In the 1997 James L. Brooks rom-com As Good As It Gets, Jack Nicholson plays Melvin Udall, a monstrous, misanthropic novelist with obsessive-compulsive disorder whose carefully articulated world is disrupted by Helen Hunt, playing a kindhearted server in one of the few restaurants in NYC that will tolerate Melvin.
Desperate for attention, he bursts into the waiting room of his psychiatrist’s office, which is crowded with other needy patients invisible to Melvin. Finally, he notices the others waiting. Scanning the room, he asks, “What if this is as good as it gets?” The patients’ collective gasp is the centerpiece of the film. That is a long-winded way of calling attention to a recent blogpost of the same name by Jordan Furlong, the legal market analyst. Furlong has been noodling about three fundamental issues: standards, quality and value. “The more I think about these three issues,” he writes on his terrific blog, Law21, “the more I’m coming to think that they’re fundamentally connected. That is to say, they’re all variations on the same basic question: Are legal services any good?” He analogizes to a time, not all that long ago, when it was a mark of professionalism for a surgeon’s gown to be caked in blood and filth. Sure, he says, it’s conceivable that legal services today are as good as it gets. Gasp! “But I wouldn’t bet on that.”
Published January 11, 2019.
