Lawyers as rapacious, avaricious, immoral, pond scum

In My Humble Opinion
1

I keep seeing posts discussing this or that where someone tosses off a line about how lawyers are greedy, avaricious, immoral, pond scum etc.

In my capacity as commercial real estate agent, businessperson and divorced father I’ve come to know lots of lawyers both professionally and personally. I am well acquainted with the disputes they mediate just in my field endeavor, and by and large my impression over time is that lawyers (in general) are usually quite intelligent, and highly ethical people. There are some overly aggressive and unpleasant personalities, and a few bad apples, but no more than in the general professional population.

People seem to keep forgetting that lawyers are playing roles, defined for them in law, as advocates for a client’s position. They are not psychiatrists, priests, policeman, social workers, doctors or Indian Chiefs, they are advocates, and are instructed, and bound ethically and legally to do all they can within the bounds of the law to argue for their client’s position. Some people, even highly intelligent people in some cases, think this makes them moral and intellectual prostitutes. This is an intensely ignorant perspective that ignores then entire constructive basis of our legal system. Lawyers are a vital and necessary component of a civil society and without their efforts to structure workable agreements that follow the guidelines of the law and solve disputes, the wheels of commerce in a complex society would grind to a halt.

Lawyers, in one form or another, have been with us since the early inceptions of complex commercial societies. Next time you hear someone bitching about lawyers think how the world would operate without them, and think especially how the world would operate for you if you weren’t the top raccoon on the totem pole, and you had to represent yourself going against a larger and more powerful contending entity

2

I agree.

3

The people who are frustrated with the manipulation that too often occurs in our legal system probably don’t agree with the bolded part of that sentence.

Change the words “defined for them” to:
“created and interpreted by them”
and it takes on a whole new meaning.

4

I agree as well. I’m reminded of a comment made somewhere that people hate trial lawyers, but only out of context. If you asked twenty randomly selected people if we should get rid of trial lawyers, many would say yes, but if you asked the same people if we should get rid of trial lawyers and let corrupt corporations, greedy landlords, inept doctors, &c, &c… (and please note the obvious, that these are stereotypes as well; I’m not looking for a debate on this) act as badly as they want with no risk of legal recourse, then few would say yes.

5

As long as they don’t work for Marlboro I agree as well.

BTW, my lawyer is a great guy.

6

Lawyers don’t create and interpret the law, though. Legislatures and judges do. If you feel that lawyers have to much say in how those laws are made, I’d say the same could be said of just about any profession or industry.

7

Yeah, but let’s not forget that many legislators and all judges are also lawyers.

A friend of mine was frivolously sued by a psychopathic drunken imbecile. His lawyer was instrumental in getting the case thrown out, and he did it pro bono because my friend was a college student with no money at the time.

8

So? If they’re not actively pursuing careers as lawyers, what incentive do they have to fashion the law in such a way as to favor them?

9

The US Senate is comprised of 53 lawyers. Judges are lawyers.

10

See above post.

11

My lawyer is a great guy. Yours, though, is a scumbag.

I think most people actually like lawyers, so long as they’re “on their side.” If they represent or act on causes they disagree with or violently oppose, they seem to become a scapegoat.

12

A story:
When my father died, a lawyer was associated with the funeral home. As part of the funeral planning, he sat down with me to discuss estate issues and to offer his services as an attorney. Fine. The discussion is going along swimmingly (for him) as I am in a very vulnerable state and I am dumping a lot of financial details that maybe I shouldn’t be dumping until I actually hire an attorney. He’s getting more and more interested, when I mention that I had a half brother that my dad lost parental rights to (the half brother was adopted by his stepfather.) He starts talking about how he will have to research the law on how an estate is handled when a parent has surrendered a child. Thinking I must have misunderstood him I asked “So, this situation has never come up for you before, where a person has given a child up for adoption? You will have to do research?” He said, “Yes, that’s exactly it. That, of course, will cost extra.” The next week, I went to see a different attorney and he confirmed my feeling that the “need to do research” thing was pure bullshit. The second attorney helped me handle my dad’s estate in a fair, competent and reasonably priced way. He’s still my attorney.

These are the kind of stories that give lawyers a bad name. However, you will notice there are really two stories here: one bad and one good. It’s just that the “bad story” is more important to tell, to warn others. Lawyers are human beings and are subject to the full range of human flaws.

13

Well maybe he was fee generating scumbag, and maybe he was new, or just being cautious. For every lawyer story where an attorney saves someone money by going “Ignore it, it’s BS” there’s another story (some I’ve been involved in personally) where that attitude got a client into world of hurt, and in my business that can amount to millions of dollars of liability. There’s a balance point betwen common sense and caution, and it’s sometimes as hard for attorneys as for clients to know here that place is sometimes.

14

So, what, we should have a rule barring lawyers from all legislatures and the judiciary? :rolleyes:

As long as we have laws, we will have, nay, need to have, a group of people whose job it is to advise as to what those laws mean, and how they apply to specific issues. This is why some form of lawyer/ advocate has existed for as long as we’ve had laws.

And in case you hadn’t noticed, legislatures are elected in this country. If a lot of them are lawyers, might that not mean that the voting public prefers that the act of crafting legislation be performed by those who are professionally experienced in legal matters?

15

I used to feel the same way, that those poor lawyers really seemed to get treated unfairly. But then I had my first occasion to use one, and began to change my mind.

When I bought my first home about 5 years ago, the lawyers who handled the deal were constantly late delivering on promises (when I was lucky enough to have the promise delivered on at all). They would repeatedly tell me to swing by the office to pick something up/sign something/discuss something at a certain time, but then when I would arrive at the time they stated, the office would be all closed up for the day. They gave me a number of pieces of bad advice that I am still paying for, made up charges, double charged me on several things, have not returned any of my calls since the day I received their bill, and have rejected registered mail I have sent in attempts to sort out their billing. I ended up just having to pay the bill, and I felt absolutely robbed.

A couple of years later we needed to refinance the mortgage in order to pay for some renovations, and so of course we got a different lawyer. The nightmare that was that lawyer made our first experience a joy. A process that was supposed to take about a week took over 18 months (with us paying for it all along). He lost a number of documents, including the $200,000 cheque from the bank (he accidentally took it with him on his skiing vacation), he was unfathomably rude to us, and we never did receive a bill from him. He took an amount out of the cheque the bank sent for our mortgage as his payment, but never gave us any breakdown explaining the amount he took, and my requests for such over the last year have gone basically ignored. I call him, he says he’ll fax something to me right away, nothing comes, I call back, he says he’ll fax something to me right away; repeat process infinitely.

Then about 6 months ago it came to our attention that not everything the lawyer was supposed to do had been done, including making some changes regarding the ownership of the property with the city. We went back to the lawyer to try to get it done, but our calls went unanswered. It was a somewhat urgent matter, so we found a different lawyer to take care of it for us. He was by far the best experience, but even still, he ended up charging almost double what he had told us he would, it took him about three times as long to deal with it as he said it would, and as with the others, he missed appointments, didn’t return phone calls, didn’t follow through on commitments, and was just generally a jerk.

Now, I do want to clarify that I’m sure there are plenty of absolutely super people out there who I’m sure are absolutely super lawyers. However, the fact that all three of my three experiences were so similar and fit the stereotype of the sleazy, dishonest, shady, money-grubbing jerk makes me at very least begin to understand how that stereotype came to be.

16

Did any of these lawyers specialize in real estate, and how did you come to choose them? Just curious.

17

Truth in babbling disclosure: I am a lawyer and have been for some 35 years. I am a solo general practitioner in a rural county. In my time I have handled cases of almost every description, from divorce to medical malpractice, civil and criminal, on both sides of the table, along with an active office practice. I think (hope?) I know what I am talking about. I do concede that I am less than objective, however.

There are about twenty lawyers who actively practice in my county. Some have offices in the county, some keep offices (sometime several offices) in adjacent counties. Most are middle aged males but there are a few women and a few rookies and a few geezers. With the exception of two, I have regard for all of them, would trust any of them and would be willing (and have) to send clients to any of them when for one reason or another I have not been able to deal with the client’s problem.

The other two are the model for most lawyer horror story I have heard. It is apparent that they are in the business (for it is a business) entirely for the money and they are willing to go after the money when ever they can, where ever they can. For the other 18 of us these two are ridiculed behind their back and treated with cold and formal disdain to their face. The do an adequate job of what they do they just charge unreasonably for it and do all sorts of stuff that is clearly just for the purpose of padding their bill. Yet they get business, once, because of church and political connections (never trust a lawyer whose reaction to a favorable ruling is “praise the lord”).

In short, we have 18 solid, honest, fair and reasonably priced lawyers and these two jerks. The bad experience somebody has with them sticks to the rest of us. Because of these two who never do anything that will get them sanctioned, the rest of us are branded as money grubbing, heartless villains who will do anything for a buck.

As far as the legislature is concerned, this state has created an every-year-for-three-months legislature. As a consequence no one with anything worth doing to do can afford to serve. It tends to be made up of retired farmers, insurance agents whose businesses run themselves and lawyers with no practice, and precious few lawyers at that. You can’t blame lawyers for the silliness that has come out of the state legislature.

As far as Congress goes, I suspect you will find that of all the law school graduates in Congress there are few of them who ever had any extensive experience in the practice. My Congressman was a county attorney in a small county for two years before he ran for Congress. He hardly counts as a lawyer by any fair standard.

In short, it’s a bad rap, fostered by insurance companies and a generalized fear of being pulled into the entangling coils of litigation and a forlorn wish that life in a complicated world was a lot simpler. It is a convenient boogie man in this politically charged year.

18

Or the Church of Scientology.

19

Well, class action lawyers are R.A.I.P.S., in my humble opinion.
They tend to do things like this: Bring up a suit against Corporation A. Win $3 million in a “settlement” that not only prevents any further damages from being sought, but eschews any alteration in the law that may prevent or discontinue the abuse that the lawsuit was based on. Then the lawyer walks away with $2 million and the 23,000 people they “represented” each get a big fat check for $43.47, and Corporation A gets to continue the practice of whatever it was they did in the first place. Good example: the music industry ramping up CD prices. Did you get your check for $13 or whatever it was?
Yeah. Justice. Whatever.

Also, my soon-to-be-ex-roommate is a lawyer, and she is a self-centered, passive-aggressive, lazy, judgemental bitch. So there’s another lawyer that I willingly classify as R.A.I.P.S.

But the rest seem OK to me, I guess. Minus those that are Republican and currently serving in the Senate.

20

I neither said nor implied such a thing.