job description

I'm a partner at Sinclair, Wilson & Bedore. My practice emphasizes lawsuits that primarily involve real estate or business.

There are many different types of lawyers. They range from sole practitioners (one lawyer who owns an office) all the way up to huge mega-firms. The amount of specialization varies depending on the type of lawyer. In a large firm people can get very specialized, almost boringly specialized. A sole practitioner out of necessity has to cover more areas.

I'm a partner which means I'm an owner of the business. I have one other partner who comes from a tax background so he does estate planning and tax work. My brother works for me because I would kill myself if I didn't have some help. Over the years we've gone from two lawyers up to seven when we were at our "biggest." Now we're back down to three.

My typical client is someone local, with ties to Placer County. It's an individual, a small business owner or a manager of a medium-sized business. What I don't get are the large businesses, like the big developers or banks.

Usually it starts with some form of a dispute. Then if you do a good job for them or they otherwise see you have some talent, they start to use you proactively, because they realize the benefit of solving a problem before it's a crisis.

There is a local golf course that was owned by a family for many, many years. They wanted to sell it and they got into a contract with someone where the contract wasn't clear about the price. They got in a big argument over the price so the family came to me to try to get them out of that agreement.

Another one of my clients owns $200 million worth of motels and hotels. When he first came to me in the early '90s, which was a recessionary time, he had incurred all this debt and all of a sudden he couldn't cover the debt. Creditors were coming after him and suing him, so we juggled that and kept him from bankruptcy. Once the economy began growing again, all the values shot right up and covered the debt. Now he's hugely successful.

Most of the work takes place in the office. But relatively speaking, I go to court about six hours a month. That excludes trials. If you have a trial you're in court seven hours a day for the length of the trial. In the past 15 years I've tried about 29 cases, which is more than most. That said, most of the work takes place in the office. For some lawyers all of it takes place in the office, like people who write wills, or form businesses, or tax attorneys. It's the litigators who go to court.

A judge once told me that successful attorneys come from all different types of personalities, because there are so many areas of the law that you can find something that fits your personality. If you don't like confrontation and you want to do good for everybody, maybe your calling is in wills and estate planning. If you like numbers, perhaps you become a business and tax attorney. If you're competitive and like to engage in debate, then perhaps you'd become a litigator. There are people who are drawn to family law, which is a very stressful type of work because there's a lot of emotion involved. There's something for everyone.

education & career path

I went to college at UC Davis. I loved science and math. I was a genetics major. I worked one summer in a hospital as a porter, which is a fancy word for janitor. Because it was a small town I was able to spend time with the doctors, watch surgeries and go with them on their rounds. I decided I really didn't want to be a doctor because I thought it was boring. It was mechanical to them. So I decided I didn't want to do that.

I finished school, and it was either go get a job or keep going to school. Because my family had been involved in the legal system I decided to go to law school. So I went to the Santa Clara University School of Law.

My dad was an attorney, and I have two brothers who are attorneys.

I grew up knowing he was an attorney. I grew up knowing there was some prestige of being an attorney. But I didn't have a big drive to be one. If you told me when I was in college that I was going to be an attorney, I'd have said you're crazy. When I had to go get a job I thought, "Well I'll try this. If I don't like it, I won't stay." And I stayed.

My first work was as a clerk for the California Supreme Court. I did research and wrote draft opinions that the judges would fine-tune to make their final opinion. Being a clerk opened a lot of doors for me. I got a job at the Court of Appeal in Sacramento, which was easy to get because I'd worked at the Supreme Court. The way it works is, the trial courts are one level of judicial appeal. Then the Court of Appeal reviews the trial courts, and the Supreme Court reviews the Court of Appeal. So I did that for about two years. That was a really interesting and rewarding job. As a new attorney with your own office, you might get four or five cases in your first year. As an attorney at the Court of Appeal, you see four or five cases a month and are asked to write preliminary opinions on them. The whole case is in front of you, start to finish. Right away you can see good work from bad work, what's effective and not effective. It was really a profound experience. It's like a turbo charger in terms of seeing how the legal system works, what works for lawyers and what doesn't work for lawyers. When you get out you're accelerated over a person who's never done that.

In November 1979 I went into private practice. My dad was an attorney in Roseville, and he had larynx cancer and lost his vocal chords. He said, "Here's this practice, come." So that's what I did. That's the practice I still work at. I was a partner instantaneously, which is a very unique situation. It was more of a baptism by fire. I was thrown into a very sophisticated law practice with no experience in private business. It was, "Here, go."

Fear. At some point my dad handed me this file and said, "Go do this deposition." I'd never done a deposition, which is where you take a statement from a witness in an informal setting. So I went, and there were all these lawyers sitting around asking questions. It came to me and I might as well have peed my pants. I didn't know what to do or what to ask and I was so afraid of asking something stupid I didn't ask anything at all, which was the stupidest thing I could possibly do.

my day

Typically I get to work about 7:30 a.m. Sarcastically I say if I manage to stay even, if I don't lose ground during that day, then it's a good day. People will call, and if this weren't happening you wouldn't have a business. But people call and say, "I've got this, can you deal with it? I've got this issue, can you address it?" So you're trying to progress in the work you already have but you're getting pushed back with these phone calls. You have to make decisions all day long about what you're going to do and who you're going to work for.

My work involves doing a lot of writing, spending a lot of time on the phone, and doing research to try to understand what the law is. People think, "There must be a law on this. It must be easy." But no, it's not. It's very unclear. That's why we have jobs, because it's unclear.

I also meet with clients. New clients come in, and I find out about their problem and assess factors about them such as the merits of their case, their financial ability to pay, and their ability to withstand stress. I assess all these things and decide if I want to take on the case. I've had people with nice cases, but sitting in the room with them I didn't like them, or I knew they would be difficult clients. Some of the best clients are business people, because they're totally practical and they value your advice. When you say, it will cost you $50,000 to go to trial or $20,000 to settle this it's (snap!) "When do I write the check?"

A few days a month I go to court, which is actually a relaxing time because the phones aren't ringing and you are focused on one thing, which is what you have to do in court. There's not this mentality of: How many balls do you have in the air and can you stop them all from hitting the ground?

Each month I put out about 100 bills. Not all of them are lawsuits. Some are contracts or other work, but that's how many different files I've been in during the course of a month.

My partner runs about the same. We're both similarly oriented, which is we work too much. For small firms or sole practitioners that's atypical. Most people aren't as driven. In the larger firms their genetic makeup is to be driven like that. They'd die if they weren't driving people to work long hours. The pyramid structure of those firms is based on that amount of work.

I've found there to be variety. I think it's a wonderful deal. I still like it. At times I get down because I have so much to do and it seems to never go away and people never stop calling. I would like to have less work but it's not my personality. After a while, you come to grips with who you are. And that's what I am. It was a good choice for me. I like the intellectual stimulation of figuring out a case.

A lawyer hired me to represent him in Colusa County to help him establish the right to get into his farming land. I spent a couple of days going through records from the 1800s that were maintained by the Colusa County Recorder's Office. With old records we were able to prove there was a road into his property back then. When we tried the case I had the clerk bring up these old, yellowed, crumbly pieces of paper that had the inspection reports on this road. It was fun. It was like a big puzzle. To me the variety is a particular calling card for the legal system. It's a constant little intellectual chess game with who you're dealing with to come up with answers and win.

salary & lifestyle

Lawyers' salaries really vary depending on their work ethic and their business acumen. For the attorneys who aren't committed to it as a business, don't want to work hard and don't have the personal skills to get good clients, they're going to make $20,000 to $50,000 a year. Then there's a group of attorneys who are kind of good and kind of committed but aren't driven and compulsive. They're going to make $150,000 or so. Then there's the group of attorneys who've got it together. They're going to make $300,000 to $500,000 in my kind of setting.

The attorneys who choose to do civil service, like district attorneys and public defenders, are going to make $60,000 to $130,000. In the big firms, they're going to start you off pretty high and if you display the work ethic and talent they're looking for, I'd bet that the big shots, meaning the senior partners in those firms, make $600,000 to $900,000.

No; my wife and I have been on a privately paid plan for years. We've never had a medical plan at our office and we're always able to hire secretaries and others who have medical benefits from another family member. However, that is probably not typical.

On average I get to work at 7:30 a.m. and try to leave by 6 p.m. I usually bring stuff home, but whether I do it depends on how I feel. I probably work at night two or three nights a week for two or three hours. If I've got a really big project going on I'll just go back to work. One night this week I worked until midnight at the office. I work a lot of weekends also.

I don't think everyone does that. People would say I work more than others.

I've always thought I put my family first. If you ask my wife she'd probably raise her eyebrows at that. But also I enjoy work, so I don't know that I'd go back and do it any different.

I usually take off the time between Christmas and New Year's. I also take one week in the summer, sometimes two. This year we went on a houseboat for a week. It's not a lot of vacation.

In my circumstances, no one's going to fire me so it's 100 percent stable. If you're serious about it and you're reasonably good, then people want you. So I would think there's a lot of stability in it.

In private practice you're subject to your own good planning. There's no government pension or company pension to get. For me I would put something away and accumulate some wealth and that would be my retirement. People in government work, like district attorneys, are going to make less as they go along but there's going to be retirement for them.

There are some lawyers who are 80 years old and they're still doing it. Then you'll find people who get out of it pretty early because it's a pretty stressful world. You're carrying other people's problems around on your back all the time. The timing of a lawyer's retirement can be as varied as the personalities of people who get into the profession.

I enjoy law, I like it. I haven't developed other hard interests. I still like the intellectual stimulation. I like the people I work with. I'm 55 and I don't have any plan to retire. I don't know what I'd do with myself.

pros, cons & trends

When a client has a problem and you come up with a solution that they like, whether it's winning a case or coming up with an answer. Interestingly enough, sometimes it's even telling them they can't win. At least they get that answer and they're able to move on.

It's very costly to do what I do for people. Many times a client can be in a situation where the client has rights that are just too costly to enforce. It's frustrating that what you think should happen and what's fair gets lost in the shuffle over how much it costs.

What's really changed in the last few years is that big firms are starting to value people who aren't going to be their career partners. For instance, a woman who wants to raise a family and only wants to work part time would have been toast 10 years ago, at least in terms of being a partner in a law firm. Well not anymore. Law firms have now made room for that kind of a lifestyle. It's not limited to women. There can be men who aren't that driven to work all those hours but still have talent and would be good lawyers. The firms have now found room for them.

Growing. Our society is becoming less and less personal and more and more technical. And people look to the law to solve their problems. Law is a system designed to solve disputes. Our society has grown to look to the judicial system to solve more and more types of disputes. It's more complex and we've got more laws. When my dad was a lawyer you could carry around the laws in a book that fit in a coat pocket. Now they're in 5-inch thick volumes. With that much expansion you can imagine how many opportunities there are for taking different viewpoints on that big book.

It's very dependent on the economy. In a growing economy like we've had for the past six years or so, you're seeing a lot of work on the front-end of business ventures like putting together new companies, buying property to develop, doing construction loans, that kind of stuff. In a bad economy you see more back-end problems: partners in arguments over a dwindling supply of money, companies that can't pay their bills. It turns. Some people would say we make our money on the turns. My business right now is not as busy as it was a year and a half ago, because the economy is not as strong as it was a year and a half ago.

It's taken over the law field. For instance, our ability to do revisions on briefs is infinite because of word processing. Before if you had a 25-page brief and you want to change a word on it – well, it's good enough, because there was no way to change it. Also, with the Internet, entire reference libraries are available online for someone who's inclined to look at it that way.

I remember when my partner came to me and said, "We should get a fax." I said, "What the hell is a fax?" It's both incredibly efficient and annoying. You can get a letter just like that (snap!) instead of in two days. Now with e-mail people have immediate access to you. A client can send you something and say, "Attached is this contract, would you be able to get back to me by 5?" You're right in the middle of two things with two more things waiting and here comes this e-mail from an important client who wants this by 5. The ability to address that immediate access to you is a big change. That change is good and bad.

advice

Being a lawyer offers a probability of making good income. Relatively speaking, you're more likely to have a good life, a good income and a good lifestyle. You have to be willing to work hard and to commit yourself to it. You're not going to be the richest guy on the block but you're going to do better than many. It's a career for the people who aren't gamblers. If you take the collection of lawyers who graduate from law school, the majority of them end up living a nice life. What I would say is if you're willing to work hard at it and be committed at it, then it will pay off with a good lifestyle for you.

What I would look for in hiring someone would be an ability to associate well with other people. An applicant can be the best lawyer in the world, but any lawyer that can't get along with clients or can't make clients have confidence in them will not have clients over the long run. And without clients, they've got nothing. I would want them to have good writing skills because a lot of our work now is done in writing. And there's a sense about a good lawyer that's hard to put into words. It's someone who has a talent for looking at a situation, assessing it, figuring out a solution and getting to the solution. That one's a little harder to put your finger on, but it's very important.

I don't think it's that important. Certainly, going to Harvard or Boalt or such schools gives an attorney a card to get in the door first. There's a presumption that you're good. The problem is there are other characteristics that go into making a good lawyer. Many of those people who are very smart and did well and got into the highly ranked law schools don't have these other talents. They're nerds or they can't go out to lunch with someone and have a conversation with them. So they end up not being successful attorneys. I recently attended a seminar where studies were presented that indicated that there was no correlation between successful partners in successful law firms and the caliber of law school they attended. Going to a good school is a big door opener. But it just gets you in the room, and you can still fall flat on your face if you don't have the talents once you're in that room.