Sonoma County attorney brings ‘big law’ to the North Bay

John Friedemannlearned early on that no one hands your future to you. To gain a trip to Disneyland, he sold avocados from his backyard at a stand in Orange where he grew up as the son of a banker.

Through the years, the lawyer has used his father’s skills that he later honed working at Security Pacific Bank in Los Angeles to send himself through college and consequently understand cases involving finance.

The North Bay Business Journal sat down with Friedemann to get a glimpse of the man of “big law,” who started his own practice in Sonoma County 22 years ago.

Is practicing law where you saw yourself headed?

After I won a classroom argument with a Russian literature professor, a classmate whispered to me: “If I am ever in trouble, I’m going to hire you to represent me.” I asked her what she meant by “represent,” and she responded, “As my lawyer.”

“I’m not going to be a lawyer,” I told her.

She replied, “Oh yes, you are.”

Who in your life has been your greatest inspiration to your career?

Weeks before I graduated from UCLA, an uncle pulled me aside at a family gathering and urged me to join him in the legal profession. He was persuasive enough to nudge me into what may have been my destiny.

Considering you've been practicing the law for 37 years, how has the profession changed and in what way in the last few years?

I cut my teeth as a lawyer in Los Angeles. Most lawyers would agree that the big-city practice of law is more cutthroat and less civil, probably because the legal community is so large that your bad conduct will not come back to haunt you.

But even in the 27 years I have spent practicing law in Northern California, it seems that there has been increasingly less civility. There is more lip service paid to civility, but I see a clear trend of lawyers taking more unreasonable positions and refusing to offer traditional courtesies.

Have new attorneys improved the practice of law? If so and if not, why?

I have met new lawyers who are passionate about the law and have received excellent training from more senior lawyers about how to be a lawyer.

But, how to be a lawyer is not taught in law school. During the great recession, many law school graduates responded to a challenging job market by going solo. These lawyers seem more likely than most to take unreasonable positions or follow naïve strategies. This is not to say that all solo practitioners are less competent. Far from it. In fact, I was a solo practitioner in the 1990s, but by then I had worked in-house and at two law firms, ultimately becoming a partner in big law. By the time I was a solo practitioner, I had been mentored by excellent lawyers for years.

If you had to pick one thing, what would you tell any new attorney starting out as a key to success in this line of work?

I don’t know any one thing to tell a new attorney. There are a thousand things, each important in little ways. I have read that the great basketball coach, John Wooden, began the first practice of every season by sitting his players down and teaching them the proper way to put on their shoes and socks.

The feet are the players’ foundation. They cannot play well in shoes that are too loose or too tight, or socks that give them blisters.

It is like that for new attorneys. You have to get the basics. How do you take notes? How do you interact with clients? How do you enter your time for invoicing purposes? How do you interact with staff? How do you deal with lawyer bullies? How do you maintain your morality? These are the types of things that new attorneys need to learn after law school.

What is the advantage to working on cases outside the North Bay region?

I enjoy doing complex transactional work and handling complex commercial litigation. While we have these cases locally, there are far more of them statewide. It is exciting to work on a case where the other side is demanding $2 billion. It is fun to create a novel lending structure involving a real estate-secured $70 million line of credit.

Regarding the COVID-19 age, are taking depositions via Zoom an adequate substitute?

A deposition via Zoom is better than no deposition at all, but it is, in my estimation, a poor substitute.

In person, there is an ability to hold the attention of a witness from across the table, to read the subtlest facial tics and the movement of the witness’ eyes. In person, there is an opportunity to compel the truth from a reluctant witness, which does not exist via Zoom. On the other hand, for an unimportant deposition focused on authentication of documents, a Zoom deposition is an excellent, cost-savings alternative.

Are the courts overwhelmed during the coronavirus crisis, and if so, what are the pitfalls to the backlog?

The courts had too many cases to handle before the coronavirus crisis. COVID-19 shut down the courts for many months and limit the courts’ activities even now. It is as though heavy rush hour traffic has turned into a massive pileup. Some cars can drive slowly around the wreckage, but most go nowhere.

It seems now that we have to wait for even the simplest judicial action to be taken for weeks or months on end. When clients ask: “How much longer?” We can’t do much more than shrug. There is no precedent for this.

Where do you see the battle between the unvaccinated and some hardline employers leading?

I am the son of a scientist, a professor of chemistry. The science of vaccination cannot rationally be denied.

When you hear a person claim the earth is flat, it seems that there are three possibilities. The “flat earther” may be so simpleminded as to be incapable of rational analysis. The flat-earther may be delusional and given over to wild conspiracies.

Or the flat-earther may be disingenuous and merely trolling people to get attention. The same can be said about anti-vaxxers, but with an additional element, they are also people who are indifferent to the lives and health of those around them. It seems inevitable that the numbers of the unvaccinated will dwindle as a result of death or quiet capitulation until that position is no more than a sad footnote on a terrible time in human history.

In your view, may a company require vaccination?

Absolutely yes. The Supreme Court spoke on the issue in 1905 saying something like, even if mandatory vaccination for the protection of the community against smallpox proves to be distressing, inconvenient, objectionable to some, the government must attend to the welfare and safety of the many, and not permit the interests of the many to be pushed aside by the wishes or convenience of the few.

This ruling seems like a precursor to the famous words of the character Spock: “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” So long as an employer provides accommodation for employees who cannot be vaccinated or who sincerely hold religious views preventing all vaccination, they can make vaccination a requirement to keep your job.