** Investigation into the Aberrant Mindset of American Attorneys using recent quotes from resident Straight Dope lawyers**
*** Lawyer crassitude*** "…When potential clients try to give me this sort of BS, I usually tell them “you’re in this building right now for the exact same reason I am – to GET MONEY.”* - lucwarm
Notice how in this responce to what she declares is BS, Lawyer lucwarm berates her potential clients by accusing them of blatant greed as coarse as her own.
Lawyer pomposity “What a lawyer does can have serious, lifelong consequences to his client; that being the case, it makes sense to be sure practitioners are reasonably competent. It’s the same rationale used for licensing doctors. Or do you think any John Doe off the street should be able to hawk his skills with a scalpel?”* - Dewey
(Listen carefully to this slick grouping of self enhancing ideas.)
Would you let an untrained man do surgery on you?
What we lawyers do is serious with lifelong consequences.
What we and doctors do is more important than what John Doe does.
We are Professionals.
Lawyer elitism and charity* " For 200 bucks, I researched the situation and wrote the former employer a letter explaining exactly why what he was doing was illegal. He agreed to return the tools."* - lucwarm
200 bucks = two days works for client
20 minutes of research ( a phone call) and writing letters (one letter) = 20 bucks of important lawyer’s time.
Net: 180 bucks profit for 20 minutes of charity work.
Sweet Charity.
Mmm? One wonders: why did not the cops just confiscate the 20,000 bucks of tools and arrest the former employer for theft?
*** Lawyer humor** “Ignore him, Dewey. He’s ain’t got no money.” - Minty Green
Smug, in-house joke, as an off-handed way of dismissing this question…
** Why is it that in 21st Century America justice is dispensed relative to the amount of money the petitioner has to invest in legal representation?**
Now here’s the question: Do you have a job? Would you continue to go to work if they stopped paying you? Do you consider yourself to be blatantly greedy?
For the record, it was about 2 -3 hours of work.
Since you have changed the subject, can I take it that you now concede that “Many lawyers help folks who are poor and unsophisticated assert their rights against a hostile establishment.”?
As far as the money goes, I do my job for the exact same reason non-lawyers go to work every day - to MAKE MONEY.
Let me ask you again:
(1) Do you have a job?
(2) Would you continue to go to work every day if they stopped paying you?
(3) Do you consider yourself to be blatantly greedy?
**
Because the victim was poor, uneducated, and black and nobody would listen to him except me. I listened to him because (1) I like helping people; and (2) I wanted to MAKE MONEY.
I’m still waiting for an answer to my question about electricians . . .
I don’t make judgments about the relative importance of various professions; however, it is undeniably true that hiring an unqualified lawyer can have serious lifetime consequences for a client.
For example, if your lawyer fails to file a claim before the statue of limitations has run, you can’t recover regardless of how much merit your case has. Or consider trust and estate lawyers: imagine you wish to put together a will, but because of the negligence of your lawyer it was not sufficient under the laws of your state. Your property will then pass by intestacy, which may or may have been your intention, and there’s nothing you can do about it because you’re dead.
Making sure lawyers are properly qualified is a good thing. Good Lord, there are enough crappy lawyers out there even with the relatively minimal barriers to entry presented by the bar exam; why on earth would you want to encourage more unqualified souls to practice law?
**
You assume he bills at $60 an hour. Upon what basis do you assume that? You also have no idea what his overhead is – he has secretaries and electric bills and rent to pay. It ain’t profit until you take out all the expenses.
And actually, I suspect he read over the statutory law governing his client’s situation, if any, and poked around on Westlaw or Lexis for relevant caselaw. Much more than a quick phone call. He also, of course, had to spend time talking to his client, getting her to give him all the relevant facts involved (the word “relevant” being key; most clients don’t know what facts are legally important and which aren’t, so a skilled lawyer needs to know how to coax that information from his client while avoiding a gabfest about what the client had for breakfast that morning, etc.)
To my eyes, $200 bucks for the successful disposition of a case is really cheap. That’s only 1% of his client’s recovery. It ain’t nuttin.
Sorry ** lucwarm **, I apologize for the unintentional flattery. I mistakenly thought you had identified yourself as a woman. Beyond that…
Do I have a job? Yes. My job is like your job which is fulfilling the purpose of my existence.
Do I go to work each week day for money? Yes, I do.
Do I consider myself blatently greedy? No, of course not. Greed is antithetical to the progressive march of modern man.
Furthermore…
I don’t dislike lawyers. Those I run with are mostly good decent human beings, even the one who spent a year and a half in federal prison. But what I do dislike is an inequtable judicial system.
And I will continue to speak out against this affront to all freemen.
And yet it seems you feel that when an attorney refuses to work for free, he is being blatantly greedy. Do you have any principled reason for the distinction you draw?
If your employer asked you to work for free so that it could make more money, would you consider this hypocritical?
And you still haven’t answered my question about electricians.
And do you now concede that “Many lawyers help folks who are poor and unsophisticated assert their rights against a hostile establishment”?
Ok** lucwarn**, since you are not disposed to answer the question central to the main discussion I will condescend to answer your little trumped-up quiz.
Not yes, but hell yes! Of course electrictians would still learn their trade and libel for their installations and repairs, but in addition they would price themselves more efficiently and develope more competive techniques, and in general, be more responsive to the needs of the free market.
Yeahbut,** lucewarm**, my buisness is in the public works, and we don’t hide behind a declaration of high moral standards in order to make a buck.
No lucewarm, I will not concede. Don’t you get it? You lawyers are part of the corps that keeps the poor poor. And this kangeroo system of justice that you knowingly or unknowingly help perpetuate is a major part of the hostile enviorment that the unsophisticated must endure.
A pox on your chosen profession for its indifference. And a tish tish on you for failing to understand.
Dang it, lucewarm, I was saving this case history make to a point with** Dewey Cheatum** later, but you’ve been so bull headed I’ll go ahead and give it now…
Over in Birmingham ten years ago the city government decided to compensate for the loss of revenue from the flight of the frightened city people to the suburbs by imposing an occupation tax on those who worked in the city. And they did so, but only after excluding doctors and lawyers from the tax did the measure get the approval of the city council. It was explained that doctors and lawyers are special people who help the poor and therefore shouldn’t have to pay the occupation tax like teachers, truck drivers, beauticians, butchers, pimps, clergymen, deaf and blind street singers, used car salesmen, and the rest of the common population that are not doctors and lawyers who do the community so much good.
those who fret so over the prospect that a lawyer might hope to make as much for his labor as, say, a corporate middle manager, should consider that you mostly get what you pay for.
Except veterans.
The law, wisely kept unamended since the civil war, prevents lawyers from receiving a fee above $15.00 for appearing on behalf of veterans in disputes with the VA.
Result:the VA is not troubled by veterans who are effectively represented. I mean, represented at all.
Hmmm, getting back to the original post, and ignoring the ignorant rant of milum (um, folks, why do you engage in discussion with such people? They won’t admit you are correct, no matter what reasonable argument you provide.), the reason attorneys didn’t advertise is because it was considered unsavory. Attorney bars are, in general, highly conservative when it comes to change in the profession. The attempt in the late 1800’s to re-establish a decent set of standards for becoming an attorney (someone should point milum to the types of abuses common in the mid-1800’s when Jacksonian democracy resulted in a period of allowing “all who can speak english to practice law before the american courts”) was influenced by the general opinion of “advertising”, i.e. huckstering. It was the opinion of the bar that good attorneys didn’t NEED to advertise to sustain a practice. Word of mouth would be sufficient to result in clientele for those proficient at their job. And, too, there is the element that advertising by attorneys can result in encouragement of lawsuits, hardly a good thing.
These attitudes, of course, don’t neccessarily apply to an age where advertising can mean simply attempting to obtain name recognition, as opposed to making wildly extravagant claims, mostly untrue, about one’s product or services. It is hard to assert that there is an inherently “wrong” concept in allowing an attorney to place an advertisement in the paper for his practice in a major metropolitan area, where “word of mouth” would hardly be sufficient to inform potential clients of his proficiency. Nevertheless, whenever I am in Los Angeles, and am bombarded by the types of ads that are placed on television by the firms of the area (“I can get you MONEY!!!”), I do get nostalgic for the concept of small tombstone ads in local telephone directories.
Perhaps. Frankly, I’d be a little uncomfortable if my landlord were free to hire someone to do electrical work who’d never taken a class; never passed a test; etc. Just MHO of course.
**
I’m not sure what you mean by “hid[ing] behind a declaration of high moral standards in order to make a buck.” Can you give me some SPECIFIC examples of things that EVERY lawyer does which you would consider to qualify?
**
Well, getting back to the anecdotes I offered, will you concede that my clients were unsophisticated? That they were being screwed by the man? That I helped them?
**
Oh really? Does that apply to the lawyers who help enforce minimum wage laws? Overtime laws? Workers’ comp laws?
**
Ok, so are doctors part of the “corps” that’s keeping the poor poor?
I wonder whether it’s simple inverterate hatred which drives the conception that our political bodies are overwhelming made up of lawyers, or if anyone has even an scrap of evidence to justify the proposition.
… because, as someone who deals with parliamentary representatives, it would appear to me that we have far more ex-school teachers, doctors and small business people in the business of politics than lawyers.
Will a cite be proferred? Will Milum use bizarro colours to address the question? Will it be ignored? Will crazy spacing and symbols be employed? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All freemen wait with bated breath… ab ovo tick tick!
Even more fucked up that I remember. One of those pics has a man sticking his arm into a machine with a big sign that says “keep hands clear of machinery.” In fact, it looks like he is JUMPING in. It’s not really too hard to imagine that this ad is actually encouraging someone to injure themselves deliberately, despite written warnings not to, in order to file a lawsuit.
Now now, not everything Milum is saying is crazy. Or at least, there are some points that could be extracted from his posts, dusted off, dipped in that blue barber shop stuff, cut down to size, and then considered.
For instance, isn’t it possible that our legal traditions arose out of something that was once much more like a guild, along with its own efforts to protect trade secrets and use special language so as to increase the value of its members? Is it really impossible to imagine that there could be elements of the legal system, especially those handed down by way of the Common Law which are uneccesarily complicated and obscure less because they need to be, and more because if they weren’t, lawyers wouldn’t be quite so valuable or powerful?
I’m not saying that lawyers today consciously go around trying to increase the value of their profession by creating pointless complexity. But it’s certainly possible that elements of that worked their way into the legal profession over time, and are hard to change simply because they now have tradition and habit behind them.
As for lawyers controlling the supply of lawyers to drive costs up… there’s just no evidence that this is true that I know of, in any state I know about. You could much more plausibly accuse the medical profession of this, but even there the evidence is darn darn weak. In short, it’s just too hard to coordinate such an action, and there are too many other disruptive factors to make such a stategy workable.
For what it’s worth, my understanding is that many of the barriers to entry to the legal profession (3 years of law school; bar exam; etc.) were set up during the Depression in response to unemployed people who were becoming lawyers. So yeah, it’s possible there’s an element of protectionism at work.
In fact, it’s been argued that prohibitions on attorney advertising were in part an effort by established lawyers to keep down competition from newbies.
IIRC (and I really might not be) the post college degree started to come in to fashion slightly earlier than the depression, and it coincided with the immigrant wave (and northern migration). While, yes, it was done to help standardize legal education, ensure that lawyers were minimally qualified, and keep some of the worst abuses out, it was also done to keep “those people” out of the profession. Assuming someone would be let in in the first place, six to seven years of post highschool education, during which time the student isn’t earning a salary, is a significant barrier to poor people in a way that apprenticing into law wasn’t.
Well, I was really thinking more of traditions and specialized practices that trace their roots back much farther. But certainly some elements of the “guild” idea survive for lawyers in ways that they did not for professions that became factory scut work. The law, like medicine, remains to some extent, a calling, and one given special priveleges by governments.
Apos: guilds never existed in the U.S. for the simple reason that guilds weren’t common at the time the U.S. grew (the last couple of centuries); I think they were considered anathema to egalitarian society and free markets.
Advocates/lawyers did exist as a particular guild in Paris in the 14th century. The bar association that developed from there was, I think, abolished by Napoleon, but revived shortly thereafter since (I’ve heard) he found society couldn’t do without.
In England the group of lawyers developed probably from the court clerks. References can be found as early as the 13th century. They set up the Inns of court in the 14th century, which are still around and have functioned all this time as a kind of guild.
