First witness to plead the Fifth Amendment before Congress lies moldering in a Tarboro grave

To recall that the first person to invoke the Fifth Amendment privilege as the basis for refusing to respond to questions from Congress was from North Carolina is perhaps not untimely.

Perhaps the fact that he was a leader of the Ku Klux Klan is not irrelevant.

Maybe, knowing that he lies buried in a Tarboro churchyard is of less interest, except to a select few. Carved on his tombstone are the words: “I decline to answer.” He took the Fifth 100 times.

He was a lawyer, a Confederate colonel, a founder of the News and Observer, the North Carolina Secretary of State, a long-time trustee of the University of North Carolina, and the editor of the Colonial Records of North Carolina.

Not long ago his name was removed from a building on the campus of the University of North Carolina.

The Arc of a Professional’s Career

Article by me published this week by ABA Law Practice Today at link. Thanks to Greensboro lawyer and editor Afi Johnson-Parris for inviting me to do it. They chose the picture, not me. The guy in the picture is not me. Dresses better.

Not Fade Away: Can Old Lawyers Age Successfully?

Lawyers, the old man’s disease

Matthew Shardlake, was “the sharpest hunchback in the courts of England” in the 16th Century. That’s how he is accounted by C.J. Sansom.

In Sansom’s Dark Fire, Shardlake speaks of his “ambition to retire from practice, to escape the noisome crowds of London.” And, he says, “in two years’ time, I would be forty, in which year the old man’s disease begins; if business was good enough I might do it then.”

On the other hand, Shardlake’s friend, Guy Malton, the dark-skinned Moorish-Spanish-one-time-Catholic-monk and physician, who escaped to England to become an apothecary in Henry IV’s post-Dissolution England (always one step ahead of the latest sectarian persecution), asked

Yet I wonder if that is the life for you, my friend. Would you not become bored without cases to sharpen your wits on, problems to solve?

Shardlake:

London now, fuller of fanatics and cozeners every year. And my profession has enough of both.

I dream of a quiet life in the country …. Maybe then I will feel like taking up painting again.

Looks like the only thing that has changed from then to now is when “the old man’s disease” begins.

But wait. When Sansom in the 21st Century creates Shardlake of the 16th, who is really speaking of when?

Lawyers, information, intelligence (organic and artificial), which is primary?

I’ve come across three articles today that grapple with artificial intelligence.

One says that automation and artificial intelligence will take over all human jobs within 125 years (half in the next 25 years). Another says, well, OK, but lawyers have at least 7 skills that no machine will ever take. And the third says that all routine lawyer jobs will be taken by the machines, but maybe not the exceptional, non-routine, jobs.

All businesses will be (are) information in some fashion. Virtually all information can be digitized. Ultimately, all that information will be obtained, accessed, and understood by means of automation and artificial intelligence.

Virtually all evidence in virtually all business and commercial cases will be obtained and accessed as it comes into being. Discovery will be completed before there is a complaint.

The role of lawyers will be something new. Or, maybe it’s more accurate to say that the role of lawyers will go back to the origins of the profession.

One of those articles says, “Lawyers Are in the Information Business. Get Over It.”

Maybe instead, information companies are in the law business.

 

The march of 21st Century banking law — hermeneutics exposed

Lalita Clozel at the Wall Street Journal is reporting that:

Fed Vice Chairman for Supervision Randal Quarles said the agency’s policies on bank control have been difficult to parse, except for people “who have spent a long apprenticeship in the subtle hermeneutics of Federal Reserve lore, receiving the wisdom of their elders through oral tradition.“

Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2019, Lalita Clozel, “Fed Moves to Ease Rules for Bank Investors.”

So, the Federal Reserve is promulgating new rules intended to elucidate (and loosen) its bank control policies. And so begins the lustration of yet another once tidy and “pleasantly remunerative” corner of MidLaw’s erstwhile law practice. 

This must be among the final steps in eradicating law practices where obscure practitioners could dispense subtle hermeneutics for a fee. Shame that.

O tempora, o algorismi!

 

Cartoon by P.C. Vey, New Yorker, March 9, 2009

North Carolina lawyer John McMillan

Word has come of the death of North Carolina lawyer John B. McMillan.

John embodied the finest attributes and traditions of North Carolina lawyers. Among those was service to the profession and to the justice system. He combined humility and forcefulness with unique grace – proving indeed that humility and force can be combined gracefully.

Ten years ago, John wrote a very fine article, The Long Road to Founding the North Carolina State Bar. While the subject matter of that article is not directly relevant at this moment, it is a valuable, engaging piece and John’s voice is in it. I commented on the article some time back, and have thought of it since I learned that he has died.

A very, very fine lawyer and man.

Coffee

I’m not addicted to coffee. I never drank it until the Army. You have to drink it there, or at least you used to.

And coffee is a big thing if you are a lawyer.

Then, they started saying that coffee is bad for you. Blood pressure.

But now they say drinking coffee is good for you. Makes you live longer. I am serious. 

Well, fine. Drink it.

So now they are saying it’s an endangered species. Climate change. I am serious. 

No question about climate change here.

If we’ve got to fix climate change to get coffee pinned down, then get busy.

The uncertainty is killing me.

Sports and arts at Guilford College

Guilford College has very strong arts and very strong athletics. Right now, both are being re-imagined and newly resourced there.

Dana Giola, the Poet Laureate of California and former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, once commented

I don’t like sports, but you’ve got to admire the energy, creativity, and innovation that goes into sports. And it’s very similar to arts. It’s a way of focusing human energy to create these symbolic encounters which have enormous emotional resonance to audiences

Guilford’s got’em both.

Giola’s comment affirms Guilford’s thinking. The student experience at Guilford crosses traditional boundaries. It finds connections, focuses energy, teaches the importance of symbolic encounters. It’s creative.

These are elements of a life lived well. Both sports and arts teach those things HANDS ON at Guilford College.

I’m amazed continually at how often people who spent their college years at athletics and arts and literature (and other such endeavors) turn out to have the chops to get things done.

Athletes make great executives; French majors make the BEST lawyers.

Bright long-term future of the right lawyers and mid-sized firms affirmed by tech guru

Kai-fu Lee, leading artificial intelligence exponent, makes the following observation about lawyers and artificial intelligence. He’s in line with MidLaw’s dogged confidence in the prospects of lawyers who focus on core (indeed, 19th Century) lawyer skills and MidLaw’s confidence in the mid-sized law firms that provide the best setting left for cultivating those skills. 

Top lawyers will have nothing to worry about when it comes to job displacement. Reasoning across domains, winning the trust of clients, applying years of experience in the courtroom, and having the ability to persuade a jury are all examples of the cognitive complexities, strategies, and modes of human interaction that are beyond the capabilities of AI. However, a lot of paralegal and preparatory work like document review, analysis, creating contracts, handling small cases, packing cases, and coming up with recommendations can be done much better and more efficiently with AI. The costs of law make it worthwhile for AI companies to go after AI paralegals and AI junior lawyers, but not top lawyers.

10 Jobs That Are Safe in an AI World

MidLaw has been saying so:

• The Case for the Mid-Sized Law Firm
• Mid-Sized Firms Are the Only Hope for the Future of the Legal Profession
• 10 practice management challenges for mid-size law firms
• Oswald get your hammer, it’s a computer fight
• The once and future legal profession – 10 things (plus 4) lawyers had in the 19th Century they should get back
• We Are Not Running Railroads or Fighting Land Wars
• “The Competitive Advantages of Scale Have Been Commoditized”

Justice innovations — chucking 20th Century models out the window

In the clamor about innovation in the legal profession, a singular idea is striking a chord.

Real innovation, some are saying, will not consist of new ways to perform the chores of 20th Century lawyering. Instead, real innovation will focus on new ways to solve people’s problems. Maybe not every legal problem requires a lawyer. Maybe not every question implicates the Magna Carta.

Outside the justice business, the great new companies of the 21st Century — Amazon, Apple, Uber — are chucking 20th Century models out the window. They are reinventing what they do and getting things done cheaper and faster than ever before.

For law, it’s different.

Society has gotten way more complex. Demands for law-based outcomes have exploded —especially in low-dollar personal contexts like healthcare, housing, domestic affairs, veterans rights, social security, disaster recovery, and consumer financial issues. But legal outcomes continue to be delivered for the most part in the same old ways.

All this weighs most heavily on people without a lot of money. They are the ones with all the domestic and housing and veterans issues. 80% of the people who need to use the justice system can’t afford it. They can’t afford the lawyers. And the ones who can afford lawyers aren’t happy about that. Too often, they get expensive, slow, lawyer-centered solutions. “There is far too much law for those who can afford it and far too little for those who cannot.”

Innovations are coming, but before now they have focussed mostly on how lawyers work, and not so much on customer experiences.

In North Carolina though, some intimations of change are appearing. George Hausen says that Legal Aid of North Carolina (LANC) is North Carolina’s “laboratory of innovation” for the justice system and he claims some victories. He points to

• LANC-fostered medical-legal partnerships,
• LANC’s eviction diversion program,
• LANC’S call center, self-help clinics, and videos,
• LANC’S foreclosure prevention programs, and
• partnerships between LANC and North Carolina’s members of Congress to ensure delivery of veterans benefits.

LANC catches problems aborning and finds solutions that bypass the legal system. They take lawyers out of the picture.

LANC receives high volumes of requests for services in low-dollar kerfuffles. It has developed expertise in subject matters that not many private lawyers can match such as personal housing issues, foreclosure prevention, consumer issues, veterans benefits, healthcare, domestic violence, natural disasters. LANC’s perspectives on the system (high-volume, low-dollar) are unique. Its solutions are innovative.

Government support and private philanthropy (institutional and personal) for LANC is a good investment in justice system innovation. LANC needs a lot more support than it gets.