A lawyer writes to confirm my observations of his profession:
Your recent talk about lawyers hits close to home and is in most cases true. I’m an attorney who works in public contracting. I went to a third-tier law school and am not working for some prestige firm. I’m currently in a litigation defending against a party who has retained a big K Street law firm where all of the attorneys went to so-called “good” schools–we’re talking Ivys and the next level down.
In drafting an opposition to a stay request, I obviously did my due diligence and read the cases referenced by the other party for myself. After all, these cases are cited as precedent in support of their claim. The interesting thing was, the cases either weren’t appropriate analogues to the current situation, or in one instance, the main case the other side relied upon stood for the opposite proposition of what they claimed it did.
Unbelievable. I really need to start charging more.
In my experience, about 90 percent of legal briefs are written by lazy people attempting to bluff other people they assume are even lazier. In most – not many, most – of the legal arguments I have personally read or heard presented in court, there are multiple shameless attempts equivalent to asserting that there are twelve lights when there are only four or to claim that -1 is actually equal to +1. These attempts are easily disproved, of course, but only if your anticipation of their arguments and your preparations for dealing with them are adequate.
The level of sheer sloppiness across the board is absolutely incredible. I would NEVER hire a lawyer and expect him to even do the most basic reading of the primary material; in most cases they simply don’t do it. This is a crucial flaw, because often the significance of a particular phrase or passage don’t leap out at you until the fifth or sixth reading. With the exception of contract lawyers, who are genuinely detail-oriented individuals who actually read the relevant documents, most lawyers are rhetoricians who rely upon their verbal skills to manipulate emotions and win the day that way. And they are almost invariably unprepared for the non-lawyer who actually sits down and does the relevant research involved.
It is said, not inaccurately, that the law is nothing more than a mutually-agreed-upon illusion. And from that, it correctly follows that even the best lawyers are little more than smooth-talking illusionists with professional credentials.