Today I Learned how to Breathe

It’s CLE time again, so I am here to rant.

“CLE” stands for “Continuing Legal Education.” It should be “CCS,” or “Continuing Consumer Scam.” The purported purpose is to keep lawyers up to date on new developments that affect their jobs. The real purpose is to fool the public into thinking lawyers are staying up to date on new developments that affect their jobs, when they may or may not be doing it.

Lawyers have a bad reputation. I hate to say anything shocking, but it’s true. America is full of scum-sucking parasite lawyers who file frivolous tort claims that ruin life for everyone else and make things more expensive. Remember diving boards? Can’t have one now because of lawyers. Remember pool slides? Trampolines? Pools that didn’t have tiny, annoying fences 18″ from their borders? Tort lawyers, stand up on your mucus-oozing hind appendages, and take a bow. You took it all away.

Because everyone justifiably hates lawyers, we are continually making insincere efforts to seem like redeemable human beings. For one thing, they push us to do pro bono work. Some idiot sues McDonald’s for making hot coffee, so the Florida Bar tells me to make things better by donating $30,000 worth of work to some tattooed lady who wants custody of her sexually undefinable kids.

When I was practicing, I didn’t do pro bono. It’s all risk and work and no reward. I’m still on the hook for malpractice regardless of what I charge. I’m still on the hook for bar discipline if I screw up. I still have to pay my expenses, including any sanctions I incur. I end up burdened with lifelong loyalty to a stranger who didn’t pay me, along with his, her, or its confidential information. It’s quite a bit different from pro bono medical work, where you fix a cleft palate in Borneo and the happy patient vanishes from your life forever.

I think I’ll start Lawyers Without Borders. We’ll go to foreign countries and sue grocery stores when people fall down in the aisles.

People cheer when Doctors Without Borders show up. Imagine how they will run when my crowd lands.

“Doctors Without Borders is here! Roll out the red carpet and bring out the dancing girls!”

“Look! A plane full of lawyers! RELEASE THE DRONES!”

CLE is supposed to perform the same function as pro bono work. If the public thinks we’re working to stay current, they’ll have more confidence in us. Supposedly. In reality, the way to make people believe in you is to win cases.

As I have often said, every competent lawyer does CLE on his own, continuously. When you get a case, you do legal research. You find out the current state of the law. You find out whether procedure has changed. You adapt on the fly. This is business as usual. You have to do it in order to avoid screwing up. You bill clients for it. It’s part of every case that isn’t incredibly routine.

Forcing lawyers to take stupid courses and report to the bar is totally unnecessary for good lawyers, and it won’t help bad ones. And isn’t it possible that a farcical, insincere effort to keep lawyers informed will cause the public’s confidence in us to go down instead of up? Doesn’t it reinforce the notion that lawyers are always trying to fool people? Because with CLE, we are?

Then there is the dirty secret no one but me discusses: there are lawyers who sign up for CLE and then claim they did it when they really did not.

I worked for a patent attorney named Jack Dominik. He’s dead, so I’ll just name him. This man was a really excellent attorney. Extraordinary. Before I met him. By the time I showed up, he was in his late seventies, and he was making ethical mistakes, but other than that, he was very impressive. He used to buy CLE tapes and play them on a machine in my office, where he could not hear them.

My dad practiced for over half a century, and he was the best lawyer I ever knew. He bought tapes, put them in a drawer, and told the bar he listened to them. But he was extremely meticulous about preparing for cases properly. He was always ahead of the game.

I’m not sure any lawyer I’ve ever known has actually done CLE for real, when there was any kind of a choice. I think I may be the only one who does it.

Last time around, I downloaded some free CLE stuff, which brings me to the third purpose of CLE. It allows lawyers and companies to promote themselves and their products. You get to tell people about what you do or what your product can do, and you can provide web links and so on. A lot of the stuff I found last time was created for promotional purposes. Infomercials. A software company named Rocket Matters did a lot of it. This time, it’s a company named…I’ve already forgotten.

Anyway, I downloaded this junk and put it on a flash drive. Then I listened to it whenever I drove anywhere. I also used an Ipod, I think. Maybe it was my phone. I used 3M Worktunes Bluetooth earmuffs while I was riding the tractor and mower and when I was using loud tools.

While I was doing all this, it occurred to me that I could speed this stuff up. The time requirement was over 30 hours, but what’s time to a lawyer? We routinely charge people for three hours of work when we’ve actually done half an hour. Believe it or not, there are times when this is considered ethical. So I thought, “Why should I spend an hour listening to something when I can do it in 40 minutes?”

I’m not saying I ever did this, or that it makes no difference at all in the effectiveness of the teaching, because the material is often simple, and many CLE instructors talk way too slowly. But I will say the thought occurred to me.

I will admit that I looked, and do look, for courses with exaggerated time credit. Sometimes the bar will give an hour’s credit for a “course” lasting under 40 minutes, and sometimes a “course” will run almost 70 minutes, so which one would you choose?

I have wondered about the ethics of speeding up CLE audio, but yesterday, I saw something really funny that answered my question. On a CLE site belonging to the bar itself, I saw an audio player with a speed control.

The speed control isn’t small. It’s not hidden. It’s right out there where you can see it. Click a plus button or a minus button, and you can listen at whatever speed suits you.

Guess we know how concerned the bar is about speeding up the sound.

Who clicks the minus button? Who wants to turn 33 hours into 66? I want to meet that person. Is it some kind of exotic masochistic fetish? Anything is possible. Some people get off on watching fat women smoke.

The plus button would be a huge help to me (if I were using it). My mind works a lot faster than most people’s. When an audio presentation goes up to 1.5x or more, suddenly, I can stand to listen to it. Listening to accelerated audio, which I’m not saying I would ever do with crucial, case-saving CLE materials, helps me understand how great it would be if everyone in the world thought as fast as I do. I must have spent a hundred thousand hours, finishing people’s sentences in my mind.

“Hurry up. Hurry up. Hurry up. I know what you’re going to say. Spit it out. I can’t stand this. Get it over with. Self: concentrate. Concentrate. It’s really not that boring if you focus.”

“Should I make lasagna tonight? I don’t think I have ricotta. I need to clean out my dryer duct. What would happen if I made pizza dough with club soda? What’s so interesting about fat women smoking?”

I get really tired of the wokeness in the videos, even here in Florida. I also feel alienated by the mental health videos.

Back when life made sense, CLE was about practicing law. How to do discovery. How to identify unfair labor practices. Stuff like that. Now we get stuff about meditation and yoga breathing. No lie.

Mental health and wellness CLE’s help fulfill our professionalism requirement, so I listen to them even though my mental health is so amazing, it should be studied for the good of mankind. I’m totally normal. No problems at all here.

Okay, maybe not everyone believes that.

Anyway, yesterday I heard two videos about coping with stress. One said stress was good for us and helped us live longer lives. It really did. It was made by a lady who said she had had strokes and surgery because of stress. The obvious question: “Is this woman the best possible choice to teach about reducing stress?” How about some videos from people in their nineties with low blood pressure and clear arteries? Just a thought.

The second video was from a guy who said it was impossible to be stressed and happy at the same time. The lady who made the first video needs to watch the second video.

When he started talking about meditation, I skipped it. I have religious objections to weird mental exercises that come from Satanic religions, so, sorry. Not listening. I feel I should still get credit. You wouldn’t get mad if an Orthodox Jew took a break while a speaker put up pornographic slides. To me, advice about taking up paganism is worse than porn. Merely hearing it is harmful.

As I listened to these people, I realized how different I was from them and their target audience. I was riding around on a diesel mower, in my tranquil, gated, heavily-armed, rural Florida compound, without a care in the world. They were talking about using alcohol, drugs, and heathen religion to cope with the huge anxiety loads their listeners dealt with every day. I realized how blessed I was and how miserable people can be when they get shackled to Satan’s hamster wheel.

I wasn’t miserable or stressed when I practiced law, but I think most lawyers are.

I don’t know why I maintain my license. I never want to go back to the law. No one who leaves it does. When lawyers get together and one says he found a way out, everyone says the same thing. “Lucky you! I wish I could do that.”

I better fire up some videos before the compliance deadline passes. I hope my diligence gives you confidence in the competence of legal professionals everywhere.