LONG WINDED By: Jason H. Long London Amburn
THANK YOU I started writing this column for DICTA in the spring of 1999. Let’s put that into perspective. The Tennessee Volunteers were the reigning college football national champions (let that sink in). That was seven coaches (counting interim), and I’m estimating around $15 million in contract buyouts, ago. I was 27 years old. Still fresh out of law school and trying to figure out how to practice law. Sheppeard & Swanson was my home (literally and figuratively as I lived in a two-room apartment next door to the office). I owned no home, had no children, and had not even met my wife, who was still in law school at the time. I did not own a cell phone. I remember my boss, Sarah Sheppeard, had just purchased a Palm Pilot and I thought it was the coolest tech gadget in the world (we had advanced as far as a civilization could go). No one had even conceived of Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter. Bill Clinton was still president, by the hair of his chinnychin-chin. He had only weeks earlier been acquitted by the Senate on impeachment charges. Dr. Kevorkian was on trial for second-degree murder for administering a lethal injection to a terminally ill man in Michigan. Google had been founded about four months prior. Mark Zuckerberg was fourteen years old. On the local front, Annette Winston was president of the Knoxville Bar Association and the KBA offices were still located in an upstairs office on Union Avenue (anyone remember that space?). We only had one law school in town, and I would still have to go there, not infrequently, to Shepardize cases. Interesting to note that several students currently attending that law school had not yet been born when I wrote my first DICTA article. Regas was still The Gathering Place, down off Magnolia Avenue. Don Paine was still brewing beer and teaching us all how to practice law. Twenty-two years is a long time to do anything. While I have been submitting these columns, our country started and ended the longest war in US history. Tennessee basketball climbed to number one in the rankings not once, but twice. Tiger Woods won 14 of his 15 major championships. The towers at the World Trade Center were destroyed and children who lost their parents in that tragedy have grown into adults. We have lived through a pandemic, continued racial strife, the dot.com and housing bubbles, hipster renaissance, fidget spinners, Tim Tebow, ice bucket challenges, Tide pod lunacy, and a whole host of fads and trends which have fortunately passed on (I could write an entire article about wasted lives and Farmville, but I will refrain). Needless to say, a lot of water has gone under the bridge while Marsha has patiently waited for me to submit my musings. Eleven columns a year for twenty-two years is 242 columns. Sadly, I ran out of good ideas after about the third submission and so I’ve been forced to write about anything that happened to cross my mind on a particular day including Tennessee athletics, taking depositions, lawyers in movies, presidential trivia, political ideology, proposing to my December 2021
wife, election of judges, raising children, the weather, hunting wild boar, negotiating with the devil, the NCAA tournament, answering discovery, and writing utensils. I even once wrote an article about my feet . . . and the KBA published it (which tells you how desperate they were for content back then). If it seemed at times like my choice of topic was haphazard and lacking any cohesive plan, that impression was correct. I started writing for DICTA for fun, at the request of Angelia Nystrom (then Morie). She called me one day and said she needed a filler column. It had to be around 1000 words, did not have to be law related, but should be funny. My article was meant to be a palate cleanser, jammed in between the more meaningful and informative articles. Twenty-two years later, the publication has grown to the point that my stream of consciousness rambling no longer feels necessary. Have you looked at DICTA lately? I don’t know if anyone recalls what it looked like twenty-two years ago, but I assure you it is nothing like what it looks like today. Consisting primarily of a couple of informational articles and a series of notices regarding upcoming KBA events, the publication could not have been more than eight pages long. It wasn’t printed on the mimeograph and stapled together, but it wasn’t far from that. Today, I challenge you to find an organization of a similar size, in any profession, that publishes a higher quality magazine with as many informative and entertaining pieces as DICTA. Being there for the growth of this publication has been rewarding in and of itself. Thank you to Marsha, the KBA staff and the many editors and contributors who have given their time and energy to DICTA. You have given our bar a special gift. You have given me a gift as well. Writing for DICTA has been a true blessing. I can’t tell you the number of people I have met, and good friends and acquaintances I have in the bar, that started simply from someone saying “hey, I read what you wrote in DICTA last month.” Writing this column taught me the importance of getting involved at any level with professional organizations and creating connections within the community. I predict that my legal career would have been much shorter and far less rewarding, were it not for this stupid little column. So, this is my last Long Winded column. It wasn’t particularly funny (of course that can be said for the vast majority of the columns I write). Perhaps it was a bit too self-aggrandizing. I feel a little sheepish about writing a column about my own efforts to write a column. Still, I hope you will forgive the “Jason-centric” musings. I thought it was important, at least to me, to have some closure and to say “thank you” to Marsha, the KBA staff, my partners over the years, and most importantly my wife, for allowing me the time and opportunity to write for DICTA. Thank you also to those still willing to read this column. Perhaps now you can dedicate those two minutes a month to something more productive and worthwhile. Cheers.
DICTA
29
