Articles

Can dogs teach us about collaboration

I listened to a fascinating interview today about dogs seeing the future. Alexandra Horowitz’s “Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know” draws on that of an early-20th–century German biologist, Jakob von Uexküll, who proposed that “anyone who wants to understand the life of an animal must begin by considering what he called their umwelt . . . : their subjective or ‘self-world.’ ” Hard as we may try, a dog’s-eye view is not immediately accessible to us, however, for we reside within our own umwelt, our own self-world bubble, which clouds our vision.

While we mainly look at the present, the dog’s “olfactory window” onto the present is wider than our visual window, “including not just the scene currently happening, but also a snatch of the just-happened and the up-ahead. The present has a shadow of the past and a ring of the future about it.” Now that’s umwelt.

Ms. Horowitz challenges the alpha theory of training dogs. The idea that a dog owner must become the dominant member by using jerks or harsh words or other kinds of punishment, she writes, “is farther from what we know of the reality of wolf packs and closer to the timeworn fiction of the animal kingdom with humans at the pinnacle, exerting dominion over the rest. Wolves seem to learn from each other not by punishing each other but by observing each other. Dogs, too, are keen observers — of our reactions.”

My, oh my, is there a lesson of cooperation and collaboration here for lawyers? <g>

Old files

Recently, the question was raised as to how much time clients’ old files must be retained … The long and short is, it depends.

There is a duty of safe-keeping for original documents. They can never be destroyed. Your best bet is to make arrangements for the client to retrieve these documents.

Another general mantra is that files can be destroyed when

• it’s reasonable under the circumstances to do so
• your jurisdiction has a definitive time provision, such as 10 years (few states do)
• your client agrees to a destruction protocol in your engagement agreement

Here are some provisions to consider for the minimum time frame

• passage of time for filing a malpractice action
• passage of time for lawyer misconduct (is there such a statute of limitations?)
• equal time to maintain client trust account documents
• time equal to corporate and tax records

Bottom line, there generally is no minimum time provided for in the rules of general conduct or in the general rules concerning corporate governance. Lawyers are, generally, stuck with maintaining the clients’ files unless the can find the clients and persuade them to retrieve their material and / or create protocols in the initial agreement that the client accepts and signs.

Oh, and what happens to the lawyer who retires, sells his practice … or worse, dies in his boots? How can the estate of the lawyer protect his/her heirs? What can the lawyer do in advance to protect those loved ones who follow him, seeking to clean up and close his practice?