The Annual Training Days for the Colonoscopy....

aka the virtual presentation of the Western New York Bankruptcy Conference, wherein, since 2021, we all sit on our asses at our own desks for 5½ hours on two straight June afternoons. It makes me wonder how I ever survived thirteen years of sitting on my ass six hours a day in public school, but at least that had breaks for lunch, gym and recess. We go through this torture to learn new things, commiserate about others, and rack up a butt (heh)-ton of the continuing ed credits we still need to collect and report, pandemic and all, to keep our shingles on the poles.

New York requires 24 of the 50-minute hours in every two-year reporting cycle; yes, as I've observed in the past, the only other primary use of that definition of an "hour" is in psychotherapy.  Of those, us old farts can pretty much pick and choose any topic or classification of the credit (I did a panicked I-can't-count-to-24 video at the end of my cycle last year on Weed Law), provided that the 24 include at least four hours of ethics and (for the old farts only) an hour of "diversity and inclusiveness."

Excuse me while I try to change the name of this journal to captainsblog_he_him...

In the Before Times, these generally went well and freely for me, because I am a "popular speaker at continuing education seminars," as some PR hack put on a long-dead bio from a long-dead firm I was once in. That meant I got triple credit for however many hours I spoke for prep time (anywhere from one to four of them), plus was comped for the other 4 to 7 hours I just sat on my ass, plus plus got "paid" in the form of a chit to do any other seminar for F-R-E-E-FREE! I still have my last of those which has sat, unused and technically expired, since March of 2020, because that provider hasn't done any live presentations under the COVID Administration.

So last year, getting near the end of my 2020–21 cycle, I had a small number of attendance credits from one lunchtime presentation in February 2020, and nothing else. I thought they might temporarily suspend the requirement during the pandemic.

::Pause for the judges in charge of the program to laugh hysterically at that, the judges who are exempted themselves from having to comply with it:: (Some judges do participate as panelists, some don’t. We’ll get to that.)

Thus a year ago in June, with six months to go to get 20 something credits in, I knocked off 10 of them by going to Virtual Batavia for the first time it was offered, and my first time at all at this conference in several years.

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It was a nice idea when they started it 18 years ago. There was, and I think still is, a similar annual function to bring together lawyers in the adjacent Northern District, with a similar division of their bankruptcy Bars between Albany and Syracuse, at a very nice extended seminar at a fancy hotel down in Cooperstown. Let me tell you, Batavia may be in the midpoint of our district, but it ain’t no Cooperstown. They have a Hall of Fame, a resident opera, and a beautiful lake. Batavia has a harness track and onions.  I am not making that up. Plus, there was a problem in the early years in finding a venue big enough to accommodate a few hundred lawyers, mainly because the judges are ethically prohibited from entering any establishment under their jurisdiction, and many of the hotels and catering facilities out there have walked in the door of our bankruptcy court at one time or another. The most recent ones had been at the community college, which I suppose could go bankrupt under chapter 9 but hasn’t done it yet.

For many years, the bankruptcy lawyers of Rochester and Buffalo rarely crossed over between each other’s territories. I was one of the few who routinely did all the way back to starting my practice. So this was one way to see the colleagues irregularly seen. All three of our judges then on the bench regularly appeared, spoke and participated in panels, plus we usually had a guest jurist or two from Northern, to share their perspectives and giggle at what a shitty place we had to do this.

COVID changed all that, and the program went dark in 2020. It resurfaced last year as a two afternoon virtual program. A $100 half-day on a consumer focus, another one similarly priced devoted to business cases. A buck fitty would get you into both, which I did last year to get of my much-needed credits, including several of the ethics ones and that elusive hour of inclusiveness.

I never got to speak at any of these. The Usual Suspects- the three judges, of course, plus the visitors including an occasional state court one, plus trustees of all chapters and briefs, plus Big Pots from the big firms who get all their CLE in-house at their firms for free and don't need the @#$&* credits- tended to take up the slots. I saw something, and I said something, while returning my certification for the weed seminar last November. (Ah, the certification. Because lawyers are lying cheating weasels, we can't just pay for these, but have to prove we sat through it. They embed alphanumeric codes throughout the day, which have to be duly written down and turned in with your affirmation that you didn't sneak out to play golf for part of it. Also, no partial credit for the first nine holes if you do.)  And either because I spoke up, or because the Big Pots didn't know how to use Zoom, I was invited to speak at this one this week.

Three extra credits just for writing eight pages and telling jokes for an hour! Maybe, possibly the thing would be comped! Turned out, it was. Both days, even. That was by no means assumed; because when the Big Pot law firms moved all their CLE in-house and stopped paying for Bar Association seminars, these groups actually lost revenue when continuing ed went mandatory. I paid close to 100 bucks to watch a video about weed, which cost them nothing for the content, all sunk costs for the original seminar and maybe a dollar to upload.  I figured my best case was they'd comp me for speaking but charge the whole $100 for the second day, putting the value of my service at fifty bucks. Fortunately, they gave me both days for free....

which is kinda like how Becky must've felt when she got talked into whitewashing that fence;)

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I've done my words for the day, so I will be back tomorrow with the substance and the weirdness. Of how nobody knows who is at these things, except the speakers they see, and even they ("we" when I was briefly one of them) can only see names of the people actively watching the presentation at that time. I was messaging people who weren't there with something of a running MST3K commentary on it all.  We will also get to the more serious substance of things I learned, some of which were decidedly Not Nice. Those concern student loans, and we will return to the subjects of Tingling and N.M. Both of which are actual things we should talk about, and neither of which is the least bit funny.

See ya tomorrow, if my ass should live that long after 5½ more hours of this....