Street Talk

The National Retail Federation is optimistic about the coming holiday season, projecting a 5.7% increase in sales this year driven by an average per consumer spending increase of more than $20.

BIGresearch polled 8,234 consumers in early October for the NRF 2003 Holiday Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey. The survey found the average consumer plans to spend $671.89 this holiday season, up from $648.85.

On average, consumers plan to spend $518 on gifts, $34 for decorations, $26 on greeting cards, $79 on candy and food and $14 on flowers. The NRF expects sales to reach $217.4 billion in 2003.

Items on consumers' wish lists remain largely unchanged from last year with 52% hoping to receive books, CDs, DVDs, videos or video games in their stockings. Clothing and accessories came in second, landing on 51% of Santa's lists.

75% plan to shop at a discount retailer while just 53% plan to shop at a department store. Memphis' somewhat battered fulfillment business should also get a boost, with 36% of people expecting to do some shopping online.

If you succumb to one of those Chapter 13 TV commercials, chances are you'll be happiest before U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge David S. Kennedy, who scored a 9.5 for the highest rating among 72 local judges.

Bringing up the rear was Circuit Court judge D'Army Bailey, who had the lowest mean score of all Shelby County judges with a 5.9.

The scores are part of the Memphis Bar Association's Judicial Evaluation Survey for 2003, in which attorneys grade all federal, state and local judges in Shelby County. Since these are the same judges the lawyers will appear before, the survey is anonymous.

Conducted by Yacoubian Research of Memphis, judges were graded on a 1-10 scale on a variety of criteria ranging from punctuality to fairness to the application of sound legal reasoning and overall job performance.

The average mean score for all judges, regardless of the number of respondents, was 8.2. Out of Shelby County's 3,100 lawyers, 542 responded to the survey.

10 years ago Memphis attorney Greg Siskind bailed out of a cushy job as a corporate lawyer in Nashville to attempt something that even today still seems nonsensical: open a practice in the middle of the country where a lot of the potential clients are poor immigrants.

That derring-do landed Siskind on the November cover of ABA Journal as part of an article about attorneys with the brass it takes to be a risk taker. The magazine, published by the American Bar Association, is read by about 400,000 members. The cover was shot by Memphis photographer Steve Jones.

Siskind started his immigration practice in Nashville and then moved it to Memphis. He was looking at long-term trends and projected major waves of immigration. He also saw that to make it work, he'd have to give his Memphis practice a national reach.

That entailed another longshot, gambling that the Internet would catch on quickly, even though less than 5% of the nation had access at the time. Siskind staked out the domain www.visalaw.com. The site allows immigrants to glean plenty of information and updates, and also to open an account with the firm as they seek to enter or remain in the United States.

The site gets about 3 million hits a month, and Siskind Susser is now one of the nation's largest immigration law firms.

No Ode to the Bard would be complete without speculating about unpublished manuscripts in Shakespeare's tomb, in Stratford-upon-Avon. But Rhodes College will host an equally tantalizing lecture next week on the search for the lost works of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Christoph Wolff, a Harvard professor and the world's leading Bach expert, will be the guest speaker for the Rhodes Springfield Music lecture Nov. 6 at 8 p.m. Wolff will discuss his 20-year global quest to find music from the Berlin Sing-Akademie library that disappeared during World War II and was presumed lost.

The Berlin Sing-Akademie was founded in 1791 and dedicated to the preservation and performance of 18th century sacred choral music, and was a primary archive of Bach's work.

Wolff was one of the scholars who identified the archive in 1999 in a library in Kiev, Ukraine. It contained some of the world's most significant compositions from the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as unpublished manuscripts.

Bach scholars from around the world will be at Rhodes to learn more. The event is open to the public. Call 843-3775 for information.