Much as I make fun of some of the “columnists” at Above the Law because they are vapid, clueless or disingenuous hypesters, one has produced an exceptionally good body of advice, even without infantile toilet references or images of naked people.  He’s none other than  my fellow curmudgeon, Mark Herrmann.

His  latest quest is to explain to the children why old guys (like him) are insane.  Don’t worry. He uses small words and lots of examples and analogies.

As you age, you are driven insane by mistakes that you’ve made (or seen others make) in the past. You’ve seen someone wait until 5 p.m. to call for vital information, and the person who had the information had left for the day and was now unreachable. For the rest of your life, you make your phone calls for vital information before noon, just in case.

You’ve sent an email urgently requesting information and not received a response for a week, because the intended recipient was out on vacation. For the rest of your life, when you send an urgent email, you then call the person to whom you’ve sent the email to confirm that the person is not on vacation. If you don’t reach the intended recipient, you speak to the recipient’s secretary to confirm that the recipient is in the office and will see the email. You remember that once a secretary deceived you, saying that the person was not on vacation, but neglecting to mention the person was tied up in court and wouldn’t see the email for hours. For the rest of your life, you cross-examine secretaries about when the lawyers for whom they work will next be checking emails.

Sure you’re crazy; you’ve been driven insane by events. You’re hedging against things that victimized you in the past.

We become the accumulation of our life experiences.  We’ve been burned.  We won’t be fooled again.

A pervasive complaint about young lawyer is that they “don’t sweat the small stuff,” leaving them, in the eyes of the curmudgeon, ” bums, unwilling to do what’s needed to succeed in our cold, cruel profession.”  Mark doesn’t mention that, in some instances, it’s that simple, but being a man of good character and spirit, he seeks a less snarky explanation.

But another possibility is that the older lawyer has simply lived longer and so had the chance to be driven insane by more events. The older lawyer knows — deeply and fervently, down to his very core — that you simply must proofread the last draft of the brief before you file it, even though the final revisions did no more than fix a couple of typos. The younger lawyer thinks the older lawyer is nuts.

Thinking happy thoughts may be a wonderful way to go through life, but once you’ve seen Pinky Pie brutally slaughtered and left to rot at the side of the road, it’s impossible to ignore the many things that go wrong.  Things go wrong.  Things go wrong all the time.

It’s axiomatic that we’re supposed to learn from our mistakes.  Only a moron doesn’t.  George Santayana would be forgotten if this wasn’t the case.  As we get older, and experience life’s many screw ups that come in ways and places never anticipated, we accumulate a long, long list of things that have gone wrong, can go wrong and, if we have anything to say about it, won’t go wrong again.

We old lawyers pass our list on to you young lawyers.  You don’t see it. You think we’re nuts.  We’re just negative about everything. We make you do what seems like busy work just to appease what you see as our paranoia.  Come on, nobody deleted a critical sentence by accident out of the middle of a brief for our biggest client.  Nobody could be that stupid/incompetent/careless. 

Yeah.  It’s happened.  But it’s not going to happen again.

Just because it’s not something you’ve experienced in the 23 minutes since you left law school doesn’t mean that it never happens and the old man is nuts.  Chances are it won’t happen, but we won’t take that chance.  It won’t happen again. Ever.  And if you’re paying attention, it won’t happen to you either.

Hard as it may be for the young lawyer to believe this, there is a breadth of experience they lack, and that includes the wonderful world of screw ups.  Eventually, you’ll have a world of screw ups of your own.  And then, as your hair begins to gray, your skin wrinkle, your body ache, you will wake up one day and realize that young lawyers think you’re insane too.  And you will know better.