Lawyer-limpics to be on the Ocho in 2028?

By Spencer Farris

The Paris Olympics recently finished. I don’t need to watch an average person compete alongside the Olympians to know these sports are tough because I already know I couldn’t do most of them, with the possible exception of breakdancing like an Australian. The coverage on Peacock was perfect for short attention spans, especially the daily recaps. Anyone who gets to the point without a lot of fluff wins me over.

My oldest son played rugby, so I know about 40% of the rules of that sport, and it was fun to watch. I enjoyed basketball as well. Being a persistent bench warmer, I had a front-row seat to a lot of basketball games in high school. That level of athleticism was beyond me in high school and remains that way.

I don’t understand the numbers problem for the American basketballers. The five-man team won gold. The three-man team didn’t make it out of the pool play. It would seem that having 40% fewer players and 50% less court to cover would make the five-man gold medalist country dominant in three-man ball as well. Appearances are deceiving.

The inclusion of skateboarding and breakdancing either means that the Olympic committee is trying to broaden the potential audience or that it was desperate to fill airtime. In fairness, some events have been expanded to the brink. The 10-meter dash is about the only track event we don’t have.

Given the number of lawyer ads I saw during the Olympics, it is clear that lawyers would like to have our own ‘lympic games. We could cut out the middleman and get in front of the spectators without all the distractions of actual events in between the lawyer talk. In case Peacock execs are paying attention, I have a few ideas:

• Advanced billing: In this event, associates will be handed a file and told to get it ready for trial. The competitors will have to make sure they do justifiable extra things — to avoid a malpractice claim, for example — while focusing on the pertinent parts of trial prep. The competition will be judged by insurance claims reps, and the winning team will have the highest billable time total with the fewest disallowed charges. Bonus points to any lawyers who are related to a member of the judging panel.
• Conviction: Despite the name, this category does not necessarily involve a criminal trial. Competitors will be given a case file with horrible facts — representing drunken drivers, sleeping security guards and serial-biting toddlers. The challenge is to get the most fired up to try the bad fact case in the shortest amount of time. Past winners were quoted as saying, “I don’t know about the jury, but by the end of the trial, I liked the case a lot.”
• Lingo limbo: All industries have their own language, and lawyers are among the worst — depos, hypos, rogs, typos and so on. The gold medalist will work the most trade lingo into a conversation. Bonus points for using Latin phrases, deductions for dropping the name of your alma mater, especially if it is Harvard.
• Temper tossing: It is not surprising that in a profession where the spoken word is a tool, there will be practitioners who yell more often than they speak in a civil tone. Hooked up to specialized monitors, the competitors will be taunted and handed setbacks, including unfavorable rulings. When the anger level hits an acceptable level, a light will blink on the machines, and the lawyer will launch into a tirade. The challenge is in keeping the language and volume suitable to the occasion, whether it is responding to clients, associates or judges, the last where a contempt ruling will eliminate the competitor.

We know that much of the work in a law firm is done by paralegals, but the name Paralympics is already taken, and those games finished just earlier this month. This means paralegals will have to wait for their games, or at least come up with a clever name. It is obvious that I am less of a TV producer than I am a basketball player, and there are a lot of details to work out before 2028. If my paralegal wasn’t on vacation, this would already be done.

Spencer Farris is the founding partner of The S.E. Farris Law Firm in St Louis, Missouri. He would win a gold medal in procrastination but didn’t get entered in time.