On the third day of posts here reviewing the year, my true love gave to me,....

Two busy offices, one disgraced judge, and a beer.



(Probably should've used that one yesterday, since it relates to sport- it riffs on the Bills' "Shout Song" played after the team scores at home.)

Today, much like last week, was Hurry Up and Work And Then Don't. No court to speak of, as some shut down completely while others go on skeleton crews. With the two Big Twelve Days falling on Wednesdays this year, it's resulted in the Tuesdays being the "extra day off" for some outfits, the Thursdays for others, and both for more than a few.  I had a full morning of signups of documents left over from last week's semi-catatonic state, but once done with those I spent the afternoon running outside errands, doing a noontime workout while my psychotic car's panic button kept going off in 48F temperatures, and picking up the odd can of craft beer for illustration purposes.

I have two sides to what I do in terms of business models: here in Buffalo, I am a sole practitioner, do all my own billing and collection work, and keep all of my revenue except the expenses that I have kept historically to around 20 percent of the gross (primarily by not hiring anybody), and pay both sides of self-employment tax on the net chunk.  In my other office, I'm a W-2 employee, am entirely dependent on them to provide the work, send the bills and handle the collections, and I get net pay every two weeks when anybody does bother to send in a check, out of which x percent is deducted for overhead and differing percentages get deducted for various taxes (including my share only of what used to be called FICA, and pension and dental insurance plans they've set up). 

My own side broke all kinds of records this year, partly from just generally being busier and occasionally being luckier with collection cases, but my W-2 number is way down. Some is because we transitioned a major client from their side to mine, but also a big part is because they've endured some distractions during the year which I have had no control over. An employee got the boot in the summer for, among other things, falling completely behind in sending bills to clients after entering them in bookkeeping as if the clients HAD been billed.  Then those same clients got understandably peeyoed when they got "reminders" for bills they'd never been sent.  It's led to a backlog that I have a significant share of, and I suspect some of it may get written off for "goodwill purposes." 

Then, for the past 2-3 months, several of my co-workers there undertook a major outside project having nothing to do with the practice of law, which led to less work being done, and less attention being paid to what work was being committed to, billed and paid for.  With one exception that I've done a lot for in the past month with success, I have no clue when any of the rest of it will get caught up.  They're good people, well-intentioned to a fault, and part of the problem is I've been so busy here, and they so distracted there, I really need the better part of a full week to work with them in their space to figure these things out- and this week and last ain't those times.

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I've dropped real estate completely, except when weird things come up on other peoples' deals with bankruptcy issues, judgments against interests and such.  A few of those wound up resolving nicely.  Collections have been hit and miss, but the hits have been nice and one looks like it will begin 2020 with a nice downstroke.  Bankruptcy remains most of what I do- personal referrals from other lawyers, former clients and a legal plan resulted in 24 cases being filed this year. Not my biggest volume for a single year, but it wasn't that long ago that I filed only seven cases in an entire year.  There's also been transition in the practice: Buffalo's two judges and Rochester's one have run essentially two separate fiefdoms for as long as I've been working in both.  That began to change this summer, when one of Buffalo's two, the elder statesman of the bench, elected semi-retirement.  He's long continued in office despite there being no financial incentive for him to work versus draw his pension; he's stayed on out of loyalty to the court and his colleagues.  With our overall population being somewhat down and bankruptcy filings being significantly down, it has long been suspected that the DC judicial bean counters will not replace him, leaving one judge for our fiefdom's eight counties and its five different places of holding court.

Rochester's judge covers nine counties, but with around 60 percent of the overall case volume of Buffalo's, and he no longer travels outside the courthouse for "Rochester division" cases. So when the senior judge here took semi-retirement, the Rochester judge began receiving assignments of roughly half of all new Erie County filings.  That has brought his attitudes, his forms and a very different way of doing things to cases here. Since I've practiced significantly in both fiefdoms since 1986, I know the distinctions and have no trouble working with them, but I'm also very aware of how disruptive it is to The Way We've Always Done Things. I am awaiting the first of my Buffalo Chapter 13 cases with him, scheduled for Valentines Day.  Word is, he will be handling them electronically from the Rochester courthouse; I've done that with video setups in the past between Utica and Binghamton, so that alone is not the new part. But it has hastened the retirement of at least one of the trustees here, and that will lead to new people and more new ways, in all likelihood.

Still, nobody's left in disgrace. That was the word from this weekend out of state court down the road a piece.

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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.

And no, I'm not interested. Have you seen all these posts I've been putting up? How could you get a judicial gig if people find out that
 

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