THE UPS AND DOWNS

of practising law in federal court have never been more apparent than in the last couple of weeks. Literally.

Have a case in federal court?
Here are your choices: The Dyer Building and all the mold you can breathe or...
the King Courthouse which has eleven floors, and ONE working elevator at any given moment. Don't even bother saying a word when you race into court 20 minutes late for a hearing. The Judge already knows. You were in the building a half hour ago, and that's how long you waited to get into an elevator.



Meanwhile, the Wilkie Ferguson courthouse sits there like a gleaming glass joke, laughing and mocking the lawyers trudging around it on the way to the Mold or the Stairs. A marshal recently whispered to us that on some days NO elevators were working in the new courthouse. And MOLD is not a word confined to the Dyer building.

(laughing at us?)



Yup, as surprising as it may seem to our federal architect experts, in South Florida, the combination of heat and humidity creates....all together now...
No- not weapons of mass destruction, but nice try Mr. Vice President.
It's Mold. And the Feds have plenty of it.





So there you have it. A nice juicy federal case walks into your office, and after the cheque clears (nobody takes cash do they?) you have a year ( or two weeks if you get Judge Huck) of running up and down the stairs of the King building; holding your breath in the Dyer building; all the while staring wistfully at the new Wilkie Ferguson courthouse, which combines the best (or worst) of the other courthouses.



See You In The REGJB, where the elevators work. And so do the escalators. And even when they don't, it's only six stair flights of courtrooms and most of us can use the exercise