Did You Hear the One About Dead Lawyers?

The last time we visited Carl the lawyer the subject was car telephones. My friend from Fresno is now a big-time plaintiff’s attorney in Los Angeles, and he was telling me about rotten looks other motorists shoot his way as he weaves through traffic, yakking away in his big black BMW with the Malibu-is-a-Way-of-Life license frames. “They hate me and everything I stand for,” he said. I thought it was a joke, and I think he did too. It wasn’t.

Lawyers in California have been taking their lumps over the past week. The president of the State Bar of California called a press conference Monday and attempted to link a madman’s deadly attack on a San Francisco law firm with a growing public disdain for the legal profession.

Enough is enough, is what Harvey Saferstein said. Stop the lawyer-bashing.

Here is what everyone else said:

Hahahahahahahaha.

The lampooning of Saferstein by columnists, comedians and even some colleagues has not stopped. After I heard my 20th lawyer joke in a week--Why do they bury them 12 feet deep? Because deep down they all are really good--I tracked down Carl for an expert opinion on Saferstein’s crusade.

“I was very happy to see it,” he said. “I thought since ninth grade that being a lawyer was an honorable thing to do. I mean, Abraham Lincoln did it, right? Now, after being in practice for 10 years, I find that at times I am not made to feel so honorable.”

You mean people hate you and everything about you?

“Exactly. Nobody likes lawyers, until they have a loved one who is seriously injured or killed. Then we are the first ones they call.”

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Carl caught me up on a few cases. The skinny high school kid who complained about a sore neck to his football coach only to be ordered back into the game, where he promptly snapped his neck and was left paralyzed for life. And the infant who, in a botched delivery, was damaged with forceps and will never draw a breath on his own. And the young mother of two who was blinded and disfigured when a cleanser exploded in her face.

I asked Carl how many of his clients would give back the money he won for them in return for full use of their broken bodies.

“Every one of them,” he said. “In a minute.”

Still, that many people regard such plaintiffs as gleeful participants in a great legal lottery--Get run over by a truck and strike it rich. Eureka!--is one source of the anti-lawyer sentiment Saferstein wants to reverse. Another is advertising. Without doubt, those 1-800- Dinero commercials can attract unsavory clients, but they also invite into the legal system whole classes of people who otherwise would not find the courthouse door, introducing a rare measure of populism into an otherwise clubby system.

Also, people rarely come to court in good humor. They go to fight for property, for children, for freedom, and it’s rare a customer walks away from these wars completely satisfied. So they blame their lawyers. And when they see these lawyers drive away in their big BMWs, the resentment builds. Of course, not too many clients would want to hire an attorney who only drove clunkers, now would they?

Finally, politics comes into play. Lawyers have become a handy foil for conservative campaigners who believe that corporate America knows what is best for consumers and should not be forced to tolerate bothersome legal challenges when little mistakes are made--like gas tanks exploding. A subset of this group are those who believe that cops only capture the guilty, and that the FBI never shoots without cause.

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This is not to suggest that Saferstein didn’t make mistakes, as even Carl admits. His timing was bad and his focus fuzzy. Asking for legislation to stiffen penalties in assaults on lawyers seems a bit much--and reinforces the image of attorneys as elitists.

Snickering aside, however, his main premise is correct. A stereotype is a stereotype is a stereotype. The ruthless lawyer is a cousin of the dumb blonde, who is related to the wily Armenian and works with the bumbling bureaucrat while in league with the lazy Mexican. Some are more hateful, perhaps, than others, but all derive from the same base instinct to attack by group.

He’s also right that the lawyer-as-shark stereotype has gotten a bit out of hand, and in a world where lunatics have easy access to combat weaponry, this can be dangerous. Remember, all you wiseacres, they were burying lawyers and their clerical help and clients last week up in San Francisco and, as Carl put it, “I don’t see what’s so funny about that.”