TO-WIT: ALONE AND PALELY LOITERING
They were the first words out of her mouth. “Where’s your briefcase,” she declaimed, clearly taken aback that I had shown up empty handed. They were also the last words out of her mouth; during the remainder of the closing she said nothing.
As legal matters go it was simple enough, she was selling her residence; but as life matters go, it was not so simple. The parcel of more than seventy five acres she was selling had been her family homestead for almost two hundred years, and the transaction had for her a portent far beyond the mere signing of papers.
And here I had had the temerity, the chutzpah, to show up as her representative on this auspicious occasion without any briefcase or papers to signify that the passage of her familial estate to strangers was worthy of commemoration.
There had been no pragmatic need for me to bring anything to the closing. As attorney for the seller, all I had to do was prepare the deed. I had circulated it by email to all concerned well in advance, provided you consider my sending it off by smart phone while driving to the closing to be well in advance.
The title company had prepared all the other documents, so there was nothing for me to bring to the closing but me. Nonetheless I could sense my client’s extreme disappointment that I had arrived naked of accouterments save for a head which contained, however lacking in obviousness, both a complete understanding of this legally simple transaction and four decades of experience.
From my client’s perspective however, these things, unadorned by documents and a suitable leather wrap, signified nothing beyond a silent declaration that her life thus far warranted not so much as a single shred of paper mit cowhide to commemorate its passage.
Papers matter because we don’t deal in bricks and mortar. We are not architects of buildings, we are architects of thought, and sometimes the stuff of heads is a hard sell, even to us. Maybe that’s why so many lawyers risk hernia after hernia unnecessarily dragging immense files to deposition after deposition, particularly when laptops and iPads do the same job without the attendant medical hazards. Perhaps that’s the only way they can remind themselves that their work has meaning.
When it comes to papers, clients take far more comfort from a massive array of tree detritus, with its infinitely greater corporeality, than they do from thought. That a brief may be brilliant is of no never mind, that thoughts and ideas outlast buildings no palliative, to a client wanting more from his investment than merely the sort of ethereal skeletons that have carried civilizations on their backs for eons.
As we departed the building post-closing, I walked my client back to where my car was parked. There, palely loitering on the passenger seat, lay an old, withered briefcase of mine, a remnant of many other battles and currently over-stuffed with the paperwork of another client’s latest disarray.
“That’s YOUR file,” I said, pointing with one finger while crossing some others, “right there.”
She smiled, obviously relieved, and thanked me for all my good work. With that she walked off to her newly altered life, not only restored to her belief that she had received something of benefit for the hiring of me but now with the paperwork to prove it.
©2013, S. Sponte, Esq.