I was halfway through writing the first draft of my column for this week when Las Vegas happened. It’s not necessary to explain what “Las Vegas” means in this context, and so writing about anything in our profession pales against what has happened there. Fretting about billable hours, legal technology, bar passage rates, bonuses, et. al. is so stupid, so trivial, and yes, so petty when measured against lives lost and all those injured. Writing about anything related to what we do every day was not something that I could do. Writing about Las Vegas is.
Above the Law is pretty East Coast centric, and many of its readers believe, like Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cartoon, there is no life worth living, let alone any life at all, west of the Hudson River. We westerners who live three time zones and approximately 2500 miles away from the Atlantic seaboard are happy with that distance. There is life here, and now, once again, there is death.
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Las Vegas is less than 300 miles from SoCal, and if you can’t visualize that, take a few minutes from billing those hours and look at Google maps or whatever resource you choose.
(A pop quiz: which is further west, Reno, Nevada or Los Angeles, California? Most people get it wrong. Reno is further west. The California coastline curves to the southeast.)
Depending on how fast you drive (no comment here), it takes approximately 4 hours on Interstate 15 to get to Las Vegas. The Mojave Desert drive is pretty desolate, but thoughts of what awaits in Las Vegas spur drivers on. Traffic can be a nightmare, just as it is in SoCal, and what takes four hours normally can take double that, depending upon the number of overturned tanker trucks and drivers who go too fast and lose control, tying up traffic between here and there for hours.
In the summer months, it is an incredibly hot drive (115 or so is not uncommon, but it’s a so-called “dry heat”). Many people fly; it’s a short, one hour flight but bumpy because of the mountain range separating California from Nevada. Most non-California tourists fly into McCarran, grab a taxi/shuttle to their hotel and never wander outside again until they fly home.
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Many, many people from SoCal go there on the weekends to gamble, see shows, shop, attend concerts, play golf, gamble, eat at many fine restaurants, hike, shop, lay by huge sparking pools drinking adult beverages, gamble. For those who have been there, have you noticed that there is not a single clock anywhere in any casino? You get the picture. It’s fantasyland for adults, leaving reality behind for whatever the length of stay. Las Vegas is our backyard playground.
Among the 59 dead are two dozen from SoCal, including a San Diego lawyer. Two dozen, almost incomprehensible.
So far, I don’t know personally anyone among the dead and/or injured, but given the concept of six degrees of separation, I can’t imagine that I won’t.
Some lawyers are admitted in both California and Nevada. (There’s only one law school in Nevada and that’s only been within the last twenty years.)
In the employment area, which is where I spent much of my career and still do as a mediator, the two states could not be more different. California is highly regulated (emphasis on the “highly”) while Nevada takes more of a laissez faire approach. Just one example: Nevada follows the federal overtime law of more than forty hours in a workweek, while California has the daily overtime law of more than eight hours in a day. And don’t get me started on paycheck stub issues here in the Golden State.
When an employment lawyer I know moved his practice from California to Nevada, I asked him what it was like to practice in a state that was so lightly regulated in the employment area. He laughed and said it was heaven.
Take a look at the difference in lawyer population of the two states. ABA statistics show that in 2015, there were approximately 165,000 active lawyers in California, compared to a little more than 7000 in Nevada.
Does that mean there would be more job opportunities for lawyers in the Silver State? California’s population is more than 39 million; Nevada’s is under 3 million. I’ll let you do the math.
I know lawyers who live in Nevada and commute and/or telecommute to their practices in Southern California. They all have varying reasons for doing so. One reason is housing affordability. The “Great Recession,” as it is called, gobsmacked Nevada, especially Southern Nevada, and housing prices are only now starting to rise, a decade after massive losses hit that housing market. Foreclosures and bankruptcies kept Nevada lawyers busy for years. Meanwhile, SoCal housing prices keep zooming up and we wonder if another bubble is on the way or already here.
Another reason for practicing here and living there: Nevada has no state income tax. There’s been an exodus of SoCal residents moving to Nevada for that reason alone.
Las Vegas has been called “America’s Playground” and rightly so. Everything imaginable is there. Elvis lives there, at least his impersonators do. Built by the mob, promoted by the Rat Pack, Las Vegas rose out of the desert to become today a city of high rise hotels, full of glitz. Las Vegas Boulevard, aka The Strip, is so busy that there are pedestrian overpasses to get from one side to the other; there’s also a monorail that runs between certain hotels. Drive on the Strip at your own risk.
Right now and for, I think, some time to come the luster of the Las Vegas marketing term “America’s Playground” will have a darker meaning: when an armed bully tore up the playground and didn’t have the guts to stick around to face the consequences. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” is, sadly, no longer true.
Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. 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 dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at [email protected].