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August 14, 2015
For road warriors: "We live in a world that never sleeps."
Reprising Blawg Review #65, The World Cup Blawg Review, July 10, 2006, and in honor of two passed road warriors, Ed and John. Does this description of the global legal landscape in 2006 still stand up? Nine years on? Blawg Review #65 begins:
We live in a world that never sleeps. Most mornings, lawyers at my firm get e-mails from people in all manner of time zones: Hanjo in Bonn, Michael in London, Giulio in Rome, Paul in Cardiff, Angel in Madrid, Claudia in Pretoria, Ed in Beijing, Christian in Taipei, Greg in Sydney and finally Eric, a DC trial lawyer. Two or three times a year, I see Eric, a partner in an international litigation boutique of 35 lawyers.
But I've never seen him in the US. Ever. In the eight years I've known him, Eric has had a plate full of international arbitrations. He could be anywhere when he e-mails--just probably not in this hemisphere. His client could be German with a claim against a Dutch company at a Brussels arbitration venue applying English or American law.
Lawyers sell services--and services are increasingly sold across international borders. In fact, services generally are becoming the new game. In 2004, services, sold alone or as support features to the sale of good and products, accounted for over 65% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the US, 50% of the United Kingdom's GDP and 90% of Hong Kong's.
Our clients? The sell both goods and services. The growing "global economy", the expansion of the services sector, the Internet and the resulting ability to partner with people and entities all over the world permit our smallest clients to do business abroad.
And lawyers in all jurisdictions can act for interests outside their borders. You, me, our clients and our partners are now international players. Every day we meet new ideas, new markets, new regulatory schemes, new traders and new customs. Our new world may not be exactly "flat" yet. But it's certainly become busier and smaller very quickly.
In the distance, Zürichberg: suburb of Zürich, Switzerland and FIFA HQ.
Posted by JD Hull at 01:35 PM | Comments (0)
August 13, 2015
John Ralston Pate (1944-2015)
American expat lawyer John Pate was a friend of mine. I met him in 1998, in Vancouver, Canada, and saw him last in 2009, in Florence, Italy. He was suddenly widowed in 2008. During the 2009 Florence trip, I was able to meet his new girlfriend, Sally Evans. Like me, John was a member of a small, expert and enduring invitation-based group of corporate lawyers from business and government centers all over the world. Our consortium, an early global experiment in unbundling legal services, worked. We all met frequently, did business, worked for clients and, in countless instances, became lifelong friends. Together, we sampled the great cities of Europe, the Americas, Africa, Australia, Asia and the Middle East. One of the group's leaders, John was a gentleman, soft-spoken, subtly patrician, smart but reserved. He was, too, an international lawyer--and a great one--before that was cool. John Pate died Sunday in his beloved Caracas, Venezuela. There are scores of articles on his killing from papers all over the world. This New York Times brief from an Associated Press article is the shortest:
Venezuela: U.S. Lawyer Is Killed
A prominent American expatriate lawyer was killed and his girlfriend wounded in an attack at their home in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, the authorities and relatives said Monday.
The lawyer, John Ralston Pate, 70, was found dead on Sunday in an apartment in an affluent neighborhood of eastern Caracas, the country’s public prosecutor said.
Prosecutors identified the woman who was wounded as Sally Elizabeth Evans, 67.
Venezuela has the second-highest murder rate in the world after Honduras, according to the United Nations.
Mr. Pate had lived in Venezuela since the 1970s and helped build up a once-thriving expatriate community.
He moved to Caracas after studying at Brown and Boston Universities, helping found the locally based law firm De Sola Pate & Brown.
“He never wanted to leave,” said his son Thomas Pate, a lawyer in Miami. He added: “His family, we were always nervous. He told us that he couldn’t stop living, but he was being careful.”
Posted by JD Hull at 01:32 AM | Comments (0)
August 11, 2015
Greenfield on Ferguson.
Two days ago was the one-year anniversary of the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a black suburb of St. Louis. The usual wide if dumb-downed and undiscerning media coverage yesterday and Sunday of protests, looting, one shooting, the beating of a local journalist and arrests gave us all a sense of déjà vu. Featured again were the citizens of Ferguson, local police, the media and the U.S. Justice Department, that new and relatively passive chorus character for race-laced events in America. Whether or not you think that events in Ferguson over the last year have one, two or even several evenhanded explanations for what actually is happening there, do read Simple Justice today. In one of his posts this morning, its founder, New York City trial lawyer Scott Greenfield, writes We've Learned Nothing (A Rant). Besides some things to think hard about, we get a glimpse of Greenfield at his honest and inspired best. Excerpt:
Sweet words were uttered by the Department of Justice, condemning flagrant racism in Ferguson, and then everyone walked away, proud of their fine work, leaving the black people of Ferguson to live the same shitty lives as they had before. Even those sympathetic to the cause of Ferguson prefer official solutions, trusting the peaceful and systemic trick of making the noise of change without actually doing anything. Usually, they give themselves an award afterward for being such good white people to the poor black people. The black people never get invited to the party.
So what have we learned? Not a fucking thing. The cops responded with the same excessive display of force, and use of force, as always, because force is so much easier than thought. And the adoration of calm, peaceful and law-abiding, without regard to the circumstances and motivations giving rise to the protest, plays well to the white public. We hate it when blacks get all angry and disagreeable. Jeez, just because cops keep killing unarmed black people? That’s no reason to upset our happy, peaceful lives. It’s not like they’re doing it to us.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)
August 10, 2015
One of us: Bless you, Mr. Trump.
Trump is what happens when we Yanks look in the mirror: good, bad and occasionally a bit ugly.
According to NBC/Survey Monkey polling as of last night, since last week's debates Donald Trump--and even after saying 'inappropriate' things before, during and after the debates--is up one point to a remarkable 23% out of 16 candidates. Amazing. Donald Trump has been around since I was a kid in Cincinnati. As a young man, in fact when he was still a college student, he redeveloped a insolvent project in The Queen City, the Swifton Village apartment complex, which his father had purchased in the early 1960s. After that my timeline for him is simple, and probably like everyone else's: real estate, gambling, bankruptcies, wife troubles, Rosie O'Donnell feud, financial recoveries, part-time pundit and now political candidate pushing 70. I have never liked his real estate, either hotels or office buildings. I don't like him as a television personality. But I have always liked his feistiness. I have liked him as a personality because he is clearly "one of us"--as "American" as you get. Whether we admit it or not, Donald Trump is a living caricature of the American Dream Achieved--loud, proud, out front, in your face, feisty, unapologetic--and exactly how we actually are and how we have been viewed for two centuries going back Alexis de Tocqueville. Trump is what happens when we Yanks look in the mirror: good, bad and occasionally a bit ugly. Love or hate him, you don't get any more authentic in America than this guy.
Posted by JD Hull at 03:12 PM | Comments (0)
Journée du 10 août.
Louis XVI:
My God, it's a revolt!Duke de la Rochefoucauld:
No, sir, it's a revolution.--2 years earlier.
Two hundred and twenty-three years ago today, during the French Revolution, an insurrection at the Tuileries Palace marked the end of the French monarchy until the Bourbon restoration in 1814. An August 10, 1792, a mob supported by the Paris Commune stormed the palace, where Louis XVI and the royal family had been taken two years earlier and put under watch. The family fled to to take shelter at the Legislative Assembly. Three days later, the king was officially arrested and imprisoned. Six weeks later, on September 21, the National Convention abolished the monarchy and established the French Republic. King Louis XVI was executed on January 21, 1793.
The Taking of the Tuileries ("Prise du palais des Tuileries") 1793, Jean Duplessis-Bertaux (1747-1819) National Museum of the Chateau de Versailles.
Posted by JD Hull at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)