Anonymous Lawyer

I had a good round of golf yesterday. I get more use out of my $3000 set of Callaway golf clubs than out of my assistant, who costs quite a bit more. And, thanks to my good fortune finding a couple of clients who like to leave the office early on Wednesday for a round of golf too, it's a tax deduction. I'm glad I don't practice tax law. We've got some great partners and associates in the tax practice here, absolutely; I'm just glad I'm not one of them. The price I pay for golf on Wednesday is a long, long Thursday catching up on what I missed taking off when the sun was still out yesterday. It's not looking like I'll be so lucky today. A kid that I interviewed this past fall -- I can't remember exactly which one -- commented on all the stacks of paper in everyone's office. It was just idle small-talk, it wasn't like he asked a question about the paper, or made a big deal of it. He said he'd have thought so much more would be electronic. And a lot of what we do is electronic -- I certainly don't print out every e-mail I get -- but you can't mark up a document on the computer, you can't carry it down the hall and wave it in someone's face and ask them what they were thinking when they left out the comma on page 17. I never thought about it before, but I can't imagine ever getting to a point where there wasn't all this paper. You just can't walk into an associate's office, slam your laptop on his desk, and scroll down to the place where he made a mistake. You need to have that brief printed out, you need to be able to tear those pages right in front of eyes, to scatter them wildly across the room, to fill the sheet with red lines and crosses and corrections, to crumple those papers up, toss them in the trash can, light them on fire, and watch them burn. Sure, we could probably afford to destroy a couple dozen laptops a day just to make a point that we demand perfection -- but paper just works so much better for that.