Small Town Life

Rural Compensation

/ Bruce Cameron

Fall is in full swing out here where the big woods meets the prairie and that means harvest is in full swing and that means that, with the exception of all things relating to football, grain yields, market prices, profits and losses are the primary topics of most casual conversations. The fall months also see an uptick in the rural lawyering business as clients look to close those little, optional matters like estate planning while the weather is still pleasant and cash comes a bit more readily to hand. Profits, losses and budgets are on a rural lawyer’s hit parade as well, for fall also brings sales reps for the phone books, the local school sports teams sponsorship opportunities, and the requests for various and sundry donations – everyone is aware of when cash is flowing through the community.

This fall, a small town lawyer passed away. I didn’t know him and were it not for the internet, I would have never heard of his passing. However, serendipity, the season, and the vagaries of a Google search led me to a small obituary in the Valley News Dispatch and got me thinking about how rural lawyers are paid. It’s true that a rural lawyer’s net income is less, perhaps substantially less than that of our big city, big firm counterparts – a fact that we hope is balanced by the fact that the cost of living is lower for those of us out here in the sticks. But does net income really sum up the totality of a rural practice’s earnings or is there something more to a rural lawyer’s compensation?

skyscrapers and smog anyone?

Now, I’ve never had the privilege of seeing a city sky line from a high-rise corner office and I must admit that my desk now sits in a window-less room in a building perched perilously close to the city limits and the ragged edges of suburbia, but when I step outside at the end of the day, I am rewarded with views like this:

It may just be me, but this always comes down as a plus in the compensation column.

But it is a couple of lines at the bottom of those few column inches spent on the passing of a lawyer that stick with me. The lines read in part: “The Valley News Dispatch will occasionally run obituary stories on notable local residents. They are news items…” In small towns, lawyers make a difference and their passing is newsworthy, not just noted by a paid listing in the back of the classifieds. Those column inches do more than simply mark the death of a small town lawyer, they’re the last installment on his compensation package.

Rest in peace Mr. Ambrose and thank you.

Don’t Tell Me It’s Raining

/ Bruce Cameron / 2 Comments

Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality. — Peter Drucker

Having gotten hooked on the concept that it is possible to engineer a consumer’s experience, I’m becoming more aware of the clues I use to evaluate quality service and I’m quickly coming to the conclusion that any consumer experience that adheres to  old adage: “don’t piss on my boots then try to tell me it’s raining” can claim to be providing minimally functional customer service. Given this relatively low bar, coming across truly horrific customer service is a rare event; yet recently, I’ve had the misfortune to walk away from a pair of consumer experiences with fairly damp footwear.

The first sandal sprinkling came from a small start-up marketing firm looking to expand into my neck of the woods. I like working with young companies, usually they are all teeth, shiny ideas, and enthusiasm. In this case, regrettably, it seemed that the teeth had been turned inward, the shiny ideas tarnished and the enthusiasm replaced by rancor as the failing interpersonal relationship between the company’s principles collapsed overnight. Now, I must commend these folks for letting me know (when it became evident that their personal differences were adversely impacting their working relationship) that they would no longer be able to meet with me. However, I could have done without the acrimony and personal tales of woe that accompanied the statements. It’s not that I’m not interested in “done me wrong” melodramas – I’m always on the look out for the next great country song lyric – but trying to engender sympathy just to poach business from the other is just plain icky (besides, I do family law and have learned the family law lawyer’s manta of “it ain’t my problem”). Continue reading →

Do it yourself

/ Bruce Cameron
water pump

There are times when duct tape just won’t do

Rural communities pride themselves on their independent spirit and the idea that an individual or a community can accomplish anything if they just set their mind to it. This is the land of do-it-yourself; there are few things these folks won’t or haven’t done be it a simple matter (say rebuilding a tractor’s motor) or the more complex (building a home). Sure, they’ll hire a “pro” to handle the tricky bits, but out here the term “pro” can mean “someone with more tools than you” or “someone who’s done it at least once” – it does not, necessarily, mean “someone with actual training, skill and expertise”.

This do-it-yourself spirit also extends to things like sewer and water – things generally considered basic infrastructure items in metropolitan areas. Given the lack of population density, private sewer and water systems are far more cost-effective than their public utility equivalents; when the distance between homes is measured in terms of miles (or fractions of miles) and not feet or yards, it is hard to recoup the cost needed to install and maintain a public water system. And, for the most part, private systems work well and once installed are reliable and simple to maintain – that is until they stop working and you realize that getting water out of the ground is a bit more complex than simply turning a tap.

One of the advantages of being in solo practice is that it’s fairly easy to get your boss’s OK to stay home and deal with the crisis du jour. One of the advantages of being a rural solo is that your clients understand when you call them at 7:00 AM to tell them you can’t meet with them that day because your well pump is out and you are hand-watering your livestock. The big disadvantage is that once you’ve cleared your calendar, you now have to (a) actually see to your livestock one bucket at a time, and (b) fix your well pump – if you are lucky the problem is electrical, above ground and easy to fix (provided you remember to turn the circuit breaker off first), if not, then there’s a couple of hundred feet of slimy, wet pipe that needs to be pulled out of the ground and it’s time to call in a pro.

Besides putting a kink in your morning ablutions, this rural fascination with DIY can put a kink in a rural law practice. It is the rare rural client who’ll see a lawyer at the first sign of a legal problem (cherish these people for they make your life simpler), most will either put things off until the last moment or try to handle things themselves. While these DIY’ers can have significant impact on your bottom line (inevitably, it costs far more to fix a problem than prevent one), they represent a far more valuable marketing opportunity and can become some of your biggest fans. When the DIY’er reaches the call-the-pro stage, they are (a) looking to resolve a very immediate problem and (b) are at a very teachable moment – if you can find a satisfactory, cost-effective solution and show them in a non-judgmental way (a) how much more cost-effective this solution would have been if… or (b) how many more options would have been available if … these do it at the last-minute consumers can be transformed into loyal call-at-the-first-sign clients — plus, pulling someone’s butt out of the fire (it may be a small fire to you, but it’s a big fire to them) is always good for positive word-of-mouth advertising.

Now, it’s time to get back to watering the critters.

The Dark Night of the Solo

/ 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 →

Flora, Fauna and Balance

/ Bruce Cameron

BalanceThere 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