RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED
LEXAPLEXY
There is a curious malady which affects me, and the longer I practice law and the more often I observe my colleagues, the more I realize I do not suffer alone. To the contrary, I find almost all of my fellow lawyers suffer in varying degrees with this singular professional affliction. It has no name of which I am aware and, unlike the misnomered Legionnaire’s’ Disease, seems to strike only the legion at the Bar. For want of a better name and imagination, I call it lexaplexy, from the Latin word meaning law, and the Greek word meaning struck down. I would define the word, and hence the illness, as a sudden temporary loss of the ability to practice law. Every attorney may have different symptoms, but here are mine: An inability to answer a ringing telephone; a shiver at the sound of a buzzing intercom; a reluctant, almost death-like dread of clients; a pronounced fear of leaving the office, or in severe cases, of even going there; and, an overall fear of making any decision pertaining to anything whatsoever. Every letter or pleading that requires a response becomes an Everest, every appointment a High noon. In short, the illness robs me of my ability to function professionally, and is identifiable by the autistic behavior it induces.
One such colleague similarly afflicted spent the whole of his working days enwombed in his office, sitting in his chair and his chair with his back to the door, muttering “If the law rolls over, we will drown.” His secretary, after making sure his malpractice premiums had been paid, notified the Bar Association and he was eventually committed to the Commonwealth’s facility for the bewildered and legally insane.
Most cases are not that severe, and fortunately the symptoms usually pass after a few days, or the settlement of a large personal injury case, whichever comes first. Query though, what causes the condition and what causes it to pass? The psychiatric journals offer no insight nor do the physical medical journals, other than to suggest that all lawyers are basically crazy. I suppose it will be left to us doctors of juris to heal ourselves.
As to the cause, I can only offer the surmise, based on personal experience and the observation of my brother attorneys, that the onset is produced when one’s professional instincts for combat and survival are eroded to that point where one fees indefensible, a sort of intellectual shell shock, a dementia ab inuria. The erosion begins with the judge who sneeringly advises you from the bench that your 90 page brief served only to provide his cat with a week’s supply of kitty litter. It may be accelerated by that $200 fender-bender contingency fee case in which your worthy opponent serves his first set of pleadings on you in a U-Haul-It. The finishing stroke may be a coup de main from that whiz on the appellate bench who questions why your brief and record of 800 pages fails to address itself to the apparently insurmountable issue of jurisdiction over the subject matter, and shouldn’t you be in another court?
The catalog of causation is matched in its variety and unpredictability only by the response it produces. I have heard tell, in the hushed whispers usually reserved for the holy and the dead, of a practitioner, a gentleman of previously impeccable and unblemished professional character, who, during a particularly severe lexaplectic seizure, barricaded himself in the library of his 15th floor city office and began dropping volumes of the Dicennial Digest out of the window onto unsuspecting passers-by below. Some months later, when he had regained a small measure of his coherence, he explained that his behavior was motivated by a professional curiosity concerning the reaction of layman when struck down by legal precedent.
As to the abatement of the symptoms, I cannot readily put my finger on the “why”. Pass it does, usually, just as reappear it does, always. A vacation helps, without the telephone, mail, newspapers and bills. A long weekend sometimes helps, and death almost always cures it. Typically though, the symptoms disappear as the nerve ends heal, or as one wins any confrontation, however minor. Any point conceded in your favor becomes an aspirin of delight and hurries the restorative process. Gradually we regard ourselves with sufficient confidence to muddle through leaving the lingering effects behind as if a bad dream.
As for a cure, there probably is none. It is, quite simply, a hazard of the profession, a by-product of the adversary system and human nature. We survive because, and only because, we can endure.
In the end, I am reminded of the dean of my law school, who, during that most impressionable period of my life, was fond of telling me that the law was blind. I conjured up the statue of Justice, scales majestically balanced and outstretched, blindfold covering her eyes, and I gave to that universal image the layman’s notion of impartiality. Now, of course, I know, as do we all, that the blindfold prevents that most jealous of all mistresses from seeing the clowns who stumble and fall, trying to do her bidding.
Respectfully submitted,
S. Sponte, Esq.
© 1977 – S. Sponte, Esq.