CLE, Koolhaas, and Winco, oh my!

On Friday, a fine day out to the Jet City! We woke to genuine snow here on the South Sound, then I made it up to Seattle for a WACDL CLE.

Not too bad, but a few of the sessions illustrated the Trial Lawyer's Paradox: being able to sway a jury doesn't automatically make you an effective or even interesting lecturer. The better presentations mixed visuals, anecdotes, and stats, like this one from the Pierce County Department of Assigned Counsel: in 2002, Pierce County (Tacoma) had the highest per capita consumption of lithium batteries in the world - due to a local abundance either of photographers or meth labs.

The best presentation was pushed to the last. I listened to a real public defender hero, Robert Schiffner of Moses Lake, Grant County, a small-town lawyer with enough backbone to take a leading role in exposing the public defense scandal in his own county.

(I also saw another great p.d. who passed on me once before, but we're cool now. The lesson I learned from that experience was, if you want to shine with a potential employer, it's better not to spend the night before the job interview getting stuck in the snow in the Cascades and spending a few hours trying to dig out, then hitchhiking to the top of the pass and sleeping about five hours there, then riding back to the scene in the morning in the first-available tow truck, extracting your vehicle, and hauling ass to your interview town. Even if you arrive with minutes to spare, you don't exactly arrive fresh or impressive.)

Another good thing about the CLE was this cool house down the street, where Seattle stores most of its library books and some of its pretensions of being a "world-class" city. I spent the lunch hour there navigating the place, being impressed and perplexed in turn, and I guess I'll have to check out S M L XL to learn whether the cheap-ass aspect of much of the $165 million building resulted from Koolhaas' post-modern assault on the privileging of quality materials and workmanship, or just from a lack of funds after the dot-com bust.

Then from the high-brow delights of downtown Seattle to south King County and Winco! Every southern Idaho expatriate in the Puget Sound needs to make a pilgrimage here! Friday night in the Winco in Kent combined highlights of Idaho and Western Washington: Falls Brand meats, bulk food bins and white guys with garments visible under their shirts sharing the polyglot camaraderie of working-class Seattle. I loved it.

I know, I know, it's not a union shop, but it's closer in spirit and practice to Costco than to Walmart. Thinking of Winco's ESOP eases my mind as I feast on made-in-Idaho Basque chorizos and reflect on my continuing education, legal and otherwise.