Legal Commentary

Wendy and Windy

By David A. Giacalone

.. Wendy & Windy . . . .. Today is a travel day, with the f/k/a Gang facing strong winds and trying to stay ahead of a rain and snow storm that will be arriving very soon along the road from Rochester to Schenectady, NY. Two posts have dominated activity at this weblog during our visit home:

• Upset that f/k/a called him “whiny” and would not remove that word from our headline, lawyer Kurt Mausert spent much of the past few days assaulting the Editor (and even Scott Greenfield) instead of focusing on his campaign to become Family Court judge in Saratoga County, New York.  You can judge for yourself whether the mud he is slinging at us repaired his image or not.
• On a more pleasant front, the allure of lovely lawyer Wendy Savage brought an extra 2000 visitors a day to this site over the weekend.  We hope all this attention will help sell the Beautiful Lawyers Calendar for the benefit of several public interest causes.  Thank you Wendy, Google, Above the Law, and the FootballGuys.com Forum for all the referrals.

.. A year ago today we featured a post on ?The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the nature of legal services,? by Richard Susskind, OBE (Oxford University Press, due May 2008), and his End of Lawyers series at the London Times Online. The issues are still important and worth considering. So far, Susskind has not taken our advice to start his own weblog:

An urgent (if somewhat selfish) request to Richard Susskind: Please start a weblog and bring your insights and commentary about the Future of Lawyers to us every day. For the f/k/a Gang, it gets tiring being just about the only voice speaking realistically and consistently about the evolving market-and-digital revolution. Your presence is much needed, Richard. Frankly, within the American Bar and its weblawg community, the members who most pride themselves on being future-oriented and ?proactive? (and their consultants and coaches) all paint a happy-face future, where they?ll use tactics such as law firm branding, value billing, and price sensitivity (along with a large dollop of psycho babble) to achieve premium pricing and increased income, in the face of marketplace realities, and at the expense of their clients (while, miraculously, satisfying them more, and somehow working fewer hours, freed from the hourly-billing bogeyman).

Take another look at our list of “signs to look for that will help determine whether the American bar is choosing to (or able to) act like a guild protecting its own interests first, or like a learned profession seeking to best serve the public interest in creating a truly accessible and affordable legal system.”

Here are the poems we posted a year ago, by our Honored Guest Matt Morden:

halloween ?
part of the moon
follows a bicycle home

harvest festival
small fingers trace
a saint?s name in slate

post inspection
a bean-counter shakes
my cool hand

halloween
thousands of starlings
flux together

??????? by matt morden - Morden Haiku

Full post as published by f/k/a . . . on October 28, 2008 (boomark / email).