I’ve been practicing plaintiffs’ personal-injury law for the past three years. It ain’t a highly respected field of practice, it’s one of the few fields actually subject to a hostile political movement (“tort reform” – see here for the Straight Dope on that; but this ain’t GD nor the Pit). Anyway, it only makes things worse when people have misconceptions about it.
On this week’s ep of Franklin & Bash, the title pair are having coffee, hear a crash, and immediately run outside to give their card-and-spiel to one of the drivers. The joke is that both he and the other driver agree it was his fault, but F&B are thinking to blame it on a distracting TV-sign with a scantily-clad woman.
Now, regardless of whether you think that’s funny, you, and the writers and directors, should know: Lawyers can’t do that. They can’t approach a potential client on the scene of an accident. It’s professionally unethical. It’s against the rules. It’s called barratry (one of four legal meanings of the term, actually). A hard-up enough lawyer might do it, sure – the shamefaced way Paul Newman crashed a funeral in The Verdict, not blithely and publicly like F&B.
Look, we ain’t talkin’ about Bones being given the wrong technical name to say for a bone injury. This is an easy one. I’m just astonished how this ambulance-chasing meme has achieved such unchallenged UL status.
Actually, I’ve never seen it actually shown except in The Verdict. It’s a very rare occurred on TV, just like it’s a rare occurrence in real life.
But here’s a concept you seem to have missed: TV shows are not real. They do not portray real events or real people. What they do is try to tell an entertaining story, and, you see, sometimes that requires that you use what is known as “dramatic licence,” a concept that means that you portray things in the most dramatic way possible to make the story more entertaining and meaningful. This sort of thing has gone on since the Greeks and is an standard part of the dramatic repertoire. If you have problems with it, then maybe you should stick to documentaries.
I know all that, and I know that even arguable abuses of dramatic license are fair grounds for the trekkiest of nitpickery. At least that’s the consensus in CS.
Look, if a TV show perpetuated some invidious racial/ethnic stereotype by portraying it as an established fact, there would be . . . fuss. This isn’t anywhere near as bad, but it is the same kind of thing and you don’t need to be a lawyer to see how.
You’re talking about Franklin & Bash, the comedy about the frat-boy lawyer that plays-fast-and-loose-with-the-rules-but-always-comes-out-on-top?
Isn’t this basically like calling shenanigans on the depiction of the habits of nuclear power technicians shown on The Simpsons? “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission would never permit such sloppiness!”
I haven’t actually seen an episode, but the promos for Franklin & Bash make it out to be an off-the-wall "I Can’t Believe They’re Lawyers!" comedy series without so much of a whiff of proceduralist sensibility. Am I that off base?
Actually, I dunno, never watched it before. But from one ep I can tell it ain’t no sitcom – more a dramedy like L.A. Law than Night Court – and I would not give L.A. Law a pass on this one.
No, Larry Mudd is correct. Previous episodes included one where the lawyer made out with a woman while she was testifying in court. She was fired from a Maxim-type of magazine for being unattractive, and he wanted to convey to the jury that she was very good looking. I think another episode had a female defendant or plaintiff flash the courtroom as a distracting tactic.
OK, right now I’m watching the premier of this new show Suits where a kid who has no law degree (nor bachelor’s – got expelled from college for selling papers), but who did pass the New York Bar Exam (a friend bet him nobody who had not been to law school could pass it), gets hired by a silk-stocking NY law firm because a flamboyant partner took a liking to him and is willing to tell the uppers the kid graduated from Harvard Law (this firm only hires Harvard Law grads).
The premise is that the kid is a supergenius and picked it all up from independent study. Fine, I can buy that.
Thing is, the guy who hired him is worried only about getting caught lying about the Harvard thing.
No mention is made of the fact that it is illegal for this kid to practice law. He has no license. Passing the exam is one thing, and getting admitted to the Bar is another; there is always background investigation. He wouldn’t pass that part.
What’s more, I know of no state where you can sit for the Bar Exam without first earning a law degree. Which generally you cannot do without first earning a bachelor’s degree.
What’s more: The first case they give him is a “pro bono” one, a sexual-harassment case. No, sir, that’s a contingency-fee kinda case. Never heard of a legal aid clinic litigating one, though I could be wrong.
Since when does anyone involved with the law actually follow the law anymore, if they’re inconvenienced by it? They just bull ahead, do as they please, say they’re following the law if they’re called on it and feel like responding, and know there’ll be no consequences. It’s all over YouTube, so I’m not surprised it’s finally being acknowledged on network TV.
I learned of this recently when I passed by a bad fender bender and saw a guy getting out of his car and handing the woman whose car had been hit his card, then driving off. I mentioned it to a lawyer friend who said “I’m not saying there aren’t sharks in the profession, but I can almost guarantee you that if he was a lawyer he was just giving her his contact info as a witness to the accident because it would be too many hells of trouble on him if it was found that he was ambulance chasing. And besides, class action torts is what ambulance chasing used to be and pays a lot more.”
Is it at least true that in a criminal trial if a defense lawyer asks a series of questions that seems completely irrelevant and the prosecution objects that the judge will usually say “I’m going to give you some leeway, but you better show relevance” and that it’s alright so long as the person breaks down and confesses either to the crime or to perjury?
Even though TV and movies bend and break the rules of professions for the sake of a laugh or drama, it is still disappointing. I know why they do it, and I also know if I wrote TV I’d do it too, but it’s still a shame that they can’t work with the facts more often.
I watched the first ep of the new season of Drop Dead Diva, and though it has fantasy at its heart, and is basically a soppy girly show, the way they stretched the rules on Court procedure was really bad this time. It drew attention to itself, it was that absurd.
I just had to hijack this one. Mrs. Cad once had to fire her second-in-command (private security and not on a ship) who had a history of gross misconduct. One of the causes (along with all of the documentation) given on the termination paperwork was barratry. The lady from the unemployment office called Mrs. Cad and asked what barratry was and she explained that it is gross misconduct of a master or a master’s mate. The lady from UI said she had never heard of that but liked it.
Don’t know, I’ve never done criminal trials above the traffic-court level. But, one legal maxim I remember from my first semester of law school is, “You can never suck up to the judge too much.” You don’t do anything that might annoy them if you can avoid it. I wouldn’t try it, and if I did I would be sure to show relevance immediately. Not even a jury trial is like a TV show, where you want to foreshadow and hint for dramatic effect; just get it all out there. In fact, you want the jury to hear your message as early and often as possible.
Another cinematic example is in The Rainmaker, where Danny DeVito’s shifty paralegal aggressively ambulance chases in a hospital. Though to be fair it is shown as being highly unethical.