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November 24, 2007
Patriotism, conflicts and high-profile trial blunders.
Midwest-raised WAC? is quite patriotic--as American as apple pie, baseball, moral pretension and land grabs. And even though patriotism has limitations as a system of thought, since early 2003 (U.S. making noises about invading Iraq, and finally does that) I have "defended America" at dinner parties, meetings, hotel lobbies and restaurants in London, Aldeburgh, Paris, Kandel, Mainz, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Dusseldorf, Berlin and Barcelona. Until late 2003, my rule for ground travel was this: rented cars in UK, Germany and Austria; trains everywhere else. That had always made sense. But trains, no matter where I went in 2003, became a problem. In April 2003, a half dozen chain-smoking French boarding school students once cross-examined me on a train from Paris to London, causing me to start smoking again. In the late summer of 2003, an inebriated
Hungarian guy twice my size in the bar car as we were nearing Budapest (he claimed I was an American "bombardier") tried to pick a fist-fight with me--but apparently settled for putting a hex on me and mine. A week later, a Prague massage lady swore at me in a decent-looking non-goofy Marriott near the Charles Bridge, but at least it wasn't on a train.
So I love my country--and have taken to renting cars in Europe in countries other than the UK and Germany. However, and as we've noticed since 2005, the Canadian Bar Association's CBA PracticeLink has a client service and real lawyering-oriented website which puts counterpart sites by bar associations here in the U.S., well, to shame. For examples, see "Developing a Conflict Checking System for Your Law Firm" by Janice Mucalov, and "Top Five High-Profile Trial Blunders and How to Avoid Them in Your Own Practice" by Ted Brooks. Don't worry that it's Canadian material--you can still use it.
Posted by JD Hull at November 24, 2007 03:00 AM
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