Recently we met with the “lawyers’ moving company.” Well, they probably move people and businesses other than lawyers, but they certainly seemed to know what they were talking about when it came to moving law offices. Besides, all that matters to us lawyers is that they know what they are doing with our precious “stuff.”
And precious it is – at least to me – or anyway it’s been precious enough to keep in my office until I had to deal with moving it. The moving man was very professional, but seemed clinical in his instructions, and a little detached when it came to the importance of my particular stuff. He probably didn’t realize that in my rosewood hanging file are pleadings I gave a lot of thought to 25 years ago.
He also may not have known how important the stuff is in my desk drawers, like the ticket stub from the 1985 National League Championship series. He even had the gall to suggest that moving presents an opportunity to “declutter.” That seemed downright insulting if he was referring to the carved Egyptian scarabs I use for paperweights. As I looked around my office, I thought about my really nice wallpaper. Law firms – even large ones – do not pay for wallpaper, but a couple of us thought it was a nice touch when we moved into this office a few years ago. When I divide the years in the space, into the price I paid for the wallpaper, I’m not sure I received my money’s worth, and the moving man insisted I could not pack “my” wallpaper. I hope the lawyer in the firm that’s moving in enjoys it.
I also noticed my expanding “read pile,” of important articles I intended to get to. Unfortunately, their timeliness may have lapsed around the turn of the century.
I also considered pictures I had adorning the wall behind my desk. I’ve walked by them every day for years, and glanced at them periodically during really long discovery dispute calls. Taking them off the wall brought back the events, the stories, and the relationships that made them each a memory. The pictures are of my family, old sports clients like Jerry Rice, mayors, a lot of politicians, a State Supreme Court Judge and a U.S. Senator.
The later two were mentors, but their final motion for change of venue to a higher court was granted long ago. There was also a picture of high school students from a law-related charity I helped start in 1992. I knew many of those kids, and it is sobering when I realize that some of them may now have their own kids who are thinking about becoming lawyers. It seems like time always goes by faster than any of us expected. Like most lawyers, there are a lot of books in my office. There is a set of history books I bought which claims to cover “all of history from the beginning to current time.” The current time, however, when those books were published, was 1759. I suppose there are a few things missing – like the entire American legal system. My wife suggested I ought to protect those books by bringing them home. I have taken her argument under advisement.
My credenza is full of plaques given to me for service in various organizations, and mementos from various cases. There’s no room for me to do any legal work on the credenza, so maybe when I move, I’ll “declutter” it, but probably not. When I bought my furniture it was new and fashionable. It’s not new anymore, but because it spent a lot of late nights with me working on briefs – sometimes all night – I’m not ready to let it go. The furniture is no longer a thing, it’s become woven in to the events of a legal life.
In the midst of deciding what to leave and what to leave out, I meandered down to one of my partners, Pat’s, office and asked him what he was keeping.
He wasn’t sure either, and picked up a Northwest Airlines airplane model. He reminded me that for years he had done legal work for Northwest, and that after winning a double defense verdict in a big lawsuit, besides paying his bill in full, Northwest sent him a coffee cup and a model of their latest large jetliner. Unfortunately, Delta bought Northwest a couple of years ago and Delta’s outside lawyers are now doing the work Pat used to do. Lawyers can do great legal work and lose the client anyway. Pat’s office had several plexiglas corporate tombstones symbolizing large acquisitions by companies that intended to do great things, but somewhere along the way, they too become a tombstone.
As I write this column, I am gazing at the Mississippi River, and one of the first steel arch bridges ever constructed. The Eads bridge was built in 1874. Moving law offices these days involves different issues than moving a law firm in 1874. I’m thinking that in those days there wasn’t any bubble wrap, cardboard or plastic boxes, so I guess everything was put into wooden boxes, packed in sawdust, and transported by horse-drawn carriage.
In today’s technological world, we don’t worry about horses or sawdust; we worry about T-1’s, servers and whether our computers are going to survive the move and if all of our files were properly saved.
Some decisions are easy. I’ll take all the pictures of my family. Then there’s that big, dusty pile of something between my couch and the wall. I’m not sure how long that stuff has been there, but I’m sure it’s valuable, otherwise why would I have kept it? So, some things will get thrown out, and I may just use other stuff to “re-clutter” my new office. In the end, it’s an adventure, and to paraphrase a favorite song, moving time “…every new beginning is some other beginning’s end.”
© 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.