artma: Heart and Art to Beat Cancer in Kids

Something from nothing I get. I see it regularly in my work as a business lawyer and in my efforts in the community. Turning your tragedy into someone else’s hope is another story altogether, especially when the nightmare involves your child.

Morgan Adams was five-years old when she was diagnosed with a glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor. The best, most aggressive, treatments The Children’s Hospital of Denver could offer were brought to bear on Morgan’s disease, but they were not enough. Eleven courageous months later she died peacefully at home.

Every year, about 12,400 children and teens under the age of 20 are diagnosed with cancer - that is one in every 330 children. The average age of diagnosis is 5.

Morgan’s parents, Joan and Steven, were ordinary folk, an accountant and a photographer, doing what ordinary folks do--raising children, paying the mortgage, helping at school—before Morgan became ill. After she was taken from them, they became extraordinary. They knew that too many children were dying from pediatric cancer; they knew that the survivors often suffered devastating side-effects from their treatment; they knew that little attention and few dollars were dedicated to changing the situation.

Cancer remains the number one disease killer of children; more than genetic anomalies, cystic fibrosis, and AIDS combined.

They knew that they had to do something, and that is how in 2001, artma was born.

artma is a unique biennial art auction featuring over 200 pieces of art which are donated by local, regional and national artists. This funky, offbeat event brings fresh, new art out to play and is an evening that is highly-anticipated and much loved by everyone who attends. The art is outstanding, the crowd is fun and the night is dedicated to raising money for children fighting cancer and to fund a cure.

The passion and success of that first artma led to more events, including a summertime celebration of rare autos and airplanes—Concours d’Elegance, and formation of the Morgan Adams Foundation. Within 7 years of deciding to continue Morgan’s fight on behalf of other kids, Joan and Steven reached their first million dollar moment in funding pediatric cancer research. It’s been my honor to have been part of that first million.

This year, the employees of my law firm, Minor & Brown, decided that giving money was not enough; they wanted to join in with their hearts and have some fun, too. I’m very proud to say that over half of our firm volunteered to help at artma 2010. The event is February 6, but we’ve already started having fun and being humbled.

Kids being treated for cancer in the Cancer Center in the new Children’s Hospital have made art that will be sold at artma along side of the work of professional artists. Minor & Brown employees had the honor of assisting them in that process.

Feathers, sequins, googly eyes and hot glue guns--very hot glue guns—aren’t typical lawyer tools, but I think our helping these “clients”  is some of our best work ever.

Come to artma to see it and experience for yourself how much joy can be had in fighting cancer in kids.

artma

February 6, 2010; 6– 10 PM

Denver Studio Complex

241 South Cherokee St.

Denver, Colorado
Tickets $50 per person in advance, $65 at the door

Hear from some of the families of the Morgan Adams Foundation why your support matters.



Update, February 5, 2010: Minor & Brown has been busy setting up artma this week. The firm is becoming even more passionate about our connection with this cause. A wonderful post from the mother of a child who was Morgan's kindergarten classmate appeared today and reduced me to tears. I am looking forward to a wonderful and successful event tomorrow night.

Thank you to artma contributing photographer Gifford Ewing for his photos of M&B at The Children's Hospital.

Willy Wonka and the Law Degree Factory

The melt-down of Big Law and the implications for young people holding expensive law degrees are the subject of No Longer Their Golden Ticket by Alex Williams of the New York Times:

Lawyers who entered the field as recently as a few years ago could reasonably expect a life of comfort, security and social esteem. Many are now faced with a different landscape. Firms shed more than 4,600 lawyers last year, according to a blog that tracks the legal industry, Law Shucks. Bonuses for those who survive are shriveling, and an increasing number of firms now compensate associates based on grades for performance — shades of law school — rather than automatically advancing them on the salary scale.

Because I’m a big fan of the 1971 movie based on Roald Dahl’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I’ll continue the Golden Ticket metaphor. Those twenty-somethings lamenting the demise of $160,000 starting salaries and complaining about pay-for-performance are our equivalent of greedy Augustus Gloop and bratty Veruca Salt.

But the terrible children in Wonka’s factory weren’t entirely to blame, were they? The attitudes of the parents fostered the excesses of the children. Six-figure salaries for first-year lawyers who don’t know a Schonzwanger from a Vermicious Knid -- what were those Big Law partners thinking? (Which more and more of their clients have been asking.)

Law professors, with their Socratic riddles and cryptic comments, are our Oompah Loompas (which is a hell of a lot better than “dead fetuses in the womb of Justice” as trial lawyer Gerry Spence once called them when he spoke at my law school.).

Oompah Loompa, Doompa-dee-do, I’ve got a perfect puzzle for you: In 2010, how is it that record numbers are taking the LSAT and applying to law school while at the very same time the American Bar Association is lobbying Washington to provide student loan relief to recent law graduates who couldn’t get a job if they were dipped in chocolate?

The Law Degree Factory, our nation’s law schools, has a huge vested interest in the allure of the Golden Ticket, but the Factory is silent and unchanging, just as it looked to Charlie from behind its gates. Law schools need to be open with their students about the cost and reward of a legal education. Certainly, the Law Degree Factory, like other factories, needs to modernize and streamline factory processes in response to the changing need for, and value of, their product.

Law school was a life-changing experience for me. I wouldn’t discourage anyone who is passionate and realistic about being a lawyer from attending. Think hard about why you want to go to law school; if the best answer is to get rich, then think again. Law seems to be turning back toward its roots as a profession after a try at being a high-profit business, and that’s a good thing.

As long as there is business in America, there will be a need for business lawyers who are willing to do good work for reasonable compensation. Being a lawyer to human-owned businesses is a rewarding career for me. My income would be scoffed at in Big Law, but it’s been good for me and my family. Plus, I get to work with some of the most interesting and necessary people in our country: people who build businesses and create jobs.

But until the Law Degree Factory changes, before you walk through its gates, turn your best analytical thinking to an estimate of the debt you will incur and the time it will take you to repay that debt in an evolving market place for legal services. If law school still seems logical, then allow yourself to be illogical for a moment. Start law school, like me and many before you, with the starry-eyed dream of changing the world; that’s the real Golden Ticket.

If you want to view paradise
Simply look around and view it
Anything you want to, do it
Want to change the world, there's nothing to it

The Content of Our Character: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birthday

More than any of the other legal holidays, this one challenges us. First, we were challenged to establish the holiday. Now, holiday in place, we return to a more fundamental challenge: Are we who we say we are? The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday is a national mirror that dares us to recognize our failings and still strive to live up to our ideals.

Public Domain: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division,

U.S. News & World Report Magazine Collection, LC-DIG-ppmsc-01269

The third Monday in January is the federal holiday honoring the life and achievements of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The tumultuous story of its establishment begins only four days after Dr. King’s assassination on April 4, 1968 and continues for 15 years at the federal level, even longer in some states, to culminate on November 2, 1983 with the adoption of a new legal holiday beginning in 1986. In between, we see America in its full humanity, struggling with its failings, but ultimately transcendent.

Fortunately for a post on “legal” holidays, Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech begins with very legalistic metaphors: the ideals of our Constitution and Declaration of Independence are a promissory note issued to the people of our country, yet payments on that note to people of color are being returned for insufficient funds. Dr. King, however, refuses to believe the bank of justice is bankrupt, and without asking for or accepting excuses, demands an appropriate cure; he calls on our nation to “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’”

We have made progress toward Dr. King’s dream; the first non-white-male President of the United States is one clear indication. I see another indicator in my family. As a high school freshman, I was bused under court order to integrate a traditionally-black inner-city school in Virginia to overcome decades of Plessy v. Ferguson’s separate-but-equal failings. Today, my daughter is a freshman in an inner-city, racially-diverse high school in Denver by choice. Yet, lingering achievement gaps among racial and economic groups in her school and Colorado schools generally remind us that we have more work to do.

Today, Denver holds a “Marade,” one of the largest King Day celebrations in the country. A Marade, a term coined by Wilma Webb, former State Representative, former First Lady of Denver, and founder of the King Holiday in Colorado, is both march and parade, both demonstration and celebration, her way of reminding us that in civil rights, human rights, no matter our accomplishments, ongoing attention is required.

Striving is central to the content of our American character. I am reminded of the remarks of one of Dr. King’s predecessors in the civil rights movement concerning an even earlier figure in America’s struggles to live out its creed. From W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the NAACP, writing about President Abraham Lincoln: “I love him not because he was perfect, but because he was not and yet triumphed.”

Joint Tenancy: Medical Marijuana Leases

Real estate is one of the law’s most confusing areas,* but add in the buzz over medical marijuana and what’s a landlord to do when considering leasing to a marijuana dispensary? Talk to your lawyer for starters.

The possession and use of medical marijuana is legal in Colorado, but state and local officials are scrambling to fill-in huge gaps in the authorizing law, including, for purposes of this post, where that medical marijuana can be grown, distributed and used. Add the simple fact that marijuana is still an illegal drug under federal law, and a property owner will have many more questions about potential legal liability for leasing to a dispensary than there are currently answers.

To begin understanding some of the questions, even as the law evolves, consider two pretty basic pieces of paper: your mortgage and your insurance policy. In each, there may be implicit and even explicit requirements that a lease to dispensary could violate, especially as the regulatory structure develops. Thus, potentially, the lease could default your loan or cause your insurance to be cancelled or limited, so be sure to review them first. Your other tenants and neighbors may have their own legal concerns with your new tenant, so best be prepared for that, too.

Even without the legal issues, consider the other practical matters that you should examine before every lease, such as creditworthiness and sustainability of the tenant. The Denver Post reports that Denver has issued more sales tax licenses for marijuana dispensaries than for “liquor stores or Starbucks Coffee.” While that fact might please a Wild West yearning in some, it hardly makes for good business. Certainly many of those dispensaries will be eliminated by the market, while others will be regulated out of existence.

Your goal as a landlord is make sure your tenant's problems don’t become your problems. Since these are the goals of owners of commercial real estate generally, the due diligence procedures and well-drafted lease you would use for any tenant are great starting points for a marijuana dispensary tenant, but until the law, and the market, are settled, get your lawyer involved, too.

*Joint tenancy, to clear any confusion my attempt at humor may create, has nothing to do with marijuana leases and everything to do with estate planning and probate. Joint tenancy is a way for two or more people (often spouses) to take title to property so that title passes directly, outside of a will, on the death of a joint owner.

New Year’s Day: a Legal Dud With Resolutions for Change

There are ten federal holidays in the U.S. and this one is the dud. New Year’s Day has no story or compelling national interest behind its status as a legal holiday. New Year’s Day, like the Christmas federal holiday, recognizes the “cultural” significance of the day, but, unlike Christmas, it lacks constitutional tension for interest. There is no separation of football and State, despite its religious fervor. The practice of making, but not keeping, resolutions may be punishing, but it is not cruel and unusual. Prohibition was repealed in 1933.

The need to celebrate a new trip around the sun is a compelling, ancient human tradition, with the only disagreements being which calendar and where a circle begins. My tradition of blogging our legal holidays, for one year at least, is no less compelling to me. So, in the spirit of the culture honored by the legal holiday, I am proposing two resolutions, one for each of my main audiences: human-owned businesses and folks who care about Colorado; only one resolution per group because I’m hoping for some progress on both fronts.

For anyone who owns a business, the internet overflows with suggestions for improving it, but in my law practice there is one idea that resonates with virtually all our clients. In 2010, resolve to make yourself less important to your business. “Entrepreneurs” who brag about how hard they work, how little vacation they take, and how they carry the weight of the business on their backs have created nothing more than high-paying jobs; they certainly aren’t building businesses.

Not only are these people risking their health, marriages, families, etc., they are missing the opportunity to create more personal wealth by building a sustainable business with the potential to spin-off more income to them while they own it, and much, much more value in purchase price when it is eventually sold or passed on to new owners.

Resolving to be less important to your business requires you to develop key people and systems to do the company’s critical work. Your development work could be challenging and frustrating, but the pay-off, a business doesn’t rise or fall, live or die with you, is huge, huge to you, your family, your employees, and, I think, your state.

For Colorado, there are many things we to do better in 2010. I’m still very concerned about our state’s budgeting issues and the report of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation on our declining competitiveness, but there too many moving parts and too many chances to disagree to make for a good resolution that could garner broad support.

There is one opportunity for improvement, however, that demands our collective attention, even if we differ on its causes or solutions. Childhood poverty in Colorado increased by at least 72% from 2000 to 2008, the worst rate change, by a large margin, in the nation. The Denver Post’s recent series on childhood poverty contains anecdotes and a map that vividly illustrates this fact. The reports of the Colorado Children’s Campaign, which dig deeper into the data of childhood poverty, put the figure at an even more sobering 85% increase, and that number predates the worst of the current economic crisis.

Regardless of political stripe, I think everyone can find at least one long-term consequences of that trend, whether in human suffering, crime, health care, work force development, or impact on our state budget, that is unacceptable. So, can we resolve, as a state, to not just diminish the rate at which poverty increases, but to actually turn the rate around and start bringing our children out of poverty?

The Post article connects concerned readers to a partial listing of agencies that aid children in poverty, but our resolution is bigger. To treat the causes of poverty and not merely alleviate the symptoms, however, we need to do more than provide aid, we need jobs and education, but jobs must come first. More and better paying jobs will provide both tax base to tackle education and paths out of poverty.

Colorado is a small business state. The jobs needed to turn around our rate of childhood poverty will come, for the most part, from small businesses. More and more successful small businesses are therefore part of the answer and where my two resolutions merge. If our government and business development leadership can do more to grow small business in 2010, then New Year’s won’t have been such a dud after all.