June 1999

Letters

Editor:

I read the article in the April Bar News regarding reciprocity in admission to practice in this state [Wayne Blair, "Is Reciprocal Admission of Lawyers a Good Idea?" p. 15]. As an attorney that has gone through that process, I think I have comments worth merit regarding this situation.

At the time I took the Washington State Bar, I was admitted and in active practice in California for approximately 17 years. I had sworn that I would never take another state bar examination, but wound up eating those words, as I desired to relocate to this area.

I was stunned that I would have to take the entire bar examination notwithstanding my 17 years in private practice. However, once I began studying for the Washington State Bar Exam, I learned there is something extremely unique about this exam as compared to California. The California Bar Exam is traditionally geared toward thinking and filling up blue books with everything from common law to emerging legal trends. It is a highly esoteric bar exam. On the other hand, I found that the Washington State Bar Exam was geared towards a practice in this state and did require some general knowledge of current Washington state law.

Despite 17 years of practice and dealing with the real world in California, I still had burned into my mind the common law crimes and common law torts. I had to unlearn all of those for the Washington State Bar Exam. The exam was a real hands-on approach in that it does deal with current Washington law.

I would suggest that a limited form of reciprocity be adopted. It could be in the form of a shortened bar exam with questions primarily highlighting areas of prime importance in dealing with Washington law, such as criminal law, family law, etc. Done this way, the applicant could rely on his or her background but still be able to distinguish the considerable difference between the two states. I feel that this would be an equitable solution to the problem.

Michael A. Aronoff
Federal Way

Editor:

The article [Greg Lawless, "Improve Your Accounts Receivable with a 'Name the Moose (Elk) Head' Contest," Bar News, April 1999, p. 13] was absolutely great! I haven't had a good laugh like that for a long time.

Please include more humorous articles (or even cartoons) in future issues. How about another one by Greg Lawless?

Janis Hutchinson
Legal Assistant, Everett

Editor:

This is a brief summary of the system of remote secretarial assistance that I use out of my home. This system could be useful to the practitioner either as a primary resource or as an adjunct to services available at the office.

The assistance has been particularly useful during trial. Documents dictated after trial can be transmitted and transcribed in the evening. The attorney can download and print the documents early the next morning.

Both the attorney and the remote secretary have computers, modems and the required word processing programs. Transfers are made over the Internet. The secretary needs to have a grasp of using the whole computer in addition to operating the word-processing application. I have tried to use available software rather than becoming committed to special-purpose legal or virtual-office programs.

The first procedure is the transfer of dictation. Phone patches can be used to make real-time transfers. It is more convenient to upload voice files so the secretary can download them when convenient. The issue here is compressing the audio files in order that they can be transferred in a fraction of the time it takes to run the tape.

A virtual recorder incorporating good compression may be downloaded from the Purevoice/Qualcomm website at http://www.eudora.com/purevoice/pluginDL.html. The dictation is transferred from the dictaphone into the microphone jack of the sound card and recorded as an audio file. The file is then transmitted as an attachment to an e-mail message and played on the secretary's virtual recorder. The output from the sound card is patched into and recorded on the remote transcriber.

This process will be abbreviated in the future. The new handheld dictaphones use PC cards that can be inserted directly into a PCMCIA drive (often built into laptops). The audio file may then be selected and attached directly. Olympus, BVP and others have proprietary systems available that include transcription pedals for the secretary's computer. The pedal is plugged into the sound card and the computer becomes the transcriber.

The secretary keyboards the dictation and places the resulting file into the directory (folder) dedicated to the client. When all documents are completed, they are attached to an e-mail message and sent to the attorney. The attorney downloads the files when convenient, edits and prints. The edited file should be returned to the secretary with instructions to overwrite the previous draft.

Handwritten timesheets are fed into a sheet-fed scanner and the resulting image file transmitted to the secretary. The transferred file is opened in Windows using the imaging utility or a browser. The images may then be printed as graphics and typed by the secretary. The text is returned to the attorney for printing and transmission to clients as invoices.

Once a bookkeeping system is established on both computers, the ongoing chore of posting checks and cash receipts may be performed by the secretary. In QuickBooks, the expense accounts may be categorized to correspond to the lines of Schedule C. Designating notes can be made on the check register entries and cash receipts. Their images can be transmitted to the secretary as in the case of time sheets. The secretary posts them to the designated expense account and "backs up" the completed work. The back up file (extension .qbb) is attached and transmitted to the attorney, who "restores" the office program with the new file. This incorporates the new postings. Schedule C may be prepared directly from the profit and loss report generated by the program.

The secretary submits his/her itemized hourly charges to the attorney every month. E-mail from the secretary is saved until the charges are settled. The service provider's saved-mail screen provides a record of the work transmitted and its size in bytes. The charges may be reviewed against the service provider's screen.

Cordless and cellular broadcasts of client confidences raise ethical questions. E-mail should not be subject to these concerns as it is a point-to-point communication system that is not readily intercepted. Encryption would not seem to be a technical problem, if warranted.

In conclusion, this system of remote secretarial services is a logical utilization of the computer tools now available to attorneys. Ms. Heidi M. Powell was of the greatest assistance to me in making it work.

John Q. Powers
Seattle

Editor:

Dr. Kervorkian's 10-year sentence (possible parole after seven years) is too long. A long-term solution to the right-to-die and assisted-suicide problem would be for each state to add a paragraph to their homicide statutes. It would allow an exception (or complete defense) for murder when it is "mercy killing." This would tide us over until courts finally uphold the right to die, which they'll surely do in the next 20 years.

Such a paragraph could read:

It shall be a complete defense to a charge of murder or manslaughter if the defendant was performing a mercy killing. Mercy killing shall be defined as the ending of the life of a person (after that person's informed consent) by a licensed physician after two other licensed physicians have approved.

These safeguards, guaranteed by statute, would prevent abuses. With this built-in exception to murder, we wouldn't have injustices like that of Dr. Kervorkian's. It seems the law has yet to catch up with medical technology. Our legislators better get cracking.

Jeff E. Jared
Kirkland

Editor:

I would like to commend the authors of the article "The Becca Bill: Is the Cure Worse than the Disease?" [Bar News, April 1999, p. 19] for both their insight and courage.

We have turned the clock back to a time where children can now be shackled and jailed for talking back to their parents or cutting school, all in the name of a benevolent government that simply wants to "help" them.

In reality, however, the At-Risk Youth program offers precious little help to children. Instead, it is a mechanism through which children, mostly teenagers, are punished with only passing regard for due process, and often for simply behaving like teenagers.

Rare is the child in the At-Risk system who has not been the victim of some truly terrible parenting. Yet the system does absolutely nothing to hold the parents accountable or offer any types of services to help fix problems in the family. Instead, Suzie faces jail if she doesn't wash the dishes or sasses her folks, with no regard for the environment in which such behavior takes place.

Most of us who handle these cases day in and day out would have far fewer concerns if the name of the law were changed from At-Risk Youth to Families At Risk, and its focus changed from punishing teenagers to helping families.

Ms. Chaney and Ms. Kysar had the courage to say that jail should not be used as a form of behavior modification in this context. Would that someone, anyone, in our legislature had had similar courage, we might now have a system in place that reflected a true and considered concern for the welfare of children and families instead of the hysterical and emotional reaction to a perceived social problem that is the Becca Bill.

John F. Hayden
Port Angeles

Editor:

The April Bar News carried a letter from Attorney Christopher Hodgkin which was critical of WSBA Disciplinary Counsel Barrie Althoff. Although I generally agree with what Chris had to say about the Bar Association, Barrie deserves to be cut a little slack.

In particular, Barrie should be recognized for the work he has done in organizing numerous free CLE seminars around the state, several of which are now available on the freecle.com website. Much of this work has been done outside of normal workday hours, on his own time, and at nominal expense to the WSBA. For example, when Barrie put on a free CLE program here in Richland, he drove his personal car, a 1975 Ford Pinto, across the mountains from Seattle on a Saturday morning, gave an exhausting multi-hour, solo presentation, and then drove back to Seattle that night.

Disagreements concerning the need for new disciplinary rules are inevitable. Regardless of these, Barrie deserves credit for his enthusiastic support for free CLE.

Edward V. Hiskes
Richland

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