Arrogant Attorney Asshats

The BBQ Pit
1

I was going to go for a different title for the symmetry, but it wouldn’t have been accurate.

Here’s my core beef, (at least at this particular moment, since I don’t want to take the time to recite every beef) I actually know and understand the difference between information and advice. Do you? Or do you just pretend you don’t because it’s convenient?

If you don’t understand the difference, then it’s okay, because I’m smarter than you so you have nothing to offer me anyway.

If you DO understand the difference and you are just being paranoid, dismissive, whatever…fuck you. Really. FUCK YOU. Don’t hide behind a bullshit excuse about not being able to give advice when we both know I’m clearly and unequivocally NOT wanting your advice. I’m desperately hoping you will keep all your advice to yourself, PLEASE. I BEG YOU. DO NOT ADVISE ME. For lots of reasons, but the most important one is that I do not take advice from anyone about anything but especially about legal issues until I have the information I need to evaluate the advice I’m given. 95% of the advice I HAVE gotten from attorneys has either been incredibly bad, because the lawyer didn’t know what he or she was talking about, or just lazy.

What I WANT, that you are not giving me under the guise that it is advice, is information. And that really pisses me off. It pisses me off that you won’t give it to me, but you have the right to say no. What pisses me off a whole lot more than that is the insulting and irritating and infuriating lie that you “can’t” give me information because you insist on telling the lie that all information is advice. Fuck you.

So if you don’t want to give information, at least be honest about it. Or fuck off, you arrogant ass(es)

2

What information were you looking for? (caveat - there’s a 99% chance I won’t know the answer :p)

3

Please. You’ve already used up all your bitching about lawyers credit when you posted asking lawyers for advice^s^s^s^s information, and then got pissed when they all said you’re veering off onto a tanget to crazytown.

Yes, you got it right. Fuck us, because we don’t want to give information to a batshit insane pro se fuckwit who will, after she loses her case/appeal for the hopefully last time because she went off on some meaningless and irrelevant distinction, sue us for malpractice because she followed our “advice” (even though it was just information). How are “her majesty” the judge and the “beast” attorney doing?

The advice you have been given, repeatedly, is that you don’t know what the fuck you are doing, and that you should hire someone who fucking does. The fact that you consistently refuse to believe that there is anything these people might have learned in 3 years of law school and passing the bar exam that you can’t pick up in “I go to the law library all the time and read Winning a Lawsuit You Already Lost for Morons” just emphasizes the point that maybe you aren’t the best person to represent yourself.

Sure, post another big rant about how lawyers don’t want to expose themselves to liability from yet another person who, let’s face it, is basically calling them out and claiming she can do something better, even though she has not been trained. Post a rant about how lawyers are just out to screw you, because how hard can it be? Everyone knows you are in the right, so you should automatically win.

So guess what, I am going to be totally fucking honest right here. Fuck you if you want free “information” about the law. Fuck you if you want me to tell you how to proceed in your likely worthless appeal. Fuck you if it’s wrong because I (and most lawyers) don’t want to give away for free to some nutcase what cost me thousands of dollars and years of work and even more years of practice to attain. Fuck you if when we tell you that you don’t know what you are doing, you call us stupid and worthless. Fuck you if you can’t figure out how to use that goddamn library that you are so proud of being in all the time and so excited about that the people who work there (college kids who aren’t even law students) know you by name, most likely as “that crazy person who asks us for those old dusty volumes in the back that no one uses because they are worthless”.

Don’t fool yourself that because people inexplicably or politely say that they wish you luck, that they don’t think you are the arrogant asshat.

Basically, my response to your newest bullshit rant is this:

If you think you’re entitled to free legal help, but at the same time you are contemptuous and arrogant toward those very same fucking people you are asking for help from (because let’s not kid ourselves, “information” filtered through a lawyer is not substantially different than “advice” filtered through a lawyer), then I think you have a serious misunderstanding of how the world works, and of what your place is in it, that lawyers should just suck it up and work for you for free.

My even shorter response is this:

Fuck off and go to law school yourself, you goddamn whiny nutcase, or just shut the fuck up about how no one will help you for free, even though you’re so nice to them.

4

Also, fuck you for making me reread a post by The Second Stone and agree with him.

5

I got the giggles from reading the referenced thread.

I’m actually quite surprised that a party can appear before a court of appeal without representation, specifically to avoid issues like the present. Here, you can’t even appeal if you’re not represented, which makes sense, seeing as you can only appeal on a question of law, and a lay person would be seriously ill equipped to argue such a question, thus wasting the court of appeal’s precious time.
Also, if the “central issue” is law v equity… my gut feel is that either there is a technical issue far too complicated for a litigant in person, or the litigant in person is glomming onto a totally irrelevant bit of a textbook that s/he read.

On the bright side, if the central issue really is law v equity, at least it’s likely to turn on a question of law, which might actually be appealable!

… giggle

6

There is a difference between the lay understanding of the words, and the legal understanding of the words as they apply to a malpractice suit or ethics violation. I suspect you understand that difference about as well as you understand every other legal principle.

7

The O.P. has just given me an idea,I offer legal advice for money to people that I know and then go on the Dope ask legal dopers for advice on the cases,relay it to my “clients” and make a killing…

8

Well, when someone is as up-front as you’ve been about how they’re representing themselves, it becomes very difficult to distinguish information from advice. Everyone you’re pursuing for “just the facts” will be very aware of what you’re doing, and that you will be processing said facts through an incomplete knowledge and limited experience of the law. This in turn means that there is huge scope for misinterpretation of bald, simple statements. You might say that’s your problem, but I don’t think it’s that easy to insist people disavow responsibility for their words.

In my field, computing, someone might ask me, “hey, Dead Badger, I’m writing a high-performance maths program in Prolog; I need some information about Prolog’s operator semantics” (for the non-geek, this is like trying to build a bomb shelter with balsa wood). I can see right away that they’re going about it all wrong, and should use a completely different technology. Do I tell them that? That’s advice. Or do I give them the information they asked for, in the full knowledge that they’re going to end up with enormous problems because of advice I withheld? That’s a failure of responsibility, to my mind.

It’s easy for me; there’s no ethical problem with telling them they’re a wally and should use a different language. Not so easy for lawyers, especially when they’re being screamed at that they’re not being asked for advice.

9

ivn118, I agree with everything you had to say in your post, and bravo.

10

Stoid, I say this as a friend:

You have all the brains in the world . . . and none of the sense.

I’m not a lawyer, but you’re starting to remind me of Christopher McCandless. Do you remember reading about this guy? Honors grad from Emory University, who one day decides that this plus some outdoor experience somehow qualifies him to hike the Stampede Trail for three months without any equipment except for a rifle and a backpack that weighed less than my backpack when I go to grad school on my days off. His boss tried to dissuade him, the guys who picked him up hitchhiking tried to dissuade him, people with actual–you know–knowledge about the outdoors in general and the Stampede Trail in particular tried to dissuade him, but he was just tooooo smart for them, wasn’t he? He figured that smarts alone would get him through.

He wound up getting fucked, too. You will probably survive this, but there’s an obvious fact here that everyone but you seems to be getting.

YOU ARE A BABE IN THE WILD, AND YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING!!

It doesn’t matter how smart you are, how mature you are, or how right you are. The law isn’t something you pick up as a hobby to help you get ahead while learning something in the meantime. It’s a career, one requiring years of training and a fucktastically difficult test just to practice it. What you’re doing is like some outdoorsman thinking that just because he can paddle a canoe and shoot his hunting rifle straight that he’s somehow qualified to lead a Navy SEAL team into combat. It simply doesn’t work that way.

You might make some progress. You might be encouraged by someone’s praise about how well you’re doing, but you are not a lawyer, and you don’t know how lawyers do what they do, and you’re going to wind up getting hurt. Law isn’t a scam. It’s just a field you happen not to know anything about. A bunch of lawyers who have nothing to gain financially by ADVISING you to get a qualified lawyer have said as much. It’s time to face facts, Christopher.

Get a lawyer. Seriously, just . . . get a lawyer, OK?

11

Stoid, I went through a civil-law (medical negligence) case acting as my own counsel for most of the time until it actually got to Court. I found it incredibly difficult to get ‘information’ from any legal-types, but did find that the Clerks at the local courts were a fount of information and advice without charging by the minute nor worried about any major repurcussions.

I dunno what your system in the US is, but if you can, approach the desk-person at your courthouse and see what information they can give you.

12

I would post something supportive, but I need to go start a GQ thread and see if any of our resident neurosurgeons can tell me how to get this screwdriver out of my ear. Home brain surgery is hard!

(need answer fast)

13

Stop picking at it, dude!

Warning: I am not a neurosurgeon. I just say I am to get chicks.

14

Seriously now. It’s not rocket science.

15

I need *information *, please, about building a bomb shelter out of balsa wood. Can anyone help me?

16

Only if you’re using Prolog to calculate the necessary thickness of the roof. If you’re not using Prolog, you’re up a creek.

17

You can look up all the facts (information) you need at the law library.

If you ask for an interpretation of some fact you are asking for advice.

If you ask for which facts are more or less relevant to your case, you are asking for advice.

If you ask for facts relevant to your case that you haven’t found, you are asking for advice,

I am hard pressed to imagine anything a lawyer could tell you that ISN’T advice, usless you simply ask them to read some passage to you from case law that you have already found.

Please provide an example of a question you’ve asked a lawyer that does not involve them providing advice in the course of answering it.

18

As a structural engineer, I inform you to build it really, really deep and really, really thick, and make sure you duck and cover underneath a flame resistant cover when the bomb hits three feet from the where you’re lying, not that bomb shelters made of wood stand out or anything.

Warning: Linty Fresh is not a real structural engineer. He just says that when the chicks look at him funny and go “You’re not a neurosurgeon.” Then he says, “Yeah, you got me. I’m a structural engineer with a twelve-inch love catepillar.” In his heart of hearts, Linty Fresh knows this will work someday.

19

Just because you think it’s information and not advice, doesn’t mean that they agree with you. And they are not “lying” if they disagree with your assessment of what’s “information” and what’s “advice.” Even if they are lying, there’s no reason to assume it’s not garden-variety white-lying (“Gee, I’m sorry, I can’t help you”) as opposed to the less friendly truth (“You want to pick my brain but not pay me for it? Fuck off.”). Not everyone is strictly honest in every occasion, especially when honesty leads to social unpleasantness you’d just as soon dodge.

You want information? Go to the law library. Lawyers are not reference desks; they are practitioners. They advise, and they perform. If they are not willing to indulge your desire to access their expertise without paying for their services: Suck it up.

And if the sum-total of your rant is not that the lawyers do not have every right to withhold their knowledge from you, but merely that they should be ruder (“more honest”) in how they do it – it’s a weak-ass rant indeed.

20

Fortunately, Prolog will also be very handy when you’re up the creek, and discover a farmer, pig, wolf and goat who want to work out how to get to the other bank without the wolf eating the goat.

As often happens.