Appellate Law

Cultural anthropology 101 for lawyers

By S. COTUS

I have often been criticized for being isolated from non-lawyers.  After all, like most of my readers, since non-lawyers have very little contact with non-lawyers, we simply don?t know much about their simple, yet ancient and beautiful culture.  It seems that there is more to their culture than simply being a crack whore or an expert witness.  After extensive and detail-oriented research, we have found out this startling fact: many of them will be born, get married, and die without ever taking a deposition!

We didn?t find out much about their ?jobs? but we did discover these two fascinating occupations of people that are not involved in appellate litigation.

• Person paid by Comcast to sit in the audience at a hearing and whoop whenever something bad about net neutrality is said, and boo when something good about it is said. A typical day involves saying "(1) Whoop; (2) Whoop; (3) Whoop; (4) Whoop; and (5)  Whoop."  Miro writes about this here and Free Press writes about it here. 
• Sea Cowboy. These members of said beautiful culture travel all around the world and right ships carrying primitive vehicles that have tilted over due to, I imagine, a whiny paralegal. A typical day involves "Open[ing] the access hatch to the ninth deck and rappel past hundreds of Maxdas. "  I was surprised to learn that they don?t even have ?contract attorneys? to do their document review. I assume that since they ?dive? for a ?living? they must talk about documents they had other people review over their vacations at the water cooler. Many of them have tattoos, which presumably commemorate great opinions letters they once wrote. Wired Magazine writes more about them and thankfully a law firm called Countryman & McDaniel explains their beautiful culture (with more pictures) here. 

Full post as published by Appellate Law and Practice on February 27, 2008 (boomark / email).