Reflections of a Boston Lawyer

I came to Boston at the beginning of my career to serve a one-year term as law clerk to a United States District Judge.  One benefit of district court clerkships is that you get to see and work on civil and criminal trials and pretrial proceedings.  Several of our cases were covered by the press.  After my clerkship, I worked on other matters that received media attention of various degrees, ranging from cases that received only a few seconds in a news broadcast, to cases that covered the front pages of our major newspapers, to a case that became the subject of a best-selling book and major motion picture. During the year of my clerkship, I quickly learned a lesson that was reinforced throughout my career, namely, that unless you are in the courtroom, listening to the witnesses' testimony, observing their demeanor, studying the physical evidence and reading the documentary evidence, you will not be able to form an accurate judgment about the case.  No matter how objective reporte

I am a sports fan.  More accurately, I suppose, I am a Boston sports fan.  Over the last 35 years, I have gone to countless Red Sox and Celtics games.  I was at game 5 of the 1986 World Series (the one the Sox won at Fenway on a masterful performance by lefty Bruce Hurst, who for a fleeting moment during Game 6 was prematurely named series MVP), the bloody sock game of the 2004 ALCS, Game 2 of the World Series that year, and other notable contests.  I also witnessed first-hand the Celtics Game 7 victory over the Lakers to clinch the NBA championship in 1984, Bird's steal of Isaiah's inbound pass for a last-minute win against the Pistons in the 1987 Eastern Conference Finals, Tree Rollins biting Danny Ainge in a 1983 playoff melee, and many more exciting (and some not-so-exciting) games I attended through the Reggie Lewis, Paul Pierce and Rajon Rondo eras of Celtics basketball. Professional sports have changed, and the agent of change has been money.  Players who considered th

We live in an increasingly narcissistic culture.  Technology has given us so many ways to express our love for ourselves.  We can post pictures of ourselves on Facebook, tweet them on Twitter, share them on Instagram, or snap them on Snapchat.  One of our favorite new activities is to use our smart phones to take "selfies," a word that transparently reveals our enchantment with ourselves.  The more we play with our new toys, the more we become obsessed with sending our images into the ether, for all, or at least our friends, to see.  We have become shameless self-promoters. In fairness, our motivations aren't all bad.  We display ourselves on social media as a way of being social.  Connecting with our friends, our families, and others is a good thing.  We don't just want them to see who we are and what we're doing; we also want to see them and their activities.  And the selfies we enjoy most are those that include other people, not just ourselves.  We are partie

A story in today's Boston Globe reports on the decline in law school enrollment attributable to continued weakening in the employment market for new lawyers.  The precipitating event was the financial crisis of 2008, which soon thereafter led to a massive tightening of corporate legal budgets and an increasing intolerance by corporate counsel for the practice of staffing their matters with inexperienced law firm associates.  Law firms reacted in various ways, with some rescinding offers of employment they had extended to soon-to-be law school graduates, others finding (and funding) temporary public sector placements for their incoming classes of new lawyers, and virtually all either eliminating or drastically reducing their summer associate programs from which new lawyers were typically recruited.  Public interest law firms and other publicly funded legal employers were not immune from this sea change.  The financial crisis also took a serious toll on their budgets, resulting in l

The farther I get in life's journey, the more I think about the impermanence of things.  I look out my front door and think of people who have walked through it over the years, my parents and friends who have died, children who have grown, parents of those children whom we haven't seen in years.  When my father passed away more than a decade ago, it finally hit me that death brings dissolution - as Shakespeare put it, our too, too solid flesh does indeed melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew.  Everything we know and have known will someday disappear and be no more, including ourselves.   Of necessity, I suppose, we tend to brush this realization aside, choosing instead to go on with our lives as if we will live forever, as if nothing really will change, focused on making our lives and the lives of our loved ones as secure as we can.  And there's nothing wrong with that.  To quote a man at least as wise as Shakespeare, we choose to "eat, drink and be merry, for to