by S. Sponte, Esq.
I am a bit depressed. Yeah, I know, but this one is different. This one is not my usual kind of depression, like when I start the day by cursing at my office plants or like when I sit sullenly at my desk hour after hour clipping my fingernails into the goldfish bowl. No, no, this time it’s really different. This time I’m so depressed that I’ve completely quit sending out bills, even the accurate ones.
It’s also different because of the season. It’s summer now, usually a happy time for me, a time when the weather around here improves to half-gray and the citizenry is generally not as litigious as usual. Thus in summer I usually have a less demanding schedule, with more leisure time to pursue my various avocations. Traditionally I take advantage of the summertime lull to improve my litigation skills by spending more time with my lady.
Another of the customary pleasures that summer brings with it is our local bar association’s annual bench-bar conference, and therein lies this particular tale of angst. The bench-bar conference is a wonderful and festive event, an occasion when many of the local lawyers and judges retreat for the weekend to a nearby wooded resort to attend seminars, play golf and drink in public. It’s the one time of the year when we can let down our hair in the presence of our colleagues without fear of being scalped.
The weekend is the ideal time to renew the sense of professional comradery that, because of the customary rip and tear mechanisms of daily practice, takes such a battering during the rest of the year. Accordingly I take great pains to display as much sincerity and affection for my fellow lawyers as I can possibly feign. It makes them ever so much easier to deal with during the rest of the year if they think I like them.
Now normally I come away from the conference feeling refreshed and invigorated by such deception. Not this year, however, as I have been in a funk ever since I returned home.
It all started the afternoon of the second day, following the golf tournament. My foursome had won the trophy for the most inventive score card, and even though our victory was being appealed, I was nonetheless feeling particularly mellow and content. After a quick shower and a beer chaser, I found myself strolling along the row of display booths set up by various suppliers of law-related commodities. The usual purveyors were there, offering the latest in law books, title insurance services, Bearcat scanners and the like. This year however there was a newcomer, a company that described itself as a specialist in document management. Since I was unfamiliar with the service, I stopped to ask a few questions.
The gentleman in charge of the booth was delighted to see me. Since he wasn’t passing out free samples, no other lawyers had stopped. He specialized in computer storage of files and he told me he could store all my closed files on computer disk, thereby eliminating the need for me to retain both the old files themselves and the office space required to store them.
When I told him I had about 2500 closed files, he held up what looked like a large computer floppy disk and allowed as how all of them could be stored on less than one, count ‘em, less than one of those disks. At first I took affront. Then I was taken aback.
“Just one,” I said. “You mean all my files, my entire career, can fit on less than one computer disk? That it, just one.”
“They do hold a gigabyte of information,” he said, as if he thought that would somehow offer solace.
Now it’s true that my closed files take up a lot of office space that could probably be put to better use, and it’s also true that I actually have been considering some type of file storage arrangement. But I have oft times taken such great pleasure from wandering into my file room and gazing at that expanse of paper. I stand there amidst the divorces, the wrongful deaths the custody wars, the will contests, the malpractice suits, the huffings and puffings, the traverses and travails of the sundry lives of sundry people, and I reflect on what and where I’ve been as a lawyer. The physical presence of all those files is a comfort to me. They stand as corporeal testimony to my career, and when it comes to their final resting place, storage by gigabyte had simply not occurred to me. I’d been thinking more along the lines of a mosque.
When I first started my career, I really did expect to change the course of mighty rivers and bend steel in my bare hands. But the intransigent truth is that as a small town general practitioner I’m not going to leave behind me the legacy of an Earl Warren, a Hugo Black, a William Douglas. However I do like to think that I’ve brought some measure of esprit to my practice and that I’ve imbued my clients and their causes with a fair degree of energy and passion. That’s my legacy, such as it is, and my files are the only physical traces of that legacy there are.
However it now appears that, by the wave of some techno-magic wand, my entire career can be stripped bare-wire clean of emotion and converted into a pedestrian string of O’s and 1’s. And it’s not even a very long string at that.
So after having given the matter due consideration, I have decided not to digitize. I simply could not bear to see my work product reduced to a floppy disk that can be carried around in someone’s coat pocket. I need for my files to take three strong men three full days to move out of my office after I’ve shuffled off this mortal coil. I’m a lawyer, by God, and I will not settle for less. How else will anyone know I’ve been here?
Copyright 1994, S. Sponte. Esq.