Someone recently sent me an email complaining about the math. He (or she, possibly, as the email address was quite androgynous) apparently had a brilliant comment but couldn’t get past the equation. He sent an email requesting that the administrator post the comment for him because he was vexed by the difficult calculations necessary to offer his two cents. I refused to do it.

How good a comment could it be, after all, if the author struggled to complete some basic arithmetic? He didn’t even think to Google the answer. I told him to give it his best shot and never heard from him again.

I think there’s a distinct possibility someone just sent the email to be funny. If so, mission accomplished. If not, remind me to send my web guy a thank you letter.

The notices themselves contain a lot of boilerplate language. Writing a disclosure notice from the ground up would waste time. Plus, things like diagrams of the scene and maps of the area aren’t normally the first thing a lawyer thinks about when mounting a defense, and it’s good to put the state on notice of those potential discovery items early to avoid an irritating objections later on in the process.

There are a few different approaches to drafting what’s usually entitled “Defendant’s Rule 15.2 Disclosure Notice.” One is to print a completely boilerplate pleading, check the applicable defenses, and file it. The better way is to look over the standard pleading and, with a good understanding of the case, supplement it with language that will encompass every conceivable thing that needs to be disclosed at that point in that particular case. It doesn’t take very long, but it’s really worth it for that one-in-a-million time when the prosecutor skims the notice and later objects to something it contains on grounds involving lack of disclosure. It makes the prosecutor look spectacularly stupid.

Prosecutors almost never read their own disclosure notices either. It’s something their paralegals prepare and that they only think about when it becomes an issue. Some defense attorneys do the same thing. The parties can get away with generalized, sloppy notices, and they often do. Carefully composing a notice can set a defense lawyer apart. Sometimes, out-lazying the lazy prosecutor can set a defense lawyer apart too.

There’s one defense lawyer who had some company print up triplicate carbon copy disclosure notices. It’s amazing. He rolls into court, late, of course, and picks up the calendar. He pulls out his stack of notices and fills in the names and case numbers of his clients, checks the defenses on the spot, and calls the cases. The judges ask him if he’s filed his “15.2,” and he says he has it with him. He dramatically pulls off the top sheet and asks to approach and deliver it to the court before handing the second copy to the state. He keeps the third for himself.

The if-you-can’t-beat-em-then-join-em mentality is remarkable. It’s also funny. If you aren’t a client. And if you don’t really care about the quality of representation people are getting. The McJustice feel of the system in general is bad enough, but it’s that much worse when a one-man firm uses a choose-your-own-adventure approach to criminal defense. How many clients does someone need before the printing expense of carbon copies becomes economically sensible? Probably a lot.

His approach serves as a litmus test for other defense lawyers. The ones who think “hmm, that’s a good idea” should probably reduce their caseload. The ones who think “man do I need to reduce my caseload; I can’t believe I think that would be helpful” will hopefully follow through with it. Follow through with reducing their caseload, I mean. The ones who think “holy shit, this place is going to hell in a handbag” are the ones to whom I refer cases.

In all fairness, most first-pretrial minute entries say “Defendant has not complied with Rule 15.2. Defendant’s Notice shall be filed by such-and-such-a-date.” I guess the carbon copy guy may be ahead of the curve. Sadly, most pretrial minute entries also reflect that no substantive motions are planned and no interviews have been conducted.

A justice system where defenses are kept warm under heat lamps isn’t so just, but I suppose it’s better than starving. What a depressing thought.

Events bring out the young lawyers with no jobs, wandering around like zombies clutching stacks of business cards with “Esq.” after their names but no firm name or physical address anywhere to be found. Some only list a cell phone with an Illinois area code and a Gmail or Yahoo email address consisting of a cutesy name followed by a few odd digits. As smart as some of them seem, I can’t bring myself to refer a potential client to Jim from Joliet who goes by “puppylover69″ and practices out of a post office box. I try to buy them drinks instead; they deserve a cold one.

The events also bring out the newly-minted small firm associates. Some of them are models for success, but more of them are there because they aren’t yet earning their keep. Their bosses send them out hoping they’ll make connections and snare a few small referrals here and there. They usually aren’t quite sure about what type of law they practice. They try to feel out what the solos are making and figure out how much vacation time other young associates get. It isn’t encouraging.

Perhaps the most fascinating lawyer of all at these functions is the big firm associate. Like any type of lawyer, there are amazingly talented ones as well as those who make me concerned about the future of the profession. The latter are far more interesting. Some of them are still fixated on law school. Despite all their money (I assume) and support staff (I assume) and mahogany-scented homes filled with leather-bound books (I assume), they seem to have peaked before they ever met a client. They talk about their law school grades like Al Bundy talks about the touchdowns he scored during the glory days of high school football.

In high school, I remember the people who were at their peak. I remember the pretty girls who never got any prettier, and the athletic guys whose dreams of a professional sports career turned out to be nothing more than dreams. I’m confident that the ones who made it big don’t think about high school anymore, and so it goes with the top of any law school class. There are ones who have gone on to great things. There are ones who still tell you about their grades.

Law school isn’t trade school. Maybe it should be, but it isn’t. It also isn’t a vacuum. I’m happy about that. The important parts of the professional life of a lawyer, a life centered around representing people or people’s ideas or institutions comprised of people, are the parts that occur after the lawyer starts lawyering. That much may seem obvious, but like many obvious things, it’s only that way when you have a certain perspective. Epic tales about all-night cram sessions to ascend into the elite top 7.6% of a school ranked in the top 37.5% just aren’t that interesting to me. They are to some. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

What I take from many networking events, and from grade-obsessed people in general, are a reinvigorated outlook and a little bit of resolve. It’s the idea that what I’m doing now should be the most important thing I’ve done. It’s resolving that I won’t define myself based on something I did or didn’t do in training school or at any other point in my past, but that I’m defining myself by the work I’m doing right now.

I’m not hanging around with ex-presidents. I’m mostly meeting people my age or younger. If they’re already coming down from the peak, it tells me they haven’t climbed much of a mountain. People who are eating free hors d’oeuvres and hobnobbing with the likes of me should be people whose best is yet to come. Constantly reminding myself that’s what should ring true for me as well is the best thing I can do to ensure my clients now are as well-served as the ones I’ve done right in the past.

Luckily, the first rule doesn’t apply to state grand juries generally, just to specific grand juries. I can’t tell you anything about any of the poor folks currently being judged in their absence by a group of randomly selected residents in secret proceedings led by an agent of the state, but I can at least tell you a little something about the process in general.

As you can probably guess from the first rule, grand jury proceedings are held in secret. In Arizona, it’s a crime to disclose the fact that an indictment has been found or filed before the accused person is in custody or has been served with a summons. It’s also a crime to disclose the nature or substance of any grand jury testimony or any decision, result or other matter attending a grand jury proceeding. Arizona isn’t alone, and it may not even be especially secretive.

Here, everyone tiptoes around the grand jury. Its secrecy leads grown-up lawyers to allude to a “special place” where cases might be. We all know the state is seeking an indictment, but we don’t dare divulge any of the nasty details.

Defense lawyers tell their clients the state is doing something they can’t talk about but that we’ll write a letter explaining everything to the indictment-hungry prosecutor and hope he reads it to some mysterious people in secret. The only solace is that we can tell our clients we’ll get more information when they’re in jail or they receive a summons, but we don’t know which one it’ll be and would be committing a crime if we told them anyway. Comforting, huh?

The whole things strikes me as profoundly unfair. In one of my first appointed cases, I was advisory counsel for an elderly gentleman who filed a number of pro se motions arguing the indictment, which the state obtained against him in secret grand jury proceedings, was fundamentally unfair for that reason and therefore violated due process. The judge and prosecutor were more amused than anything, snickering about how silly he must be to not realize that all grand jury proceedings occur in secret.

I thought my client was onto something. It is fundamentally unfair that the opposing party, the party with all the power in the world and far better access to the courts and everything else in the criminal justice system, gets to go behind a defendant’s back and rubber-stamp the charges.

And what a rubber stamp it is! You simply can’t challenge the sufficiency of the evidence. Even if they indict your client without any evidence on a major element of the charges, you can’t say the presentation was insufficient. You have to frame it under the theory that your client was denied a substantial procedural right.

I remember at one point learning about the history of grand juries in this country. As I understand it, in the beginning, anyone could bring a case before them. It certainly wasn’t some secret group to whom only the state had access. It was a group of ordinary people tasked with deciding if there was enough evidence for the complaining party to proceed with a case. It seems like a great idea, almost democracy at its best. If every case started with a defense lawyer helping to present the full picture to a group of impartial citizens, there’d be a lot fewer cases.

As it currently works, the grand jury is little more an effective way to keep important information away from the defense during the early stages of a case. Grand juries indict almost every person almost every time. People tell me there are instances where they’ve indicted without having been given a single shred of evidence on substantive elements of the charges or without having been told the date and place where it occurred or even the defendant’s name. Is it any surprise that people who only see prosecutors seeking indictments and cops testifying about why to indict tend to do what the prosecutors and cops want them to do?

At some point, grand juries may have served as a check on the state’s ability to bring charges. Now, it’s one of their greatest weapons. It’s a little extra confirmation for my belief that we aren’t really a free, open society at all. It’s a symbol of the state’s incredible power and its ability to turn anything and everything it touches into a weapon against its citizens, even those things intended to protect them.

It’s fitting how it’s evolved and that it’s done in secret, as the first rule of ever-increasing government power and abuse is that you don’t talk about ever-increasing government power and abuse.

Let’s say, for example, that you’re a criminal defense lawyer and you want to know the effect of a certain type of conviction on a client’s driver’s license. Specifically, you’re trying to figure out the MVD consequences of a conviction for driving in violation of a license restriction, A.R.S. 28-3480. I am personally quite familiar with the charge, though I didn’t have to worry about the consequences of a conviction because the case was obviously ridiculous and the prosecutor dismissed it. Sadly, everyone isn’t charged in a jurisdiction where prosecutors care about doing what’s right. Some people are cited in Scottsdale, after all, and it’s important to be able to tell a client what’s going to happen to his or her license. What do you do then?

Sometimes, you can figure out what’s going to happen by looking through the Arizona Revised Statutes or Arizona Administrative Code. More often than not, you won’t find any answers there. The Arizona Driver License Manual and MVD and Courts Training Manual don’t help most of the time either. When you can’t figure it out on your own, your best bet is to call the MVD. That’s probably what you’ll need to do for a violation of A.R.S. 28-3480, though you may be disappointed by the amount of help they’re able to provide.

To its credit, the MVD has several employees who are willing assist attorneys in just such a situation. They’re actually quite friendly and eager to help, obviously a great alternative to spending hours on hold after calling the main MVD number. Unless you want to satisfy some kind of sick longing for bad muzak, calling the main MVD number is rarely advisable.

If the helpful MVD liaisons were in charge, everything would probably be simple. No one would have to speculate about whether there are going to be serious consequences to a person’s license after a conviction for driving in violation of a restriction. They’d be able to quickly and easily tell a defense lawyer just what happens when a person is convicted of A.R.S. 28-3480. Unfortunately, they aren’t in charge. In reality, the MVD’s actions in response to certain convictions appear to be determined in one of two ways.

First, I suspect there may be a strange, hermit-like wizard lurking somewhere beneath MVD headquarters. When a court reports a conviction, it is delivered to him by a blindfolded MVD courier, and the wizard secretively decides the driver’s fate somewhere deep inside his lair. After the wizard has made up his mind, he sends up colored smoke to signify his decision. MVD employees carefully watch for the smoke, and when they see it, they immediately send out a letter telling the driver what’s going to happen to his license. White smoke? No action. Blue smoke? A one-year continued restriction.

If there isn’t an MVD wizard, the most plausible alternative is that the MVD has Hal 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey stashed away someplace. When a conviction comes in, it goes directly to Hal and he decides accordingly. It’s far too complex a decision for a human to understand, so the MVD leaves Hal to decide based on some unknown evil super computer methodology and simply reports the outcome to the driver. Of course, there’s also the distinct third possibility that the Family Guy Idea Ball Manatees are currently on loan to the MVD, but that just seems ridiculous.

My theories about the inner workings of the MVD are based on highly competent MVD employees’ inability to say with any certainty just what will happen to someone convicted of A.R.S. 28-3480. After extensive research and several calls, all I knew for sure was that the court should report the conviction to the MVD. I was also able to determine relatively early on in the process that, if the driver has not yet obtained a new license without the restriction and goes and gets such a new license after the MVD has already acted on the previous violation of the restriction, the MVD will definitely not apply any restriction triggered by a previous violation of the same restriction to the new, unrestricted license. If the conviction for the violation of the restriction occurs after the driver has gotten the new license, however, things become awfully confusing. Apparently, nobody knew for sure what would actually happen.

For over a week, the best answer I got from the MVD was that “the system may spit out a letter imposing an additional year of the restriction.” No one could tell me what rule required a continued restriction in the first place. No one could tell me why it would have to last a full year either. They couldn’t point to any specific governing provision or even any list of factors they consider. Most amazingly, no one could tell me who actually decides what happens. Is it any surprise I’m speculating about wizards and manatees?

How does the MVD “spit out” a letter? Does a computer write it? Does a person? When they say “they,” who do they mean? Aren’t they “they”? The questions for the MVD liaisons are endless, but they didn’t get me anywhere. The liaisons are just unusually nice people trying to do their job. They aren’t the ones who created this beast of a division inside a bigger beast of a department inside our enormous state government. They aren’t in charge of anything.

In the end, I finally got a voicemail from one liaison saying, “don’t worry about the additional restriction, your client won’t be getting a letter.” I think he’s right. I couldn’t find any authority for the MVD to continue the restriction, and I’ve never gotten more than anecdotal evidence that it’s happened from the defense lawyers who claim it will.

As much as I appreciate the fact the liaison actually followed through with what he said he would do, I’m worried that a government agency could be so big and powerful and opaque and that people fairly high up in the system wouldn’t even know how it works. The liaison who gave me an answer did eventually figure it out, but I was lucky he bothered. I was lucky to have his number in the first place. Most people are stuck guessing after listening to hours of muzak and being treated like crap by a customer service representative.

Imagine you’re convicted of driving in violation of a 60-day restriction requiring you only drive to or from work or school after the 60 days are over and you’ve already gotten your new, unrestricted license. How comforting is it to only know that the MVD may send you a letter telling you the restriction that’s already been lifted is back in place and will last an entire year? The fact that experts at the MVD couldn’t initially say for sure what would happen or even give me some general guidelines about what to expect is pretty amazing. Unfortunately, when it comes to licensing agencies, it’s also pretty common.

If you’re charged with regular DUI and your blood alcohol falls in the uppermost part of the range, they offer you a plea to 3 days of jail. You’d get 1 day losing at trial. When they aren’t anti-negotiating, they typically offer you the same thing you’d get at trial. Across the board, it’s one the most wasteful, absurd things I see in any Arizona court. When the court gives you notice of what they call a “trial readiness conference,” it says trial will be set within 45 days. They’re setting trials in late February and March right now. I doubt anyone wonders why the city’s courts are so clogged.

I spent most of the afternoon last Thursday in a motion hearing there. It’s a no-real-plea case, and I filed three motions to suppress. The prosecutor was irritated with me, almost as if he didn’t realize that it was his own office’s fault for not making a meaningful offer. However, his irritation was nothing compared to the officer’s. That poor officer couldn’t have made it clearer that he didn’t want to be there, and I don’t know who irritated him more, me or the prosecutor.

I honestly felt bad for the cop. He could be out patrolling the streets. He could also be getting some shuteye or mowing the lawn or spending some time with family. Instead, he’s spending an afternoon in a courtroom. He’ll spend more time there when the next round of motions comes along. He’ll devote yet more time in the future to depositions and complying with new discovery requests. He’ll kill a whole day or two in court when trial rolls around.

I felt even worse for the poor people of Scottsdale. That cop won’t be doing anything useful for them during all those hours he ends up spending on the case. It’s all because someone in the prosecutor’s office thought it would be a good idea to institute a ridiculously wasteful tough-on-crime policy that’s more tough-on-logic than anything else. If the zealots at MADD are right and enforcement is the key to stopping drunk-driving, I wouldn’t be surprised if Scottsdale soon becomes the DUI capital of the world. All of their DUI cops are going to be sitting in court because mayhem on the streets is apparently not too high a price to pay to avoid shaving off a little time from DUI defendants’ sentences.

It should go without saying that I don’t feel bad enough about any of this to do one iota less of work on any of my cases there. The constitution sets a high bar if we insist on it. All the government waste in the world is justified in my mind if that’s what it takes for one defendant to get his fair shake. Of course, my interests are my clients’ interests. The people who create wasteful policies have different responsibilities. They should be thinking about justice. They should be thinking about the broader consequences of their actions.

The objective of the representation in a case with no plea is still to do the best I can for my client. I have to make the system do its job, and the wheels of justice turn slowly. My clients and I win little by little with each passing moment the state has to devote to the case. Every second we spend means that some issue is being litigated and preserved. Holding the state to its burden is time-consuming. It should be. The questions the prosecutor finds objectionable and the issues that make the prosecutor roll his eyes are each little victories simply by virtue of the fact we are arguing them. The state never seems to get that. They never ask themselves if a Pyrrhic victory is really a victory at all if the person they’re fighting doesn’t suffer anything because of the loss.

There are plenty of bright people working at the City of Scottsdale. They have some great prosecutors, but sadly, they don’t seem to be the one crafting the policies. Whoever is in charge doesn’t have any clue what they’re doing, and the end result is an epic disaster where wasting resources and keeping police from policing are the norm. If more residents knew how their tax dollars were being wasted to make them all a little less safe, there’d probably be an occupy movement at the city attorney already. Maybe people will wake up sooner or later. Better yet, maybe the city will rethink its policies.

People hate lawyers because they think lawyers are greedy. They think we’re all a bunch of privileged little brats who’ve lived our entire lives in a world of endless opportunity. They think we went to private schools and had tutors. They think we entered a mysterious old money system at an early age and got fed straight from prep school into colleges adorned in ivy. They think that, after we finished our useless undergraduate degrees, we weren’t equipped to do anything capable of supporting our lavish lifestyle, the only one we knew, so mommy and daddy funneled us right into another ivy-covered institution for law school.

In short, people think lawyers have never had to sit in a shitty apartment with a bunch of other poor kids wondering how the hell they were going to scrape together rent. They think we’re all a bunch of rich, entitled punks who are out of touch with the rest of the country. Publicly whining about bonuses in a recession isn’t doing much to dispel that notion.

I have nothing against bonuses. People who do good work and earn money should be rewarded. Bonuses for lawyers, however, don’t seem quite the same as bonuses for most other people. The nature of our job, specifically the fact that we earn our keep by representing clients, separates us from many other fields. We are paid by people and entities to do work for them. When we celebrate big bonuses and lament those that seem inadequate, we are in essence celebrating the money we’ve taken from people who trust us. Those people are probably struggling or at least price-conscious in this economy, and they’re paying our rate because we told them it’s our rate. Nobody is so stupid to believe that you can’t practice law without a marble foyer on the top floor and a library of leather bound books. Some people like to know they’re hiring an overpriced lawyer, but more people want to know they aren’t being overcharged.

If I owned an investment firm and made a fortune investing wisely for my clients, I doubt any of my clients would hold a big bonus against me. I get rich to my client’s benefit. It’s similar if I own a company that makes a product. In that case, I get rich because lots of people decide my product is worth buying. They want my product, I want their money. There’s nothing strange about celebrating the money people have given to me because I used it to make more money for them or because I made the best version of something they wanted and were going to buy anyway. There is something different about celebrating profit with huge bonuses to associates whose primary contribution is padding the bill with a bunch of 0.2-hour emails and useless memos about obscure bullshit. Lawyers and clients may get rich together, but not always. When they don’t, the lawyer is the one who still ends up with a payout.

My beef with bonuses really comes from the lack of any real value I see in a lot of what these big firms do. If I’m wrong, let me know, but what I see from Biglaw is a lot of nickle-and-diming institutional clients. They employ armies of people vetted in the hallowed halls of a select few institutions and use those automatons to squeeze every little penny out of the companies that hire them. If I owned a company that was struggling through a recession and paying Biglaw to help me out in a lawsuit, I’d be pretty pissed seeing my money used to give a bunch of twenty-something associates several thousand dollar bonuses that they’ll probably blow on coke and hookers and iPhones. I’d wonder about the value I’m getting from that firm. I’d wonder if they couldn’t have knocked down the hourly rate a little. I’d start looking elsewhere if I saw their young associates publicly bitching that they didn’t get a big enough chunk of my hard-earned money for their essentially worthless contribution to something I didn’t want to pay for in the first place.

The bonus obsession doesn’t just reinforce the negative stereotypes most people have about lawyers. It also highlights the fact Biglaw is probably a broken business model. People in general aren’t so stupid that they’ll never figure out Biglaw as it is right now just isn’t worth it, are they? If it does happen and all the fees dry up, it’ll be interesting to see where the associates who used to whine about bonuses go to complain about unemployment. I wonder how all this bonus talk will look to them then.

Curious, I looked up the case and read the facts. An officer was patrolling the three lanes of westbound traffic on I-10 in Tucson when he saw a pickup truck in the far-left lane going under the 65 mile-per-hour speed limit. The officer noticed other cars were slowing behind the black pickup and passing it in the center lane. When the speed limit increased to 75 miles per hour, the officer paced the truck, which stayed in the far left lane going 60 to 65 miles per hour. The officer gave the truck plenty of opportunity to move into the right-hand lane, but vehicles continued to pass it on the right. Two cars had to slow behind the truck. The officer eventually initiated a traffic stop and saw five undocumented immigrants hiding in the back seat.

The opinion is about whether the officer had reasonable suspicion for the stop, and the magistrate recommends the court find he did. Honestly, though, that isn’t what matters to me. This is the type of case I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.

I know plenty of defense lawyers who won’t represent defendants in certain types of cases because they find the subject matter disturbing. They’re usually bothered by sex crimes or crimes against children, and they don’t take those cases because they can’t set aside their personal feelings and properly represent the client. For me, this is that type of case. It strikes far too close to home for me to look at the facts and fully consider the legal issues. Emotions get in the way. I just couldn’t represent the driver, and it isn’t because I care about whether he was smuggling humans or not. The problem is that the evidence suggests he was going under the speed limit in the left lane.

Here in Arizona, we’re all about highways. We have high speed limits, though not quite high enough, and lots of lanes, though still far fewer than we need. Highways connect everything. It’s a big state, and the only way most people get from one point to another is by driving. I occasionally feel like I’m more of a driver than a lawyer. It’s rare for me to travel less than 250 miles in a week. Often, I have to drive two or three times that much.

Nothing ruins a pleasant drive through the desert quite like some idiot in a beat-up truck going under the speed limit in the left lane. I’ve lost countless hours of productivity, perhaps days of my life if you add it all up, to people going way too slow in the left lane. As much as the criminal defense lawyer in me wants to see a motion to suppress granted, the driver in me wants to see someone punished for driving too slow in the passing lane. In this instance, the driver in me wins.

I find the opinion disturbing because of the callousness with which the court addresses the defendant’s abominable driving. This is no mere swerve over a marked line. This isn’t extreme speeding or an expired tag. Those things don’t really affect anyone. This moron had three beautiful, wide, newly-paved lanes in which to travel. He was on the fourth-longest highway in the country in a major metropolitan area. The monumental stupidity of his decision to pick the left-most lane in which to travel under the speed limit defies belief. Whatever punishment he gets for smuggling isn’t nearly enough to provide retributive justice for the heinous and unforgivable crime of going too slow in the far left lane.

You wouldn’t see a news article saying “Man stopped fleeing scene after murdering family, officer finds he is unable to provide proof of insurance.” Why do we care about a bunch of guys hunkered down in the backseat catching a ride to Phoenix? The defendant could’ve had a semi-trailer full of people and I wouldn’t care. They could be sitting on bales of marijuana carrying fully-automatic assault rifles. I wouldn’t bat an eyelash. Who cares? Not me, that’s for sure.

What has this world come to when we think that a victimless crime like smuggling humans is the greater harm based on those facts? How twisted must our priorities be for us to think that a dangerously slow driver in the left lane should be punished not for leaving numerous innocent and utterly helpless motorist-victims in his slow wake, but rather for being found to have some buddies in the backseat when he’s stopped?

We need to wake up. We’ve really lost sight of what matters. For shame.

I noticed most members of the panel drew no distinction between law enforcement experience and military service. When the judge asked the jurors if they or any close friends or family had any law enforcement experience, most people who answered in the affirmative did so because they had friends or family in the armed forces.

My impression was that they viewed the two as being the same because they view both soldiers and cops as protectors. I found the lack of distinction troubling.

Maybe it’s the libertarian in me, but I’m bothered by the increasing police militarization in this country. Every day, I read The Agitator. Almost every week, I read something there that makes me depressed about police militarization and the government’s war against its citizens.

The officers I encounter in my job look more and more militarized with each passing year. The evolution has been from simple uniformed public servant to basic tactical gear to full-on SWAT to military combat uniforms. Now, everyone who gets to wear a gun or even a taser looks to me like he or she is ready for battle. Maricopa County court security now wears something that looks more fitting for a person guarding Fort Knox than someone watching beltless lawyers amble through an overly sensitive metal detector.

It feels like we’re being groomed. The more the police look like soldiers, the more accustomed we’ll be to policing methods better suited to the battlefield. After we’ve gotten used to the militarized policing of ordinary citizens by police officers, how hard will it be to just cross the blurred line and use the military? Talking with the jury panel, I gathered it wouldn’t be very hard at all.

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.