My favorite related experience was while clerking, and the high profile name atty at the firm just got a client in an infant wrongful death claim. Crowing over his good fortune he loudly asked, “How much do you think a dead nigger baby is worth? Put down a million dollars - it will get my name in the papers!”
But I’m sure it was just my fortune to be present that one day something like that ever occurred.
I believe another reason that lawyers are “hated” has to do with the use of lawyers by huge companies to, in the eyes of the public, screw the little guy. For example, I have an uncle who used to own a little store named “Cost Plus”. This was quite awhile ago, before “Cost Plus” was a household name. Of course, when the company that owned the “real” Cost Plus found out, they sued. Rather than just make him change the name of the store, they opted to sue him for every penny he had, forcing him into bankruptcy.
Now, of course, this was likely the doing of the corporation that owned Cost Plus, not the lawyers - I doubt they were sitting in there with their client, saying, “C’mon! Soak him! Ruin his life! Muahahahaha!” Nevertheless, the lawyers in that case were the tool with which the corporation stuck it to my uncle. It’s easy to see how situations like that would create a lot of hostility towards lawyers.
Jeff
blanx:
Oh no! Are you saying that if huge awards go to the public, and not the lawyer or their client, that you will quit your job? Well, it will be a sad day indeed, but luckily there are plenty of lawyers to make up for your loss.
And of course, I never said lawyers or their clients should get nothing. If you take a look at some other professions, you should fairly quickly realize there are other systems of being paid besides ridiculously huge awards that by all rights should go to the public, because usually the public will end up paying them.
And I know the blanx does not speak for all lawyers when he says that he would quit if the system of payment was changed.
Another reason why people hate lawyers in only two letters:
O.J.
There are few things more nightmarish than being falsely accused of a crime and having to rely on overburdened public defenders, while those with means can hire absolutely remorseless and shameless Shapiros, Baileys, Dershowitz’s, Abramsons, etc… The West Memphis Three had no shred of evidence connecting them to three murders and their verdicts were two life sentences and one death sentence; OJ had motive, a past history of violence, holes in his alibi, an unexplained gash, the victims blood in his yard, etc., but because he also had money he golfs while the WM3 waits for the chamber. While this isn’t the fault of lawyers in and of itself, people do associate lawyers with another tool of the rich to make themselves more godlike.
Except perhaps the next victim of the criminal who was sprung on the technicality.
Maintaining a just and accurate rule-of-law is nothing if not a delicate balancing act.
Nightime- do you know how one of those class action suits works fromn a business standpoint? The costs in litigating from the plaintiff’s side are usually enormous. PLaus, plaintiff’s side work is a gamble at the core- you are unsure whether or not you will recover anything, and could conceivably be out all of your costs.
You certainly implied that the plaintiffs and their lawyers should get nothing in your previous statement.
Additionally, what is the incentive for the plaintiff to go through the whole trouble of suing, and the pain and hardship of the court case, other than money? By the time the cases end, most plaintiffs don’t care at all about the rightness or wrongness of their fate (not because they are only concerned about , but rather because it takes so bleeding long). People should be compensated for their troubles, and the only means we currently have is .
As to the OJ thing, the problem with that case was Marsha Clark, and Judge Ito. If that case had been tried in my prior jursidiction of New Hampshire, it’d have lasted 3 weeks at the most.
All of this may be true, but it’s not a technicality- it’s a freaking constitutional right. Calling it a technicality misses the reality of what actually happens.
Threadkiller:
The exclusionary rule has its problems, but it is still superior to the alternatives I have seen. It was especially disoncerting to see this alternative from Sua:
So the alternative is yet another case of huge awards being paid by the public to the lawyers and their clients? I think not.
Exactly! Just like any profession or group where some “bad apples” spoil the bunch, the corrupt, money-grubbing, (insert adjective here) ones are the ones you hear most about. People are quick to complain about a poor example of a profession but slow to laud the good ones.
I think there is a perception that there are very few “good” lawyers, and maybe due to the nature of the profession there is a greater percentage of the “baddies” than would be in another group, say doctors or engineers. So that’s my theory, that people hate lawyers because lawyers have a greater percentage of poor examples than any other group, so they get to be despised and the butts of jokes more than the other groups.
Or maybe everyone’s just jealous.
Nightime, you would be amazed how effective a deterrent my idea would be to violations of the 4th Amendment if the police and/or D.A.'s in question could not be indemnified. 
But there is another option: criminalize violations of the 4th Amendment. It is already a federal crime to violate the civil rights of another under color of law. Extend that to cover illegal searches.
The problem with the exclusionary rule is that it is in direct contradiction to the basic precept of the law of evidence - “that which is relevant is admissible; that which is irrelevant is admissible.” Under the exclusionary rule, relevant evidence is excluded simply because of the way it was collected. That makes little sense.
The countervailing argument usually is that illegally obtained evidence is excluded because it is suspect - if the police obtained it without the proper judicial oversight, it is more likely to have been planted, etc. I don’t agree with this argument for two reasons:
First, I don’t think that is the point of the Fourth Amendment. I believe that the point is freedom from unwarranted government interference with our persons or our home. The Fourth Amendment is not intended to be a mere evidentiary rule to determine what is credible and what is not.
Second, even if it were intended to be an evidentiary rule, the exclusionary rule is a bad one, as it is both over- and under-inclusive. A proper search warrant is no bar to the planting of evidence (note the planting allegations in the O.J. case). Nor is illegally seized evidence by definition planted.
A deterrent is needed, but the question is, what is a better deterrent - where potential criminals go free and all the police and District Attorney suffer is the embarrassment of screwing up a case, or where potential criminals go to trial with all relevant evidence against them submitted, but where the police and D.A. suffer actual harm for their violation of the 4th Amendment?
In my experience, tangible detriment is a more effective deterrent to intangible detriment.
Sua
I know a lot of lawyers. I have to constantly work with them. I have dated a few lawyers. The problem with about half of the lawyers I know is that they can’t turn their lawyering off. Sure, it makes them good in the courtroom but in a regular social situation it makes them the nasty asshole that no one wants to talk to, thus perpetuating a cycle. ie, No one wants to talk to me, let’s get more bitter…look no one wants to talk to me…let’s get more bitter and argumentative. etc"
I guess the real problem comes when asshole lawyer B becomes excessively litigious in real life. There was that Judge Judy show where the lawyer was suing some woman whom he trapped in a handicap space (she wasn’t handicapped but was illegally in the space) for several hours and then tried to sue her afterwards for taking up the space that he needed to use for the post office. The sad thing is that I can easily see any of the assholish lawyers I work with do that at any given time. I can even see them suing for billable hours if the electricity goes out in an elevator for 5 minutes.
ack!!
“that which is irrelevant is inadmissible.”
You’ve been a great audience. Don’t forget to tip your waitress.
Sua
Piffle. Judgment-proof tortfeasors couldn’t give a damn whether you sue them or not. And I assure you there are very few police officers (they’re the ones who perform illegal searches, not the D.A.'s) with any significant assets capable of being collected by a plaintiff.
december:
The link you provided doesn’t give any more detail than you did, so it’s impossible for me to examine whatever specific case they are talking about. For example, it’s unclear who much of the money retained by the lawyers went to their expenses, and how much was retained as fee.
If the people being represented had to pay, then it’s incorrect to refer to it as a contingency fee – it was merely the expense of hiring the lawyers.
Even a class action suit must conform to the ethical rules regarding reasonableness of fees. I’d be quite surprised to see a fee (that is, money earned after expenses) of 50%, even in a class-action.
Since your link makes only an unsupported assertion that this is so, I will make an equally gratuitous denial. It ain’t so.
-jarbaby
The Practice is not the most realistic picture of the law to be found.
But even so, we live in a society in which we choose to let the guilty go free in order to protect the system. Yes, it’s awful when a nun-murderer is released. But would it not be mroe awful if the police were simply free to search what they liked, when they liked? As awful as a single murder is, I’d suggest it would be far worse if the cops could search at their leisure.
To ensure that the cops must follow the rules, the courts have tried to remove all incentive for them to flout the laws. Evidence found without a valid warrant is excluded. The cops are thus given a vested interest in playing by the book and getting a neutral, detached magistrate to approve a search before it’s made.
I didn’t see the particular episode you mention, so I don’t know what the facts were. But I can tell you that the show incorrectly leaves the impression that the fruits of searches are subject to exclusion far more than they really are.
Example: several years ago, I saw a Practice episode in which a man had murdered his wife, and was driving along with the body in the trunk when his car was stopped by a young police officer. The inexperienced officer testified that she “had a hunch” and searched the trunk without a warrant or consent, and discovered the body. Naturally, the defense moved to exclude the evidence.
It then developed that the officer and the man were having an affair; they had conspired to kill the man’s wife and then immunize him from conviction by “discovering” the body via her job and an illegal search.
According to the show, that was the end of that - the body was inadmissible.
In real life, if such a thing happened, the prosecution could successfully argue that exclusion was NOT warranted, because the police officer was not acting as an agent of the state when she “discovered” the body; the wrong sought to be prevented by the exclusionary rule simply didn’t exist. The man was never subject to an illegal search by police; he was participating in a charade with his lover, who happened to be a police officer.
Alternatively, it’s clear he actually consented to the search, so even if you assume that a cop is a cop no matter what, he was part of the scheme and wanted the officer to find the body. Either way, the evidence would have been admissible.
In real life.
The lesson is: don’t look to TV to determine how well these remedies are working.
Bingo. And it’s way more than half that can’t turn it off. Try about 95%. I’ve had extremely laid-back friends go into rabid lawyer mode rather than admit they were wrong on some minor everyday issue. I think for most lawyers, it becomes reflexive. One of the common complaints heard in the “spouses of law students” group on my law school campus was they felt their spouses were constantly cross-examining them, rather than communicating with them. I know I fight this urge in personal interactions, but many lawyers don’t see the problem it creates.
Well, I’ve got a $1.5 million sanction (joint and several) against a guy making $35,000. He seemed upset when we seized his Geo Metro and garnished his wages.
Sua
I have been in the lawyering business for 35 years, albeit in a rural backwater, and I think I can make a few general observations.
Lawyers make the best companions, dinner and drinking partners. While the ego gets in the way sometimes, their conversation tends to be intelligent and witty.
There are more than a few jerks in the trade. Let me assure you that lawyers hate the mercenary, money grubbing, win-at-any-cost, argue-every-point-to-exhaustion jack off more than the general public does. Often we literally drive these twits out of practice. None the less there are some left– if you want to find out who the jerks are go to the waiting room behind the court room where the lawyers gather to drink coffee and gossip and see who it is that nobody will speak to.
I can’t speak for the Bay State but out here less than 10% of the legislators are lawyers, and those are for the most part party hacks without a practice. No one with knowledge of the facts can accuse the Iowa legislature of being dominated by lawyers.
I have seen 40% contingency agreements with a 50% contingency if the case goes on appeal. These are exceptional cases in which it is obvious that the cause is doubtful and the expenses will be high and no one is willing to take it at the more typical 1/3 contingency. Remember that the contingency fee lawyer only gets paid if the case is won and the only people who go on a contingency are those who cannot pay a flat fee of the sort you pay your doctor, your fuel oil dealer and your plumber. Try telling your doctor that you ought not to have to pay him because you were not as cured as think you should have been.
Many people regard lawyers as having sinister occult powers that can transform reality with magic words like res ipsa loqutor and the like. Lawyers are seen as dabblers in the mystical are therefore feared. Most people don’t know much more about the law than they have seen on TV or heard in a tavern (not reliable sources of information) and regard the whole thing as somewhat scary. For most people and encounter with the awful majesty of the law is some sort of traffic or small claims court and it is not a pleasant experience. It is only natural that that same sense of dread is carried over to people who move freely and unafraid through the perils of the legal system.
Lawyers exist to assist people in resolving and avoiding disputes—they do not create disputes any more than firemen cause fires and cops create crime (note that some firemen are arsonists and some cops are criminals and some lawyers create disputes).
Some lawyers work in an adversarial setting. It is only natural for the anxieties involved in being in an adversarial situation should transfer to the guys who are actually representing or championing your adversary.
Why Do People Hate Lawyers?
Innate revulsion at things reptillian…
Hey! I resssemble that remark!
:slither:
Back to the whole exclusionary rule thing-
I think that the problem with Sua’s plan to allow civil damages vs. the exclusion of the evidence is an issue of worldview. The point of the exclusionary rule is really at some level to put the defendant in the position that he would have been in had the police not violated his rights- thus, creating the legal fiction that the illegally seized evidence does not exist.
If you think of it in those terms, it makes more sense. You may disagree with it, but it makes more sense.