A Happy New Year to All

We made a pledge to ourselves that we would not end the year in a depressed state of mind.  But it has been hard.  We have ended the year in what seems to us to be a concatenation of events — a financial melt-down and two protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.   

For while we like to bitch and moan about our mistreatment as attorneys — poor wages, disrespect, cramped quarters, and cold pizza — those issues pale in comparison with reports about our returning war veterans, no matter your feelings and opinions about the wars.  As reported in the National Law Journal, state criminal courts have begun to create systems devoted to war veterans across the country, from New York to Oklahoma to California.  An increasing number of soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are showing up as defendants with a special set of problems.   State court judges are joining with local prosecutors, public defenders, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs officials and local lawyer volunteers to create courts with veterans-only case proceedings, because they have seen a common thread of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), substance abuse, head injuries and mental illness underlying the crimes of veterans from these particular wars.  As one attorney has said, it’s a population that’s not just underserved, it’s unserved.

And as contract attorneys and their families deal with the knock-on effects of the financial melt-down on their world (less work, increased competition from India, squeezed in the cost cutting vise of law firms and agencies, etc.) we learn the work/family cause championed by President-elect Obama (featuring bills that would for the first time mandate paid sick days and paid family leave nationwide for many businesses) is colliding head-on with the worst economic crisis in decades, giving wary employers and their allies fresh ammunition for their fight against the mandates.  In Milwaukee, voters on Election Day made their city the third — after San Francisco and Washington, D.C. — to require private employers to provide paid sick days.

It will be the usual seesaw national debate we always see between “them” and “us” (or is it “us” and “them”?).  We’ll hear “a recession is not the time to raise the cost of work and it will make it much more difficult to fix the economic crisis” versus “bad economic times are the worst times to lose a job because your child is sick or your father has a stroke”.

And then there’s the regular daily jolt we get about how transient we are.  Dan Ziegler, a D.C. Posse List member, died yesterday, not even 30 years old.  A number of us were working with him on one of the A&P projects here in D.C.  Our prayers are with his family.

But it’s the holidays and we shall try to remain festive and not end the year downbeat.   Life goes on and it must get better.  As Posse List members have reported to us almost daily, projects are trickling into the DC and NYC contract attorney markets (which have suffered the most in this downturn) and projects are on the upswing across the country.  DC and NYC still lag in our overall job postings but as we reported in our “Trends” report earlier this week our contacts inform us projects will begin in earnest again in January: FCPA cases, Federal government investigations, bankruptcy/restructuring and litigations. 

We hope you are all able to enjoy the holidays.  We are taking a break and we’ll be back January 5^th.  We will endeavor to a better job in 2009 for the contract attorney community and, as always, we encourage your feedback.  We have plans for expanding the List’s coverage, but we’ll save all that for January.

A Happy New Year to all, and we sincerely appreciate your support and feedback.

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The Staff at The Posse List