It’s that holiday time of the year again. It’s been a very warm fall and I’m grateful for that. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and it’s nice to be celebrating another one. You just assume the next turkey day will come, but as lawyers we’ve known slowly slip from view, it makes us think about the impressions they left us with and the space they leave behind.
While I still feel like a teenager, and act like one sometimes, I am now the longest serving member of the Board of Governors of my state bar. That seems really odd for someone as young as I think I am. Last night my wife, Cheryl, and visited a close friend who is also a member of the Board of Governors. She is in an extended care facility after battling cancer for years. Things are constantly being put into perspective. Even though we are giving thanks for a wonderful fall in the Midwest, the predictions are for a very cold winter. I don’t pay much attention to predictions, and I never complain about the weather. I try to complain about things I can control – like getting favorable rulings from judges.
Because I work hard for those rulings, they usually work out, and I’m always thankful when my clients win. I try to not make losing arguments in the first place. Part of the art of being a good trial lawyer is knowing when to fight and when to choose a different direction. None of us are thankful when we get surprised and it turns out that our good argument wasn’t that good after all. It’s easy to blame the judge, but sometimes even the best of us miscalculate. I try to pick and chose the arguments I make to my wife as well. My win/lose record is better with the judges.
There are other things I’m thankful for this year. We just moved into a new law office in a consolidation of two smaller city and county facilities. I am thankful to be with lawyers I hadn’t practiced with day-to-day. Almost every lawyer, or anybody else for that matter, has something interesting to give if we pay close enough attention. There are things I’m thankful for that have nothing to do with the law. I pulled into a gas station last night to “buy” air for one of my tires. I was thankful it only costs 50¢. Some stations charge 75¢ or $1. Maybe their air is premium grade. The whole concept of paying for air to fill my tires rankles me. I’m pretty sure that someday I’m going to drive into a gas station and they will have found a way to charge me for the air I’m breathing when I’m standing at their pumps. Like free air to breathe, I am thankful Cheryl has stopped spending money on bottled water. Municipal water is produced by a government and it’s almost free.
Bottled water costs money and the driving principal behind it is profit. I know lots of people are anti-government these days, but when it comes to protecting my health, I trust the government more than for-profit business. I don’t blame for-profit business for not being overly concerned about my health; I just recognize they are responsible to their investors. It took several years of losing arguments to convince my wife on that one.
Cheryl recently went online and bought a foreclosed house as an investment. Buying a house online is horrifying, and I was thankful when she got the keys that there was actually a house there, as opposed to a smiling Nigerian scam man. Then this morning I realized one of my wife’s large dogs had eaten a rare Indonesian artifact for breakfast In the spirit of the season, I’m going to be thankful he didn’t eat another couch (or nibble off one of my toes). In these tough economic times, I’m thankful for the good attitude my father passed onto me so that I can still laugh at myself.
John Kennedy was assassinated 48 years ago this week, and Stephen King has written a new book titled “11/22/63”. The book speculates about what would have happened if President Kennedy had lived. I’m thankful there were politicians who inspired us once. I’m sure there are still some good ones today, but the partisanship is so overbearing, and the cynicism so rampant, it is hard to hear voices of reason. Maybe leaders like we used to have will eventually emerge from the shouting. The shaky economy, the bitterness, and the ever increasing criticism of the legal profession might make some lawyers anything but thankful this Thanksgiving. Not me. I think Thanksgiving is a good time to be thankful for our legal system and the lawyers and judges that keep it going.
Also, I intend to give thanks for the turkey, our good friends and family (at least most of them), the armed forces that protect us, our democracy, and, best of all, the fact that people will keep suing each other, starting the day after Thanksgiving – and that’s what I call a positive attitude.
© 2011 Under Analysis LLC Mark Levison is a member of the law firm Lathrop & Gage LLP. You can reach Under Analysis LLC in care of this paper or by e-mail at comments@levisongroup.com.