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captainsblogBefore I get into the Clash of the Kevins, just a summary of work in general these days:
It's been rough, and I'm only beginning to understand why.
Not the financial part of it; my gross revenue for the first half of 2021 is almost the same as it was for the same period last year, that with the pandemic not really kicking in until halfway through the first six months of 2020. Expenses are about the same. I like the co-workers here I share space with, and feel mostly the same about the ones in Rochester, who I've been seeing less of thanks to most of my hearings being remote these days. The workload has been steady but rarely overwhelming: Tuesday through today, I had one hearing each morning, each going about as expected. New clients are calling and some things are getting wrapped up.
I kinda figured it out today: it's a current batch of particularly difficult clients and/or client situations, which have been just coming one after another without much in the way of victories, even little ones, to break them up. Client A is vying with A's opponent to see who can take up more of my time without really letting me make any progress toward a conclusion. B has very unrealistic expectations and delays getting a document back to me to the point where it may be becoming prejudicial. I didn't hear from C in almost four months, only to have that fairly large bit of work become Extremely Urgent a few Thursdays ago. I take these things too personally and my first lizard-brain response is shit, what did I do wrong? In all of those, the answer, pretty much from up front, is nothing.
It helped that today, a case did unexpectedly resolve in my client's favor. Another opposing party finally got back to me to confirm that I don't have to travel to meet a client Monday morning and the client doesn't need to be involved in the hearing at all. And B and C from above at least progressed; B paid on one matter and got a positive result on a prior one; and C got me some needed information while taking some of the pressure off. I have nothing specific scheduled tomorrow and, while there's work to be done, it's what I will want to do, when I want to do it, and as much of it as I can.
----
B's case involved my Kevin Baconish experience. If you've never played the game, The Oracle of Bacon is a handy way to test it out. Pick any actor, no matter how longago or obscure you think they are, and chances are they will fall within six degrees of performance separation from Our Hero. So, taking last night's Night Court star:
Harry Anderson
was in
The Escape Artist
with
Joan Hackett
who was in
Only When I Laugh
with
Kevin Bacon
The number is two.
More obscure? Try Bull:
Richard Moll
was in
Loaded Weapon 1
with
J. T. Walsh
who was in
A Few Good Men
with
Kevin Bacon
Wanna see how close Kevin is to God? Phil Leeds played him in a season 1 episode:
Phil Leeds
was in
He Said, She Said
with
Kevin Bacon
I tend to have experiences like that often, only with lawyers and clients. I brought a client into a bankruptcy hearing where her late husband's first wife was on the same calendar as she was. I've had to duck around former clients who happened to have a bankruptcy appearance on the same day as one of mine. Here's how Kevin got me today:
I probably deal with hundreds of lawyers in the course of a year. Many are frequent fliers on Air Ray and, fortunately, I get along well with most of them. But lots of others, particularly from overgrown lawyer pounds like New York City, are the kind I will only deal with once in a lifetime.
Or not.
My only mail today was an oldschool letter from a lawyer in Brooklyn, agreeing to substantially all of what I'd asked for in a motion. He asked me to prepare the stipulation. I went into my Magic Bag of Word Documents to find the last stip of that kind I'd done, which was back in 2012....
and was with the same Brooklyn law firm. Which I've had no contact with whatsoever in the intervening nine years.
Coincidence? FUGGEDABUTIT!
----
But then, some Kevins are nicer than others. The once respected Kevin Spacey, without whom Netflix might still just be mailing out DVDs after he launched House of Cards as their first Netflix Original Series, came to mind today when the other kinky boot finally dropped on a story we first heard about just about a year and a half ago:
New York State Supreme Court is not the highest in the state, but the trial court of general jurisdiction. It is statewide but each of the five counties of New York City and the 57 upstate ones each have a place for it to sit. Judges are mostly elected to it, through a process that deserves its own rant post, and once on the bench they serve for 14 years. Its practice has changed drastically in my almost 35 years in the wringer, with alphabet soup terms like RJI, IAS, UR and most recently ECF (electronic case filing) getting added to my daily lexicon.
The court has few limits on what it does- estates, claims against the state, and family law matters involving minors have courts of their own- and the Court Administration Machine is always trying to organize and reorganize its jurists to expedite as many and/or as important cases as it can. Upstate judges were long used to getting long-term relegations to New York City! to clear overworked criminal calendars. There were experiments with judges specializing in matrimonial disputes, malpractice matters and, most relevant to me, commercial cases. Starting in NYC and coming first upstate to Rochester, State Supreme began assigning "Commercial Division" cases to a limited number of judges who would work to expedite them, once freed of the gaggles of car-accident and criminal dockets that fill most of the courthouse. Buffalo now has one, as well, with a higher monetary minimum of $100,000, but the one judge assigned in Rochester has historically gotten a lot of my cases there because anything over $25,000 (later raised to 50k) would go to him.
It's been at least three judges, all Hims, since it started there. The predecessor judges are still on the bench there, but internal politics have prevented the job from going permanently to one judge. (Same is true here, with even more turnover in that gig over the years they've had it.) But the incumbent, a few years younger than me, had been doing it since at least early this decade. He was friendly in chambers (filled with baseball memorabilia among other things), courteous on the bench, but did not suffer fools gladly and was quick to penalize parties for noncompliance with a sheaf of specialized divisional court rules. He was up for re-election this past November, and nobody ever expected he'd encounter any real challenge; State Supreme judges are nominated, not through primaries, but "conventions" that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld with the faintest of praise: "The Constitution does not prohibit legislatures from enacting stupid laws.” They then run in multi-county districts that bleed deep red outside their immediate municipal chambers' locations. The incumbent ran as a Republican, and there was little doubt he would begin his second 14-year term this week after winning that race handily.
Until this weekend, that is: word came out that he is under investigation for judicial misconduct, that pending that he has been banned from his cases and workspace, and that he has notified Albany of his intention not to accept the second term he just got. This is not an uncommon result in New York politics (see, Spitzer, Silver and Bruno, passim), and even among judges it's not unheard of. Two of the former incumbent Commercial Division judges in Buffalo got disrobed earlier this century: one for filing false statements in an investigation of a drunken lawyer he was out for drinks with, the other for outright bribery involving pending cases of his and his desired promotion to an appellate court. (The first resigned but was not disbarred; the second is totally out of the legal profession.)
"Shock" doesn't begin to describe it; the Rochester incumbent was respected and would never have struck me as the type to do anything untoward. It's been three days since the announcement, and the court system has kept the details of "what allegedly happened" completely locked down from the media and the practicing bar. All I know is that several of my cases have already been reassigned and others will no doubt follow. The Guv may appoint a temporary replacement who would have to run next November for the remaining 13 years of the term, or his bench may sit empty until then, clogging already full courtrooms even more.
Welp. Since then, here in Buffalo we've had one judge go on extended leave after laying his head on a railroad track, while the administrative judge in charge of Rochester and surrounding counties gave up his supervisory duties after a photo of him in blackface surfaced. Rochester's Commercial Division judge signed a letter in mid-January of 2020, resigning completely from the bench, and vowing never to seek state judicial office again. There were rumors, hints and allegations, but nothing really came out about it until just now:
A woman who said she was employed as a secretary to [a former Judge] from 2005 to 2019 has filed a lawsuit against him for sexual abuse.
[The judge] abruptly resigned from his position in 2019.
The victim alleges that [he] raped her and compelled her to perform oral sex when she did not want to.
She also alleges that her complaints to supervisors, human resources, and state watchdog agencies went ignored.
The claim said that the judge said these sexual acts were a part of her job and would use custody of her child as leverage against her.
...
The victim said that the former judge continued to have unwanted physical contact after she said she would no longer comply with his demands, and that he sometimes did it in the presence of others.
At one point the victim claims that another Supreme Court justice went as far as saying women needed to deal with sexual harassment from male judges because there’s no way for the to be reprimanded.
If you click that link, or track down others, you'll see his name, which I have removed, and possibly hers. In that time period, I likely received dozens of emails from her on scheduling matters, and was in the same chambers with her and him at least a few dozen times. Never got a hint of it. But then, hindsight does quite the job of descaling retinas. Compare and contrast his official Judgy photo, which still haunts all these stories about him, with a fictional character we saw on camera getting a Wholesale Club:
Last I heard, he'd tried to stake out a new career as a mediator. I don't think that's going to go well now.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-23 12:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-23 01:11 pm (UTC)Yep
Date: 2021-07-23 12:17 pm (UTC)What phase is the Moon in, BTW? Hmmm... Guess I should be glad I haven't been accused of sexual abuse--YET.
Re: Yep
Date: 2021-07-23 01:03 pm (UTC)- He seems nice.
- I am extremely disappointed in particularly two of the other named defendants. One, male and in charge of the "internal investigation" that abruptly ended when he quit, specifically told her it was her fault and she had "asked for" the treatment because of how she dressed. The other, female and a still-sitting judge of the same rank, told her in an earlier report that women had to endure sexual harassment from male judges because there was no way to have them reprimanded. I have a case with her a week from Monday. I shall try not to hurl on the hem of her robe.