It’s way too much to read, what with running a practice and all, but some of it is has been very interesting. Specifically, a recent post asking people what they would have done had they not gone to law school really got me thinking. The post itself isn’t terribly bitter, though I sense a bitter subtext. It seems mostly like daydreaming from people living the dream of most first year law students. The comments, on the other hand, range from asinine to the kind of stuff that makes me want to cry. That’s kind of a pervasive theme with the comments over there.

Don’t get me wrong; I can bitch with the best of them. In fact, I love a good bitch about the long hours and occasionally difficult client as much as anyone out there. The feeling I got reading the post and more importantly the comments, however, made me more thankful than a decade’s worth of reading sappy Thanksgiving posts would.

I have a lot of other interests. I’m sure I’ll open a brewing company someday soon. I imagine I’ll continue to pull out the ol’ horn and play some gigs every now and then too. I get excited about stuff other than law because there’s all kinds of other awesome stuff out there. When I joke about the joy of the life of a non-lawyer, however, I hope I don’t come across nearly as jaded, bitter, and generally unhappy as some of the mildest commentators there. It’s a great career. High stakes and high stress, but great. It’s awesome stuff too.

For me, thinking about what I would’ve done had I not gone to law school first and foremost conjures up a terrible feeling of regret in the pit of my stomach. I think about the clients I’ve helped. Would they have gotten good representation without me? Probably, but I wouldn’t have gotten to know them. I wouldn’t have learned what I know now about the criminal justice system, about the art of trial lawyering, or about human nature in general. Knowledge and relationships matter to me. Perhaps most important of all, I wouldn’t have met my amazing wife, and I wouldn’t have the blessed life I’m fortunate enough to be living right now. I wouldn’t have a great business partner, wouldn’t have the great group of friends I have, and wouldn’t have the ability to do all the other things I love so much. Maybe my little practice in the suburbs doesn’t turn heads, but it’s satisfying. Other areas of law and types of practice can’t suck that bad, can they?

It’s odd thinking that someone could win the rat race and complain about the prize. Given what I can only assume is the target audience at Above the Law based on many of the subjects that frequently appear, it’s probably more like the rat Grand Prix. The site is clearly geared towards people with BigLaw jobs. At the very least, it’s geared towards people who want BigLaw jobs and at least in their own minds believe that’s a realistic enough possibility to justify wasting their time reading about it. How are these people more jaded than the overworked contract lawyers and public defenders I see in court most days?

BigLaw people went to great schools and probably make great salaries. Why are they complaining? I don’t know who’s more depressing, the ones who one day hope to get the job in the field they’re already bitter about, or the one’s who are already bitter about their fortunate lives. Is it that they’ve never done anything else? If that’s true, with a six-figure salary and even a tiny bit of spending discipline, it can’t take long to get to a good starting point for more education or a new job in a different field.

Anyone half as bitter as some of the commentators should do that. Now. Hell, they’ve should’ve done that yesterday. The last thing this world needs is more lawyers who don’t want to be lawyers.

I should never view any non-work-related plans as concrete. As hard as that’s been for me to swallow, with my current practice, I know that it’s true. I represent a fair number of clients each year, and at any given time, many of their cases are at very different stages. I’m never at a point where I have no clients, so there’s always somebody who’s my responsibility. My clients, as well as courts, prosecutors, law enforcement agencies, and all kinds of other unexpected people, therefore have the potential for creating urgent work for me at any time. If something comes up that falls within the scope of my duties as counsel, I have to make the sacrifice and get back to work. If I can’t do the work when it needs to get done, then I shouldn’t have accepted the fee. For that reason, although I spent two years planning what I had hoped to do this year, work still interfered tremendously.

I was going to take all of this past July off so I could ride my motorcycle all over the country. I worked my ass off for a long time to have that month free, but my plans just didn’t work out. I ended up having to leave my bike in Boston and fly back to Arizona to go back to work for a couple of months before finishing my vacation. Why? A court vacated a hearing set after my return. There was a possibility the client would be released at the hearing, and the court’s next availability after the hearing it was vacating wasn’t for quite some time. The court said it could push the hearing back, resulting in weeks of additional jail for my client, or it could set it right in the middle of my vacation, potentially resulting in my client’s release weeks earlier than we previously thought possible. The decision to change my plans was easy, but it was still tough to do. Luckily, the sacrifice paid off with my client’s immediate release following the hearing.

Taking uncertainty into account isn’t the end of it. Sure, I don’t know if I’ll ever buy a non-refundable ticket again. And if it doesn’t seem like a total scam, I imagine I’ll always buy cancellation insurance too. But I’ve also learned that planning often starts well in advance of the vacation. What do you do if an in-custody client insistent on trial wants to hire you, and you know his trial date is going to fall right in the middle of your vacation months down the road? In jurisdictions like Maricopa County, it’s easy to anticipate trial dates. They’re always about 120 to 150 days from the arraignment, so if you’re taking a few weeks off, you can be pretty certain based only on a summons whether or not you’re going to be available for the eventual trial. If you have any reason to believe your client’s liberty may be affected by your vacation schedule, you need to disclose that. In my practice, if I’m not working, then I’m not making money. Vacationing also costs me clients both during the time I’m gone as well as months in advance.

I haven’t even gotten to the most difficult part. Of all the hassle of trying to get some time away to relax, the part that’s taken more getting used to than anything else is the fact that any vacation I take is probably going to include some work. Because I have clients at all times, and because a great deal of my schedule is beyond my control, there is probably going to be work to do. As a rule of thumb, I just assume that every client being investigated gets arrested right after I leave town, that every client waiting for charges receives a summons with an initial appearance date right after I leave town, and that every motion I’ve filed gets set for a hearing right after I leave town. In eight days of my vacation, I probably stopped the bike on the side of the road in at least as many states to try to get something reset. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but it was what I had to do. It’s the price of being a criminal defense lawyer with a small firm. I doubt these things are ever going to change, but if any of the other lawyers reading this have any ideas that won’t hurt any of my clients, I’m all ears.

Despite all of this, I had a great vacation. I’m convinced that the most important thing to remember for any private criminal defense lawyer trying to take time off is the fact that nothing will be perfect. Any vacation will be especially expensive for me because of the nature of my job, and I may have to work during my time off or even change my plans entirely. In the end, though, I look at it like this: would I rather be back at the office somewhere in the middle of an eighty-hour week, or would I rather be fishing during a beautiful sunset or riding over a curvy mountain pass, about to return to reality for a little while before getting back to fun and relaxation? Putting it that way, the answer is obvious to me.

After arriving, I was supposed to meet some people at a mysterious location. They refused to give me any details in advance. I knew the purpose of the meeting and who set it up, and I didn’t want to end up on the other side of town scrambling to reach some secret location in time for my appointment. I consulted Google, entering the name of the government agency involved. I went to the location I found, the first hit nonetheless, and I sat there drinking a cup of terrible coffee.

Shortly before my scheduled meeting, I got a call from the organizer. He told me to meet everybody else at a certain location. It probably had way better coffee than the place I chose. It was a few blocks away, so I walked over and made small talk. Some impressive law-enforcement types pulled up a few minutes later, and we got into a little convoy. I felt like the president. For about sixty seconds.

Where’d we go? A few blocks away, to the exact place where I was happily drinking that awful cup of coffee ten minutes earlier. I wish they’d at least given me some kind of warning about the coffee. The kicker is that they wouldn’t confirm where we were going the next day. Hint: it was the same place.

Thinking about that makes me think about another situation.

I recently went to visit my parents in rural Western Kentucky. I met an old friend at a bar one night, and I saw they had Sam Adams Octoberfest on tap. In my opinion, it’s the best beer that company brews, so I ordered a pitcher. As I carefully poured two pints, I noticed it was cloudy and the carbonation was off. The smell wasn’t right either. My friend and I knew there was something wrong with the keg before the end of the first sip.

I started to write this paragraph beginning with the words “I don’t want to brag,” but that seemed ridiculous. I probably should brag; I have a great palate when it comes to beer. I can taste any beer and consistently identify the style, the varieties of malts and hops used, the IBUs, the yeast strain, and much more. I’ve spent years testing myself too. I can make a homebrew clone of pretty much anything I can taste. I drank a Sam Adams Octoberfest from a good keg less than a week prior, and Oktoberfest styles are among my favorites. Unless the Boston Beer Company has started making a special edition Brettanomyces or Lactobacillus Festbier, there was something wrong.

Confident there was a problem, I brought my glass to the bartender and told him there was something wrong with the beer. His comment? “That shit is fucking delicious. It’s a fresh keg.” There was a blond girl with curly pigtails sitting next to him. She looked exactly like Daisy Duke’s beat-up evil twin, with super-short cutoff jeans and a red and white plaid shirt that exposed her stomach. Apparently she was a beer connossieur, so she chimed in. “Yeah, that’s good shit. Totally fucking delicious.”

I asked the bartender to try some, a request that didn’t require much convincing. He poured a quick shot from the tap and without looking or smelling tipped the glass back and drank it in one gulp. He should have looked at it, as certain beers are supposed to have a certain appearance, and he should have smelled it, as you can get at least as much sensory input from smelling a beer as you can from tasting it. It took him a second, but after an awkward pause in which he seemed to have forgotten why he just took a shot of beer, he confirmed his initial reaction. “Fucking delicious.”

In situations like those two, I often think about a comment my mom made made a year or two ago. She was talking about retirement and mentioned how it would be interesting to see how it feels, as the men and women of her generation identify themselves by their work. The job defines them, apparently. I’ve thought about that statement often. I can’t say if she’s right, but I can say that a negative implication of her statement is definitely true. The men and women of my generation generally do not identify themselves by what they do for a living.

I frequently see blog posts about job-hunting for law students and new lawyers. Getting a job is obviously a big concern for a lot of people, and there are plenty of others willing to provide advice. Advisors suggest things like hanging around with practicing lawyers and broadening the search to include non-lawyer jobs. They say to embrace social media and to think outside the box. Those are the tools to get a job, the explicit goal of people in my generation. Rarely do people mention being qualified for the desired job as an important part of the equation. The advice all seems geared toward staying just as you are while altering superficial things that make you more appealing to employers.

My generation wants work, but they don’t want to define themselves by their work. A job is a way to live in a nice house, drive a late model car, and have enough stability to relax on evenings and weekends and during several weeks of vacation each year. A job will provide an office with a window and a big desk under which they can grab a quick nap after taking a long lunch break at a trendy restaurant with their work friends. Jobs are means to an end. They want a job not because it’s the job they want to do or even that they can do exceptionally well, but because it will help them do the non-job-related things that make them happy. They don’t care if their work time is well spent as long as it pays the bills.

Every time someone who’s done nothing to build a foundation of knowledge and skill in a given area of law complains about how employers in that area want someone with three to five years of experience, I worry about the future. Just like when I’m confronted with government agents needlessly shuffling me around to make work and bartenders with no knowledge of the beer they’re serving, it confirms that far too many people my age believe a job is just a way to stay busy and get paid. It isn’t the kind of thing that you strive to do well or efficiently to make the world a safer or more enjoyable place, but rather a set of motions you go through to draw a paycheck.

My experiences have left me hoping that my generation isn’t actually different. I hope that previous generations were just like us but that they changed. I hope that they’ve just forgotten, and that they now they criticize us because their memories are bad. I suspect the only way the world is going to function in the future is if we change, and knowing it’s happened before will make me far more optimistic. If my hopes are misplaced, though, I suppose I’m going to have to get used to wasting time over bad coffee and paying for unintentionally sour beer.

Before I had any real experience, I looked all over the place for guidance about caseload. I spoke with public defenders and met some who had 30 open felony cases. I met some with 60. Several public defenders who handled misdemeanors as well as felonies told me they typically had over 100 open cases at any given time. Relying to some extent on the stereotype of the overworked public defender but mostly figuring they had experience and paralegals and secretaries I didn’t, I decided the absolute max for me should be a fraction of the minimum for them.

I also spoke with lawyers who built their practices around court-appointed clients and only occasionally took a private client. For the most part, they blew the public defenders away as far as numbers go. One lady bragged to me about having 400 appointments in one year alone, some of which were capital cases. I was extremely disturbed, and believe it or not, that isn’t the highest number I’ve heard. A month or two ago, I contacted a court-appointed lawyer before taking over a case from him. He was irked that I called and wasted his time, and he informed me that he had no clue who the client was anyway because he has 1200 different clients on his caseload.

Public defenders and turn-and-burn contract lawyers weren’t the place to look, but the people who had my dream practice were no better as a guide. They had very few clients, but they were all bigger cases. If I’d have taken so few clients, I’d have starved with the types of cases I did in the beginning. On top of that, they handled the kinds of cases I had no business touching fresh out of law school. Without any perfect example to follow, I did my best to set limits on my caseload and hoped that one day I’d be busy enough to worry about that kind of thing.

As with many of the elaborate plans I laid in beginning, my efforts largely turned out to be a waste of time. I didn’t realize just how different each case and each client really can be. I could have guessed that some would be more demanding than others, but I never would have realized how much of the difference isn’t apparent without experience.

I’ve had “easy” DUI cases kill over a hundred hours. One of my first jury trials should have been a straightforward burglary case, but I must have ended up interviewing fifty witnesses, many of whom suddenly popped up on the eve of trial. After a few years, I’ve gotten better at guessing from the initial consultation and the discovery whether it’s going to be an unusually demanding case or client. I don’t have delusions of grandeur though; I still regularly underestimate cases and quote flat fees that end up way too low in the long run.

It’s also tough to realistically assess your own efficiency when you haven’t done something before. How long does it take for you to read and digest medical records? Bank statements? Accident reconstructions? I realized pretty fast that I’m generally quick figuring out a familiar document, but that a little change in the format can double or triple my time.

No case management policy is going to be a substitute for experience. No amount of experience is a substitute for a little more experience. Most lawyers assume they’ll know when their caseload is too heavy because they’ll be rolling in money. They think they’ll see the huge bank account balance and hire an associate. In the real world, it isn’t unusual for a lawyer to be buried under an excessive caseload while barely getting by financially. A law license is a license to practice law. It isn’t a license to print money, no matter what marketers say.

Setting a cutoff number or creating a formula for deciding when to begin rejecting cases isn’t a bad idea, but it’s anything but a guarantee. Managing caseload, like the law in general, is practice. It’s never time to kick your feet up and quit thinking about it. As depressing as that may seem, at least it’s comforting to know you’ll keep getting better.

I am no salesman. It isn’t in my genes, I haven’t gone to great lengths to develop any sales skills, and quite honestly, the idea of selling things to people, even if it’s something I believe in, makes me feel a tad bit icky. I acknowledge I must sell my services to stay afloat in this profession, but I generally do that by sticking with one basic principle. It’s the one that makes me feel the least icky.

I am the product I’m selling. Constrained only by my own natural abilities and the number of hours in each day I am capable of devoting to improving on those, I have absolute control over the quality of my product. Improving what I’m selling so it hopefully sells itself is the best way to increase sales. It’s better than making some false claims on a website, though perhaps slower to show a financial return on investment.

Unfortunately, clients don’t hire based on legal skills alone. For the most part, they don’t have the requisite knowledge to meaningfully assess legal skills at all. Even lawyers who don’t practice in my specific area usually don’t have enough understanding to tell a good criminal defense lawyer from a bad one.

Clients sometimes look to things like the lawyer’s car, the lawyer’s clothing, or the lawyer’s office. They don’t want a lawyer who’s spilled chocolate milkshake on his oversized hand-me-down suit and smells like the elephant cage at the zoo. Riding a BMX bike to your office on the corner stool of a dive bar is no way to impress a potential client, even if you’re a great lawyer. Habits can be important too.

Occasionally, I see something that reminds me that lawyers are products. As products, we should not only refine the skills that enable us to achieve our intended purpose, but we should also consider how we present ourselves. I thought about that after I got an email containing this fabulous photo of International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his expensive lawyer:

I don’t practice in New York. I’ve never met that lawyer. I imagine he does a fine job considering his list of clientele, but the glance from his client is so wonderfully skeptical that my first inclination is to doubt him.

I expect he’s just the victim of an unfortunate photo. I feel bad for the guy, but nail-biting is such a fantastically expressive thing that it completely colors my impression of him. You could pull up to your billion-dollar office in a Bugatti Veyron wearing a suit made of solid gold thread, and I’d be suspicious if you started biting your nails. I’d probably look a lot like Mr. Strauss-Kahn looks. It just isn’t a good habit, especially not in the middle of a hearing.

That picture reminded me that any product improvement on the part of a lawyer needs to be comprehensive. You can still focus primarily on increasing the quality of services you provide, but you should also remember not to bite your nails or engage in any other bad habits that might reflect poorly on you. It doesn’t look good. It might cost you business.

It doesn’t seem like it’s hurt Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s attorney, but then again, he and I aren’t exactly in the same situation. I suspect his product isn’t too hard to sell at this point in his career. As for me, I think I’m going to go shine my shoes and drop my suits off at the dry cleaner’s.

I saw Obama on the television giving a speech yesterday. He was short on details, but his message seemed to be that Americans don’t have to make any sacrifices. We don’t have to cut entitlements or defense spending. We’ll just tax the rich, do some other things I’m apparently not smart enough to understand, and we’ll reduce our debt by fifty-gazillion dollars. Like I said, he was a little short on details. I got the point though.

Before becoming a lawyer, I would’ve probably been fine with taxing the rich to death. I didn’t really know who they were. I didn’t even know what made someone rich in the eyes of the government. I assumed they’d be vacationing in the Hamptons all summer and Aspen all winter, so I’d never meet any of them anyway. They were people in suits and ties, like lawyers. Damn rich lawyers.

I really had no idea how little lawyers, even the ones the government calls rich, actually made. I know better now. They may be rich by some measure, but after taxes, they look a lot worse than pretty much anyone I know who works for the government or gets a W-2.

When starting a firm, most lawyers put themselves in the exact same crappy situation. The money isn’t going to be steady for a while, so they don’t put themselves on payroll. They form a business entity with pass-through taxation. Those aren’t bad things, but they can be dangerous.

Let’s say the business pays $2000 a month for every single necessity, like an office, malpractice, health, and other insurance, office supplies, and all marketing or advertising. Not bad, right? Lean and mean. On the personal side, let’s say the new solo has monthly personal expenses totaling about $2000. About half of that is student loans, and the rest is rent and food and everything else. If anything, that’s less than most new lawyers have in the way of monthly expenses.

Using those numbers, if the business struggles and only makes exactly $4000 each month for the first year, April 15th will be a terrible day. Your accountant will probably tell you that you need to cough up thousands. That’s thousands you don’t have because you spent everything you earned trying not to starve. You’ll have barely made it from a financial standpoint, as every cent went to some necessary expense. You took no vacations and saved no money. You couldn’t make quarterly payments because most of your money went to student loans. Those are the student loans the government made so easy for you to get when you were a dumb teenager and now won’t let you discharge in bankruptcy.

The government doesn’t care that you didn’t actually make any money. There’s no deduction for the hundreds of hours of pro bono or reduced-rate work that tend to accumulate in the first year. Some of your essential business expenses, like bigger office items that must be capitalized and meals with other lawyers, are also not fully deductible. It doesn’t matter that you took some of Brian Tannebaum’s good advice and spent your last $20 not eating alone by taking a master in your field out for a cheese crisp. You spent it on the best (and perhaps most tasty) business investment there is, but only half of that is deductible. You should have saved enough to cover the self-employment tax on the taxable half.

Welcome to the world of a new solo or small firm. It’s living paycheck to paycheck professional-style, and there’s no guarantee you’ll ever get another fee to write another paycheck. The only financial consolation is that you will hopefully grow your business so quickly that you can soon put yourself on payroll, make huge quarterly payments when times are extra good, and pay a smaller percentage of what you tried to save the year before each April 15th. It sure feels great. You’ll being forking over more cash both as a total and as a percentage of your business’s income, but at least you’ll be losing it gradually. You’ll only truly realize just how much Uncle Sam takes every mid-April. It’s easier that way, trust me. If you’re lucky, one day, probably a day when you still feel like you don’t have an extra cent to spare anywhere, you’ll realize you’re one of the rich people Obama wants to tax. Congratulations!

There’s a purpose to this story, and it isn’t just to demonstrate that I’m an irritable jerk when the middle of April rolls around each year. The moral of the story is that you really should want to be a lawyer before you make the jump. Most lawyers are solos or small firms. You probably won’t get rich and famous hanging out a shingle. You’ll probably have a fulfilling, interesting career. That has to be enough. Just because you’re a lawyer, and even if you’re a rich lawyer according to the internal revenue code, you’re probably not that rich. More lawyers live like my example than live like the lawyers you see on television. It’s something to think about before becoming a lawyer, even if you’ll only really have to stop and think about it every April 15th if you do decide to do it.

It didn’t take me long to realize what was happening. Years ago, indigent defense contract work was a key component in our business model. People don’t line up to retain lawyers in their mid-twenties with about ten seconds of experience. Not if the lawyers are honest, that is. Contract work builds experience and helps during lean months.

Though I’ve tried very hard to phase out indigent defense contracts as part of my practice, I haven’t been terribly successful. Telling contract administrators I won’t accept any new appointments seems to do exactly the opposite of what you’d expect. Playing hard to get really drives ‘em wild, I guess.

In all honestly, I’ll probably always accept the occasional appointment. When someone contacts me asking if I’ll take an interesting case in a new area of law for a guaranteed fee, it’s tough to say no. Having first done cases like homicides and wiretap cases through contracts, I can’t imagine doing one for a private client first. How would I know what fee to quote? Having the government on the hook for a set hourly rate makes for a financially risk-free opportunity to find out just how much time it takes to properly prepare to cross-examine a medical examiner or review a stack of affidavits for necessity or authorization motions. Some cases are just different, and most private clients aren’t willing to pay by the hour.

Back to the distressed mother, I could tell I had probably been appointed to represent her son. First, she was calling my cell phone. Find me online or through a referral, and you’ll probably only have my office number. Every client, whether private or appointed, gets my cell number. Second, she had that sound of mistrust in her voice that tells me she thinks I’m just another part of the system that’s going to harm her child. Her story also sounded all too common.

Her son had an actual public defender at the pre-indictment stage, and she forgot to tell him his preliminary hearing would be vacated because the state was taking the matter to a grand jury for an indictment. He took off work for the vacated prelim and sat around all day for nothing. His job had a strict policy limiting absences during a set period, and the arraignment the court set after the indictment came down fell just within a period in which he’d already taken off too many days for court. One more would be immediate cause for termination.

The poor client and his mother frantically called the public defender but couldn’t get through to anyone. I know for a fact that particular public defense office has a seemingly infinite phone tree designed to never let you through to a living, breathing, human being and to promptly hang up on you if you hit the wrong number at any point. It’d be easier for the client and his mom to get President Obama on the phone and ask for some help.

I probably would’ve rejected that particular appointment under any other circumstances, but he had a problem and knew I could help him. I confirmed the appointment with the agency that appointed me, but nothing in the court record showed I was in fact the lawyer.

I called the court to let them know what I was going to do, as moving to continue an arraignment is fairly unusual in that jurisdiction. I called her son’s job to verify her story. I had to coordinate with both to get a new arraignment date that would not only work for the court, but also save him his job. After a few more calls to get a prosecutor on board, I filed the motion, making sure one copy went straight to the arraignment calendar judicial assistant so the judge would see it before the end of the day.

I got confirmation that my motion was granted just in time to tell my client’s mom her son wouldn’t have to tell his boss he’d miss work and lose his job. Her response was something like this:

Oh. Okay. By the way, I think we may hire a street lawyer. He really should have an attorney represent him. It is his life, you know.

In all, I killed a decent-sized chunk of time I didn’t really have to spare. I had to work that much later that day to get all of my other things done. I sure would’ve loved to have instead spent that time relaxing on a couch at Starbucks with a nice, hot, cappuccino while writing a blog post about something exciting. Or maybe not. I’m probably just dreaming.

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I was frustrated and that, for me, the best possible outcome might actually be if he hires a “street lawyer.” The type of case falls under the $846.00 flat fee section of the county’s schedule of fees. If he hires someone else right away and I get to keep the check, I’ll at least end up having made about what I would have made had I billed the same amount of time on one of my private cases. In reality, however, if he does hire another lawyer, the county will probably send the check but demand I return some of it because I was relieved so early in the representation.

If he doesn’t get a new lawyer, I’ll inevitably end up putting a massive amount of work into the case for a meager and totally insufficient fee while feeling generally undervalued by everyone involved. On top of that, the county is actually quite likely to refuse to pay me altogether because of the circumstances. Filing a motion prior to the county making me the attorney of record in the case makes it look like I was privately retained. I may really have to fight for that tiny, tiny little check. If I didn’t have a healthy private practice, there’s no way I could afford to handle his case even for the whole amount.

Why do it then? Why help out? It’s not like I have any spiritual beliefs that make me believe I’m earning points toward any kind of eternal reward, and even if I did, moving some guy’s arraignment a couple days surely wouldn’t mean much of anything in the grand scheme of things. I didn’t cure cancer, I filed one little motion. I didn’t learn anything new by doing what I did. I didn’t refine some skill or even make a new connection, and if I wasn’t writing about it, the whole scenario would be forever out of sight and out of mind. I just helped a nice lady and her son, two people who may never believe I’m actually a licensed attorney. Because I might get paid, I can’t even call it pro bono.

I’m left with nothing more than a little bit of satisfaction knowing that I did a good deed that I didn’t have to do. I picked this job because the system is cold and cruel and I believe the people caught up in it deserve to have someone fight for them. I should act accordingly, and not only when there’s some underlying selfish reason for doing it. It’s easy to persuade myself writing this after the fact, but it’s harder to have that perspective when you’re actually doing thankless work.

In the end, that’s why situations like this make me admire the public defenders out there. I just get a little taste of what many of them have to endure day in and day out. I deal with it once in a great while and wonder why I bother doing good deeds in the first place. I have nothing but respect for the ones who not only do it, but do it right. It really is an inspiration.

He pieces together very different types of work to make ends meet, and it works very well for him. It keeps things interesting, and he can make his own schedule. Things can get hectic, but things can also be very calm. His work life has obvious goal posts. The next booking or the next concert signifies a clear stop to a given task. He can tie up loose ends before beginning a new project.

Although I have one very clearly delineated job, to some extent, I too piece together a living getting different types of work from different places. All of my clients need representation in criminal cases, but their cases and backgrounds are very different. Like with my friend, that keeps me interested. Unlike my friend, however, things are rarely ever calm for me. My career often feels like a power-walk through a dense and endless forest of goal posts. There’s a point where there are so many of them that they lose their significance.

I’ve been thinking about that conversation quite a bit this week. I have a number of big trials on the horizon and have been preparing extensively, filing pleadings and conducting interviews. Mid-week, a prosecutor decided to dismiss a felony case because of a motion to suppress I filed. That was certainly cause for celebration, but there just wasn’t any time to celebrate. I have more motions to write. I have trials coming up. When those are done, there will be even more motions to write and more trials to do. It’s a good thing I like the work.

The overlap of tasks is a necessary byproduct of business being good. If I didn’t have some overlap, I probably wouldn’t be making any money. From what I can tell, even if I chose just two cases in my caseload and dropped everything else, I’d probably still have the same problem. It’s actually a lack of a problem from a business standpoint, and I’m certainly not complaining. The work never ends. There’s always something. That’s why the lights stay on.

The work also doesn’t yield itself to neat prioritizing. I had a plan for yesterday. I had all of the things I needed to do organized and ready to do, but things didn’t go according to plan. I knew they wouldn’t because they never do.

Things that aren’t even on my radar always pop up and take precedent. I end up having to file an emergency something or call an angry someone. A well-planned day falls apart as I work hard to put out fires and reorganize. As is always the case, I found myself ending yesterday just like I’ll probably find myself ending every day next week. I have a well-thought-out strategy for Monday I’ll never actually use.

Like I said before, I’m glad I like the work. It’s challenging, interesting, and ultimately fulfilling. It isn’t something I can tie up into a neat package. I’m not complaining, but I’m also not denying that I’m often envious of people going through life without the loose ends. Some days, it feels like that’s all I have.

The show was Harry’s Law. The entire thing was terrible, but one part went beyond normal bad TV. The part that transcended the average prime time schlock in awfulness, unfortunately, was the primary storyline itself. The main character, a lawyer, represented a client in an drug case with no defense. In terribly-written courtroom scenes that could be remarketed as a primer on how to get a judicial bar complaint, the main character argued nullification to the jury. The jury rejected it, perhaps the only realistic part of the show, but in the end, the judge suspended the prison sentence. It ended with the main character saying something to the effect of, “we only had to convince one, and it turned out the one we convinced was the judge.” I may have thrown up a little in my mouth.

I’m embarrassed I suffered through the whole show, but I’m also angry it ever got made. Its general terribleness aside, it sends the worst possible message to the public. Its message is far more harmful than the typical good-versus-evil, prosecution-versus-defense message sent by similar shows. Showing the system from the perspective of the defense lawyer and humanizing the people we represent is good. Making it look like everything is okay and telling the public things turn out right in the end is most certainly not good. It isn’t just bad TV; it’s probably representative of a big part of the reason why people in this country couldn’t care less about the injustice of mandatory sentencing provisions and other unfair features of our criminal justice system. They don’t know it exists.

In the real world, a defense might be tailored to encourage jurors to nullify, but the blatant presentation of a nullification defense is a surefire way to violate a slew of ethics rules. Telling the jury about the punishment, which the lady in the show did over and over again, is expressly prohibited. The jurors don’t get to know what they’re actually doing to the poor souls whom they judge. With blinders on, they decide if certain elements have been proven. To them, it at all times remains unknown whether their fact decision merely puts another man on probation, or if it makes them killers handing down a sentence of death by prison.

The main character’s tirades about fairness and justice would not only invite discipline from the judge and perhaps the bar, but would likely be precluded as irrelevant before the commentary even got off the ground. The jury considers the facts. The law isn’t on trial, the defendant is. Fairness and justice have absolutely no place before a jury. Did the defendant possess drugs? Look no further.

When the blind jury hands down its verdict, it doesn’t go to a judge who can disregard the sentencing laws and grant probation. Judges can see what’s going on, but they are largely powerless. With only that power to see and enough discretion to add or subtract a few years here and there, if at all, they are not as limited as a jury. They’re one-eyed men presiding over a trial whose outcome is determined by a jury of the blind. Their power goes no further than the numerous boundaries they must obey, boundaries set by people with little if any familiarity with the system and whose only qualification is having won a popularity contest.

Talk to a defense lawyer who’s been around for a little while, and you’ll hear stories about clients trusting God or fairness or justice all the way to a life sentence for a nonviolent offense. “I can’t go away for that, God wouldn’t let it happen.” “I have faith,” they say. People have what seems to be an infinite capacity for maintaining a state of denial faith. I know one lawyer who, when confronted with the old God-wouldn’t-do-this-to-me argument, responds with this: God sacrificed his own son to help the people of the world, so why wouldn’t He sacrifice you to teach people not to take bad cases to trial?

Except in those extraordinarily rare cases where subtle nullification works and the defendant walks, there’s no happy ending to a case like the one portrayed in the show. A wise and caring jurist doesn’t make right every wrong from a bench far above the fray. In the real world, the jury decides if the shoe fits and the judge does what the law requires the judge must do. A person anguishes behind bars as everyone else returns to life exactly like it was for them before.

I can only hope that everyone else found the show as worthless as I did. Even better, perhaps the public will assume that the show isn’t just bad, but also inaccurate. Maybe they’ll see our system needs to change. The worst thing that could happen would be if people saw it, believed its outcome was possible, and remained content in their lives thinking the system can get it right.

In Arizona state courts, far more so than in federal court, the disclosure rules are quite extensive. The state must comply with all kinds of requirements as the case proceeds. At the arraignment, it must turn over all law enforcement reports as well as the names and addresses of experts and the results of completed physical examinations, scientific tests, experiments, or comparisons. Within 30 days after that, the state must provide the defense with pretty much every piece of information or evidence it would need to assess the case. Other less-important disclosure deadlines continue to occur more or less right up to trial, but the important stuff comes out early in the process. There are even rules providing for sanctions, though the sanctions, like preclusion, are used less frequently by courts than they should be. There’s plenty to complain about with Arizona’s system, but I must admit the discovery rules aren’t bad.

The rules, however, don’t just apply to the state. There’s a whole list of things a defendant must do upon the state’s request. The defense has its own primary disclosure to make, more or less a mirror of the state’s primary disclosure, and it’s due 10 days after the state’s disclosure or 40 days after arraignment, whichever comes first. By that deadline, the defense must provide its notice of defenses in writing, specifying all defenses the defendant intends to present at trial.

Your disclosure statement probably says you reserve the right to supplement any part of your disclosure up to and including the day of trial, but if you spring an alibi defense and accompanying witness list on the state on the eve of trial, you’re probably going to have a problem. You might end up a test case for preclusion, or more likely, you’ll end up looking at a bar complaint.

Everyone knows our clients sometimes love eleventh-hour surprise witnesses and mad scrambles before trial to gather new evidence. The system will generally admonish them for a little trickery, but not much more. When the lawyer sits on the information and fails to disclose it for no reason other than to avoid tipping his or her hand, the system isn’t nearly as kind. There will be repercussions.

Knowing just how much and when to disclose is an important part of a criminal defense lawyer’s role. It must happen within the framework of the rules, however. No matter how exciting it might be if it was, this isn’t TV drama. The Arizona criminal justice system is not brought to you by Dick Wolf. I don’t have to spoon feed my defense to the state or give the prosecutor a written draft of my intended opening statement at trial, but I can’t engage in dramatic trickery when it comes to the content of the defense.

If more people understood that, I think I’d hear a lot less about the importance of not tipping our hand.