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I’ve always thought there were too many attorneys per capita in the United States. Whether that’s true or not is a matter of personal opinion, but to lend credence to my position I offer a couple observations.
First is that our laws are made by attorneys and for attorneys. Attorneys make up 40% of Congress and 54% of the Senate. On the surface, it makes total sense that trained professionals make the best product. Wouldn’t we want a well-trained mechanic to work on our car or a chef with lots of culinary experience preparing our meal at a restaurant? Of course!
However, I feel the wholesale making of the laws we live by should have input from those that are affected by those laws. Yes, the chef prepares your meal, but in the end, it is the customer who determines if it satisfies their expectations. The same for the service on your car or any other service.
Congress passes hundreds of laws every year and a half are for special circumstances to accommodate something not dealt with before. But after decades of our government passing laws, our system had become muddled in interpretation hell. An example is IRS law, 75,000 pages of many times contradictory rules and more are added every year.
I met a man who the IRS took to court trying to take his home from him for taxes they said he owed. It just so happened that this man was what I considered a genius with a photographic memory. He fired his attorney when he realized he didn’t know as much as he knew. The IRS attorneys were befuddled because of his ability to quote IRS law. The case went to the appeals court in San Francisco. The court refused to consider the case and he was able to keep his home. I know that story sounds far-fetched but this guy quoted IRS law to me word for word off the top of his head. I’m sure the average person would have lost their home.
The government have great lawyers and an endless supply of money and time so the likelyhood of you winning isn’t much. What I’m saying is simply this. There are too many laws that can be interpeted several ways depending on the courts bent.
We’ve arrived at the most liturgeous point in our history because well-meaning lawyers desire to right some perceived wrong. Case in point is the settlement with the tobacco industry. The attorney who headed the case wound up with a billion dollars and his own jet. And the money set aside to each state for iradicating tobacco addiction was in the end largely used to feed the general budget of each state.
There’s no doubt the case (Bates vs Arizona) that brought about lawyers being allowed to advertise is a matter of free speech. The court noted: “The choice between the dangers of suppressing information and the dangers arising from its free flow was seen as precisely the choice that the First Amendment makes for us. “
Of course that’s true. The problem is Americans have become accustomed to thinking with their eyes and ears and not their brains. Pizza appears on the screen, there’s a good chance you’ll have pizza tonight. An ambulance chaser appears on the screen a thousand days in arow chanting their phone number. What’s the first thing you do when you’re in an accident? Call an attorney!
Wouldn’t it make sense to talk to your agent first before calling an attorney? Maybe what you’re offered is fair and you could just get on with your life. Adding a lawyer fee or not on top of what remedies your situation would seem like something worth considering.
I do realize that there are times when an attorney must be involved and maybe we’ve reached a point where we’re fools not to play that game.
But maybe we could try to work things out and not think that every accident or tragedy is an opportunity to win the lottery.