Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

More Americans are applying to law school this year (see “Law School Is Hot Again as Politics Piques Interest” from the WSJ, for example).

I wonder if all of the publicity around litigation following work-related sex is playing a role. After all, every plaintiff needs a lawyer and every defendant also needs a lawyer.

One new wrinkle that could make a career in law more lucrative is that folks have established a fund to pay plaintiffs’ legal expenses (described by the New York Times as a “legal defense fund, backed by $13 million in donations, to help less privileged women”; the word “defense” is curious since the cash will be used to paid to lawyers who are on the offense by representing plaintiffs).

This has the potential to transform workplace sex litigation into the same kind of opportunity as divorce litigation. From “Divorce Ligation”:

From a more practical standpoint, divorce litigation is more intense than other kinds of civil litigation because, depending on the state, one person can be designated by the judge to pay the legal fees for both sides. “Once my plaintiff gets a hint from the judge that she’ll be getting a fee award,” said one attorney, “she no longer has any motivation to settle. The lawsuit and trial are going to be free for her and anything she gets in the final judgment is gravy.” Another lawyer said “Most civil lawsuits end when each party has spent about as much on legal fees as the amount in dispute. By that point they’ve both learned their lesson that litigation generally makes sense for lawyers, not for litigants. In divorces, however, since all of the fees are being paid by the defendant there is no reason for the case to end until he runs through his savings, what he can borrow from friends and family, and what he can borrow from the bank.”

A competent family law practitioner in the Boston area, where this kind of system prevails, can easily earn $1 million per year.

[Note that this is very different from a contingent fee system in which a plaintiff’s lawyer gets paid if he or she wins. The risk of losing and not getting paid anything (and, in fact, typically being on the hook for some expenses) limits the number of cases that are filed. With a “legal defense fund” paying the lawyer who sues an employer on behalf of, e.g., someone who had sex with the boss but didn’t get a hoped-for promotion, neither the lawyer nor the victim/survivor has anything to lose.]

Readers: What do you think? No society in the history of humanity has ever devoted as much of its resources to litigation as the U.S. does, but we cranked out so many lawyers that, after the collapse of 2008, there was a surplus. Will the #metoo movement help turn this around to the point where going to law school becomes rational?

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A nephew starts from a base of “I consider myself pretty liberal, and a relatively big proponent of the welfare state.” (this is fortunate because he has embarked on a career in Silicon Valley where the labor shortage is not so severe that a company would knowingly employ a Trump supporter!)

The other day, however, he wondered if unlimited unskilled immigration can be consistent with America’s welfare state, a thoughtcrime most famously committed by Milton Friedman. He linked to this article from Atlantic about how Americans are happy to sit on the sofa and play Xbox if the government gives them free housing, food, health care, and Obamaphones.

A discussion among his friends, most of whom are Millennial Harvard graduates, ensued. A planned economy was popular, e.g., with “If employers were required to pay minimum benefits like living wage and health care to their employees, then the need for welfare reduces. … To stay competitive globally we require the same for overseas exporters, raising quality of life globally.”

The most interesting response:

I think ‘welfare system’ is poorly defined in this case. my hypothesis is that poor people would not leave the workforce if US welfare included mental health service, or in maybe more numbers based terms, whatever correlation there is between social services and high unemployment there is for the poor, there might be an alternate cause (emotional) that could be better served by actual better social services (mental health based)

This is from a woman approaching 30 with a STEM degree from Harvard. I was curious about her reasoning:

Medicaid (taxpayer-funded health care for the poor) does include mental health coverage. “Medicaid is the single largest payer in the United States for behavioral health services, including mental health and substance use services. Medicaid accounted for 26 percent of behavioral health spending in 2009.” (source)

With tens of billions being spent by Medicaid each year on “behavior health and mental health ” services, what makes you say that U.S. welfare does not include “mental health service”? Is it that you don’t think Medicaid qualifies as “welfare”? That what they purchase with these tens of billions is not truly “mental health service”? Or something else?

She answered

I don’t know — do you know what exactly that is? Not trolling — is it neighborhood clinics? Earmarked for nonprofits? I thought Medicaid only applied to people over 65 or with qualified disabilities

In other words, one of the most expensively educated Americans who will ever go to the polls is unaware of a government program that consumes $565 billion per year (cms.gov), roughly 3 percent of GDP.

Related:

• Canvassing for Elizabeth Warren (a 55-year-old politically active Massachusetts voter who was unaware of the existence of Medicaid)

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“Everyone in Trumpworld Knows He’s an Idiot” (nytimes) is interesting to me because of the thousands of comments. Average Americans (in terms of achievement; nytimes readers are obviously not average in their political sentiments) just love to savor the idea that they are much smarter than Donald Trump. (Yet the supposedly vastly more intelligent Democrats selected as their best candidate a person who had funneled $2 billion, much of it from foreign governments, into a non-profit org controlled by her daughter?)

My Dad grew up in 1930s New York City where a common expression was “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” It is kind of interesting to me that this perspective has died out. People who cash a $100,000/year W-2 paycheck and spend 10 percent of their after-tax earnings on alcohol (then waste the other 90 percent?) are convinced that a teetotaler billionaire is an “idiot.”

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I got a text message yesterday from one of my co-teachers in an upcoming pilot ground school class. She wasn’t in my contacts, but iOS found her phone number in an email and put a “Maybe: Tina Prabha Srivastava” up at the top of the Messages page. I clicked on the “i” button and tried to “Add New Contact”. At that point, however, the inferred name had been dropped and I was forced to retype everything (except the phone number) by hand.

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“Mel Gibson’s ex sued for $108K over child support fight” (Page Six) provides an interesting window into just how much Americans spend on transaction costs in family court:

Court documents obtained by The Blast reveal the forensic accounting firm that Grigorieva, 47, hired to investigate baby daddy Mel Gibson’s finances in her child support fight, is suing the singer for $108,000 for unpaid fees.

Grigorieva hired White, Zuckerman, Warsavsky, Luna & Hunt following her 2015 bankruptcy filing, and the company claims they aided Grigorieva in getting her child support payments increased to $22,500 per month for daughter Lucia.

In their filing, the firm noted that Gibson, 61, paid the bulk of their charges with the exception of the unpaid balance of $108,887.24.

I.e., the accounting fees were in excess of $218,000 for this child support modification action (Gibson paid at least 50 percent if it was “the bulk of the charges”). Just imagine the legal fees!

Note that, despite the fees, litigation should have been a rational strategy for the plaintiff. Her daughter is now yielding tax-free revenue of $270,000 per year. That’s nearly $5 million over the 18 years during which a child can yield a profit under California family law. Legal and expert fees might be pretty close to the $5 million number, but her defendant will pay most of them.

[The defendant in this case is famous, which is why the lawsuit is in the news, but this scale of fees is consistent with what is spent when ordinary high-income Americans are sued.]

Young readers: Remember that going to accounting school doesn’t mean being stuck filing 1040 returns!

Related:

• “Litigation, Alimony, and Child Support in the U.S. Economy” (adding it up nationwide)

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Time to plan summer travel! Here’s an idea for pilots with kids: a 48-state tour of the U.S. in a four-seat airplane, hitting a bunch of historical sites, especially pre-Columbian, with at least a touch-and-go in every state. The tour should take roughly three weeks with about 50 hours of flight time in a Cirrus SR20 and cost about $5,000 for fuel and engine/prop reserves.

See

• the route on Skyvector (note that coming down the spine of the Appalachians enables a lot of Eastern states to be knocked out without too much flying; staying on the east side of the West Coast states also saves quite a bit of flying time, though there is a lot of wilderness)
• an annotated navlog with some information about what to do and see at each stop

A Cirrus SR22 with air conditioning would certainly be a more comfortable choice for this journey, but it could also be done in an even more basic plane, such as a Cessna 172.

Aviation rules:

• Pick airports such that we can land within 60 percent of available runway (i.e., FAR 121 airline safety margins)
• Avoid IMC/IFR since a big reason for this trip is to understand the landscape rather than be inside a cloud, despite the high level of avionics and autopilot capability of the Cirrus.
• No night flying in the mountains.
• No IMC/IFR flying in the mountains.
• Wait out any afternoon thunderstorms; fly the next morning.
• Cross big mountain ranges only when winds aloft are 30 knots or less, ideally first thing in the morning.
• No over-water operations (go around Great Lakes); saves having to carry a raft

Prep:

• Update Cirrus with ADS-B transponder
• Upgrade Jepp and Garmin subscriptions to cover all of North America
• Get oil changed by East Coast Aero Club (good for 50 hours so plane will be just ready for another change upon return)
• Send oxygen system out for recertification
• Send in PLB for fresh battery

Best time of year? If the kids are substantially ahead of grade level, take them out of school around June 1 so as to avoid (a) peak summer school vacation crowds, and (b) peak summer temperatures that will compromise aircraft performance. For home-schooled kids, maybe start this trip on April 15?

Readers: Thoughts on the overall idea or route?

[The airports: KBED KSFM KLCI KDDH KOXC KTTN KGED KGAI KROA KAVL KGSP KCHA KPDK KMGM KDTS KNEW KHEZ KASL KROG KEOS KIDP KAVK KDHT KSAF KCEZ E91 KGCN KPGA KBCE KBVU L06 26U KGEG KCOE KMSO KWYS KCPR KAIA KPIR KBWP KSTP KDBQ KJVL KPWK ZOGEB KBEH KEYE KGLW KPMH KPKB KJST KSWF KPVD KBED]

Related:

• Book review: Rinker Buck’s Flight of Passage (Piper Cub with no GPS as cross-country machine for two teenagers!)

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… and then wasting the rest.

Vanity Fair has published an except from Brotopia that has my Facebook friends talking.

[The excerpt does not take the Wall Street position that “there are two sides to every trade.” There are, instead, victims and victimizers. This lead to a Facebook comment regarding the purported victims: “they thought that they were going to Bible study with some good Christian friends”]

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Traveling by car in Manhattan has slowed down 27 percent in the last 5 years, from a slow running pace of 6.5 mph on average to a fast walking pace of 4.7 mph (nytimes).

“The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth” (nytimes) says the same thing as New Yorker magazine (the U.S. spends 5-6X what it costs other developed countries to build infrastructure), but supplies details on the no-show jobs, the $400/hour for union construction workers, etc.

As the U.S. population grows (due almost exclusively to immigration) and our successful cities reach Chinese-style population densities, I wonder if it is time to abandon the idea of travel by road or rail. Instead of trying to relearn how to build major infrastructure projects, why not arrange cities into walkable sub-cities in which the primary mode of transportation is via foot? To speed up travel-by-foot time, New York could build catwalks about 15′ above the streets. This is a pretty simple project that should be within an American local government’s capability and it would speed up travel times tremendously (no waiting for lights; no fighting for space on sidewalks that have become crowded).

Details: compensate building owners for the compromised view from the second floor windows by reducing the property tax rate on those floors.

Readers: Thoughts?

Related:

• How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure?
• U.S. versus German infrastructure spending and results
• Danish happiness: bicycle infrastructure

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The forecast for our local airport (Boston suburbs) is a high of 4 degrees F on Saturday with a low of -12.

Tomorrow will be toasty warm by comparison with a high of 29. Time to celebrate? I just got this email from the airport operations folks:

Tomorrow, Thursday 1/4, we are expecting 10-15” of snow with blizzard conditions, followed by high winds gusting over 50mph and frigid wind chills down to -25F through Saturday 1/6.

To better assist you, we ask you to advise us of any planned flight operations on Thursday 1/4 or Friday 1/5.

(The airport almost never officially closes, but sometimes a runway will be closed for snow-plowing and also sometimes runways are in marginal condition, e.g., covered with an inch or two of snow.)

From the school on Monday:

As you know we are experiencing extreme cold temperatures with dangerous wind chills. This is a reminder to ensure that your children are properly dressed for the conditions as they prepare to return to school tomorrow. … Our principals, including the preschool coordinator, will be working with faculty to ensure the safety of children throughout the day. As always, you should make the decisions that are best for your family regarding transportation to school and school attendance under severe weather conditions. [emphasis added]

(As it happened, the school building, slated for a $100 million identically sized replacement, was so thoroughly heated that students and teachers ended up opening windows to obtain a comfortable T-shirt temperature in the classroom.)

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One of our local public radio stations (see this previous post on the finances), WBUR, ran an article (“2 Firms To Investigate Allegations Against Tom Ashbrook”) about unhappy times among staff members of the On Point show. I.e., the news organization is reporting on itself. This makes sense because WBUR is packed full of journalism professionals who are great as investigations, right?

But then it seems that they are going to spend listener donations on hiring a $1,200/hour law firm, Holland & Knight, to figure out who had sex (or wanted to have sex? or talked about sex?) with whom. They’re hiring a separate contractor to look at “allegations of name-calling” (why not give the cash to local 3rd graders? That’s where I would go to find expertise in this area!).

I could understand WBUR not wanting to write about its own internal dispute and also leaving any investigation to outsiders. But if they are going to investigate this sufficiently to write the article, why can’t they finish the investigation internally? Why not simply have the reporter who wrote the above-cited article continue interviewing people and deliver a full account to management?

Related:

• What do we do with all of these leftover middle-aged accused sexual harassers? (about another NPR employee and including my question “Who will scold the scolders?”)

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