The Virus of Expedience
When did our society prioritize expedience over quality?
Maybe it goes back to the beginning of the Industrial Age.
I’m not sure.
During my life, like a virus, expedience has spread to large sectors of our society, leaving quality in its wake.
In the local legal community, where I have spent most of my life, I believe the virus originated (who knows when? These things happen in the dead of night or behind closed doors) in Collin County, Texas.
In their divine wisdom, the judges there decided that all hearings would be limited to twenty minutes.
No matter how many issues there were or how complex the case was, each side had 20 minutes to present its case.
Period.
Even if you have a critical witness who had an emergency medical procedure, no exceptions were accepted.[1]
“Five more minutes, please?”
Nope.
Like a chess game, when your flag dropped, you were done – even if you were winning by a large margin.
It was not like this when I started practicing law.
A judge would push you along, but s/he understood that lawyers worked hard to prepare their cases, and simply allowing them to say what they came prepared to say was an important part of the process.
As a litigator, I always believed that if a judge would just allow me to present my evidence, I could tolerate an adverse ruling (at least better than otherwise).
At least, I had “my say.”
Making expedience more important than the quality of justice always bothered me.
Judges feeling pressure to “move their dockets” drank that Kool-Aid and complied.
The expedience virus spread to Dallas and other counties.
I have been out of touch for a while, but I would be surprised if this has changed.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if time limits have become the unwritten law in the State of Texas.
As usual, I was in the minority - but not alone.
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A few years ago, I saw a panel of judges from various local counties discuss the infamous twenty-minute rule.
One judge (from Denton) out of six agreed with me:
Two people come in with a dispute about custody of their children.
One wants me to order supervised possession for the other parent.
Unless one of the litigants presents evidence that the child is in danger, this is a harsh remedy, even on a temporary basis.
Once imposed, it may continue for months, seriously damaging the relationships between the parent and the children, not to mention the loser’s prospects at a later trial.
How am I supposed to make a decision that reduces what may be a good parent to a sub-parent in forty minutes?
The other five judges on the panel preferred expedience to a thorough review of the evidence.
To hell with the quality of jurisprudence, we have got to move those cases along.
The public demands it.
Hell, the Supreme Court demands it.
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When COVID hit, the quality of justice took another nosedive when the courts opted for Zoom hearings rather than hearings with live witnesses.
Traditionally, a judge’s ability to scrutinize a witness’s credibility by watching him testify in person was considered critical.
But we gotta move those cases forward.
Family law hearings have always resembled a bar fight in most courts, with lawyers interrupting one another, making rude remarks, and judges allowing it.
A Zoom hearing with multiple lawyers and a judge who is unskilled at maintaining order (many of them) is a cacophony that reminded me of a trip to Manhattan I once took.
Between Zoom hearings and time limits, the quality of jurisprudence got to the point where I just didn’t want to do it anymore.
The virus of expedience was more than I could take.
I stopped litigating soon after COVID hit, limited my practice to estate planning, and retired last June altogether.
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The Doctors Are Not Immune
Right around the time I retired from law practice (6/1/25), I discovered that I had a recurrence of prostate cancer that had been in remission for nine years.
I also had serious lumbar issues, partially caused by age and partially by a Mack Truck that kissed the back bumper of my sedan too passionately on Central Expressway in December, 2022.
Eventually, I consulted several orthopedic surgeons.
I noticed that I rarely saw a real doctor.
It was more expedient for his PA to see me.[2]
Between my back problems and my prostate recurrence, I went from seeing a doctor once a year for my annual check-up to seeing one at least once a week.
I quickly learned that the expedience virus had infected the medical profession as it had the legal profession.
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I grew up with one iteration of Marcus Welby after another.
A nice white-haired older man would come in and chat with me a bit, run me through his protocol to check my blood, urine, EKG, chest x-rays, stethoscope treatment, blood pressure, and any evidence of an alien abduction since my last visit.
A “checkup” was relaxed and unrushed, usually taking about an hour, maybe a little less.
I began to notice that at some point, while I was sheltering in place, things changed.
If and when you saw a doctor, he no longer sat.
He stood and dominated the conversation, rushed me to the lab, and out the door.
One doctor I saw was so domineering and manic that, as I was leaving, I asked his nurse if he was taking Adderall.
Needless to say, I wasn’t invited back.
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I moved from local doctors to those practicing “big box medicine” (e.g., BS&W, UTSW).
I learned that their corporate bosses required them to see 30 patients a day and to limit patient time to 15 minutes.[3]
For me, that typically meant an hour of driving, searching for the right building, a parking space designed in the days when lots of people drove “compact cars” rather than F-150s, fifteen minutes with a doctor, and then the hunt for my car.
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It's All About the Money
One big box corporate clinic had a rule: “one body part per appointment,” obviously designed to meet the 30-patient-per-day quota.
That meant an MRI of my spine required two trips to the big box to review the results: one for my lumbar and one for my cervical.
That sent me over the top and to a doctor with a concierge practice.
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You Cannot Have Empathy Without Rapport
Doctors once valued rapport with the patient.[4]
Rapport improved their intuition and provided empathy for the patient.
Establishing and maintaining rapport in any situation takes time.
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“The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy.”
Elon Musk
Wrong!
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Legal, medical, whatever the situation, expedience comes at a cost.
Empathy and rapport have value.
[1] I experienced a variation of this in a jury trial in Dallas County when my expert witness went to the hospital on the eve of trial with stomach cancer. Motion for continuance – denied.
[2] Ironically, some people would rather see the PA than the doctor anyway.
[3] According to ChatGPT, many studies confirm that the average time a primary care physician spends with a patient is 15-20 minutes. During that time, patients experience more typing, more interruptions, and less eye contact than in the past. They also feel visits have become more hurried, less personal, and less attentive.
[4] They were also more collaborative and less autocratic. The autocratic model, of course, is more expedient.