TO-WIT: DARK AND STORMY NIGHTS
It was a dark and stormy night again last evening, just one of many I’ve had of late, and they’re always the same. At three a.m. I’m sucked into involuntary consciousness by the raucous swells of lightning and thunder going off inside my head, and there I lay, fretting much against my will until way past dawn.
What with all this angst, all this turmoil, all this sense that I’ve committed a transgression for which I will most certainly fry in hell until crispy well done, you might properly conclude I’m practicing family law again. But you’d be wrong. This is all about a lawsuit I’ve recently filed. It’s a wonderful lawsuit, creative, intelligent and aggressive, but those exemplary attributes, usually more than enough to pilot me through the turbulent emotional seas of litigation, have in this instance been insufficient to save me from an inundation by night sweats.
My client is the plaintiff, an honest-to-God, oh-be-still-my-heart damsel in distress, and the defendants are the usual suspects I enjoy excoriating, save one. He is both a colleague and - although he probably isn’t anymore - a friend. I have never before sued a colleague, but unfortunately his conduct had placed him directly in the line of fire, and what else was I to do?
Oh, I could have just said no. I could have proffered my client the opinion that, yes, she had a great lawsuit, and that, yes, she had sustained significant and needless damages at the hands of a misbegotten assemblage of bullies, villains and small town tyrants, but that, sorry, she would have to get another lawyer.
But how can I suggest another lawyer for this case when I am so despicably beset by the notion that there’s no such thing? Such a dogged and egocentric mindset has its value, to be sure, but it carries with it that accursed amalgam in which dark and stormy nights fester and thrive.
When I was an abecedarian, the notion of suing a colleague was unthinkable. Those were also the salad days of the minimum fee bill, a wonderfully insouciant conspiracy in restraint of trade which set forth the minimum fee a lawyer could charge for most services and included the admonition that charging less was evidence of unethical conduct. I thought it to be ridiculous, of course, but it did say something about the care and camaraderie with which we looked after our own. It was a grubby, illegal camaraderie, yes, but if then we were soldiers of fortune we were also soldiers of a common cause, and there was something of comfort in that.
And where has that comfort gone? How can I ever again have any peace of mind, any sense of solidarity with my colleagues, when there are ghastly miscreants such as me going around suing us?
This morning I had a dream. There both of me stood as two knights at either end of the jousting field, one valiant in the finest chainmail armor, spotless and shining and glinting in the sun, the other villainous in tin, besmirched by perfidious mire and shielding his eyes from the light. Rosalind drops her kerchief and at it we go. There’s this titanic crash of horse, metal and men, and then there’s this dark and stormy thundering of the ether, and one of us wakes up and is alone.
©2010, S. Sponte, Esq.