What About Clients?

February 23, 2010

Real Heroes: Tom Wolfe

Cuff links, stick pin.
When I step out
I'm gonna do you in.

--Gibbons, Hill and Beard

Man in Full: Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr.

Prince of Journalism, Risk-Taker, Interpreter, Virginian, American Original. "Every girl crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man."

Posted by JD Hull at 10:59 PM | Comments (0)

February 20, 2010

Work-Life Pulitzer.

The difference between a job and a career is the difference between forty and sixty hours a week.

Robert Frost (1874-1963) spent his life as a poet, student, teacher, newspaper reporter, farmer, factory worker, father, husband and accomplished Yankee. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize four times.

(New York World-Telegram & Sun)

Posted by JD Hull at 08:44 PM | Comments (0)

Rue du Vaux

Are you positive Mademoiselle Clotilde du Vaux sparked a religion? Ever wonder about place names in Paris? There are about 6200 of them. Read about Clotilde-Marie de Ficquelmont in Invisible Paris.

Auguste Comte's "muse"

Posted by JD Hull at 05:00 AM | Comments (0)

February 18, 2010

Hubris: Zeus and Religion.

Ah how shameless--the way these mortals blame the gods. From us alone, they say, come all their miseries, yes, but they themselves, with their own reckless ways, compound their pains beyond their proper share.

Do you need religion to check hubris? Does it matter who or what you use to curb folly and excess? We think not. Anyway, that's Zeus speaking above--in a rare public apppearance--in Homer's Odyssey. He's the last anthropomorphic god we at WAC/WAP? will let take liberties with us. Just for a little while longer, though.

But should you view world religions as more than first-rate crowd control devices to keep you and yours in line, Zeus (also below) is seen either negotiating with you or practicing his aim--Westerners have never been sure which--with his lightning bolt. So be advised: 1. Be good. 2. Aways follow someone else's rules. 3. Don't screw it up.

P.B. Persinger: "Semele and Zeus with Thunderbolt" (2007) 10" x 8" Oil

Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

American Religion.

Ellen Bry: Stamford girl makes good in "Lost and Found Family"

It is a movie for people who go to church, sing, watch lots of TV, eat a lot, have never had an original thought, and are afraid of virtually Everyone and Everything All The Time. Already a cult classic, it will comfort millions stuck in the vast gray reverie of American Fly-Over Country.

Sony film released in September picks up speed in Bible Belt. Ellen Bry, a nighttime drama television mainstay (St. Elsewhere, Dexter, Boston Legal, Monk, The Closer) for decades--and known in the LA-NYC underground as WAC?'s in-house photographer--has the lead role as Ester Hobbes, a Chicago socialite who suddenly loses everything, in The Lost & Found Family, a new Sony Pictures release.

In the film, we meet a determined and spiritual woman who is surprised to learn that she has inherited just one thing from her dead businessman husband: a run-down old house in Georgia, and the turbulent foster family living in it.

Taken from the story Mrs. Hobbes' House, The Lost & Found Family is a poignant, uplifting, instructive and remarkably powerful family film set in the American South. It was filmed in Jackson, Georgia, a town between Atlanta and Macon, with a population of about 4000, in Butts County.

It is a movie for rural people who go to church, sing, watch lots of TV, listen to Bocephus, have at least two cousins in the Meth trade, eat a lot, and are afraid of virtually everyone, and of everything, all of the time. It is bound for fame as a cult classic: a comfort to millions of rustics stuck in the vast grayness and troubled reverie that is American Fly-Over Country.

Hey, just joshing you. Early in 2008, I saw a rough cut of The Lost and Found Family--then still entitled Mrs. Hobbes' House--before Sony Pictures acquired it. Do see the new Sony clip below, which includes what I saw. Like me, you may recognize the people portrayed.

An American story. Many Americans, including my own family, have roots that reach deeply into, say, southwestern Virginia, east Tennessee, and southern Missouri (where I've visited family my entire life), going back well over two centuries. These tribes often haven German (Palatine) and northern English or Scottish roots. They do endure. Later generations are still there: always hard-working and proud, sometimes devout, seldom well-to-do, and worlds away from the country club life Ester Hobbes led when her husband was alive. They often struggle to make the best life they can.

So you need not be Southern, rural or devoted to any form of organized religion to be moved by Ester Hobbes' story. This film will touch every viewer with simple but forgotten verities that bind us to one another.

There are artful, and moving, performances by Ellen and her younger cast members, who include teen heartthrob Lucas Till (Walk The Line, Hannah Montana: The Movie), and Jessica Luza, a film and television actress (The Sullivan Sisters, Boston Legal) and MTV fashion host.

Stamford girl makes good. Ellen Bry's movie credits include Mission Impossible 3, Deep Impact, and Bye, Bye Love. Stage work has included The Sixties, The Cafe Plays, Tribute and Seduced. A graduate of Tufts and Columbia universities, she is a former stunt woman, a Mom, and a well-known national advocate for autism issues. She makes a mean Peppered Shrimp Alfredo.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:12 AM | Comments (0)

February 12, 2010

Make Yours Moxie.

Your business, your rules. Get off your knees. Demand things of yourself--and of others. (1) What did you do this past week? (2) What did your employees do for you this week? (3) What did you all do for customers and clients?

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

Karl Llewellyn: Eternally baiting fresh Siwash grads.

Karl Nickerson Llewellyn (1893–1962)

We have no great illusions, my brethren and I, about how much good it will do you to be told these things in advance...You conceive this, I take it, to be somewhat in the nature of the pep meeting to which you were first exposed when you entered college.

You expect me to tell you that you should be earnest about your work, and get your back into it for dear old Siwash, and that he who lets work slide will stumble by the way.

My guess is that he was not a fan of "going through the motions". We can safely assume he would have never Twittered (or at least not have disclosed that activity to sane and serious clients). And he would have been deeply saddened by the current professional trend of doing all things in a way to "please the professional"--rather than to advance the interests of the entity served: Client, Patient, Buyer, Customer.

The above of course is from the opening chapter of the The Bramble Bush: On Our Law and Its Study (1931), which sprung from a series of introductory lectures Karl Llewellyn gave to first-year law students during the 1929-30 academic year, when he was appointed the first Betts Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia. The book's title is from a poem "The Bramble Bush" by Robert Penn Warren, excerpted here:

There was a man in our town
and he was wondrous wise:
he jumped into a bramble bush
and scratched out both his eyes--

and when he found that he was blind,
with all his might and maine,
He jumped into another one,
and scratched them in again.

(from past WAC? posts)

Posted by JD Hull at 11:58 PM | Comments (0)

February 10, 2010

Daniel O'Connell, Barrister.

Would this gentleman have Twittered? We think not. Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847), "Liberator of Ireland", led a movement that forced the British to pass the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, allowing Catholics to become members of the British House of Commons. As a leader, O'Connell had moxie, brains, drive, patience, organizational skills, and personality out the wazoo. More about him here and here.

O'Connell was also a consummate and legendary trial lawyer, a bit of an actor, and way-fun just to be around. In a set of lectures published in 1901, John L. Stoddard said of him:

He was a typical Irishman of the best stock--wily, witty, eloquent, emotional and magnetic. His arrival in town was often an occasion for public rejoicing. His clever repartees were passed from lip to lip, until the island shook with laughter.

In court, he sometimes kept the spectators, jury, judge and even the prisoner, alternating between tears and roars of merriment. Celtic to the core, his subtle mind knew every trick peculiar to the Irish character, and he divined instinctively the shrewdest subterfuges of a shifty witness.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)

February 09, 2010

Real heroes: Catherine Deneuve

Gallic elegance. Catherine Deneuve is as strong, resilient and talented as she is beautiful. The only woman in the world who could make director François Truffaut completely and hopelessly lose it. She is smart, entrepreneurial and ageless. Add her to our Roman Pantheon.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:31 PM | Comments (0)

America's Henry Miller

My people were entirely Nordic, which is to say they were idiots. Every wrong idea which has ever been expounded was theirs. Never once had they opened the door that leads to the soul; never once did they dream of taking a blind leap into the dark.

--Henry Miller (1891–1980), Tropic of Capricorn (Grove Press, 1961)

Even when writing about his own tribe of northern Europeans, he was funny, profound and painfully on target. Born in Manhattan and, interestingly, of German-Catholic parents, Henry Miller, novelist and painter, lived in Paris, Big Sur, Pacific Palisades, and many places in between. An inspiration to more than a few Beat poets and writers, he was a generation older than them--and beat most of them to it.

He lent an angry but insightful, funny and bawdy voice to the sentiment that Americans were too desperately conformist, unwittingly sterile and flat-out afraid to seize and live real life. Despite his often tiresome overtures of extreme existential dread, Miller was, and is, way fun to read. He could write beautifully; at his best, no one is better.

Women. He knew how to write about them in any profession, culture or walk of life. When he wrote of women, he was infuriating, hilarious or touching, moving easily from porn and hate, to awe and worship. Deep down, I think Miller loved them all--especially when he ranted against them. The whores of Paris, too.

"Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race."

Posted by JD Hull at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)

February 05, 2010

Lafley: Look to the meaningful outside.

The consumer as boss. From 2000 to June 2009, A.G. Lafley served as chairman of Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble, where he is now a director. Last May, he wrote "What Only the CEO Can Do" in the Harvard Business Review. Here's an excerpt, in which Lafley quotes the consultant-writer Peter Drucker (1909-2005) in comments Drucker made in 2004:

Inside there are only costs. Results are only on the outside.

The CEO alone experiences the meaningful outside at an enterprise level and is responsible for understanding it, interpreting it, advocating for it, and presenting it so that the company can respond in a way that enables sustainable sales, profit, and total shareholder return growth.

Alan George Lafley

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

February 04, 2010

What some sophisticated clients just might want.

We understand that, in lawyers, our friend Ari Gold seeks the following:

1. Quarterbacks--not Generic Dweebs.

2. Value--not Reduced Rates.

3. Verve--not Risk Aversion.

"Lawyers? Send me take-charge workaholics who don't dress like FBI agents or talk like Mr. Rogers."

(Photo: HBO)

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)

February 02, 2010

Sarah Kate Silverman for Congress

A papal water slide, too. To run, she may have three states to pick from. Or at least give her job/role at State? (We're serious.)

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

'O New York City you talk a lot...'

You look like a city. You feel like a religion.

--L. Nyro, 1969

Foley Square, 1963

Posted by JD Hull at 11:28 PM | Comments (0)

January 31, 2010

Kabul

Give us that old-time ambition. In case you never worked it out, What About Clients?/What About Paris? is merely about Quality. Values. Old Verities. It's the Enduring Stuff no one nation, religion, community, family, school, employer or profession can pretend to give you.

Maryam, a heroine in our story, is a photojournalist who lives with her family in Marrakech, Morocco. She's been in Kabul and Herat since January 5. She has an innocent's shining eye for everyday beauty and courage.

All photos below, and behind the links, are by Maryam and My Marrakesh.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

January 30, 2010

Romain Rolland: Of things that matter.

There is no joy except in creation. There are no living beings but those who create. All the rest are shadows, hovering over the earth, strangers to life. All the joys of life are the joys of creation: love, genius, action.

--Romain Rolland (1866-1944), Nobel Prize winner, in "Lightning Strikes Christophe".

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)

January 29, 2010

Jerome David Salinger (1919-2010)

Salinger changed writing. He died Wednesday. There are hundreds of articles out today but see The Boston Globe.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2010

Storytelling

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

--Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

Posted by JD Hull at 02:48 PM | Comments (2)

January 19, 2010

Sarah Kate Silverman doesn't like PC, either.

Sarah Silverman is saucy and attractive, too. If you don't think that's very important, you're wrong--but you can write us an angry letter, not invite us to parties, or tip off Nina Totenberg and NPR.

The Future is Not for Weenies. We have this Vision of It:

When politically-correct culture, and other goofy forced-conformity social agendas wane and disappear, you will be able to say what you want. (Okay, anything that puts kids at risk--and about Mothers--will not be fair play.) You will use words like "secretary", "stewardess"--and even "stew", if you've had a few drinks on the plane.

If you're a lawyer, you will start using the term "Chinese wall" again. You will be able to swear, and loudly, in the workplace, and start war stories with: "You know, I had this case in the Southern District, back in 1987, when men were men."

After the Revolution, you will be able to flirt, and be playful and even a tad eccentric, at work.

If someone you work with is lazy, you will be able to say things like, whoa, that dude Josh "is lazy" rather than have to say it's so awesome that Josh is "low profile/independent/a team member requiring minimal face time/empowered by his flexible hour arrangement/a pioneer in work-life balance".

The expression "Not Work-Oriented" will be okay, too.

Using "not work-oriented" rather than "lazy" is also a proven attention-getter. Granted, it's too indirect. It's soft. Sounds a bit PC. But think of it as a transitional term you can employ until people start saying what they mean.

For example, we have used "not work-oriented" frequently in recent years in telephone conversations with people, unknown to us, who check references, of former employees, who we know too well. Saying that your ex-employee Kendall, who had top grades at Dartmouth and Duke Law, and had interviewed well, is "not work-oriented" is easier, faster and frankly more fun than struggling through on the phone with:

Mr. Bloor, it just wasn't a 'fit'. Kendall has many gifts. But we always knew she would flourish more in an alternative work setting where, you know, team members were, uh, not required to do any work per se, or actually perform, or add value. You know what I mean.

After the Revolution, you will also be able to use your real name when you give your opinion in the ether of the Internet.

In fact, anonymity will be banned--and reserved for rape victims, Iranian and Cuban dissidents, Ned Beatty "Deliverance" casualties, and the ballot box at primary and general elections. You will be able to utter all manner of potentially rude, offensive, defamatory and even straight-up tacky things--but you will take responsibility by backing it all up with your real name.

More great news: In the New Order of Things, long after PC culture has dissipated and died, the Seas will not turn Red. No One will go to Hell. The Family Unit will not Implode. The Clintons won't Abduct Your Kids.

You get the idea. We don't like "PC culture" that much--sane First Amendment people of any political persuasion never do unless to make fun of it--and so we do cherish Sarah Silverman.

Right now, America needs shock troops. Yanks don't think much on their own anymore. So Sarah's our girl.

Besides, Sarah is saucy and attractive. If you don't think that's important, you're wrong--but you can dash off an angry letter, not invite us to parties, or report us to Nina Totenberg and NPR.

Silverman's also a fine comic, writer, actress, musician, and rebel's rebel who never met a taboo she did not like.

While at first blush Silverman's humor may seemed based on stereotypes, she's smart and ironic, not mean, and an unrelenting satirist of life and priorities in America.

Meet Lenny Bruce's adorable grandchild who has escaped from Scarsdale, New Canaan or Shaker Heights and now has a bunch of uncomfortable questions for us all. She's going to ask them, e.g., "Sell the Vatican, Feed the World".

Let's see, what else?

Her sister is a Rabbi. But Jesus is Magic? She's ethnically Jewish--but for years allegedly wore a St. Christopher medal from her boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel ("It was cute the way he gave it to me. He said if it doesn't burn a hole through my skin, it will protect me...").

She claims ancestry from Hungary, Poland, France and Slovakia. She does not drink. For you snobs, she graduated from a prep school in New Hampshire. She attended NYU. She turns 40 this year.

How about this: Can we run her for Congress in, say, California, New York, or New Hampshire, this year or 2012?

That might help move things along.

Posted by JD Hull at 02:45 AM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2010

Greenfield: When is anonymity "all talk, no responsibility"?

"Okay, kids, get your learn on. Today we will learn about the right of all Americans to throw stones at your house and run away like thieves into the night." Do see "All Talk, No Responsibility" at Scott Greenfield's Simple Justice. It's a piece we wish we had written about a new U.S. Supreme Court case (cert. just granted) that we will follow. Doe v. Reed, No. 09-559, concerns the "right" of Washington state petitioners to be anonymous after successfully bringing a referendum to the ballot for the November 2010 general election. The referendum seeks repeal of a controversial law on domestic partnership rights. Frankly, we could care less about the law at stake here. (We haven't read it.) The item on the ballot is not the issue. Anonymity in "getting it there" is. The Supreme Court's decision is expected early this summer.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

January 16, 2010

Genevieve wants to know: Who are your Huns?

I know it, I see it. The Huns will not come.

In 451, Sainte Genevieve (422-512) saved Parisians from the Huns, the legend goes. People had started to flee Paris in anticipation of the invasion led by Attila--but stopped when she told them she had a vision that the Huns would not enter Paris. She became the city's patron saint. In 1928, a grateful Paris erected a statue to her on the Pont de la Tournelle, a bridge now about 400 years old. Genevieve is facing east, the direction from which the Huns approached.

She is also said to have converted Clovis, king of the pagan Franks, to Christianity--but she hasn't quite worked that magic on me. I still visit her anyway. If you walk in a southwesterly direction--from, say, the Place des Vosges on the Right Bank--to get to the Left Bank, you can use that bridge (Pont de la Tournelle). If you do, you can walk right under Genevieve, with Notre Dame and Ile Saint Louis on your right.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

January 09, 2010

Real heros: Annabeth Gish

Add Ms. Gish to our Pantheon. It's hard to find it all in one human.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

January 07, 2010

Professionalism, Actually.

Let’s say you’re a blues guitarist with a broken ring finger on your fretboard hand. What do you do? If you’re Albert King, you put a splint on it, and you get out there and play.

--The RainMan

Clients. Consumers. Buyers. It's about "the customers"--and not just about being polite and courtly to other attorneys. It's not a club. Lawyers are a dime a dozen. Not that big a deal anymore. No one cares. For example, every single person waiting tables in Washington D.C. last week was a graduate of Georgetown, Hastings or Yale Law. (Eventually they will eat your lunch.) It's true. We checked. So get over yourself. Think about the Main Event. Remove your head from your Wazoo. Work harder to distinguish yourself. Join a better club. For starters, visit Ray Ward's Minor Wisdom or his the (new) legal writer.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

January 05, 2010

Real Heros: Benjamin Disraeli

British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) was provocative, precocious, and a comeback kid all his life. Though he had very early success as a writer, he failed miserably in business. He then ran for office--but kept losing. As a young man, he picked ill-considered political fights that he often lost with Daniel O'Connell, the dangerously witty Irish barrister-politician.

Finally, in 1837, he was elected to the House of Commons. But he blew his maiden speech so badly he was laughed at uproariously from beginning to end.

A shameless self-promoter, he attracted too much attention. He even dressed to provoke. He shunned most men, preferring women, especially the high-born. Mainly, Disraeli was restless. He bored easily. He simply liked the limelight, and getting important things done.

As a student, the idea of practicing law, which he pursued briefly, left him feeling stale and useless. "Izzy" said he felt most alive when he was doing something both public and difficult.

Early in his career, he once wrote unhappily to a friend: "I am dying for action, and rust like a Damascus sabre in the sheath of a poltroon." Disraeli, A. Maurois (Random House 1928).

=

Vanity Fair, 1869

(from past posts)

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2010

Starting fresh, curious and truly awed.

He was a loner with an intimate bond to humanity, a rebel who was suffused with reverence. And thus it was that an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the universe, the locksmith of mysteries of the atom and the universe.

--from Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Schuster, 2007) by the Aspen Institute's Walter Isaacson, former Time managing editor.

Try this at home and work: The Holy Surprise of a Child's First Look. Forget for a moment, if you can, about Clients and Paris.

WAC/WAP? is at heart about Quality, Old Verities, and Values--the things no business, government, non-profit group, religion, politician or leader (a) wants to give you or (b) can give you. You have to find them on your own. Work and Service, whether you are paid for them or not, are inseparable from these things.

At this blog, at our firm, and in our lives, we seek (in the largest sense) serious overachievers, and aficionados of life, past and present: identifying them, learning from them, having them as friends, hiring them and, above all, never holding them back.

It is often hard to find these people--or even to remember that they once existed.

We do, after all, live in a cookie-cutter world. Originality, intuition, authentic spirituality, and even taste are not valued--these traits are often feared and attacked--in most of the West.

This is especially true in America, where we continue to be geographically, culturally and (some think) cosmically isolated. The United States, despite its successes, high standard of living and exciting possibilities, has become world headquarters of both moral pretension and dumbing life down.

Besides, fresh thinking leads to painful recognitions. It's easier to let something else do the thinking for us.

"Fragmentation" is a word some people (including those with better credentials than the undersigned to write this) have used for decades to describe modern humans all over the world: lots of wonderful, intricate and even elegant pieces--but no whole.

So, in our search for coherence, we look for clues.

We look to television, advertising, and malls. To work, and to professional organizations. To secondary schools, universities, and any number of religions (none of the latter seem "special"--they say identical intuitive and common sense good things, but just say them differently), and to an array of other well-meaning institutions.

In fairness, all of these have their moments (hey, we all like our insular clubs).

And, importantly, we seek answers from others we know and love--family and friends--who have been soaked in the same messages and reveries, who make us feel comfortable with the same choices, values and lives that gnaw at us all in rare moments of clarity and solitude, and who are able to "reassure" us so we can get back "on track".

So what's missing?

It's Imagination.

Children come with Imagination. It's standard issue. Some lucky adults hold onto Imagination, even as it is bombarded with a tricky, confusing, and lob-sided mix of messages favoring mediocrity over quality. Until Imagination becomes a value in and of itself, a lot us will "shuffle off" life on earth without even knowing what happened in the past 80-odd years.

Dang. We denied ourselves (a) thinking our own thoughts and (b) acting on our own. We would not even fight for these qualities. We would not take chances. We built, embraced and often defended a Cliff's Notes life. We were uninspired, desperate to fit in, and frightened. We "missed it".

We missed it All--like drunks who slept through the Super Bowl.

Our children, friends and people who respected and loved us even took notes on what we thought, said and did here as "spiritual beings" having a "human experience. They emulated us. That means you and me, Jack. How do you feel about that? Oh well. Next time, maybe?

Which brings us, finally, to Albert Einstein.

True, few of us can have Einstein's talent for Western logic, or his IQ. But Einstein's advantage over other physicists may have been that he was a "new soul". He looked at everything as if he were seeing it for the first time. Imagination.

Take work. He approached it from a wellspring of joy. There are, and have been, others like Einstein in that respect. Those are the kind of people we want as friends to inspire us, and as co-workers to solve clients' problems. His IQ and genius is not the point. We'll take an IQ a lot lower than Einstein's (for associates, though, Coif or Law Review would be nice).

Reverence and a child's awe. Imagination. That's the outlook we prize here at WAC? Energy, intensity and creativity always seem to come with it. If it comes with serious brains, we'll take that, too.

(From past posts, and with a grateful nod to Samuel John Hazo.)

Posted by JD Hull at 08:29 PM | Comments (3)

December 17, 2009

Hesse's Complaint

It is hard to find this track of the divine in the midst of this life we lead.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1927)

Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

December 11, 2009

The Real Paris.

In another illustration over the centuries (this one from the 1400s) of an important Greek myth, Paris, the Trojan prince, judges a beauty contest. The goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite compete for a golden apple.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:59 AM | Comments (2)

November 29, 2009

Men of Letters

Never write a letter, never throw one away.

--Attributed to the late private investigator and consultant Thomas Corbally, two medieval priests, and three U.S. mayors.

For reasons which go back to 1974, WAC? misses Hunter Thompson. This son of Louisville put some of his best and funniest stuff in personal letters--and he wrote volumes and volumes of them. See the Charlie Rose interview, undated, but likely about 1997.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

November 25, 2009

Real heros: Chrissie Hynde

Midwest-bred rocker Hynde is said to have no fear of anything or anyone. Can you say that? How free are you, anyway?

Way to go Ohio: Firestone High School, Akron, Ohio, 1969.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

Greenfield

No computer will ever win a case. No gadget will replace the mind that drives the fingers that push the buttons.

SHG, Simple Justice, November 24, 2009

NYC's Scott Greenfield in November 2004, days before alleged hunting accident in Hamptons.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:00 PM | Comments (2)

November 24, 2009

Inspiration: Getting it.

I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil.

--Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Writer Jack London thought you could not wait for it. You needed, he thought, to go out and hunt inspiration with a club. Walt Whitman, however, was luckier. He was a relatively young man when Ralph Waldo Emerson was thinking and writing. Emerson set off the young printer and hack writer, hurling him into an exuberant and celebratory realm, where no one had ever been.

Wild Walt, circa 1860, by Matthew Brady

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

November 22, 2009

Johnny, we hardly knew ye.

Died Nov. 22, 1963. 46 years old.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:52 PM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2009

Special Irish Trial Lawyer-Politician Moment: O'Connell the Barrister.

Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847), the "Liberator of Ireland", led a movement that forced the British to pass the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, allowing Catholics to become members of the British House of Commons. O'Connell was a consummate trial lawyer, and by nature a bit of an actor. The English, of course, found him infuriating. In the end, he was a very great trial lawyer--one of the best ever--and a real leader who may have done more for Ireland than anyone after him. In a set of lectures John L. Stoddard published in 1901, he said of him:

He was a typical Irishman of the best stock--wily, witty, eloquent, emotional and magnetic. His arrival in town was often an occasion for public rejoicing. His clever repartees were passed from lip to lip, until the island shook with laughter. In court, he sometimes kept the spectators, jury, judge and even the prisoner, alternating between tears and roars of merriment. Celtic to the core, his subtle mind knew every trick peculiar to the Irish character, and he divined instinctively the shrewdest subterfuges of a shifty witness.

(from previous HO posts)

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

October 29, 2009

Writing well: Samuel Hazo

Poet-dramatist-novelist, gift of America's Industrial Heartland, always a man in full. Pittsburgh's Sam Hazo writes simple, thoughtful and pregnant prose.

This Part of the World, by Pittsburgh's Samuel Hazo.

Posted by Rob Bodine at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

September 28, 2009

Generation Weenie

Being "just a copy" is outlawed. I just left Los Angeles, where it's tough to offend anyone about anything. Like NYC, LA is not for everyone. No one cares what you think in either city. It's wonderful. My take: both LA and NYC these days make even Chicago seem like an effeminate Alan Alda-land. PC and unoriginal thought are frowned upon in America's two most important cities. LA and NYC tend to look down on Weenies. If you live somewhere else, try not to be a Weenie.

Frankly, I've been running into a lot of Weenies these days--from cultural liberals who keep surrounding themselves with no one but like-minded people, to religious educated white collars too afraid or too lazy to think anymore on their own, to "professionals" who always reserve the right to do third-rate work. They have this in common: they are highly emotional about keeping to their low aspirations and narrow views of the world.

They've stopped growing--and they are very happy with that, thank you very much. These people have children. It's worrisome.

If you are not sure if you are a Weenie, do see Generation Weenie, for humans "who tend to be insulted, outraged, offended, or traumatized". According to the definition section, you may be one if you: (1) utilize the words offended, outraged, insulted, or traumatized whenever possible, (2) believe nothing is your fault, and you are a victim of circumstance, (3) wear a dorky little ribbon in a half figure eight pattern to signify your solidarity, and (4) sue everybody because you have been wronged.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:10 AM | Comments (2)

September 27, 2009

Real Winter

John Dawson Winter III, b. Beaumont, Texas (1944- ). Note to U.S. generic weenies ("no guts, no gospel") born after 1965: Johnny Winter is a straight-up Boomer Hero. No secret that listening to him could make you tougher. Make you ready to compete. Make you work harder. Make you stop whining. Make you stop settling for mediocre.

Real Winter makes a blind man see.

"...put some bleachers out in the sun/And have it out on Highway 61".

Posted by JD Hull at 12:28 AM | Comments (1)

September 20, 2009

More real heros: Parker Posey

They're picking up prisoners and putting 'em in a pen.
And all she wants to do is dance.

-D. Kortchmar/WB Music Corp. ASCAP (1984)

Posey is the original Party Girl--and one with huge brains.

Rent "Party Girl" (1995) and watch her dance in the last scene. Parker Posey is way beyond hip. She is her own world: 100% authentic and convincing in every sense. Not unlike Neal Cassady, François Villon, Raoul Duke or the tragically misunderstood, and now martyr-like, GeekLawyer. You may have to look them all up; it's worth it--so do that. Escape Rancho Bernardo, Centerville, Moon Township and Latrobe. Come live in the world.

In mid-2006, I met Posey in the Newark Airport on the way to Manchester, Wordsworth's Lake District, and then London. I remember nothing about my life before that day--and thought about her the whole trip. (I've recently given up on all other actresses--well, okay, one--closer to me in age. Actresses in LA and NYC are a king-hell pain in the ass; so they need to be worth it.) Posey's the rare American woman with Southern roots who won't make you gag the minute she starts talking. Slight accent, always subtle. Not just funny. Her natural quirk and smarts almost hide how gorgeous she is. Can't remember if I gave her my card--but she can call me.

Query: May we see her in more dramatic roles? It's not (yet) like the Bill Murray-syndrome--where people just look at him and laugh. Not enough of us have seen Parker Posey. She's picked roles early in her career that were brave and non-commercial.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:58 PM | Comments (0)

September 18, 2009

Real heros: Tom Wolfe

Cuff links, stick pin.
When I step out
I'm gonna do you in.

--Gibbons, Hill and Beard (ZZ Top)

Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr., Prince of New Journalism, and A Man in Full (1931- ). "Every girl crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man."

Posted by Rob Bodine at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

September 14, 2009

Got Heart?

In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country. The craving for ethyl alcohol and the opiates has been stronger, in these millions, than the love of God, of home, of children; even of life.... Why should such multitudes of men and women be so ready to sacrifice themselves for a cause so utterly hopeless and in ways so painful and so profoundly humiliating?

--Aldous Huxley, "Drugs That Shape Men's Minds", The Saturday Evening Post, October 18, 1958

Huxley on realigning passions. Heart. Somewhere, deep inside, most humans have Heart. (Hey, if you only get passion for booze and drugs, you can transfer later it to something else...) But our company hasn't seen much Heart in the workplace these days; too many people of all ages seem to have given up on their lives and standards.

"Dumbing it down" is the New Drug.

Everyone these days in all workplaces seems to want "easy"--but things are as hard as they have ever been. There's a Recession goin' on. This is not the time to give up on, or stop demanding, quality.

Now, more than ever, many Americans are just "mailing it in".

We see it in retail clerks, employees of vendors, our own new hires, many consultants, customer and client service, and, increasingly, in the way many law firms just "practice law". In fact, the quality of corporate lawyering, in our view, is at a new and consistent low. (Yes, we're in a position to judge; every work day, we experience law firms from all over North America, Latin America, Asia and Europe.)

What's Next? "Humanizing" Antitrust Litigation? Making Cross-Examinations at Trial Politically Correct? Perhaps, in the Military, "New Age" Special Forces Training to Accomodate the Mr. Rogers Crowd? In the past 15 years or so, efforts to "humanize" education and the workplace--the great Ken Blanchard and Steve Covey and their followers are not the men for this moment, folks--have only made matters worse. Those efforts and overtures now peak at the worst possible time for the West.

In the name of the compassionate treatment of others in school and (especially) the workplace, and appealing to our "better angels" in all spheres of human activity, we have also dumbed down hard things. We have made the challenges of life and work "easier", way less complex, and less jolting, less competitive and "less violent" than they really are.

Yanks are famous for Heart, Achievement and Doing Things Right Under Pressure and in Adverse Situations. Heart. Where is it? Maybe America's detractors were right. Are we now Teletubbies? Did we Yanks lose our Fight and our Mojo?

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2009

Disraeli on books.

Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

--Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)

"Dizzy"

Posted by Rob Bodine at 11:37 PM | Comments (0)

September 09, 2009

An old tragedian on stepping up.

This is slavery: not to speak one's thought.

Euripides, non-lawyer (480-406 B.C.)

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

Out of Germany

The most civilized nations of modern Europe issued from the woods of Germany; in the rude institutions of those Barbarians we [received] the original principles of our present laws and manners.

--Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter IX (1782)

Posted by JD Hull at 01:59 PM | Comments (1)

September 05, 2009

These Days Drink Moxie--And Lots of It.

Sometimes you have to look reality in the eye and deny it.

--Garrison Keillor

Posted by JD Hull at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)

August 12, 2009

Eunice Kennedy Shriver (1921-2009)

I grew up in a family of Depression Era-WWII Parents and Boomer Kids. For us, the U.S. economy overall was very good in the 1950s-1970s as we moved around in corporate America from D.C. to Chicago, Grand Rapids, Detroit, Chicago again, and finally southern Ohio. We were not poor. My brother, sister and I attended some of the finest secondary schools in the U.S. My parents--especially my mother, a 1960s prototype of the Strong Suburban Super-Mommy, and one with a caregiver's heart--stressed not only achievement in school and sports, and having constant paid part-time jobs, but also on working with the physically or mentally handicapped, or the otherwise unlucky.

And we were to do that without telling the world about what completely lucky and swell people we were. It meant spending your time, and part of your soul. Bonus: You need not be paid money in those part-time jobs. Secret: You got more than you ever gave. We volunteered--Stepping Stones Center in Cincinnati was just one venue--and my mother and sister each entered careers to work with special adults or special children. Eunice Kennedy died yesterday. No matter what your age, your politics, or your tolerance for social welfare programs, the middle child of Rose and Joseph Kennedy was a very big deal in making lucky people realize how much unlucky people had to give to them. See in the Washington Post this editorial.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

Richard Haynes: Brilliant, bold, rich, imperfect.

I would have won them all if my clients hadn’t kept reloading their gun and firing.

--Richard "Racehorse" Haynes, now 82, quoted in first-rate March 2009 ABA Journal article by Mark Curriden.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

July 24, 2009

1st Earl of Beaconsfield

Every girl crazy about a sharp dressed man. --ZZ Top

Dandy, Womanizer, Author, Politician, Prime Minister.

Posted by Rob Bodine at 04:00 PM | Comments (0)

July 22, 2009

Thinking Well: Jonathan Swift

Anglo-Irish, Angry and Wild. And now add Clergyman and Satirist. A unique mix. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), the author of Gulliver's Travels, was truly wild, but maybe not quite as sick and strange as his contemporary critics thought; they saw him through the lens of the many illnesses that plagued his last decade and put him in a permanently bad mood. Certainly, he had no fair shake from any of us in the last century, when we all went nuts on Freud.

True, Swift could be abrasive. Aggressive. He made enemies, both literary and political. But he was influential.

So who--and who with a caring heart--is truly brave these days? We live in a "consensus consciousness" society and, if you are a lawyer, or some other kind of Western "professional", it's perhaps even worse. You get patted on the head for making your thoughts and actions risk-averse ones. You don't lead. And you are actually rewarded for it in the short term.

Who any longer feels, thinks on their own, talks about it, writes about it, acts, and is not afraid of the consequences? Who leads?

Posted by JD Hull at 07:50 PM | Comments (0)

July 18, 2009

Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr. (1916-2009)

Yesterday's NYT: "Walter Cronkite, Voice of TV News, Dies". Cronkite was part-Midwesterner, part-Southerner, and started out in print journalism. He earned his reputation as a war correspondent in Europe, covering some of WWII's major campaigns. Recruited to CBS in 1950 by Ed Murrow, he was America's first "celebrity" anchor, and we saw him nightly from 1962 to 1981. He took what he did very seriously: broadcast journalism as religion, the fourth branch, and something to be done the right way.

A studious-looking Lefty, Cronkite likely thought of JFK as "his" president. The two men were born eight months apart. We and our parents saw him choke up on the air--even if barely--just that one time: November 22, 1963, reporting JFK's death in Dallas. Cronkite had just turned 47. But he always seemed older somehow. He had this reassuring voice: authoritative but never affected or self-important. You never got the impression when he reported one crisis after another--there was a new one every month from 1963 until 1975--that he was telling you that things would be "okay". Rather, he was telling you the truth--and that it was his mission to get it right.

He served you. He was the soundtrack of every American Boomer's youth: from Kennedy's somehow promising but wistful and aborted New Frontier, Viet Nam, more assassinations, GOP and Dem party conventions that were serious brawls or riots, the Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations, and up to the start of the overly-serious, and some think seriously-demented, Reagan Revolution that gave us the Newt Brigades. Nearly 20 years.

(Photo: Washington Post)

Posted by JD Hull at 02:14 AM | Comments (0)

Creation.

There is no joy except in creation. There are no living beings but those who create. All the rest are shadows, hovering over the earth, strangers to life. All the joys of life are the joys of creation: love, genius, action...

--Romain Rolland (1866-1944), Nobel Prize winner, in "Lightning Strikes Christophe".

Posted by Rob Bodine at 12:40 AM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2009

Dr. Thompson on American life...

Once they let you get away with running around for ten years like a king hoodlum, you tend to forget now and then that about half the people you meet live from one day to the next in a state of such fear and uncertainty that about half the time they doubt their own sanity.

Their boats are rocking so badly that all they want to do is get level long enough to think straight and avoid the next nightmare.

--HST, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1972)

Step up, speak up, and walk with the King.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

July 03, 2009

Got real patriotism?

A wise man's country is the world.

--Aristippus (435-360 BC), as quoted by Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosphers

"There is hope. I see traces of men." Aristippus was shipwrecked on the island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea. He and his fellow survivors did not know where they were or if the island was inhabited. But he sees geometric figures drawn on the sand.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

More Crossroads: Boomers ask "Who is John Mayer?"

Would prefer a good video/audio of 1968 live version but this--with lame but short introduction--will have to do for this former U.S. national anthem:

Posted by JD Hull at 11:43 PM | Comments (0)

The late-2008 Recession: A Crossroads for Corporate Law?

I'm staying at the crossroads, believe I'm sinking down.

If you can navigate through all the painstaking diplomacy without pulling a hamstring, do visit ALM's Legal Blog Watch and read "Are the BigLaw Layoffs a Good Thing?", and the related links. It was inspired by a provocative and courageous Dan Slater column July 1 at NYT's Deal Book. Note: In writing the op-ed piece, Slater, of course, used his real name. Most of the twenty-five commenters--presumably Cuban dissidents, battered housewives and former Tony Soprano crew in the Witness Protection Program--did not.

"I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees. Asked the Lord above, have mercy now, save poor Bob if you please." Robert Leroy Johnson (1911-1938) used his real name when writing and performing.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:58 AM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2009

Breaking: Local Boy Makes Good

Scott Greenfield of Simple Justice. NY Law Journal: "Free: Court Finds Attorney's Unsolicited Faxes Did Not Violate Communications Act".

Greenfield (client cropped from picture) celebrating.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:37 PM | Comments (1)

June 14, 2009

John Hope Franklin

And Bill Clinton does Duke--but let's not miss the point. On Friday Bill Clinton gave a eulogy in the Duke Chapel for John Hope Franklin, the historian and civil rights figure who died in late March at 94. See The Miami Herald. Franklin wrote From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans, a classic first published in 1947. As is often the case with Clinton, his arrival on campus eclipsed his reason for being there. Nathan Freeman, a columnist at The Chronicle, the school's enduring student daily, certainly liked the idea of having the ex-president in the Gothic wonderland that is Duke University. Even before Clinton spoke, Freeman wrote: "Bring Bubba Back Again".

The real deal at Duke last week: John Hope Franklin

Posted by JD Hull at 02:17 AM | Comments (0)

June 05, 2009

John Arthur Carradine (1936-2009)

One of us, if you grew up in the 1960s-1970s. Forget about Shane and Kung Fu, which likely embarrassed him. A brilliant guy from a celebrated acting family of three generations: the New Age Barrymores. Way meaner, edgier, smarter and tougher than Cole Younger, who he played in the James-Younger Northfield raid saga. Eldest son, Alpha male, part-Beat, part-Hip. Seeker. He didn't care what you thought.

David Carradine was on a short list of people who got right to the point--and told you the brutal truth. Authentic. A non-wimp's evil answer to Phil Donahue. Could not be bothered with trendy people, weenies, hedgers or metro-sexuals--or anyone else who forgot who they really are. AP: "Actor David Carradine found dead in Bangkok."

Posted by JD Hull at 04:32 PM | Comments (4)

June 03, 2009

Churchill in Paris

A photo from Paris-based A Clear Blue Sky.

Winston Churchill in front of the Petit Palais, Av. Winston-Churchill, 8th Arrondissement.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

May 29, 2009

Breaking news: GeekLawyer sued, finally.

The Romans at Teutoburg Forest, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, the Oscar Wilde trial, the death of Bambi's mother. And now this. We bump our in-progress pieces on SCOTUS nominee Sotomayor, "the end of the recession", the GM bankruptcy, and a tip we got about the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa to note that GeekLawyer--soft-spoken and mild Brit barrister, writer and IP specialist WAC? befriended in 2005, and recently drank Diet Cokes with in Mayfair--has been finally sued. See Geeklawyer sued--finally!

Details are sketchy at this point.

But who would want to sue this guy? No matter what he's done (within reason), he is "one of us". Let's circle the wagons for our cousin in Albion. He's done scads to help us get over our fears of really having a First Amendment culture here in the States. At a minimum, he's unwittingly lowered--and quite drastically--FCC standards.

Here are excerpts from the milder parts of yesterday's GL post, edited by WAC? for Yanks of PC-persuasion and/or moral majority sensibilities:

GeekLawyer has taunted many a [phallic, arguably anti-gay and un-PC imagery expletive deleted] who has huffed and puffed but climbed down: billionaire [F-word imagery implying cretin-esque qualities deleted] Stelios for example.

Mercifully this litigation, for a piffling £300,000, was unrelated to GeekLawyer's profession and his capacity to entertain the judiciary while [violent and horribly un-PC client service imagery deleted] punters and opponents alike remains unimpeded.

Outrage in London--how will it end?

Above: Well-loved Brit pundit GeekLawyer at Epsom Downs racetrack just days before vicious and groundless lawsuit for doing something.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:35 PM | Comments (3)

May 26, 2009

Holden Oliver (2007-2009): Done, out, onward.

As planned, and dreaded, "old" law student Holden Oliver, a WAC? co-blogger, is leaving us. He graduates, takes a bar exam, and takes his "outfit" (his term) to Europe for a year. And then? Well, he's not sure. But the guy sure has options: journalism, law, maybe both. Some of us see him in politics. (He doesn't.) In addition to being a fine (and fast) writer, Holden's unusually well-read, and leading a down-East life that's "on purpose and examined".

The only serious Libertarian I've ever liked, he's taught me, and Tom Welshonce, the real brains behind What About Clients?, much. We're sorry, sir, that we killed you off the last couple of years on April 1. But we were insanely jealous of your easy charm with everyone, and every thing. You could be arrogant and droll and funny all at once; yet you still enriched our lives beyond our capacity to ever repay you.

Posted by JD Hull at 02:43 AM | Comments (1)

May 23, 2009

St. Genevieve: Who are your Huns?

Get down on your knees and pray! I know it, I see it. The Huns will not come.

Sainte Genevieve (422-512) saved Parisians from the Huns, the legend goes, in 451. People had started to flee Paris in anticipation of the invasion led by Attila--but stopped when she told them she had a vision that the Huns would not enter Paris. She became the city's patron saint. In 1928, a grateful Paris erected a statue to her on the Pont de la Tournelle (now about 400 years old). Genevieve is facing east, the direction from which the Huns approached. She is also said to have converted Clovis, king of the pagan Franks, to Christianity. If you walk from the Right Bank to the Left Bank near the Ile Saint Louis, you walk right under her, with Notre Dame on your right.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

May 15, 2009

'Let no man write my epitaph.'

It the title of a 1960 movie with Shelley Winters, Ricardo Montalban, Jean Seberg and Burl Ives (playing a kindly and boozy Irish-American judge). It was based on a 1958 novel by Willard Motley. But the words came from a real guy, Irish nationalist Robert Emmet, during the "speech from the dock" before he was hanged by the British in 1803 for leading a march on Dublin Castle. History doesn't think Emmet was the most effective Irish rebel who ever lived--but his final words endured:

I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world – it is the charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph. No man can write my epitaph, for as no man who knows my motives and character dares now to vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them rest in obscurity and peace until other times and other men can do justice to them. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then shall my character be vindicated, then may my epitaph be written.

I think of Emmet's words this way--and my sense is that nearly all

of the people I work with for clients, or have as friends, or look up to, think and feel the same way:

No one but you should have the right to define who you are. Don't live your life by 'default' or design of another person or thing. Think your own thoughts; make choices. Avoid defining yourself based on 'one thing', even a good one thing: a political party, a philosophy, a family, a company, a region, a nation. Try out different people, and ideas. Mix, match and avoid the small-mindedness of certitude. Don't whine, do something.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:58 PM | Comments (0)

The Chess Player

Portrait of Chess Players (Portrait de joueurs d'échecs) 1911. Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) was French-born and became a U.S. citizen in 1955.

Posted by JD Hull at 04:59 PM | Comments (2)

May 09, 2009

Genevieve standing watch.

Get down on your knees and pray! I know it, I see it. The Huns will not come.

Sainte Genevieve (422-512) saved Parisians from the Huns, the legend goes, in 451. People had started to flee Paris in anticipation of the invasion led by Attila--but stopped when she told them she had a vision that the Huns would not enter Paris. She became the city's patron saint. In 1928, a grateful Paris erected a statue to her on the Pont de la Tournelle (now about 400 years old). Genevieve is facing east, the direction from which the Huns approached. She is also said to have converted Clovis, king of the pagan Franks, to Christianity. If you walk from the Right Bank to the Left Bank near the Ile Saint Louis, you walk right under her, with Notre Dame on your right.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

April 28, 2009

Deliverance.

It was at a concert of lovely old music. After two or three notes of the piano the door was opened...to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defences and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things gave up my heart.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf.

1926 by Gret Widmann

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:41 AM | Comments (0)

April 22, 2009

We, The Undisciplined, The Miserable.

For a long time I've thought that American business schools and the training programs of global and often publicly-traded companies do a much, much better job than do law firms of training recruits to value and adhere to the structure of a plan on an item for action.

Do we lawyers know how to get things done, done right and done on time? Do we even value that? I wonder.

I am not talking here about the simple "keeping face" and survival requirements of meeting client deal or court deadlines, or even about the cliches of working hard, creative thinking, "out of the box", working smart or being persistent. I mean structure, a real standard, and "practicing structure" every day--the discipline of (1) having a plan or strategy for any one project, client or non-client, (2) meeting internal project deadlines no matter what, and (3) applying the will to work that plan and timetable.

And making it a habit until it's natural--and fun.

"Structure" is not just the hard process of getting things done. It's a frame of mind and a value which must be sold to others in your shop--like the importance of making that 5 minute call to a client about a loose end at the end of the worst day you can remember, even while you could do it the next morning at 8:00. It's realizing that letting anything but emergency tasks "slide" makes you inefficient, unlikely to meet your real goals, and tired.

"What ever is he talking about?"

Do you get up early every day with a idea of what needs to be done on each project, and knowing the difference between "important" and "urgent"? Example: Monday is your deadline to have the final changes and notes to your web designer on your new firm website, an important but not urgent project you've talked about at internal meetings for months. So far, for once, you have been on track. But on Monday a longstanding client calls with two new projects; the new projects are exciting but not THAT urgent in the sense they need to cut into internal deadlines and other goals for Monday. You need to take some first steps, though, to get on top of the new matters for your client. After all, these folks are the main event.

Key ongoing internal project v. new client project. Which gets the most attention that day? Which slides? Answer: they both get attention, and neither slides. The website (long-term important) and the new client project (short-term important) are both critical projects. Years ago the Stephen Coveys and Edwards Demings out there pointed out that business people burn themselves out by waiting around only for "the urgent" in a kind of manic crisis management that keeps other important things from ever getting done or ONLY getting them done when they morph into a crisis. For lawyers, other examples would be only respecting deadlines like transaction closing dates and court-filing deadlines--to hell with everything else.

For a long time I've thought that American business schools and the training programs of global and often publicly-traded companies do a much, much better job than do law firms of training recruits to value and adhere to the structure of a plan on an item for action. It's almost as if law school and firms deem us all such "professionals" and "artists" that we are beyond learning skills of project planning and execution. What a crock. Not learning the value of pushing non-urgent but important things along at a steady pace has cost us dearly. As motivated as lawyers often are, our discipline for sticking to anything and seeing it through is often poor; again, unless it's urgent, we just don't see its value. Do our best clients run their businesses that way?

This attitude is the norm, and we lawyers--who rarely innovate or take a leadership position on anything in commerce--are just fine, thank you, with it. After all, "all the other law firms" are mediocre on the discipline of getting things done, and have "crisis-only" mentalities--why shouldn't we be that way? So we waste time blowing off important but longer term projects. Worst of all, we send to others in our firms, and especially to younger lawyers, the message: "No worries--just work on a barely adequate level; don't do things until you have to; and if it's not urgent, let it slide." As with client care and service, our standard is not only embarrassingly low, we are exporting that low standard internally whenever and wherever we can.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (4)

April 05, 2009

Overheard in Los Angeles

Life is short, opera is long, Wagner is longer.

--Plácido Domingo, Spanish tenor, L.A. Opera general director

German tenor Johannes Sembach (1881-1944) as Lohengrin.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 08:00 PM | Comments (0)

Wild Men

And Wild Women. They love Value. And Quality. And Stepping Up. Wild Men and Women are people who listen only to the little voice in their head. They get things done. They build things. They don't care what you think. Uncertainty and turbulence--in the economy, stock markets, governments, the weather, you name it--only get their juices flowing.

1. Ben Franklin
2. Ted Turner
3. Dr. Johnson
4. Dr. Thompson
5. Theodore Roosevelt (yes, he was wild)
6. Andrew Jackson
7. Ayn Rand
8. Ana Marie Cox
9. Boudica
10. Dustin Hoffman
11. Winston Churchill
12. Benjamin Disraeli
13. Arianna Huffington
14. Bucky Fuller
15. Jerry Lee Lewis

16. Bill Buckley
17. Bill Clinton
18. Steve Jobs
19. Captain Harry (Charleston SC fishing/hunting guide)
20. Welsh and Irish guys when they're sober
21. Nick Nolte
22. Ernie from Glen Burnie (DC lawyer, alias of WAC? childhood friend)
23. Christopher Columbus
24. Jann Wenner
25. Sean Penn
26. Ken Wilbur
27. Plato
28. Catherine the Great
29. Val Kilmer
30. Harry Dean Stanton
31. Scott Greenfield
32. Julius Caesar
33. Pete Seeger
34. John Lennon
35. Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (3)

April 01, 2009

Holden H. Oliver (1968-2009)

WAC? co-writer, former reporter and third-year law student Holden Oliver died Tuesday in Palo Alto at Stanford University Medical Center. A Boston native, and from a family that has lived in eastern Massachusetts for nearly 380 years, Holden graduated with a degree in English (highest honors) from Williams College in 1990. A former reporter for the Kansas City Star in its Washington, D.C. office, he also worked for ten years in the London and Frankfurt bureaus of the New York Times. Holden entered Stanford Law School in 2006, and joined WAC? "out of boredom" while still a student in early 2007. Last year, he was elected to the Managing Board of the Stanford Law Review, and worked in July in Hull McGuire's Pittsburgh office. His death was the result of a kiln explosion in which his ex-girlfriend, a Stanford undergraduate co-ed half his age, was apparently not injured in any respect. If you wish to help us honor Holden's life, his sarcastic uber-WASP prose style, his support of the profession's growing value movement, and his energetic if, frankly, amoral lifestyle, donations can be made in his name to the Nantucket Preservation Trust, the Cosmos Club or Kelly's Irish Times in Washington, D.C.

Posted by JD Hull at 06:49 AM | Comments (3)

March 28, 2009

Saturday's Charon QC: Meet the Prime Minister

Charon After Dark: An interview with Gordon Brown? "Few people get a chance to interview an unelected serving Prime Minister and I am no different." And why not, sir? The real one we urge you to do may even be as good as this.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:56 PM | Comments (1)

March 27, 2009

Real Women: Ms. Posey

Deep, deep depression is the flip side of comedy. Casting agents don't realize it but in order to be funny you have to have that other side.

--Parker Posey

Ms. Posey is way beyond hip. Her own world. Like Neal Cassady, François Villon, Raoul Duke or GeekLawyer, if you have to look her up, you won't even get it. In late 2007, WAC? met her in the Newark Airport on the way to London; he remembers nothing about his life before that day. She's the rare woman with some Southern roots who won't make you gag the minute she starts talking. Not just funny. Her natural quirk and smarts almost hide how gorgeous she is.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:21 PM | Comments (1)

March 16, 2009

A moving tribute to the Human Spirit.

And to drunkenness, madness, small animals, the secret Ree-Lax Parlor in DC's West End, "dooce"-bags, Kelly's Irish Times Saloon, Ruthie, and far more deplorable pleasures of the flesh. Enough to curl Freud's hair. To make a blind man see. To send a Good Man straight to Hell laughing about it. Some really sick stuff--especially if you're from Elkhart, Indiana. Slick, too. It's rendered under a cheap, transparent pretext and gloss of Art, Literature and The Classics. Long. Larry Flynt and Madonna were each too freaked out and flustered to get through the whole thing.

Well-written, though. Very.

In short, Blawg Review this week does not disappoint. It is the real Barrister-Prince of Darkness in rare form--even for him. But there are far more unsettling things in this world than a London Lawyer messing with you: reading the books of Mormon or Revelation for the first or twentieth time, an hour in any Target store, or watching American lawyers employed by insurance companies (their real clients, as they see it) argue discovery motions on Fridays in courts all over and knowing they will get paid for it.

So in perspective, but still out of its head, GeekLawyer's Blawg Review #203 is wonderfully eccentric, even revolting, but it hits home, and (gulp) it's dang funny, if you have any sense of the English: XXX-rated, in campy vile taste, and arguably pregnant with a new industry of actions for defamation, slander per se and false light privacy that will pump new life into any lulls currently experienced by First Amendment lawyers in New York, DC and LA.

Just kidding. In your button-down lawyer world today, you may behold offensive movies, "bad" pictures, "bad" language, the F-word all over the place, by golly. If you are appalled, don't read it all, dog. Bonus Badness: it will set back trans-Atlantic relationships about 50 years.

Southern Brits: a quirky but sick race. We've tried to tell you.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 10:14 PM | Comments (2)

LexThink March 29-30: Head Heartland, Young Man.

The next LexThink is Sunday and Monday, March 29-30, 2009 at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri.

Even the payment terms are innovative. If we can, we will send someone from Hull McGuire PC. Will all depend of course on actual length of this year's St. Patrick's Day recovery period--generally a fortnight (about 13.5 days average) so we'll be cutting it close.

Do visit LexThink: Innovate for details. Designed by Matt Homann, our friend, adviser and entrepreneur-lawyer-international consultant--his recent travel schedule makes WAC?'s seem provincial, pedestrian, pint-sized, paltry--who was looking freshly at things before that was cool. Go see Matt in Missouri this month. Catch him in the Heartland before he heads back to Europe.

Matthew Homann in repose.

(photo by E.T.Attorney)

Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

March 14, 2009

U.S. Const. Amend. I: GeekLawyer Test on 3.16.09

Heads up for Yanks of the Weenie persuasion. See Blawg Review #666.

Posted by JD Hull at 03:54 AM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2009

The Return of Legal Sanity

We are not worthy. Not an overstatement. New York's wise and inspirational Arnie Herz at Legal Sanity is back--and we noticed this happily. I admire him--despite the fact that reading him for me is always daunting, even threatening. Arnie Herz is a lawyer who makes way too much sense; he knows and acts on things we all know and should act on but work too hard to avoid even admitting. When tradition-and-Western-logic-bound lawyers grow up, or become sane, which ever happens first, I hope we become like Arnie. See "Life and Business Lessons on Resilience from a Young Point Guard".

Posted by JD Hull at 11:46 PM | Comments (1)

March 07, 2009

Save the country. Save yourself.

Save the country. Save the children. Up in heaven, Laura Nyro is watching. I saw Nyro on my 18th birthday. She thought you could be angry and happy at the same time; I feel that every day. Laura got really angry at you if you had "no gospel, no guts, no brain". Because you are missing life, work, relationships, ideas, growth,the separate magics of the West and the East, old verities--and joy.

Be inspired--or hang it up. If you're "blocked", head to your Lake District. Wait for a sign. Get your sign. Say thanks to Whoever.

Then come out of your woods swinging and angry: like a bad-ass preacher of the Church of the Final Thunder.

Like Laura Nyro.

Laura Nyro (1947-1997) wanted you to have fury in your soul.

Posted by JD Hull at 08:36 PM | Comments (0)

March 06, 2009

Notes From the Breadline (continued)

Among the things that I do care about is insurance, or, specifically, making sure that I have some.

--RST, March 4, 2009

Re: Keep on Keepin' On. The Notes. "Roxanna St. Thomas" keeps writing them and Above The Law is savvy enough to never miss printing them. See "I Have My Freedom, but I Don't Have Much Time". Past Roxanna Notes are collected here.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

February 28, 2009

GeekLawyer is coming to America. Again. (Update)

Weekends are the only times I can write on this thing about important national and world events. We then communicate with our sixteen loyal but isolated non-American readers who want all the skinny on the States in towns like Aldeburgh, England, Mainz, Germany and Tooele, Utah.

During the week, I help my firm make money defending people who are accused for no reason at all of: spilling, copying, making too much money, and suddenly breaking promises with people who suddenly have no money. Many of these business disputes, ironically, have their roots in a law firm making world-class transactional and "just-wrong" advice mistakes which could have been avoided by a smart third year associate on Methaqualones who shows up at work most days; it would be funny except for the expense to their clients.

Best of all, and the most fun, I also make sure that former employees, often highly-paid ones, of some companies wish they had thought twice about getting mad about something my client did. I talk with them for a few hours--well, sometimes two or three days--with a court reporter, people they don't like anymore, and people who work for me, in the room. You can see the lights go on. They learn with me. I feel I am of service. We have windowless rooms for those talks.

Lots of free coffee, though. If Elizabeth or Lauren is at lunch, or gone for the day, or sleeping, or it's the weekend, or Christmas Day, I often serve the coffee myself--always slowly, deliberately and with a head waiter's flourish, and from the left--hopefully while they are reading something they signed back in 1999. I get to sport bow ties for these little talks, but my office said the black cape, hat and eye-patch were a bit much, so I stopped all that. I still wear the spats, though.

All wonderful work, if you can get it--I still can't believe you can get paid for it. So I am reconsidering my lapsed relationship with the Episcopal Church. It reminds me of a couplet in the Celtic prayer-poem "Purple Haze", in which a picaresque left-handed genius named Jimi gets a little grateful himself. Visit Tower Records for a copy.

Seriously, though, here's a major happening, and an extremely controversial one. Apart from monetary strategy to jump-start the economy, President Obama's current foreign policy plans, and the advent of useful new Covey-esque seminars you pay for on "How To Accommodate Young People Born After 1974 At Your Failing Business", the big news in America is that GeekLawyer--who I was unfortunate enough to meet and have 13 Diet Cokes with in Mayfair last September--will again (see Edition #666 of July 1, 2008) host Blawg Review* on March 16.

A friend of mine, an inspired and quite sober Charon QC in London, even crafted a short film about the nervously-anticipated return of a man whom Elkhart, Indiana and many other U.S. venues can do just fine without thank you very much. It's the guy's language. He likes words (all of them), he's British (they are all quirky creatures, but GL has raised High Brit Quirk to a "potty-mouth" if intelligent art form) and so you get the idea (but maybe not; this is off-the-charts stuff, Jack). Charon's sensitive film, a labor of Lud, is below.

*Now edited by a dead guy, apparently, but a minor detail for Americans, like Ed., with moxie and grit.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:44 PM | Comments (1)

January 29, 2009

Hesse's main point.

Ah, but it is hard to find this track of the divine in the midst of this life we lead...

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1927)

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

January 28, 2009

John Hoyer Updike (1932-2009)

That something-is-missing in the suburbs was one of his great themes, and no one did that better. Although I liked his Bech character (and alter-ego) the best, the Rabbit books made him famous. None of us growing up in the 1960s and 1970s wanted to end up like Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the reluctant small town family man who made choices in life that hardened around him quickly. Updike won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice, both for "Rabbit" books. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who for decades has done great work covering other writers, has this article in the New York Times, via the International Herald Tribune.

Posted by JD Hull at 07:30 AM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2009

American Signage: Bed-Stuy, Seattle and Johnstown PA

New York Times: "‘Not Much of a Block,’ but It’s Named for a King". The Seattle Times: "Dream Remains Alive on Seattle's Street Named for King". The Tribune-Democrat: "Johnstown Bridge Renamed in Honor of Martin Luther King Jr.".

NYT: Martin Luther King Jr. Place, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn

Posted by JD Hull at 11:16 PM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2009

Andrew Newell Wyeth (1917–2009)

"Weatherside", 1965

Posted by JD Hull at 09:37 PM | Comments (0)

December 30, 2008

2008: The Year to the Crossroads.

I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

December 28, 2008

The Judgment of Paris

Paris was a bold man who presum’d
To judge the beauty of a Goddess.

-John Dryden

The Judgment of Paris, Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553)

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

December 25, 2008

Nicholas, again.

"Be excellent to one another."

--From fragment written circa 340 A.D., recently discovered in Demre, formerly Myra, in Antalya Province of Turkey.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

December 22, 2008

A possible Christmas

It was at a concert of lovely old music. After two or three notes of the piano the door was opened...to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defences and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things gave up my heart.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf.

1926 by Gret Widmann

Posted by JD Hull at 12:57 PM | Comments (0)

December 20, 2008

Saturday's Charon QC

London's Charon QC is doing wonderful things these days. He's versatile, in a Renaissance Man way, and with the promise of fine quirk: a lawyer-pundit-radio host who can think, opine, write and talk, deftly moving in and out of all manner of issues with considerable elan, even when half in the bag. If he were a Yank, he's be a university president, the Congressman from Nantucket, or the host of a Brit version of "The Dick Cavett Show". Read his meanderings through the streets of 2000-year-old London. Listen to his many well-done podcasts, in which WAC? has twice been a guest, once in London, and once by phone in America.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:29 PM | Comments (0)

December 18, 2008

Yours in the struggle, dudes.

Usually, and as important as they are, observances like Human Rights Day, Bill of Rights Day, and Human Rights Week, 2008 make me feel like: (a) I died and went to Hallmark, (b) I should give up everything and join Che and his guys in the hills, waiting for the right time to eradicate bourgeois fascist death forms (at least Indianapolis), or (c) I should at least learn to play the lute. But Blawg Review's hosts this week, The Legal Satyricon, did it all such justice at Blawg Review 190: Bill of Rights Day that I am feeling guilty about voting for John McCain last month. I am also thinking about giving up acting for corporate Europe and America, and representing the oppressed, and real street crime defendants under the CJA program, and helping poor people, maybe. This is a very fine Blawg Review performance, and WAC? will check in with this blog a lot in the future. Moxie everywhere, humor, and these folks can write. They get the Constitution and its first ten amendments--the most important Thing Western In Ink. And, like me, they think it's important. Bravo.

Read revolutionary Blawg Review 190.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

December 07, 2008

London's GeekLawyer seeks U.S. lawyer to craft "Limeyism" suit against ABA Journal.

He's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct.

--General Corman to Willard, briefing him about Colonel Walt Kurtz, Apocalypse Now (1979)

Over in the UK, GeekLawyer, the normally reserved and self-effacing product of Eton and Oxford, and rightful heir to some strange ancient crown in Ceylon who hosted Blawg Review earlier this year, is angry.

He is more disturbed than usual that he was not included in the ABA Journal's "Blawg 100". We received the below message very early Friday morning, when most Americans were still asleep. He apparently read our post of Thursday night. In response he was very matter of fact. He wants a pro-bono lawyer for his crusade.

Any takers? We know him as a persistent if frugal human who will press this until he gets want he wants. He would be a cooperative client, and he understands the trial process in the U.S. and the UK. He is, after all, under his real name, a key player in Legal London. He has contacts, influence, Inn membership and a motorcycle called "The Terrible and Inexorable Wrath of God". If you are a man, he can introduce you to lots of professional women. Anyway, his request:

Can you recommend a good lawyer who'll act for me against the ABA? This is clear Limeyism - it cannot stand. They'll need to work pro-bono because although I have plenty of money I need to keep it for mead and hookers.

Lincoln's Inn, Holborn, London

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:00 PM | Comments (2)

November 28, 2008

Formerly Known As a privilege, an honor, a trust: Lawyering.

The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die. With apologies to Uncle Ted's writer of the 1980 speech, we refer here to the search for Value to Clients. We do revel in a fleeting glimpse of it now and then. More on clients, hard work, marginal work, associate bonuses, real life and common sense at David Giacalone's always superb and thoughtful f/k/a... See "Smart Clients Care About Bonuses and Marketplace 'Value'". He gives you all the parts, and then puts it all together himself.

"I showed. I suffered. Pay me."

Alternate universe: no one loses, everyone gets a trophy.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 09:51 PM | Comments (1)

November 21, 2008

"I'm good enough, smart enough, close enough."

Forget your politics. Norm Coleman isn't fun. And Franken's (gulp) just smarter than Norm, when Al is calm. Finally, this Minnesota U.S. Senate race annoys the right people. Think of it as a cattle prod. The Hill: "Franken narrows Coleman lead in Recount".

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 09:15 PM | Comments (0)

November 08, 2008

Dr. Johnson on drinking

"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

O Canada, thank you.

Canada's Joni Mitchell turned 65 yesterday. She was the soundtrack for Boomers while we did a lot of different things. Not a bad poet, either. "O Canada": Marshall McLuhan, Alexander Graham Bell, Leonard Cohen, Jennifer Tilly, Elias Koteas, Pierre Trudeau, Lolita Davidovich, Graham Greene, Dan George, Dan Ackroyd, and my bud Zoe.

Boomers: Dreamers, telephone screamers.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:03 PM | Comments (0)

November 03, 2008

Voting, stepping up and America.

No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

--Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

For most of us, given the apparent complexity of the world, universe and whatever else is out there, there aren't many absolute principles in play these days. But here's one: All Americans who can vote should vote, even if--as I am doing tomorrow--you are holding your nose and voting for the "least objectionable alternative." The American vote is a special and very hard won thing.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

November 02, 2008

Studs Terkel (1912-2008)

He was a writer, journalist, interviewer, broadcaster, oral history pioneer, Pulitzer Prize winner, UC-educated lawyer who never practiced, part-time actor (query: what famous movie about baseball did he have a big role in?) and Chicago's main Renaissance man. He died Friday home in Chicago at age 96. If you are an American under 60 and don't know who he is, or have never heard of him, feel free to sue the secondary schools and colleges you attended.

Posted by JD Hull at 06:37 PM | Comments (1)

September 23, 2008

Bubba, and once again, you busy?

WANTED STILL: Of counsel for growing, innovative Pennsylvania-based boutique business law firm with branches in California and DC. You must have at least 8 years of highest level federal Exec. Branch experience, world-wide connections, Yale Law degree, one year at Oxford, own money and people skills. Crowd-pleaser. Must be able to sell anything to anyone. And be originally from Hope, Arkansas.

State government experience in American South preferred but not required. Also preferred: participation in Renaissance weekends (writer is member). We also look for some fund-raising, and United Nations experience. Plus: past participation in Boys Nation or Boys State; writer is also alumni, and knows there's nothing flitty about them.

Sir, you don’t need to re-locate. We are desperate for can-do uber-Boomer who "comes to play". Happy to set up the office for you. Wherever you want. NYC, Harlem, Chappaqua all okay. Or DC. You decide. You can work out of your house. Or limo. Whatever.

NOTE: No previous private law practice experience necessary. Not a problem–-no problem at all. Excellent benefits package, if you need it, sir. Call collect.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

September 17, 2008

Business and Net Royalty Hosts Blawg Review

Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends

We're not easily star-struck.

Cruel, ruthless and demanding--eccentrics who think that employees are paid to work and add value, rather than to just talk, be wankers, leave work at 5:45 PM and feel good about themselves--WAC? writers are different. Hardened. Tough. And not easily impressed. And we don't even like small businesses (except ours), small minds, small towns (under 5 million SMSA) or small parking places. We've grown up around, worked with, drank with and/or even "dated"--if you call trophy sport-swiving "dating" (and we do)--a few public figures, politicians, artists and celebrities. We are not usually fazed.

But like Parker Posey, who WAC? met last year in the Newark airport and still has a huge thing for, Anita Campbell, of the widely-read and respected Small Business Trends, is also different, and authentic. Even glamorous. Somehow we feel like the flustered men or women who met Sharon Stone or George Clooney in the early days, before anyone knew Stone and Clooney were just more fun bozos on a boomer bus.

Seriously, folks (and just kidding, Sharon, George), Anita's site does have five (5) qualities you almost never see in Anything: Popular, Interesting, Well-Written, To-the-Point, Useful.

See Blawg Review this week and Anita's Back to Business Blawg Review #177. WAC? is not worthy. We be flustered.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

August 24, 2008

Greenfield's Children: "Hi, I'm Justin, and..."

[H]umiliation is one of the core ingredients of a good law school education....Hopefully, your professors won't be touchy-feely wimps and will use the Socratic method in order to embarrass as many students as possible...

Listen, you creeps, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore... Here is a man who stood up. Scott Greenfield: lawyer's lawyer, a seer, artist. We hear he's even got a great-looking, brilliant wife. Ancient law student, fringe boomer and ladies' man Holden Oliver just called from Palo Alto to say that he'll name his next legitimate son after Scott: "Greenfield" Oliver, Cornell '31. See at Scott's Simple Justice his post "The Slackoiesie Goes to Law School."

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

August 04, 2008

Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)

Reuters, the Russian news agency Interfax and other sources are reporting that the novelist died of a stroke. The writer, historian, ex-Red Army soldier and dissident won the Nobel Prize in 1970.

Posted by JD Hull at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)

July 29, 2008

Spence: Law education is a fraud.

We were both intrigued and happy to see this Legal Blog Watch piece by Robert Ambrogi and links to Gerry Spence's blog. My take (with a nod to to Laura Nyro): law schools all over the globe have always attracted or produced their share of semi-literate robots with no guts, no gospel and no soul. They always will. But it's gotten worse. And the best part of many law students' undergraduate education--being steeped in old verities and enduring ideas--is ripped from him or her during the law school process. By age 35, most lawyers I know of any generation are disappointed, burned-out or bored. Reason: their work lives are not enriched by ideals or principles beyond the workaday nuts

and bolts of their job. It is the entire profession's fault (mine included) and problem. From Spence's post:

One need not write poetry or paint pictures to be a successful human being. But some intimacy with the arts and the language and its use and with right brain functions of feeling and creativity are essential to the development of the whole person. Little wonder that lawyers, disabled by all of the stifling, mostly useless mental exercises they have suffered, have trouble relating to jurors much less to the rest of mankind.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:52 PM | Comments (6)

July 26, 2008

Correction.

Following Dan Hull's post below on the upcoming host of Blawg Review, Scott Greenfield's wife immediately submitted this alternative photograph of Scott which she prefers to the one we used. Your wife have a single sister, Scott? Because we won't be dating her.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (2)

Simply Excellent.

Listen, you creeps, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the dogs, the filth and the crap. Here is a man who stood up.

~ Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver (1976)

It's not that often that a high-powered, talented and well-known practicing trial lawyer has a wildly popular blog he operates on the side. The odds, folks, are against it. Well, here's a man who gets more clicks than any working attorney we know. A hero to many, and a thorn to some, lawyer-writer-New Yorker Scott Greenfield at Simple Justice is my comrade in various global struggles and movements. And together we seek to become the Travis Bickle of law and policy. Just saner, mainly. Scott is not just passionate, analytical, admirably credentialed, and way bad-ass. He's a bit mysterious, even ominous: the kind of man who beats fish to death with his bare hands. In two days, he hosts Blawg Review, #170. We'll stay up late to say we read it first. You talking to me?

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (2)

July 23, 2008

David Giacalone: Debt Reduction in America.

Over at the consistently elegant f/k/a, lawyer-writer and former U.S. Federal Trade Commission lawyer David Giacalone gives us "Doubts Over Debt Negotiation Fees". This is one of the best supported and comprehensive pieces of writing you will read about lawyers on a blog--or not-on-a-blog. We stopped billing hours, serving subpoenas and gutting pension plans just to read it. Thank you, sir.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

July 14, 2008

Quatorze Juillet

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

July 13, 2008

How the Marquis de Sade was finally forced into politics.

And the moral of the story is never lean on the weird. Or they will chop your head off. Take my word for it, Bubba. I am an expert on these things. I have been there. --HST, 1994

Bastille Day is tomorrow, July 14, the French day of independence. According to Hunter Thompson in "Better Than Sex" (a 1994 book about U.S. politics), and some other sources, the Marquis de Sade, Parisian artist and French nobleman, played a role in this opening drama of the French Revolution. As Doctor Thompson notes, the Marquis, a serious artist, was out-front different, wild and independent; he didn't care what people thought or said about him. On occasion The Marquis would run amok on booze and laudanum to blow off steam. The mainstream French aristocracy and clergy were never happy with him. They "not only hated his art, they hated him".

By 1788, the Paris police routinely harassed him, and jailed him a few times. The Bastille itself and then an insane asylum were his homes in the days leading up to July 14. In turn, he began to hate cops--and the government. Well, by the summer of 1789, Paris, in its oppressive July heat, was about to explode anyway and, acccording to Thompson:

The mood of the city was so ugly that even the Marquis de Sade became a hero of the people. On July 14, 1789, he led a mob of crazed rabble in overrunning a battalion of doomed military police defending the infamous Bastille Prison, and they swarmed in to "free all political prisoners"....

It was the beginning of the French Revolution, and de Sade himself was said to have stabbed five or six soldiers to death as his mob stormed the prison and seized the keys to the Arsenal. The mob found only eight "political prisoners" to free, and four of those were killed by nightfall in the savage melee over looting rights for the guns and ammunition.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (3)

July 02, 2008

Learning well.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

--Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

June 27, 2008

Writing well, and living large.

Commenting on the body of work left by John Dryden (1631-1700), the English poet, critic and playwright, Samuel Johnson (who was born a few years after Dryden's death) called Dryden's compositions "the effects of a vigorous genius working upon large materials".

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

June 24, 2008

George Denis Patrick Carlin (1937-2008)

One seriously funny, angry American-Irish guy from the City who always made us think. An original. See Washington Post obit.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 03:57 PM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2008

Bad King John, good King Edward.

London-based Charon QC notes that today, June 15, is an important day for Brits and Yanks alike: the date of Magna Carta Libertatum. King John's negotiation with his rebellious Norman barons occurred in 1215; the Magna Carta established that the king may not levy or collect any taxes, without the consent of his council, a kind of rough first English parliament. It also bolstered the previously-existing idea of the writ of habeas corpus--the "let-me-out" claim against unlawful imprisonment--and afforded rights and procedures to both free and unfree men. An elected parliament replacing the king's council was first instituted in 1265, and it was "upgraded" by Edward I in 1295. This text of the 1297 statute, as amended, is official UK law. Edward I (for us Yanks, that's the same guy who had Mel Gibson killed) made sure that the 1215 agreement stuck with us.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

May 22, 2008

Ted Kennedy

To be Irish is to know that in the end, the world will break your heart. --Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Call me a cultural stereotype. A boomer. A limousine liberal. I don't care. Ted Kennedy being diagnosed with malignant cancer of the brain floored me. I don't even know why.

Long ago, Duke University, which changed my life in a number of ways, awarded me my first paid desk job to work for Wisconsin's Senator Gaylord Nelson. With some help from my father, I rented an overpriced and horrible little apartment across the street from the hospital on Washington Circle where I had been born 21 years earlier, and excitedly entered the world I'd been seeing on television since I was in my early teens growing up in the Midwest. That first sunny Monday morning in May, I walked all the way to work, zig-zagging down Pennsylvania Avenue, and then up Constitution Avenue, well over two miles total, just to take it all in. But I walked in a hurry.

The Hill job was in health policy, and I was asked to follow and report on the work of the busy U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Health, chaired by then 42-year-old Ted Kennedy. I saw Kennedy up close a lot during committee sessions and mark-ups during the next 3 months. (A few years later, I worked again on Capitol Hill, and lived there for many

years. I'd see him around. Today, if I were lucky, he might recognize my persistent face if he saw me--but I certainly wasn't important those first 3 months.) But way before that, as the "last Kennedy", he was always part of the soundtrack of my life and my friends' lives since we were in our early teens. But he was more than a name, mystique and the booming populist oratory and Gaelic cadences of speech which come naturally to him.

For me, Ted Kennedy has never been about ideas, legislative agendas or even the Kennedy schmaltz: the hope, the dream that never dies, the struggle, all that. He left that music to others, like to his uber-aggressive brother-in-law, Steven Smith, and to his staff. I just never saw Kennedy as an ideologue, even when he ran for the American presidency--which I bet he never really wanted. A character out of a novel, he's simply as Irish as they come: brooding, playful and contradictory. Quietly but definitely war-like. He's smarter than people think, and remarkably adept at sifting through and making sense of too much information thrown at him. In the main, though, he's passionate, human, even poetic--and vulnerable in all the best ways.

Like lots of senators, he's also distracted as hell, even endearingly spacey--but warm and charming, a natural politician, easily the best in his family. He can turn that on and off. Like Bill Clinton, and for whatever the reason, Kennedy genuinely likes people; it's not for show. Watch the guy in a crowd. He's at ease once he's there. He physically resembles most, and is most like, his mother Rose, the family saint and caregiver. And that soulfulness, I think, helped him to be very good at his job. Family friend and economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said that Ted Kennedy was the best U.S. senator he'd seen in his lifetime.

Finally, the last Kennedy is as wounded as they come, too. Try, if you can, not to cry when you watch a clip of his eulogy of his brother Robert in 1968, when he was 36. Kennedy's voice cracked badly, and I can't forget the sound of him as he struggled to finish the speech for his older brother. It wasn't about politics, ideas, or even about anyone's family. The sound was pure grief and loss, unashamed.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

HRC: Until the last dog dies.

That's a Bill Clinton Ozark mountains expression. We have always liked it even though WAC? writers (and Hull McGuire lawyers) are very split among the three candidates still punching, and we have some stalwart if calm Clinton dislikers. But wondrous, irrational keep-your-options-open optimism is very American. Sometimes it works. From today's daily Hillary Clinton campaign e-mail update: "On May 31, we'll hear the decision from the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee on whether they'll seat the delegates from Michigan and Florida". But, she continues, "Puerto Rico votes in 10 days, and the last primaries in Montana and South Dakota are just two days later, and...." See Salon's "She's in it to spin it".

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

Learning well

Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.

--William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), poet and statesman.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2008

Not just an Irish thing: "Let no man write my epitaph".

It was a 1960 movie with Shelley Winters, Ricardo Montalban, Jean Seberg and Burl Ives (playing a nice boozy Irish Chicago judge) I first saw as a re-run on TV growing up in Cincinnati. It was based on a 1958 novel by Willard Motley. But the words came from a real guy, Irish nationalist Robert Emmet, during the "speech from the dock" before he was hanged by the British in 1803 for leading a march on Dublin Castle. History doesn't think Emmet was the most effective Irish rebel who ever lived--but his final words endured:

I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world – it is the charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph. No man can write my epitaph, for as no man who knows my motives and character dares now to vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them rest in obscurity and peace until other times and other men can do justice to them. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then shall my character be vindicated, then may my epitaph be written.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:52 AM | Comments (0)

May 13, 2008

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)

"Portrait of Chess Player"

For our friend Nearly Legal.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

May 11, 2008

Mothers, and movements for others.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

--Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895.

My mother was the mom that all the other kids in the neighborhood wanted to be their mom. A photogenic only child growing up in Chicago, she started working as a model when she was quite young, and the agency loved her all-American girl next door face and smile. Now, in her seventies, she is still tall, almost 5'10", angular, with dark hair, and fresh, friendly, athletic, striking. In boarding school and college, she was always the homecoming queen--but that rare one without enemies. All my life, I've heard both men and women remark how beautiful she is--and how nice she is to them. She is never interested in herself. She loves children and sloppy dogs.

Energetic and very physical, she still does things too quickly. But she moves for others. She's fond of the troubled, those with raw deals, the strays. And she wants to get things done for them. She has a very private but active spiritual life, and a natural class and ease with others. She is comfortable with, and genuinely interested in, everyone she meets, anywhere in the world. She wants to know them.

She lights up all rooms--not just ours. She puts up with me, and my father, and I wish I could be more like her. She's led a charmed life, which she views with gratitude, humility and grace. Her side of my family came from the still-tiny village (below) of Lindsey, England, to Massachusetts in 1634. I visited Lindsey, in Suffolk, in 2003. Her family's name is still on some of the stones in the churchyard.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

BBC News: French industrial output way down.

You are holy conservators of the best things Western: ideas, art and living. But you must get back to work. Sixty-three years is too long a holiday.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)

May 10, 2008

Wanted: "A fool in the forest".

Which is the name of a site of a talented California lawyer named George Wallace who has been working too hard, even by WAC?'s brutal standards. We miss his playful yet erudite Renaissance man's perspective. We need more lawyers writing about Salvador Dali.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:45 PM | Comments (2)

May 08, 2008

Who said this? "We have no great illusions, my brethren and I, ..."

about how much good it will do you to be told these things in advance. We have learned by bitter experience that you will not take the things we tell you very seriously. You conceive this, I take it, to be somewhat in the nature of the pep meeting to which you were first exposed when you entered college. You expect me to tell you that you should be earnest about your work, and get your back into it for dear old Siwash, and that he who lets work slide will stumble by the way.

And to whom was this said? Think carefully. The first person with the

right answer to both parts of the question will receive a free WAC? gift.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:56 PM | Comments (1)

May 03, 2008

Ten years of Swerdloff Dot Com

A NYC-residing lawyer and Renaissance man with smarts and wisdom beyond his years reaches a milestone, celebrates.

Posted by JD Hull at 03:22 PM | Comments (0)

April 29, 2008

Ken Wilber, this century's philosopher.

In Salon, see You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber by Steve Paulson. Ken Wilber is no fad. He thinks and writes about the "ultimate reality that science can't touch", who's evolved and who's not, and what's in store for us. He really did amaze us in his 2000 book A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality. What's weird today is truth tomorrow.

Posted by JD Hull at 09:27 AM | Comments (0)

April 25, 2008

Name's Holden...buy you a Heineken? Just got back from Île Saint-Louis, and...

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

April 21, 2008

"Have you ever been punched by a client?"

We mean literally. See this one by David Giacalone, both lyrical and spiritual leader of the entire blogosphere, at f/k/a....

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (2)

April 20, 2008

Real Yank lawyers read Charon QC's Weekend Review.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 01:39 AM | Comments (0)

April 15, 2008

The enduring Duke lacrosse experience

"Write something on the Duke Experience, that's all I ask," my editor was always telling me.

--W. Morris in "Making the Nut at Duke", Duke Chanticleer, Vol. II, 1975

The lacrosse case never really ended. See at The Chronicle, Duke's student daily, "City attorneys argue for ethics rule in lax suit" re: the 38 unindicted members of the 2005-2006 men's lacrosse team who have brought a civil suit. And see KC Johnson's stalwart Durham-in-Wonderland.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:54 PM | Comments (0)

Life after--or instead of--law.

At the ABA Journal's Law News Now, see "Lawyer Hated Securities Practice, But Loves Fox News", about new Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly.

Posted by JD Hull at 08:29 PM | Comments (0)

April 14, 2008

Jennifer TV

Former news anchor Jennifer Antkowiak's show "Jennifer" is on Sundays at 11 AM EST. See www.jennifertvshow.com

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

March 17, 2008

Irish

St. Patrick's Day. This day is in honor of a missionary born in Roman Britain, a Celt captured and sold into slavery by "Irish marauders" to the chieftain Milchu in the year 403 AD to work in what is now the County of Antrim. Saint Patrick died on March 17, in either 493 or 460. From a poem and prayer possibly by him, here are lines from St. Patrick's Breastplate.

I bind to myself today
The power of Heaven,
The light of the sun,
The brightness of the moon,
The splendour of fire,
The flashing of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of sea,
The stability of earth,
The compactness of rocks.

I bind to myself today
The strong virtue of an invocation of the Trinity,
I believe the Trinity in the Unity
The Creator of the Universe.

Posted by JD Hull at 04:13 PM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2008

The Ides, the pirates and the other JC.

First, when the pirates demanded a ransom of twenty talents, Caesar burst out laughing. They did not know, he said, who it was that they had captured, and he volunteered to pay fifty...

--Plutarch, on young Caesar

Grandiose and flawed, but still great, I'd say. He made Rome an empire. Today is the Ides of March, death date of Gaius Julius Caesar (July 13, 100 BC-March 15, 44 BC), general, politician, schemer, explorer, writer, alpha male, womanizer, patrician and, as we begin to observe St. Patrick's day, no friend of Gaelic peoples. Caesar conquered what is now France and Belgium--and made Rome more interested in taking on an assortment of Celtic tribes in Britain after his death. An egomaniac, he was both charming, vain dandy and a skilled military leader, with a surprising compassionate streak. A century after his death, the Greek historian Plutarch wrote an enduring bio. Plutarch even mixed it up with armchair psychoanalysis, treating Caesar's life in "parallel" with that of Alexander the Great, another wildly self-assured fellow. The term Ides of March ("March 15") has nothing to do with our hero; "ides" means middle in the earliest Roman calendar, which some say was devised by Romulus, the mythical founder of Rome.

Posted by JD Hull at 02:09 AM | Comments (0)

March 13, 2008

Flaubert's last letters

In yesterday's London Times, the popular British Flaubert scholar Julian Barnes reads between the lines of "Flaubert's letters on sex, art, bankruptcy and cliffs."

Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2008

Charon QC 24/7?

Charon After Dark. "A new idea…not, perhaps, a good one…", Rioja and music lover Charon thinks. While he plots, read our London hero's Weekend Review, on Brits, Brit law and old Albion herself.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:02 AM | Comments (0)

March 08, 2008

Is Holden Oliver a radical Muslim?

Like George Will, he's one of our best 17th century minds. His middle initial is H--but the literal meaning of Muslim is a person who "submits" to the Will of God. Holden is a lapsed Episcopal--it's a little late for him in any organized religion. He went to the "right schools" (but wished he'd attended Summerhill as a child), made law review, and he likes difficult women and scotch. He's in good shape--but he won't let on

that he ever works out. Last summer he took the Hull McGuire DSM-IV-driven narcissist test for litigators and got a perfect score--but he wants to do corporate tax law. Anyway, ancient law student and recovering journalist Holden H. Oliver gets a little weird as exam time in the Bay Area approaches. But he's a quick study. An expert on the development of the DaneLaw (Danelagh) in the 9th century (long story but that's the reason WAC? met him in the first place), he would have been very happy as the village magistrate in a past age in rural East Anglia. His religion: "making my life art". Grandiose but admirable. Good luck on those outlines, Holden. Godspeed. But we expect a post on Ordeal By Water by the middle of next week.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:12 PM | Comments (1)

March 07, 2008

Today, 24th and M, NW.

Q Going home already?

A Would have left earlier--fell asleep at my desk.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

March 06, 2008

The UK's Justin Patten: British Reserve, Human Law and Intelligent Mediation.

A year ago this week I spent an hour or so near my hotel in Mayfair (close to the Marble Arch on the northeastern corner of Hyde Park) with my friend Justin Patten of Human Law Mediation, a firm for higher-end clients he founded six years ago. If you're an American or

European business lawyer, and you don't know this English gentleman, solicitor, mediator, and thought leader, you should get to know him. Justin himself specializes in HR and employment disputes mediation--but offers a wide variety of mediation training programs to businesses and law firms. He's an original--and loves what he does. See his website or ground-breaking blog. He didn't ask for this post; Justin is a creature of Brit reserve, and never asks us to do anything for him. WAC? just admires him. We think of him as a sane version of our London barrister friend GeekLawyer: another mega-talented southern Englishman "in trade", yet less likely to upset your mother, your wife, your girlfriend, or all three.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

March 03, 2008

London: Saturday's Charon QC

Charon QC, London's well-regarded lawyer-pundit, has a fine review of last week's news and Brit blogs. "Blogging" may not be ground central for All Things Legal or Otherwise on the Planet. Time is precious to busy people; as a friend recently asked, "should humans blog, ski, watch birds or philander in their spare time?" But you are missing the big picture--and some fun--if you do not check in with Brit blogs. These phlegmy men, like Reactionary Snob, and exotic birds, like Ruthie, do own our language. It shows in their skill, play and heart with words. Never prissy. See, respectively, "Assorted idiocy" (Snob, the libertarian) and "Fair Trial My Arse" (Ruthie, the demure).

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

Duke in Wonderland; Cornell in Heaven.

Mike Krzyzewski wins 800th. NBC: 87-86 against NC State at Raleigh. Coach K thanks evil twin-mentor Bobby Knight. And Cornell defeats Harvard to win Ivy league, finally slipping past Penn and Princeton and making the NCAA tournament.

UPDATE: The normally staid and ancient Duke daily, The Chronicle, gets excited about Coach K's win, too.

Posted by JD Hull at 10:43 AM | Comments (1)

February 29, 2008

Duke: Coach K looks for 800th win.

DURHAM, NC (Duke Chronicle)--Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski is already recognized as one of the premier coaches in college basketball. After tomorrow, his status among the all-time elite could be cemented. [more]

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

February 27, 2008

William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008)

No matter where you sit on the political spectrum, only the small-minded and single issue freaks would fail to acknowledge that Bill Buckley was a powerful intellect, one of the most influential writer-thinkers of the last century, and a true Renaissance Man. A class act on a level with Voltaire and Disraeli. Everyone has lost a mega-smart if patrician friend--and one who respected language and loved ideas.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

February 19, 2008

The Praise

Samuel Johnson had quite a compliment for John Dryden (1631-1700), the English poet, critic and dramatist known for his energy, range, heart and nearly musical style. Dryden's compositions, Johnson said, "are the effects of a vigorous genius operating upon large materials". From a book my grandfather, Dr. J. Dan Hull, gave me after retiring from Washington, D.C. life and moving back to Springfield, Missouri. The Best of Dryden, L. Bredvold, editor, xiii (Ronald Press 1933).

Posted by JD Hull at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)

February 09, 2008

Ca' Paxatagore

Posted by JD Hull at 11:28 PM | Comments (0)

February 08, 2008

"Good call, Garth."

Restaurateur Armed with 200 Rounds Planned Super Bowl Gunfire--but Changed his Mind in Parking Lot.

PHOENIX (AP)--A would-be bar owner angry at being denied a liquor license threatened to shoot people at the Super Bowl and drove to within sight of the stadium with a rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition before changing his mind, federal authorities said. [more]

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 08:59 PM | Comments (0)

February 06, 2008

Can you identify this Frenchman?

Alexis de Tocqueville

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (3)

February 05, 2008

WAC? loves Simple Justice.

No, it's not a horse at Del Mar, or a stock. This is one of our "real lawyer" alerts.

See Scott Greenfield's highly-respected site, Simple Justice--A New York Criminal Defense Blog. Lawyers with criminal defense practices. Hull McGuire stands in awe before them; we've "been there" a few times. Armed with fancy outside white collar crime help, we defended (and did well) in a few criminal matters, including three seemingly endless jury trials. All were in federal court, with classy clients, before sane judges in DC or Pennsylvania. Then we got this new white collar defense guy in California. Still, we stick to corporate defense and the occasional criminal investigation with Sarbanes-Oxley issues. Why? Day-to-day criminal defense work, especially in NYC, is a Wild West Show--one for studs and studess-es only. It's a marathon, and for the toughest lawyers on earth. We are ultra-corporate smart--but we are not worthy of these guys. See Scott's blog. "Yeah, Simple Justice--they be bad...."

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:22 PM | Comments (2)

January 28, 2008

Good morning, American worker.

Happy Monday. It's still Winter. Today, you're just a shade of a tad Hungover. You hate your Job. Your entire Life. Your Dog. And your eldest son's resume is beginning to read like a Police Blotter. Re: suffering, maybe you can just use It, because it teaches.

Suffering overcomes the mind's inertia, develops the thinking powers, opens up a new world, and drives the soul to action.--Anthony H. Evans

Great minds have purposes, others have wishes. Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above them.--Washington Irving

Posted by JD Hull at 12:08 AM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2008

Real Blogs are Rare: Ray Ward's Minor Wisdom.

And he'd just say shucks. It's Sunday: the only day I spend any time alone, am quiet for long stretches, and won't yell at any one. In my head and heart, where things can grow, I've bumped Ray Ward's Minor Wisdom from the #11 spot to #1 on my best blogs/blawgs/sites/all on-line and electronic magazines. This is All Categories, All Professions, All Nations, All Tribes, All Humans, All Life, All-Cosmos. I've seen the light, having waited for a vision to deliver me. Minor Wisdom has beyond lawyerness: spiritual, literary, musical, political, brave, human, personal and get-off-your-ass. And he's one of the few Jesuit-educated humans who makes it all sound like damn fun. His blog is so much better than every lawyer blog I've seen--including this one--that it makes me want to write full time, even if I starve ("purity of the heart is to will one thing"...). Well, strike the starving part. Anyway, let's pull Ray and MW from that soul-less category: lawyers. He's that and more. He reminds us that Jesus is headed for The Big Easy--and that's enough to make a blind man see.

Posted by JD Hull at 09:37 AM | Comments (3)

January 22, 2008

Southern Winter

Associated Press: "Freeze Follows Snow in South, Gulf Coast"

"...put some bleachers out in the sun/And have it out on Highway 61".

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2008

Real Lawyer Stuff: MLK Day at Blawg Review

Blawg Review #143 is up. It's thoughtful, graceful and first-rate. It's hosted by Gideon at Public Defender Stuff.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:14 PM | Comments (0)

January 20, 2008

The Framers meet Rodney Dangerfield.

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

--Adlai E. Stevenson, Jr. (1900-1965), speech in Detroit, Oct.7, 1952

Even Adlai Stevenson's political enemies looked up to him. The highly-respected Illinois governor, diplomat and lawyer never got to be president--he lost to crowd-pleaser Eisenhower twice--but a lot of people wanted him to have that job. He liked ideas. American ones. People called him an "egghead" a lot. Ever wish that as a lawyer you did something genuinely worthwhile, important and part of a great American ideal? Something difficult, often unpopular and that reflects hard choices we've made as a society? Or are you just another lawyer dependent on the insurance companies for dough who wants to read a great blog every now and then? Tomorrow's host for Blawg Review is Public Defender Stuff. "Indigent defense news, delivered fresh daily". The guy's name is "Gideon".

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2008

Fancy Brit lawyer Ruthie loses passport in back of Scottish cab.

We know from her on-line confession that this happened to the famous English lawyer-writer-biker Ruthie in Aberdeen, Scotland around New Year's, culminated in a run-in with the feared and notoriously unrelenting Grampian Police, and therefore almost certainly involved booze, men and/or worse. See "Do Not Lose your Passport" at Ruthie's Law. We Yanks expected much better. Arched eyebrows.

Posted by JD Hull at 08:20 PM | Comments (1)

January 17, 2008

Breaking: Hungarian scientists decode Doggy Talk.

See Livescience.com. No inroads, however, reported on Lawyerspeak. But there's hope: "I'm pretty sure this could work with any animal vocal signals," researcher Csaba Molnár told LiveScience.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

January 11, 2008

QuizLaw is original, gutsy and fun.

Non-dweeb lawyers from New York and California write it. Dang. We're naming our next son after it: QuizLaw Pennington Oliver. "We're very proud of Quiz'. After Dartmouth, he'll spend a year at the Sorbonne."

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:14 AM | Comments (0)

January 09, 2008

Best business wisdom quote ever.

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

--Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784

If you don't fully understand, worry.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

Hermann the German: McCoffee v. Starbucks.

The next Great War: McDonald's has a go at Starbucks. See at Observing Hermann yesterday's piece "We knew this was going to get ugly". Hermann regularly monitors developments in Western thought, culture and commerce--and in The Cosmos generally--but here has confined himself to one of his favorite if more pedestrian topics: sideshows of globalization.

Posted by JD Hull at 10:42 PM | Comments (0)

January 02, 2008

Ann Althouse: best quotes of 2007, life actually, varmints.

If you don't like your life, change it.

--Lawrence Olivier, who would have turned 100 in 2007

The best one is above--except that it makes way too much sense. If you hate what you do and are, at least you're on the right track--but family, work, clients and feeding your dog merge into a joy-less chore until you fix it. The rest of her favorite quotes from her posts in 2007 are here. She recalls that we learned this past year that Arizona U.S. senator and 2008 GOP contender John McCain has a hair-trigger wit, too. No matter where you stand on gun control or immigration, the

word "varmint" (i.e., troublesome person or animal) deserves a comprehensive come-back in America. Join us. Use the word "varmint" today, preferably in writing--in an opinion letter, Rule 12 opposition brief, Phase I environmental report, or a reply to the Disciplinary Board. Just be discreet. Our young French friend Tocqueville would agree, or at least understand. This is America.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:29 PM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2008

Bang bang, you are the warrior. Ready?

Break out of captivity
And follow me, stereo jungle child
Love is the kill.....your heart's still wild.

--P. Smyth

New day, new year, and it's time for lawyers to lead. Let's resolve to:

Put clients first, tell clients what we really think, give advice and not just options, stop covering our asses, take risks, stop pretending we are "special", minimize our clubbiness, practice discipline and structure, stop making the law about our convenience and schedules, think like business people and not like mere academics, help clients control costs, fight the mediocrity in legal products and client service we continue to accept, change the way people think about lawyers, quit writing to clients, to courts and to each other like mental patients talking to themselves, become trusted consigilieres, surround ourselves with strong talented people, fire bad clients, refuse to bottom-feed, fire employees who don't or won't get it (and stop pretending they'll see the light), act, and otherwise stop being weenies.

Our clients still wait for us to so evolve. To lead. Ready?

JDH, HHO, TWC 1/1/08

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:23 AM | Comments (1)

December 27, 2007

Blogging in Cuba is different.

So you've got your blog, your pet ideas, and you write about them. But you think you've got sand? As WAC? understands it, blogs are supposed to be out-front journals, i.e., honest and brave, right? What are you willing to risk to get your ideas out there? Here's a must-see from WSJ.com called "Cuban Revolution" about a Havana-bred woman, 32, who blogs from Cuba about Cuba.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:26 AM | Comments (0)

December 23, 2007

No sleep 'til Christmas

Been quite a year. The sub-prime mortgage crash rippled through other markets, international approval of America has remained at a steady low for nearly 5 years now, and WAC? met Parker Posey on his way to Europe. Now we're travelling again. Which these days, we think, lawyers should be doing anyway to service clients. So we're shutting down our Palo Alto-based "news division" until the 26th--unless, of course, in the next couple of days, North Korea accidently destroys Japan, Ron Paul picks up 30 points in the polls, Time Magazine declares lawyers, politicians or executive headhunters the most admired humans on earth, or Keith Richards passes from over-eating.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 03:07 PM | Comments (1)

December 22, 2007

On the Senate, court and cocktail parties.

I prefer tongue-tied knowledge to ignorant loquacity.

--Marcus Tullius Cicero, lawyer-statesman-poet-pundit (106-43 BC)

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 01:23 PM | Comments (0)

December 20, 2007

What About Clients? named to ABA's "Blawg 100".

Many first-rate blogs didn't make this list--so we're really honored. We hope that our inclusion will bring attention to some of the consistent themes of What About Clients? since we started this project in August 2005, with the solid advice, example and help of a fine Chicago trial lawyer-blogger, and at the urging of two old D.C. friends of Hull McGuire: (1) client/customer service all over the world is remarkably poor, if not a cynical global joke; lawyers and other professionals can discipline themselves to deliver a better "experience"--weaving technical skills and real service--to valued clients, (2) corporate law firms under 150 lawyers can land and keep Fortune 500 companies if they have the right people and game plan (it's time for those with true grit to stop groveling and bottom-feeding), and (3) the legal services marketplace has become international for nearly all business lawyers.

There are the other WAC? categories--international business, litigation, IP, natural resources, HR, politics, writing well, Keith Richards, other mysteries of universe--listed over on your right that we cover every week. Other blogs we are "competing" with for votes in this ABA thing are very, very good. However, we think that WAC?--a part-time gig written by practicing lawyers (often under pressure and in very bad moods)--is more honest, broader in scope, funnier, better written, more useful, more thought-provoking, edgier, less constrained and just flat-out braver than most of the other great blogs out there. Life's short, and we started WAC? to say a few things you won't always hear at the cocktail parties and other dweeb-fests we all attend this time of year.

In short, we think lawyers should lead. So, if you are hearing us, and you appreciate it:

Posted by JD Hull at 10:27 PM | Comments (2)

December 18, 2007

More French job news: perks.

WAC? always wondered what people kept in those $2 million apartments near our usual hotel on I'lle Saint-Louis. AP: "French President Linked with Supermodel Bruni".

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 07:01 PM | Comments (0)

December 16, 2007

Christmas in our nation's capital

"Christmas is a special time in Georgetown. You don't need to drive anywhere. You just walk around. You spend time with people you really love. You give presents. Best of all you can get drunk and no one says anything."

--Ernie from Glen Burnie (b. 1958), WAC? childhood friend, power lawyer and philosopher, at Nathans, corner of M and Wisconsin, a booth, 1:15 AM, December 15.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:34 PM | Comments (0)

December 06, 2007

Driving instructor sues Borat and Fox studio.

A cast member files in SDNY for fraud, emotional distress and punitive damages, alleging he was paid $500 in cash to give Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) a driving lesson--during which Cohen drove wild and crazy down residential streets, drank booze and "yelled to a female pedestrian he would pay her $10 for 'sexy time'". [Reuters-UK]

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)

November 22, 2007

Thanksgiving

For what else can I do, a lame old man, but sing hymns to God?

--Epictetus, The Discourses, Book I, 101 AD

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

November 21, 2007

Anne Frank tree gets a second reprieve.

AP: The famous chestnut tree, over 150 years old, wins another stay from Judge Bade. Amsterdam city officials must present more detailed alternatives to the tree's proposed destruction.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2007

Anne Frank's chestnut tree

We've followed this one over the last few months. According to the AP, the 150-year-old ailing chestnut tree in Amsterdam that Anne Frank saw daily outside her attic window during the two years she hid from the Nazis will be cut down. The Anne Frank Museum has taken grafts from the tree in hopes that a sapling can replace it.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:38 AM | Comments (0)

November 12, 2007

Norman Mailer (1923-2007)

I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

Irish guys always liked Norman Mailer. About twenty five years ago Legs McNeil wrote, after doing an interview with Mailer, "nobody talks better than Norm". Mailer reveled in words, and the man could talk. And punch. But our best-ever American literary talker-brawler won two Pulitzers, and was famous for writing alone by the age of 25. He died at age 84 on Friday after nearly 60 years on a pedestal he built and maintained himself. He could be a blow-hard, but he knew something important. Strong opinions put strongly--about writing, men, women, politics, modern life--isn't about getting press. It's a way to have the Conversation in the midst of conformity and complacency. Enemies?

Natural provocateur Mailer knew also that, if you don't have a few, you simply aren't in the game. Like Mailer himself, the news coverage is spirited, opinionated, immense. L.A. Times: Mailer: An Ego with an Insecure Streak; The Irish Times: U.S. Literary Giant, Norman Mailer Dies Aged 84; NYT: Towering Writer with a Matching Ego, Dies at 84; The Guardian: Death of an Icon; The Huffington Post: Norman Mailer: Death and Remembrance. But Norm would have liked this next one the best. Via Pajamas Media, see at Chesler Chronicles: "Norman Mailer, one Tough Jew, is dead." And how many Jewish guys can drink like that? Gaelic retired toper WAC? is way impressed. Keep up the Conversation, Norm. We're bored down here already.

Posted by JD Hull at 07:36 AM | Comments (1)

October 24, 2007

"No, officer, the book didn't exactly attack me--but I definitely felt menaced".

Fear and loathing in Bloomington. For a kind of Hoosier madness other than basketball, see at WSJ's Law Blog the piece "Indiana Law Student Shoots Real-Estate Finance Casebook". Casebook, shot twice in a parking lot, is reported to be in critical condition.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)

September 23, 2007

Got Resilience?

Please see a piece by Texas lawyer Mark Bennett I've been brooding about ever since I saw it: "Resiliency". But don't obsess about it too much. Ironically, resilience--the ability to recover and spring back from adversity, a shock or a set-back in short order--is not a lawyer trait. Indeed, these days there's lots of commentary out there which in the aggregate goes something like this: lawyers don't market, work, argue, negotiate, or even do trial work as well as they could because they are "relational", nice, academic at heart, a bit passive aggressive, naturally not "war-like" and--even when we are competitive and direct--we suffer, brood and worry too long about setbacks and defeats. And we are beginning to hate what we do all day long because, oddly, (1) neither fighting (2) nor "going with the flow" are in our natures. It's true. We lawyers are, in the main, natural-born

weenies and squirrels. We are great people. But we sweat small stuff--part of our job, of course--and we over-react. We have amazingly poor defenses to each day's hard knocks and battles.

Well, why? My take: the profession attracts type-A eldest-child perfectionists who can become disoriented and even ashamed by not winning on every point. We get hurt easily. Too many of us suffer guilt or shame in the smallest defeat. We even kick ourselves about being that way. We feel like impostors. And that--trying to be something we can't always easily be--makes things worse. We start to hate our jobs and our lives. If our clients knew how thin-skinned and tortured some of us really are, they'd just take pity and fire us.

Solution? Somehow--and I don't care how--get over yourself, free yourself from all that bondage of self, and accept that some defeat is inherent in everything you do, and may be even helpful to achieve good results. I am NOT talking here about being a good loser or lowering standards. It's about Sweating Just Big Stuff. Stepping back. Getting perspective. Nothing brilliant here. However, without even doing an empirical study, it's obvious to me that lawyer "over-sensitivity" is a huge problem in our lawyer worlds and workplaces. Our reactions to the sum of small bad stuff prevents us from doing the big stuff or from doing it well. This hurts us as people. But way more importantly, it hurts your client: the main event. Remember that as a lawyer you are not royalty--sorry, but you never were that special. Clients are not "the equipment" for a patrician game. You are there to serve.

If you can't get a plan for this and change yourself--or can only do it the cost of violating who you really are--think about another career path. And for godssake if you're a trial lawyer, part of your damn job is to be resilient. So get some of it really, really fast, and buck up there, mate--or just teach, sell women's shoes or get that masters in taxation at NYU you sometimes dream about.

Posted by JD Hull at 08:20 PM | Comments (3)

June 26, 2007

Geoff Sharp: Fear as a Tool

New Zealand's Geoff Sharp at mediator blah...blah... is just not that PC. He isn't compelled to make the same comfortable New Age noises as the rest of us (especially Americans) so often make and take refuge in. He's honest, innovative and authentic. See his "The Legitimate Use of Fear to Encourage Settlement". You got sand, Geoff.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

June 18, 2007

Charles Fox: Autism, and Blawg Review #113

Today is Autism Awareness Day (1 of every 150 children, according to the U.S. CDC). Chicago attorney Charles P. Fox of Special Education Law hosts a special Blawg Review, #113.

Posted by JD Hull at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)

April 23, 2007

David Halberstam (1934-2007)

Halberstam, a New Yorker, Yankee's Yankee and Pulitzer Prize winner at the age of 30 for war reporting, was killed in a car accident today in San Francisco. He gave us both the idea and the book of Viet Nam as supreme American hubris in the 1972 bestseller The Best and the Brightest.

Posted by JD Hull at 04:14 PM | Comments (0)

February 13, 2007

Happy Birthday, Ms Bry, Renaissance woman.

Posted by JD Hull at 01:37 AM | Comments (0)

January 13, 2007

Kid from Brooklyn on Human Rights, 2nd Amendment.

Here. Open windows, turn up speakers, earplug the kids.

Posted by JD Hull at 05:22 PM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2007

More Irish Guys

"With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?"

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) had a rare mind, wrote well, lived too short a life, and was one of those people who give humans a good name. He had mega-talent, moxie and a good heart. Years ago, I visted the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris to see the graves of Jim Morrison, Richard Wright, Chopin and others and learned that Wilde was there, too.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:44 PM | Comments (0)

December 26, 2006

On the good foot....(1933-2006)

"Early in the morning/Can't get a ride/Had a little time/With my baby last night/Early in the morning/Gotta do the walk..."

A South Carolina native, James Brown died on Christmas. He was either 73 or 78. We loved it when he screamed to his band members things like "Maceo, hey Maceo, help me out!"

Posted by JD Hull at 11:21 PM | Comments (0)

December 09, 2006

Ms. Bry stars in "The 60s" - All you need is love, and a shrink.

She is actress, producer, writer, Renaissance babe, mom, ex-stunt girl (for fun, Google her name re: the Superman movies), and WAC? friend and advisor. Ellen Bry stars tonight in the Trish Soodik comedy "The 60s" at the acclaimed Pacific Theatre in Los Angeles, 703 Venice Boulevard, at 8:00 PM. Directed by Paul Linke.

Posted by JD Hull at 01:59 PM | Comments (0)

December 02, 2006

Mount Purgatory Warm-up

See "lawyers sentenced to haiku purgatory, without appeal " at f/k/a [formerly known as]. WAC? loves Dante, and serenely awaits guides Virgil and Colin Samuels at next Blawg Review, No. 86.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

November 11, 2006

Curmudgeon This--For Now.

Busy as I am defending corporate America and European companies from the forces of darkness and dumbness, traveling around the U.S. and western Europe with my new assistant Ms. Bry, working hard to get a couple of good books turned into movies, and trying here and there to teach people in my shop about the Holy Surprise and Miracle of Rule 36 and the fun break-dancing between Rules 30, 45 and 34, I feel very left out. I haven't read or even held in my hands Mark Herrmann's popular book The Curmudgeon's Guide to Practicing Law (ABA Litigation Section, 2006). But I want to read it, and will, for a few reasons:

First, you hear and read everywhere that Herrmann's Curmudgeon's Guide is intelligent and very funny. Second, about my vintage, Mark's a trial lawyer and writer with real lawyer credentials from a legendary firm (Cleveland-based Jones Day, ruled for years with an iron hand by a legendary curmudgeon) which was big, international and multi-officed before all that was cool. Mark's firm, unlike many firms from 250 to 3000 plus lawyers on growth streaks, seems to have expanded without doing great violence to or compromising its own gene pool. Third, WSJ Law Blog's Peter Lattman (e.g., here) likes Mark's book a lot, and has posted about it three times. Finally, and importantly, Arnie Herz, of Legal Sanity, did read Mark's book--and, hey, Arnie liked it. Arnie, also busy, is wise, perceptive, discriminating, and with a litigator's filter. That's enough for me until I get to Mark's book. See Arnie's post "The Curmudgeonly Law Firm Mentor".

Posted by JD Hull at 05:51 AM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2006

The Greatest Generation Day

It is Veterans Day, although the offical day is tomorrow. For me, though, that holiday is about those born between 1912 and 1932 (give or take): the Greatest Generation. They are my parents, my parents' friends and the parents of other baby boomers like me--my models growing up in Maryland, Michigan, Illinois and Ohio. They got us through the Depression and World War II, and rebuilt the American economy, with genuine courage, hard work and class. Ironically, the WWII generation spawned children who, with the best intentions, rebelled against the very prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s which had freed boomers to learn and brandish great ideas--and in time to invent and innovate. But our parents knew loss and sacrifice followed by a new stability. No whining, self-pity or blaming. I think of them as the quietly strong. Today, every day, we can salute them.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

October 29, 2006

Work-Life Balance This.

It's Sunday, near the end of October. This week offers us all a series of ancient harvest and life-death cycle observances with Pagan, Celtic, Roman and even Christian roots. Halloween (also called "Pooky Night" is some parts of Ireland) is just a faint shadow of this celebration of the awesome powers in the Cosmos.

U.S. kids of course love this week for its costumes and candy. Some cultures and religions commune a bit more seriously with the spirit world this week. But for me, a boring Anglo-Saxon Protestant who grew up in Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, it's just Fall (and a chance to catch again on TV two of the funniest movies ever made: The Exorcist and The Shining).

So inspired and assisted by an e-mail from my college and, later, Washington, D.C. roommate--friend, Super-father, husband, thinker, doer, outdoorsman, environmentalist, Duke and Columbia graduate, man of letters, journalist and author of, among other things, the acclaimed The Trade Warriors: USTR and the American Crusade for Free Trade (by S. J. Dryden, Oxford University Press)--WAC? offers, in an audio reading by Robert Pinsky, and in print below, John Keats's (1795-1821) poem To Autumn. And I can't improve on my friend's introduction to the poem:

"Give it up for my man John Keats and his poem To Autumn!"

1

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom‑friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch‑eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er‑brimmed their clammy cells.

2

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on the granary floor,
Thy hair soft‑lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or, on a half‑reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinéd flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider‑press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

3

Where are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too—
While barréd clouds bloom the soft‑dying day,
And touch the stubble‑plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full‑grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge‑crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden‑croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

September 19, 1819

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

October 22, 2006

Charon QC

Saturday is a particularly good day to visit my friend Charon QC. Here's a Brit who works harder than most of us Yanks, and has fun doing it. He's got a dang good WLB, too. WAC? has it on good authority that Charon loves the law, clients, hard work, counting his money, thinking, ideas, politics, reading, action, talking, sports, smoking, drinking and biking. Only Bill Clinton is better connected, or as dynamic and fun. Charon blogs at least once a day--but just for the bloody hell of it. Meet Mike Semple Piggot, Renaissance chap.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:09 AM | Comments (0)

October 15, 2006

Ellen Bry: New Judge on Boston Legal

Later this Fall on ABC watch for the elegant Ellen Bry to play a judge in two episodes of Boston Legal. Ellen and I met at a Renaissance Weekend in 2003, and she was impressed that I don't watch television. She doesn't either; when she landed a guest role on TNT's The Closer last year, her LA friends and I had to explain it to her. We've conspired for 3 years, often without screaming at one another. I posted about the talented Ms. Bry back in March. She made me like Los Angeles.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2006

NBC Deal: Anonymous Lawyer May Hit the Screen.

From Washington, D.C.'s Legal Times, here's "The Anonymous Anti-Hero", by Alexia Garamfalvi. Go Blachman.

Posted by JD Hull at 02:33 PM | Comments (0)

July 12, 2006

Born Lucky.

On July 12, 1986, around 1:30 AM EST, I had my last drink. By that, I mean my last Heineken, Jameson, wine, hooch or inebriant of any kind. Where this happened was a wonderfully depraved Irish bar my friends (cocky young litgators and news people, mainly) and I loved. It was midway between and my house on Capitol Hill and my job on Eye Street. Like all DC bars, it had fire-breathing trial lawyers, deal lawyers, politicians, journalists, students, professors, diplomats, and a novelist or two. But this was no "fern bar". It was whispered that the IRA raised money and ran guns through the place. It was common to see people in suits asleep on the floor. The waiters and waitresses had brogues from places like Tralee and Cork. The day bartenders were belligerent, and often drunk by noon. My kind of saloon. Perfect venue for the last drink: amazingly grace-less bar.

But there is nothing remarkable about why I quit. I had a great job, and was headed toward a partnership. My childhood had been lucky and fun. I could not have asked for more loving parents, siblings and friends. Nothing to drink about. I just liked it way too much. Born different, I guess. It isolated me, even with people around. That isolation, and knowing that drinking had somehow separated me from the rest of the universe, was enough. Sure, it's hard to quit. You may experience for the first time "exclusion"--even if it's self-imposed. You're in a minority. You feel left out. Yet lots of people, including adventuresome fire-breathing trial lawyers with one dash of the wrong DNA, do finally give up booze so they can tap into and use the gifts they have, and grow. Born different, maybe. Born lucky, too.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:33 AM | Comments (3)

April 28, 2006

Vital Voices, Improbability--and Julie Meets Hillary.

Last night my law partner and respected corporate tax attorney, Julie McGuire, an alleged Republican, was unexpectedly introduced to Hillary Rodham Clinton, certainly a Democrat, by Paula Stern, a very accomplished human and "known" Democrat, at the annual Global Leadership Awards and Benefit of Vital Voices in D.C. at the Kennedy Center. No conversions occurred--but Hillary was "very nice!" and it was an honor for Julie to meet her. A good start.

Apart from name dropping, implying that our firm can effortlessly work both sides of the aisle in our lobbying practice, and proving that life is strange, I mention this as a plug for Vital Voices, an innovative bi-partisan non-profit which invests in and honors women worldwide--often unsung and especially in the human rights area--who have undertaken key leadership roles in their countries. More information about Vital Voices Programs is here.

Posted by JD Hull at 10:34 PM | Comments (0)

April 17, 2006

Do What You Love: Hero 4 - Julie Elizabeth McGuire

Even serial over-achievers are impressed with a person who was graduated first in her class from both college and law school. In this case, our subject Julie Elizabeth McGuire has raving fans, most of them accomplished themselves, all over--in Fortune 500 companies, giant firms based abroad (especially in western Europe) and business lawyers worldwide. A multi-talented corporate tax and transactions lawyer, and CPA as well, Julie can land a job tomorrow morning at any in-house counsel shop or law firm she wants. A former in-house lawyer at Alcoa, she knows how General Counsels and CFOs think and what they worry about. She's what clients want in deals: a savvy business person and a tough, shrewd negotiator. At the same time, Julie McGuire has few if any enemies--just people who want to be more like her. It's not just the resume. She's serene, kind and genuinely friendly. She focuses on others. In a phrase, she's as nice as she is brilliant.

So what's Julie McGuire doing with me? In fact, people never politely or in passing ask "So, how did you two become partners and form Hull McGuire PC anyway?" Instead, they ask, in an intrigued, puzzled and slightly embarrassed tone: "Uh, how did you two even meet, anyway"? It's just difficult to believe that a Universe with any order or compassion would put Julie--with her no-nonsense Carnegie-Mellon Mathematics and Business Management double majors (try to be first in your class in that stuff!), her Midwestern values and charm, conservative political views, Yoda-like serenity and kindness, and real appreciation for the mysteries of Pittsburgh--in the path of a litigator and lobbyist with a liberal arts background and an enemy here and there, who loves Washington, D.C., old books, and old Europe, once wrote a senior History paper on "How the Shi-shi Got the Chutzpah to Overthrow the Bakufu", and prefers to serve subpoenas on Friday afternoons.

An American professional odd couple--but we are fast friends. We do have something else besides friendship and a law firm in common, and we are obsessive about it: Julie and I (1) both love practicing law, our clients, and traveling all over the U.S. and the world to act for them; (2) both think corporate clients are getting a raw deal on both quality and service at many large and traditional law firms; and (3) both are convinced that nimble, aggressive law boutiques with the right talent can do 85% of the legal work done for Fortune 500 companies, keep those clients safe and happy and have fun doing it.

Posted by JD Hull at 03:49 PM | Comments (1)

March 14, 2006

Do What You Love: Hero 3 - Mark Del Bianco

Speaking of our nation's capitol, I've posted about D.C.-based telecom and lawyer's lawyer Mark C. Del Bianco before, including here a couple of weeks ago. And see this article on "The Law of Telecom" which Mark and I wrote for The Pennsylvania Lawyer. Mark's another Renaissance guy and person-who-gets-it. I've known him for about 20 years, and he loves what he does for clients with legal tech issues.

Telecom issues are Everywhere and in Every Deal these days--and Mark figured that out long before it happened. So Del Bianco became a telecommunications law brand--and yet people want to work with him in other areas where his experience and expertise is both broad and deep. If you practice law long enough, and love it the way he does, that will happen: antitrust law (he's also Vice Chair of the Computers and Internet Committee of the ABA's Antitrust Section), foreign trade law (he used to edit the Yale Journal of International Law) and even litigation (DOJ trained him a long time ago). And anything to do with that exciting yet inscrutable new point where the law intersects with the Internet, Technology and All Things Digital. SuperDad, athlete, well-read, well-traveled, and the guy other lawyers go to first for advice on the hard stuff, Mark is the first person you hire when you get elected President. Some say way too many Yale people have been working in or sniffing around the White House these days. I disagree.

Posted by JD Hull at 08:00 AM | Comments (0)

March 07, 2006

My New Hero U.S. District Judge Clark..."Attaboy!"

See yesterday's WSJ Law Blog at "Judge Rejects Inscrutable Motion, Cites Adam Sandler’s 'Billy Madison'".

Posted by JD Hull at 01:54 PM | Comments (0)

March 05, 2006

Do What You Love: Hero 1 - Chris Abraham

From D.C.-based Chris Abraham--friend, marketing consultant, inspirer, writer, Renaissance dude, interpreter, learner-teacher, person-who-gets-it, and the guy to spend time with when I want new ideas. And he's got the best laugh. I talk to him and read him to get back on track. He actually likes lawyers, and helps them. Those of us who consult him worry he'll go to law school. "Do What You Love", which he's covered better than anyone, is here.

Posted by JD Hull at 06:31 AM | Comments (1)

February 21, 2006

Abraham & Del Bianco--Two People You Should Get To Know.

No--this is not a multicultural-sounding law firm. It's two very different Washington, D.C. people I know who are both "digitally-advanced", and who I urge everyone to get to know personally and professionaly. Since more than 10 people a day (still mostly relatives and associates paid to view it but it's getting there) finally are visiting and really reading this site, I thought, why not briefly sing Chris's and Mark's praises in a post? I met DC-based Chris Abraham, an expert on corporate blogging and building on-line communities, and a very interesting human (likely because he's not a lawyer), at a Renaissance Weekend a few years back in California. His blog is at www.ChrisAbraham.com .

Another Washingtonian, and a D.C. native, Mark Del Bianco is an uncommonly talented telecom lawyer, lawyer's lawyer and friend who I have known most of my professional life. Mark is also an invitee to Renaissance but is always too busy to go. See Mark's main site at www.MarkDelBianco.com. Both Mark and Chris are in demand these days. Visit their sites and you can quickly figure out why. Very good people to know. And Mark and Chris--whether they know it or not--in different conversations two years ago got me interested in blogging. In fact, both had to explain to me the meaning of "blog". Neither Mark or Chris know about this post and both of them would be embarrassed by it. Well, maybe not Chris--he's got that Steve Jobs thing going.

Posted by JD Hull at 07:06 AM | Comments (3)

January 27, 2006

Wanted: Natural Born Marketer From Hope, Arkansas.

First, I noticed this blurb in Peter Lattman's new Wall Street Journal Law Blog about Bill Clinton's possible return to the profession. I like Bill Clinton. Face it--even a lot of Republicans like Bill Clinton. The guy's smart, knowledgeable, charming and connects with people. Second, earlier this week Larry Bodine and others reported on Dr. Larry Richard's assertions in a speech to the Marketing Partners Forum in Florida that only 1 out of 5 lawyers are natural born marketers. That troubled my partner Julie McGuire, allegedly a Republican, and me. So here's our new ad:

WANTED: Of counsel for growing Pittsburgh-based boutique business law firm. Must have at least 8 years of highest level federal Exec. Branch experience, world-wide connections, Yale Law degree, one year at Oxford, own money and people skills. Crowd-pleaser. Must be able to sell anything to anyone. And be originally from Hope, Arkansas. State government experience preferred but not required. Same for participation in Renaissance weekends, and fund-raising. United Nations experience also a big plus. You don't need to re-locate. Happy to set up the office for you. Wherever you want. Harlem or Chappaqua, New York are okay. Or DC. You decide. You can work out of your house. Whatever. NOTE: No previous private law practice experience necessary. Not a problem--no problem at all. Excellent benefits package.

Posted by JD Hull at 09:32 PM | Comments (0)

August 02, 2005

About Dan Hull

What About Clients? is a weblog, or "blog", which contains ideas and news on servicing business clients as valued customers in law firms all over the world. I started WAC? in late 2005 because (1) the level of service at even the best global law firms is often inattentive and erratic, and (2) even where the service is sound, it can still be a lot better. See The First Post. What About Clients? has nothing to do with Hull McGuire PC, my law firm.

I am a member of the California, District of Columbia, Maryland and Pennsylvania bars. A litigator and lobbyist, I have life-long ties to the Washington, D.C. legal and government communities, and equally close ties to lawyers in Europe, Latin America and, increasingly, Greater China. I practice in the areas of complex business litigation (primarily U.S. federal courts and ADR abroad), environmental law, IP, employment practices and legislative affairs.

I've tried over 35 court cases to verdict, mainly jury actions representing defendant companies in federal courts, and prevented even more cases from ever being filed. While I love litigation, it's expensive, and nearly always overdone. Lawyers need to do more to stop or minimize business disputes that waste client time and money, and keep clients from doing business--and lawyers need to stop treating clients like they are "the equipment" needed for a game. When I can, I write about business litigation, natural resources law, IP, the American legal profession and cultural aspects of international law practice. I also consult and speak about these topics. But I'd rather just practice law.

My clients are businesses my firm and I represent on a repeating basis throughout the U.S., Europe and Latin America. We take on only two or three new higher-end clients per year--typically Fortune 500 or publicly-traded companies formerly represented by much larger law firms--which need attentive help in litigation, international business law, taxation, securities, IP, telecommunications, environmental law, employment practices or legislative affairs (lobbying).

Since 1992, we've worked all over the U.S., and abroad. We charge by the hour. We compete with other law firms on legal outcomes and service--not on price. Fifteen years ago, an in-house counsel of a Fortune 500 company called my firm, Hull McGuire, a "muscle boutique". The term stuck. That's a fair description of who we are and what we do.

More Interesting Stuff

In recent years, Hull McGuire has worked to help established writers and authors turn their fiction and non-fiction works into feature films by production companies and studios in California and New York.

A Procter & Gamble brat, I was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Maryland, Michigan, Illinois and Ohio. I attended Cincinnati's consistently excellent and well-regarded Indian Hill High School, where I was Senior Class President and an Eagle Scout. The students and faculty at IHHS--like Duke University after it--changed my life in ways too numerous and wonderful to mention. At Duke, I was a reporter and later an associate editor of The Chronicle, Duke's daily newspaper, and also a student representative of the Duke Board of Trustees. During my last academic year in college, I worked as an intern in health and environmental policy for a Wisconsin Senator (D-Wis.) in Washington, D.C. (93rd Congress) as part of course work at (and a grant from) Duke's Public Policy Institute. At the University of Cincinnati's College of Law, I was a student articles editor of the Law Review, and won some awards for writing. During my second year at UC Law, I saw my first two professional feature articles--one a cover article--published with the Sunday magazine of a major Ohio newspaper.

After law school, I worked again at the U.S. Congress, this time in the House as a legislative assistant to a U.S. Representative (R-Ohio), in the areas of energy and environment (95th, 96th Congresses). Later I joined the Washington, D.C. office of the now-defunct Rose, Schmidt, & Dixon as an associate and, eventually, a partner in the firm's litigation and environmental law groups. On St. Patrick's Day in 1992, Julie McGuire, a well-known and internationally respected corporate tax and transactional attorney based in Pittsburgh, and I founded Hull McGuire PC. We have offices in Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, and San Diego. For some time now, I have been listed in Who's Who In America, Who's Who In The Law--and other publications with similar-sounding names that may or not mean that much that.

I travel in my work--mainly Europe, Latin America and all over the U.S. Since 1997, I've been very active in building both international and domestic networks for the benefit of our clients, my firm and other law firms. I have chaired, moderated or served as a speaker in conferences of the International Business Law Consortium in England, Wales, the U.S., Germany, Austria, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Hungary, Canada, Mexico and Argentina. Together with Julie McGuire, I am a mainstay of the IBLC's Business Development Group, a member of the International Bar Association and one of the first members of the Congress of Fellows of The Center for International Legal Studies in Salzburg, Austria.

I am also Co-General Editor, together with Dr. Hans-Joseph ("Hanjo") Vogel, a German international lawyer who speaks American English better than Bill Buckley or Bill Clinton, of the IBLC publication International Directory of Corporate Symbols and Terms (IBLC 2003) by the Member Firms of the IBLC, which is available through Mr. Vogel or the IBLC in Salzburg.

Locally, in San Diego, between 1998 and 2004, I was an active member or officer of the Rancho Bernardo Planning Board, a land use and zoning board chartered by the City and County of San Diego, and serving a community of 45,000. In 2004, I was a primary fundraiser in San Diego for Wesley Clark For President, and was elected a Clark delegate to the Democratic National Convention (which of course lasted for about a week).

I live mainly in Rancho Bernardo, California. I'm interested in U.S politics, the workings of the new European Parliament, the histories of England and France, Ellen Bry, Parker Posey, Sarah Silverman, Annabeth Gish, travel, running, fishing and airports that make sense.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:00 AM | Comments (2)