Recently, Phin spoke out loud about the almost universal dislike for attorneys in modern culture. Among other things, he opined as follows:
In general I’ve found that most people hate to ask for help; especially to resolve a situation we’ve screwed up. It’s that moment of being helpless, when we realize that we can’t solve the problem and we’ve made it worse, that causes us to loath lawyers.
Miss Feisty agreed pointed towards relevant examples:
[P]articularly in family law cases (although, I see the parallel in criminal cases) because a judge (or jury as the case may be) controls one’s fate. It’s much easier for people to blame someone else (their attorneys) for an outcome they are unhappy with than their own actions for getting them there in the first place.
A-fucking-men. With divorces so commonplace these days (Everyone’s doing it, didn’t you hear?), and most people thinking they got screwed over royally in the legal process, of course lawyers are disliked. Especially when one considers that it a divorce essentially results from the ill contributions by both parties, and not everyone is willing to admit that they failed in love. Add children to the mix, and it gets even stickier. Interestingly enough, the criminal law judge that I once worked for had just transferred off the domestic docket, and he pointed towards the relative civility of the criminal defendants in relation to divorcing couples. I do suppose that since most criminal defendants opt to plea bargain, they must be rather content with the relatively lighter punishment they receive at the hands of their attorneys. Heh. On the other hand, an attorney certainly isn’t a marriage counselor, no?
When lawsuits are resolved by negotiation or mediation, there is possibility for solutions that perhaps might benefit both sides. When things get to a lawsuit, only one party technically “wins,” although that party may not be as big a winner as they had hoped. So right there, that’s at least fifty percent of people involved in litigation at any given time that would tend towards disliking lawyers. With multiple lawsuits and lower verdicts than ever these days, it’s easy to see why more parties see themselves as “losers” in the fight against lawyers.
To analogize the situation to a doctor-patient relationship, let us assume the patient has a degenerative condition that’s been steadily worsening for a matter of years (much like the point in a dispute when a lawyer is contacted). Like the lawyer, who is bound to zealously represent his client (barring frivolous claims and the like), the doctor is bound by the Hippocratic Oath and will likely try to make some last ditch efforts to heal the patient. The prognosis is poor, but the doctor still persists, and if the patient continues to deteriorate despite his efforts… well, that necessarily isn’t the fault of the doctor. Yet for some unquantifiable reason, this is accepted, while a similar “failure” by a lawyer is not so well-received.
Ah well. At least one can be assured that most lawyers are well aware of this aversion when they enter the profession. As someone wise once said, “Crap happens.“
8 comments
Taking that doctor/lawyer analogy, could it be the doctor’s “clients” don’t complain because they are dead?
Now THAT’s an idea…
; P
(joking)
Ah, but there’s always the litiginous relatives that come out of the woodwork (never having been seen or heard from while the patient was dying). Been there and done that just once in 30 years, but that’s ’cause I tried my best to flush them out and work with them too before it was too late. Often they had unresolved business and guilt involving the patient, which they’d try to transfer to the doc. Kinda like what is described above with our legal brethren.
I generally rationalize avoiding antipathy to attorneys in realizing that if we did not have a legal system in which to slug it out virtually, there would be a whole lot more gunfire in the streets and hallways of America as we physically tried to extract revenge, rather than legally.
Yes, peeps despise lawyers until they need one, right? Many can’t see anything beyond the stereotypes on TV–not all lawyers make a zillion dollars a year and not all lawyers are litigators either. The doctor analogy is a good one.
I have always seen the legal field as largely artificial.
If mathematics were codified in a dead language, and practitioners were required to obtain a degree in mathematics and to pass a rigorous mathematic review in order to be licensed to perform calculations in this or that state, then people wanting to transact business would be required to hire an expert to do what they, themselves, could do … if allowed. Buying or selling a car? Call the mathematician … or go to jail (’practicing mathematics without a license’).
It is vital that people who have studied and demonstrated knowledge of the legal system help “lay” people navigate the system … but the system itself is cloistered for the specific purpose of setting up a priesthood of Latin-speakers to perform the math for people who might do it themselves if it were not illegal to do so. They certainly might do it far less effectively than an expert, but this is true of plumbing, cooking, driving and mathematics, too.
As the system stands (camouflaged in Latin, etc.), only a fool would wander into a courtroom (or a significant contract) without the able assistance of a “priest(ess).” It is the system itself that is superfluous, and which makes attorneys an artificial necessity.
I stopped whining about how I “hate lawyers” long ago because I have met too many who are really very excellent people, if not friends. But my radical Protestant upbringing does not allow me to respect the legal “industry” itself. If the main (or only) reason I can’t represent myself is because the legal transaction requires a knowledge of Latin (as a very broad and simplified example), then convert it to English and let me do it myself is my idea. Cheaper that way by a long shot (unless I screw up … but when is that NOT an issue?).
No offense intended, and I am interested in reasoned rebuttal pointing out aspects I have not considered. (When I was younger I considered a law degree for myself, and if I were ten years younger today I might actually go for it now!)
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