Lawyers Are Not Engineers!!!!!!!!

The BBQ Pit
41

Bollocks. You’re so caught up in your own argument you can’t see how twisted it is. One can only assume that you consider that mowers shouldn’t have a load of mollycoddling restrictions on them to save idiots from their own stupidity and annoy the hell out of everyone else, right? You think it is fucking annoying that when you want to do something like mow the lawn, you are slowed down by “safety features” put in place by others who seem to believe their own judgement about what is best for you is better than yours.

But when it comes to lawsuits everything changes. Suddenly you turn about face and believe that mollycoddling restrictions (in the form of lawyers refusing to act) should be in place to prevent people from doing things they want to (indeed have a legal right to) do. One can only assume (based on this view) that you would not be annoyed if you wanted to bring a lawsuit but you were prevented from doing so by others (lawyers) who believed they knew what was right and appropriate better than you do.

You need to think long and hard about what you do or do not believe about personal responsibility and then get consistent.

And besides which you (and you are not alone) have this bizarre view of what lawyers do. We are not judges, we are not juries, we are not legislators, we are not ethics consultants.

A client comes to you with a story about hurting themselves. They ask if a lawsuit would get them damages. You form a professional judgement that it would. You tell them that. They then say that they wish to proceed, or they do not. Their call.

You say that lawyers should form a moral judgement as to the lack of deserts of the client’s case (regardless of legal rights) and tell them to go away in appropriate cases.

Who the hell gave us lawyers the power to decide upon such issues? If lawyers did do as you suggest, I suspect that you would be amongst the first to abuse us (and rightly so) for stepping way out of line and setting ourselves up as a professional kangaroo court, judging what does and what does not entitle an injured party to bring suit.

I agree with you that the mere fact that a job pays does not mean it is a job that should be done. But what you appear to be overlooking is that you propose a system whereby lawyers band together and deny access to legal rights to citizens, based on the lawyer’s own judgement as to what the law should be, as opposed to what it is.

And finally, even if one accepts that lawyers have some responsibility for assisting undeserving litigants, what gives myself and I suspect the other lawyers posting in this thread the shits is the way all the blame and vitriol is directed at the lawyers, despite the fact that (as my previous post demonstrates) the key decision makers are the litigants themselves, the juries, the manufacturers and so on. All the lawyers do is assist those parties in carrying out their wishes.

And before we get into deciding who is thin skinned, Tuckerfan why don’t you tell us what you do for a living and we’ll heap some undeserved vitriol on that and see how you react?

42

Minty, take a pill, pal. You’ve got some raw nerves there, bub, and they’re showing. You’re letting your anger get the better of you.

To address your points:

Perhaps, I can’t say. I’ve never met the Bard, but apparently you converse with him on a regular enough basis to be able to form such an opinion. Tell me, how’s Mrs. Roosevelt doing? (I’m assuming that if you can talk to Will, you can talk to the former First Lady as well. If not, you could ask Will to find out how she’s doing.)

Do you remember what I said about engineers? Evidently not, rather than force you to scroll back up to my OP, I’ll quote it here:

IMHO, any engineers who aren’t willing to get their hands dirty by actually physically messing with whatever it is that they’ve designed are worthless. Ross Perot (in one of his saner moments) said the same thing about the folks at GM.

And you never bothered to deny them. Isn’t that the same as an admission of guilt?

Again, I ask you, could some fuckwit on his own successfully navigate the maze of legal paperwork and terms neccessary to file a lawsuit, bring it to court, and win a judgement? How common is it for someone to launch a lawsuit against a major corporation and win without the use of a lawyer? You’re the lawyer, you tell me.

Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass as to what you conclude about me. Each person is entitled to his/her own opinion last time I checked, and like assholes, you have yours and I have mine.

43

So, Princhester, what you’re telling me is that if someone came to you with a case that was totally without merit (and you knew it was without merit), you’d take it? And your reason is because its not up to you to decide to fight the case or not?

Oh, and Princhester, I’ll be more than happy to tell you what I do. I’ve posted that fact many times on this board. I am a customer service rep for a cell phone company. I won’t post the name as I could get sued. And you can insult the position all you want, I won’t get pissed off at all. You see, I know there’s a lot of fuckwits who do the same job as I do. I know, because I spend a good portion of my day trying to fix their fuck ups, and if I do fuck up (which I do do), I agonize over my mistakes and do my damnest not to make them again.

44

Actually, your previous posts on the Bard are simply inherently contradictory. They are fucked on their own. No outside communication (let alone with the dead) required.

By this reasoning, you believe that Osama Bin Laden was not to blame for 9/11, because he could not have carried out the attacks without help?

45

Just another lawyer with an undergraduate degree in engineering checking in here.

Carry on.

46

Princhester, wow! That’s some reasoning skills there, bub. First of all (and this may come as a shock to you, so you’d better brace yourself), the common usage of the Shakespearean quote I used is to express the contempt many people feel for lawyers. The fact that Shakespeare meant it otherwise is immaterial to the discussion at hand. A significant number of popular quotes in use today are actually misquotes, taken totally out of context, or misattributed (if not all three).

Secondly, why do we focus on Osama bin Laden in conjunction with the 9/11 attacks? Could it be that without bin Laden being in the position that he’s in, those attacks might never have happened? Nah, too easy. I was going to take the high road out on this one, but its late, and I’m tired, so I’m going to go for the cheap shot. To throw it back at you, think of it like this. The way I see it bin Laden = lawyer. Bin Laden has the connections, the ability, and the means to orchestrate an event the same way a lawyer has the connections, the ability, and the means to successfully file a lawsuit, bring it before a court a law and win a judgement.

47

I think I might first deal with your comments being points 2-4 from Minty’s post above. The problem here is that you have so little understanding of what lawyers actually do, that the comments simply don’t compute. When you understand that, maybe you’ll understand why the whole basis of your OP is fucked.

See, I would never be “worried that some candidate for natural selection might actually find a way to hurt himself doing something with the lawnmower that the maker didn’t intend”.

What would actually happen is that the client manufacturer would ask me to consider their exposure to injury claims because they were worried about that. And I would say (for example) that as demonstrated in recent decisions (made by juries just to make this quite clear, because I have perceived a certain lack of cognitive ability on your part) they were at risk of similar lawsuits based on particular potential allegations about the lack of safety of their products. And they would perhaps decide to take that advice on board, and have their engineers make decisions about how to design “safety” features into their products to avoid such lawsuits.

So the whole thing about “the lawyers” being worried about this or that or making decisions about the process is a crock of shit. It demonstrates only your pigheaded ignorance of the whole matter, and your apparent wilful determination to fail to learn anything in case it upsets your comfortable prejudice against lawyers.

**

I’m not sure what you mean here. Normally, when a lawyer speaks of a case “without merit” (at least in Australian legalese) they mean a case that has no chance of winning. If you mean that, then no, I would advise a client not to continue, and if they said they wanted to go on I’d tell them to find another lawyer because in this jurisdiction fighting a case that you know to have no legal chance of winning (perhaps to try to gain some tactical advantage) is against the law.

And again, maybe you mean would I take on a case where I knew that it was based on falsities (ie my client was lying about the matter). Again, I would not take that on, and it would be against the law to do so (at least if representing my client’s interests would require me to advocate his lies).

But those situations have no relevance to this topic. Manufacturers do not redesign mowers due to lawsuits against them that fail. And the lawsuits we are concerned with (I think) are not those where the claimant is lying, just arguably undeserving.

I suspect that what you mean is, would I take on a case that I thought was totally without moral merit, but which I also thought would result in my client winning damages in accordance with the laws of this country? The answer to that is that I would, if I had to. That is to say, I would probably try to find my client a lawyer who empathised with them, both for personal reasons and because I am not very good at representing clients when I don’t actually respect their position. But if we take the theoretical situation to its logical conclusion and ask: what if I couldn’t find any way to have somebody else represent them, and if I thought they had a good case (in the sense of one that would win in court according to the laws of the land) then I would represent them, because I don’t think that it is fair for someone to have rights according to law, but be unable to pursue them due to other people’s opinion of what the law should be.

I see on preview you have now posted again. Was that wise?

But anyway, to deal with the Shakespeare thing, the point is that you relied on the quote as having authority due to it coming from Shakespeare. You said:

**

In other words, you didn’t rely on it merely as common usage but as having come from the Bard. It was then pointed out to you that the Bard didn’t mean what you meant. And then suddenly you start pretending you were relying on common usage of the quote, not on what the Bard actually meant.

At which point you began to look like a fuckwit. Which is appropriate. And you are looking more and more like one, the longer you keep raising this point.

And as for OBL, have it your way. OBL represents the lawyers. So you presumably think that those who flew the planes have no culpability, do you?

Either way, what you have to accept is that there is more than one person or group or profession involved. And so to single out one group, and put all the blame on them, is unjust.

It’s complicated. Think about it for a while. You may get it if you try hard enough. Don’t bust any blood vessels though, it’s not worth it.

48

I’d just like to pipe up and say I’ve had a Briggs & Stratton deck-type gasoline lawnmower- this very same mower- since 1969. In that time it has required several sparkplugs, a carb rebuild, and a new ignition module. It has consumed countless gallons of gasoline, and is on it’s third blade.

Even after sitting all winter, it will start within two or three pulls, and within one pull the rest of the summer. It has a little lever, on the engine itself, with two speeds: full throttle and off.

There is no clutch, no brake, no powered wheels, no spring-loaded throttle, no “deadman bar”. If it ever had a warning label, it has long since disintegrated. There’s no flapper door over the discharge chute, there’s no bag, no screen, no guard. There’s no emergency cutoff, no safety bar, and no heat guard over the muffler.

I’ve pushed that thing since before I could easily reach the handle. It’s mowed lawns in three States and for fifteen different houses. We keep the blade quite sharp, to reduce bruising of the grass.

In the thirty-three years it’s been in this family, it has inflicted precisely zero injuries.

None. Not to me, to my parents, to my siblings, to my friends or anyone who has borrowed it over the years. No one has even been hit by a flying rock.

Personally, I’m with George Carlin. I think we should totally abolish not only warning labels of all kinds, but also machine guards, guardrails, handrails, airbags, 5mph bumpers AND personal-injury claims. :smiley:

Darwin at it’s best.

49

“The best way to make things fool-proof is to eliminate fools.”

50

Ye gads.

I really don’t have anything against those who practice law, in general. It’s a job that needs to be done, just like we need someone to scrub dried urine off of the floor in public restrooms… But then you run across one of those folks who can’t even grasp that their arrogance might turn a jury against their client just out of spite.

Tell me you were holding that tongue firmly in your cheek Jodi…

51

Thinking about the OBL thing a bit further (yep, those blood vessels are popping!) I am being unfair on myself and other lawyers. The point about there being more than one person or group involved still stands. But it is actually ridiculous to say that OBL represents the lawyers in this analogy.

Tuckerfan you say:

**

I’d be doing your ignorance a disservice if I let this one go. This is just poppycock, because you are ignoring one crucial point. As I understand it, OBL was an ultimate decision maker, and did what he did to further his own goals. He was the prime mover, and if he had not made the decision that the attacks were to occur, they would not have occurred.

Lawyers may have the connections and the ability and the means to bring lawsuits, they lack one crucial thing on their own: a client to make the decision to instruct them to bring a a lawsuit to further the client’s own goals. Without that instruction from the client, the lawsuit does not occur.

An aggrieved party can bring a lawsuit without a lawyer (its hard, but it can be done). A lawyer cannot bring an action on behalf of an aggrieved party, without that person’s instructions.

In that context, your insistence that the lawyers are solely or mainly to blame, and your refusal to acknowledge the prime role played by litigants themselves and juries and so on is not only wrong, muddle headed and ignorant, it is bizarre.

52

An adult who gets paid to mow his father’s lawn . . .

Need one say more about personal values?

53

It must be a real pistol to around you guys when an episode of The Simpsons comes on featuring “Lionel Hutz, attorney at law.”

And so you’re telling me that all the arguments lawyers make in court cases are essentially meaningless, and that juries are wholly responsible for the legal decisions made? That the oratorial skills which lawyers pride themselves on (and have even written books about) is essentially worthless. In other words, O.J. Simpson would have been found “Not Guilty” even if he had defended himself. :rolleyes:

I mean a combination of things here. One is a case in which you knew the client to be lying, and I’m pleased to see that you’d tell them to get bent. I can respect that. I would do the same thing were I a lawyer. Another is a case where a client is obviously at fault (see my example about the guy with the drill), but insists on suing anyway. Sure he may have a right to sue, but should he? No, and any rational person would know this. If you’re using a product in a manner not intended by its designer (such as using a gun to pound nails) and you get injured, that’s your fault and you should be adult enough to say, “I screwed up.” and move on. One of the localities here posted the Ten Commandments on the walls of the courthouse even though this is a violation of the seperation of church and state clause in the US Constitution. When someone sued them over it, they didn’t say, “Fair cop.” and pull the Ten Commandments down. Nope, they went to court. And lost. Appealed, and lost again. What a waste of tax payer dollars and people’s time. The city’s lawyer should have told them that they hadn’t a prayer of winning and resigned if they had insisted that he fight the case. I know I would have.

And you think that I’m simply going to let a lawyer have the last word?

I was being pithy, I see that your sense of humor is even more stunted than I thought.

Didn’t say that I thought the nutjobs who hijacked the planes were without culpability. Merely that they wouldn’t have been able to do it, if it hadn’t been for OBL or someone like him.

Apparently the “Land Down Under” is free from that plague of leeches in the States we call, “ambulance chasers.” These are lawyers who don’t wait for clients to come to them, nope they actively go out and seek clients saying, “It wasn’t your fault. I can get you lots and lots of money for your troubles.” I’m sure OBL has had to do some recruiting as well.

Let’s see here, dad calls me up and says, “The wife and I are going on vacation for three weeks or more. If I pay you $60 will you cut the grass while we’re gone?” Hmm, a lawn service would charge dad that much a week to do it, dad’s bank account is in the six figure range, my bank account is almost empty, you do the math. (And yes, I’m doing it for $60.)

54

Well, here’s something to try on for size. Don’t accept money for assisting your parents. I know it sounds odd (what else would you expect from a lawyer), but there is it just the same.

55

Muffin when I was eight years old, dad walked out on myself and my mother. On his way out of town he emptied their bank accounts. My mother and I lived off of charity from the church and her side of the family until she could find a job. Then it took her three tries to find a divorce lawyer who didn’t try to suppliment the meager amount mom could afford to pay him by cutting a back room deal with my dad’s lawyer that would have left mom with no child support money and no alimony. When I was 20 years old I was sick and needed to go to the doctor and didn’t have the money because I was working a minimum wage job and living on my own. Mom didn’t have the money I knew, so I called dad. I spent days on the phone with him, begging for the fifty dollars I needed to pay for a trip to the doctor.

So now, the old man calls me up offers to pay me while he and my step-mother go out of town for three plus weeks. Hell yeah, I’m gonna take the money, I’d have done it for free (dad’s gotten better in his old age), but if he’s offering, I’ll take it.

What I’m wondering is how many of the lawyers who’ve been so quick to condemn me would have had the same “You’re a worthless piece of shit!” response if instead of posting my OP here, I instead showed up in their offices, repeated the OP verbatum and ended it with, “I wanna sue!”?

56

Please Tuckerfan, don’t try to find this out. Whatever stupid thing you are planning to do with a power tool isn’t worth the damage it will cause to prove yourself wrong.

57

Honestly? You wouldn’t get to speak to me because my staff try to insulate me from drivel.

So now you’re $10 up on him. Impressive. I guess dysfunction does pass from one generation to the next.

58

DARTH NADER –

There is no shame in any honestly earned dollar, but my tongue was as firmly in my cheek as yours was when you compared my profession to scrubbing urine off a floor. And “arrogant” is not really considered an insult to a trial lawyer, though only a bad trial lawyer (or an inexperienced one) would be ham-handed enough to convey that arrogance to a jury. If you’re going to trial, you want an arrogant litigator; they’re the ones that know what they’re doing.

TUCKERFAN, I appreciate you posting some back story, because it allowed me the perspective to realize that I don’t really give a shit what you think of my profession. I earn a decent living, and I earn an honest living. I worked hard to get where I am, and I’m good at what I do. If you feel the need to heap disdain on that, as you ride around on a lawnmower for 60 clams, you go right ahead. Whatever gets you by.

59

Happy 4000, Jodi! (What a waste of P4K, huh?)

60

Wowsers! :o I didn’t even notice. Thank you, MINTY, for noting such a dubious achievement. :slight_smile: