FEBRUARY 7, 2024 – Yes. In my very first year of practice I handled a murder case—all by my lonesome, as my dad used to joke about solo efforts, usually in reference to cabin projects involving his clever deployment of wheel and lever.
It wasn’t exactly a murder case per se. It arose out of a wanton murder by a serial felon using a large caliber handgun, but my mission—and the lawsuit I had to bring—was to collect death benefits under a no-fault automobile insurance policy. That I wound up with the case and that I rode it to numerous 15-minute-installments of fame was the greatest irony of my law career. To understand the depth of the irony—and its relationship to one of the greatest pianists of all time, Vladimir Horowitz—requires a drive through an improbable background of wrong turns, dead ends, and rocky roads. Viewed wholistically, the case proved to be my personal phoenix.
* * *
In my third year of law school I took an elective course in insurance law. As I understand insurance law today, a whole semester course about it in law school was wholly unnecessary. Nearly anyone who’s filed an insurance claim knows that the law of insurance can be reduced to a simple principle: insurance companies are in the business of collecting premiums, not paying claims[1]. Exactly why I signed up for such a class is now beyond my powers of recall. I’m guessing that all the other electives that semester looked no less hellishly boring, and since Ray Peterson, my closest friend throughout law school, was signing up for insurance law, I’d decided to join him.
Ray was at once one of the smartest and funniest students in our class. He was a summa cum laude graduate of highly regarded Macalester College less than a mile away from our law school. If I wasn’t a member of Ray’s High IQ Club, at least I was smart enough to recognize how smart he was—and to laugh at his relentless wit.[2]
He’d also been a long-distance track star during his undergraduate days. Though Ray was retiring from his running career just as I was ramping up mine, training and competing gave us plenty to talk about. We never ran together though. He was too busy helping his wife, a graduate student in the U of MN pharmacy school, rehab the Victorian house they’d bought from the city for a dollar.
In any event, because of Ray I believe, I wound up taking Professor Kyle Montague’s course in insurance law. In age Montague was somewhere between my dad and my grandfather. He smoked a pipe and with his bushy yellow mustache, he reminded me of “I am the Walrus” from the Beatles’ Magical Mystery album. His loud, gravely voice made him sound like a walrus. What I remember most about his class—aside from his walrus likeness—was how painfully boring the subject matter was. Ray agreed, but unlike me, he never fell asleep in class. I didn’t know it and certainly wouldn’t have appreciated it at the time, but Professor Montague was somewhat of an institution at the school; a bona fide “distinguished” professor of law.
As with nearly all of our courses, the grade was determined by a semester-end essay exam. There were always two parts to law school exams. The first and most important segment was issue-spotting. In the cockamamie hypotheticals that the professors worked up—invariably involving characters with punny names—you were supposed to identify all the legal issues. It was a steroidal version of the Hidden Puzzle featured in every issue of Highlights magazine: If on your first go as a kid you counted 20 articles of clothing in the puzzle, you could be sure there were at least 30. Likewise with a law school exam, if initially you flagged a dozen issues, you’d better read and think more carefully, for doubtless there were another half dozen lurking between the lines. The second part of the exam was issue resolution based on all the law you’d read and studied over the span of the course.
Back in those days, you used a pen or pencil and scribbled in a “blue book” your responses to the essay questions. On exam day you’d enter the classroom five minutes before start time, grab a stapled two- or three-page test off the stack on the table at the head of the room, pull a couple of blue books from the multiple piles, then take a seat.
On the occasion of our insurance law exam, Ray and I walked in together. He took three books. I settled for two. You could always go back for more. When The Walrus gave the signal, we flipped over our exam sheets and started reading. For a good five minutes, the room was quiet. People were absorbing the hypotheticals, underlining issues, maybe jotting down a few notes.
Ten minutes in, pens and pencils started cranking away in earnest. Ray was off to the races—or was it off to war? He wrote so furiously he reminded me of General Patton during the Battle of the Bulge; as if the legendary take-no-prisoners warrior was stuck in an OCD tank rut and writing the order, “WE ATTACK AT DAWN! WE ATTACK AT DAWN! WE ATTACK AT DAWN!”
Me? I had no idea what the hypotheticals were about. They read like so much gibberish. On my second reading, I panicked. I was experiencing the biggest brain block of my entire academic career from kindergarten through college and now into two and a half years of law school. Ray, still posing as Patton, kept writing, “WE ATTACK AT DAWN!”
I didn’t know what to do. I tried looking at the ceiling, then the floor, then the shirt of the student sitting ahead of me. I tried playing in my head the first movement of Edouard Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole. I read the last hypothetical first and the first hypothetical last, but nothing, nothing came to me.
All I could hear was Ray as Patton blasting his way toward Bastogne and flipping noisily from one page to the next in his blue book. By the time he started into his second blue book, I had yet to open my first.
Reality then set in: I was in the process of flunking the course. FLUNKING! How would I explain myself to my family of honor scholars? I thought. No one had ever flunked a class—EVER—except . . . oh, yeah—me: eighth grade geography, my all-time favorite subject. But that had been strictly the teacher’s fault, not mine. If practicing law was no longer an option, what would I do? I certainly hadn’t practiced the violin enough to join my sisters—all three, professional violinists—on the stage of a music hall.
As I reflected on my past failure, I grew philosophical. My F in junior high geography—the price of my rebellion against a teacher who in my estimation was an abject failure as a teacher; a lazy bum who thought geography was nothing more than a coloring class in which he’d hand out mimeographed maps to color while he went on break. I’d “colored” my maps with angry black crisscrossed lines as if re-enacting the three 18th century Partitions of Poland by which Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great, and Empress Maris Theresa wiped the country right off the map. Yet the bigger consequence of my F was a grand reward. That F was the springboard to my being sent away to boarding school a million miles away, where I’d flourish beyond my parents’ wildest dreams, and where all kinds of doors and windows would open onto a bright and colorful future; a future that never would’ve ensued had I colored my maps inanely inside the borders and spent the rest of my school days in Anoka, Minnesota.
Maybe, I thought, as Ray started in on his third blue book, just maybe, the F I was in the process of chiseling into my academic record was another springboard—one that would catapult me straight out of law school, which I hated with a passion, and into my true and ultimately wonderful destiny. Maybe The Walrus wasn’t my executioner but my savior, or rather, by serving as the terminator of my law career, he was actually directing me toward a much better life.
I thought back to the day I’d taken the LSAT. At Bowdoin it seemed that half the students were pre-med and the other half, pre-law. Ever since fifth grade I’d naively thought I “wanted to be” a lawyer. I’d never considered anything else, and despite a “liberal arts” education, my undergraduate experience encouraged my narrow-mindedness.
My best friend, Jeff Oppenheim, was also gunning to become a lawyer. Apart from our college GPA, of course, the first big step in our chosen career was doing well on the LSAT. We both studied hard for it. To optimize our alertness on the day of the exam, we devised a fool-proof plan: we’d get a good night’s sleep the night before; we’d get up early and do some math problems, just to get our brains working—logically; we’d then hike to the dining hall at a pace designed to get the “phagocytes working,” even though as pre-law, not pre-med students, we had no idea what phagocytes were, just that we’d heard it was a good thing to “get them working”; we’d eat a decent breakfast but not so much it deprived our brains of blood in favor of stomachs; afterward, we’d march back to our dorm, go to the bathroom, grab our pre-sharpened pencils, and head for historic Massachusetts Hall, where the exam was to be administered. We timed everything so that we’d be able to walk up the stairs of the old building (completed in 1803) without being winded and enter the actual exam room with plenty of time but not too much time to spare.
All had gone exactly according to plan until . . . at the check-in desk I couldn’t produce my registration card. I broke into a cold sweat. Had I left it in the dining hall or our dorm room?
I bolted like a race horse that a rancher had just labeled with a branding iron. I charged down the hall and flew down the stairways, passing my friends and classmates so fast, every face was like a stylized smudge on a painter’s depiction of panic.
I’ll never forget the exact moment when I burst through the front door of Massachusetts Hall and sailed out over the stone steps. While I was still airborne, a lightning bolt rent the air simultaneously with a deafening thunderclap that reverberated inside my chest. I could smell the burnt air as the heavens unleashed a downpour.
I started off in a full sprint but within a few paces and with every second counting, I had to choose—check my dorm room first or the dining hall at the far end of campus? Perhaps it was my long-distance running bias that made me choose the dining hall. Soaking wet, a minute and a half later I entered the dining hall and made a beeline for the table where Jeff and I had eaten breakfast. No registration card. I checked the monitor’s desk. No registration card there either. I dashed back into the Maine monsoon and raced to my dorm, bounded up the stairs to the second floor, exploded into my room, nearly flattening my roommate. The registration card lay on the corner of my desk.
Chasing me back to Massachusetts Hall was the specter that maybe all of this—the lightning bolt, the torrential rain, the wrong choice as between dorm and dining hall, and the forgetting my registration card in the first place—was a collective sign that I was not intended to be a lawyer; that I really needed to find another path, pursue another career, go into the foreign service, explore the world for what was surely full of limitless possibilities other than the law.
By the time I reached the exam room, I was a human sponge with a heart rate of 5,000 and very late. Everyone else was hunkered down, already wielding their pencil points over the multiple choice selections. It had been an unsettling start down my chosen path of law.
* * *
My thoughts circled back to the insurance law exam at hand but only for a moment before jumping to the future. (Cont.)
Subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
[1] This is particularly true, you might say, in the area of real estate title insurance. At a seminar I attended hosted by a large title insurance company, the insurer’s general counsel gave a big speech. He started off with an oft-repeated joke among real estate lawyers: “When it comes to title insurance, if you can get it, you don’t need it.” The joke is a reference to the unusual nature of title insurance and the manner in which it is underwritten. The insurer can examine title by using a large figurative magnifying glass to determine what potential risks are involved in any given real estate transaction and decide to accept or reject the risk—unlike a casualty insurer, which plays statistical odds regarding fire, wind damage, etc.
[2]I was also smart enough to borrow Ray’s detailed notes of his administrative law class, which he took the semester before I did. He’d recorded nearly verbatim every single question asked by the professor, who followed religiously the Socratic method, and wrote down every answer—underscoring the ones that the professor especially liked. Ray’s notes served as my crib sheet, saving me the time and effort of having to read all the excruciatingly boring cases in the textbook. I never did buy the book, but mostly for sport, I volunteered more in that class than in all the others combined.
