Arrogant Attorney Asshats

[Stoid]

@Linty_Fresh

A
What you just put up for us to view about the bunny and the pancake? The lawyer is right, and you are wrong. That’s advice. You’re asking for advice. Not in the sense that you’re asking about advice on whether you should break up with someone or not. This is a different type of advice, as has been pointed out to you by real lawyers about half a dozen times in this thread, and Dog knows how many times in your other thread!!!

Simply asserting that any sentence referring to the law, directed at a lawyer, that ends in a question mark “just is” a request for advice does not make it true, which is my point exactly.

If and when you can actually explain how my pancake/bunny question really is a request for advice, ( (by the special lawyers-only language that merely seems to be English but is actually some special other language you can only understand via law school, is my guess) the rest of your comments might have weight.

I make a distinction, because there is one, between my asking for advice and a lawyer being unwilling to speak on the law just in case his or her words are misconstrued as advice. Not the same thing at all. Again, any lawyer is free to say: “Because I don’t want to have my words misconstrued as advice, and I dont’ know whether you will or won’t, I am unwilling to discuss the law with you at all.” Bummer, but a perfectly valid and honest way to blow me off.

What’s really funny (or irritating, depending on my general level of patience) is how frequently the same lawyers who insist they cannot give advice of any kind and mischaracterize my questions as advice…give advice. They get a teaspoon of data (because they start talking almost immediately, rather than listening, assuming they know where I will end up when they don’t) and immediately starting saying things like: “Cases like that end up going this particular way, you should probably…”

[Linty_Fresh]

@Stoid

If and when you can actually explain how my pancake/bunny question really is a request for advice, ( (by the special lawyers-only language that merely seems to be English but is actually some special other language you can only understand via law school, is my guess) the rest of your comments might have weight.

I can’t explain how, because I don’t know about the law, because I didn’t go to law school. I can only look at what others who have gone have said about what you’re asking, because they know what I do not, because I didn’t go to law school.

See how this works?

[Stoid]

@Elysian

You are asking him how the law is going to work in your case. You want him to predict for you how your case is going to work. This is advice.

Nope. If he or she is terrified I will see it that way, it’s not on me. Because I speak and understand English.

“Has it ever happened/is it possible” is not “Tell me what will happen.” and it is not “tell me what I should do.” and it will never be either, no matter how many times or ways people try to assert that it is. I know exactly what I’m asking for, and it is not advice.

Again, you don’t trust that I am aware of the difference, don’t wanna risk being misconstrued, fine, that’s your right.

(Although even that fear is way overblown, I’d love to see the case where lawyer got punished for malpractice for having a single conversation with someone who then did something that went badly, blamed the lawyer, and managed to get anywhere with it. And if someone actually can show me such a case, my frustration with this situation would be lessened.)

[Enderw24]

@Stoid

Which would go easier and faster if I could get lawyers to stop arguing with me about the meaning of advice and either give me information or tell me they don’t want to, one or the other, doesn’t matter which. If I can be spared the argument I laid out above, I’ll get to the next lawyer that much faster.

So basically you’re the like the guy asking a girl out on a date and she says “I’m washing my hair,” and you say “well what about the next night?” and she says “I’m going to my grandmother’s house” and then you come on here and rant about why these girls aren’t just being honest with you and you’re a big guy and can take a bruise to the ego. Why do they have to LIEEEEE?

OK, well then, let me break it to you. These lawyers don’t want to date you.

[MsWhatsit]

I’m not sure I see what the huge hassle is, here.

Stoid: Tell me the answer to this question I have about bunnies or whatever.

Attorney: Sorry, no can do. That would be giving advice.

Stoid: OK, thanks anyway. [moves on to next lawyer]

Would this not be easier and quicker than trying fruitlessly to convince an attorney that what you want him to give you is not, in fact, advice? Has arguing with an attorney about how you really don’t want advice worked for you so far? If not, should this not be a clue to you that it is not going to work, and that when an attorney says, “That’s advice and I’m not going to give you advice,” he/she means it?

[Ogre]

Wait, so you’re asking him questions about precedence, and you don’t think that constitutes legal advice?

:dubious:

[Sarahfeena]

@Ogre

Wait, so you’re asking him questions about precedence, and you don’t think that constitutes legal advice?

:dubious:

Yes, I’m confused by that, too.

[Malacandra]

@Dead_Badger

Ah yes, all good fun (it’s even easier if you use the constraint logic solving features, which I suspect didn’t exist in the mid-80s). I actually think the bank problem’s a bit trickier in Prolog, to be honest; Einstein’s Riddle is pretty easy, because it’s really just the matching problem, which is a basic feature of Prolog, plus a couple of other constraints (which, as you note, you pretty much just have to write down). The bank problem involves some recursion and case checking, which always breaks some of our students’ brains.

(This sounds a bit one-uppish, actually; not meant to be, I just always find it interesting which problems the students have trouble with…)

No, I don’t take it as one-uppish - it’s seldom enough these days I get to talk about Prolog with anyone. As for recursion, Prolog will recurse its little socks off as I remember - the difficult part is to get it not to. For example, the following program to calculate Fibonacci numbers is beautifully concise, quite watertight (assuming inputs have been sanitised elsewhere)… and completely sucks donkey balls:

fibonacci(N) :- fib(N,M), say('Answer is ', M).
fib(1,M) :- M = 1.
fib(2,M) :- M = 1.
fib(N,M) :- fib(N - 1, M1), fib(N - 2, M2), M = M1 + M2.

(If my syntax is off, please remember I haven’t touched this language in twenty years…)

And of course some problems are even worse. F’rinstance, you could compute a Knight’s Tour by coding something like “Make 64 legal Knight’s moves. If at any time you are unable to make a legal Knight’s move, retract your last move and choose a different one”, which Prolog is brilliant at, but I bet it would take forfreakinever to find a complete Tour. But the farmer puzzle isn’t so bad. AIUI all you need to be able to do is code up what a legal position is and ensure that your current move doesn’t retract your previous move, and you’re golden. Otherwise, I agree, your farmer could end up ferrying the goose back and forth until the boat falls apart.

Talking of which, I heard an alternative version of this puzzle: Three jealous husbands and their wives must cross the river. The only boat can carry any two of them (but can be managed by one). No husband will allow his wife to be with another man if he himself is not there, even if the other man’s wife is also present. Worth setting to your students after they’ve solved the farmer puzzle.

[Elysian]

@Stoid

“Has it ever happened/is it possible” is not “Tell me what will happen.”

I knew I was bouncing my head off a brick wall :rolleyes:

“Have people put pancakes on bunnies before, in my situation?”
“Is it possible that they will put a pancake on my bunny’s head?”
“Will they put a pancake on my bunny’s head?”

Three questions that are asking a lawyer to predict your case, and tell you about precedence. This is advice. You’re not asking him for the definition of equitable servitudes; you’re asking him to extrapolate information about bunnies and apply it to your case about bunnies, and that’s advice.

[Fenris]

Remember all those threads in GD?

“I was wondering if anyone could tell me how to hack into my…um…someone’s boss’s e-mail account? Not that I would. I’m just curious”

or

“Hey QtM? If…someone…not me of course…had a painful rash in the crotchal area 3 weeks after seeing a Tijuana hooker and wanted to get black-market penicillin, where would they go? Hypothetically of course. I’m not looking for medical advice, I just have a general interest in purely abstract matters of this nature.”

or

“Hey, Mr Lawyer–I know that there are liability-type issues that could get you entangled in my mess if you give me advice so let me ask you about this other, purely hypothetical case.”

If it’s not related to your case, I’m not clear on why you need to know. If it is related, however tangentially, to your case, it’s advice.

Fenris, not a lawyer but friends with several.

[Stoid]

@Linty_Fresh

I can’t explain how, because I don’t know about the law, because I didn’t go to law school. I can only look at what others who have gone have said about what you’re asking, because they know what I do not, because I didn’t go to law school.

See how this works?

Yes, I see exactly how it works: you buy into what you’ve been told completely, which includes being convinced that you must not even try to understand, because you cannot possibly without four years of law school. You buy it so thoroughly that you are willing to argue that it must be true, because lawyers tell you that it’s true, even though you have no way of personally knowing one way or another if it is true, because you would never even try to find out, because you believe what you’ve been told, which is that you cannot possibly understand enough to figure out if it’s true that you can’t understand without going to law school unless you go to law school. (And that, folks, is why lawyers will never starve.)

You see how that works?

For your own sake, I hope you never have occasion to need a lawyer and find yourself unable to hire one, because you will be completely screwed and that will suck.

To the folks who compare the law to medicine or engineering, or whatever else: hooey.

I would definitely, because I am a curious person, seek out lots of information if I had a medical issue. I am always an informed patient. But I would never be my own doctor (even if it were possible) because it is obvious to me that I don’t understand enough and will never understand enough. Even if I tried to go to school to become a doctor I’d fail. It’s not something I understand sufficiently, and my inability to understand it in depth is apparent to me when I do get what information I can. I pretty quickly hit huge chunks of information that simply do not register in my non-science mind. Same thing goes for (most) programming. And many other heavy on the higher math and science stuff.

But the law is a whole different kettle of fish. When I started looking closer, I realized that it made perfect sense to me. In fact, I loved it. I can spend an entire day in a law library, following the leads from one case, idea, law to another, chasing down every branch into new territory, seeing the underlying reasoning of how this fits into that.

I thought about going into law 20 years ago, then didn’t for several reasons, but one was that I believed I would only find the “fun” parts interesting. What this process has taught me is that I find it all interesting, stuff I would never have dreamed I would find compelling utterly captivates me, and I do understand it. It makes sense to me in a way that is genuinely thrilling.

But I don’t have the luxury of time, so a few nudges in the right direction are all I’m looking for.

[Jodi]

@Stoid

Not his area.

Oh noes! Guess you’re SOL then, him being the only lawyer in the world and all.

[The_Second_Stone]

@ivn1188

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

A wise lawyer once told me that just because you can object doesn’t mean that you should. Likewise, just because you can use “fuck” as seven different parts of speech doesn’t mean that you should, as you did in your first post.

IIRC our difference is that you like and trust all lawyers, and I wait and find out if they are likeable and trustable first. That doesn’t mean we can’t be agreeable on other matters.

A different wise person once told me never to argue with the insane, as those watching won’t be able to tell the difference.
Stoid:

You’ve never put the file in front of anyone here. You can get no useful information/advice from a lawyer who has not reviewed the entire file carefully. The lawyer must be licensed in the jurisdiction you are in, experienced in the area of law you are engaged in (I gather it is limited liability partnerships which will mean most civil litigation lawyers) and familiar with the local judges at the trial court level if you are still there. If you are at the appellate level (and I gather you are) the local experience doesn’t matter.

Your hinting at what the problem might be is nowhere near enough. You must put the entire file in front of a trained lawyer that you trust in order to get information that might be useful in any way. The law is applied to the facts of each particular case. The message board is going to be utterly useless to getting information here. All you are going to do is get abuse here, and that will not be useful to you.

[Sauron]

@Stoid

But the law is a whole different kettle of fish. When I started looking closer, I realized that it made perfect sense to me.

I think this may be the heart of the problem, here. Every lawyer I know, and more than two-thirds of the lawyers I don’t know, say that the law *in toto *(Latin, meaning “contained inside a small dog”) doesn’t make sense. The law is contradictory, random, confusing and downright ridiculous at times. They all say “You’d have to be crazy to fully understand the law and all legal matters.”

Ergo, you’re legally insane.

The good news is, that probably qualifies you for some *pro bono *(Latin, meaning “favoring Sonny over Cher”) work.

[The_Second_Stone]

@Stoid

I do have one advisor, by far the best qualified and smartest of the lot, on a very small retainer, but I prefer to reserve that for the critical moments when I HAVE to have someone whom I trust as highly skilled to review what I’m doing or thinking of doing.

You need to find some more dough an talk to this lawyer more often, and not only at the most critical moments. Follow the information that this lawyer gives you.

[Bricker]

@Stoid

But the law is a whole different kettle of fish. When I started looking closer, I realized that it made perfect sense to me. In fact, I loved it. I can spend an entire day in a law library, following the leads from one case, idea, law to another, chasing down every branch into new territory, seeing the underlying reasoning of how this fits into that.

I thought about going into law 20 years ago, then didn’t for several reasons, but one was that I believed I would only find the “fun” parts interesting. What this process has taught me is that I find it all interesting, stuff I would never have dreamed I would find compelling utterly captivates me, and I do understand it. It makes sense to me in a way that is genuinely thrilling.

Who else, besides you, believes that you possess this understanding?

[Ferret_Herder]

@Ogre

Wait, so you’re asking him questions about precedence, and you don’t think that constitutes legal advice?

:dubious:

I’m thinking the definition of “advice” is definitely the hang-up. How about we replace it with “lawyering”?

Stoid: Blah blah blah blah blah, so can you give me any information on that?
Lawyer: I’m sorry, that’s actually a request for lawyering (and would require a contract/paperwork/me taking you on as a client/money to continue), not information.

@Stoid

To the folks who compare the law to medicine or engineering, or whatever else: hooey.

I would definitely, because I am a curious person, seek out lots of information if I had a medical issue. I am always an informed patient. But I would never be my own doctor (even if it were possible) because it is obvious to me that I don’t understand enough and will never understand enough. Even if I tried to go to school to become a doctor I’d fail. It’s not something I understand sufficiently, and my inability to understand it in depth is apparent to me when I do get what information I can. I pretty quickly hit huge chunks of information that simply do not register in my non-science mind. Same thing goes for (most) programming. And many other heavy on the higher math and science stuff.

But the law is a whole different kettle of fish. When I started looking closer, I realized that it made perfect sense to me. In fact, I loved it. I can spend an entire day in a law library, following the leads from one case, idea, law to another, chasing down every branch into new territory, seeing the underlying reasoning of how this fits into that.

Stoid? Hooey right back. I work in the medical field, doing research. I was pre-med in college. I deal with patients a lot in my job.

I am not a doctor or nurse.

And therefore I don’t freaking dare try a comparable level of effort in my own medical care. What you are doing is like me showing up at a gastroenterologist’s office and saying ‘hey, I’m having these digestive troubles and the last doctor screwed up (which may translate to “I didn’t like his answer”), can you give me some information on how one does a colonoscopy and what different things might mean should I see them? I’ve been doing a lot of reading at the medical library and just need some clarification.’ :smack:

[Jodi]

@Stoid

Yes, I see exactly how it works: you buy into what you’ve been told completely, which includes being convinced that you must not even try to understand, because you cannot possibly without four years of law school. You buy it so thoroughly that you are willing to argue that it must be true, because lawyers tell you that it’s true, even though you have no way of personally knowing one way or another if it is true, because you would never even try to find out, because you believe what you’ve been told, which is that you cannot possibly understand enough to figure out if it’s true that you can’t understand without going to law school unless you go to law school. (And that, folks, is why lawyers will never starve.)

For fuck’s sake, if it’s all so easy and such a big racket, no specialized training or knowledge required, then do it your own damn self and leave the lawyers alone. Except – could it be? – you actually CAN’T figure it out yourself, because despite your shining victories on your own, your clear genius, and the fact that every lawyer or judge you’ve ever run across is a liar, an idiot or both, you still don’t know enough to know what to do. So maybe some specialized training or knowledge actually IS required. And people possessing it might actually – gasp! – charge for it.

You can’t have it both ways, and it pisses me off no end that you continually try. Either you need a lawyer, or you can do it yourself. If you don’t need a lawyer, fucking do your own work and stop bitching about how the lawyers won’t HELLLP you. If you need a lawyer, then go PAY one to get his or her ADVICE. Just like every other non-indigent person does.

And whether or not something is precedent is advice, as others have already pointed out. It’s not “information,” because whether or not a case will continue to be binding in future is something that can only be predicted, not known. And whether or not a case exists on a particular esoteric point – that’s legal research. Why the hell would you expect any lawyer to do yours for you, for free? You’ve looked; you can’t find any precedent. Live with that, or PAY SOMEONE TO TAKE ANOTHER LOOK. Shit fire, maybe these lawyers know a case on point, and maybe they don’t. But why the hell would they simply tell you that for free? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Oh, surely not – they’re all liars and idiots, remember?

No lawyers owe you a “nudge.” No lawyer owes it to you to be as rude as you personally prefer when declining to give you a “nudge.” No lawyer owes you shit. What is simultaneously most aggravating and most blackly funny is how you keep on sniffing after lawyers here and apparently IRL, hoping against hope for free assistance, while simultaneously shitting all over virtually every one of them (us) and our profession.

[Enginerd]

@Stoid

But I don’t have the luxury of time, so a few nudges in the right direction are all I’m looking for.

Identifying “the right direction” for you requires specific knowledge and evaluation of your case, and thus constitutes advice.

[wonky]

“You’re all useless shits and I can do this myself but I need your help!”