Well, that's one way to do it without inter-continental trading. . .

No need to have the Welsh trade all their vowels to Hawaii in this case.


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Requisicat in Pace, Doctor Tiller

May the Nature Spirits guide him home,
May the Honoured Dead welcome him among them,
May the High Ones grant him rest and rebirth in due time.

There will be a returning for him.

As if I needed an excuse to buy the new Lily Allen album

The Economics of the State Public Defender Private Bar, Or How to Work Eighty Hours a Week and Still be on Food Stamps

I have avoided posting this for some time, principally because I hate feeling like I am whining, but I have come to realize that there are things in this world that nothing gets done about unless someone - preferably several someones - start up a ruckus.

In Wisconsin, if you are indigent and you are accused of a crime, your representation is generally provided through the State Public Defender's office. Now, there is no way that the staff offices in each county can handle all the cases (principally because of conflicts and other similar factors) so a certain number (i.e., quite a few) are farmed out to private attorneys who have agreed to take public defender appointments.

Sounds cush, eh? You just sit there and the clients are steered to you. And, I suppose it might be if SPD private attorneys were allowed to bill at anything approaching even the low end of the market average.

Do you know what these private bar attorneys are allowed (by statute) to bill (a rate that hasn't changed in decades)?

Forty dollars an hour.

Now that may sound like quite a bit. Frankly, a few years ago I would have looked at forty dollars an hour as something amazing, but you have to step back for a moment and remember one thing. That's not what I get paid for public defender appointments; it's what I can bill. There is a critical difference between the two things.

You have to think of an attorney not as an individual who is out making a certain amount per trick but as the principal machine in a small business (the press in a small print shop, or example). The attorney's billable hours are not the attorney's pay, they are the business's income.

So, what happens to that income? Well, like any business, an attorney has overhead, and dear gods does an attorney ever have overhead. And we're not talking fancy office space either; in some cases, we're not talking any office space at all (as many private bar attorneys work out of their homes and maintain P.O. Box addresses as their business address).

What does this overhead consist of?

1. Bar dues. Unlike many states, Wisconsin requires that all attorneys be members of the State Bar, and dues run in the hundreds of dollars every year.
2. CLE courses. Continuing Legal Education. Every attorney must attend a certain number of hours of classes in order to retain her license to practice. These courses are not free. Quite the contrary. Again, we're talking hundreds of dollars each year.
3. Malpractice insurance. This is also not optional, for reasons that doctors have already learned all too well, and the premiums aren't going down any time soon.
4. A computer, the necessary software, and internet access. This, also, is no longer optional.
   
5. Staff. Increasing numbers of attorneys are doing without any staff, but there is a trade-off involved. Anything your staff would have done, you now have to do yourself, and most of it is work that you cannot bill for.
6. Lexis or Westlaw access. Admittedly, there are venues through which one can obtain caselaw for free, but they tend to have such inefficient search engines that they do more harm than good. So, some form of access to Lexis or Westlaw really is a must, at least it is if you ever plan to file an effective motion at any point in your professional life.
7. A cell phone. This is not optional either, even for the most pared down practice.
8. Utilities. Even if you're working out of your home, the demands of your work will increase the size of these bills.
9. Office supplies. This is a huge and varied list, and even for the most pared down practice it runs in the thousands of dollars.

And that, really, is only a partial list of the things that have to come out of that forty dollars an hour before the attorney gets paid.

But there's more.

Unlike most legal jobs, billing on an SPD case isn't done monthly as things go along. Oh no. The bill is submitted after the case is completed. So, as the case is pursued, any expenses come out of the attorney's pocket, for later reimbursement.

Need an expert? You bear the up front cost (unless you can find an expert willing to wait months for payment), assuming you can approval of the cost from the SPD (which you have to get in advance) and assuming that you can find an expert who is willing to work for the rates that the SPD is willing to pay (which, not surprisingly, are well below market average).

Want to add more insult to injury?

When you submit your bill, SPD will peck away at any expense it thinks is unreasonable or any billed hours it thinks are higher than they deem necessary. (The people who make these decisions are, incidentally, not attorneys.)

The final indignity?

In more years than not, the SPD runs out of money to pay their private bar attorneys some time in late winter or spring. So, any bills submitted after mid-March (or thereabouts) on stand a fair chance of not being paid until July. These months of no pay are typically called "the drought," and if you don't have an established line of credit you can draw on . . . well, you can imagine what this does.

One of these days, I will learn to take my own advice . . .

Apparently, that day is not today.

So, a little over a month ago I announced that I was closing this little venture down. That I just wasn't posting often enough to make this blog worth wasting the bandwidth.

::::shakes head at self::::

So much for retiring and staying there.

Turning out the light

Okay, it's time to turn out the light.

I have just been too busy to even imagine posting semi-regularly any more, so it's better to let this one go than take up the bandwidth.

Thank you to my readers . . . . all five of you. Believe it or not, I will miss this place.

Another for my collection . . .

Like most attorneys with a pulse, I have a real weakness for lawyer jokes.

Here's this week's . . . brought to you by the letter N, the letter R, and the number 2.

A Mafia Godfather finds out that his bookkeeper has cheated him out of
ten million bucks. His bookkeeper is deaf. That was the reason he got the
job in the first place. It was assumed that a deaf bookkeeper would not
hear anything that he might have to testify about in court.

When the Godfather goes to confront the bookkeeper about his missing $10
million, he brings along his attorney, who knows sign language.
The Godfather tells the lawyer, "Ask him where the 10 million bucks he
embezzled from me is." The attorney, using sign language, asks the
bookkeeper where the money is. The bookkeeper signs back: "I don't know what you are talking about."

The attorney tells the Godfather: "He says he doesn't know what you're
talking about." The Godfather pulls out a pistol, puts it to the bookkeeper's temple
and says, "Ask him again!"

The attorney signs to the bookkeeper: "He'll kill you if you don't tell him!"
The bookkeeper signs back: "OK! You win! The money is in a brown briefcase,
buried behind the shed in my cousin Enzo's backyard in Queens!"

The Godfather asks the attorney: "Well, what'd he say?"

The attorney replies: "He says you don't have the guts to
pull the trigger."

Friday Random Ten

1. Suffragette City - David Bowie
2. Two and Two - Jesus Jones
3. Brown Eyed Girl - Everclear
4. I Prefer - Ministry
5. Tenth Avenue Freeze Out - Bruce Springsteen
6. Tell Me Why (The Riddle) - Paul Van Dyk
7. Fallen on Hard Times - Jethro Tull
8. Mama - Beth Hart
9. Volvo Driving Soccer Mom - Everclear
10. Punk Rock Girl - Dead Milkmen

This is one of the reasons one shouldn't retire until one REALLY means it . . .

Brett Favre retired . . . again.

Damned if I can get up enough gumption to care.

What was that about leaving women behind?

During the primaries, I took a fair amount of grief from my sisters for my unabashed and unreserved support of President Obama. To the point where I actually stopped talking about politics at all for weeks on end.

Over and over and over again I was told that I did not understand why Secretary of State Clinton's candidacy was so important, and I was repeatedly treated as a traitor to my gender, and as a know-nothing neophyte for my choice of candidates.

"I just don't trust him on women's issues."

That's what I was told.

And, frankly, I understood where the hesitancy originated.

That being said, my reasons for supporting President Obama were as tied to my feminism and my identity as a woman as anything else. As an attorney, as a professional woman, and as an attorney, all it took was becoming familiar with the work and character of the First Lady. No man marries and obviously adores such a strong woman unless he actually gets it.

Add in the fact that the President has daughters (and as the mother of a brilliant, beautiful, bull-headed daughter I understand all too well the impact that has), and I felt secure putting some faith in President Obama.

It has been so wonderful to have my faith repaid in kind.

It seemed to be all about Lilly Ledbetter at the White House yesterday -- her name was enshrined in history, affixed to the first piece of legislation signed by President Obama. He presented the former Goodyear plant supervisor with a pen he used at the East Room signing ceremony and said, "This one's for Lilly."

But the day belonged to Michelle Obama, too. She wasn't on the stage with her husband, but she was there watching, and her stamp was on the new fair-pay law that Democrats have pushed since 2007. Its signing represented a concrete example of the first lady's interest in domestic policy, women's advocates say, and signaled her determination to push the concerns of working women and families to the forefront of national debate.

The President does not appear to do anything by accident, and it certainly isn't by accident that the Lily Ledbetter Equal Pay Act was the first piece of legislation the new President signed into law.

Jill, over at Feministe, perfectly captures the contrast between the two Administrations.

Did I drop that crack on the sidewalk, officer?

Power, of course, corrupts, and absolute power, not surprisingly, corrupts absolutely.

Or so the old saw goes.

So it should, perhaps, not be terribly surprising that those who have power in our society sometimes - okay, more than sometimes - are corrupted by it.

And, yet, we cling to the notion of the inviolability of authority, and the common man and woman continue to stake their everyday existence on the simple article of faith that the police never cut corners, never make assumptions, never outright lie to get from Point A to Point B.

Of course, as a defense attorney, I could be accused of some bias in my reaction to a recent piece in The Wall Street Journal.

It's one of the most common accusations by defendants and defense attorneys -- that police officers don't tell the truth on the witness stand.

Now, I am not a drinker of the "the State is out to get everyone" Kool-Aid, but I do have to acknowledge what experience has taught me.

The accusation has more truth in it than falsity.

Questionable testimony by police comes up most often in firearm- or drug-possession cases in which officers often testify that a defendant had a bulge in his pocket -- which they thought might be a gun -- or dropped drugs in plain sight as they approached him, giving the officers the right to seize the contraband.

I wish I could say that it was some sort of in-bred cynicism that made me look at this and nod as if the author were saying "the sky is blue," but I can't. It's a lesson of hard experience, and the fact that this lesson was learned so very well so early in the game is, in itself, indicative of a larger problem.

None of this, of course, is to imply that the officers involved are generally evil.

Though few officers will confess to lying -- after all, it's a crime -- work by researchers and a 1990s commission appointed to examine police corruption shows there's a tacit agreement among many officers that lying about how evidence is seized keeps criminals off the street.

The ends justify the means.

That, at any rate, appears to be the rationale driving things. A rationale that tells us an awful lot about convenient justifications.

You see, I have had the opportunity to become acquainted with more police officers (and, most especially, more narcotics cops) than I even care to think about, and in my experience the overwhelming majority of them are genuinely good people who desperately want to make a better place of their community.

The problem is that they have a unique position of power, from which they can act to do things that they perceive as making the community better . . . provided they are willing to cut a few corners.

Fortunately, the Founders understood this.

Unfortunately, the current Court does not seem to have quite gotten the Net.

How many words is a picture worth again?

One of the reasons I adore Jill over at Feministe . . .

She has a way of encapsulating things perfectly.

Friday Random Ten - The "I Am Still Mourning the Lack of Awards for BSG" Edition

The Sex Has Made Me Stupid - Robots in Disguise
Guitar Song - The Dead Milkmen
Turning Japanese - The Vapors
Fable (Dream Version) - Robert Miles
Face to Face - Paul Van Dyk
Golden Years - David Bowie
How Far We've Come - Matchbox Twenty
Princess of Light - Robert Miles
Puttin' On the Ritz - Fred Astaire
Only the Good Die Young - Billy Joel

The funniest thing I've seen all month . . .

I swear, sometimes I think that Non-sequiter is the best comic to come along since Bloom County.

Trust me, and go here.

I am the polar opposite of a Federalist, but . . .

. . . I have to admit to being more than a little envious in light of this story.

Dayum! Why couldn't I have had Scalia (or any Supreme Court Justice) as a competition judge back when I was in Moot Court.