Joining The Bandwagon

July 17, 2012July 17, 2012 / Bruce Cameron / 2 Comments

Like this, but with instruments

It may not be news, but two facts are colliding – rural communities lack lawyers and the placement rate for newly graduated law students is abysmal thanks in part to a nationwide glut of attorneys – in the ivory towers of academia and the in paneled halls of Bar Associations (please allow the literary license – I know that very few law schools actually have ivory towers, most simply make do with concrete and cinderblock, and most Bar Associations’ hallways are paint & drywall). But there are efforts afoot to try to rectify the situation by, in one form or another, inserting tab A (new graduates) into slot B (rural communities).

Recently, the Wall Street Journal and Eastern Iowa News Now reported on efforts by the Iowa State Bar, the University of Iowa, Drake University in Iowa, and Creighton University in Nebraska to place law school students in to summer internships and young lawyers in to permanent jobs in small towns and rural communities.

Today, the Kansas City Star and the ABA Journal report on a collaboration between the University of Kansas Law School, Washburn Law School, and the Kansas Bar Association aimed at enticing young lawyers and law students into rural practice. Currently, the collaboration offers two programs, one to help students master the business management skills needed to thrive in a solo/small practice and the other arranges for unpaid internships with rural lawyers and judges.

Mobility

July 16, 2012July 16, 2012 / Bruce Cameron

The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn’t get bigger or heavier. — Bill Gates

Woman working on laptop by lake Out here in the little law office on the prairie, horsepower and hydraulics rule, so the term mobile is very, very broad; this is farm country where 1200 pound hay bales are stacked in the barn like Lego™blocks, and 2000 pound cows are lifted to table height to save the farrier’s back. Folks out here are much more impressed by the technology that makes large things mobile than they are in lightweight mobile technology – after all, it is far more awe-inspiring to watch a 4 man crew lift a house and move it 60 feet to the right than it is to watch one guy pick up a laptop and walk down the street.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I dearly love those dainty bits of battery sucking silicon that keep me tethered to the outside world. The fact is, I was mobile when being mobile was all about lead/acid batteries and 9 inch black and white screens. It was an era when laptops the size of a suitcase weighing in at 16 pounds were considered sexy enough to rate a swimsuit models for their magazine cover shots. It seems that, back in the day, courting a hernia was a sure path to the halls of übergeekdom and god-like sex appeal.While there were obvious strength-training benefits to those early luggable computers, today’s flyweight devices do wonders for encouraging the road warrior’s cardio-fitness as they allow facile movement between car and coffeehouse, coffeehouse and gym without the need to ever cut that etheric umbilicus cord that links us to our data.

For the rural lawyer, mobile technology’s promise of 24/7 access is but a siren’s song; luring us ever forward in the hopes of finding true connectivity only to dash all hopes upon the rocks of rural realities. For all that rural life offers – bucolic vistas, the tranquil peace of a meandering brook, the intoxicating smell of newly mown hay – the reality is that all this rural beauty comes at a price. The one thing those vistas, brooks, and hay fields have in common is that they are usually found at some distance from areas of high population density and all the wonderful infrastructure that blesses modern suburbia. So, as one travels those scenic country roads that wind their way through woods and over hills on your way to meet a client, you will find your path to be strewn with potholes both in the road and in the ether and its even odds that your destination will lie in one of those areas that cellular cover maps label terra incognita and warn travelers that hic sunt dracones. Continue reading →

The Dark Night of the Solo

July 11, 2012 / Bruce Cameron

Once in the dark of night, Inflamed with love and wanting, I arose (O coming of delight!) And went, as no one knows, When all my house lay long in deep repose — Saint John of the Cross

One of the more nerve-racking things about public speaking is the wait between the speaking engagement and the receipt of the program evaluation sheets. It’s a giddily self-deluding period where, based on the positive feedback from the 3 people who talked to you in the 5 minutes between speakers, you are sure that all went well and that you are on the road to becoming the next great orator of our times. Then the evaluation sheets arrived and you realize that it will be some time before you are a threat to Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King or Emmeline Pankhurst. But, as often is the case, it is the comments and not the numerical evaluations that strike a chord , and it is one of these comments that I would like to take a moment to respond to. The writer states:

Rural [law] equals less rich (not necessarily ‘poor’). At age 28, I was desperate for a job, so I moved to a small town to work with an experienced attorney who is nearing retirement. Now, almost 7 years later, I want to leave and will if I can. Modest income clients don’t (or won’t) pay attorney fees even though we charge much less per hour than attorneys in urban areas. Fact is, attorneys in rural areas make far less than in urban areas, often have bad clients, and can get better & more interesting jobs elsewhere.

As our young writer has travelled halfway down life’s path, let me play Virgil to his Dante, and let our journey begin not in our Dante’s dark wood or in the proponent’s idealized celestial sphere, but rather at the foot of the craggy mountain of boots-on-the-ground reality. Young Dante, I’ve yet to run across a lawyer (big city or small town) who has not had at least one the-grass-is-greener moment at some time or other in their career. Lawyering is a tough slog for anyone who gives half a damn about doing the best possible job they can for each client, and it sure doesn’t help that, for the average lawyer, it sure ain’t the high-paying, jet-setting, celebrity career the law school brochures described. Even I must admit to having the occasional lustful thought about packing it all in and heading off to look for a quiet associate’s position with a regular salary. However, if this is not merely a passing fancy but is one of those dark nights of the soul, then it is far better to move on to those greener pastures than to unhappily till the same dismal furrow. But before you go, talk to someone (a mentor, a friend, your local branch of Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers); perhaps there are other options out there and it may be easier to fix what you have than to start something new.

The comment continues:

Continue reading →

Road Trip

June 20, 2012June 27, 2012 / Bruce Cameron / 5 Comments

The saying “Getting there is half the fun” became obsolete with the advent of commercial airlines. — Henry J. Tillman

The Rural Lawyer is hitting the road this week. My thanks to the South Dakota Bar for their gracious invitation to speak at their Annual Meeting, I’ll be filling the dead space between the good speakers and the mid-afternoon break with my take on technology and marketing for the rural solo/small firm.

There is a lot to be said for travel – it’s broadening (though give the current state of the coach seats on commercial aircraft, I’d dispute that sentiment – though my hat’s off to the air crews; any one who can keep smiling after dealing with the hoi-polloi that generally occupies coach either is of a more pacific temperament than I or has access to some high quality mood stabilizers), it’s educational, it’s relaxing – but for the rural lawyer, travel is just part of the job.

While those charming wide open vistas of rural America are part of the attraction of small towns, they also mean that there is always going to be some distance between where you are and where you want to be – usually only a practice located in a county seat will find clients and courthouses in close proximity. So, the rural lawyer finds that reliable transportation and a good GPS are just as important as form books, laptops, and practice manuals.

Flora, Fauna and Balance

June 4, 2012 / Bruce Cameron

Balance There is one thing I have to say about moving a law office – don’t pack your checklist with all the rest of your papers. Took me 3 days to find it again and trying to tie up all the sundry loose ends from memory is a harrowing endeavor. You are constantly plagued with the nagging doubt that you’ve forgotten something. The only positive thing about this whole exercise (outside of the lower rent) was having scheduled some vacation time at the end of May (the great thing about being solo is that my boss is pretty easy-going when it comes to providing a little down time when needed).

For those not familiar with the idiosyncrasies of a rural solo practice, you have to realize that, unless you actually leave the vicinity of your practice (generally 500 miles is the minimum safe distance) vacation does not translate into time away from the office – rather, it translates into less time in the office (or dealing with client matters) and a more relaxed dress code. How much less time is highly variable and is highly dependent on the number of fires that crop up – rural clients understand that about the need to grab a little time away from the office from time to time (especially when the days are sunny, the fish are biting, or there’s hay to put up) and know that if you are on vacation, phone calls and e-mails may not always be returned the same day, but closings have to be done, bills have to be paid, invoices have to be sent, and court dates have to be made even if they do encroach on your time off. My latest vacation was about par for the course – 4 half days in the office and 2 half days working from home out of 10 working days away.

The upshot was that I had plenty of time to clear various assorted bits flotsam and jetsam out of the barn, garage, house, and my mind with time left over to put up first crop hay. Nothing like physical labor and the relative quiet of the rural country side to clear out the noise of the e-mail, cell phone, social media connected world. By the end, I was ready to head back to the practice ready to dive into this summer’s version of adventures in solo practice – that is until my 5:00 AM greeting by a highly affectionate and horrendously odoriferous dog snapped my synapses out of my vacation induced bonhomie. There is nothing quite like a freshly skunked dog to focus one’s attention – no slow immersion into the work-a-day world, this is the jump-in-the-deep-end-oh-man-that-water’s-cold introduction to reality. This morning’s activities became focused on the single task of reducing the pungent cloud currently enveloping the dog without transferring it to those of us who would shortly be interacting with other people. There is little that can actually remove skunk smell from dog hair (only time can do that), the best one can hope for is to get to it while it is still fresh and remove enough of it so that the dog’s mere presence no longer brings tears to one’s eyes. It’s a battle best fought with degreaser, baking soda, and elbow grease – the folk remedies of tomato juice and peppermint mouthwash simply leave the dog smelling like a bowl of Tabbouleh that’s gone off.

Balance 0, skunk 1