of the Southwestern sales formula was a mere suggestion. The daily start time, the evening finish time, the daily door-knocking quota, the get-yourself-across-the-threshold quota, the give-your-pitch quota, the closing quota, the closing procedure, the weeks-end letter to your booster back home, and the weeks-end report you turned into your …
JANUARY 7, 2023 – When I first heard the Southwestern method of finding summer living quarters, I was dubious. As the hours grew on that cold rainy miserable Saturday in Buffalo, I decided the approach to finding housing was nothing short of hare-brained. Yet in the end, it proved to be effective. And who was …