I've been speaking to my law partner lately, and we've together come to the conclusion that the populace, in the past year, has just gotten a little ... meaner.
My business practice consists of both transactional work (e.g., the buying and selling of businesses) and business-related litigation. While I'm not surprised by the fact that transactional business is currently down, I've been surprised at how much business-related litigation has picked up (and this is not counting collections and debt-related litigation). Sure, some of the cases I've picked up involve the fact that someone is now financially unable to perform the terms of the contract, but many of the cases involve malice, opportunism, fraudulent behavior.
The tide of meanness doesn't just stop with clients, however. I've spoken to some of my fellow attorneys, many of whom are extremely frustrated. Some are just wanting to get out. In tough times, when an attorney is involved in a transaction, if something goes wrong, everyone looks to the attorney as a sort of insurance policy or bank, expecting him to pay for everyone's mistakes--and this is what a couple of my colleagues are feeling right now. Others have started to fight among themselves, even to the point of spreading rumors about some of their fellow attorneys' impending shutting down of offices.
Beyond the legal profession, I've seen more bitterness in the local newspapers (who seem more than usual, to engage in rumor mongering and yellow, opinion-based journalism), in consumers, and in the population at large.
When pointing this out to my partner, he agreed, and we discussed what we thought about this ugly mood that we're seeing. Here, I believe, are some of the causes:
1. Economic Difficulties. This, of course, should be no surprise. My insurance clients tell me that more questionable claims have arisen, and claimants are quicker to threaten suit if they don't receive a settlement they believe is fair. Folks, desperate to hold on, want someone--anyone--to bail them out, and so they appear to be quicker to point the finger of blame and expect compensation. Anyone who is married knows that when money is tight, you tend to argue more, and with an American populace collectively feeling the pinch, there are a whole bunch of ornery people out there right now looking to fight.
2. Political Difficulties and Change. In the last year, the country has seen a sea change of politics. The political minority is scared about the direction being taken by a decidedly leftist administration. Some realists within the political majority are coming to see that a smooth-talking man with a cult of personality is not the panacea they hoped. It's all different now. And the politics have gone from an understanding that government is no solution, to one in which a desperate population is willing to give up its collective freedom for financial security.
3. Changing of the Rules. With all of the political and economic change described above, many of the rules we've all gone by suddenly have been thrown out the window. Real estate, the way to sure riches, suddenly has become a burden and a source of loss. Whereas two years ago we were all reading books and dreaming of how to leave the boring office cubicles to live an exciting life of entrepenurialism and self-employment, most of us now are just thankful for (or even worse, still wishing they had) those same boring jobs.
While I expect the effects of all this change to eventually settle in (for better or worse), the current instability has created an ugly mood in our area. The only lesson, perhaps, to be drawn from this is that in this world, when depending on the temporal, it can all be taken away, and if that is the base of a person's life, it, like a foundation created on sand, can wash away in a great storm.
