It’s not just IT and assembly line work that’s being outsourced overseas. It appears that legal work is being outsourced, as well. I don’t know what to think about that. All I can think to say is, “Hmm.”

Given some of my experiences in court the last several years, I’m going to have to take this kind of thing seriously. I’ve always felt that it was important to have your mojo working whenever going to court, but these days natural born mojo doesn’t seem to be enough. Clearly, there’s some kind of spell casting or black magic going on, as there’s no rational explanation for some of the things I’ve seen in court.

I happened across The ‘Lectric Law Library’s Legal Lexicon the other day. It’s not quite Black’s Law Dictionary, but it’s pretty good and it’s handy.

Don’t get me started about legal fees. Not because I would talk for hours, but because I’d really just as soon not talk about ’em at all. Legal fees, charging ’em, collecting ’em, are the second most stressful aspect of my legal life. If you want to know the most stressful, it’s having to deal with assholes who are abusing the legal system for personal greed, at the expense of my clients. That, in turn, contributes to the stress of legal fees, since right from jump street I’m believing that in a just world my client shouldn’t be put in the position of having to pay thousands of dollars for legal fees in the first place. I should do my part to make it a just world, shouldn’t I?

I was near dumbfounded when I saw this Dirty Little Secrets article about what some lawyers actually charged their clients for. That kind of stuff is so foreign to anything I would even think about doing, that I wanted to believe the clients were just making it up out of spite. But, I’m afraid that’s probably not the case. So, it got me to thinking that maybe I’m way out of line, in the opposite direction, about how I charge fees.

As opposed to double billing, I’ll actually discount my billing if I think something I spent ten hours doing could maybe have been done in less time if I would’ve worked faster or harder. There’s that popular joke about the 50 year old lawyer who dies and is greeted by St. Peter who says the lawyer looks awfully young, inasmuch as he must be at least 150 according to the time he’s billed his clients. I won’t have that problem. St. Peter will be looking at my time records and asking how I thought I could get by only working four hours a day, like I must be some sort of sloth.

I mean, who can’t work a little harder or a little faster? How many lawyers actually even turn off the clock when they take a 20 minute break from the brief they’re working on? I guess not many. Hmm, maybe I could afford to join a gym if I would think about a case a few times while working out, so I could bill out the gym time. Any guesses how many lawyers actually do that?

Well, in the end, maybe my approach is one of the reasons that once I have a client, I generally have a loyal client. But, I wonder, is that because I’m me, or because I’m cheap? Maybe it’s time to start finding out.

I kinda like the overall appearance of this blog. I do like blue! The right panel is an enigma. On my desktop PC it looks gray. On my laptop it looks powder blue. I suppose I could take a reading from a color palette using a graphics program to get a numeric value to see where it actually falls in the spectrum. Or not. Chances are, the design will be tinkered with from time to time. The real challenge is going to be content. Something relevant and topical (is there a difference?) to oil and gas. Like, how about those gas prices? Which most people take to mean at the pump when they fill up their car. In my line of work, it means natural gas, such as $5.43/Mcf, where Mcf stands for thousand cubic feet. Technically speaking, that would be at natural pressure, and sea level. I think there’s a certain temperature, too, which I forget. A thousand cubic feet sounds like a lot, but it’s just the contents of a 10 x 10 x 10 foot cube. One of these times I’ll try to remember to figure up how many cubic feet of oil there are in a barrel. Can you believe in 28 years of law practice I never needed to know that? I can tell you this, though: a cubic foot of oil on the ground looks like a LOT!