Death and Credits
Jun. 22nd, 2021 01:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogI spent five hours sitting in a bankruptcy seminar and all I got was this stinkin' form:
Oops, that's today's, where I get six all-new codes for sitting here. The primary Things Wot I learned yesterday, duly recorded near the end of the first five-hour marathon:
- My brain hurts.
- My butt hurts more.
- At least two lawyers from Western New York, who I knew for decades, have died in the past year.
I made specific mention of one of them when I Facebooked that the other day. Jack was a lawyer mostly representing creditors, who spent most of his career in a large Rochester based firm before moving over late in life to an even larger behemoth of a firm, formed out of a statewide Syracuse-based firm merging with an almost-as-big Buffalo one. Jack was of immense help to me in the months after the 1986 death of my mentor Lloyd Relin, but I remembered Jack mostly from a famed local exchange of correspondence with Lloyd's older cousin Leonard.
Lloyd referred to Lenny as "my first cousin many times removed," and I wound up dealing with him occasionally over the final 25 years of his life. While Lenny's "Relinisms" became legendary in local practice, it was Jack who got the final word in the set of letters which got passed around in photostats, faxes and eventually emails among the local bankruptcy bar. In response to Lenny's accusation that Jack's creditor client was hell-bent on "raping, pillaging and plundering my client," he received the following reply: "Without prejudice, my client will stipulate that it has no right under the Uniform Commercial Code to rape your client. Pillage and plunder, however, are another matter." (Both clients were corporations, so don't take things too literally here.)
----
More recently, I dealt quite a bit more with the other lawyer we lost. John was old-school, and a gentleman among gentlemen whether acting as a debtor attorney, a representative of a bank, or a trustee of a debtor's creditors. He went back to the old days when trustees were appointed by the bankruptcy judge; Lloyd was among those who sat "up there" in the Rochester courtroom and got assigned cases, although Lenny never was. Until the end of the Before Times, there was still a vestige of that practice in Buffalo, where the trustees continued to sit together in the front row, as if waiting for the judge to "pick me, pick me!"
By then, though, the judge never did. In the mid-80s, Congress revamped the statute to take the appointment process out of the discretion of the judge. John continued getting a regular batch of cases assigned to him until around the turn of this century, and he was still walking the couple of blocks from his office to the courthouse every week to represent debtors and banks before the remaining trustees or the judge. He even made the 70-mile drive between the two courthouses to handle Buffalo cases for various lenders; for a few years, he referred those appearances to me, and was always gracious and prompt in covering my bills for that.
I last saw him in Rochester maybe two years ago. He now needed a walker to make it those couple of blocks, and his gregarious persona was significantly reduced. His obituary encourages donations to Rochester's Legal Aid Society and to the Alzheimer's Association, which suggests where his heart still was and where his mind had gone.
----
First code is in. Five to go.
----
ETA. Under two hours to go. More codes, more death.
Ethics Guy, back for the second day- who has so far cited to IBM's Watson, Terminator and Terminator 2, the lawyer fined $3,000 for flipping the bird to his opponent on a Zoom court appearance, the ones wearing pajamas, and the one who did an entire argument with a Zoom icon of a cat- just reported another death I was not aware of. I think I only met the deceased once- at, what else? a seminar- but David Siegel was the dean of everything but a law school when it came to New York procedural practice. He wrote the treatise I used to learn this stuff in 1984, and continued to update it through five more bound editions and numerous back-of-the-book updates. At least three times this month, I've turned back to the most recent edition in our office on some obscure point of procedural law I wouldn't begin to know where to look otherwise. His commentaries were snarky before anyone knew to call them that. Anyway, EG just referred to him as "the late Professor Siegel," and that got me to finding out that he passed at his Massachusetts home not quite seven years ago.
I can't say anything bad about the man. After all, the general statute of limitations in New York is six years:(
Oops, that's today's, where I get six all-new codes for sitting here. The primary Things Wot I learned yesterday, duly recorded near the end of the first five-hour marathon:
- My brain hurts.
- My butt hurts more.
- At least two lawyers from Western New York, who I knew for decades, have died in the past year.
I made specific mention of one of them when I Facebooked that the other day. Jack was a lawyer mostly representing creditors, who spent most of his career in a large Rochester based firm before moving over late in life to an even larger behemoth of a firm, formed out of a statewide Syracuse-based firm merging with an almost-as-big Buffalo one. Jack was of immense help to me in the months after the 1986 death of my mentor Lloyd Relin, but I remembered Jack mostly from a famed local exchange of correspondence with Lloyd's older cousin Leonard.
Lloyd referred to Lenny as "my first cousin many times removed," and I wound up dealing with him occasionally over the final 25 years of his life. While Lenny's "Relinisms" became legendary in local practice, it was Jack who got the final word in the set of letters which got passed around in photostats, faxes and eventually emails among the local bankruptcy bar. In response to Lenny's accusation that Jack's creditor client was hell-bent on "raping, pillaging and plundering my client," he received the following reply: "Without prejudice, my client will stipulate that it has no right under the Uniform Commercial Code to rape your client. Pillage and plunder, however, are another matter." (Both clients were corporations, so don't take things too literally here.)
----
More recently, I dealt quite a bit more with the other lawyer we lost. John was old-school, and a gentleman among gentlemen whether acting as a debtor attorney, a representative of a bank, or a trustee of a debtor's creditors. He went back to the old days when trustees were appointed by the bankruptcy judge; Lloyd was among those who sat "up there" in the Rochester courtroom and got assigned cases, although Lenny never was. Until the end of the Before Times, there was still a vestige of that practice in Buffalo, where the trustees continued to sit together in the front row, as if waiting for the judge to "pick me, pick me!"
By then, though, the judge never did. In the mid-80s, Congress revamped the statute to take the appointment process out of the discretion of the judge. John continued getting a regular batch of cases assigned to him until around the turn of this century, and he was still walking the couple of blocks from his office to the courthouse every week to represent debtors and banks before the remaining trustees or the judge. He even made the 70-mile drive between the two courthouses to handle Buffalo cases for various lenders; for a few years, he referred those appearances to me, and was always gracious and prompt in covering my bills for that.
I last saw him in Rochester maybe two years ago. He now needed a walker to make it those couple of blocks, and his gregarious persona was significantly reduced. His obituary encourages donations to Rochester's Legal Aid Society and to the Alzheimer's Association, which suggests where his heart still was and where his mind had gone.
----
First code is in. Five to go.
----
ETA. Under two hours to go. More codes, more death.
Ethics Guy, back for the second day- who has so far cited to IBM's Watson, Terminator and Terminator 2, the lawyer fined $3,000 for flipping the bird to his opponent on a Zoom court appearance, the ones wearing pajamas, and the one who did an entire argument with a Zoom icon of a cat- just reported another death I was not aware of. I think I only met the deceased once- at, what else? a seminar- but David Siegel was the dean of everything but a law school when it came to New York procedural practice. He wrote the treatise I used to learn this stuff in 1984, and continued to update it through five more bound editions and numerous back-of-the-book updates. At least three times this month, I've turned back to the most recent edition in our office on some obscure point of procedural law I wouldn't begin to know where to look otherwise. His commentaries were snarky before anyone knew to call them that. Anyway, EG just referred to him as "the late Professor Siegel," and that got me to finding out that he passed at his Massachusetts home not quite seven years ago.
I can't say anything bad about the man. After all, the general statute of limitations in New York is six years:(
:(
Date: 2021-06-23 10:30 am (UTC)"You're arm's off."
"No, it's not!"
'Tis but a scratch!
Date: 2021-06-23 11:27 am (UTC)Merde.