Thursday, August 12, 2004

I Dreamt I Was Defending a Deposition...

...and woke up to discover I was.
Just kidding. But I did sit through an interminable "examination" of my client by an inexperienced lawyer who confused being repetitive with being thorough. After the first 15 minutes I could have objected to practically every question this idiot asked. The trouble was, it would have turned an 8 hour deposition into a 10 hour one. So, I let him go his merry way for the most part; entirely missing the point of what he was doing. He brought the tedium back to redundancy. But what can you expect with the state of the legal profession business these days. Clients won't pay to have a young associate attend a deposition being conducted by a more senior lawyer (even though they are benefiting from another client that paid for senior's attendance while he was young) and law firms, being greedy as they are, won't eat the billables either. So, instead, you have an ineffective examination taken by an inexperienced lawyer that just wastes his client's money. The trouble is it also wastes my time and my client's money.

It got to the point where I could envision the following scenario playing out following another confusing and convoluted question:
ME: "Objection."
YOUNG LAWYER: "On what grounds?"
ME: "The grounds are that at some point I completely lost interest in what you were asking."

So, while all of this was going on (and while, during breaks, I was on the phone desperately trying to hold a deal together for another client) all hell was breaking loose. Jeez, I just can't go away for a minute without the whole world going down the crapper.

The other day we had the incident with Mike "What-the-F**k-Are-You-Looking-At" Wallace and the cowboys who looked to go federal on him. Today, we had Smilin' Jim McGreevey. I guess if you're former Connecticut Governor John Rowland you have to be glad that it's taking some of the attention away from your problems. Well it seems that not only have some of Smilin' Jim's cronies been caught with their hands in the till, but Smilin' Jim has been caught with his hand in another man's pants. More Democrat Family Values I suppose. They're even proposing a The image “http://radio.weblogs.com/0115787/images/My%20Pictures/jersey.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors. category over at FARK. Democrat Richard Codey, the current president of the state senate said, "Jim McGreevey is a good person and a good friend and today's events sadden me." Good person? Not only was he looking to put his Johnson in another man's caboose, but he was cheating on his wife to boot.

The way I see it, this is the least of his problems. Let's look at the tally for his administration:
  • Some of his most trusted advisors and friends -- Gary Taffet, Paul Levinsohn, Roger Chugh, and David D’Amiano have all been under investigation or have been indicted for serious offenses. Most recent was D'Amiano for influence peddling and extortion schemes involving a Piscataway, New Jersey farm owner.
  • Smilin' Jim spent $105,000 of the state’s money on drinks for some distant cousins during a trip to Ireland.
  • He had previously named his boyfriend Golan Cipel to a job as as coordinator of New Jersey's anti-terrorism efforts. A job he wasn’t even remotely qualified to do.
  • He took a a vacation to Puerto Rico with some questionable cash from the mob-tied Longshoreman’s union.
  • His top fund raiser, Charles Kushner, who almost became head of the Port Authority, was indicted and accused of secretly hiring prostitutes to video-tape and embarrass a witness in an ongoing campaign finance investigation. (Although McGreevey himself was not indicted, he was implicated in that case for using the code word "Machiavelli." That word was established by undercover federal investigators to signal his complicity in a scheme to extort campaign money in exchange for help in a land dispute.)
I won't even get into his out-and-out imcompetence as governor. But, in his defense, I guess we'd never have to worry about him refering to the loyal opposition as girly men.

File under Rants and Raves.
11:40:34 PM    Go ahead, make my day  []  trackback []  

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