TO-WIT: SOLE MAN
This has been a tumultuous decade for me. It has seen me relieve myself of both two wives and a law partner. though I have no regrets about any of those three divorces, I do in fact at times miss my law partner. At least he usually smiled at me in the morning.
My partnership was better than most. I liked my partner and he liked me and we got along as well as any two litigious souls might who were confined for hours on end within the same walls, facing unreasonable clients, endless deadlines, demanding judges and opposing counsel. to our everlasting credit, screaming was kept to a minimum, and neither one of us did anything to the other that left marks.
Yet after seven or eight years, our interests diverged and so did our partnership. The divorce was amicable. He took the phone number and I took the office space and we parted friends, mutually agreeing that it would not be appropriate to continue the relationship, even on the weekends. We still shake hands when we meet, but that’s it, and it’s better that way all around.
Do not, however, mistake my sentimentality for regret. Since my partner and I went our separate ways, I have been a sole practitioner and it is a sole practitioner, in all things save love, God willing, that I intend to remain.
At one time practicing law alone would not have been considered of any particular note, but now we sole practitioners, as a breed, have edged out the snail darter on the list of endangered species. You see, it has become increasingly tougher to solo in a profession that, for various reasons, has quadrupled in its complexity over the last two decades. Our society is more litigious than ever, people point or otherwise direct fingers at the drop of an invective, and as always, it is to the lawyer that the populace turns for direction, protection, salvation and revenge.
Unfortunately, in response to the clamoring of a constituency that has come to regard legislation as the ultimate talisman for society’s multitudinous ills, lawmakers have taken to enacting legislation in a spawning frenzy heretofore attributable only to bunnies. So, what with all the new laws and a fairly activist judiciary to interpret them, it has become virtually impossible for sole practitioners to keep up with all of the changes. It’s true enough that I’ve never been one to read the advance sheets. It’s just that now I’m falling behind at a much faster rate than ever before.
For a sole practitioner to contend with the entire panoply of the law,, unaided and alone, is a hopeless and barbaric undertaking in an arena that brooks no weaklings. There are just too many battles and too many battlefronts, and as a net result, our numbers continue to diminish against the onslaught of an ever-burgeoning adversarial system. By apt analogy, just consider how many more Christians there might be in the world today if centuries ago they only had to contend with one lion at a time.
completely apart from the practical economic benefit of spreading the overhead cost over a broader base, the practice of law by partnership or some other form of collective arrangement makes good sense. Such an association enables the lawyer to specialize in just one or two aspects of the law and permits him or her to confine the ever-increasingly complex adversarial search for truth and justice to a smaller, more manageable field of battle. It also affords a ready pool of warm bodies to blame when things go unexpectedly amiss.
All of the foregoing notwithstanding, here I yet remain, anachronistically a sole practitioner, and it is here, precariously perched, that I fully intend to remain, daunted, yes, crazy, probably, but only slightly bowed.
You see, the problem with practicing law with partners is that you have to practice law with partners. If lawyers were not a litigious lot in the first instance, they would not be lawyers, and who in their right mind would want to form any sort of business arrangement with people like that?
As far as I am able to determine, partners have only one useful function. Because of their own knowledge and experiences, they can on occasion offer fresh insight into any case that might be troubling me, the better by which to assure that I have a full and complete understanding of how badly I’ve screwed it up. But then again I have a lot of lawyer friends who can do the same thing for me over the telephone, and, unlike a partner, they won’t ever be occupying my bathroom when I need it most.
Thus it is that I practice law alone, frequently having to be in two places at once, frequently having no one else to blame when things go awry, other than my secretary of course, and frequently having to hop Milady’s tightrope on one foot while I wend my anomalous way from one crisis to another, balancing court dates, clients and colleagues with all the aplomb of a blind juggler. And that’s just fine with me.
Do I make mistakes? sure. Do I miss appointments, recent significant statues and decisions, and scheduled court appearances? Sure. And, as I have come to learn over the years, does any of that make a difference in the lives of my clients? Naw!
© 1991, S. Sponte, Esq.