Ten Pounds of Excrement in a Five Pound Bag

"Beware the barrenness of a busy life."

A brief one this morning because, well, I'm busy. I have a hearing in a little bit, yet another mea culpa to the court arising out of my transition to solo practice. I couldn't find one of my clients for a month, and now am having to ask to continue a trial in May because, although I've since located her, we lost some critical weeks of trial prep. It's an odd scenario. We'll see what the judge does with it all.

This weekend we hosted our first wedding at the farm. All that youthful optimism felt contagious, and they had the perfect weather for their shotgun nuptials.

They were all Baptists, so no drunken late night antics, although I'm told the high school girls eventually cajoled the DJ into playing their favorite tracks, rapped by black men fantasizing about gang raping and beheading a white girl. I weep for the future.

And there's a lot to weep about these days, eh? That poor migrant who was carted off to a dungeon in El Salvador due to an "administrative mistake", and can just stay there despite a judge's express order because it would require the executive branch to engage in diplomacy to get him back, and that's exclusively the executive branch's function. So much for the rule of law, for due process, for separation of powers. We're cooked as a country. Word is they're negotiating to build a 100,000 prisoner facility there, so they'll eventually have room for you and me.

Meanwhile, Rumplethinskin's Liberation Day has created chaos across the world economy, and essentially guaranteed that we'll all pay more for watermelons and pickup trucks and iPhones. The Chinese seem to have seen this coming, and apparently are running circles around our Master Negotiator. He's also managed to tank the government bond market, with yields shooting up as investors flee the dumpster fire he's started here. That means mortgage rates are rising again, so kiss the housing market goodbye. We'll be renting places we'd hoped to sell this year, because folks who are too broke to qualify for a mortgage or are trapped in their own low interest mortgage and forced to move to another city still need a place to live.

Other than that, and the Braves entering Week Three at 4-11 and in last place in the NL East, things are ducky.

I was pondering this morning the struggles I and every other litigator have had in the last several months keeping up with our caseload. It's not just me, and it's not just sole practitioners who are buried these days in Florida. The problem here is that the supreme court decided as of 1.1. 25 that the trial judges must pour on the coals to get their crowded dockets cleared. We saw a crush of cases after Hurricane Michael, and struggled during the Covid years to move cases to resolution. The result is a bolus of somewhat old cases that need to find their way around third and to the finish line.

But we are all struggling with the remedy. As of January, no case is supposed to be on the docket more than a couple years, basically accelerating cases by about a third of the average lawsuit's lifespan. Divorces without kids are to take nine months, start to finish. Judges who aren't moving their cases at this pace will find themselves on a "bad apples" report provided to the supremes. Continuances are extremely disfavored, and trial judges are almost encouraged to sanction lawyers who are perceived as a little too lackadaisical about working their files.

The problem here is that this push to clear dockets means every litigator ramping up the tempo of his or her practice, with no increase in staffing, technology, or anything else that might help make that happen. I didn't have an associate most of the time I was at D&S, and now definitely work alone. That means finding myself an old lawyer at a point in my career when, a generation ago, I'd be slowing down, billing less, spending more time generating work and handing it to other, younger lawyers. Instead I'm working like I did when I was 35, and almost never take an actual day off.

I don't want to work like this, but don't really have a choice. With the economy in free fall, P and I are two of the lucky few who can just work a little harder to ride this one out. So that's what we'll do, until we can't.

Time to get ready for that hearing, then I'm flying the Columbia over to Tallahassee for an oil change, then on to PC for the week and Easter weekend.