“First we kill all the lawyers”

Lawyers

Depending on how you look at it, I have been blessed and/or cursed to have been born into a family of lawyers.

My father, various uncles, brother-in-law, cousins, my cousin’s husband – there are lawyers everywhere in my family tree.

My brain tells me to respect lawyers. They play a vital role in society, I reason to myself.

My heart tells me, in contrast, that most lawyers do it for the money – and they are mostly brawlers hired to fight for you. I know, I know… being a tax lawyer is different from being a real estate lawyer which is different from being a courtroom litigator who brawls on your behalf in a lawsuit or criminal trial in front of judge and jury.

But here is a fun fact: most of the lawyers I know don’t like their job. Many HATE their jobs. Last month during jury duty I had to answer this question: “What is your opinion of lawyers?” I gave the following answer:

“Most lawyers I know are just doing their job, like most everyone else. But most of the lawyers I know don’t like their jobs. There is a cost. It is sad to watch.”

That, in truth, is my considered opinion of lawyers. I am generalizing, of course, but I think this is generally true.

Why do most lawyers dislike their jobs, in my experience? It is because the nature of handling clients and their difficulties – the legal problems in question – is extremely taxing. “My clients are like piranhas, always making demands on my time and attention; it never stops!” one lawyer tells me. It is unending acrimony and difficulty in a non-stop stream of cases for client after client. The lawyers I know make good money as legal advice is expensive. But nobody is going to a lawyer when life goes well. People pay tens of thousands of dollars to a lawyer when they are in trouble. So there is always an element of stress and conflict at work. During a criminal trial, the defendant’s freedom might be at stake. Talk about pressure!

For sure lawyers develop thick skin in the face of acrimony and tension, but still. It is no secret that lawyers overall have high rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, and divorce. The stress and combativeness produced by their work bleeds into the rest of their lives. It would be hard to have it otherwise.

Lawyers don’t really add value to the world. In the best case scenario, they are part of the grease of the business world and capitalism: they help to make contracts, enforce the terms of service, and so help businesses thrive. For sure relying on lawyers in business disputes is better than relying on hitmen and murder, as do drug dealers and other organized crime figures out on the “black market.“ But most lawyers deal with long hours, difficult clients, and intense competition. Lawyers feed off the weaknesses, misfortune, discord, and evil in the world: that is where lawyers make their money. The vast majority of law comes from moments of difficulty, disagreement, and discord. Usually nobody calls a lawyer when life is going well. Lawyers don’t really produce anything valuable by themselves, unlike factory owners or farmers. There is an element of parasitism, of living off others.

I can hear the lawyers (especially my father) in my family saying to me, “Don’t be naive, Richard!” Dealing with disagreement and conflict is an important skill-set in this world. It cannot be avoided. Lawyers allow for conflict resolution and crisis management in disputes ranging from families and marriages to businesses and governments in a whole range of concerns. This is the world we live in. We need lawyers and judges, for much the same reason we need police and paramedics, or teachers and therapists. They play an important role in society, the thinking goes.

It might be fairly said that the United States is a country run by lawyers. If so, that speaks well for it, comparatively speaking. Look at Russia who, as John McCain described it, is essentially “a gas station run by the mafia,” with Vladimir Putin and all his oligarch cronies hogging all the power to themselves, and whose only operating principle is their own self-aggrandizement and self-interest. Lawyers and the law provide certain guardrails to prevent a government from turning into a rule-by-thugs regime where those in charge can basically do anything they want. (How much power does an independent judiciary have in Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran?) As John Adams described it, the Founding Fathers wanted a nation ruled by clearly understood laws based on tradition, not the caprices or egos of powerful men of the moment. So the United States has been well served by its lawyers and constitutional system overall, no?

Yes. This is true enough. I admit it.

Nevertheless, the reputation of too many lawyers is not good, and it is not for no reason. Lawyers are often seen like bottom feeder fish which feed on all the crap on the floor of the ocean. It is as this joke I read recently in Michael Connelly’s “The Lincoln Lawyer” paints it:

“What’s the difference between a catfish and a defense attorney? One’s a bottom-feeding scum sucker. The other’s a fish.”

Or this one in a similar vein:

“What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A good start.”

Perhaps it is a cheap shot to tell lawyer jokes. Lawyers have a right to make a living, like anyone else.

And I can hear this obvious retort: “Everyone hates lawyers, until you need one! Then you love your lawyer!”

Probably.

But still.

Maybe it entirely depends on what kind of lawyer we are talking about. Perhaps it is as simple as the difference between a used car salesman (high-pressure slickster) and someone selling cloud servicing software for Salesforce, as my cousin does. One former student of mine attended the US Military Academy, UC Berkeley Law School, and now works at the prestigious O’Melveny and Myers law firm in their downtown Los Angeles office. I am pretty sure any professional venture this impressive young man works on is on the up-and-up. But I have two other former students who tried journalism – where their heart really was – before seeing there was no real money or job security in it, and then going into the law as a way of earning a better paycheck. After abortive ventures into journalism, these two ladies spent years of their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get law degrees which had more marketable value. The whole venture has a feel of “going along to get along” while making a living. You might as well take insurance claims by phone or oversee compliance policies for some business. Or you could go sell condos in Florida and make more money than most lawyers do. At any rate, It becomes just another boring white-collar job. At least that is how I see it.

I figure if you want to be a lawyer, you should be a “true believer.” Ideally you should have grown up in awe of the majesty of the law from early childhood. But how many people become lawyers because they want to make a lot of money? Or because no better idea suggested itself? It is like doctors. Many talented and ambitious young adults go into medicine not necessarily because they feel called to minister to the sick and dying but because it is seen as a prestigious and well compensated job. Same with the law. My paternal grandfather claimed he wanted one of his sons to be a doctor, another a lawyer, and the last to be a Roman Catholic priest. That is what happened. Doctor, lawyer, priest: those were all highly respectable jobs in the mid-20th century. Are they now?

I will give lawyers their due in those extreme cases where an obvious injustice has occurred. But the majority of lawyers I know are part of the messy machinery of the world where the damned, unhappy, and unfortunate litigate their disagreements. Professionally-speaking, lawyers usually dwell in those complicated “gray areas” where it is enormously difficult to identify exactly who is wrong or right in a dispute. Furthermore, lawyers are often just one of many employees working for some larger economic concern. Lawyers are most often the “shock troops” of Western capitalism, as sociologists claim they have mostly been since the middle of the 19th century onwards. They are the assiduous worker bees of corporate America, or corporate America adjacent, or those trying to sue corporate America to make their living.

Boring.

But the law can often be a tedious career typified by enormous stress, high conflict, long hours, and unending difficulty, with the possibility of a big payout at the end.

No wonder most lawyers are unhappy in their jobs.

I would warn my own daughters away from law school, unless they acquired the “true believer” aspect of the religious convert. “I want to fight for the rights of my client!” “I want to help convict violent predators and land them in prison where they can’t prey on the innocent!” “Even allegedly horrible people who have allegedly done horrible things deserve due process and a fair trial!” If you’re a true believer, then maybe it will be worth it. All the combat and combativeness might be worth the effort of the fight, which will often be a bitter, scorched-earth one. The job will take much out of you, even if you win, which will not always be the case. As the Chinese say, “When two tigers clash, one is killed and the other maimed.” 

And fighting for a living is one thing when a person is young. It is quite another as one ages. How much of a killer is acrimony and stress among the middle aged or older? Heart attacks? Strokes? Diabetes? Alcoholism and drug abuse as a coping mechanism for stress and conflict? One lawyer in my family could go to war in the courtroom during the day and leave it all there and go home and breathe freely at night. He was unusual. Others suffered. There was a price.

As I see it, if you’re not in it for the principle of the thing as a lawyer, then you’re just another slickster chasing a buck. You’re more of a parasite taking away from it than a person adding value to the world. You add to the din, confusion, and dysfunction.

Or maybe, in real life, most lawyers are a combination of ambulance-chasing profit and rights-respecting idealism? It is a complicated job in a complicated world? Lawyers find their way. The law giveth, the law taketh away. Is it worth a lifetime of labor?

I don’t know.

There are all sorts of negatives to being a public school teacher, too, and God knows I have felt most of them keenly. But there are also positives. It is similar to being a lawyer: there are pros and cons. And one positive I appreciate more as I get older: I have no real enemies out there. Nobody targets me, as there is little to be gained. I have kept a low profile in the world. It is a peaceful life. As a lawyer it would have been otherwise almost for sure.

There is value in moving into the fall and winter of my life hating nobody and nobody hating me. I enjoy being able to live my life mostly without the psychological baggage of regret or guilt about past actions. Nobody offended or harmed me much, and I didn’t harm others. Maybe I did not start a company or make a stir in the wider world, but I managed to keep my job in perspective while raising my daughters and pursuing my passion projects outside of work. I had a worthwhile career which exercised my imagination and creativity, while still providing me enough free time and money for myself and my family. I accepted the negatives of my job and tried to minimize them, while seeking to maximize the positives. It was usually a life-giving effort, not a life-sapping one. The public school system was often ridiculous and not entirely to be taken seriously, so I put my quibbles with administrators away in a box and paid little attention to it. I focused on the students in front of me and usually enjoyed the interaction. No regrets.

So I approach retirement in good shape moving forward.

Would it have been this way if I had chosen to become a lawyer instead of a teacher? Should I have tread in the footsteps of my father and become a lawyer? Would it have been a positive part of a healthy life?

I have no way of knowing. History is what has happened, not what would have happened if things had gone otherwise. “Counterfactuals” are interesting in the abstract, but they are of little use in real life.

But again I have no regrets.

Amen.