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October 27, 2005

Obbie gets this right

Throughout the public evisceration of Harriet Miers, even her critics have tended to concede one of President Bush's main claims: Miers couldn't have been a complete loser to rise to the top of the bar and of her law firm.

Wrong.
. . .
Guess who seeks election to such groups. Not the busiest, in-demand lions of the bar. Instead, it's usually the second stringers, the runners-up in the lawyer game. Real lawyers, for the most part, snicker about "bar weenies"—much as they did about the goofs in high school who ran for class president. Does David Boies spend his $800-an-hour time going to committee meetings and wrangling over the ABA's next convention schedule? Hardly. He might deign to give a speech at a bar gathering if he can fit it into his busy trial schedule. But bar weenies—their slightly kinder name is bar junkies—are the ones holding the Town Car door open for Boies when he arrives at the hotel. And when they're not doing that, they're jabbering endlessly about legal-regulatory policy questions that even most lawyers find stupefying.
. . .
it's even easier to diss the business savvy of a 1990s-era law-firm manager. By the 1990s, when Miers' partners put her in charge, law firms had reluctantly concluded that they were in fact a business. Now that they were thinking outside the box, they had to figure out how to run themselves like businesses. Mostly they failed. Often it didn't matter anyhow. As recession-proof money machines, most firms could wait for clients to seek them out. "Managing" such an enterprise meant divvying up too much money among partners, paying overworked associates just enough to keep them chained to their desks, and deciding whom to admit to the partnership—mostly those who could turn a profit and not those destined to be bar weenies.
. . .
For bar weenies, seeing one of their own elevated to the coolest enclave in law has to be, like, their wildest dream come true. For Miers, it all depends now on a simple question: Is there a Napoleon lurking among her White House handlers?

"Vote for Harriet!!!! The dubious professional distinctions of Harriet Miers," by Mark Obbie, slate, October 25, 2005

Posted at October 27, 2005 06:27 AM | Categories:

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