By: Martin Merritt, esq.
Past President, Texas Health Lawyers Association
Past Chair, DBA Health Law Section
martin@martinmerritt.com
“Please Tell Me you Didn’t. . . How to Keep Clients Out of the Jailhouse, Poorhouse and Lawyers Out of the Nuthouse” -Blog
As you can tell, I love talking about health law & litigation issues, and general wellbeing, if you have any health law questions or better yet, need to refer a case, just call or drop me an email and I will happily talk.
“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
–Oscar Wilde, from “The Decay of Lying” (1889)
“The Lost Document” is one of my favorite works of law firm art. Its cheap, its funny, and it tells a compelling story. I saw it during a trial a couple years back at opposing counsel’s office on the courthouse square in Graham, Texas (pop. 8,800).
The print depicts a lawyer in his office—in what looks to be about 1980— screaming orders as half a dozen secretaries and staff turn everything in the office upside down searching for some missing document, that seems like it really aught not to have gone missing.
Lawyers can’t help but laugh at it, because we have all been there, in one way or another. The Lost Document depicts (at least, one form of) the abject terror we lawyers all live with every day. It is the “fear of failure” and public ridicule, which first began in law school. In fact, law school is packed with “firsts.”
In our first year, first day, we first encountered something called the “Socratic Method.” The fear of being called on in class, to answer a professor’s questions, in front of our peers (who secretly thanked the divine that they weren’t chosen), is something really only known to lawyers and perhaps medical students.
What we learned from all of this is, when it comes to the probability of falling on your ass in public, is there is a sort of mathematical calculous we can do in our heads: the “chance of ridicule,” equals the product of the coefficient of friction, times square root of the hypotenuse of how seriously the lawyer takes the threat.
In other words, it is the “fear” that teaches us what not to do. Ignore that “fear,” and ridicule follows. (What we later learn in the real world, is how to put on our suits, go out there, and make it look as if the whole thing was effortless.)
Gilbert Stewart’s, The Skater. This concept is no better exemplified than in the true story behind a framed print I found in a Dallas antiques store over the weekend. It is Gilbert Stewart’s, The Skater, which is now on my law firm wall.
The original was painted in 1782 and now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (Just Google it) If you look at the painting quickly, it looks like a normal outdoor period piece of a man who looks like the guy on the Quaker Oatmeal Container.
The “Quaker guy” is British lawyer, Sir William Grant. Arms crossed, he seems to be confidently taking a strolling in the park. On closer inspection, you will notice the lawyer is on ice skates. An odd thing for a lawyer to do in 1782. The painter is Gilbert Stewart, who eventually painted the image of George Washington, the one that is now on our U.S. one-dollar bill.
But in 1782, The Skater was the very first full-length painting Gilbert ever attempted. It became a sensation at the 1782 Royal Academy exhibition, because, according to the National Gallery of Art website, “The unorthodox motif of skating — indeed, any presentation of vigorous movement at all — had absolutely no precedent in Britain’s “Grand Manner” tradition of life-size society portraiture.”
And the depiction that you see, of a lawyer easily breezing across a dangerous frozen pond on skates to the delight of cheering crowds, is not what happened at all. The outing was nearly a complete disaster.
The painter recalled that when Sir William Grant arrived to have his picture painted, the Scottish sitter remarked that, “on account of the excessive coldness of the weather . . . the day was better suited for skating than sitting for one’s portrait.” Thus artist and sitter went off to skate on the Serpentine River in Hyde Park.
But, when the two men took to the ice, the lawyer engaged in a series of skating maneuvers that attracted an admiring crowd, so the lawyer began putting on a show and the pair ended up farther out in the pond than would have been wise. Then, the thinner ice beneath them began to crack.
Chaos ensued as the lawyer had to be hauled by Stuart’s coattails and pulled safely to shore.
The print I bought cost less than a bag of groceries, but to me, the reminder that we lawyers need to take care not to skate on too thin of a patch of ice, especially while showing off to admiring crowds, is priceless.