Gotham Diary:
The System
2 May 2014
Almost perfect weather for running around! Lunch with Ray Soleil, followed by a patrol of Madison Avenue, from Crawford Doyle to Feldman’s. I bought the new Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, some of which appeared in a recent issue of The New Yorker but mostly not. (“Where, in the five stages of death, is cheese sandwich?“) There are photographs of the author’s parents, sometimes shown with the author. They had been married for quite a long time before Roz came along, and they don’t seem to have been youthful at any period. But I shall read the book before saying more. Also (seen in the bookshop’s window) Simon Thurley’s The Building of England, as much a guide as a history, with plenty of photographs. (It weighs a ton.) At the flower shops, geraniums were appearing at last, and I had some sent home. Lots of walking, though, and now I’m tired.
First thing this morning, I changed the sheets and tidied the bedroom. Kathleen went in to the office, with high hopes of returning in the afternoon — hopes dashed by circumstances. But if she had come home, the bedroom would have been ready for her, dusted and polished and spruce. It was good to be up at a reasonable hour, instead snoozing beyond ten o’clock, but that’s another reason why I’m a bit droopy. We’re going to have a quiche from Agata & Valentina for dinner. It’s just enough for two, and it’s a thoroughly American combination of ham and Swiss cheese.
We were going to watch Nothing Sacred last night, to make a trio of Carole Lombard pictures (we saw My Man Godfrey on Tuesday), but by the time we were done with dinner and talking, it was a bit late to start a video; and now Kathleen wants to watch something more “current,” preferably a comedy. We’ve got plenty of those.
***
Kathleen put in a full day’s work yesterday, mostly from bed, but later sitting outside, and then in the living room. Throughout, she was fuming at Citrix, the application that provides a secure access to her legal documents. When it’s working, that is. I have never used Citrix myself, but I’ve listened to Kathleen complain about it for years. She’s right to complain — without warning, she is occasionally disconnected from “the system” and her work, despite all her efforts to save it, simply disappears. But she’s wrong, I think, to keep complaining: she is, after all, a partner at the firm, and therefore something of a boss. Can’t she do more than complain (to me, mostly)? Everyone complains about Citrix, she tells me; ask any lawyer who has to use it, and you’ll get the same response, according to her. I asked Megan about it once, and Megan rolled her eyes, half at unreliability of Citrix and half at my assumption that Citrix was any different from death and taxes.
Free market economics certainly doesn’t explain Citrix! What does?
It’s that “system,” I think. The system didn’t exist thirty years ago, not outside the military, anyway. Thirty years ago, lawyers maintained word processing departments, using limited precursors of the personal computer. “Word processing” was simply the latest name for the typing pool. Lawyers worked with pen and paper; other people turned their drafts into distributable documents.
When personal computers came along, they gradually erased the need for word processing departments, as more and more lawyers worked on screens. With the explosion of the Internet came the possibility of working remotely, from somewhere outside the office. This in turn brought security problems. Citrix seems to have been a satisfactory solution, and maybe it was at first. But popularity was a weakness. Too many users signed up at the same time could cause crashes (so I understand), while at the same time security risks mounted with the ever-increasing sophistication of hackers. The result is the probability of working remotely, with the considerable possibility of merely wasting one’s time.
Year after year, Kathleen has been complaining about Citrix. On more than one occasion, she has gone in to the office because she absolutely could not afford to risk its caprices.
We’re not quite at Idiocracy yet, but when the smartest people in the room are obliged to work under conditions of stupidity…
Smartest people in the room, sure, sometimes. But not necessarily the best managers. Lawyers are like cats: they really don’t herd. As the spectacular recent failures of some of New York’s most prestigious law firms demonstrates, senior lawyers can make terrible business decisions. There’s a saying that lawyers who have a gift for business go into business, and make even more money. Lawyers working at a large firm collectively lack something that many of their clients collectively enjoy: an ability to deal with “the system.” Law firms themselves are not systems; at best, they’re federated provinces, each of which comprises numerous fiefdoms. An operational problem that causes nothing worse than a lot of inconvenience and hair-tearing is not likely to increase the collegiality of partners whose mutual esteem depends on keeping one another at arm’s length.
Thinking about all of this from the perspectives afforded by my new guide to thinking, the lady Virgil who used to live at 370 Riverside Drive, I’ve imagined a conciliar solution. A task force ought to be constituted, consisting of senior associates (not partners, but lawyers approaching the partnership threshold, which not all are invited to cross), Internet technology workers, and engineers from Citrix. This task force would be charged with thrashing out the problem of unreliable connections and finding solutions, including workarounds. But for the very reason that partners prefer to work at arm’s length, the lawyers on this council ought to be drawn from as many large firms as possible, with only one lawyer representing any one firm.
The council would proceed counterintuitively: in place of the lawyers hectoring the engineers with their demands, the engineers would explain “the system” to the lawyers, who in turn would have to make an untiring effort to understand what they were being told. This would, I suspect, give them unprecedented insight into why Citrix is unreliable or, as very well may be the case, it is perceived to be unreliable by the lawyers who use it, but don’t know anything about how it works. The lawyers would do most of the learning, but the engineers would learn something, too, about the relationship between the lawyer’s mind and a very large document on which a number of lawyers are working at the same time. It is not really at all like the collaboration that produces large bodies of code.
By understanding “the system,” lawyers might be able to make it disappear.