Declarations and Exclusions

The Amazing Fraudini!

Gloria Teasdale: I thought you left.
Chicolini: Oh no.  I don't leave.
Gloria Teasdale: But I saw you with my own eyes.
Chicolini: Well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?

-- from Duck Soup (The Marx Brothers, 1933)

In an article in Insurance Journal, investigator Brad Ballentine discloses the hitherto unsuspected similarities between insurance fraud and stage magic:

One trick that magicians often rely upon is the tendency we all have to assume things.  They very often use props of objects we are all familiar with, so that when we see the prop, we assume it is the genuine article.  For instance, the magician pulls out an egg, and we subconsciously assume it is an actual egg, and not a hollow plastic shell, or he presents you with a deck of cards and we subconsciously assume that it is a genuine deck of cards and not a trick deck.  Most people seeing a scarf or handkerchief might unwittingly assume it to be nothing more than that, instead of realizing that two scarves of the same color, stitched together on three sides, still looks like a single scarf, but makes a nice pouch in which to hide things (like a hollow, plastic egg).

Similarly, in the world of insurance claims, we are constantly being presented with something that looks like the genuine article, and thus, our tendency is to assume that it is.  A report about injuries and treatment written on a doctor's letterhead causes us to assume that there was an actual patient, that there was an injury, that there actually was some treatment and there actually was a doctor who was in some way involved with that report . . . .

Via the always interesting Law and Magic Blog, which is about exactly that.

David Rossmiller Has You Covered

". . . . Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season."
-- T.S. Eliot, "Gerontion" (1920)

In August, this weblog will be five years old. I do not know what the proper formula is for converting Human Years to Blog Years, but I sense that this sort of longevity makes Decs&Excs authentically middle aged, if not yet exactly a grizzled old timer.  And like many another aging hipster, Decs&Excs has been slowing down.  Since hosting the 102nd Edition of Blawg Review here last April, I have generated a mere 21 new posts of my own, barely enough for any weblog worthy of the name.   

Next Monday, March 31, it will be my pleasure for the third time to host an edition of Blawg Review, the 153rd.  (It is never too early, by the way, to submit suggestions for inclusion in that compendious portmanteau of a post via the handy submission form.)  It remains to be seen whether that will inspire a return to a more frequent cycle of posting here.

I will confess that some part of my slowdown may result from my being utterly intimidated by the undisputed Big Dog of the insurance coverage weblogging world, David Rossmiller's Insurance Coverage Blog.  David has pretty much owned the coverage of coverage over the past year or so, particularly the post-hurricane litigation in Louisiana and Mississippi and the spectacular fall from dubious grace of Dickie Scruggs and company.  While maintaining his own weblog at a consistently high level of quantity and quality, he has also found time to guestblog at PointofLaw.com and to serve on the advisory board for the burgeoning Lexis/Nexis Insurance Law Center.  I take it as a given that he somehow manages to render good service to his clients while he's at it.

For lawyers with weblogs, and particularly for lawyers thinking of starting a weblog, there's inspiration to be had in a post Mr. R. contributed to the Insurance Law Center earlier this month with the exclamatory title, "People: Throw Off Your Shackles and Blog!"  After adding his name to the long list of those who have despaired at the sheer gosh-awfulness of so much of the writing produced by lawyers-as-lawyers, he posits blogging as a promising cure:

This is what lawyers all too easily lose sight of when writing – that the goal is not to show how smart they are, or even to win.  The goal is to communicate with the reader.  All other aims must be secondary, because these goals stand the best chance of being realized if the primary goal is first achieved.  The reader’s needs must always come first, before any of the writer’s needs.  The writer must work hard, so the reader does not need to.  Blogging can be a great place for lawyers to discover how to do this, to break free of the iron claw of Latin and dead English, to use creative language, to employ metaphor, simile, allegory, and character development, to discover the storyteller within, to really connect with the reader.  Even judges and other lawyers, so they say, are human.  Given a choice between analysis that plods along like a mastodon on crutches and analysis that is both insightful and entertaining, the market will choose the more attractive product.

I wholeheartedly agree, but would add that there is potentially even more benefit to be derived by lawyers blogging about something other than the law.  The practice of law does not take place in a vacuum, but in a vast and multifarious Real World full of fellow human beings and of social, economic, political, natural, and cultural tidal forces, and the practice can only gain from the attorney's engagement with that larger context.  Also, writing about All That Other Stuff is frequently just more fun than writing about the law.  So, while there is undoubtedly ample room for additional well-written law blogs, there is even more room in this world for well-written, lively non-law blogs from well-rounded, lively lawyers.  Heed the call!

~~~

P.S., Blawg Review #152 is now up at TechnoLawyer Blog, which despite its name is not a blog for lawyers who love Techno.   Say, there's a niche for someone to fill.....