I am not an Internet expert, but I do post on message boards, uh, now and then.
But you still haven’t explained what “interest” any of these folks have?
If you don’t understand that a person who is a lawyer saying “don’t represent yourself, hire a layer” without any mention that person happens to be a lawyer looks skivvy, I don’t know what to tell you.
Sure is skivvy – almost as skivvy as a surgeon advising people to not operate on their own innards.
Yes because these are completely comparable situations. Tons of people operate on themselves but nobody attempts to represent themselves in legal matters.
I don’t think **John’s **point is entirely without merit: operating on yourself verges on suicide, but the pros and cons of acting for yourself are rather less clear cut. Regardless of reality - on which I will opine in a moment - there is a perception that lawyers propound the view that everyone should use a lawyer in order to increase the amount of work available to lawyers. For appearances’ sake it would perhaps have been better for Bricker to have mentioned his background, though I think he’s retired(?).
What those who accuse lawyers of self interest don’t understant is this, IME:
Plus also, IME the type of people who might self represent are the type of people I have absolutely no interest whatever in representing. For several reasons, self-representation self selects for “bad client”. At least in this jurisdiction, most people with a decent case can find a lawyer.
When a person tells you that they had a bad experience self representing and that the profession hated them and the judge was biased against them, bear in mind that IME there is a very, very good chance they are type of person who thinks that anyone who does not agree with them is biased or hates them.
Imagine you are a chess master and your sworn job is to neutrally oversee a chess game between a middle ranked player and a complete newbie, for high stakes: the loser will have their arm chopped off. You can see that the newbie doesn’t have the first clue how to play and is making major mistakes.
Do you infringe neutrality and help the newbie, possibly resulting in the middle ranked player justifably accusing you of bias? Do you stand quiet and watch the newbie lose their arm?
Are you getting a cringing feeling?
So you have an unexplainable objection.
Not at all. I explained it. Your inability to comprehend the explanation is not my burden to overcome.
It’s pretty obvious, the implication is “I’m a lawyer, so when I tell you Don’t represent yourself, hire a lawyer, what I mean is, Don’t represent yourself, pay me to represent you. After all, a guy’s gotta eat.”
The flipside is, who better to speak about the concerns of representing yourself in court? A doctor? An engineer? An exotic dancer? Oh, wait, how about someone knowledgeable about the law and the court system and why self representation is a bad idea. And who would that be? :smack:
The background to this, though, is that very few lawyers would actually benefit by the otherwise self-represented seeking legal counsel. They are, generally speaking, not the clients lawyers typically dream of having. 
you said it “looks skivvy.” That’s simply a conclusion or expression of your personal opinion.
Plus, what’s “skivvy”? I understand that word to mean “underwear”. 
OK, I have a law degree but am not an attorney. I would not represent myself except in the most trivial of situations. And I would absolutely not recommend that anyone else represent themselves unless they basically don’t care what the outcome is or there is no actual adversarial element. People (often family) ask me about legal stuff all of the time - I always tell them the same thing: get a lawyer. I assure you it’s not because I hope they’ll hire me as their lawyer me, because: a) they can’t and b) I can’t.
I think the word intended is usually spelt, “skeevy”
Certainly many of them are going after things that aren’t real legal issues. But there are some who are dealing with real legal matters where they do need counsel, like murder defense, where they would be far better served with representation.
Or are you stating that the clients would be so screwed up it would be more of a drain on resources and effort than they compensation the lawyer would receive?
ISTM that this is a bit circular.
After the conventional wisdom has been solidly established as maintaining that self-representation is a bad idea, then the people who insist on doing it anyway will naturally contain a very high percentage of cranks, and these are people a lawyer wouldn’t want as clients anyway. But if the conventional wisdom were to become that self-representation is a good idea, then a lot of more normal people - and desirable clients - might go for it as well. So it’s in the interests of lawyers to promote the notion that everyone should hire a lawyer.
Except you’re missing the most significant factor – aside from the most basic stuff, legal practice ain’t simple, so normal people will flop at it too. If more people self-represent, you’ll just end up with more messes.
We’re not recommending that people use lawyers so we can get the work. We’re recommending that people use lawyers so they can get better results than if they go it on their own. The collateral benefit to lawyers is that when the opposing party is represented by a lawyer, the odds are very high matter will proceed much more smoothly than if the opposing party is self-represented.
I was not advocating self-representation in that post. I was responding to one specific argument for lawyers not having self-interest.
All true, very likely.
Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that people tend to make assessments that align with their self-interest, and lawyers would naturally tend to find arguments in favor of more people hiring lawyers more compelling than would people who had no self-interest involved.
I mean, not to specifically impugn lawyers or anything, but they are not above human nature. Everyone is affected by self-interest, even lawyers.
I can’t speak for Malthus, but for myself, yes. Where I am, for weighty disputes, most people can afford proper counsel appropriate to the level of dispute, either by cash up front, or security (lawyer holding the mortgage) or payment plans, or contingency fees, or legal aid, or borrowing (mortgage, line of credit, credit cards, family, friends), or delegating parts of a file to trained non-lawyers (paralegals, clerks, etc.), or limiting the retainer to only certain parts of the file. (And yes, where I am the court usually orders the loser to pay a large portion of the winner’s legal bill.)
When a party is self-represented on a matter that is not a simple matter, it usually isn’t that the person could not retain counsel, but instead is because the party does not want to pay counsel, or has unrealistic expectations or demands that a lawyer could not meet, or just plain hates lawyers.
If you’re a lawyer, you’re inclined not to want to represent someone who preferred to charge off into litigious oblivion rather than hire a lawyer, you’re inclined not to want to represent someone who thinks they know your job better than you do, and you’re inclined not to want to represent someone who would turn around and sue you for not winning an unwinnable case.
Then we come to the self-represented types who are crackpots, who at the lesser end of the scale waste lawyers’ time by calling about town trying to get free legal advice throughout their cases, and who at the other end of the scale stalk, harass, assault and sue lawyers.
So yes, self-represented people knocking at a lawyer’s door quite often are “so screwed up it would be more of a drain on resources and effort than they compensation the lawyer would receive.”
Smart lawyers will routinely ask prospective clients, “Has someone else already represented you in this case? What happened?”
And the average citizen is very ignorant of even the most basic points of law. I’ve encountered frighteningly large numbers of people who believe that the Constitution of 1787 created, ex nihilo, an entirely new legal corpus, and that the Constitution bears to statutes the same relation that geometric axioms and postulates bear to theorems. Or consider the crowd that thinks that “Corporations are not people” is any sane kind of refutation of Citizens United, or those who have no idea of what “circumstantial evidence” means, but think it’s somehow a bad thing.
I’m not a lawyer. I couldn’t even pass myself off as a legal secretary for five minutes. But I know enough that, to me, the idea of Joe Average representing himself gives me the same feeling as watching a child playing near the edge of a cliff.