Book-A-Day 2018 #76: The Soddyssey and The Werewolf of New York by Batton Lash

I'm not a lawyer. But I'm a lot more familiar with lawyers these days, having spent the last three years working with a bunch of them (including more "recovering lawyers" than one would expect) and marketing things to lawyers all day every day. So maybe this time I came back to Batton Lash's long-running "Supernatural Law" comics series with just a bit more understanding of who he's talking about and what some of the jokes mean.

(The supernatural side of Supernatural Law is much simpler: Lash's bedrock sense of the supernatural is pretty much that of monster movies from the B&W era, all Draculas, Frankensteins, and Wolfmen. There are no hot-to-trot young women with lower-back tattoos and complicated love lives, no modern wizards, no elves hidden in plain sight, no unexpected Grail quests. Actually, given that Lash isn't a lawyer himself, his take on both sides of the equation come from similar places: general cultural knowledge. It's just that lawyers are more common in everyday life and more apt to have complained to Lash about perceived slights.)

I read Supernatural Law back when it ran in CBG as Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre -- yes, I am old -- and I think I used to read it in floppy-comics form through the '90s and early '00s, too. (I gave up on floppies about a decade ago, and lost twenty-five years of accumulated comics in my 2011 flood, so I can't check.) But, like everything else in comics, Lash has been moving his creations into book and webcomic form, since that's where the readers are these days. (Some of the comics used to be available at supernaturallaw.com, but there's just a single "cover" image there now.)

There were two Supernatural Law collections sitting on my shelf, for longer than they should have been: The Soddyssey and Other Tales of Supernatural Law and The Werewolf of New York. Since I'm doing Book-A-Day this year, I'm running through books more quickly and actually clearing out those shelves. (Stop me before I turn into an infomercial.)

Soddyssey collected issues 9-16 of the comics series -- which I think I vaguely recognized from reading in the '90s -- while Werewolf was a brand-new graphic novel created for book publication and funded by a Kickstarter campaign a few years back. But they're both the same kind of thing: stories about supernatural creatures in legal trouble, told mildly tongue-in-cheek but with realistic legal outcomes. Soddyssey has several stories; Werewolf one. But Lash was telling a soap-opera-style story to begin with, full of life and romantic complications for his series heroes and their supporting cast, and that continues throughout, even as one case ends and another starts.

Alanna Wolf and Jeff Byrd are the principals of a small law firm, one that concentrates not on a particular area of law -- though they do end up involved in litigation more often that not, since that spells "law" to a non-legal audience -- but on a particular kind of client. One might wonder how all of these diverse creatures know to make their way to Wolff & Byrd, or how likely it is that they all have legal troubles in a state where those two are barred, but that's the premise. We'll be here all day if we start to question premises.

Supernatural Law always felt old-fashioned to me, in the best way, as if it should have been a daily-comics strip like The Heart of Juliet Jones or Mary Worth -- something more culturally central than it really was. These two collections give me that same sense: Wolff & Byrd do the kind of law you'd see on TV fifty years ago. They're not brokering the merger of the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, or negotiating the transfer of IP from a banshee to a hot new pop star, or handling the import paperwork on a half-ton of grave dirt. They're filing briefs, traipsing back and forth to court to plead in front of a judge, and counseling their current client to keep his mouth shut. (Always good advice, from any lawyer to any client.) It's the kind of law you recognize, even if you don't know anything about law.

These are fun stories about that kind of law, with some inventive twists on the kind of supernatural creatures you know the same way. Creator Batton Lash has been doing this, off and on, for forty years, and he makes it all smoothly entertaining.

Book-A-Day 2018 #24: The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance by Kevin Underhill

Some books are better than they need to be. In the same ground where a dozen others have hacked out something quick and easy, a diligent author works hard to do it right, finally. In a better world, we wouldn't be able to identify them, because the quick hackwork wouldn't exist at all.

But this is very much not a better world, and Kevin Underhill's The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance is the Platonic ideal and sole example of the perfect "weird laws" book. As an initial proof point, I will note that it was published by the ABA itself, which knows something about this law business.

Underhill is himself an attorney, working out of San Francisco [1], and the author of the law blog Lowering the Bar. (It was one of my happiest discoveries after I wandered into marketing to lawyers; the standard multi-author blog for attorneys is less fun than the one for accountants, but lawyers are more likely to be good writers, due to their training.)

Typically, bloggers who graduate to writing stuff between two covers find ways to re-purpose their old material, but it looks like Emergency Sasquatch is all new material. Underhill here looks at various odd, quirky, and outdated laws -- starting with a Reform Edict from Sumeria circa 2350 BC, which prominently mentions beer (because some things, both reform and beer, don't change), and moving up to the present day -- either that he saw listed in other "weird law" articles or otherwise came across in his researches.

Emergency Sasquatch is made up of a myriad short chapter-lets, each one covering one specific law or provision that Underhill finds particularly silly, and organized into several sections, covering the ancient world, the not-quite-as-ancient world, US federal law, US state law, US city/county law, and finally laws of other countries in the modern day. And every single law is cited; if you had access to Westlaw (obligatory plug for my day-job), you could look them up for yourself. Underhill even thanks an associate in his acknowledgements for checking those citations -- these are not just weird laws, they are verifiably real weird laws.

All that could be kind of bland if Underhill weren't such an entertaining, sprightly writer. I don't know if he's a natural humorist or if he sweats over each page, but his final work-product here is impressive and funny: each little bit is funny and amusing.

Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance is a quick, funny read, easy to pick up for a page or two when you have time, and also quite enjoyable to read straight through (as I did). Again, it's vastly better than it had to be, both in the legal and humor realms, and the fact that it exists at all is at least a minor point in favor of the theory that there is a benevolent Creator.


[1] Purely for people in that world, as I am these days: he's a partner at Shook, Hardy & Bacon, a litigator specializing in complex class-action defense. For the rest of you, all of those things add up to "knows what he's talking about, and good at this law stuff."

A Near-Perfect Sentence

"Although the police called in a SWAT team, because this is apparently necessary whenever something happens, even though regular police have guns too and are perfectly capable of killing people with them if necessary, or even if not all that necessary, they did not in fact kill this guy."
 - Kevin Underhill

Mini Twitter Rant on Ownership of Law Firms

Hey! Who knew I had strong opinions on the ownership of law firms?!

But it turns out I do, and the Twitters heard those opinions, whether they wanted to or not:

American lawyers insist they are such special snowflakes that no non-snowflakes could own any part of their firms. https://t.co/YGYh4zXQyk

— Andrew Wheeler (@Hornswoggler) May 13, 2016

Of course, lots of lawyers work at companies...for non-lawyers. And work in government...for non-lawyers.

— Andrew Wheeler (@Hornswoggler) May 13, 2016

And other ownership partnerships -- accounting, consultants, etc. -- are not nearly as snowflake-y about taking investments from outsiders.

— Andrew Wheeler (@Hornswoggler) May 13, 2016

Basically, lawyers think they're better than everyone else. What else is new?

— Andrew Wheeler (@Hornswoggler) May 13, 2016

What I think is behind this -- and this may be my accounting-marketing background coming out -- is that lawyers are afraid the Big 4 accounting firms, the Big 3 management-consulting firms, and adjacent companies (Marsh & MacLennan, for example), will go on an attorney-buying tear and destroy the old clubby attorney-partnership model.

And they want to make sure that can never happen, so the only people exploiting the work of lawyers are other lawyers, like Ghod intended. It's not the hill I'd want to die on, but I'm no lawyer.

Unprivileged Communications

I find myself reading a lot more legal news these days, since law is at the core of the Day-Job. And, amazingly, I find that I can still become even more jaundiced about the world than I thought possible.

For example, I was reading this Corporate Counsel article on recent rulings on attorney-client privilege. (As you do.) And it seems to me that all of the rulings aim towards one direction: the outside counsel needs to control all aspects of an investigation, and directly control any subcontractors (accountants, forensic investigators, etc.) to maintain attorney-client privilege. (That privilege is the thing that means you or your lawyer can't be forced to testify about your conversations -- it's a big, big deal.)

A business, on the other hand, would prefer to have the choice of how to run those functions -- some companies would want to do them internally.

So it's really convenient for outside, bill-by-the-hour lawyers that the lawyer rules say they absolutely have to be in charge of everything, and bill for the hour on every last bit of them. Mighty damn convenient, if you ask me.

Things That Amuse Only Me, # 2853

So I work for a legal services company these days, on a product with a vast array of really useful documents for all kinds of legal stuff. And I find myself digging through that array now and then, for various purposes.

And today I came across Deposing a Rule 30(b)(6) Witness.

So I thinks: we must have a lot of documents about deposing various kinds of people, right? Stands to reason. If you're deposing, you want to do it right. And different people need to be deposed in particular ways, if you want them to stay deposed.

But, sadly, I can't seem to find anything called Deposing a King. (Or even a President, for that matter, given what side of the pond I'm sitting on.) And that seems like a real lack.

Not that I'm planning to do it myself, mind you: I'm a law-abiding man. But I'd like to know that rules for any eventuality are out there, just in case.