November 15, 2014 Letters
Letters
We lawyers are the profession of contrasts.
On one page of our paper we invite and encourage our peers to attend the “Bar at the bar” meetings, and on the next page we invite them to call a select phone number if they have a problem with alcohol or drugs.
On one page we readily accept the money paid to run an ad titled: “No Lawyer Has Ticked-off More People in More Places,”and on another page our leadership and circuit committees encourage and press for professionalism and civility.
Go figure!
William C. Davell
Ft. Lauderdale
Ping-Pong Justice
In the October 15 News, I read the Letters with interest, particularly with Mark Zientz’ “Ping-Pong Judge Selection” idea.
My good friend Mark’s fertile brain is still active with great ideas.
I would follow up with a continued idea to resolve our legal issues in court in the same manner. Let our ping-pong selected judges set up ping pong balls with the name of each lawyer appearing for an oral argument — or trial conclusions — and rule in favor of the random selected ping pong ball whose lawyer’s name is prominently displayed thereon.
As a former circuit judge, I would welcome an easier way to make decisions than our current one which requires reading of memos, listening to oral arguments, spending research time and review of the law, and applying the law to the proved facts.
This would have given me a lot more time to play ping pong — or tennis.
David L. Tobin
Miami
The Solo
The solo lawyer is becoming a rarity. The idea of putting up a shingle in a modest office with one secretary and a typewriter has gone the way of the wind.
How can solo lawyers compete in today’s world against the forces that conspire against the solo lawyer?
* Do-it-yourself software.
* Online companies providing legal documents to an unknowing public.
* Low-cost legal services provided by discount retailers.
* Legal clinics providing free or greatly reduced priced law services.
* The expense of e-filing court papers requiring expensive equipment and additional personnel.
* Inefficiencies in the adversarial system that cause long delays in cases being heard.
* Demands of continuing legal education that burden the solo lawyer more than the multi-lawyer law firm.
* Mandatory pro bono service that places far more of a time and financial burden on the solo lawyer than on the multi-lawyer law firm.
* Computers churning out floods of legal documents that swamp opposing counsel.
* Costs connected with maintaining an office — rent, utilities, and insurance.
* Steep malpractice premiums.
* Bar association dues.
* Ever more laws, rules, and regulations that even an Albert Einstein would have trouble deciphering.
* Paralegals doing the work of lawyers.
* Inability to stop the unlawful practice of law.
* Client inability to pay for legal services.
* Lawyer advertising that stresses cost over quality and makes a mockery of law as a profession.
* Intense competition for clients because of an overpopulation of lawyers.
* Paying off law school and college student loans.
* Huge law firms with vast financial resources that create very considerable imbalances in the adversarial system.
* Retired lawyers offering free legal advice.
* Employer in-house counsel providing outside pro bono legal services.
* Employer legal services for employees.
* Family life and responsibilities.
These issues must be addressed before any further decline in the solo lawyer population becomes irreversible.
The loss of the solo lawyer to society will be great, for it is the small law practice as it is with the small business that is the lifeblood of free enterprise and which can best provide the individuality of decisionmaking that is the hallmark of a democracy. The aggregation of legal services into larger and yet larger law firms means a rising monopolization of legal services and at prices that exclude provision of legal services to the middle class and the poor!
Put another way, how can a solo lawyer participate in the leadership of this or that bar association, given the time and financial constraints that are of far less concern to multi-lawyer law firms?
I know a thing or two about solo law practice, having more than 40 years ago been a solo attorney. The problems to which I make reference, some of which did not exist then, have grown much worse since that day in 1970 when I opened my 10-by-8-foot ninth-floor law office with one window, one Selectric typewriter, three chairs, one desk, no secretary, and a couple of legal form books!
But, sad to ask, who is listening as the erosion of the solo law practice continues apace, let alone doing anything about it?
Stephen Schoeman
Westfield, New Jersey
Career Counseling
advertising a counseling program to assist new and older lawyers explore and develop nonlegal careers and to advise law graduates with student loans how to salvage careers outside the declining legal profession, Career Planning Services will have plenty of responses to its November 1 News ad.
When I graduated from Stetson Law School and passed the bar exam in 1972, Florida had about 28,000 attorneys compared with about 100,000 today. That statistic has made a joke of the old axiom, “Become a lawyer and you’ll always have a job.”
The Internet, with its free legal advice and downloaded documents, pulled an end run around attorneys (“Don’t pay a lawyer thousands of dollars…”). Banks and securities firms advertise: “When you come in for a financial review, ask us about whether a will or trust is a good idea and whether a Sub-S corporation or an LLC is right for you.” Having closed my practice a year ago but keeping my law license active, I feel like an immigrant from a country that no longer exists.
David P. Carter
Seminole
Judicial Elections
First, this letter comes not from a position of perfection, but, from perspective. While a law student, I watched events unfold which were artfully chronicled in Martin Dyckman’s book A Most Disorderly Court: Scandal and Reform in the Florida Judiciary. Now, watching a Florida judicial election play out makes me think that the judiciary and the public which it serves are threatened by the continuation of judicial elections.
In sum, my view is that judicial elections are an abomination. So what? If that is the view of retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, however, that view means something. Justice O’Connor is now chair of the O’Connor Judicial Selection Initiative of the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver. The initiative’s goal is to help judges be more than “politicians in robes,” according to Justice O’Connor.
Justice O’Connor argues that judicial elections increasingly threaten to undermine the independence of the courts. We in the legal profession must protect the judiciary from being viewed as just a bunch of politicians wearing black robes to work. The public is, indeed, growing increasingly skeptical of elected judges. Justice O’Connor references surveys showing that more than 70 percent of the public and 25 percent of judges are considerably more distrustful of judges than in the past. That is sad.
Should attorneys desiring to be judges be allowed to say more than “I am male/female,” “I am pretty/handsome,” “I am smart,” “I am married,” “I have children,” etc.? Of course. But, attacking opponents and engaging in typical political behavior is anathema to being judicial. If elections are to continue, and they should not, let’s initiate a process which includes requiring candidates to take exams, such as are required for board certification. Then the public could be provided with scores and make an objective evaluation.
Recently NPR’s the Diane Rehm Show had a lengthy segment on judicial elections. One call-in was a former Florida judicial candidate who both ran and sought appointment, and he told the nation that there is not “a nickel’s worth of difference” between election and appointment in Florida and that appointment occurs in “smoke-filled rooms.” I watch most every Florida appellate arguments on the Web and every judicial discipline proceeding before the Florida Supreme Court and believe that we have the highest quality appellate judges resulting from the appointment process and that a lot of judicial discipline results from campaign activities.
Let’s eliminate the politics. Let’s stop judicial elections and improve the appointment process to ensure that the politics in that process is neutralized.
Lonnie Groot
Lake Mary
Same-Sex Divorce
On August 27, the Second District Court of Appeal certified Shaw v. Shaw to the Florida Supreme Court. Shaw involves two women who lawfully married in Massachusetts and moved to Tampa. They separated, came to full settlement via the interdisciplinary collaborative process, and petitioned in the 13th Judicial Circuit to dissolve their marriage. Their petition was dismissed for lack of subject matter jurisdiction pursuant to the state’s same-sex marriage ban, and the parties appealed.
In the certification order, Judge Alternbernd authored a dissenting opinion in which he wrote, “Given that same-sex marriages are a recent development in other states, I am not convinced that Florida’s courts will be clogged in the next three years with out-of-state same-sex couples seeking dissolution. I cannot certify that this order will have ‘a great effect on the proper administration of justice through the state’ requiring immediate review in the Supreme Court.”
On September 5, the Supreme Court declined jurisdiction, citing Judge Altenbernd’s dissent, and sent the case back to the Second District.
Though Judge Altenbernd is correct in that same-sex spouses have not been clogging the courts to get divorced, he may be wrong in his assertion that the reason is because same-sex marriage is a recent development. What is more likely accurate is that we family law attorneys have been blocking LGBT families’ access to the courts.
And not without reason. Most of us figured that if same-sex marriage is not recognized in the state, then Florida courts could not dissolve those marriages. And so we said, “There is nothing I can do for you.”
But now we are coming to the realization that a law that affects the fundamental right to marry and seeks to prevent same-sex couples from enjoying the right cannot rationally be related to preventing same-sex spouses from dissolving their out-of-state marriage.
We should now take on these cases, while letting clients know that the law is in flux. We should review our Oath of Admission: “I will never reject, from any consideration personal to myself, the cause of the defenseless or oppressed.”
We should properly administer justice.
Adam B. Cordover
Tampa
