Law School May be Dangerous to Your Health!

    I have a file for recommendations to law school. It’s done on a fancy form now a lot more sophisticated than the old days, but in many ways it asks the same questions. How do you know this candidate? Is there anything that makes them particularly suited to study the law? And on and on and so forth. What it does not ask is whether the person making the recommendation has set the candidate down and read them the Riot Act. Not so much about how difficult it will be to find a rewarding position and the magnitude of the debt that may be facing them when they are finally out of law school, but one more basic. When my old college roommate’s daughter decided to go to law school I gave her this advice: If you become a lawyer you will never be the same. Let me tell you what I meant. Last week friends invited me to go with them to see a new movie that had made some top billings at film festivals out West. It was called “The Biggest Little Farm.”  Now to non-lawyers, it is a sweet film about overcoming obstacles and realizing an almost unobtainable dream. In this case going from being evicted from their apartment because of their loving dog Todd (An expressive rescue doe eyed canine) in Los Angeles to acquiring a 200 acre farm an hour north and turning it into a sustainable, organic piece of paradise. I could hear sobs from some of the people in the audience. I will confess that some of the scenes including the one involving the birth of seventeen piglets were touching and Kleenex worthy. But as I sat there my two law degrees and 45 years of practice including a stint with the Internal Revenue Service began to surface. The chief characters John and Molly both had incomes of a sort. He being a photographer and she owning her own small business. The eviction was not because they were broke, but because of their dog. But still how could these young people swing owning 200 acres north of Los Angeles? The movie off offhandedly mentions the word “investors.” That did it for me. It brought back memories of tax shelters from the 1970's where investors were eager to pony up their money even if they lost their investment because they were more than covered with beneficent tax deductions. In the most egregious examples with a multiple of their original purchase price. My mind wandered to my days in the US Tax Court where movies were the schemes upon which tax shelters were built as well as oil wells, silver mines, cattle, Caribbean yachts and the like. Instead of paying attention to the human side of what I was viewing, I was picturing the prospectus that had been prepared by some fancy law firm in Los Angeles chock full of tax law promises. Further, I was intrigued by whether or not this activity would be considered active or passive for the many rules disallowing real estate deductions. Could IRS challenge any tax deductions because this was a hobby venture with little potential for profit? This was never my field and I was considering at the time calling one of my colleagues the next day and reviewing those very rules. John and Molly in the movie had stars in their eyes; they used their talents coupled with hard work to make the farm a reality. You can see it for yourself, it’s called “Apricot Lanes Farm” in California. I did some research when I got home and concluded none of what I had legally fantasized was probably true. I guess if you are a real estate lawyer you would be intrigued by the various riparian rights issues. If divorce and family law is your game you would be questioning why these young people have not entered into well advised pre-or post-nuptial agreements. Injury lawyers would be gasping at some of the farm tractor antics. Land use, animal rights practitioners, civil rights lawyers and gun-control advocates would find elements here to also be concerned for. I think you get the point by now. We lawyers are a strange group; our brains permanently reorganized to consider facts critically and to weigh rights and liabilities. Normal people don’t do that. They just go to a movie and enjoy the show. I can’t help but wonder if we lawyers can be reprogrammed perhaps at retirement. I thought about writing the law school admission people to suggest that their law school application should contain a warning perhaps from the Surgeon General: Law School May Be Dangerous to Your Health and Attitude.