I just got off a telephone call with a customer, a solo practitioner outside of Austin, who wanted to talk about a big case he has and some of the information in one of our books. The conversation was more about his case and less about the book, and I, being extremely busy trying to get other work done, did what any of us the same situation would do: I listened as he bounced ideas off of me. Now, I don’t know if I was the only one he could have talked with at the time, but I was somebody in his community who might understand and respect the problems he was faced with. Twenty-five minutes later, we ended our conversation with promises to keep in touch.
The call reminded me of one of the most important things about our practice and business generally; namely, it is crucial to have one or more people to throw ideas at, to help you make sense of all the information you’ve pulled in. In my earliest experiences, the conversations always took place in my office with a partner looking to kill some time. The partner would come in and shoot the breeze, throw out a few details of a case, and see what I thought. Then twenty minutes or more later, the partner would bounce out and I would scratch my head wondering if I could bill for that meeting (the answer was always “no”).
As I moved out of law and into the publishing business, I never left that aspect of my social education behind. I still write and research heavily, and I rely on impromptu conversations with other people to help me make sense of what’s been written. Over the years, I’ve come to recognize that the size of the “shoot the breeze” legal community isn’t limited to partners and associates, but includes librarians, legal secretaries, paralegals, law clerks, court clerks, filing clerks, process servers, and on. They have helped me make sense of things, and I hope I’ve helped them in return.
More importantly than that, however, is the recognition that I never left the community myself. While I am part of a business that makes and sells legal information to a community of legal professionals, I am not separate from that community. I rely on the community to make sense of what I’m writing and producing so they will find it useful enough to purchase. This is why I call to shoot the breeze, and why others call me to do the same. I think in some ways that is part of the problem with the recent Thomson West e-mail fiasco nicely summarized by Greg Lambert over at 3 Geeks and and Joe Hodnicki over at the Law Librarian Blog, here and here. West forgot (and for many have continued to forget) that they are not separate from this community, but a part of it.
So, the next time a colleague or fellow member of this crazy legal community of ours wants to shoot the breeze with you, I hope you’ll stop, and spend a few minutes to see what’s up. Maybe you’ll be able to help him or her make sense of something.
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