In the 1960s, there was a very popular, but short-lived, British import TV show called TW3, or That Was The Week That Was.
A satirical, sketch show, it featured in its cast, among others, David Frost, who went on to great fame as an interviewer of many, included former President Richard M. Nixon after his Watergate resignation. If you’ve never seen the Frost-Nixon interview, it’s worth your time. While not using express words of apology, Nixon voiced his regrets.
AI Is Killing Legal’s Billable Hour. It’s Also Repeating Its Worst Mistake
Law firms and legal departments are writing the future of the profession in separate rooms. What happens when they actually work together?
So, I’m taking the title of that 1960s show, amending it a little, and putting a totally different spin on it, as this was truly the weekend that should not have been. When I wrote a column six months ago or so about San Bernardino and how the lessons I learned starting my legal career there have stayed with me all these years later, I never thought that within six months, there would be another mass shooting at what is called a “soft target.”
I’ve never been to Orlando, only been in Florida on my way to somewhere else, but the sheer horror of what happened there makes everything, and I mean everything, else seem trivial.
Thus, it’s not a week for sharing lawyer jokes (thanks to those who sent some my way); it’s not a week for snarky comments about increases in first year associate salaries to a level that some attorneys practicing for many years will never make; it’s not a week to whine or complain about business or lack there; it is not a week to complain about anything. Anything and everything pales in comparison to the awful events in Orlando this past weekend: the slaughter at the Pulse nightclub as well as the murder of young singer Christina Grimmie the night before.
I’ve been binge-watching Foyle’s War, a BBC production that was televised over a number of seasons on PBS. It’s the story of a detective chief superintendent of police on the home front in England during World War II.
AI Is Reshaping Legal Practice—But Tools Aren’t The Real Differentiator.
Explore the mindset, cultural shifts, and training strategies that define the AI‑savvy lawyer, revealing why human judgment, standardized competence, and integrated learning—not technology alone—will shape the future of the profession.
The series starts in 1940 when the British retreated from Dunkirk, evacuated by ships small and large, whose crews risked their lives to rescue the solders by crossing the English Channel to bring them home. The series continues throughout the war and ends a year or so thereafter. Crimes, big and small, don’t declare a moratorium during war.
Foyle’s War clearly delineates lives lived on the home front, the air raids, the Blitz, the rationing, the shortages, the real worry that the Germans would invade, given that they were just across the Channel, the feeling that the war would never end.
We dinosaurs (too young to remember Korea), remember Vietnam all too well. That war was fought on the other side of the world; it was the anti-war movement that was waged here. I remember young kids (and I do mean young, e.g. my age at the time) leaving from the Oakland Army Terminal to an all too uncertain tour of duty in “Nam.”
We remember the draft, friends who were 1-A, enlisting in the Air Force or the Navy, rather than being drafted into the Army and then foot soldiers in the jungle. The lottery replaced the draft in 1969 and if you lucked out with a high-enough number, you knew that civilian life would continue to be yours. Four years later, the draft was abolished. The scars of that war remain; post-traumatic stress syndrome has disabled (one hundred percent) a good friend of mine, a multi-decorated Army grunt.
Grenada, Panama, the 1991 Gulf War, even the Iraq War have been far away from home and except for television coverage of them, they didn’t really penetrate the dinosaur conscience unless family and/or friends were in the military.
So, now we’re engaged in the war on terror and have been for more than a decade with no end in sight. Some millennials have said that 9/11 was their Pearl Harbor.
As San Bernardino and now Orlando show us, there is no longer any demarcation between the home front and the war front. They are one and the same.
Millennials are fighting a different kind of war, one we dinosaurs didn’t ever imagine, a war on the home front. In today’s combat, there are no bomb shelters, no Cold War, no Berlin Wall, no Iron Curtain, no Cuban missile crisis, no Premier Khrushchev banging a shoe on his desk [yes, you read that correctly] at the United Nations and also telling us that “We will bury you.” Those were much more obvious, blatant, transparent times.
Today, it’s a totally different kind of war, the 21st century variety. It’s subtle, stealthy, and targets can be anywhere, anyone, and anything as this past weekend so sadly proved. We dinosaurs remember how very close we came to the brink of war in 1962 (affiliate link) when the Soviet Union had installed missiles in Cuba.
Now war is around the corner, in a government office, in a night club, or any of what are now called “soft targets.” The ages of those who perished in Orlando are almost all millennials. The war on terror enshrouds them in ways that we dinosaurs never thought possible.
Our targets were clearly delineated and easily definable. We grew up with the threat of nuclear war, that mushroom cloud, and Slim Pickens riding on a bomb in the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove. We thought outliers were responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1995 carnage in Oklahoma City.
Millennials have grown up with not only the threat of mutual nuclear annihilation, but now, as adults, it’s the reality of terrorism on the home front. While the war on terror is not the first war fought on American soil (how about the Revolutionary War and the Civil War?), it’s the first war of a very different kind. Just as dinosaurs were on the front lines in Vietnam, if Orlando is any example, millennials seem to be on the front lines now.
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 [email protected].