Monday Morning Lawyers

I am a creature of habit. There are certain parts of my life that need to be comforted by unchanging ritual. Monday morning is the most important of these. I think of it as the Monday Morning Rite. In my past, I would get very depressed on Sunday night at I contemplated the beginning of a new week of work. To make me feel better, I designed a Monday morning to look forward to; a transition from life unfettered to the discipline of work. The Monday Morning Rite for me is an early morning 7 mile run (slow jog actually), followed by a long shower; and then on to an apple fritter (world class) and coffee at the Donut Hut. For the next hour I drink coffee, nibble on the apple fritter and work on the latest NY Times Sunday Crossword. After that I go to work.

This morning the thermometer showed 9 degrees outside. I can be compulsive, but 9 degrees makes even me bow to reality. So I went to Club USA and did the elliptical machine. I hate treadmills and elliptical machines. All you can do is watch the mindless television news. But trapped in the torture machine that is the elliptical machine, I watch it. It seemed this morning that many of the commercial ads were for personal injury law firms. Everybody in Denver is familiar with the strong arm of Frank Azar, but he is not alone. Not by a long shot.

Time moves very slowly on the elliptical machine. In that interminable wait for the next tick of the clock, I had no choice but to think about lawyers. Most people are of two minds about the legal profession. On the one hand, lawyers are the butt of mean spirited jokes, and as Shakespeare among others reminds us, the source of much (all) trouble in this world. Yet from Perry Mason to LA Law to Boston Legal, lawyers are shown as noble, and even more importantly, sexy. How many times have you heard a proud parent announce their clueless college student to be in pre-law?

It has been my sad fate as a company executive to get to know a number of real lawyers. Hence the importance of the Monday Morning Rite. Despite a strong predisposition to find them as dastards, I have liked most of them. They are just ordinary people, no matter how much I want to throw stones at them. They have a job to do, mortgage payments to make and a conscience to live with. The sad fact of human existence is that underneath it all, we are just people. Hence the need for lawyers.

And that is the source of our schizophrenia. We are human beings. Which means that we screw up on a regular basis. Despite our best intentions, we hurt ourselves and others all the time. We are arrogant, lazy, greedy and envious. To make matters worse, we display a decided tendency to sanctimony. Is this not a fertile ecology for the legal profession? One might imagine the situation as a large warehouse with heaps of spilled corn on the floor, with plenty of dark corners and a warm damp atmosphere. Is it any wonder that there are rats?

And yet we aspire to be better than we are. We are heirs to a tradition that speaks of truth and justice. The Profession of Law is the embodiment of that tradition. Theirs' is the language of justice and the righting of wrongs. While we recognize the failings common to our condition, we also believe in something better. We are all faced with situations or institutions that are powerful, leaving us helpless and vulnerable before them. We need a champion that protects us from the power of the state, from the impersonal procedure bound insurance company or employer, from the implacable results of our own folly.

And so we have the personal injury law firm, the "ambulance chaser" advertising on early morning and afternoon television. My nose curls with the odor of damp moldy corn and the rustle of unseen rodents in dark corners. But I also hear the echos of Marcus Tullius Cicero, of Thomas More, of John Marshall, of Thurgood Marshall. And so while I continue to snort when I think of lawyers, I am also glad that they are there.