Immortality for Difficult Colleagues

by Tony Wilson

One of the more exasperating things about this profession is if given the choice between catching the flu or dealing with certain lawyers on the opposite side of a file, many of us would just as soon pick the flu. You can take drugs to deal with the flu, you get to stay in bed for a day or two and work from home if you have to, and the flu eventually goes away. Not so with Difficult Lawyers. Although I’m lucky enough in my practice area not to have to deal with Difficult Lawyers very much, everyone has to deal with them at some point in their career, (and if you’re really unfortunate, regularly).

These lawyers are one part prima-donna, and two parts egomaniac, (and surprisingly, they aren’t all just from Toronto!). When your colleagues see these lawyers walking down the halls they mumble to themselves “Oh no, not again,” while they look to the heavens asking the Gods why they’re being punished. These are the ones who don’t return calls. They confirm things in correspondence that were never agreed to (or said). They don’t move the file forward. They take aggressiveness pills with their coffee. They disagree with what may have been agreed to the day before. They yell on the phone. And they certainly wouldn’t be on your list of lawyers you could share a drink with when the file’s over, because the file’s never over. Fortunately, there aren’t many of these lawyers around, but we all know their names, don’t we?

If there’s not much we can do about them in this life, perhaps something can be done about them in the next. I’ve imagined putting the names of my less than favourite colleagues on the card that’s given out at Gunther von Hagen’s “Body Worlds” so they’ll be solicited to have their mortal remains plasticized and displayed at places like Science World when they die. A hit wherever it shows, Body Worlds left Vancouver in January, attracting almost 300,000 attendees to view bodies in various states of preserved dis-assemblage. By putting their names on the “take me when I’m dead” list, you’d be doing your difficult friends a favour, as plastination is cheaper than a casket burial or cremation and someone else would be paying for it! Better yet, because your friends’ mortal remains are lacquered with chemical preservatives, they could have some degree of immortality traveling the continent like some pickled rock star (not unlike Keith Richards during the last Stones tour).

Having recently seen all the fun the skinned and disemboweled corpses were having on skateboards, engaged in archery and gymnastics and perched on balance beams, it struck me that plasticization offered more fun in the afterlife than some people have in the current one. As for my Difficult Lawyer colleagues, I’d want them with their feet up on their desks, on the phone yelling at some other lawyer while the passers-by could inspect various anatomical details in the search for the heart, the brain, and the largest organ, the ego.

Body Worlds’ most interesting display, however, was mounted on the wall in a special frame like an autographed Canucks jersey. Eight feet high, and without any other bodily parts to suggest it was once attached to a human, it was the digestive tract from tongue to anus, with the entire colon unraveled in all its glory. Although all the subjects were anonymous, I have to admit, this one did have a passing resemblance to a Difficult Lawyer I have dealt with in the past.

Vancouver Franchise Lawyer Tony Wilson practices at Boughton Law Corporation in Vancouver, and has written for the Globe and Mail, Macleans Magazine and Canadian Lawyer. twilson@boughton.ca | www.boughton.ca/people/lawyers/tony_wilson

This article was published in the February 2007 issue of BarTalk. © 2007 The Canadian Bar Association. All rights reserved.