In an opinion including gobsmacking on all sides with debates on justiciability and the history and purpose of the Constitution, the Washington Supreme Court struck down the controversial 2/3 supermajority requirement for tax increases (and tax loophole closures). Rather than recreate my analysis, I’ve decided to just repose my tweets, which do a good job of walking you through the document.
Link to the opinion below.
This is actually quite hilarious. Judge Rodriguez-Chomat is dealing with a low-level offender, who is acting like Lindsey Lohan during her bail hearing/arraignment. The judge, of Hispanic descent, calls her back when she laughs, blows him off, and says “Adios”. He bumps her bail. She then flips him off and tells him “Fuck you”, to which she gets a 30 day sentence.
Now, what did we learn from this? ALWAYS, and I mean ALWAYS, be respectful to the Court. Too often I see both attorneys and lay people who do not treat the Court like a solemn institution. It kills me. If you are in court for a proceeding, dress your best, and dress conservatively. If all you own is a pair of khakis, wear them. If you don’t have a white shirt and tie, find one. If you are female, wear a conservative skirt and blouse. Always address the court respectfully as “Your honor”. Say “good morning” or “good afternoon”. Explain to the court why you are there. NEVER interrupt the judge.
These are just a few things that help the Court take you seriously. And yes, this goes for attorneys too, who I have seen violate this wayyyyyy too often.
I know, I know, I said I’d be posting something substantive. This may be as close as we get 
Its been two weeks since the last post. This is mainly because I didn’t feel like doing it last week due to a staggering number of things I had to get done at work. But alas, here you go! And yes, I’ve included things from the week I missed. Happy job hunting. Hopefully this week I will also have a substantive post, to boot.
Hey all, here’s the jobs update for the week of 1/21/13. As yesterday was MLK day…well, I didn’t do a darned thing, instead waiting until today: (more…)
So I posted a few weeks back about work life balance. But there’s another side to that same coin. I don’t mean to say that attorneys should be lazy. Quite the opposite. I think you should suck every bit of marrow out of life and use your abilities for the betterment of society. I think you should grab every fun opportunity and experience life to its fullest.
The problem with that, it leaves you tired.
Par example (that means ‘for example’), today was one of those whirlwind days that is not nearly over. Wake up at 5:30 and go let the dogs out. Check on the chicken that has been sick and is sleeping inside: specifically, check the poop situation. Wake up the girlfriend and report on the situation. Help out my cousin via a facebook post regarding a legal matter. Load up the chicken into my car, and away we go.
Commute the 30 minutes to work and work for a half hour on a letter going out to one of my expert witnesses. Drive the chicken to the vet, spend a half hour explaining the symptoms, shelter, food, and chicken roommates. Back to the office. Work on a few more letters, make a few calls, and out the door again. On the way to the MLK county celebration, make a couple calls to girlfriend regarding the chicken and Nate Roberts regarding a case (figured I’d give him a shout out in case he reads this). Arrive at county celebration 15 minutes early, wolf down sandwich. Pictures with Dow Constantine, Larry Gossett, the other King County Civil Rights Commissioners, and our MLK Essay Contest winners — then into the hall. Hour long event and then to my car, stopping on the way back to scout The Rack for new shoes, as my trust black Mezlans that have already been resoled once are now decrepit and nasty on the inside. Back to my car with no luck and back to the office.
Read a response brief, draft a reply brief, decide on an arbitrator, send a few emails. Oh crap! Chicken!
Drive to vet to pick up chicken. Drive to grange to pick up new feed recommended by vet. Update girlfriend on status of said chicken during the drive home.
Stop at store, home, cook sirloin burgers. Make a wasabi aoili for said burgers. Pick up the kitchen and start the dishwasher. This post.
Next: restring guitar for friends band to use tomorrow, as they’re coming down and playing The Comet (Sex with Strangers, you should check them out). Clear off double keyboard stand, load up both into the car. Write a motion. Bed.
Tomorrow? Finalize motion, draft a few letters, KCBA MLK Luncheon, more letters and a motion, wine friday, and work until the show starts at 9. Then dance my ass off to Canadian Rock.
Will I be exhausted? You bet. Would I have it any other way? Hell no!
Seeing as one of the biggest complaints of new attorneys is “Hey, I don’t have a job!”, I figured I would try to, once every couple of weeks, do a bit of digging and see what’s out there for entry level employment jobs.Keep in mind, these are only postings from the last week. By fart he best source has been the WSBA jobs site, which has 125 postings new and old. Here’s what I’ve found:
One of the things I often get asked is why I made the transition from Plaintiff’s work to Defense work.
This usually results in me screaming “You’re not the boss of me!,” slapping the person with a white glove, and running to hide behind a chair. I have issues.
But seriously, the answer is really complex, personal, and not a story I am likely to tell unless I know you fairly well in person.
The next question, however, is one I have no problem talking about. “What is it like working on the dark side?”
(Like that, except with Windows)
In law school, they always pose the ethical question about defending someone you know committed murder. My response was always the same, I may not like it, but every person is entitled to a defense under the constitution. Its the only way to keep a check on the police powers of the state. Insert random generic sounding 1L answer.
That argument doesn’t hold up as well when you’re talking the civil side of things. So, here’s the short answer, I really like what I’m doing.
People I am co-counsel with, and plaintiff’s counsel who didn’t know me prior to the transition, are often surprised to learn that I was Plaintiff’s counsel before this.
There were a lot of things I liked about working on the Plaintiff’s side. I learned people’s stories. I was able to hold people accountable for negligence. I sometimes was able to try interesting theories. I learned a lot about a lot of different things. I loved getting in knock down drag outs over discovery. I loved drafting responses to summary judgments (and the odd Plaintiff’s motion for summary judgment). I loved taking depositions.
Some of the things I didn’t like? The sometimes overwhelmed feeling. The marketing yourself for cases/clients. The having to bone up on a complex area in a short amount of time.
So how is that different in the transition to defense work? Well, its really not. The stories I tell are from a different perspective. The work is largely the same. I tend to have the same work load, which sometimes feels like its hard to get out from under, but is very rewarding.
Really, litigation is litigation is litigation.
One thing I have noticed in the transition is, as a Plaintiff’s attorney, I saw all my cases as having merit. I tended to see the value as higher than the defense attorney, but I always strove to put the best case forward, being open and honest about the warts on my case, but moving to exclude things that were irrelevant. I thought I did a good job of screening my cases to be sure I was taking something meritorious. If I did not believe my client, I was not the attorney for them. I had to let more than one client go for unrealistic expectations.
On the defense side, not all cases are created equal. I thoroughly enjoy going up against attorneys that are well-prepared, have screened their cases, are responsive, and generally behave as I had – tough but fair. However, I see some Plaintiff attorneys who are absolutely blind to blatant faking, attorneys forging or altering evidence, and everything in between (not all the time, thank goodness, or I would go insane). Those cases make me work hard to get to the truth, which generally lies somewhere in between where Plaintiff and Defense have staked their ground.
There are some things to get used to. Reporting being the largest. My clients now want far more information than my Plaintiff clients required or wanted. But that leaves me the ability to give them an honest evaluation of when I think the cases are good, when I think they’re bad, and why.
So take that for what its worth. From what I’ve heard, I am a bit of an outlier. Many people move from Defense work to Plaintiff’s work. Not so much the other way around.
So what do I feel each side has the ability to offer the other? From the Plaintiff’s side, you gain an ability to actually see the effects of the injury on the person. This is something often left out or underdeveloped in defense depositions. The importance of knowing the stories that will be told by the lay witnesses cannot be understated, as you will have the same ability to pick those stories apart if they do not match the facts. Too often a defense attorney will just ignore the lay witnesses, offering “no questions” at trial.
From the Defense side, learn how to prepare and manage your case load. It is too easy on the Plaintiff side to get mired down in the day to day of your work, and lose picture of the case’s overall goals, or tasks that need to be accomplished. One of the large aims of reporting is to ensure all those tasks get accomplished well before trial. Now, I’m not saying you need to draft a full report on each of your cases, but you should definitely have a to do list on each case, and prioritize and revise that list often (the best Plaintiff’s attorneys I know have meetings on all the cases often enough that they always have a bead on what the next step is).
The sooner we all realize our jobs are essentially the same, getting to that middle truth, the sooner we eliminate the consternation and conflagrations that often permeate our cases.
So one of my resolutions is to make a concerted effort to blog a little more. For those of you that don’t know, your Dean has gone through a through life changes. Don’t worry, I’m not going through the big life change:
(Went through “the change” before it was cool)
Sooooo, things that happened in 2013:
So what is missing off of that list? Oh…writing here. Guess what one of my resolutions is for 2013?
So here’s to a future of hopefully more blog posts, witty legal news, and the occasional court case that strikes my fancy.
So a post just came down on the Seattle Times’ website laying out the chainsaw murderer’s explanation for why he went all chainsaw murdery: self defense.
No, really, it was for my own protection!
Anyhow, the “victim” claims his landlord came at him with a roofing stake. Lest you think its something innocuous, please be aware that its really something the reaper would carry on his days off:
(Reaper Roofer Tools)
So what do you do when someone attacks you with one of those things? Hit him with a baseball bat.
That actually sounds kind of reasonable. However, it was the chopping off the guys head with a chainsaw after he hit him with a baseball bat that may have been a little over the top. You have to put down the bat, go find the chainsaw, start it up, chop through the head. There’s a few too many steps in there to claim it was a reasonable reaction to the initial attack.
Well played though, gutsy self defense move!
I know there are a few of you looking at the time this was posted and thinking: doesn’t The Prof have a job? Doesn’t it involve billable hours? Why is he posting this now instead of an unreasonable hour. Two reasons: I love sleep and this requires fairly immediate attention. This post is specifically addressed to graduates of Seattle University School of Law.
In looking through my Facebook feeds last night, I came across an interesting post from a current law student at SU, which was reposting a letter sent to the Public Interest Law Foundation. I will preface this by saying I was never active in PILF during law school, but appreciated its subsidization of public interest law internships, and was very active in Seattle Journal for Social Justice, which embraced the same lofty goals, albeit from the ivory tower that is a law school publication. Anyhow, the letter follows the break:
-ANNOUNCEMENT-
Dear Fellow Students,
The Public Interest Law Foundation (PILF) would like to inform the student body about a concerning new trend at Seattle University that affects all students and the law school’s commitment to social justice. Over the last year, and since the appointment of the new Archbishop of Seattle, there have been numerous examples of the Catholic Church (via the administration of the University) stifling the social justice activities of student organizations. The church has decided that certain “issues” are not to be promoted or advocated for on campus. Important social justice issues like gay marriage, pro-choice advocacy, end of life care, and others are being slowly removed from the school’s definition of “social justice”.
PILF was made aware of the problem when a public interest summer grant recipient was denied a grant because of choosing to work at Planned Parenthood. Sadly, this is only one example of the school’s refusal to support real social justice issues. We were subsequently made aware that there was at least one instance in which the school pulled an invitation to speak from a person who had worked on one of the social justice issues noted above.
One of the major problems with this new “policy” of denying certain individuals, organizations, and issues representation on campus is that it is not written down anywhere. We, as students, are not given notice of these new rules that apparently bind our activities at our school. The response from the administration has been reactionary instead of proactive. Student organizations have been told they cannot do something only after events have already been planned and speakers invited. How can we, as students, plan meaningful events on campus that promote the school’s social justice commitment if we don’t know what we are REALLY allowed to do?
Because the new policy is not explicitly posted anywhere, PILF decided to reach out to all students to inform them of the issue. As the school continues to stifle these issues on campus, we students should think about how we can confront the issue head-on to make sure OUR definition of social justice is continually represented at OUR school. Please feel free to email us with any ideas or feedback about this problem.
Thank you,
Samuel Leonard &
Chanele Brothers
PILF Presidents
Now, if you’re anything like me, you have a real hard time with a Jesuit institution that takes such a stand against gay rights or equal rights to all. I’m not even Catholic, but this doesn’t pass the smell test. What has happened as of late is Seattle’s Archbishop, Peter Sartain, asked priests to help collect signatures for No on R74, the bill that would repeal gay marriage as put into law by the governor. Okay, repeal is a strong word considering the law is in the referendum stage, and thus wasn’t enacted, but its still a stripping of what most consider a step forward in human rights (and basic dignities) in Washington.
(Governor signs gay marriage into law.)
Some of the Brethren have spoken out on the issue, most notably Father John Whitney of St. Joseph’s Parish in Seattle. You can find those stories here and here. A number of parishes downright refused to comply with the Archbishop’s request.
I think its time to ask ourselves whether the law school, as an institution of higher learning, has the ability to separate itself from the formal affiliation with Seattle University and its Jesuit tradition. This would avoid the conflict that can and does occur when an inherently religious institution is put at odds with its inherently logic-driven counterpart.
Seattle University helped the law school grow. It purchased the school from University of Puget Sound, built a wonderful building to house the school. It brought SU into the city, where it could attract not only bright students, but also focus its resources into helping the community around it.
While it is true there are not a whole lot of independent institutions (17 that matter by my count), there are several that are ranked, including Brooklyn (#65) and Vermont Law School (#119, #1 in Environmental Law).
At the very least, I think its time to have a discussion with the University about where we are placing our social justice values, and why it is important to embrace justice for all, and not just justice for some. The whims of the Archdiocese will often conflict with forward progress, as churches are designed to do, and they will often conflict internally with the Jesuit tradition. When these conflicts infringe upon the Social Justice foundation upon which the law school was founded, its time to talk.
Justin P. Walsh is an Associate Attorney at Floyd, Pflueger & Ringer, P.S.
Ryan Carson is an associate attorney at Robinson & Tait, specializing in mortgage and real estate law.
