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February 2004Change and decay, change and decay . . .by Lindsay Thompson, Bar News Editor Change is inevitable. In a progressive country change is constant. The country's moral values, far from changing, seem to remain unnaturally constant.
Change will be a recurring theme in coming issues of Bar News. It's happening all around us. As usual, as a profession, we are behind the curve. We resist it. We fight it. I recall the lawyer at the Millennium Bar Convention who wondered — in a seminar on diversity — why "Mexicans" who move here don't just learn English, become productive and forelock-tugging members of the community, and not cause trouble — the way they did when he was a lad in eastern Washington. When former BOG member Paul Lehto proposed this issue on transformative law, I jumped at the chance to do it. These articles, and more we didn't have room for but will run in the future, represent what's just over the horizon — the shape of things to come. While litigation has its place — after 153 trials, all over Washington, I know it does — we need to stop treating everything, as one author suggests, as though it's a nail and all we have is a hammer. Shabby practice by lawyers goes on all the time in this state. Judges impose more rules all the time. Look at how the volume of local rules has assumed a life of its own — hundreds of pages of ways to hometown your opponent, and we're no better off. To no small extent, the problem is one of judges letting lawyers do pretty much what they want without fear of consequences. One lawyer, plaintiffing a case against my client, missed every deadline in King County's minutiae-driven case schedule, then wheeled in three days before trial to ask for a continuance. The judge's bailiff, in a spontaneous moment, said, "You should ask the judge to dismiss the complaint. This is outrageous. She won't like this a bit." From your mouth to the bench's ears, I thought. I moved to dismiss. The judge refused. I could write a whole series of columns on idiot stunts I've seen lawyers pull, and I may yet. But I digress. Suffice it to say, in every court there's a judge presiding. If the way we do litigation needs to change, let the courts force it. Whack lawyers' pocketbooks, and they will change for the better. Beyond that, however, is the inescapable fact that the legal profession in Washington and everywhere else is getting more and more insulated from most of the population — those whom we took an uninspired, antiquated, badly in-need-of-revision (with that revision languishing in the glacial fastnesses of the Supreme Court's Rules Committee) oath to serve. Bar News recently ran an article on how few Hispanic lawyers there are compared to the burgeoning Hispanic population of our state. We ran an issue on Indian law a year ago — about how it affects most counties in Washington, yet we require no knowledge of it on our bar exam. We'll be running articles in the future on gay rights — the new third rail of American politics and law. While Washington residents go to neighboring British Columbia to get married, the WSBA is standing with its fingers in its ears, eyes closed, singing, "la, la, la, la." Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, a novelty 30 years ago, has come to roost amid us. Change — rapid, radical, and immediate — is the order of the day. You can get used to it or be overwhelmed by it. Bar News is committed to helping identify coming change and how we address it. As Alva Long used to say, think of us as the dead horse in the living room no one wants to talk about. We will shout until we are heard. Attention must be paid. Lindsay Thompson practices law on Salmon Bay in Seattle. He can be contacted at tradelaw@thompson-law.com.
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