Unintended Consequences

This morning started out well enough. We've taken to locking the cats out of the bedroom, allowing for eight hours of pretty much uninterrupted sleep without rolling over on a kitten or feeling like a recumbent Daniel Boone with Slane draped over our heads. The Southern Tier is in the midst of a heat wave, with heat indexes in the mid-90s and high temperatures soaring into the upper 80s (you can't see my eyes rolling at this as a Floridian, but trust me they are), so the window unit air conditioner hummed softly at us all night, its white noise cancelling the howl of hungry cats and occasional car driving past.

This particular morning I drove Peg to the hospital for work, so I could double back to the golf course and hit a bucket of balls at 6:30 in the morning instead of reading the paper. It would be better for my soul, not to mention my newly-acquired swing.

Sunrise at Guthrie was beautiful.

A chevron of geese flew just overhead, hanging there in space before turning south and east for the next leg of their migration. Mist hung over the mountains that cradle this little hospital. All lovely.

The Corning Country Club was also a visual feast. And empty, except for the hum of zero turn mowers and tractors preparing the course and driving range for the day.

I schlepped my golf bag along the path to the driving range, traveling with hope even as a sinking feeling settled over me in my solitude that perhaps my plan was in jeopardy.

And it was. As I approached the range, I noticed that the bags of golf balls usually arrayed along the range mat were all missing. If I wanted to hit golf balls, I'd have to provide them myself.

It befuddles me that there is no early morning option in the summer to hit a few range balls or play a couple holes. Down South this is prime time to work in a round or a bucket of balls, particularly in the summer months when the heat makes late morning or afternoon play almost too oppressive to bear. And before the equinox the summer days here are so long that nature itself seems to invite a little golfing fun as the sun rises.

But apparently that song of the season doesn't resonate with the locals. I'll have to hit balls another day, or try to sneak in a few swings on the way to pick up Peg from work this afternoon.

I really needed a little golf therapy to battle my growing unease, floating along with a gloom that isn't quite depression but not the happiness I correctly feared was fleeting a few days ago. I keep coming back to an email conversation I had with an old friend and fellow lawyer in the panhandle a few days ago. In reading the history a shop on Market Street placed on its webpage, I noted that the original builders and occupants of the old nineteenth century brick structure bore the same last name as him, an unusual central European surname I've never encountered in the South. I asked him if he had kin up here, and a conversation began about how our practices were faring.

Somewhere in there I dropped the comment that it would be great to get together for a mediation one of these days, either live or by Zoom, after he expressed his disdain for the volume of Hurricane Michael cases still in his file cabinet.

"I'd love to hire you, and have tried several times, but the south Florida lawyers who represent the insureds in those cases have started insisting on using their own mediators from down there. They just won't hire a panhandle mediator."

This explains in part why my volume of mediations this year has dropped from an annual pace of fifty or so down to thirty. Not a positive development, what with a new plane and alimony and this needy old house.

I should have seen this one coming. For years, the southeast Florida legal community has crept into the panhandle like a rising, fetid tide. We quipped that we in northwest Florida were living on an island of civility, where lawyers knew each other personally, regularly interacted with the same players, and lived by the "Yellow River Code" that made our word our bond and imposed long-term consequences on lawyers who could not be trusted or who tried to gain advantage in a case through gamesmanship. Gradually over the last decade, through telephonic appearances and assiduous avoidance of live appearances in court, the folks from Down There started to squeeze out the lawyers who lived between Tallahassee and Pensacola. They undercut our rates. They gained the favor of insurance clients by engaging in the sort of cut-throat tactics we refused to countenance.

A lot of folks don't realize that literally fifty percent of all Florida lawyers practice from West Palm Beach south through Miami-Dade. That's a lot of bar cards chasing a finite pool of work. It was inevitable that they'd see the explosive growth of the panhandle and set their sights north.

And the pandemic opened the floodgates. Mediation was the last thing left that, by rule, was almost always in person. Although adjusters would sometimes appear by phone, there was always at the very least a lawyer in the conference room representing that defendant. And the mediator himself (or herself, an odd rarity in a profession that is rapidly approaching fifty percent female) appeared in person, every time.

Now in the age of Zoom the entire south Florida clown car caravan can arrive on our screen (well, their screens because I'm not involved), Fort Lauderdale defense lawyer and adjuster in his home office in who-knows-where, with plaintiff's lawyer in Miami representing some working class couple in Bay County just trying to get the wreckage of their home fixed nearly three years after the storm. Presiding over the whole exercise is now a mediator who couldn't find Lynn Haven on a map six months ago, but now is trying to shepherd the case toward settlement with no context at all, no understanding of what happened on that October day in 2018 or the days that followed.

I like to think that guys like me, and my friends Jeff and Ross and others, all longtime local mediators, added something to the process. I used to begin a Hurricane Michael mediation by telling the insureds I knew their experience in that my home was destroyed completely that day, and my office windows blown out. I slept in a stranger's garage apartment in the next county for weeks after the storm. Over the course of the mediation we'd talk about the local contractors whose work was often a topic of debate--I knew the good ones and the not-so-good. I knew intimately the quirks of the local judges, and their own stories of enduring the aftermath of the storm.

None of that matters, I guess. In the end, I can mourn the blow to my practice and income ushered in by this pandemic and our technological work-arounds, or I can figure out how to respond in a way that accepts things as they are, and as they'll continue to be probably for the rest of my career.

Von Moltke the elder once observed that "no plan survives the first encounter with the enemy." This is not to say that the south Florida crowd is an enemy--I have lots of friends and lawyers I respect a great deal down there, although they have more than their share of hamburgers in shiny suits. Rather, at the outset of the pandemic I had a vision of how to leverage this moment and the tectonic changes in my profession wrought by our need to work remotely. The only problem with that vision was that it was not anchored in any actual data points, but instead was resting on a rich froth of hope. What is taking shape was completely foreseeable, and I sort of kick myself for not anticipating it and getting out in front.

But here we are. The paradigm shift of the last seventeen months is still a work in progress, a different vocational world emerging by the hour. I can figure out how to prosper, or I can drown.

Time to start swimming, Donk. Plenty of billable work to do today, which is a blessing.