I'm not sure when was the decisive moment that I realized lawyers were rapacious, greedy shysters looking for ways to fleece their clients. Over the course of my life, over the past sixty years, I've been through a lot of lawyers. I've been in and out of jail, have had problems with a few exes, and have been sued a few times. The courthouse has been my secondary residence, and there were a few years when I was in my thirties when the courthouse and the jailhouse were my primary residences.
I haven't led a perfect life, and I regret a lot about the choices I've made.
That said, even with a thick criminal record and the fact I have some two dozen judgments and child-support orders outstanding against me, I am a better man than the men (and they have all been men) who have represented me. I have come to hate lawyers. Hate even the sight of them. When you're waiting for them in court, the first thing I, as a client, notice is how their expression changes when they see you. They may enter the courthouse laughing and joking with one of their lawyer friends or with some court clerk, but when they see you - their whole face and body language changes to one of massive disappointment and glumness. It's just amazing to watch it actually happen. You, the client, are the reason why they're actually there, you're paying them for their time, or, in my case a lot of the time, Legal Aid is paying them - and you, the client, are the person they least want to see.
Most lawyers' clients don't get that, but it's true. Whatever kind of working relationship you have with your lawyer, you have to understand these things above all: You are just a source of money to your lawyer. Your lawyer doesn't actually like you; your lawyer doesn't ultimately give a damn what happens to you; your lawyer would never talk to you or spend time with you if there wasn't money connected to it.
This is what I hate about lawyers. At bottom, they just don't give a good goddamn about you. It's just a business, it's just about the almighty dollar. People who become lawyers become lawyers not to help but to bill. As a client, you are a source of billable hours, a collection of minutes representing fractional fees. Lawyers always make it clear that their agreeing to see you is simply a commercial transaction. From the moment they give the say-so, and this is usually very, very early, you pay for not only their advice and opinions but their time, period. Can you think of any other profession that works like this?
In the case of those who are represented on Legal Aid certificates, it's even worse. Since the client is completely disconnected from the payment of fees, and since those fees remain fixed in a block sum regardless of how much time the lawyer spends on the case, you should consider yourself lucky if you get ten minutes of their time. It's quite well known among criminal defence lawyers who do a lot of Legal Aid work that you have to approach it like Wal-Mart: you have to take clients in volume. To these lawyers, clients are no longer people with individual problems that require specialized solutions. To the Wal-Mart lawyers, clients can easily be treated as cattle, to be herded along prescribed routes. It's disgusting.
In both cases, lawyers will almost always fall into the categories of greedy or incompetent, typically both. It's common knowledge among young lawyers that you have to herd together a lot of clients so you can gobble up a lot of fees, and it is exactly this commercial, business mentality that leads these shysters to dangerous short cuts. Greed often leads lawyers to become incompetent, not only because they're taking on too much but because they're taking on stuff they don't know enough about. Lawyers who've only done slip and falls and med mal find themselves doing divorce law; lawyers who've never stepped outside of criminal court suddenly find themselves drawing up wills or handling house deals. I've been the victim of this a million times. As a young kid facing the system for the first time, I found myself at the mercy of snot-nosed young lawyers who before meeting me had never stepped foot inside a courtroom. How'd you like to have your bail argued by some 25-year-old whose only courtroom experience is as a spectator?
The point is, in my life, I've been screwed over by so many different lawyers, I've lost count. When they're not grubbing for clients and money, they're busy making mistakes. That's the other thing most people don't realize is that lawyers screw up a lot of the time. I don't know if it's because they have too many clients or the law firms they work for don't give 'em enough to prepare, but whatever the reason, most lawyers are screw-ups and bad at what they do. I created this blog to broadcast this fact to the world, to puncture the myth of elitist self-importance that lawyers project onto an unsuspecting world full of unsuspecting clients. Over the days/weeks/months ahead, that's exactly what I'll be doing.
