The Lawyer vs. The Writer

I've been a total bum, dissing my own blog to work on my novel - feverishly, I might add...

I expected my last revisions to Client Relations to be done by now. But no-oh-oh!! I'm on a tear.

Anyway, considering how distracted I've been (really, since November, when my latest big push began), I thought I'd re-post one of my earliest posts. It's very apropos for me right now...

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The Lawyer vs. The Writer

Lawyer: The parties executed a separation agreement on June 25, 2009, approximately two years from the commencement of the action for divorce.

Writer: Paul grasped his pen as if it were a bayonet. Across the conference table, Elaine leaned her chin on her hand and suppressed a yawn at the sight of her husband's consternation. What's the big deal, she wondered? After two years, just write your goddamn initials underneath mine. Every page, just like the lawyers had instructed. She heaved a theatrical sigh as he finally scribbled his name under hers on the last page. Finally. All the lawyers had to do was not smear the ink from their notary stamps all over the page. And fill in the date: June 25, 2009. The hemorrhaging was about to end.

Testosterone-Tanked Traders - A Rant

I've been distracted, working like a lunatic on revisions to Client Relations (I found an excellent writers' website by sheer happenstance - TheNextBigWriter.com - great bunch of writers there).

Along with being wrapped up in the Republican wrangling for the nomination (meltdown followed by meltdown), the near-daily debacles in Congress, the gut-churning insanity of the financial markets (up 150 points today, down 150 yesterday). And I'm not even mentioning the global stage....whew!

No wonder my poor blog is lonely!

But right now, I'm really frosted at all the pro-Occupy Wall Streeters who cheered - mostly from afar, not in downtown Manhattan - a bunch of purposeless people who trashed a private park for months. The "Occupy" people were protesting something (what, exactly?), without ever bothering to get permits. How hard would getting the proper permits have been? Seriously?

The protestors added to the woes of a strapped NYC budget by straining the overburdened sanitation workers and police department -- all for the sake of YouTube videos. While the secretaries, messengers, copy clerks, deli workers, shop owners - stepped over the trash and tried to ignore the media circus so they could get to work every day.

Their distant, armchair supporters across the country didn't have to deal with any of that.
Tsk, tsk, shame on me for having no mercy on the "unwashed poor." Wait, I'm paying NY taxes, among the highest in the nation - while the rest of the country dumps their "unwashed poor" on NY.

Wanna get a movement to counter the marginal but disproportionately powerful Tea Partyites? Have a simple, unifying purpose. Lobby for political influence. Organize to capture elections.

Maybe the 99% concept, which eventually resulted from the ogling media attention the Occupy people captured in the fall, will gain lasting traction in the political arena. Although I'm skeptical, given the lack of money, influence and celebrity (that's right, I said celebrity - Is Sarah Palin, on the opposite side of the spectrum - anything else?) support.

Where the hell are those enraptured, embrace-the-unwashed-poor, anti-Wall Street people now? Apart from maybe (finally?) realizing that their 401-ks suffer when Wall Street shudders, as it has been since last May?

They're certainly not paying attention to the latest wtf moment that lays out the searing issue that Occupy movement SHOULD have been about: Reversing -and strengthening - the regulation of our financial institutions and financial markets.

Sound dull? Uh-uh.

Even the pro-business commentators on CNBC yesterday were flabbergasted at the sworn testimony of former Senator and current MF Global CEO Jon Corzine before a Congressional committee. (Yeah, Congress was actually doing something - hard to believe, I know.) You see, at least $1.2 billion in customer funds has vanished - poof! - from MF Global, causing the company to go belly-up.

What happened to all the money? Congressional representatives asked him. They grilled him for hours.

"I simply do not know where the money is," he said. "I'm not in a position...to know." Huh? The CEO doesn't know and is in no position to know? Wait, isn't a CEO supposed to be, like, in charge of the whole company?

I'm thinking about all the farmers who hedged their risks against bad growing seasons, never suspecting that their funds were being gambled on European debt, and secreted away in the hinterlands.  They've no doubt figured out what the "MF" in MF Global stands for.

So what happened to the pro-Occupy Wall Street people? This is EXACTLY what that movement should have been about: the wholesale, large-scale theft of billions of dollars by financial institutions, money managers, wheeler-dealers, and testosterone-tanked traders - all as a result of over a decade of deregulation and indifference by the SEC and CFTC. The prime reason for the widest income disparities (the 99% vs 1%) in the US since the pre-Depression Era.

A wtf moment for Corzine, but also for the anti-Wall Streeters who aren't paying attention now that the young bodies illegally camped out in Zucotti Park aren't posing for the cameras anymore.

There, I've sort of gotten this out of my system.

The Confusion About Separation Agreements

Been so busy polishing my novel, Client Relations (coming along nicely, I think, I hope), that I've been neglectful of B to C.

I'm thinking of doing another HuffPo entry on separation agreements - how they're really negotiated, how they're really written. It seems many people mistakenly think we use simple forms all the time - bless those Legal Zoom people, they REALLY know what they're doing (right), including fill-in-the-blank form separation agreements.

NOT.

Anyway, while I pull the energy together for that article, which I'll post here, of course, I thought I'd re-post a related item that I wrote early on in the life of B to C last year.

And I wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving!

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Eight Emotions During and After The 'Closing'
In no particular order:

1. Exhaustion (from: negotiations, legal fees, pressure from spouse and family, emotional turmoil)
2. Relief (because the parentheticals in #1 are over)
3. Anxiety (about: financial future, ability to survive and bounce back emotionally, children where applicable)
4. Anger (i.e., why the hell did s/he have to put me/us through this?)
5. Sadness (about: the end of the marital relationship or the strains placed on it)
6. Guilt (that the relationship required a formal agreement in the first place)
7. Joy (that the parentheticals in #1 are over)
8. Emptiness

Setting Husbands Up For Supervised Visitation

There are a lot of angry dads in America who have lost temporary or permanent custody of their kids, and claim it was a setup. That the chips were stacked against them. Their voices are sometimes so loud, it sounds like "What, me paranoid? Is that what everyone's saying about me?"

But a recent scam in California was revealed in the LA Times, and then in the ABA Journal, that shows some of the dads may be right. At least, in Modesto, California.

Several bottom-feeder divorce lawyers, who represented divorcing wives, apparently hired a very shady private detective to set up their clients' husbands to make it harder for the husbands to win custody. The shady detective hired sexy, Vegas-y type women to date the husbands (the husband in the photo I saw was a plumpy dumpy guy), go out for drinks, and - bam!- the husbands would get arrested for drunk driving immediately after leaving the bar or restaurant, courtesy of the detective's contacts with the local police.

In the Plumpy Dumpy case, Mrs. Plumpy Dumpy was able to use the drunk driving incident to get an order restricting her husband to supervised visitation.

Now, it's not clear to me whether Mr. Plumpy Dumpy actually was driving drunk. He was certainly thinking with the wrong body part when he pursued the gorgeous blonde, whom he mistook for having a genuine interest in him. He actually believed her when "she told him he had large, strong hands" and "described his kisses as 'yummy.'" Sorry, but that sounds like hooker-speak to me.

It's also not clear if the divorce lawyers, or just their over-eager paralegal staff, made these dastardly (what a great adjective) arrangements. And I don't know if they will be hauled in front of their local grievance committee.

But that begs the question: did Mr. Plumpy-Dumpy deserve to lose unsupervised access to his kids for this? It was a set-up, for crying out loud. Depressed, lonely middle-aged plumy-dumpy goes for young brassy blonde with hot turn-on words. Duh. Plumpy-Dumpy was an easy mark.

Maybe we should flip the question around: Did the kids deserve to lose access to one of their parents because their parent was lured to a bar by a woman who had been paid by their mom's lawyers (via the detective's bank), and picked up by cops who had been tipped off by their mom's lawyers?

Mrs. Plumpy Dumpy claims she didn't want her husband to get arrested. Her lawyers profess ignorance about the entire matter.

So now, I wonder, who showed the worst judgment of all in this whole sordid mess?

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-dui-setup-20111017,0,7922829.story?page=1
ttp://www.abajournal.com/news/article/private_detective_accused_of_setting_up_divorcing_men_for_duis_with_help_of


Scams like this are yet another arrow in the quiver of lawyer haters.

The Voice of Sweet Reason

Many clients don't want to hear it. They want to be completely unreasonable, and they want their lawyers to agree with their unreasonable demands and expectations.

Recently, I had a consult who insisted that because her spouse had fooled around, and hadn't earned as much money as she had (maybe 25% less), he should forego his entire interest in the marital home, her much larger pension, and their joint bank accounts, leaving him with about 15% of the marital estate. She wanted me to agree that she could settle her case under these (ridiculous) terms. In fact, she insisted that I agree her proposal was appropriate. And when I didn't agree, she grew extremely angry with me.

Opposing counsel with uncontrollable clients making similar, or even more lopsided demands, are even worse. Because they can't be knocked out of your life with a simple, "Sorry, I'm sure you can find another lawyer who has another opinion, best of luck." No, the unreasonable PIA opposing lawyer and his/her unreasonable PIA client, with punishment as their primary goal, is going to engage in a war of attrition for months, maybe even years. And they don't care that they're wasting gargantuan amounts of money, energy, time, and public resources, even when they know -- at least an experienced (albeit sometimes utterly inept) adversary knows -- damn well what the bottom-line settlement or litigated result will look like.

That's why there's nothing more wonderful than a reasonable person on the other side, who can control the unreasonable demands of his/her client and cut to the chase.

Right now Republican politics is just like the unreasonable client who craves a lunatic lawyer who will accede to his/her preposterous positions and not yield to anything or anyone resembling sanity. A smart, highly articulate, credentialed and reasonable candidate doesn't stand a hope in hell of impressing the foam-at-the-mouth extremists who seem to be running that party from the outer banks of fringe conservatism. Hence Jon Huntsman's low low low poll numbers.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jon-huntsman-the-reasonable-republican/2011/10/18/gIQAFAWTvL_story.html


Told ya I was a political junkie.

But this just goes to prove my point that politics is, indeed, a macro picture of interpersonal relationships, and that divorce lawyers and politicians have a LOT in common....

Divorce Lawyers Are As Bad As Obama

A political junkie like me laughs when a presidential candidates' debate is scheduled to air on an obscure, upper-register cable channel, like say, oh, the Bloomberg Channel (#105 over here in NY). I'm not that easily dissuaded - I WILL watch it, even if I have to stream it.

Not going to be watching it in silence, though. I mean, how can you sit still when an intellectual heavyweight like Michelle Bachmann blames the country's decade-long economic woes solely on President Obama (okay okay, he's a Democrat so it MUST be all his fault); when the effervescent, blunt Ron Paul gets interrupted when he starts scolding Republicans as well as Democrats for poor legislation; and when model family man Newt Gingrich overlooks Reagan/Bush de-regulation and overspending, and stiflingly high Reagan/Bush tax and deficit increases-- NO! it's Obama's fault!

Thank God for Republican Party unity. Thank God for political ambition.

Anything to derail Obama's reelection chances is clearly fair game, even if it means re-writing history or ignoring what's best for the country now. And I thought the vitriol was high during the Clinton years. But I digress...

My favorite comment - seriously - of the evening came from Rick Santorum, who cited "the breakdown of the American family" as a primary cause of economy disparities in the US. I heard heckling in the background when he said that (the noise distracted many of the candidates, including my favorite - Michelle, of course). Maybe the heckler was a married guy. Or a single mom who's doing just fine, thank you.

But Rick Santorum is absolutely right, as study after study and just plain common sense has shown. Single-parent households struggle far more than intact families. Santorum unfortunately missed the opportunity to lambaste the group that everyone, on all sides of the political spectrum, loves to hate. Had he done so, maybe he would have propelled his poll numbers out of the single digits.

I'm talking about divorce lawyers. Naturally. We're the ones who enable a person to dump his/her spouse out on the street. We bicker over the amount of spousal and child support. We defend the deadbeats who fail to meet their financial obligations to their ex's. We file actions to decrease monthly payments because our clients can't -or won't - afford them. Best of all, we rape family assets for legal and expert fees. We're bad bad bad bad people. (The clients share no complicity in any of this, of course....Here is where I have to give a nod to Herman Cain's call for personal responsibility.)

So you see, the widening gap between rich and poor is really our fault. We're as bad as Obama. Worse.

Rick, you blew it, buddy. At least you were on the right track.

Post-Apocalyptic All-Female Celibate Society

I'm trying my hand at a short, sci-fi story:

A post-apocalyptic, all-female band of survivors re-populates the world via IVF and brain cell regeneration.

What can I say? In my younger days I spent many hours curled up with Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury...