Maybe I'm the Fire-Eater

I worked until midnight yesterday putting together The Great Man's charts. He's pleased as punch with them, even though I haven't the remotest clue whether my valuation of the cases is right because the information that went in to the electronic case tracking system (which is all I have to go on to value a case) is incomplete on its face.

So now I find that The Great Man, while pleased with my chart-making abilities, is in an absolute tizzy about Happy Bachelor Lawyer. I guess he would fire HBL if he could, but two years ago he unilaterally switched HBL to "independent contractor" status -- and it looks to me like like he did that in order to position his own assets in a way that was advantageous to him for a short-run strategic objective. So instead, he bad-mouths HBL to me and I think it's quite unprofessional of him to do that.

Funny thing is, The Great Man is most upset at HBL right now because HBL called the doctor who administers chelation therapy to The Great Man a "quack." (To the substantive point, I say, "if the shoe fits...") Now, at The Great Man's direction, we have used this guy as an expert in some cases and it's debatably unprofessional to make those sorts of statements about one of our own experts. But it's also within the realm of professionalism to have a disagreement, even with one's own colleague, about an expert's qualifications and abilities.

Meanwhile, we have clients threatening to sue us, for a wide variety of reasons; we have cases coming in the door that we should not be taking, for a wide variety of reasons; we have management directives to take only million-dollar-plus cases being handed to us on the the same day that we are told to follow up on developing soft-tissue-damage slip-and-fall cases. There is no strategy. There is no management. There is no leadership. The leader has already abdicated; he just doesn't want to admit that fact.

Theory: chaos tends to accrete, and not to disperse. It requires increasing amounts of effort to control over time, and the increasing effort put in to controlling it generates diminishing returns.

Application: this law firm is out of control. Attempts to bring it under control will be difficult, will require great effort, and may make things worse rather than better. Left alone, things will get worse and not better. So as time passes, the amount of effort needed to figure out what in the Sam Hell is going on around here will only increase.

Result: I can either put in that effort or I can leave. Putting in the effort seems like pissing into the wind right about now. So I need about one time zone's difference to separate me from all this.