When You Work It Out I'm Worse Than You

I had another flash that my faith in karma might not be misplaced. Golden Boy/Scumbag Associate blew a deadline. Blew it big. Now there are certain deadlines that a court can waive - you file a 473 motion saying mea culpa, I screwed up. The court goes tsk tsk, but since judges were once first year associates as well, the court lets it go, you file your motion/brief/legal thingy late and get told don't do it again. In fact, most deadlines are like that.

Then there are jurisdictional deadlines which the court has absolutely NO discretion to waive. Why are they called jurisdictional deadlines? Because before that date, the court has jurisdiction to hear the matter. After that date, it doesn't. If the court doesn't have jurisdiction, well, it can't hear your plea to waive the deadline, can it?

Golden Boy/Scumbag Associate comes into my office around noon-ish looking all panicked and says, "Hey Marty, I need your help to figure out if I committed malpractice." Without breaking any work product confidentiality, the bottom line is that a jurisdictional deadline passed. Had he been practicing 5 years, he probably would've realized this, but he been working as an associate for 3 months (and officially as a lawyer for 1 month). OK, that's the understanding the "but for the grace of God go I" part of me has. The "when I was a first year associate" part of me, however, says when I was an associate of 3 months, I would've caught this. Within 5 minutes, I checked the treatise that I checked as a first year associate and found the correct answer.

At the end of the day, Golden Boy/Scumbag Associate was able to figure out a colorable argument why we hadn't hit the jurisdictional deadline. However, he shouldn't have had to make any argument in the first place. Oh, and this is about a month after he told his girlfriend to stay in San Diego so he could screw his ex to celebrate passing the bar.

Yup, karma at work.