Lawyers, the Law, going pro se, expertise & expert knowledge, etc.

Great Debates
1

Inspired by Stoid’s thread about arguing her case, and the concurrent advice thread on things to keep in mind if you are contemplating appearing in court on a pro se basis, but specifically NOT offering any opinion about either of the above threads or their content:

Proposed to debate: Is the Law effectively a “protection racket”, unnecessarly difficult to understand and navigate without the aid of experts who are the very people who (collectively & historically) created and maintain its structure and content and therefore are responsible for it being difficult to understand without their help? Or (alternatively) is it necessarily difficult to understand and navigate, such that in order to be precise and not open to vastly different interpretations it is necessary to follow in the footsteps of the people who have created & maintained Law and learn it, as otherwise a written body of law would not be possible?

(Or any 3rd, 4th, etc perspectives that may differ from either of the above propositions)
In support of the “protection racket” perspective, let’s contrast the profession of Law with the profession of Medicine. EVEN THOUGH I think it is true that the medical profession has often acted in a gatekeeper role, retaining unto its licensed & accepted members the right to do certain things that in many cases could be understood and done by other people who are not doctors, it seems self-evidently true that the medical subject matter itself — human biology, anatomical structure, how organs and organ systems work, the various patterns & phenomena that constitute named & recognized ailments & illnesses and the disease processes and etiologies and whatnot, the known interventions and how to do them, how they are thought to work, etc etc etc — exist unto themselves. (I am not a poststructuralist kind of philosopher; I vehemently reject the notion that all such knowledge is “socially constructed”. There really IS a human body and its neurons and synovial fluids and capillary walls and smooth muscles behave as they do whether you understand them or not, and no body of Medicine however licensed could set them up differently). But law? Does law have an innate subject matter, as opposed to being its own subject matter, in the sense that medicine has one? Isn’t law in its entirely entirely a human-constructed body of rules, with all knowledge therefore being the knowledge OF something that could be entirely different? And if it could be entirely different, couldn’t that difference be that it would be SIMPLE, and EASY to understand? Could one of its own self-applying rules even REQUIRE that it be accessibly easy to understand to the typical person to whom those rules are held to apply?

On the other hand, le’s compare the profession of Law with my own profession, that of database design, or more generally computer software design. Mine, too, is a profession in which the subject matter doesn’t exist except insofar as we, the folks in my profession, designed it. Common opinion is that the world of code, of the raw level at which these systems are created and modified, is NOT understandable to someone without prior training who one Monday morning gets disgusted with their computer and decides that they should be able to write their own queries and reports or design their own “Manage My Personal Life” integrated database system or write their own operating system for that matter. Could it be simpler, easier to learn, more user-friendly? Yes, and some computer software companies are known for presenting themselves as significantly more user-friendly & with a much more accessible learning curve than others (Apple’s Macintosh operating system as an alternative to the DOS command line in 1984; FileMaker’s database environment as a “use it right out of the box” alternative to SQL and Oracle). But it’s only friendlier by a matter of degree. There are plenty of people who can’t set up Apple Mail to fetch mail from 3 different email accounts or modify their own Documents folder so that another user account can open and edit files that are inside it. And I’d have no business if anyone who bought FileMaker could do anything that could be done with it. IN SHORT, there is some talent & skill involved with making a human-created system sufficiently user-friendly that someone can come along and immediately make sense of how to use it, how to get work done within its confines, how to modify it to their liking, etc. And not all human-designed structures are, in fact, set up in as user-friendly a fashion as they might ideally be, and once they are already there and in use and depended upon heavily, it can be difficult to improve on their accessibility markedly and damn near impossible to just shitcan them entirely and start over from scratch.

OK, onward to the Law. I have not studied it. I have sort of run into it (as most of us have) on occasion and have found it to be intimidating and inaccessible and user-hostile as hell. I have definitely felt that there was a lot of “protection racket” involved in what I experienced of it. Not that I don’t believe that a vast amount of the complexity is unintentional and would be difficult-to-impossible to simplify, because I do believe that. But the average citizen who is affected by the law has (for the most part) a finite number of operations that they themselves would need to engage in vis-a-vis the law. How to respond if charged with a crime. How to appeal if you do not like the outcome of your case. How to file a civil claim against someone. How to sell your property, how to give your property away (as a consequence of you dying or otherwise), how to buy something, how to incorporate yourself and perhaps your business partners as a legal company, perhaps a few other things like that.

I’m a database geek. I do not think it is reasonable for Joe or Sue AverageEmployee to expect to be able to understand the company’s ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) database and its 39 tables, 290 relationships, 116 screens, 590 scripts, and the hosting environment that makes it accessible to the folks who use it (each with their own appropriate permission set and privileges within the system). But I totally DO think they are entirely reasonable in expecting to be able to find any client and see all of the jobs that the company has done for that client, to print out or view the information on what that job consisted of, to see which tasks they performed and which were performed by their coworkers; to bring up their own employee record and see which tasks were assigned to them, the status of each of those tasks and when they became set to that status, etc… TO USE THE SYSTEM AS AN END USER, in other words, without having to call me, the expert, and ask me to run those reports or do those searches for them.

When they ask me to do something that the system does not as of yet make simple and accessible to them, it is part of my job to MAKE that “something” availbale to them so that NEXT time they won’t have to ask for my help, unless it is a rare thing that is not likely to be needed by that person or anyone else after this one time.

The legal profession COULD, and in my opinion SHOULD, create structures (either adding user-friendly “front ends” to the complex processes involved or by changing the complex processes themselves) so as to make USING THE LAW on an everyday end-user citizen level something that does not require putting the request into the hands of an attorney and having the attorney to it for us.

I think that doing so no doubt lies within their collective abilities. I think that governments could certainly have interfaces (offices or web pages or whatever) set to to receive certain basic info from Joe or Susie AverageCitizen and then, having received that info, process it by mostly automated means without requiring personal time from attorneys.

So without concluding that Law in its entirety is nothing but a “protection racket”, I do think it keeps unto itself a great deal of legal processes that could be made directly accessible to the rest of us, and does so for no discernable reason other than to reap payments from us on the occasions when we have such needs. I do think it is unfair and constitutes a predatory practice by the profession.

Your thoughts?

2

Well, you can educate yourself on legal jargon, to the point where you could read some 20 page statute and fully understand it and why it has to be that length to cover numerous hairsplitting exceptions and conditions. The alternative of making the law textually simple means we’d need judges to arbitrarily make the call when someone argues that in their particular case, an exception must be made. Personally, I’d rather wade through a mess of print than try to delve into the psyche of Antonin Scalia.

3

Try running a raid group in Warcraft with vague, everyman’s rules and see how long everything holds together. You’ll very quickly find that clearcut concepts can be interpreted any of several hundred ways and until you specify which possible interpretation it was you intended, your people are going to harp on you or leave one after the other. And all of this over the one simple task of who gets how many points.

Now try extending that out to a nation of hundreds of millions of people, with rules relating to almost every aspect of life that is humanly possible.

4

All systems of public laws in civilized societies have (I believe) developed various rules and evidence based systems that have grown out of the general need for the law to be reliable (to the extent possible) in rendering useful judgments that satisfy the public need for fair adjudication across a span of topics. If the law does this competently it maintains it’s social and functional legitimacy.

To competently argue a case in a rules based legal system is complex, but to argue an involved case in a rules and precedent based system is doubly difficult because of all the predicate law you need to be aware of. Beyond this, people in general are not trained to think, focus, or argue within the constraints and requirements of these systems so intermediaries (ie lawyers) are necessary for this task. This has been true for all codified legal systems going back over a millenia.

Reasonably intelligent people, who are sufficiently motivated, can usually study the law well enough put together coherent written arguments, the problem in these scenarios is that there are often a lot of unspoken or informal rules, expectations, traditions, institutional folkways etc. to the way law is practiced in specific contexts that will damage the presentation of these arguments if they are not followed.

Is this good or bad for society? Kind of beside the point. In a complex society you are going to have a complex legal system almost as a structural necessity. There’s no way around it.

5

I would also point that the database or OS analogies fail in one respect: they do not capture the adversarial nature of most legal conflicts. That is, when the database user faces a task, his “enemy” is simply the inherent complexity of the task. The litigant faces another litigant on the other side of the room, highly motivated to succeed in what he’s after, in complete opposition to each other’s goals.

Even routine procedures, which seem as though they might be made more “user friendly,” such as making a will, have to be approached with the understanding that at some future point, that will be be challenged by someone else, seeking a different result than the will calls for.

When the stakes are small, we don’t worry so much about the issue; many states have small claims courts that do away with much of the formail rules structure and permit a judge to simply hear stories and decide an outcome. BUt we as a society accept this because the downside is small: even if the judge gets it wrong, even if someone’s rights are trampled, the amount involved is small.

6

I find the OP unnecessarily difficult to understand and navigate. Those are some gigantic paragraphs.

7

I was in an adversarial relationship with my former employer in my recent court conflict over the subject of unemployment benefits; at issue was whether or not I had quit as opposed to being terminated from my position by my employer.

I would have been up the creek without an attorney were it not for the following:
a) The court that heard the initial case and ruled against me provided me with EXPLICIT instructions on what I must do were I to elect to appeal the case. In no other court case where I was affected by a ruling did I ever get any such “If you don’t like this result here is what you must do to appeal this case” instruction. Why not? Is there any real reason that the courts that attend to matters of unemployment benefits can explain that process (and/or make the process itself a relatively simple matter of sending a certified letter with one’s reasoning to this address with cc to the other party and have it in by ThisDate, as opposed to whatever process might be involved in appealing some other court’s decision)

b) The process of DOING the appeal did not rely strictly on my ability to identify specific sections and paragraphs of applicable law or cite precedents in interpretation thereof in order to make my case. Instead, the appellate judges had at their disposal all the facts as determined in the original court’s Finding of Facts, they had my plain-English reasoning about where the original court judge had reached conclusions I wished to differ with and why, and then they reviewed all that and used their OWN awareness of the law and jurisprudence and ruled in my favor. They agreed with my reasoning but linked it to specific elements of the establshed FACTS in a way that my appeals argument did not specifically do. I think this is unusual in appeals court proceedings, that they would be open to considering such an informal presentation and examining the facts and reconsidering my case rather than basing it entirely on my legal logic. In fact the more typical scenario seems like something out of a Harry Potter book: if you don’t know the magic words to incant and the precise way to swish and flick your argument, the door will not open for you, you will not win your appeal. And that IS what folks have been saying to Stoid in that other thread, right? That any chance of her winning the appeal depends almost exclusively on what she presents and how the presents it, and not on the merits of the original case and the decisions & explanations rendered there.
I’m not saying it could all be made accessible to the person without legal training; but it seems to me that there is rather vast room for improvement. It could be LESS opaque than it is.

8

Pardon the essay:

I don’t think there’s a self-concious effort on the part of lawyers to make the law complicated so that you must hire a lawyer to accomplish any legal task. But there are aspects of the profession that lead to that result, and most lawyers are aware of them, benefit from them, and make no effort to change them. Three examples come to mind: legalese, licensing, and the way precision is weighed against ease of application in judicial decisions.

Opinions written in legalese make it difficult for lay people to research the law. Part of the reason for a writing style focused on jargon and Latin is that the law requires technical and precise definitions, and so it has technical terms for the same reason that philosophy or biology has a bunch of words that trip up laymen. But equally part of the reason for legalese is a misplaced desire to distinguish the language of the law from the vulgar language of ordinary men in order to sound authoritative.

There is no good reason, for example, to write “inter alia” instead of “among others things,” or to invent a tort concept and call it “res ipsa loquitur” instead of “self-evident negligence.” Fortunately, this is getting a bit better on the whole as American style has come to emphasize writing like Orwell and Hemingway. But a huge number of judges and lawyers still insist on legalese where it is unnecessary, and it does nothing except make them sound fancy and keep lay people from understanding.

Licensing itself is something of a protection racket of course. In medicine, if you have a less-than-serious problem, you can go see a nurse practicioner. There really is no legal equivalent. There are paralegals, of course, but they are not permitted to practice law in the way nurses are permitted to practice medicine. Doubtless a good paralegal can do many routine legal tasks with the skill of a lawyer, but you’re still gonna have to pay a lawyer for that deportation advice or help incorporating your small business. T

There are attempts to mitigate this problem, but they don’t eliminate it. There’s small claims court, as Bricker points out, which is nice for small contract disputes or tort claims, but not especially helpful for family law, immigration law, administrative law, and a whole range of other common legal problems. If licensing kept bad lawyers out of the practice, that would be one thing. But the truth is it doesn’t really even accomplish that very well. The system should be reformed, but it probably won’t be because the would-be reformers are all lawyers.

Finally, there’s a certain disregard for unrepresented parties in crafting the law. Because the default assumption is that a party will be represented by a lawyer, judges (and to a lesser extent legislatures) permit the law to become complicated because they don’t place much weight on how difficult a rule will be to apply for the average joe. A precise rule is considered desirable regardless of how many lawyers it takes to apply. The Supreme Court rejects this value decision when it comes to the rules police officers must apply. There, the Court is perfectly willing to sacrifice precision for the sake of ease of application. But this almost never happens when anyone else is expect to apply the law in their daily lives.

There’s something of a self-reinforcing spiral: complicatons in the law require a lawyer for many tasks, which makes it more and more the default that litigants will hire a professional lawyer, which makes judges and legislatures less concerned with how easy a law is to understand. Precision is important, but we could decide as a society that greater justice is achieved when, say, consumers are able to understand and exercise basic contract rights in most cases without having to hire a lawyer than when we attempt to design complex rules that get the right result in 90% of cases. It’s just a value judgment, and one made by lawyers that benefits lawyers.

In short, the law isn’t complicated or insular directly because either aspect helps lawyers, but insularity and complexity are permitted to thrive in part because it benefits lawyers. The people making the rules assume lawyers will be applying them, and that assumption is a self-fulfilling prophecy reinforced by unnecessary legalese and unnecessarily strict licensing rules.

9

I don’t believe nurses are permitted to practice medicine any more than a paralegal is permitted to practice law. Nurses work under the supervision of Doctors; Paralegals work under the supervision of Lawyers. Depending on the context, some Nurses/Paralegals are given more lead on the leash than others. But, a nurse won’t practice medicine.

In practical terms, I think the reason more nurses are seemingly given far more leash than a paralegal is:

a) medicine’s “front lines” are the areas where doctors are less likely to be present (thinking about constant patient observation, changing dressings, administering shots and medicines) whereas law’s front lines are the areas where lawyers can only be present - i.e. the courtroom.

b) since Doctors have far greater supply issues, Nurses are necessarily going to have to be given more leeway since the number of doctors we have just can’t handle the demand.

And, to answer the OP, I think your attempt to distinguish medicine versus law actually makes the case for lawyers. Medicine is physical, tangible. Law is not. Since Law is very abstract, it seems that having purpose-trained people to be able to navigate the made-up system is an efficient way to operate the legal system. The reason that lawyers exist is because it’s more efficient in the long run to have specialized people who know what they’re doing, instead of having otherwise productive time and effort spent on learning court rules and precedent anew each time two new parties waltz into court.

The reason it’s complex, as has been stated already, isn’t because it’s intended to be that way, but rather that there are no clear answers to abstract concepts - and people can and vehemently do disagree on the meaning of these concepts, words, and phrases.

10

I went to a nurse practitioner the other day who examined me, diagnosed me with a relatively complicated condition, and prescribed me a medication. Not only did no doctor ever see me, she did not even talk to a doctor between examination, diagnosis, and prescription. And my bill was lower than if I had seen the doctor at this facility. I don’t know the legal structures underlying what happened – perhaps a doctor was “supervising” her in some metaphysical sense – but nothing even remotely like that could ever happen with a litigant and a paralegal.

11

But I would argue that the legal system is set up so that you, and your millions of fellow citizens, do in fact use the legal system as an end user.

How many contracts have you entered into in your life? The answer would proably surprise you, if you could even figure it out, because most people think of “contracts” as a written document, filled with fine print, and covered with seals and signatures.

The answer is that you’ve probably entered into several thousand contracts in the course of your life.

Most people enter into contracts every day of their lives - when they buy a coffee, or lunch, or a magazine, or renew a Charter Membership with the best damn message-board on the internets. And in addition to daily one-off contracts, most people have ongoing contractual relationships - with their utility companies, their landlord (if they’re renting their home), their ISP provider, the issuers of the software licences that they’ve signed onto to surf the net and use their computers, and so on.

And by and large, all those contracts work, and you don’t need a lawyer to assist you in making them.

And then there are bigger ticket items, like buying a car, or appliances for your house, or new computers. Whenever you dicker over the terms, such as the cost, the delivery, and the guarantees, you’re busy using the law of contract to arrange your affairs. Similar with contracts for intangibles, such as buying insurance to protect your property. You’re quite competent to do all that without needing a lawyer - and in fact, the law assumes the competence and autonomy of the adult individual, unless proven otherwise. And you do all that without knowing about the technicalities of contract law, such as mutual consideration, that lawyers dream about.

Similarly with property - people exercise their legal rights in relation to property all the time - when they buy a new house, or a car, or anything else. And by and large, the law applies automatically, to protect their interests in their property. Most people don’t need to sit on your porch with a loaded shotgun 24 hours a day to protect their house and property - because the law is so entrenched in our society that for the most part, you don’t have to worry about losing your property. (Sure, there is crime and theft; but what I’m trying to get across is that most people rely on the law to protect their property, and for the most part, the law does so.) And you don’t generally need to know the details of property law in order to rely upon it - you’ve got the deed and the registration (or whatever system your jurisdiction uses), and that’s generally good enough for most purposes.

Similarly for close personal relationships, such as marriage and children - you don’t need to know the intricacies of marriage law in order to get married, and you don’t need to know the law governing your relationship with your children in order to look after them, get them registered at school, take them to the hospital in case of accidents, and so on. There’s a lot of law that covers all those issues in great detail, but most people never need to know it.

In short, the law works, and works well, for most end-users.

The difficulties come when there are conflicts - and the court-room, which is what most people think of as “the Law”, is actually one of the most exceptional aspects of the law. It’s much more like the operating theatre. Most people can get through their lives without ever needing any major surgery. If they need a surgery, that’s by definition an exceptional event. Same with a court proceeding - if you need to go to court, with evidence being led, and conflicting legal submissions, and so on - the full adversarial process - you’re already in an exceptional situation in some way. That’s not to say that the law has broken down in your case, but that for whatever reason, you as the end-user need to call in the expert to help you with your situation.

To use the OP’s example, the court-room is like the situation where the end-user has a difficulty with the database and needs the OP to come help make it work.

And yet, that exceptional situation is what most people think of as being “the Law” and triggers arguments about how the law should be simple. But for most of us, the law is simple, because it works well to allow us to govern our personal affairs, buy stuff we want, sell stuff we don’t want, get married, have kids, have a house* - without needing to know the intricacies of just how the law works and how it protects all of your personal interests.

  • Yes, I know that many of these things take money - but that’s an economical issue, not a legal one.
12

Richard has given the most honest and true reply I think, very accurately identifying how the system works.

So I’ll ask your opinion, Richard: why do you think there is such rampant disregard for the fact that so many people simply cannot possibly afford a lawyer? When the lawyers and legislators and judges are all so unconcerned because they assume the presence of a lawyer, why does the devastating cost of legal help not factor in somewhere?

And to Sage Rat: how would you describe the education of a lawyer? I ask because I’ve gotten some interesting answers in real life, and as you might imagine none of them have much of anything at all to do with knowing the thousands and millions of permutations of laws and rules and circumstances to which they apply.

So what makes a lawyer a lawyer, since most of the people who get their bar number will have to hit the books for every case, (although less and less often as they gain experience, especially if they narrow their practice to a particular specialty)

Because that’s not the case for doctors. Sure they have continuing education, but they don’t have to do the kind of research that lawyers have to do with the regularity that lawyers have to do it. There’s no Lexis/Westlaw for doctors. (I’m sure there are up to the minute resources, but you know what I mean. No lawyer in this country could hope to function effectively without access to one or both of those resources.)

Actually, I invite all the lawyers to answer that one. How would you characterize what you learned in law school that makes you so much more able than the average intelligent person to understand law? (That sounds like I’m saying you aren’t, and I’m not. It’s a sincere question assuming the underlying truth that you are that much more able.)

I think the reason I’ve been pretty comfortable with this is because the law, in my view, is about a few very basic things at its heart: language, logic, reason and debate. These are things that I have participated in (and excelled at) for the pure pleasure of it my whole life. (yeah, i know, how do you “participate” in language? Just run with me here, I’m in a hurry) I’m aces at logic puzzles (And LSAT questions, I’ve learned), great with language, passionate about reason and logic and debate.

The one thing in the law that drives me bats is all the fussy details. The shit you give to the paralegal / legal secretary to do. The fussy paper shuffling. ARGH! I nearly blew my appeal because I was so overwhelmed trying to put together the appendix and cites to the record.

13

Northern Piper also makes excellent points, I see.

But still, if the contracts were less complicated, more straightforward, there would be fewer courtroom resolutions.

I’d also like to point out that a great deal of the effort directed at precision ends up making a mess of what should and could have been pretty straightfoward, and a lot of laws are written very badly, increasing the likelihood of legal wrangling. This experience of mine has made me want to work in whatever job it is (i know what it is, can’t remember now) that involves helping the Legislature make sense when it writes laws. My infamous LLC law, for instance, is really pretty unclear in a lot of ways that it doesn’t have to be. (Which is apparent to me because I’m a freak for precise language… one of the cornerstones of the law, supposedly. :smiley: )

14

I’m not a lawyer, so I couldn’t say for certain. I suspect that it’s rather similar to programming where the problem isn’t so much learning a language or about the computer, but rather in how to tightly define the result that you want for the sake of making a bunch of rampaging idiots be able to still come to the same result every time they come to a particular section of code (on the lawmaking side). Or then on the trial side, to be able to debate effectively and impartially.

Brute facts are somewhat useless so long as you have a rough mental guideline for how things stand and access to reference documents with the accurate data.

15

Yes, most probably a doctor is legally liable for your (mal)treatment. And, yes, a paralegal could do the analogue (with the exception of a diagnosis):

take the facts of your case, and present you documents that have been prepared by an attorney, and explain their meaning to you.

here:

16

it would also mean that the subject matter that contracts deal with would me more straightforward and less complicated. This doesn’t jive with an advanced, complex society and economy.

I mean I understand the sentiment, since you and most people only see a very specific type of contractual interaction (i.e. between consumer and an end-user business).

If people had a crystal ball, or a desire to negotiate over and enter into a 1000-page contract detailing every possible nuance and outcome to a transaction, you wouldn’t need words like reasonable and lawyers wouldn’t be needed to write contracts with an eye towards future litigation.

no rational parties to a transaction want to gum up a negotiation by squabbling over infinitesimally small points and spending the time and the money to prospectively detail the rights and remedies for each of these things.

17

The alternative to our system is another system. In every system it matters a great deal who is doing the deciderering, and having the exact right fit in presenter can matter a great deal.

18

Unfortunately I think the biggest barrier to a sensible and easily understood legal system is the dearth of reasonable people… or perhaps I should say the abundance of UNreasonable people. Case in point, a lawsuit that went all the way to the 9th district court of appeals (I helped my neighbor with it) over a movie deal. The movie was shit, super cheap. One particular guy put it boatloads more money than anyone else, deal was set up that he would get first money that came out. The movie did not make back what it was made for. One of the other guys in the deal sued the big investor, claiming…wait for it… USURY??? among other things. How do you claim usury with a straight face when everyone agrees that Big Investor didn’t get back even half of what he put in??? No matter how the deal was structured… that’s just REALITY.

The guy suing lost…OF COURSE… but look at the time and energy.

And money. (No hijack, but I can’t help but note that that guy had a lawyer take that piece of shit case all the way…he had money. But I couldn’t get a lawyer for my very solid case… because I have no money. So the idea that no lawyer = bad case is ridiculous. No lawyer = no money, and no money does NOT = bad case.)

19

I’m not convinced that that the law can’t be vastly more user-friendly (as I’ve already said) but I’m willing to admit I might be wrong about that… if so, one service I’d like to see (or to know about if it does in fact exist) is Legal Insurance in the same sense that one typically has medical insurance or auto insurance.

For a flat & reasonable monthly fee I have a multi-faceted attorney firm’s services available to me on a limited but as-needed basis: free representation in criminal or civil cases if I am charged or sued, plus free legal representation for the first (let’s say) time per a given year that I find it necessary and appropriate to sue someone. Something like that. Priced for the average citizen.

20

I’m going to have to disagree with this opinion, vehemently.

Many lawyers take on many pro bono cases because they believe in their clients’ position, or whatnot. You probably didn’t find a lawyer for other reasons. If you re-read your thread, you will find some attorneys giving their opinion on why that may have been the case.
Yes, sometimes people get extremely emotional about cases and chase good money after bad, all in some endeavor to be proven right. You aren’t privy to their emotional states and the information that lead them to pursue objectively irrational litigation; some lawyers will not take these types of cases because they don’t want to enable their clients, some lawyers will take these cases because they don’t want to rob their clients of whatever emotional satisfaction they get from drawing the process out. You can’t sit in an ivory tower and pass judgment on how these people are just “unreasonable” and that if they were more reasonable we wouldn’t need expensive lawyers and all disputes in life would be bubblegum and candy - especially you, given your multi-appeal, 5+ year legal endeavors.

Tu quoque?