June Legal News Retrospective: Leases, Adultery, and Death

 

Welcome back to Lawyers & Liquor, where I normally talk profanely about legal shit in what is meant to be an amusing manner. Today, Monday July 9th, though, I need a minute to decompress from a busy couple weeks. So we’re going to introduce the monthly Legal News Retrospective, where I’ll talk about the three most interesting stories I could find from the month before.

Yeah, it’s a cop-out. Fuck you. I’m tired.

So without further ado, let’s look at June’s true tales of legal interest, including the world’s worst tenant, a Texas style adultery, and the death of a living legal legend.

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Things I Don’t Care About: BigLaw Pay Raises

Hello and welcome to Lawyers & Liquor, where we do nothing but talk about legal stuff in a profane manner because…you know what? I don’t owe an explanation to you.  Every lawyer in the world wants to just start cursing about halfway through discussing anything legal with laymen and brand-spanking-new baby attorneys, and that’s what I do because, frankly, I ain’t got much to lose anymore by doing it.

So today let’s start talking about the things I don’t really give two watery shits about, and by that I mean the whole thing going on that’s  been over-reported and covered with intense scrutiny in the legal community.  No, not the death of Judge Leighton, former federal judge and civil rights pioneer, and quite possibly the most interesting man in the world, back in the beginning of June, but rather the BigLaw pay raises that I, like many other small-time meat and potatoes attorneys aren’t affected by and don’t fucking care about.

I’m the Boozy Barrister, and it’s time to buckle the fuck up.

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“Hi, I’m Goliath from Goliath & Goliath.” – A Philly Lawyer Takes on Morgan & Morgan

Let’s take a minute and talk about these huge, multi-state law firms that swoop into the local area and start slinging their advertising dollars around. These are the candymen of the legal advertising industry, keeping radio jingle writers and shady TV commercial producers in dollars so they can run all of their ads during Rush Limbaugh or the seventeenth mid-day rerun of Judge Judy. We all know the types of guys I’m talking about, with ads that say shit like “call us, we’ll get you your money” and some 1-800 number that takes you to a switchboard before directing your ass to a regional office in some big city. You’ll get better service if you work with an injury attorney like Kirkland & Packard LLP. They provide great customer service. But the dirty little secret of lawyering is that these places are really just mills, gigantic firms from out of state with not a single named partner who could find your podunk little shithole on a map unless their private jets were flying overhead.

These guys are, basically, the Waffle House of the legal world, with a branch every damn place. They’re the bane of the small law practitioner, and especially the small PI guy, who can’t compete with the advertising and the crisply pressed suits of some partner that shows up in the commercials but never in court. But there are instances where people stick to their local practitioners, for example, Arkansas personal injury attorneys might to more sort after by a resident of Little Rock. But that dosen’t justify big firms flooding the local airwaves with commercials, lining the streets with billboards, and getting the name recognition that used to go to the decent guy down the street, they’re gonna take every call from a dog bite to a fender bender and move on.

These are the personal injury mills.

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Pride Month Special: “One True Pervert In the Courtroom” – The Trial of Dale Jennings

Here at Lawyers & Liquor we tend to dedicate the third Friday of every month to the discussion of a fetish.  But June has five Fridays, and, as a quick glance at my calendar just informed me, we’re about halfway through this month.  So I thought it may be neat, given that this is a month bedecked in the rainbow vomit and glitter-cannon parades that is Pride, to talk about something more on point with that shit:  Let’s talk about the history of the LGBTQ+ treatment at law in the United States.

That’s right, Boozy’s sticking on the way-too-tight tank top and trimming his beard to make this website the legal version of Growlr for one day only as we dive into the historical treatment of the LGBTQ+ community within the United States.  So smear on your best body paint, cuddle up with the spouse you previously couldn’t marry, and call that one homophobic Aunt that everyone has just to tell them to fuck right off as we talk about Dale Jennings, and how the LAPD totally George Michael’d the fuck out of him…and in doing so helped kick off the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement as we know it today.

…Fucking talk about some shit backfiring, eh?

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Come on Arlene’s – A second bite at the apple in the wake of Masterpiece Caskeshop

Yesterday was Gay Wedding Cake day in the lawyer world.  If you’re not really sure what I’m referring to, I’d like to congratulate you on finding a new home under that rock.  I hopes it’s spacious and has great wifi reception.  For the rest of us that live in the real world, like the poor bastard behind the keyboard at Lawyers & Liquor, the internet went nuts when the news of the Supreme Court’s ruling of the case of the baker who refuses to be a Marie Antoinette-esque figure to LGBTQ+ couples and demands that they not eat his cake set the world aflame as people tried to read into its meanings.  It was so bad that mere moments after the opinion was released I was fielding a phone call from a senior partner at my office who wanted to talk about it – meaning he wanted me to read and summarize it for him.

Most of the talk, though, was people desperately trying to find meaning in an opinion that never once really touched on the primary issue before it.  Instead of talking about whether the butcher, the baker, and the leather gear maker have a right to deny service to literally anyone in the world they want by screaming “But my Jesus” and locking the doors at the mere sight of a rainbow, SCOTUS punted the ball.  The Supreme Court issued a narrow ruling that applied to only that one set of facts, said “Fuck all of you waiting to hear if we’re about to descend into madness,” and based their ruling off of the baker not getting themselves an impartial tribunal at the first level in this shit.

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