Lawyers, Maybe Shakespeare was right

You know the quote, “first kill all the lawyers”. Our world would be less orderly without them. We are a nation of laws. The courts are the places where lawyers use the power vested in them to keep order, ask for equality, make justice reign.

That’s most of the lawyers, most of the time. There are some who are less than the honorable workers of the bar that we see in TV dramas.

I have a few examples:

I have in my possession an advertisement torn from the pages of the Chicago Tribune. The title of the ad says, “I am not a shark”. Then this nice looking women, a divorce lawyer representing women, says, “we just want to make that scumbag pay”. Shark is too nice a word. I don’t think this is what the founding fathers had in mind as they began to construct the legal system. Reconciliation is not in her vocabulary. She has a 100% divorce rate among her clients. Destroying your life is not her problem, KACHING is all that matters.

I have been “sued” by an attorney who said I sent his client a fax without his client’s permission. It’s true. I did. But I did have his permission according to the law; I did business with this client. It made no difference. He threatened me with a lawsuit. Of course, if I would agree to pay a decent settlement he would drop the case. I don’t know what the difference is between this legal extortion and when Tony with an ill fitting suit and a baseball bat shows up and lets you know you get to keep your kneecaps if you give him a hundred bucks a week. I got the lawsuit dropped when I appealed to the client.

I have on my desk right now a half dozen class action lawsuits being acted in my behalf right now. I am not participating. The way this works is the lawyers get all the money and I get a 50% off discount coupon for my next $20 purchase. And, corporations don’t pay these settlements, I do, you do, we all do in higher prices, less service and if the corporate attorney is smart he takes everything offshore insulating the corporation from anything like that again. This means jobs are gone. We need tort reform.

I won’t even mention medical malpractice abuses with lawyers helping clients win the Doctor Lottery and I won’t mention the workman’s compensation attorneys protecting repeat performance “injured” ad infinitum.

It’s a mess; it makes companies look for safe haven. Can’t something be done to stop these abuses? It should be the Bar Associations themselves. But sometimes you can’t depend on the wolves to watch the chicken coop.

Shakespeare was wrong, let’s not kill all the lawyers, let’s begin neutering the pirates and extortionists. That might discourage them. Or maybe not!