Old People

Old Lady Lawyer: Lessons From San Bernardino

This is not about about gun control, pro or con. It’s not a column about terrorism, the homeland, or anything like that. It’s much more personal.

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No, this is not a column about gun control, pro or con. It’s not a column about terrorism, the homeland, or anything like that. It’s much more personal.

I started my career in San Bernardino, yes that city, almost forty years ago as a deputy district attorney. It was, even then, a city of hard knocks and hard times, a working-class town, with blocks of vacant empty space, businesses that had tried and failed, days often so smoggy that you couldn’t see the San Gabriel mountains to the north and east. On a clear day after a rainstorm you could see Mt Baldy (at 10,000 feet or so) covered in snow. One can go both skiing and surfing in the same day, a never-ending attraction of SoCal.

In addition to learning how to try cases, I also learned how to be a lawyer, that is, how to work with defense counsel, with witnesses, with law enforcement, and citizens in need of help that only a prosecution could provide. Invaluable lessons for a baby deputy D.A. that I now use every day in my mediation practice. I learned how to try a case efficiently (read the jury instructions and follow them in the case in chief), how to evaluate a case (the witness skipped town), and how to settle one, a skill that takes time to learn.

In those days (yes, dinosaur days to the younger readers), there were less than a thousand attorneys in all of San Bernardino County, which is the largest county geographically in the country, over twenty-thousand square miles. For those of you east of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, San Bernardino County runs from the Los Angeles County line east to the Colorado River and northeast to what was called Stateline, Nevada, now called Primm (don’t ask me, I don’t name cities.) The county was then, as it is now, full of deserts, great dumping grounds for dead bodies and meth labs.

Why am I writing about this? The lessons I learned while there have stood me in good stead for all these years, and so San Bernardino means much more to me than just the site of another horrific crime scene.

The first lesson: learning from those who could teach and were willing to do so, starting from the bottom (trying traffic tickets) and working my way up to issuing complaints, handing preliminary hearings, trying misdemeanors and then felonies. Patience. No one in the office was going to assign me a triple homicide with multiple defendants the first year, let alone the first month, on the job.

Another lesson: learning how to work with defense counsel and not denigrate them (even though some of their clients were pretty unsavory and were oftentimes outright killers or other felonious types), so that we could handle matters effectively and efficiently. Neither counsel was discourteous to the other, which would have only pissed off the judge, one of whom, the story goes, kept a loaded gun on the bench, just in case the bailiff wasn’t quick enough.

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A third lesson: work hard, play hard. We would fight hard for our respective positions in court and then when the day was over, both prosecutors and defense lawyers would gather at a bar across the street from the 1926 courthouse (in disrepair even then) at a bar called appropriately Court Street (now long gone but also the name of the street). I listened to the lawyers swap stories over drinks. Camaraderie and friendship thrived over those shared happy hours, and that transferred over into how the lawyers treated each other, whether at prelim, pre-trial, or trial. We knew each other, not just across the counsel table, but across the cocktail table as well.

One of the virtues of a small-town practice, although others surely disagree, is that friendship and professional courtesy among lawyers is essential because word gets around, really, really fast. Reputation was everything, and social media today has nothing on how fast information spread throughout the courthouse and the other county courthouses as well. Lawyers talk; judges talk.

And, yes, it’s true that lawyers from out of county were traditionally “home-towned” in those days. In fact, the clerk for one of the commissioners had a big sign on the front of her desk that said, “We don’t care how you do it in Los Angeles.” The moral there applies everywhere: don’t argue about courtroom procedures; follow the local rules, even if you think they’re silly. Show respect. The old story about honey/vinegar applies.

Today, many young lawyer have nowhere to turn to learn the ropes. There’s a seeming lack of older, more experienced lawyers to whom the newbies can turn for advice, answer a question, handle overflow work that the older lawyers don’t want to do anymore, or just time spent over coffee or a drink. A lot of what I learned I picked up anecdotally at this job and not just during “working hours,” however that term was defined. Every lawyer has something to teach; every lawyer, no matter how many years in practice, always has something to learn.

I still have friends from that first job. I have picked up the phone to ask a question or refer a matter. The goal is to not burn bridges, to keep the friendships and professional relationships made along the way. In mediation, when I see an unwillingness to meet the other side, to introduce each other if they haven’t yet met, to even shake hands at the outset, I am appalled. Where does this lack of manners come from? What kind of example did their parents set? The answer is they didn’t.

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So, this hard luck, dusty, smoggy, now bankrupt city taught me a lot, a lot more probably than young lawyers learn in the big city. After all, who is going to help a lawyer but another lawyer?

Jill Switzer is closing in on 40 (not a typo) years as a active member of the State Bar of California. Yes, folks, California, that state west of the Sierra Nevada, which everyone likes to diss. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see old lawyers, young lawyers, and those in-between interact — it’s not always pretty. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.

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