Fix this, Tony, quickly -- before you lose the clubhouse -- and what should be a very special season, too

Photo credit: Jordan Johnson - USA TODAY Sports

There's a lot of ground to cover this morning, but we have to start with baseball. Because the Sox game starts at noon today and we need to fix this ASAP.

It all started two nights ago, when Yermín Mercedes, the hero of a feel-good Disney movie which will surely go into production soon, turned a 15-4 rout of the Minnesota Twins into a 16-4 rout by clouting a home run in the top of the 9th inning. He hit it off a Twins utility man, Willans Astudillo, on the mound only because the Twins did not want to further tax their already beleaguered bullpen.

Astudillo's pitches were so slow that the official speed gun could not record all of them. The eephus pitch that Mercedes demolished clocked in at a stately Sunday drive pace of 47.1 mph.

It is an article of faith among baseball afficianados (and physicists too, for that matter) that the harder a ball is thrown, the further it can be hit. A softly thrown lob shouldn't get hit very far or very fast. But Mercedes hit the ball 429 feet, to the deepest part of Target Field. According to the official MLB statistics, the ball reached an exit velocity of 109.3 mph. By comparison, Nick Madrigal's first career homer, earlier that evening, achieved an exit velocity of 99.9 mph -- off a 90.6 mph J.A. Happ fastball. Danny Mendick's subsequent grandslam, hit off an 85 mph slider from Derek Law, had an exit velocity of 102.6 mph.

Mercedes' blow was immediately controversial. White Sox announcers Jason Benetti and Steve Stone chuckled that Mercedes would probably lose half his salary in "kangaroo court" for "swinging 3-0 on Astudillo." The Minnesota announcers were not chuckling; they were incensed.

So too -- strangely -- was White Sox Manager Tony La Russa.

OK, I get it: Mercedes swung despite being given a 'take' sign. And maybe, listening to La Russa, it wasn't just a sign, it was a shout, because he could see the killer gleam in Mercedes' eye. Something like that, anyway.

I thought -- I hoped -- that maybe La Russa was talking about "consequences" for Mercedes in an effort to spread a healing balm on troubled waters, forestalling any possible Minnesota retaliation against the most suprising star of this young season.

But, then, last night, retaliation came: Twins reliever Tyler Duffey threw behind Mercedes in the 7th inning, or threw at Mercedes' behind and missed. Either way, he was promptly ejected, as he should have been.

And, after the game, which the Sox ultimately lost, and looked bad in so doing, Hall of Fame Manager Tony La Russa said he did not have a problem with how the Twins handled the retaliation. Maybe, I'm guessing, because they did not throw at Mercedes' head.

Now I'm really worried about retaliation.

Not about the Sox throwing at a Twins player today. Or further nonsense from the Twins. I'm worried that the Sox clubhouse will retaliate against La Russa. I'm worried that they will start treating him like a crabby old man who tells the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn. If they haven't already done so, they will begin to ignore, and maybe even defy him. I'm worried that he will escalate from there. And what could and should be a glorious White Sox season may go swirling down the drain.

Admittedly, I am a lifelong Chicago sports fan. As such, I am always worried about everything. But this, it seems to me, is potentially very serious.

Now, if you've come with me this far, you may say, Jack, you're out of your lane again. There are no judges in this story. Not even any lawyers.

But, friends, Mr. La Russa is (was, anyway) a lawyer. When he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2014, I wrote about how Phil Zukowsky and I covered the story of La Russa's passing the Florida bar exam for Loyola Law School's Blackacre back in 1979. La Russa was the "boy wonder" manager of the White Sox then. I was younger, too.

So, speaking lawyer-to-lawyer here, Tony, let me say you have to fix this. Fix this now. Start a peace circle. Sing Kumbaya. Hug it out. I offer my services as mediator, if it would help. Howard Ankin has probably offered his services, too. Actually, the line of willing mediators would probably go around Guaranteed Rate Field more than once.

Whatever you do, do something soon. Otherwise, you will not only wind up as the 'heavy' in Yermín Mercedes' Disney movie, you'll jeopardize this magical season.

Access to justice must involve access to lawyers

Equal access to justice is on the minds of so many in the legal profession these days. It was the theme of the recent Illinois Justice Foundation Spring Reception; a page on the Legal Assistance Foundation website proclaims, "Equal Justice Starts Here."

We are all agreed on the destination; we are, however, uncertain how to get there. The Illinois Supreme Court has established a Commission on Access to Justice to help us chart the way.

Not so long ago, the vision was much clearer: Lawyers would lead the way to equal justice. We are just past the 50th anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963), when the U.S. Supreme Court mandated that states must provide indigent defendants in criminal cases with lawyers at state expense. Equal access to justice was equivalent to equal access to lawyers.

Today, though, lawyers are seen as more a problem than a solution. It may not be polite to say so directly, but lawyers are considered too darned expensive. It's not just the indigent who can not afford lawyers; quality legal representation seems beyond the reach of the not-so-poor, even the middle class. Small businesses increasingly skimp on legal representation. Some of them may not suffer for it. But only some.

Lawyers are increasingly urged to provide pro-bono representation. Illinois lawyers are required to report how many hours they donate each year; New York lawyers are now required to donate 50 hours of pro-bono time in order to keep their licenses. This approach might provide an effective stopgap if there were a critical shortage of lawyers, while law schools churned out new recruits.

But the unavailability of legal representation for so many is not due to any shortage of lawyers; on the contrary, newly minted lawyers are flipping burgers and folding pants. Law schools are being sued (so far without much success) for providing inflated statistics about employment prospects. Meanwhile, older lawyers are getting jettisoned from firms; many are abandoning the profession.

Some blame the disconnect between persons in need of legal services and legal service providers who can not find work on law schools, others on outmoded business methods generally (and the hourly fee in particular).

These surely play a role, but I believe there's a third, greater culprit: Discovery.

Discovery is the wedge that is dividing BIG LAW from the rest of us (call us little law if you like).

John Flynn Rooney reported in Friday's Chicago Daily Law Bulletin that McDermott, Will & Emery LLP

has expanded its discovery center operations to house up to 125 project attorneys working out of three locations.

That includes 90 in Chicago, up from 60; a new document review facility for up to 25 lawyers in Menlo Park, Calif.; and space for 10 lawyers at a Washington, D.C., facility.

The discovery center attorneys review and store electronic information that is used before and during litigation. The firm can have up to 175 lawyers reviewing documents simultaneously.

The staff attorneys are permanent firm employees who are not on a partnership track and are paid an annual salary, [firm co-chairman Jeffrey E.] Stone said.

According to the Law Bulletin article, a team of 20 technology professionals backs up the McDermott attorneys, and the firm has invested in new document-reviewing technologies, particularly in its Silicon Valley location.

Stories like this tell me that it is time for those of us in little law to recognize that our colleagues in BIG LAW are evolving into a different profession. We should wish them well, but let them go their own way; we must no longer ape them.

And, make no mistake, we in little law have for too long tried to imitate our BIG LAW brothers and sisters.

I remember, as a baby lawyer a generation ago, how excited my elders were when new word processing technology permitted us to propound form interrogatories, just like the big firms. The big firms have aggressively pursued full discovery for decades. Once they could, smaller firms followed suit: Discovery has gone from an option to a necessity in the course of my career. I tried a case 18 years ago in which next to no discovery had been taken. The insurer pulled the file from the first defense firm it had retained (even back then there were mutterings that failing to pursue complete discovery was near-malpractice at least) and my initial task was to frantically beg and plead the court to open up discovery. I tried groveling, even, but it was no use. I was forced out to trial.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the world did not end: The weekend before the trial I went out to inspect the locus in quo with my 10-year old son. We took some pictures. I came up with a strategy and it actually worked (I got a defense verdict).

I don't think this sort of thing happens very often these days: Motion Judges in the Law Division today conduct case management conferences every 30 to 60 days, or even more frequently, on occasion, when an attorney fails to complete discovery tasks as expected. Discovery is done or it is waived -- with a written order documenting the choice. If something bad happens down the road, no one wants to have a forfeiture order proving that he or she didn't do all that was possible.

All this discovery costs money. Insurance companies may complain about the expenses, but it's the uninsured litigants who crumble under the costs.

Those of us left behind in little law are going to have to find some way to help clients resolve disputes without automatically incurring the expenses of discovery. Let BIG LAW build 'discovery centers.' We should work on early dispute resolutions, using mediation or any other tools we can develop. Realistically, if we hope to provide equal justice for all, realistic access to lawyers in a streamlined, cost-effective litigation process will have to be part of the overall solution.

Science explains the benefits of aging generally, and perhaps the benefit of aging for mediation in particular

"At twenty years of age the will reigns;

at thirty the wit; at forty the judgement."

-- Benjamin Franklin

At one point, all human cultures accepted a correlation between age and wisdom. In Republican Rome, for example, the first to speak in any Senate debate was the princeps senatus, the most senior senator, drawn from the ranks of the patrician consulares; only after he spoke could the rest of the consulares, that is, those who had held been elected consul (and no one could be elected counsel before 'his own year' -- 42 for plebeians, 40 for patricians) provide their opinions.

Then, in America, came the Baby Boomers -- and they proclaimed that no one over 30 could be trusted. That was, of course, before the Baby Boomers began turning 30. Now the Boomer generation orbits somewhere around 60 -- and, not surprisingly, science has been deputized to discover why gray hair should now be considered a good thing.

An article by Helen Fields on Smithsonian.com, "What is So Good About Growing Old," says that researchers are discovering that there are real advantages to aging.

"In a University of Illinois study," for example, Fields writes, "older air traffic controllers excelled at their cognitively taxing jobs, despite some losses in short-term memory and visual spatial processing. How so? They were expert at navigating, juggling multiple aircraft simultaneously and avoiding collisions."

As we age, apparently, we become better at conflict resolution as well:

For a 2010 study, researchers at the University of Michigan presented “Dear Abby” letters to 200 people and asked what advice they would give. Subjects in their 60s were better than younger ones at imagining different points of view, thinking of multiple resolutions and suggesting compromises.

The current research on aging provides a scientific explanation for the increasing importance of mediation in resolving civil disputes.

The trial of a lawsuit is a win or lose, 1 or 0, hit or miss proposition. Mediation, however, under the direction of one sufficiently trained and experienced, can provide the compromises or "multiple resolutions" that can send all parties to a dispute home satisfied (if not exactly happy).

Judicial service is not an essential prerequisite of the successful mediator. Judicial service is merely one kind of experience that a good mediator can draw upon in helping to facilitate the resolution of civil disputes. In a lot of cases, judicial service may be very relevant experience on which to draw and, thus, many ex-judges have become quite successful mediators. But it is the wealth and variety of experience, judicial or otherwise, that the mediator brings to the process that enhances the prospects for success: It is the mediator's age, and the wisdom that experience has provided, that is important, not whether there is an old robe hanging in the mediator's closet.