Ok, so now that I have written a bit about myself and my views on the practice of law, I think it time to start delving into the actual topics of  law itself and the different scenarios in which people find themselves.  After all, that is ostensibly my goal here, to inform you, the reader, about various areas and aspects of the law and the legal process.  I guess that makes me grateful to have had such a wide range of cases over my career, as I won’t run out of material any time soon.  My first topic is one that I am familiar with, both professionally and personally.  Divorce.  Ugh, what a terrible word.  I mean, it just sounds contentious, doesn’t it?  The combination of divide and force, as I perceive it, or a forceful division.  I would so prefer something less severe-sounding, but then divorce is by its very nature severe.  Some of you may be shouting, “No!  No!  It’s not always severe!  Mine was amicable!  We held hands and sang!  We sat across from each other as friends and lovingly proffered our material goods!  It was transcendant!”
Good for you.  I am not buying it.  My divorce was amicable, and it still sucked.  It was the worst thing I have ever experienced from an emotional standpoint.  I felt totally untethered and lost.  I felt guilt about what I was doing to my kids.  I felt fear about the future.  I felt anger at times toward my ex.  And boy, did I feel dead in my heart.  This was not something that went away overnight, either.  It went on for months.  And, again, this was about as amicable as a divorce could have been.  We didn’t fight about much, and never about the kids.  I was not involved in a knock-down, drag-out bloodbath like many people are, yet it was still all that I could bear and more.
Oh, and while this was going on, there was the whole nuts and bolts process of the divorce to deal with as well.  And the kids, trying to minimize the impact on them.  I was fortunate again in that my ex and I worked together toward making the transition as easy as possible for our boys.  Yes, we worked together.  We were grown-ups, set aside all of the stuff that was sitting between us, and put the kids first.  This is something that, while very challenging, is absolutely crucial if it can be done.  The kids didn’t ask for the divorce.  The kids didn’t even ask to be born.  That was our decision, as it is the decision of every parent.  Yet they were forced, at a young age, to deal with the fact that their stable and secure home environment was being torn asunder and they were now split between those two people they loved the most.  It was confusing, terrifying, shocking to them and to their lives.
No, I’m not just going to whine for 1,000 words. 
The point that I am so poorly getting to is that there were two people involved in this process, in the creation of the relationship, in the creation and the raising of the kids, in the death of the relationship, and in the divorce itself.  I believe that every divorce has two participants, that the death of a relationship has two players.  One party may be more actively involved, or do something or some things that are more overt.  But there are two people in a relationship, two people with a part.  Neither person got married with the thought that they would ultimately divorce.  There was love, and passion, and there were dreams and a future that was so bright that sunglasses were necessary.  Both people suffer when the marriage ends.  Neither is having a good time.  And neither went into the marriage intending on making the other unhappy.  In fact, I guarantee you that both people, on some level, are unhappy, or sad, or hurt, when the relationship finally dies.  What happens quite often, unfortunately, is that one or both look to the other as the cause of the divorce, of their pain, and sadness, and fear, and loneliness, and all that other stuff.  Maybe this is because one person did something really bad in the end, or because the people are unable to look at their own part in bringing about the situation, or something else.  The point is, because of this, the emotion runs extremely high.  The anger, resentment and outright hate is like nothing else.  They lose sight of everything else, of money, of the children, of their careers, of life itself, and focus on the other person in an utterly negative and destructive way.  This is catastrophic on every level.  The kids suffer tremendously.  Their jobs suffer.  Their friends suffer.  Their finances suffer.  The only ones who benefit are the lawyers.  Seriously.  They rake it in, because they are the tools that the people use against one another.  People often blame the lawyers, and I certainly have seen more than a few who just blithely took clients’ money to file motion after motion, write angry letter after angry letter.  But I have also seen many lawyers try to talk to their clients, to get them to let go and deal with the nuts and bolts as nuts and bolts.  I have seen people fire lawyers and find others who will do their dirty work.  Money gets burned.  And in the end they have nothing.  Certainly they don’t have satisfaction, because such a course can not be satisfying.  So they wind up much poorer, with a person that they despise and who probably feels likewise, with friends and former friends who think them a bit nuts (or worse), and with kids who are totally screwed up.
And they have no one, absolutely no one to blame but themselves.
So my advice to people who are getting divorced:  Leave the kids out of it.  Go to therapy.  If it is contentious, research lawyers and hire someone who is conscientious as well as tough and smart.  Listen to them and follow their advice.  Let it go.  Move on.  Get through your divorce as quickly and as smoothly as possible.  The result will be so much better, financially and emotionally.  Yes, a lawyer just said that.  I think I just saw a pig fly by.

Almost everyone who drives has been pulled over for violating some law of the road, whether it be speeding, rolling through a stop sign, or any number of other infractions.  Sometimes there are suddenly just red lights in the rear view mirror, sometimes we see the officer as we breeze past, but the end result is the same:  An officer standing at the driver’s side window with a notepad/ticket book in one hand and a pen in the other.
I am not going to tell you how to avoid having the officer write a ticket, because the truth is, I am totally without any knowledge on that topic.  I suppose that crying might work, or flirting, or something.  I just take the ticket that I know is coming.  Especially in today’s world of slashed governmental budgets, when every nickel brought in is so desperately needed.  Instead, I am going to tell you the best way that I know to avoid having the ticket turn into a conviction.
For free!  Unbelievable.  I must be mad.  Maybe so, or maybe I am just trying to pass along some information that may help someone some day.  Maybe even multiple people.  There are a couple of really important things to do, one when you are stopped and the other when you are dealing with the actual ticket.
When you are pulled over, and the officer walks up to the car, don’t get out of the car, don’t start explaining what you were doing, don’t start arguing or convincing or whatever.  Just shut up.  Yes, that’s what I said.  Keep your mouth shut, and stay absolutely silent unless you have to respond to a direct question.  No, “Do you know why I stopped you?” is not a question that requires response.  Don’t be rude, and make eye contact, since you don’t want the officer to think you are hiding something.  When asked for license, registration and proof of insurance, get them out and pass them over.  No need to offer commentary, or opinion, or anything.  If you are going to get a warning, you’ll get that vibe soon enough.  Just don’t talk or make conversation at all.
Why, you ask?  Simple.  The less you say, the less that the officer will have upon which to base a recollection of you.  When in court, an officer is supposed to testify from memory.  Not from a ticket.  If the officer has no notes, all they have is a ticket, which provides only a few bits of information.  If you were only slightly over the speed limit, or didn’t come to a full and complete stop at a stop sign (“genuflecting,” my dad calls it), then you are in good shape, if the officer is honest.  If they don’t remember you, they don’t remember the stop, and they don’t remember why they stopped you other than the data on the ticket.  It is not foolproof, or even regularly successful, but it has worked.  I have seen it work.
The second thing to do is to allow as much time to pass as possible between the writing of the ticket and the court appearance.  You will get something from the court giving you notice by when you must pay the ticket or set it for a contested hearing.  In Marin, when you set it for a hearing, you have to post the fine, which the court returns if you win your case.  Different counties handle tickets in different ways.  I can tell you that the lines to talk to the traffic court clerk are generally horrific, so be ready for that.  Also, don’t wait until the last possible day in case something goes wrong.  Go in and set it for a hearing.  Yes, even if you have no defense.  You will not be punished for contesting the ticket.  If you are eligible for traffic school, you can get it when you are at the hearing, after you lose.  If you lose, that is.  Go in, waive time, and set it for a hearing as far off in the future as possible.
Then, eleven or twelve court days before the date of your traffic court trial date, go in and continue the date.  You are allowed to do that.  The eleven or twelve days are important, because you have to do it NO LATER than ten court days before the original date.  Any later and you are stuck with the original date.  Push it out, as far as you can.  If the clerk is nice, and gives you a range of dates, pick one right around a holiday and hope that the officer is on vacation.  Set it for a Friday if nothing else, or a Monday, to catch a possible 3-day weekend vacation.  Why all of this pushing and pushing of the date?  Again, it is to allow the natural deterioration of his or her memory.  By the time you sit at the defense table in front of the judge (or, more likely, the commissioner), hopefully the officer will have forgotten all about you.  Or better yet, they won’t even show up, knowing that they can’t testify about the stop and about what you did.
You may think that this all smacks of desperation, and to an extent it does.  All of what I describe above is intended to make the best of an almost impossible situation.  If you have a good, solid defense (something besides “I wasn’t speeding”), then your chances only increase.  Photos, measurements, witness statements, all are useful and good to have.
But sometimes, you have to use what’s available.

I never thought that my first blog would come in conjunction with my law practice website.  Fitting, I suppose, as I have taken steps toward living the life that I truly want to live.  I guess that I should start by telling anyone who takes the time to read this about myself.  I can move on to the ideas, opinions and wordsmithing later.
My family moved to Marin when I was a year old, settling into a house in Novato where my parents still live.  I went to school here until college, which I spent at UC Davis, and then law school in San Francisco.  I then moved back to Marin.  With the exception of a two-year stint in the East Bay doing medical malpractice defense, I have been here ever since.
My legal experience has been as diverse and broad as I could possibly imagine.  I spent two years doing general legal work, meaning that I handled cases ranging from criminal defense to family law to personal injury to business litigation to real estate litigation…you get the point.  I then joined a firm in Danville specializing in medical malpractice defense, where I worked for two years before joining Freitas, McCarthy, MacMahon & Keating in 2000.  I moved back to Marin, settling down in San Rafael with my family.
At Freitas, I initially worked on insurance defense cases, with criminal defense and family law matters as a sort of side gig.  The firm decided to move away from that area a few years after I arrived, as the insurance companies became more and more difficult to work with.  My practice broadened again.  I handled cases as limited aspeople bringing or opposing a Temporary Restraining Order to ones as large as a Civil Rights case stemming from the arrrest and pepper spraying of a husband and wife in San Francisco.  I represented people who were in car accidents, people who had been wronged by business partners and employees, people who were going through divorces, people who had been accused of crimes.  The common thread running through all of them was the fact that at the very start of each case, there was a person who had something happen to them, something that was beyond their ability to handle on their own, and which required their searching for a lawyer.  Calling me was their last resort.
I understand that.  I get that people only call a lawyer when they have no other option.  We deal with significant problems, and work in a world that the average person can’t fully understand.  The formality, the rules, the methodical way that cases progress.  It is something like Alice’s tumble down the rabbit hole, except that Alice was in control of her own travel, and she wasn’t paying hundreds of dollars an hour for her particular journey.
Anyway, some years ago, I started thinking about running my own practice.  I like to practice law my way, in my own fashion, and bill for the things that matter.  I found the concept of running a meter for every moment spent reading an e-mail, or answering a brief call, or thinking about a case, more than a bit frustrating and contrary to my own particular beliefs.  I am not commenting on the Freitas firm here, I have nothing but respect and good feelings toward the firm and its lawyers.  I am more talking about firms in general.  On my own, I can make whatever decisions I like concerning billing practices.  Further, I can take the cases that I want to take, represent the clients I want to represent, and decline any case I don’t want, because I am the one making all decisions.  And here I am.
What are my operating criteria, my work guidelines?  Well, I will listen to my clients.  I will hold their wishes paramount.  I will communicate with my clients.  I will aggressively represent them and their interests.  I will bill conscientiously, meaning that I will remember that I am charging a lot for my time, and that I must take that into account whenever the meter is running.  I don’t bill for little things, a brief call, for example, unless the client abuses this situation.  
My goal is to have return business, referral business, word-of-mouth business, for people to know that when they hire me, they will get great representation, counsel and value.