Just scrolling through ATL daily is enough to wonder if there’s going to be room on Elon Musk’s spaceship to Mars. If there is, sign me up, as perhaps the environment there would be more hospitable to women than the one here on earth. Since Musk’s company Space X is just down the road here, so to speak, I wonder if I would have a shot. (Pun intended.)
Good grief. What do law schools, which should be “above reproach” so to speak, not understand about sexual harassment? What kind of message do they send to students, alumni, and the broader legal community when they allow a professor to continue to teach and, to add insult to injury, teach as the highest paid professor?
This is not the first case of allowing a law school dean to resign and yet remain on the law school faculty. Berkeley Law is another example. The fallout over this case was one of the major reasons that resulted in the resignation of Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks.
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Dirks’s successor? The first woman chancellor for the 150-year-old Berkeley campus, Carol Christ, who is 73 years old. Read that sentence again, please: first woman chancellor in Berkeley’s 150-year history and a senior citizen to boot. Yay! So much for the theory that older women have no value in the workplace. Legal recruiters, hiring partners and managers, take notice and pay attention. Wouldn’t it be great if someday age and gender are no longer descriptors in any article about achievement? I don’t think I’ll be around to see that.
(Full disclosure: my undergraduate degree is from Berkeley and I know Chancellor Christ, having served on a Berkeley board with her in the early 1990s. If anyone can do the job she has to do, she’s the one.)
So, there may be some hope, albeit not much, for older women lawyers who want to continue to work and find no takers. As a friend of mine has said, we are selling, but no one is buying. More’s the pity.
Maybe if I reread Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, a popular self-help relationship book of the 1990s, that would help me understand all this, but then again, maybe not. Female dinosaurs probably read the book much more than men, since it was one of those pop psychology books that were on the best-seller lists for months at a clip. The book decoded the difficulty that men and women have communicating across the gender gap in terms of establishing and maintaining romantic relationships. However, it didn’t help me, as you can call me divorced. However, I think the author would agree there can be no ambiguity about when “no” means “no.”
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Ambiguity is an essential part of law practice. A lawyer friend of mine is very uncomfortable with ambiguity. She wants definitive answers. I asked her how she could have been a lawyer for all the years she’s been practicing if she is uncomfortable with ambiguity. She says that when she controls a situation, she’s fine, but how often does that really happen? What and who do we truly control?
Unless the answer can be given “yes” or “no,” there is always ambiguity in what we do. Permission to commit a crime; there’s no ambiguity about that answer. Should I tell the truth on the stand? No ambiguity about that answer either. There are some questions where the answers are unambiguous, but not all that many.
How will the court rule? What will be jury decide? Do the cases help or hurt? If the latter, how to distinguish them? Will the witness hold up on cross? Even if we think we know what the result will be, there’s no guarantee, and we always make it very clear to the clients (and if we don’t, call the malpractice carrier) that we aren’t a guarantor or warrantor of results.
If you needed any reason to “be nice,” to be professionally cordial, to not burn any bridges (I know I sound like your mother, but I’m right about this) here’s a recent example. My former boss needed a referral to a lawyer with a particular specialty.
I suggested a lawyer, whom I knew when I was in the DA’s office forty years ago (he was a criminal defense lawyer then) and emailed him, asking if his firm could help. Within five minutes (and I am not making this up), he had emailed and called me and offered his firm’s help. I hadn’t worked with him (or opposed him in friendly ways) in forty years and yet he responded immediately.
I have to believe that the friendly relationship we have maintained over all the years, plus the fact that he’s a really nice guy, were the reasons he responded so quickly. Cynics may say that he was just interested in the potential case, but I don’t think so. In fact, I know so. Collegiality and civility are not just buzzwords; they are real.
Ever attended a legal hackathon? That’s an event where lawyers, paralegals, tech people and others with ideas about how to improve legal services and processes get together over a weekend to develop and pitch ideas. I showed up for the pitch presentations at the SoCal location. It was my first time and it was fascinating. Some very good ideas, but I’m wondering, from a practical perspective, how they’d work in real life and time.
Given that change in our profession moves about as fast as glue, I have my doubts as to whether any of them could ever see the light of day. Perhaps it’s just my dinosaur brain wondering about implementation from a perspective of seeing all the issues that I saw in the presentations. Maybe it’s just as well that the majority of the presenters were unsullied by years and years of practical legal experience. They will get there soon enough and maybe, just maybe, someday, hackers will somehow make our profession keep up with technology.
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].