BLAME THE CLIENTS, DON’T BLAME THE LAWYERS!

Blame the Clients, Don’t Blame the Lawyers!

Presumably, lawyers get so much attention and power in our society that one might think this is the most rewarding career, making people love you if you are an attorney. Is this really true? This is only the beginning of this post, but we sense a sarcastic smile on your face already…

The truth is, lawyers mostly have a terrible reputation unless it is that particular attorney who got you a huge amount of money through litigation or got you out of jail with all charges dismissed. There is an abundance of derogatory lawyer jokes around, and people constantly complain about “crooked” lawyers, incompetent lawyers, manipulative lawyers, evil prosecutors, and mean judges—all one-time law school graduates. People also despise crooked politicians who make bad laws, but somehow, when it comes to changing both, people get timid or lazy and don’t participate much in that process, especially locally where it matters most to them!

So why do lawyers have such a bad reputation?

An attorney must abide by ethical rules enforced by the local state bar, and these rules require an attorney to zealously advocate the interest of their client, be truthful with the client, don’t steal from the client, be truthful with the judge, and competently represent the client in court. When an attorney violates ethical rules, the client can file a complaint with the state bar that usually sides with the client, and the lawyer gets disciplined or loses their license. Legal fees that an attorney charges are regulated by the local market and fair negotiations between attorney and clients.

In most cases, laypeople don’t understand that in the legal world, rules are different from real-world rules! Morality is different in the legal world by design and on purpose. What is considered immoral in the real world may be not only morally sound but a necessary tool to succeed. The legal world evolved for centuries based on various forms of social compromise, politics, and cultural changes, and is different from the real world for a reason and not because evil lawyers maliciously distorted everything!

In order to zealously advocate for you and do their job right, attorneys are not allowed to be objective and must portray the other side, the opposing side, as evil, wrong, and/or guilty of something.

In a custody battle setting, attorneys for both sides, to win the case for their client, must prove to the judge that their client is a good parent and the other attorney’s client is a terrible parent. To do this effectively, each attorney must find as much derogatory information about the other side as possible, present only derogatory information in court, and amplify it to the judge. Those who are better at smearing the other side, objectively or not, win. As a result, an attorney for each party earns a reputation as a scumbag in the eyes of the opposing side parent and their family. In this example, attorneys earn a bad reputation for doing their job well.

In another example, a defense attorney who represents a murderer or a child molester effectively finds loopholes in the prosecution’s case, and the prosecution loses the trial, allowing the criminal to walk free. No one, except the criminal client, will thank a brilliant attorney for doing their job better than the other side, but everyone will rebuke them for doing their job well and winning a case for a bad person. However, in many cases, who is a bad person is up for interpretation. If you are an employer accused by a poorly performing, cheating former employee of “labor code violations” fabricated by their lawyer, then the bad person is on the other side, and you are a good person even though you are the one being sued.

If a #MeToo activist lawyer helps a manipulative, vindictive, and greedy woman extort hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars from a rich celebrity with a fragile reputation, the mainstream media will make that opportunistic woman look like an angelic victim of abuse, and her attorney will be considered a hero. But to the rich celebrity and perhaps to many of his fans, that woman and her attorney represent evil, regardless of the degree of innocence or guilt of the rich celebrity accused of sexual abuse. However, when it comes to the #MeToo activist attorney’s performance, if she manages to manipulate public opinion and the vulnerability of the defendant to the advantage of her client, she is a brilliant and effective legal professional.

In a civil litigation setting, everyone complains about aggressive litigators who deliberately overwhelm the other side with discovery requests, such as requests for thousands of pages of marginally relevant documents or requests for multiple depositions from numerous witnesses. But this is the tactic that helps to increase negotiating power and “bully” the other side into settlement. Again, attorneys not making it easy for the other side are doing their job well but get portrayed as ruthless sharks!

Also, if a case is lost, many clients do not care at all about the diligence of an attorney in doing the best they can to achieve the best result. Clients treat legal services as a product: if they get the “product” by winning, then it must be a good attorney; and if they pay all this money but don’t win, they automatically blame the attorney. Clients don’t want to consider the complexities of the case, the quality of the evidence, sometimes their own lack of cooperation, and factors beyond the attorney’s control, like a bad judge or a bad jury that caused them to lose the case. The attorney is always the one to blame.

With some rare exceptions, when truly unscrupulous lawyers steal money from clients or when attorneys are as competent as “my cousin Vinnie,” most attorneys get treated unfairly by society. The truth is: clients, the opposing side’s clients, and the community at large are not interested in being fair to the attorneys. People love to smear attorneys, complain about attorneys, and badmouth them, but when people get in legal trouble, they rush to the attorney’s office seeking help!

You mock ambulance chasers, but when you get in a car accident, you run to the attorney’s office. You call divorce lawyers scumbags, but during a divorce, when your wife is trying to rob you of everything you earned and extort spousal support for many years ahead, you are ready to pay tens of thousands of dollars to the “scumbag” lawyers to stop your wife from ruining your life. You think lawyers should help you free of charge for some inexplicable reason, but you will still be paying them thousands of dollars and pleading with them to try to prevent the bank from foreclosing on your house because you didn’t manage your own finances properly and could not pay the mortgage. You whine about attorneys being unscrupulous aggressive sharks, but you still want them to fight for you like hell!

Attorneys have to incur very high student debt going to decent law schools. Attorneys have to take part in a brutal rat race to pass the bar that is made deliberately more and more difficult to pass. Attorneys have to continue participating in a brutal rat race to find a job or open their own office. Clients are allowed to smear attorneys and attack their licenses for absolutely frivolous reasons by filing baseless complaints, and attorneys can’t fight back by suing clients back for doing that. Attorneys operate under immense pressure to pay huge student loans, to be competitive in a corporate world, to build a successful practice, to keep clients happy, to stay afloat, to fight frivolous bar complaints from bad clients, and to maintain a good reputation online despite scumbag clients maliciously posting bad reviews with impunity. Despite often exaggerated financial rewards, a lawyer’s job is hugely underappreciated and misunderstood.

The conclusion is: for the most part, with some very rare exceptions like objectively established attorney incompetence or proven attorney fraud and theft of clients’ funds, it is the clients, not the attorneys, who are to blame for lawyers’ bad reputation! Next time you face legal problems, try to be more objective to your lawyer and apply some critical thinking when you hear others complain about lawyers! Without lawyers, this society will not be able to function, and people will suffer a lot more than they pretend to suffer now from “bad” lawyers.