Dirty Tricks

I was thinking about all the tricks attorneys play, how you always get a really important motion by messenger (personal service in CA shortens your time to respond) at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon, how they always try to back door certain things, and how we (the plaintiff's side) says it's always the defense who does this kind of thing. This got me thinking about my male friend C who does defense work (I suppose everyone has to have one friend who does that sort of thing), and I'm sure he and his cohorts (co-conspirators?) think the same thing about me and my colleagues (whom he surely calls cohorts, co-conspirators, or some other equal rhetoric).

What happened to the days of honor? To when we had a noble profession? When did we all become the kind of lawyers that the jokes were about? My female friend C was mentioning that she thinks the single thing the Bar in her state could do to help lawyers was to cut down on the unauthorized practice of law, to shut down people who are undermining the quality of work that we do, and that doing so would help restore the public faith in our profession. (I apologize if I'm paraphrasing too liberally, C, but I believe that's the crux of it.)

When I was on the courthouse steps, some guy told an in pro per/pro se defendant "don't pay no evil lawyer to help you! I can help you right around the corner!" Excuse me? When you mess up this poor guy's life, and he really needs a lawyer, and you find yourself in jail and you need a lawyer for yourself, and you both end up paying lawyers far more than if the one guy had just gotten a PD in the first place and you had just gotten yourself either (a) a real job, or (b) a law degree and a bar card yourself, that's the kind of thing that makes people hate lawyers! Yes, we sometimes laugh at your idiocy, and damn it, it's our right. Suffering through law school and particularly through the bar exam has earned us the right. But when you make a mockery of all we've accomplished and then come to us expecting us to help fix it, it's not just distasteful, it's downright offensive. Cutting down on the unauthorized practice of law is high on my priority list too.

But once you have the bar card, I guess you can engage in all the dirty tricks you can figure out under the rules and some that are blatantly not under the rules but infrequently get punished. I even have a few of my own. If that sounds ominous, maybe it should. :-)