Blasts from the past

Listen up, all you whippersnappers. Close your screens and spend five minutes reading about what life in the law was like in grandpa’s day. I say grandpa because grandmas rarely counted in 1972, when several hundred of us, including me, trooped into the Music Center, raised our hands, and the moment after Justice Otto Kaus swore us into the Bar, he said, “Counsel, be seated.” To collect some remembrances, I vacuumed my brain and reached out to fellow baby-boomers – and silent generation – colleagues. Here’s what came back.

The Los Angeles County Bar put on the Hi-Jinks – an annual holiday season variety show in which lawyers lampooned issues of the day. Says Justice Arthur Gilbert, “We were raunchy and by today’s standards, excessively politically incorrect. Judge Mary Waters, the presiding judge of the L.A. Municipal Court (more on the muni courts in a moment), directed one of our skits.”

I participated in 1973’s Hi-Jinks, the Watergate Follies, in which we parodied Cabaret:

Put down your briefcase, your books and your booze, come hear the music play. Life is like Watergate, old chum….//Need a good lawyer? They’re all in the clink. So come have another drink. Whoever wrote those lyrics deserves applause. The same for our closing song, sung by Judge Jerry Pacht, a shout-out to our local law firms: Raise a glass by the fires at O’Melveny and Myers and Tuttle and Taylor, too…The Wall Street machine had yet to enter the garden.

It’s ironic. Judges don’t play like that anymore, at least to a ballroom full of lawyers. But says Judge Kevin Brazile – and I agree with him – our judges are “nicer” now. More varied. More tolerant. Back then the bench wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy, especially to women who managed to get hired as attorneys rather than secretaries. During a court trial, I heard Judge A. Andrew Hauk scold a federal public defender: “Wipe that smile off your face,” he said. “Now sit down and act like a lady.” According to one veteran who’s been there and done that on almost every court, “In ’74, women could not enter the California Club except through some back stairs. I don’t think I ever took them.” She continued: “But I recall hearing that women in my firm were telling the partners, ‘We’re not attending any event at a venue where we have to enter through the “servants’ entrance.”’”

Back to the municipal courts. Their twenty-four judicial districts were splayed across the county. Except for Los Angeles and Long Beach, they were small, some with a handful of judges. When in the late 1990s, the legislature authorized the municipal courts to merge with the superior courts, you’d think these judges would be delighted to win an automatic elevation. But many weren’t. They enjoyed their little fiefdoms. When one invited me to lunch, this person had a bailiff collect me at my office, drive me to the judge’s club, and come 3:30 pm, return me to my office. I’m told some judges had their bailiffs handle their dry cleaning.

“We’re getting big,” said a partner in my law firm after our number reached seventeen. For a discovery motion, he insisted I research Cal. Discovery Proc, a collection of Superior Court rulings, for cases on point. I sat in the library and did just that before picking up my Dictaphone. My secretary cut and pasted my edits.

Then one day, in came a word processor with mag cards.

“I’m gonna lay about 300 interrogatories on him,” said a litigator I knew. No problem. Even in Municipal Court, there was no limit, and we had to file the originals of our discoveries and answers. Blue backed.

To save the $1.50 charge to park in the Music Center, I tucked my 1973 Pontiac Le Mans Sport Coupe into a cul de sac off Temple Street, where there always was an open spot. I hiked up the hill to CCH, now known as Mosk, and glided into the building without stopping. I could have brought in anything.

Cases could be diced and served up to several judges – one for injunctions, another for attachments, a third for class actions, a fourth for law and motion, and of course another for trial. Ah yes, trial. “On the beeper,” said the master calendar judge, and sometimes you waited weeks before the beeper beeped. The individual calendar system didn’t start until 1987. And before the advent of “beepers,” says a former judge, “You literally had to sit in Department One for days on end before your ‘5-year’ case was called! The ‘good old days,’ they were awful!”

Awful? In many ways. Like how certain colleagues treated women and minorities. Like the smoke in some judges’ chambers that made me gag. I hated Shepard’s Citations. You started with red hardbound volumes, then to the supplements, and finally the up-to-the-minute slipsheets. On the other hand, if I got an extension to respond to interrogatories, no law forced me to confirm it in writing. I didn’t need to meet and confer before filing a motion, and I could set it within two weeks; summary judgment motions, less than a month.

On balance, I’ll vote for life today. But I miss the Hi-Jinks.