A Conversation With...Paul Pearlstein

Paul Pearlstein – in his art-filled office on Rhode Island Ave., with a view of St. Matthews Cathedral and a month-to-month lease that keeps him from being overly committed -  finally likes practicing law, after a mere 46 years.

“I can’t say I always loved it.  I began to love it more when I stopped caring about the money, and that was only in the last years.  I think the problem with the practice of law is the money.  It gets in the way.  If you’re always looking for the next check then you’re not really enjoying the process and devoting as much to your client as you possibly could.  So if you can relax from that…People ask me, what is it like to be a small practitioner in Washington.  There was an old old cartoon that I had seen, and it was a picture of two fellas in a jungle bar, you know, with the slow moving fans, and they were all in safari gear and pith helmets and khaki jackets and everything.  And they were both pretty drunk.  And one of them was a full sized man.  And the other one was a little bitty man sitting on the edge of the counter.  And the big one says, in an inebriated fashion, looks over and says, ‘Tell us again about the time you told the witch doctor to go to hell.’  To me, that’s the image of the solo.”

The other image of the solo, which Paul Pearlstein would seem to embody even if there isn’t a funny cartoon depicting it as such, is the guy who’s tried everything he’s wanted to try.  “The practice has sort of gone where it’s went and I’ve followed,” he says.  “I’ve enjoyed that.” 

Pearlstein was in the army in France and thought he’d be a tax lawyer afterwards until they rewrote the Code before he got out of the service. He now concentrates on real estate law – and bankruptcy law, its corollary (one practice gets busy when the other abates, Pearlstein says) plus estate planning.  He’s also done family law – though only for 20 years, he says, and not any more – as well as arbitration, litigation, and most anything else that’s come his way that he finds interesting both in work and in life. 

Life-wise, Pearlstein has raised four interesting kids – a mountain climbing Vet, a yoga teacher in Manila, a former national gymnast who trained in Beijing, and a firefighter.  He’s married a Quaker tuba player from Indiana, and joined a Reconstructionist, klezmer-oriented Jewish congregation which once had Amy Goodman from Democracy Now as a guest speaker, on Yom Kipppur..  He spends a lot of his time doing what he enjoys  rowing shells, canoeing and playing music.

“I just always enjoyed being on the river.  I took up whitewater kayaking.  But I just wasn’t very good.  I didn’t have a reliable roll.  So whenever I turned over I would get out, which is the most dangerous thing you can do.  And so I just started using a whitewater canoe for flat water.  I’d go out a couple of times a week.”  After a knee replacement Pearlstein got involved with a local canoe groups, and next thing he knew he was paddling dragon boats from Taiwan and outrigger canoes from Micronesia, all over the country – Hawaii, Nevada, California, New York, Maryland and Virginia.

“Almost everybody’s thirty years younger than me,” says Pearlstein.  “But not quite.  There’s a couple of guys that are within ten years.  But it’s a very welcoming group, it’s fun, the racing is fun.  I’ve always been a river rat.  I don’t know why.  I think part of it is I don’t have very good eye-hand control but I have lots of stamina.”

Pearlstein also spends his time agitating for the things he believes in.

“One of my prayers is getting music education back in DC public schools.  I’m being a gadfly – calling people, being obnoxious, writing letters.  They’re beginning to add music teachers this year and I’m still writing letters, just trying to stay on their rear ends,” Pearlstein says.  “I’ve been a musician all my life.  I played violin through high school  We had such a great music department at W-L in Arlington.  And it was so meaningful to me.  And I think the two things that I probably got out of my youth are the love of playing music and rowing.  Music was once a very important element to the school system.  In the last 35 years they’ve cut back and cut back and cut back.  But for a lot of kids – the only reason they attended school was for the music; choir, band, orchestra  Everything else for them at school was boring or off-putting.  And here’s something really positive, and they eliminate it?”

Pearlstein says he’s starting to slow down, doesn’t want a long-term lease on his office.  He’ll keep doing things that seem interesting and right to him, keep being a gadfly, and somehow it’ll all work out.

“I got divorced.  I got traded in I guess.  And it was around that time you kind of had to go back to the basics.  And I said, ‘What did I really like to do?’  And I thought: I like music.  And I like the river, I like the water.  So I’ve kind of been doing that, been putting most of the emphasis in that,” he says.  “And it’s kind of funny but it works out.  I think so many lawyers are doing what people think they should be doing- or what they think they should be doing.  You know, people that go out and join country clubs and start playing golf.  And I’ve talked to some of them and said, ‘Why are you doing that?  Do you like golf?’  If you like it you should do it.  But if you don’t like it don’t do that.  If you don’t like going out to lunch don’t go out to lunch.  Yeah, so I do lunch here, I bring my stuff in.  I’m going to be me, I’m not going to try to be someone else.”

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Arin Greenwood is a contract attorney and freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. She has been published in the Washington City Paper and the ABA Journal. This is her third piece in a continuing series for the DWLR. Arin can be contacted directly at aringreenwood@hotmail.com.

 

A Conversation With...Anne Meister, Register of Wills

“People behave in their wills the way they behave in life,” says Anne Meister, who became D.C.’s Register of Wills in February, 2007.  Meister is examining the original will of Robert E. Peary, who explored the Arctic in 1908.  Peary, in his will, gives to his son Robert his medals, trophies, clothes and jewelry.  “And an island,” says Meister.  “An island!”  (The island, incidentally, is Eagle Island, off the coast of Maine; it was the Peary family’s summer residence when the family was not exploring the world’s coldest places.  The island was given to the State of Maine by the Peary family in 1967 and is now open for tourism between June 15 and Labor Day.)

Meister was formerly staff attorney to the D.C. Council, then Chief of Staff for David Clarke, and later Legislative Counsel to D.C. Council, followed by an interval at Harvard getting a Masters in Public Administration and then private practice where she became increasingly involved in all sorts of probate matters.

“I like public service,” says Meister, in her office in Court Building A, with its mid-century accessories and a large, unframed, abstract painting – gorgeous purple and black paint splotches – made by her husband, artist and lawyer Jay Schiffres.  “I decided that I had maybe one more job in me.  I know how to do public service, and I enjoy it.”

Meister now heads the Superior Court’s Probate Division, where she is in charge of 45 employees charged with running the division’s five sections – the Clerk’s Office,  Auditing and Appraisals Branch, the Legal Branch, Systems Administration Section and Quality Assurance Section.  She arrived at the court with a good background in probate law and the court’s operations from her private practice, and impressed with the Court’s staff. 

When Meister first came to the Probate Division, she found an unwieldy number of docket codes – 600+ of them, covering every possible type of filing.  “I could never have learned them all,” says Meister.  Meister whittled them down to one laminated sheet’s worth of codes per case type that she says should help the Probate Division staff move cases more efficiently.  And quickly, she hopes – one of Meister’s other first big projects  was making her way through the office’s many thousands of open probate files, and make recommendations to the court as to which of those cases should be closed.  “With rare exception we’re hoping all estate cases will close roughly within three years from the date of filing,” says Meister. 

Meister has also overseen the beginning of a new guardianship assistance program at the court, which brings social work students from area schools – Howard, the University of Maryland, and Gallaudet, so far – who volunteer between 16 and 20 hours per week working with wards of the court.

Another ongoing project – one you can see pinned up on the walls around Court Building A’s second floor – is the Wills Project.  Meister worked with the Estates, Trusts and Probate Law Section of the D.C. Bar.  The wills of 13 famous Washingtonians are on display – including those of Frederick Douglass, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Woodrow Wilson, Dolly Madison – showing what they made of their estates; there are plans to add four or five new wills per year. 

While waiting for your Court Building A cases to be called, you can peruse the last wishes of Franklin Pierce – fourteenth President of the United States (and the only President from New Hampshire) – who gives away his swords to his nephews, with the explanation that these swords are to be used “for repelling foreign aggressions and vindicating the rights of American citizens, the world over.”

Or down the hall you can see the will of Euphemia Lofton Haynes, who became the first African American woman to receive a PhD in math, when she got her doctorate in math from Catholic University in 1943.  Haynes created a chair and a student loan fund at Catholic University in her neatly-typed will.

“And because she was a mathematician she set the minimum interest rate,” says Meister.  (It’s set at 4%, just incidentally.)

Grover Cleveland, meanwhile, made a codicil – hanging next to James Monroe’s will - that specifies that once he is buried, he is not to be dug up again unless it was very important to his wife that he be moved somewhere she found pleasanter for all eternity; Cleveland also specified that a monument – “only moderately expensive” – be erected at his grave.  And Alexander Graham Bell simply gave everything to his wife in fee simple.

“Isn’t that fabulous?” says Meister.  “It’s so historical.  It’s so wonderful.  This job – I find it fascinating.”

Arin Greenwood is a contract attorney and freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. She has been published in the Washington City Paper and the ABA Journal. This is her second piece for the DWLR. Arin can be contacted directly at aringreenwood@hotmail.com.

A Conversation With...Chief Judge Rufus King, III

It is the middle of a sunny Tuesday afternoon in June, and the Moultrie Courthouse is buzzing.  A line of people wait to go through the security checkpoint, lawyers, jurors, parties, court-house staff – and who knows who else – ride the escalators up and down, mill around the hallways, talk to each other.  A crowd of jurors listen to instructions so they’ll know if they are sitting on a jury or going home; two lawyers are arguing - passionately, colorfully, using words one doesn’t expect to hear so loudly in court - over the Celtics.

And in an unmarked office on the third floor, there is calm.  Large offices with pictures of sunsets on them; large windows that look over the city.  It is in a large sunny book-and-award filled office that Chief Judge Rufus G. King, III – dapper in his trademark bow tie - has his chambers, at least until the end of September when he will step down at the end of his second term as Chief Judge.

Chief Judge King became Chief Judge King on September 29, 2000, after working in private practice, then becoming a Superior Court judge at the D.C. Superior Court in 1984, then becoming Presiding Judge of the Civil Division from January 1997 until January 1999.

Moving from judging to being the chief administrator of one of the government’s largest and most complicated institutions was a big change.

“The first thing I did was to survive the process,” he says.

After surviving the process he set out to conquer his big issues: getting more resources for the Family Court, increasing the Court’s budget, strategic planning, improving the Court’s IT system.  But Chief Judge King didn’t know how to navigate Capitol Hill – how to get the Feds to give the Court the resources it needed.

“Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton – she had to educate me,” he says.  “That was a tough job.  She wasn’t always gentle about it but she was right.  She was on our oversight/authorizing subcommittee.  She of course knew and understood the collision of interests – the political pushes – that I didn’t, many of us at the Court didn’t.”

But Chief Judge King learned, and, he says, “in fact what happened after a very rapid learning curve on the Hill is we were given a better structure and more resources.”

“I think the Family Court has gone through a major improvement,” says Chief Judge King.  “We were given three additional judges for that court and nine magistrate judges.  Now we have enough time to really think about cases and manage them.  And, at the same time we were doing that, the city was really strengthening its role, so I think the combination has led to substantial improvements.  We’ll have taken a giant step forward thanks to that effort.”

On top of improvements to the Family Court, Chief Judge King has overseen strategic planning at the court, as well as a massive overhaul of the Court’s IT system so that all the different courts – family, probate, civil, criminal, landlord-tenant; all of them – are linked.  This way, when a family court judge wants to know if someone’s been evicted, they can look it up from the bench; if a civil court judge wants to know if there is a protective order against a party, they can look it up from the bench.

There’s more to be done, says Chief Judge King, though the more might be left for his successor.  “The one that I’m just getting started on now is performance standards,” he says.   “It is an area that I might not see through in my term.  The challenge is that you want to improve the timeliness of case management – you want to get the fat out of the system.  At the same time the great thing about our system of justice is that an independent judge has the time to make discretionary calls, and you don’t want to lose that. On other fronts, I think we’re seeing more and more pro se litigants – that’s going to be a challenge.  I think we’re in a world where we have to become more sophisticated in the international community.  Not only providing interpreter services but understanding different cultures and being accessible to different cultures.”

“I’d say it’s very much with mixed emotions that I leave, because I really have enjoyed it,” says Chief Judge King.  “The bench is just such an unbelievable opportunity.  From the day that I first came on the bench there hasn’t been a single day I would have traded for working anywhere else as hard as it can be.  I’ve been very lucky.  Very fortunate.”

After September Chief Judge King in all likelihood becomes Senior Judge King – he has applied for senior judge status, and is hoping to continue on the bench, hearing cases and “having some fun on the court,” he says.  That, and having some fun off the bench, “Being able to travel when I want to travel, sit when I want to sit, do what I want to do.”

But before September there is still work to be done, and on this sunny June day Chief Judge King’s airy waiting room is full of people in suits holding legal pads waiting to meet about judicial standards.

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Arin Greenwood is a contract attorney and freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. She has been published in the Washington City Paper and the ABA Journal. This is her first piece for the DWLR. Arin can be contacted at aringreenwood@hotmail.com.