People hate lawyers until they need one.
- unknown (but widely quoted in law circles)
The person who said the above forgot one very important thing… the reason that I would NEED a lawyer to protect me is because of ANOTHER lawyer trying to screw me. [minor detail] With all the talk recently of bloggers being sued and whatnot it reminded me that I would do well to have what is called a “privacy policy & terms of use” for this site. Most blogging resource sites have examples bloggers can use, so I grabbed one (linked here). It’s basically my way of covering my tail in any circumstance where I don’t overtly break the law… because as we all know lawyers will twist anything into anything if there’s a buck in it for them.
Mr. Sansweet didn’t asked to be saved. Mr. Sansweet didn’t want to be saved. And the injuries received from Mr. Incredible’s “actions,” so-called, causes him daily pain.
- Oliver Sansweet’s Lawyer, The Incredibles
I personally love the depiction of lawyers in the movie The Incredibles. The barbed arrow that the movie plunged into litigious irresponsibility and greedy hypocrisy was truly a golden takeaway of the film. Maybe that’s why I like those Pixar flicks, because even as an adult I think I take away as many things as the kids do.
Now I know I’m painting a very gloomy picture… and that all lawyers aren’t like that, but there are more than enough to rightly perpetuate the hard earned stereotype. Lawyers get paid to CREATE truth from facts… this clashes with me as an engineer where I’m paid to FIND truth from facts/data. It clashes so badly that lawyers go out of their way to keep engineers out of juries. They have no interest in anyone who bases their opinions more on facts than the eloquent linguistic ballet of an attorney.
Web designer and developer. Loud discerner. Software engineer and 
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i used to work for lawyers. one of them wrote me a memo telling me to save and reuse a 37 cent stamp that had been put on a letter that ended up getting hand delievered to our office. I calculated what it cost him to write that memo at his 200$/hr billing rate, and it turns out he lost about 78 cents on the deal…
Of course Pixar wasn’t the first to articulate a point of view about lawyers. William Shakespeare in King Henry VI Part 2 - Act 4. Scene II wrote:
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
This, of course, was further immortalized by Don Henley with the line from the song ‘Get Over It’ as:
“Old Billy was right, let’s kill all the lawyers, let’s kill them tonight.”
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, I rest my case with sincere apologies to my lawyer friends.
03 15 06
I dig you on this Steve. In fact one of the things I wrote about today was how Ayaan Hirsi Ali is insane for supporting terrorists rights to free speech. And I had an attorney say that she would do the same. I like myself more than that lol! Thanks for the link with the policy for terms of use. I am terrified of getting sued, so I should add one myself. PS I placed you on the blogroll under my genius category. Have a nice day tomorrow:) And you know what else? I had never heard of Beef and Weck before I visited your site. You learn something different every day eh? Cheers.
Heather :: You’ll have to tell me about the lawyers you used to work for some time.
Union71 :: Ah, I don’t think I ever saw King Henry VI. I’ll put it on my list. And yeah… I’ll echo my apologies to all my lawyer friends, too.
mahndisa :: Thanks!
You always have such encouraging things to say. I’ll have to get a Blogger login so I can comment on your blog… last time it wouldn’t let me (but that’s easily remedied).
Howdy. Being a physician, I am of course quite opposed to lawyers in general. One way to ‘fix’ the problem was put forth in one of my favorite shows (Justice League, now JLU). To paraphrase: “We had a problem with lawyers but fixed that ages ago.” “How?” “Simple. We gave them the same punishments as their clients. Soon, no lawyers.”
Yeah, I’m always tempted to go with a system that requires lawyers to share some of their client’s jail time if they pleade innocent and are found guilty. When kids caught on tape beating someone, who admit that the tape shows them doing this, turn around and plead not guilty at the behest of their lawyer… well, it blows me mind.
Hey, you DO know that I almost went to law school don’t you??? That would have meant that you would be somewhat related to one. Actually, David is SO relieved I didn’t get in, he just was merciless with the jokes about “bottom feeders” and “degenerates”, etc etc etc. In fact, he wondered if lawyers can be saved. Oh and thanks for the shout out for my blog. I really appreciate it!