I'd Like to Schedule Some Alone Time With Fred Karlinsky.

All of us struggle with striking a balance between the 24/7 demands of our jobs and maintaining positive and life-affirming relationships with our significant others, our family, our peers, our community, the world at large and yes, even with ourselves.

Fred Karlinsky has an answer to this dilemma:

“Fred says he can’t avoid working evenings, sometimes even in the middle of the night – as head of Colodny, Fass, Talenfeld, Karlinsky & Abate’s insurance regulatory practice, he communicates with clients and lawyers in time zones around the world. “I’m on 24/7. I know my wife gets annoyed, but I owe it to clients to respond when they need an answer.”

Ok, I agree that insurance regulatory clients are important and they are "owed" a reasonably prompt response.

But what about the spouse?  She surely is "owed' something as well:

After more than 12 hours at the office, Fred Karlinsky has arrived home to share the details of his day with his wife, Autumn. But just as she sets the roasted chicken on the dinner table, Fred’s BlackBerry pings, announcing the arrival of a new e-mail. A quick glance down and Fred’s back in work mode, shooting off a response.

“Remember,” Autumn pipes up: “Your BlackBerry is NOT invited to dinner.” By now, Autumn is realistic enough to know it may take a second reminder -- and possibly even a third nudge a few hours later when she and her husband finally have some alone time.

Much has been written about Crackberry addiction -- the need to be constantly "connected," the feeling that you are missing something if you don't immediately check your email to learn there is another bullcrap CLE available or that LexisNexis really wants you back as a customer.

In other words, it is possible that the desire to be "plugged in" at all times does not exactly coincide with the business necessity to check every nonsense email or text message at every possible moment.

In Fred's case, his wife has to schedule alone time with him, via -- what else -- email:

Autumn Karlinsky, a mother of two young children, says she, too, supports her husband’s efforts to stay at the top of his game. “It has afforded me the ability not to have to work right now.” The tradeoff, she says, is that he brings work home. When she wants one-on-one time with him, she schedules it. And, she embraces his BlackBerry addiction to communicate with him. “We send e-mail back and forth all day.”

This is interesting also -- David Brooks  just yesterday wrote about the difference between electronic contact and the real, live human kind:

[H]umans communicate best when they are physically brought together. Two University of Michigan researchers brought groups of people together face to face and asked them to play a difficult cooperation game. Then they organized other groups and had them communicate electronically. The face-to-face groups thrived. The electronic groups fractured and struggled. 

That reminds me -- I need to text my wife about this.

SFL Friday -- Spencer Aronfeld is an Out-of-Towner And Other News.

Hi kids!

Friday's here so let's crank it up.

For Christians, that means to really get wild, according to CNN:

We’ve bought the lie that the world gets to have wild, crazy sex and Christians, holy folks like us, have to have black-and-white, two-dimensional sex. But what if that’s wrong? What if the God who overflows us with love and hope and mercy wants that part of our lives to be as big and as colorful as two married people could possibly imagine?

I agree!

Totally unrelated -- the Christian Legal Association will be meeting up in Broward on September 15.

What else?

Newsflash -- your crackberry is sucking away what's left of your soul:

Screen life tends to be very rushed and superficial. We click from Facebook to Twitter to the inbox and so forth, seldom pausing to reflect and savor. Sometimes you have to live that way - our jobs often require us to rush helter-skelter from task to task. What's weird is that we're increasingly living this way all the time, even when we don't have to. We've unthinkingly adopted an approach which says the more connected you are by screens, the better - I call it Digital Maximalism - as if it's the path to happiness. But it really isn't. It doesn't serve our best interests on any level.

(I know this applies to other people and not to any of you.)

Finally, Spencer Aronfeld flies all the way to fancy-pants New York City to interview experts, and he didn't get mugged or lose all his luggage or have to sleep in the park or anything -- I can verify!

See him walk with purpose and conviction here.

Have a nice long one (and a good weekend as well)!

Are You A Rude Lawyer?

What a crazy morning, how about you?

Note to hipster ahead of me in line at the Starbucks by the Courthouse on Flagler this morning -- you do not look "cool" in your ironic fedora, particularly when you are ordering a mocha frappachino. Man up, dude.

Anyways, what do you all think of Blackberry addicts who are busy screwing around on their smartphones at depositions, meetings, and even in the courthouse?

Are you being rude or merely multi-tasking when you are playing breakout on your phone during a boring deposition:

As Web-enabled smartphones have become standard on the belts and in the totes of executives, people in meetings are increasingly caving in to temptation to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, even (shhh!) ESPN.com.

But a spirited debate about etiquette has broken out. Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril.

In Hollywood, both the Creative Artists Agency and United Talent Agency ban BlackBerry use at meetings. Tom Golisano, a billionaire and power broker in New York State politics, said last week that he pushed to remove Malcolm A. Smith as the State Senate majority leader after the senator met with him on budget matters in April and spent the time reading e-mail on his BlackBerry.

The phone use has become routine in the corporate and political worlds — and grating to many. A third of more than 5,300 workers polled in May by Yahoo HotJobs, a career research and job listings Web site, said they frequently checked e-mail in meetings. Nearly 20 percent said they had been castigated for poor manners regarding wireless devices.

Despite resistance, the etiquette debate seems to be tilting in the favor of smartphone use, many executives said. Managing directors do it. Summer associates do it. It spans gender and generation, private and public sectors.

A few years ago, only “the investment banker types” would use BlackBerrys in meetings, said Frank Kneller, the chief executive of a company in Elk Grove Village, Ill., that makes water-treatment systems. “Now it’s everybody.” He said that if he spotted 6 of 10 colleagues tapping away, he knew he had to speed up his presentation.

Personally I think some latitude should be shown to lawyers who use their smartphones to stay in touch with the office and respond to emails from opposing counsel and so forth. The device is one of the reasons the lawyer is able to be out of the office in the first place.

But in court it's a definite no-no -- you should really leave and go outside to tap away, and in face-to-face meetings I think maybe once or twice during a lunch might be ok but checking every five minutes makes you look like a fidgety schmuck.

Put Down That Crackberry, You Plebes!

We've discussed before the social disconnect that many of us have with everyone else in our lives due to the constant, incessant demands of technology.

Here's a nice summation I came across today:

We are having distracted bits and pieces of conversation via text to people who aren't with us, which of course makes us have distracted bits and pieces of conversation with the people who are. We all go about our lives now with one foot in the invisible realm of our e-social lives. Admit it, if you're out with a friend and they get up to go to the bathroom, the first thing you do is reach instinctively for your PDA/phone, when you used to just sit idly and people-watch. Because even when it's quiet, it never stops whispering at you from your pocket or your purse: "cheeeeck meeeee. I could be that person who blew you off, finally coming to my senses. I could be that work email you've been waiting for. I could be that invitation to something better than where you are now." It whispers, it calls to us, it is both our social wellspring and the black hole devouring The Now.

I thought a brilliant film exploring this very disconnect was Ridley Scott's overlooked A Good Year, where during the course of the film Russell Crowe learns how to disengage, drop the Treo, and not coincidentally fall in love both with the gorgeous Provence countryside and a captivating local French waitress.

In Jeremy Rifkin's The Age of Access, the Wharton scholar warned us nearly a decade ago:

... while we have created every kind of labor- and time-saving device and activity to service one another's needs and desires in the commercial sphere, we are beginning to feel like we have less time available to us than any other humans in history.

... The network-based economy does indeed increase the speed of connections, shorten durations, improve efficiency, and make life more convenient by turning everything imaginable into a service. But when most relationships become commercial relationships and every individual's life is commodified twenty-four hours a day, what is left for relationships of a noncommercial nature -- relationships based on kinship, neighborliness, shared cultural interests, religious affiliation, ethnic identification, and fraternal and civic involvement?

Who the hail cares -- see you all on Twitter!

Your Crackberry Addiction Is Charming And Really Quite Flattering.

Let's face it -- you're addicted to surfing the net instead of working on those crappy cases that keep plopping on your desk. That's ok -- who the hail cares when discovery ends anyway?

But I'll tell what is starting to annoy me -- this incessant need to check Crackberries at socially inappropriate times. You know who you are:

You check emails in the elevator. At lunch. At the gym. Driving home. While in bed. At the store. While on the phone. In movie theaters. At sporting events. During conversations with your spouse. On conference calls with clients. Waiting in court for the judge. In the bathroom. At a deposition. Yes, you have a problem:

"CrackBerry" was the 2006 Webster's New World College Dictionary "New Word of the Year." We are addicted to these devices. Yeah, we say, but we are addicted to air and water and food; this is a natural addiction, a good addiction. Our BlackBerrys keep us connected. We are in a service business and these wonderful devices let us render service to our clients in real time, every waking moment. But here is a caution -- when we use them at a deposition to check and return and compose e-mails, we may be violating ethical rules.

BLACKBERRY ADDICTION MAY IMPACT OUR DILIGENCE

We did not come to this view on our own; we were too busy sending and receiving messages on our BlackBerrys. We were provoked to thought by David Schott of Alton, Ill., who, in the May 2008 Illinois State Bar Association Trial Briefs suggests -- well, no, he more than suggests, he flat out opines -- that the use of a BlackBerry during a deposition is a violation of an attorney's duties to use reasonable diligence and charge reasonable fees. And with David's wake-up call, we have temporarily sobered up from our BlackBerry stupor to think this through. Join us. Come on, we know how hard it is. Put your BlackBerry down and rest your thumbs, just for a minute. Read on and think with us.

Now, part of the problem is not ethics but manners. We don't belong to country clubs, but we understand that most of them ban BlackBerrys and cell phones. (That isn't the reason we don't belong -- we just don't play the game.) But why? Cell phones we easily understand -- an untimely ring or conversation could actually distract a golfer. But silent thumbing?

Well, these devices are banned because it is bad form, it is rude, to attend to business when one ought to be enjoying one's time in a sand trap. And if it is rude on a golf course, how about in a courtroom? How many judges will permit you to whip out your BlackBerry during live testimony at a trial? Most judges ban BlackBerrys not out of concern for ethical considerations, but because their use is an affront to the decorum of the court.

And since a deposition is essentially an extension of the courtroom, are the rules any different? Well, yes. There's no one wearing a robe at the deposition. So is it rude to use a BlackBerry at a deposition? Maybe. Probably. But so what? Get over it. But is it unethical?

You have seen this guy. Maybe you are this guy. The guy who interrupts the deposition to have a question and answer re-read because he didn't hear it. Everyone there knows he didn't hear it because he was distracted by the e-mails he was reading and sending -- a self-created distraction because he chose to text rather than listen.

I used to pull on the newspaper during a deposition, so the questioner would think I thought the questions did not deserve my full attention, so I suppose this is an improvement.