As a thoroughly modern divorce lawyer, I am at my computer, marking up a Marriage Settlement Agreement and emailing it first to my client and then to opposing counsel to get their comments (in different colors) on my draft. It was not always thus. I used to be an old school lawyer.

My First Word Processor

My first word processor was a spiral notebook and a point pen in law school before every student had an apple laptop, tablet, and cellphone connecting them to the world wide web. I learned how to take shorthand and how to type, first on a manual, and then on an electric typewriter.

The keys went “clickity-clack” and a bell rang “ding” when you got to the end of the line. Old school lawyers remember that rhythmic music that got faster and faster when you pounded out that motion to strike evidence as “fruit of the poisonous tree” at a break in the middle of the trial.

Carbon Paper and White Out

Every old school lawyer had a box of carbon paper. You put a piece of carbon paper that left black smudges on your hands; your white-cotton, button-down shirt; your white seer-sucker suit in the summer time; and your fancy tie that your Aunt gave you last Christmas. You put the carbon, smudgy side down, between two pieces of typing paper and rolled them into the typewriter.  The carbon made a copy on the bottom sheet.

When you made a mistake, you had a little bottle of liquid white out which was like a white paint that came with a little brush on the cap so you could paint over and then type over your mistakes. You also had to lift the carbon paper and correct the copy without getting smudges all over it.

Big Leaps Forward

Thankfully we made big leaps forward in word processing. We thought it was a miracle when someone invented an electric typewriter that could remember what you typed. Talk about artificial intelligence!

The genius of this machine was that you could write your firm letter to opposing counsel on it, then retype only the words that needed correction or revision, then push a button and the machine would type out a perfect letter automatically. All you had to do was reload the paper.

Even better, it could type out as many perfect copies as you needed automatically — one for your client and one for the file. No more carbon paper.  No more smudges on your red power ties.  But sadly, no more “clickity-clack ding”.

Next we got copiers and a nifty word processor from Xerox. Old school lawyers thought the Xerox word processor was the cat’s meow because it had a little screen on it about four or five words long on which you could correct your mistakes. How short-sighted we were.

[TO BE CONTINUED…]

One of these days, you too will get “The Call”. It will be opportunity calling. Expect miracles.

My son is off to Boston University for his final year of college. He is majoring in journalism and political science. I wrote this to give him some fatherly advice. When I finished it, I thought you might also find it interesting or inspiring. Feel free to pass it on to your sons and daughters or anyone you think might benefit from it.

A Letter to My Son

It won’t be long now until you’ll be starting your career.  Congratulations on making it to your Senior Year.   I am very proud of you.

Be sure to collect contact info from your friends and classmates. They will be of help to you in the future if  you keep in touch.  And its so easy to do these days.  You have iPhones, the Internet, the cloud, LinkedIn, Facebook, and email. Use them. All we had were our Rolodex our a Little Black Book both of which were analogue, not digital. Our Internet was the radio.

I am pleased to see from your Linked-In profile that you are following in my footsteps with a varied and interesting work history. You already have enough experience to write about sports, law, birds, and politics – and you’re just beginning.

In Your Father’s Footsteps

As I look back at my life, I might be richer if I had stayed with P&G or the FCC or Whiteford, or if I taken that job from the IRS, instead of starting my own law firm. But I would have been totally bored, I probably would have never had met your mother and then you wouldn’t even exist.

Your work as a journalist brings back memories of my start as a news reporter in my dad’s radio station. As the new kid I was given the assignments that no one else wanted — city hall council meetings, county fairs, spotting for the sports announcer at high school football and basketball games, calling the hospital emergency rooms every morning for accidents, and visiting the police station to see who got arrested last night.

It was very exciting for me. I loved getting the news before anyone else and typing it up at 100 miles an hour to meet the 6:00 am deadline for the first morning newscast. Sometimes, the news director had to rip it out of my typewriter.

The Night I Got “The Call”

Then one night I got “The Call”. Three little kids didn’t come home for dinner. They were last seen playing near the caves that the Mississippi River cut out of the limestone and mud. The assistant news director told me to “Get the station’s remote broadcas6t equipment and go down to the caves for a live report on the radio.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. ”You want me to go on the air? What do I say?”

“Just tell us what you see,” he answered.

Probably the best journalism tip I ever received.

The remote was the size of my gym bag and ten times as heavy. It was neon yellow. I slipped the yellow strap over my left shoulder so I could walk around and key the mike in my right hand. I could her the station announcer give me the countdown – five four three two (they don’t say the one so it doesn’t get picked up when they throw the switch from the radio station to remote control.

I took a deep breath and did the one count in my head.

“I am on the banks of the Mississippi River in Hannibal, Missouri. And this is what I see.”

“In front of me there is a flat area of ground where three children were playing this afternoon. They did not come home for dinner.”

“Past flat place the ground rises and in the hillside I see an entrance — an entrance to the vast cave system that the river has cut out of the soft limestone that forms its banks. The caves are unmapped and go for miles. They are honey-comb mazes with several different levels. These are the same caves that Mark Twain wrote about Tom and Huck exploring. Only in the fictional account, they used string to find their way out again.”

“It is dark along the river tonight except for this surreal site. It is lit up like a movie set by a dozen flood lights. There is a red generator powering them. A lot of cars and trucks parked every which way. There is a hole in the side of a cliff that is the entrance to the caves.

A lot activity. Men with ropes and flashlights are going in and out of the cave. They have enlarged the entrance for easier access and I see a big mound of dirt in front of the cave. I see grim determination on the faces of these men, who are risking their own lives to search for these lost boys.”

The next day I went into the cave with those brave searchers (many of whom are FB friends 55 years later).  Eventually there would be about 200 searchers in was tlo become the largest cave search ever.    But the lost boys were never found.

Epilogue:  One Call Leads to Another

In my last year of law school at the University of Missouri, the  telephone roused me from the deep sleep of afternoon nap.  “Hello?” I answered, not yet fully awake.

The voice on other end sounded wide awake, “James?’

”Yes?”

“This is the recruiter for the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, DC. We’d like you to join our legal department.”

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Or, in your case, the future.

Love, Dad

It’s graduation time!  Caps will soon be flying as a new crop of graduates join the work-a-day world. My youngest graduates from high school this year. Time for commencement speakers to encourage and offer advice for new graduates.

I remember a lawyer spoke at my graduation from law school. He told us that while we fantasized about the luxurious life of a lawyer, the truth is that we didn’t know how good we had it as students. We would soon be longing for those bygone days when we had no court deadlines, client demands, irritating opposing counsel, and judges overruling our objections.

My first day of starting work as a lawyer, a seasoned attorney expressed a similar sentiment. He said, “You guys have it made. This is the richest  you’ll ever be in your life. No mortgages, no wives, and no children.”

I haven’t been asked to speak to a graduating class, but if I ever am, I would try to pass along some tips for their first job, like this:

 1.  Ask questions.

Your boss will give you assignments and tasks. The instructions will not be clear.  My niece interned in my office. Her first day in the office, I was meeting with a client. I called my niece on the intercom and asked her to bring two coffees to my office. She told me later that she had never made coffee before and didn’t know how to work the coffee machine. Now she has a PhD.

When I clerked for the Public Defender in law school, I was sitting next to him at counsel’s table taking notes, when turned to me abruptly and whispered urgently in the middle of a trial and said, “Run back to the office and draft a motion to suppress evidence.” That was my first motion and I had no clue how to draft it. That’s something they don’t teach you in law school. I was saved by Marjorie, the long-time secretary, who calmly pulled up an old one on her word processor and changed the names. Find the “Marjorie” in your organization and make friends with them.

Tom was the draftsman assigned to me when I worked as a chemical engineer at P&G. I designed, on paper, a tank to hold Toluene, which is a flammable liquid chemical used in making soap. I used pressure, volume, humidity, and temperature in my equations to calculated the size of the tank needed. But it was Tom who told me about the quick-connect flanges that would help the truck drivers load the tank so they wouldn’t be cursing the engineers who designed it. They didn’t teach that in engineering school.

The guys at the P&G plant in Hamilton, Ontario, wanted an air pressure line to deliver a soap making slurry to them so they would not have to move it across the plant in wheelbarrows. I designed a system that would do the job theoretically according to my equations. But again, it was Tom, who pulled out the blueprints for the plant to make sure there was room for me to run the pipes.

2.  Make a To Do List Each Morning.

I had a great boss at P&G. He was a quintessential engineer. When he assigned a job to me, he would pull out a little blue-green sticky pad, and in a very log key, calm manner, make a neat numbered list of the tasks that needed to be completed.

If you’re good, you will soon find yourself overwhelmed with too much to do. I had a paralegal who was very good at her job. But she suffered because she always wanted to give everything 100%. Perfection became the enemy of results.

Don’t lose sight of the 80/20 rule. That is 80% of the value lies in 20% of the things. So if you have a list of 10 things to do today, and you accomplish the two most important tasks, you have finished 80% of your work. The rest is out-plant. Out-plant means try to delegate it to someone else.

3.  Attack Your Work. 

You can learn things from bad bosses. One of the meanest bosses I ever had taught me this. He would call me at home about a contract of tax issue I was working on. He didn’t just work, he attacked his work, with a vengeance until it was completely defeated. We all have those projects that we just don’t want to do.

Try this. I take the case file and put it in the center of my desk. I clean everything else off my desk. Then I sit on my hands and do nothing else for 20 minutes. At the end of the 20 minutes, I attack the file. It works for me.

4.  Get Your Points on the Scoreboard. 

I recommend you keep a log of the projects you work on and the completion dates. You can  turn the log into a memo at the end of each month to give to your boss as a “progress report.”  Your boss is usually not aware of everything you are doing. It is important that you not only score points, but that your points get on the scoreboard so everyone sees them.

5.  One Word.

My high school commencement speaker was Scott Zimmerman, a local disk jockey on the radio. Scott started his speech by saying he was going to give the graduates one word that would be the secret to success in whatever they wanted to accomplish. At the conclusion of the speech he said he would now reveal that one word. At his signal, two students unfurled a huge banner that had one word written across it.  That one word was “UGOTTAWANA”.