“Sometimes I think that sanity is just a passing fad. A man could go quite mad.”

I have an admission.  I have had a bit of a crush lately.  You might have noticed it if you have been a loyal reader and have been paying attention to my trivialities.  No, I am not talking about something shallow like the hot new star or a face in a magazine.  I am talking about a crush on someone’s abilities, or shall I say it more clearly, someone’s (in the past) abilities.

I am speaking of Charles Dickens.  In the past year I would say that I have read more Charles Dickens than any other author.  Now, that may not be saying a lot since I read so many different writers, but compared with the aversion I felt to the man’s works starting in junior high school, I would say it is quite a thing to admit.  And now when I visit the bookstore, I am just as likely to peruse “The Pickwick Papers” or “David Copperfield” as I am to check out the new releases and the bestsellers.

And here is the basis for the crush:  the man had a way with words.  His style is one which is both challenging and endearing.  Believe me, it is not something you can take on an airplane and expect to breeze through over a few hours; you definitely have to work at it.  The language is cryptic and challenging, but if you work through it you feel as if you are being let into the man’s sense of humor.  He writes as if he is telling a story to his friends, a story that he personally observed while sitting in a chair in the corner, with the actors unaware.

So you can understand my concern as I began his most recent work (I say it that way because it was his last book, thus it is by nature his “most recent.”)  “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”  Heard of it?  You probably have, simply because of its novelty– it wasn’t finished; Dickens died before it was completed.  This was back in a time when books were serialized, with chapters coming out periodically.  So the book was being written virtually at the same time as the public was reading it.  Thus, when we say the book wasn’t finished, it truly was not finished.  It wasn’t sitting on an editor’s desk when the man died; the last words in the book are the last words written.

Now it would be forgivable for any other book to end in the middle with the author’s death.  Sure, we may never know if the guillotine came down on Sidney Carton’s head or whether Rhett and Scarlet got together at the end of the war, and we would be ok with that.  We wouldn’t be happy, but we could make up our own endings and be somewhat satisfied.  But this book was different, nee, it was an abomination.  Who dares to write a mystery and then die without letting us in as to whodunit?  Imagine watching “How I Met Your Mother” and never finding out who the mother was!

Well, scholars and literati have pondered the final work of Mr. Dickens to excess and have come to conclusions that many of the reading public have accepted as logical.  I won’t bore you with the particulars.  But the discussion above if important for one other thing:  do you have any unfinished business?

Look, I am not one to read the last page of a book first to see how it ends, just in case I never get there, but to have written a book and not figured out how it was to end, not sketched it in notes or outlined it on a napkin, sounds unforgivable.

So it made me consider my own affairs.  Do I have any unfinished business?  I could try to plug this into some discussion about the importance of having an estate plan or making sure a buy-sell agreement is in place, because you never know when the end might come and you need to set the gears in place to start moving should an unfortunate demise occur.  But I am not going to do that.  That is too… serious.

Instead, I am just going to take the next few days to think about my unfinished business.  I doubt there will be any races to locate my private articles and manuscripts (of which I have none, by the way), but I want to make sure that when I go, I don’t look back and say, “I wish I had done that…” 

I guess that means live life the fullest, huh?  But what does that mean?  Well, it means, to me, doing things which are entertaining, rewarding, enlightening, and inspiring.  I have my own bag of tricks so I won’t bore you with those.  Just think about it.  Nothing to serious here this week, just something I was thinking about as I was reading.  Of course, when my mind wanders like that I end up missing entire passages and have to re-read them.  But I don’t mind.

But seriously, we all know that Charles Foster Kane’s final word was “Rosebud” (Citizen Kane), so why couldn’t Dickens’ final words have been the identity of Drood’s killer?  Sound too theatrical?

 Rob

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“Jack didn’t know about the order because if Jack did and he didn’t tell us Jack knows he’d be violating about 14 articles of the Code of Ethics.”

Friends:

I hate to do this to you, but I feel it is my duty to inform you of some very concerning and stark revelations.  It will come as a huge shock and one from which I am sure you will not easily recover.  Ok, that being said, here goes:

Lawyers are not trustworthy. 

Whew, I am glad to get that off my chest.  Now wait, before you start in on the claims that I have a bias against some opposing counsel who broke the rules, let me at least say that the statement above is not of my own crafting.  In fact, I would say that the vast majority of attorneys with whom I have dealt have been not only trustworthy and ethical, but dedicated to their clients and focused on providing the best service possible.

No, the characterization of lawyers above comes from none other than the State Bar of California, the governing body for lawyers.  As it says on the State Bar’s website,  “The mission of the State Bar: ‘Preserve and improve our justice system in order to ensure a free and just society under the law.'”

So why is it that I am letting you in on the little known secret that the State Bar thinks its attorneys cannot be believed?  Because the State Bar does not trust its own members.

An attorney’s practice of law is evolving; it is never stagnant.  An attorney must keep learning and adapting to changes in laws, procedures, and disciplines.  To ensure this, the State Bar requires each attorney to complete a minimum of 25 hours of continuing legal education every 3 years.  The education can be in any subject, so long as the three required subjects of substance abuse, elimination of bias and ethics are taken and every third year attorneys have to certify, under penalty of perjury, that they have completed the requisite continuing education hours.

The mandatory hours of education can be met in a number of methods, including self-study and attending programs that present the material.  Going to a program or reading a book on the material can be time consuming and inconvenient.  No doubt the program you want to go to happens to coincide with the due date of a brief, a vacation, or a networking lunch.  So, to make it easier, some of the bar associations sell compact disks which contain all 25 hours of mandatory study (and in the required subjects).

How great is that?  You can complete your continuing education while sitting in your car during rush hour, or at the gym on the treadmill, or sitting on the couch after Thanksgiving faking sleep to avoid cleaning up the dishes.  It is convenient, cost-effective, and done done done.

No its not.  You can still listen to the compact disk in the car during rush hour, just make sure you are in the carpool lane.  And you want to download the disk to your iPod and listen while at the gym?  Make sure your buddy is on the treadmill right next to you with the other ear bud in his ear.  Want to listen after Thanksgiving dinner, better blast it throughout the house.  Why?

Because the State Bar doesn’t trust attorneys!  The State Bar requires the attorney to listen to the compact discs while in the presence of a witness, and the witness has to certify that the attorney listened to the compact disc.  Explain to me how I am supposed to have my 5 year old daughter sign a statement under penalty of perjury that her daddy listened to a compact disc for an hour about preventing sexual harassment in the workplace while under the influence of crystal meth!

Attorneys have always gotten a bad rap; lawyer jokes weren’t just made up, although they may be the product of embellishment along the way.  But when you think of the word “ethics” you think of lawyers, for good or bad.  And unfortunately, the general public likely believes that the balance of good and bad is fairly even.  That is simply not true.  It is always the evil few who bring the rest of the good ones down and create the negative stereotype.

However– what kind of message is being sent to the public when the State Bar of California doesn’t even trust the attorneys.  If a lawyer says he completed the requisite continuing education, then he completed it and that should be good enough.  Why make him or her go through the hassle of finding someone to sit for 25 hours to certify that the continuing education hours were completed? 

If the State Bar wants to promote the ethical strength of the law profession and revitalize it so that it is perceived as that bastion of honesty and dignity, then it needs to practice what it preaches.

Attorneys are by and large ethical and trustworthy.  Take my word for it.

Have a great week.

Rob

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“I must admit I didn’t think much of Andy first time I laid eyes on him; looked like a stiff breeze would blow him over. That was my first impression of the man.”

Friends:

We all have heard the idiom that you never get a second chance to make a first impression.  In fact, entire books have been written about just that philosophy, that so much is learned and decided about a person just from the initial glance at him or her that it is imperative that we always be on our game and conscious of making that great first impression.  I understand it; I just don’t ascribe to it and I challenge society to defy it.

I know, it is hard.  In fact, it can be downright impossible.  With today’s society being so centered on instant-gratification, there is a noticeable lack of patience to discover the real person.  We take on face value who people are and what they are like, because in the time it would take us to delve deeper, we have already moved on to the next big thing.  The internet has trained us to skirt the deeper issues and examine the surface only.  When was the last time you read a full newspaper article?  Don’t we all just go to the web page and read the first few lines?  We don’t have the patience to read deeper, because the internet has re-programmed us into believing that the most important aspects of the story are in the initial paragraph.  Who, what, when, where, why, and how?  Now on to something else.

Which is why this bit of information, which I only just discovered, came as such a shock.  Did you know that in 1938 and 1939 Adolf Hitler was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize?  And that in 1938 he was nominated by a Jewish woman?  I’ll get to the facts of the nominations a little later, but just hearing that bit of information was shocking to me and made me think about first impressions.  This is someone who is well-considered to be one of the most evil and vile people ever to walk the earth.  But on first impression, did he seem to be “peace” loving, such that the highest societal award should be given to him?  Before his war-mongering made him hated, were his leadership and passion worthy of international accolade?

Which is why first impressions to me are, to use a term I first heard from my wife, complete and utter bunk.  Imagine the mistakes that one can make by relying on a first impression.  Consider the great losses that you could experience simply by turning a blind eye once you have made a split-second determination that someone is not worth pursuing. 

Of course, I do understand the flip-side of the equation; that we are all governed by the sands of time and cannot afford to waste such precious time on people who might end up being exactly what we learned from the first impression.  But just having that thought in your head, that your first impression could be wrong, isn’t that enough to at least question whether the first impression can be relied upon?  It doesn’t mean that we have to dispel our first impressions every time, but understanding that they may be wrong… shouldn’t that lead us to at least try to dig deeper?  You never know what gold mine you might find.

So back to the Nobel Peace Prize.  In 1938, Adolf Hitler was nominated by Gertrude Stein, a Jewish author and Nobel Prize winner in her own right.  Her nomination of Hitler was based on her belief that his efforts to drive out the Jews from Germany (at a time when it was believed he simply wanted the Jews displaced and not completely eradicated) were in effort to alleviate the elements that caused struggle and strife in Germany, namely the factors which led to such dissension.

In 1939, the circumstances of the nomination are less distasteful.  Hitler was nominated in that year by a member of the Swedish Parliament to protest the nomination of Great Britain’s Neville Chamberlain for the same prize.  The nomination was retracted a few days later and was not intended to be seriously considered.  Although interestingly enough, Josef Stalin and Benito Mussolini were also nominated for the award.  (As an aside, for nomination, all that is required is that one qualified person make the nomination.  It does not reflect the position of the nominating committee as a whole.)

Nevertheless, the danger of first impressions is evident.  You never know what you might miss… good or bad.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t know where my next client is going to come from… it could come from that guy I just ran into who was having a bad day and didn’t bring his A-game. 

Have a great week.

Rob

www.ahslawyers.com

www.robcohen13.wordpress.com

I left my heart, in San Francisc… ugh

Friends–

 

Attorneys are a weird breed, sometimes having to wear two hats, the hat of the lawyer and the hat of the counselor.  It is a fine line to walk, alternating between advocating and advising, arguing and guiding.  In fact, we as professionals, whatever the industry, have the same struggle.  While we want to act for our clients and adopt their passions to better serve them, we must sometimes step back and “talk them off the ledge,” to counsel them as to the more advisable tactic, whether it be a less aggressive investment strategy or a more cost-effective insurance policy.



And it is a struggle, one that creates a tightrope walk which can easily result in disaster.  Push your client too hard in attempting to guide them on the right path and you risk losing the client; push too softly and you risk being ineffective.



So what makes us as professionals qualified to act as counselors?  It is a level of dispassion, a modicum of rationality that can only be perceived when you are not intimately entwined with the circumstances and the outcome.  Sitting in a mediation and trying to advise a client to take a settlement which is less than what they believe the case is worth requires a separation of emotion from clear thought.  Our clients who are emotionally involved in their case can become unreasonable.  And rational thought is a must if you are going to serve your clients’ needs best.



A lawyer, as a counselor, must be rational.  My friends, I have a confession… sometimes I doubt my ability to be rational.  I can sometimes be totally irrational… it is embarrassing.



Legend has it that a college student taking a U.S. History course to impress a girl once wrote a final exam on the rivalry between the Dodgers and Giants.  Somehow he passed the class and won the girl.  She absolutely had to have been a Dodgers fan.



It is irrational, I know, to hate a team with as much revulsion and disgust as I hold the baseball team that plays in San Francisco and wears that ugly orange color.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate San Francisco.  In fact, it is one of my favorite cities.  Fisherman’s Wharf, Union Square, Ghirardelli Square and Rice a Roni… I love going there, I really do.



But that team needs to be obliterated from the face of the earth.  What did they ever do to you, you may ask?  Shall I mention the Shot Heard Round the World?  Or Joe Morgan?  Or Juan Marichal using a baseball bat to try to attach Sandy Koufax?



Consider this… Jackie Robinson was not just a Dodger.  He was a trailblazer, an activist and a humanitarian.  He has to be tops on many lists of the most influential and well-respected people who ever lived.  And he retired because the Dodgers traded him to the Giants.  He actually refused to play for the Giants and opted to retire instead.  Doesn’t that speak volumes???



So you can imagine my pain, my agony, when the Giants won the World Series this past week.  For me, I don’t want anyone to suffer.  I know what it is like to root for a team which fails to succeed.  For the long-suffering Cubs fans, I empathize and wish them success sometime soon.  But the Giants, it would not have bothered me if they never won another game.



It is irrational and I know it.  These are just baseball players.  They didn’t choose to be on that team, they were signed there or they were drafted there or they were traded there.  They haven’t caused me any personal harm.  I haven’t lost money because of them or suffered the loss of family members.  Whether the Giants win or lose, it won’t affect my family, my kids will still be healthy, and my career will still be what I make of it.

So my feelings and my intensities about the Giants are irrational.  And I wonder if that makes me ineffective as a counselor.  I guess the first step in fixing your problem is identifying that it is a problem.  So for me, step one will be to acknowledge the Giants and their success.  For me to be more effective, I need to turn that page.

So to the Giants, I say CONGRATUL… oh, who the hell do I think I am kidding?

GO DODGERS!  ONLY 110 DAYS UNTIL THE DODGERS 1ST SPRING TRAINING GAME!!!

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“There he stands alone. But in the field, what? Part of a team. Teamwork…”

Friends–

No matter what I do in my life, whether I am an attorney or if I become an astronaut, I will always, for right or wrong, call myself a baseball player.  There is something about the smell of the grass, the feel of the dirt, and the uniform that you share with eight other guys on the field that is irreplaceable.

A few weeks ago we talked about having a good bedside manner.  This past week I saw another aspect of professionalism that awed me.  (Yes, I was awed.) 

  

As some of you know, our initial stay in the hospital for the birth of our daughter was followed up exactly a week later with another stay in the hospital, this time for less joyful reasons.  When you are in the emergency room, the trauma ward, or anyplace else in a hospital, with so many working parts and so many people with large responsibilities, it is impressive, no it is comforting to see perfect teamwork.

  

Like I said, I am a baseball player who learned how to rely on the other players to cover their base, back up the throw, or sacrifice themselves for the good of a team… and I was so impressed by the teamwork in the hospital that it gave me comfort and gave me renewed goals as a business owner.  Being a business owner is more than just delegating or making business decisions.  It is being a part of a team and ensuring that each member is playing their role effectively.

 

Let me give you an example of what I witnessed:  my wife was in the hospital with complications from the pregnancy.  Our stay began in the emergency room which quickly required trauma care when things got out of control.  While there, the senior and junior nurses and doctors all worked efficiently and with a purpose.  They all knew what they were supposed to be doing and how to do it and they acted.  More importantly, they acted without instruction.  They knew what they needed to do or patients suffered.  People they had never met before would suffer and they performed.

 

Then an individual in scrubs took Amy to have tests done- zip zoom, the bed was rolling, the IVs were unhitched, and the monitors were trailing behind.  Without any fanfare, like he has done it a thousand times before.  And more importantly, he made me feel comfortable, telling me everything he was doing, where they were going, and how long they would be.  And he was spot on.

 

Once things calmed down, we were finally moved to a room off of the trauma ward and on an observation deck.  A nurse, a doctor, and an assistant were on the go and ready to move.  IVs unhooked again, monitors attached to the side of the bed, and the bed was rolling.  Through the halls, hitting all of the lights, we were upstairs in no time… and met by the nursing staff upstairs, and they were ready for us.  With little delay, Amy was moved into her new bed, her IVs were re-attached, her monitors turned back on, and even her pillow fluffed.  No one told them what to do, everyone knew their role and everyone was performing.

 

Sitting here now, it is hard to fight back the tears.  My loved one, my wife and the mother of my children, was in poor condition and these mortal humans, these super-humans, these heroes, acted like they have been there before, and acted like they were a team.  I half expected the nurse upstairs and the gentlemen who pushed the bed upstairs to high-five as they walked down the hall.  And you know what, it would have been ok with me.  Everyone smiled, everyone worked, and everyone performed.  Like a finely tuned piano, each note was struck with the right amount of pressure to create the absolute perfect sound.  It was truly music to my ears and I was just trying to stay out of the way.

 

With all of that, I have to commend all of the staff at the hospital.  Their training was impeccable and, more importantly, they understood that they were part of a team, a team which had as its common goal to take care of the patient and be as efficient and competent as possible.  I felt so comforted by this that I knew everything was going to be ok.

 

And it was.

 

As business owners, having a good team, a well-trained team, a team that is pulling in the same direction and working to achieve a common goal, is just as important as the acumen of its individual parts.  In fact, it sometimes can be more important.  Your clients feel more comfortable and will trust you more if they see your team working to its capacity.  It will instill confidence, I guarantee it.

 

For some of us, teamwork is second nature.  For others who have always been self-sufficient… it may be more difficult to understand.  It requires a relinquishment of control and a trust in your fellow team members.  But the rewards are immeasurable. 

 

This week, I am going to try to be a better team player.  And for some of you who fly solo most of the time, if you need me, I will be on your team.  Just put me in the game and rescue me from riding the pine…  I’ll perform.

 

Rob

 

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