TO-WIT: ALL THE RAGE
Okay, okay, so I’m not the most patient guy in the world. I know it because I’ve heard it most of my adult life. Most of the complaints have come on my wedding nights, but by the time they’ve started, I’m usually already half asleep and no longer care that much.
With lawsuits typically taking years and depositions frequently taking forever, the law business is not a good career choice for the pathologically impatient. I am perpetually frustrated by the pace of this business, the less than deliberate speed at which we crawl, and I find as I’ve gotten older, its becoming even more of a problem. Oh, I recall a time I wasn’t so impatient. It was on May 18, 1973, from 3:00 pm until about 3:07 pm. Since then though, I’ve struggled.
No, this is certainly a deliberative and contemplative business, and as my first employer was fond of saying, since you’re gonna’ twist in the wind anyway, you might as well learn to like Scrabble. Well, that was fine for him, but me, I’ve always hated Scrabble. I used to play it with my mother, and I couldn’t stand the slow pace. I mean, come on, pick the word, play your damn tiles. Every time I said that to her, she quit. She had no stomach for how the game should be played and would not have made a very good lawyer.
Yet it isn’t so much the inherent pace of the law that infuriates me as it is the management of it. Keeping track of files and their contents has always been to me as elusive as the Loch Ness Monster. Nothing in all this world enrages me more than looking for a file the moment I need it and not being able to find it. The ensuing conversation between my secretary and me would go something like this:
Me: Where’s the file?
Her: I don’t know.
Me: @#$%^&*
All that has changed now. In this new world of instant communications, in this seemingly glittering age of computers, emails, fax machines and overnight deliveries, paper seemingly reproduces like bunnies, and has now as a result of such proliferation elevated my rage to heretofore unscaled heights.
Nowadays, by the time I receive an overnight document, I have already received a faxed revision followed by emailed comments. Before I can even garner a fresh new expletive, the means by which I cope with such an onslaught, I am awash in a sea of paper with no land in sight. Adrift before I start, I no longer have any idea which of the multiplicity of documents I have in my file are the currently operative ones. To draw on yet another tiresome post-nuptial criticism, I just can’t keep up.
Let me illustrate the point. I have just concluded a modern age real estate transaction, the kind in which I never ever meet a single player. All transactions, including the initial contact with the new client, occurred electronically, by phone, by fax, by email. Negotiations happen so quickly in such matters that I think there were at least six different versions of the sales agreement in existence before I was hired.
Well, I got lost in the Sargasso Sea of paperwork so early on in the campaign that my final signature version contained several paragraphs that had been rejected by both parties long before I got into the foray. My client was not pleased by either the work product or the bill that accompanied it.
“What the hell kind of work is this?” he bellowed at me over the phone. With my years of experience, I knew just how to deal with this kind of fury. I put my secretary on the phone. “Explain it to him,” I said and hung up.
It took me a week to figure out what had happened. I had worked on a redraft at home and emailed it to my secretary to print. She had mailed it to the client, he mailed it back with changes, I brought the file up on my computer and made the changes without realizing that the file I was working from was an earlier one and not the one I had emailed into the office. That one had never been saved on disc.
The conversation that followed this discovery went something like this:
Me: Uh, which version of the contract is this?
Her: What do you mean?
Me: I mean, is this the emailed version, the faxed version, the mailed version or the FedExed version?
Her: I think it’s the second revised email version.
Me: Wasn’t there a subsequent revised faxed version?
Her: Yes, but that was before we got the revised FedExed version which you revised and emailed to seller’s counsel and which he revised again and emailed back to you.
Me: So which version is this?
Her: I don’t know.
Me: Well, what about all these other versions of the contract in the file. Do we know which one is the operative draft?
Her: No.
Me: $#%!%^&!!!!!
Now correct me if I’m wrong, but if you compare this dialogue to the one I recited earlier, you will no doubt see that in this modern world of computers, faxes, emails and overnight deliveries, it takes me considerably longer now to get to the expletives than ever before. Now I ask you, is that progress?
© 2001, S. Sponte, Esq.