Big Changes

I have accepted a position as a senior city attorney for the City and County of Denver, starting in about a month, where I will be defending the City in civil lawsuits filed against it. My new position could also conceivably involve defending lawsuits brought against the City by the U.S. Department of Justice. This position involves many legal issues that I have historically blogged about here, and it is a politically sensitive position. I also expect that it will take up more of my time than my current private practice of law.

There are lots of upsides to this change. It is interesting work, which is basically the same as what I did for 50% of my workload for three years at my first job in Colorado. As a W-2 employee (for the first time since Halloween in the year 2005), I won't be spending 40+ hours a year preparing my income tax returns. My pay will magically appear in my bank account twice a month in a perfectly predictable amount without even asking them to, instead of coming at unpredictable times with most of my income for a year sometimes coming in over a period of two or three weeks. I won't have to track every single tenth of an hour of my working day. I will have more colleagues to discuss cases with, and good administrative support with good systems. If I get seriously sick for a few days, there will be someone to cover for me. I will be able to focus on the practice of law instead of spending time and money on law firm management tasks like billing, getting clients to pay their bills, balancing my attorney trust account, processing credit card payments, paying monthly City of Denver occupational taxes, paying vendors, and marketing, that I don't particularly enjoy (and to be honest, am not particularly good at). I will have a large employer group health plan at a time when the new Republican tax bill will make the terms of my self-employed person insurance exchange health plan a lot less favorable. And, I will even have a defined benefit pension plan for the first time ever. My new office will also be almost as convenient to my home as my current one, since I live reasonably close to downtown Denver (i.e. in West Washington Park).

I'm also preparing for a final trial in my private practice of law on 9/11, and this preparation is about to get very intense. 

So, while I won't stop blogging here entirely, I will greatly reduce the volume of my posts at this blog for the indefinite future, and I will significantly narrow the scope of topics that I blog about here.

My posts at Wash Park Prophet's sister blog Dispatches from Turtle Island, of course, don't involve legal or political issues, so the scope of that blog won't change. But, that blog will also probably see a reduced volume of posts. Overall, I expect that the ratio of future posts at Dispatches from Turtle Island to the number of posts at this blog to rise considerably.

I've also discontinued my participation in Politics Stack Exchange, where I was a moderator, and in Law Stack Exchange, where I am the all time biggest contributor.

And, while I will continue to maintain my Facebook account, I have changed my privacy settings, which were previously all public, to make them more restrictive, and I will be greatly narrowing the scope and volume of my posts there as well.