Charlie Robinson is an elder lawyer from Florida who about two decades ago began warning the bar that change was coming and we had better learn to cope with it. As Charlie understood, lawyers are really bad at dealing with change. (Stare decisis doesn’t just apply to court decisions.) Charlie’s slide show (I don’t think PowerPoint had been invented yet) involved something called the law of dead horses.
He pointed out that most native peoples understood that the best thing to do when riding a dead horse was to get off and find a new one. Lawyers, he argued, have a different approach. Their first inclination is to get a bigger whip. When that doesn’t work, they set up a committee to study the problem of dead horses. Some visit other firms to see how they deal with their dead horses. Some try to market the dead horse as really, really cheap to feed and go for cost savings. Some try joining several dead horses together for greater speed and efficiency. (Charlie angered many with his slide show.)
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