Finance

My Client Died In Front Of Me At The Courthouse And I Don’t Much Feel Like Writing About Money

Nobody expects to die at the courthouse on the way to a hearing.

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Ostensibly, this column is about the intersection of finance and the law. I love that topic. Honestly, if we get into the nuances of it, deep down, what isn’t about money at some level? I therefore get to write about practically any topic I find interesting, and I get to have some great conversations with very interesting people who find some of this stuff as compelling as I do (many of those who write me do not agree with me, but happily debate and discuss the subjects I’m covering with all the admirable verve you’d expect of professional advocates). I love the readers of this column as much as I love the topic.

But today, I’m not really in the mood for financial matters. The headline pretty much sums it up. Just before a hearing last week, my client passed away at the courthouse.

He collapsed outside of the security checkpoint, and the bailiffs working the metal detector sprang into action. Paramedics were on the scene performing CPR almost immediately. An AED was attached. All I could offer were a few hollow words of comfort to his son and reference to what I knew from my file when one of the deputies asked for a list of current medications. I’m no medical professional, but even from the perspective of an attorney, the prognosis did not look good.

Eventually, someone from court administration came up to me, confirmed that I was the man’s lawyer, and said that the judge wanted to see me. Although it felt a bit wrong to abandon my client (even though all I had been doing was standing there being beyond useless), I followed the instructions and headed into the courtroom. It was the judge who told me that my client had passed. Apparently the judge had been slipped a note, and apparently the ongoing CPR had become theater for the many gathered onlookers.

As deaths go, this one was not especially untimely. My client was an older gentleman, and not in particularly good health. But nobody expects to die at the courthouse on the way to a hearing.

It was a peculiar, jarring thing to witness. When I got back to the office, I saw on my desk the poem my client had handwritten for me a few weeks earlier. Yeah, he wrote me a poem (he wrote one for my paralegal too). When does a client ever write his lawyer a poem?

As the lawyer who signed the pleadings that brought my client to that hearing, I was thinking a lot over the weekend about why we do this, what it’s all about. And I sure didn’t come up with a set of comprehensive answers. Yes, it’s for the money. But I really hope that’s not the extent of it. I hope I gave this man some comfort, some companionship even, in his final days. Perhaps he felt better on the way to that hearing knowing he had someone in his corner. He was definitely a fighter. But one who wrote poems.

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So, today I don’t have any biting comments for you. I’m out of political criticisms, and I don’t have any pins to push into fraudsters. No worries: I promise you, my loyal readers, that we’ll resume our study in snarkology next week. For now though, I want you to go outside. Sit in the sunshine. Tell someone close to you — out loud — how you feel about him or her. Maybe even write a poem. Because it can all be over in a flash.

Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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