A Peek at the Pros

The nation's "esoteric" law schools "fail to help the practicing lawyer," fumes E. Donald Shapiro. "They prattle about great principles, but who is helping the slob in Cedar Rapids?"

The answer has to be Shapiro, 34, the choleric boss of Michigan's thriving Institute of Continuing Legal Education on the state university campus at Ann Arbor. Last year Shapiro lured 2,500 U.S. lawyers through a blinding blizzard to Michigan's Annual Advocacy Institute. This year 3,500 lawyers showed up from 49 states, Canada and Mexico. For two days in Ann Arbor, they positively drooled as leading judges presided over mock personal-injury trials and master cross-examiners demolished hapless witnesses.

Promoter Shapiro, once a Philadelphia lawyer noted for proving a ship unseaworthy because one of its mates had malaria, got into the teaching business because he was apparently avid for audiences bigger than juries. He now tours 14 Michigan cities with 53 programs for practicing lawyers. Delighted to be called "dean," Shapiro is wont to order lawyer-aides to pick up his children at school, or require them to don white coats and serve cocktails. He first-names Michigan Supreme Court justices, tells everyone who will listen that "educators should get off their duffs," papers the country with lawyer-luring ads that make academic purists swallow their pipestems. For all that, Shapiro has made Michigan's I.C.L.E. one of the best of its kind in the U.S.

Careless Defendant. At this year's Advocacy Institute ($35), Shapiro's 3,500 students first boned up on two tomes of theory, plus detailed, fictitious depositions. After Yale Professor Fleming James lectured on "reasonable standard of care," they watched courtroom maestros examine "Thomas Covington III," an alert lawyer-actor who insisted that he had taken every precaution before burning grass on his property. A sudden wind gust just happened to whip up the flames that incinerated Neighbor Harvey Williams' $75,000 house, stables and horses.

For Plaintiff Williams, San Francisco's famed, ferocious Lawyer Marvin E. Lewis grilled Covington:

Q. Did you think of calling the Williamses? ,4. No.

Q. Did you think of getting a hose ready?

A. No.

Q. Did you think about the possibility of a change in the weather?

A. No.

"All right!" shouted Lewis, rushing to a blackboard and scrawling in huge letters: DID NOT THINK. The "jurors" roared.

Reckless Plaintiff. The country's top torts scholar, Professor William L. Prosser of California's Hastings College of Law, next lectured on "causation"-illustrated by the case of Plaintiff "Mark Johns," 12, who had climbed a builder's hoist, fallen 25 ft. and suffered serious injuries. Mark's testimony seemed clearly to show the builder's negligence in failing to warn or keep small boys away from his "attractive nuisance." In crossexamining, though, St. Louis Lawyer John C. Shepherd created another story: Mark played the violin, felt like "a sissy" and had climbed on a dare. New York City's Emile Zola Berman then slyly offered the boy a glass of water, sat below his eye level and amiably got Mark to admit that when he got to the top of the hoist he had shouted: "Look at me! I'm Superman!"

In the final mock trial, an injured motorist sued the city of "Brush Arbor" after one of its employees allegedly ran a stop sign and crunched the plaintiff's car. Joseph Kelner, president of the American Trial Lawyers Association, forced the employee to admit that he hated stop signs because they "sprout like mushrooms." Florida's A. J. Cone, defending the city, established not only that the accident occurred while the employee was on a three-hour lunch visit to his "sick" secretary, but also that the employee had previously showered the girl with nylons and roses. When Cone was finished, so was the employee.

To a man, the students took copious notes for future use in other courtrooms, far from Ann Arbor. The Shapiro show may not be designed to demonstrate the law's nobility, but as one hard-working Negro lawyer put it: "If you want to keep abreast of what the law is all about, you'd better come to this institute."

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