Practice Management

Just a little back story first.  Not long ago I was at the supermarket getting ready for a get together, and my wife and I bought a big jug of red wine.  While checking out the kid bagging the groceries exclaimed, "That is the biggest bottle of wine I have ever seen".  I just looked at him and said, "Well, yeah, I have lots of problems".  Although the cashier was laughing, the bagger did not seem to get the joke and my wife seemed a little disgusted by the whole exchange.

So, I admit it, I sip a little "Jesus Juice" now and then.  Not much.  Not often.  But, my wife and I do like to visit Texas wineries because we enjoy the different wines produced and enjoy seeing the process of wine making.

Even though Texas is part of the wild west, I have never taken a cotton to hard liquor or whiskey.  Although, I have got to admit that I think it was the treatment of choice among highly stressed lawyers in Texas when I was younger.  I am not sure of its influence today as we have pharmaceuticals.

This is brought to mind by the article in Fortune Magazine concerning the top 5 whiskeys worth collecting.  I am neither a connoisseur nor a drunkard, so I could not tell you which is the best.

I do remember a couple of whiskey incidents in my career.  The first was when I first graduated from law school and set up a practice in Texarkana, Texas.  One of the first cases I obtained was on the other side of an older lawyer whom my family had known for years.  I called him up about the case, and before faxes and emails existed, he asked me to come on over the next morning to his office to talk about it.  It did.  When I arrived, at about 10 in the morning, we sat down at his desk, he reached into his bottom drawer and pulled out a bottle of whiskey and two Styrofoam cups.  He started pouring.  I told him that it was a little "too early in the day" for me.  The lawyer just stared at me and said, "I don't trust anybody that does not drink whiskey".  So, I found myself drinking whiskey our of Styrofoam cups on a workday morning while we negotiated away the litigation.  I am afraid to say that I then had to show up to court in the early afternoon, let us say, feeling a little under the weather.  Luckily it was just a docket call setting of a case or something like that did not take much in the way of competence.  And, it was in front of the judge that was one of this lawyer's drinking buddies.

Then I remember asking a federal bankruptcy judge once if he was going to re-up for another term.  He said, "They are going to pay me the same whether I sit in the courtroom every day or sit on my back porch drinking Scotch ...  I have decided to sit on my back porch drinking Scotch".

Working more from home these days it is hard to say if whiskey has the same influence over our jurisprudence in Texas that it once did, but at least in the past it weighed heavily on Texas legal decisions and strategies.