Epilogue

The lawyer tore into the plaintiff with ferocious relentlessness. “How many times did you have sex with your husband?”

The scene is the open court. Spectators in the gallery. The jury hanging onto each word spoken. The media clamoring for headline news. The court reporter taking down every word for posterity.

The husband is gone. His life, along with that of more than 200 others, was taken in the airplane crash. The widow sued for loss of companionship.

The lawyer pursuing the gasp-inducing question is defending the airline.

“Objection, Your Honor,” the widow's lawyer tries to come to the rescue.

The airline's lawyer explains, trying to have the judge see it his way: “The defense has a right to know. We're simply trying to establish the extent of the plaintiff's claim.”

Believe it or not, it's a true story.

It's the case of common decency (supposedly a human trait) pushed aside in favor of expedience.

And then there's the unscrupulous liar. Straight-faced he tells the judge: “Your Honor, in truth and in fact, the affidavit was not filed timely only because my client was out of the country until Sunday” (representing to the court the client was gone for more than three weeks and had only returned two days prior to the Tuesday hearing).

His scraggly beard was not pressed into service to hide a red face when the defendant challenged: “Your Honor, this officer of the court is lying.”

The truth was revealed under oath in a subsequent deposition: the client was absent for ten days and had returned nine days earlier.

Here's a lawyer to whom the oath he swore means nothing.

A third example pits greed (the elegant language of The Bar Oath of Admission uses the word ‘lucre') against morality.

This lawyer, a “member in good standing” of The Bar, lends his good name and degrades his profession by fronting for people whose lifestyle is fertilized by and bathed in criminal enterprises.

Surely, no law school curriculum includes a course on how to guide the growth of crime.

To say that all lawyers are unprofessional or immoral is naive at best. There are those (I'm included) who know and know of highly respected members of the legal community. These lawyers, who have earned the respect of the public they serve, are true professionals.

I wrote this book with lawyers as the topic with the help of others (you recognize their names on the spot or maybe not). Those behind-the-scene helpers, who documented their observations more than two thousand years ago or live amongst us today, contributed their thoughts and experiences.

Simply telling horror stories or fish tales won't improve the image of the lawyering profession because the real truth is too much like fiction.

With humor, sarcasm, satire (lumped together, they are better classified as frustration), and truth — gathered from the famous and from people like you and me — I hope to awake awareness and shake apathy.

If only I can get you to think, “Gee, could it be there's something wrong with the legal profession?”

It's a challenge, indeed, to survive lawyer trickery, incompetence, and greed. Lumped together, they're called unprofessional conduct.

This book blossomed because of serious matters, dead-serious episodes of real people concocted by real people.

We could fill tomes by simply leaning on and gleaning from the mountains of court files which serve as orderly repository of legal battles waged.

Within these pages I'll spare you the overwhelming evidence embedded in real court cases. But to get your attention, I'll give you cause to think about what many others — they qualify to be called role models — think and have to say about lawyers. I'll also give you cause for chuckles here and there.

Don't feel embarrassed; go ahead and laugh. I and others who have gone through the wringer oftentimes kept our sanity because, above all, we kept our wits.

That which you will chuckle over or which will make you see red in anger or embarrassment, let us be reminded, is folklore and lore. It's what the people throughout the land think and pass along. These stories have their roots in the real world.

This book serves as a reminder that just one bad apple will make the basket's contents suspect — it's the conduct of lawyers, tainted by mediocre competence, lack of professionalism, lust for power, addiction to avarice, disregard of ethics, and disrespect for our courts.

It's a warning to those who need the services of a lawyer and a wake-up call to the members of the legal profession who could be proud of their membership in The Bar but should not lay claim to be professionals because they conveniently look the other way.

I hope you will share with me this challenge: What's wrong with simply making everyone who swore the Oath of Admission to The Bar stick to the rules? I'm talking about the Rules of Professional Conduct issued by The Bar for its members.

Perhaps I should feel ashamed or sorry for “hinting” of ugly doings by lawyers because the many good ones are in the same basket (every lawyer must belong to The Bar, you know; it's even the law to make it stick) and, therefore, their good professional image may become tainted too.

On second thought, if those members of the profession who are appalled at how their colleagues make their living would stand up and clean up the lawyer mess, the profession of lawyers would be respected as respect is earned and due.

It was mostly common sense applied to survival drills in the trenches that told me: There's definitely something amiss about how our legal system dishes out justice but wants us to believe that it serves all, and does so fairly. So let's do something.

Let's begin by adhering to the rules so eloquently hammered out by The Bar for its members and The Rules of Court.

An immediate benefit will be the unclogging of our overworked courts.

Let's stop frivolous and malicious court actions even if it cuts heavily into the lawyers' business. That frees our judges to do judging on real issues and saves us taxpayers a bundle.

If such goals dictate exposing unprofessional conduct by lawyer X, or Y, or Z, then so be it. If the culprits mend their ways, welcome back into the professional fold. Otherwise, circle the wagons to protect all of the good apples.

Lawyers, because of their role and mission in life, have the best opportunity and the greatest responsibility to foster getting along, finding peace of mind, and creating the grand lifestyle for all of us.

The fellow human being who chooses to become a lawyer (and some move on to serve as judges — a most noble endeavor) makes the commitment to accept a leading role in making the rules by which all of us live, administer these rules, enforce the rules, and do all of these things justly.

You see, law is a binding custom or practice of a community; a rule of conduct or action prescribed or recognized as binding or enforced by a controlling authority.

That's why we cannot live without lawyers. That's why lawyers must obey the rules by which they serve us all. It's also a prerequisite for trust. That's why we must respect lawyers because without that respect we cannot trust them. That's why each and every lawyer must not defile this trust. That's why we must understand that all of us are human.

And that's why totalitarian regimes (Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, Castro's Cuba, Hussein's Iraq — to name a few) permit only a miniscule number of lawyers to “represent the people.”

I am reminded of my childhood in East Germany, that part of Germany under the clutches of the Soviet Union from 1945 until “The Wall” came down in 1989.

The German Democratic Republic gave its citizens many rights. I know because we studied them and those of our “friends” in Moscow again and again, ad nauseam, in civic class. But … Read on.

While in high school, we were hungry to read that which was published in the West. One schoolmate secured copies of popular West German magazines and shared them freely. The sixteen-year-old disappeared and, as I would learn later, wound up in Siberia for three years. There was no trial in our “Peoples” Court and, obviously, no chance for a defense.

I had managed to get out of East Germany and start a new life in West-Berlin where I shook this brave man's hand upon his release from the Gulag.

There was no one back home in East Germany who dared to ask what happened to him; there was no attorney to represent the student who simply wanted to read about life in the West and exercised his “right” to read.

One more example. Holidays (May Day, Stalin's birthday, etc.) called for elaborate parades. Dare any of us students dodge participation — we would be severely chastised. As a corollary, private citizens organizing a demonstration for whatever purpose was unheard of; it simply was not tolerated by the government.

Roy Black, the illustrious criminal defense attorney, made an eloquent argument in “Black's Law” — a spellbinding book: “Lawyers are the ones who transform abstract rights into reality.”

Half a century after having studied and studied ad infinitum the Constitution of the Soviet Union, I read those words again, repeated as a reminder in Mr. Black's book: Article 125 of the Constitution of the USSR dealing with the “fundamental rights and duties of citizens” issued by Stalin's regime in 1936.

My research led me to the revised constitution adopted in 1977 that again spells out “the basic rights, freedoms, and duties of citizens of the USSR” and proclaims in Article 50: “Citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations.”

Article 50 concludes: “Exercise of these political freedoms is ensured by putting public buildings, streets and squares at the disposal of the working people and their organizations, by broad dissemination of information, and by the opportunity to use the press, television, and radio.” What nauseating hypocrisy!

As I knew better then and we all know now, those rights and freedoms translated into duties to toe the line. And beware those whose thoughts and actions ran counter to those of the regime.

Roy Black reminds us that Stalin's dictatorship “did not provide for attorneys independent of state control to speak for those rights vigorously.”

Some years ago, it was in the 1990s, a full-page ad in a magazine catering to lawyers caught my attention. I was drawn to it by three photographs taking up nearly half of the ad; they were the images of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The headline of The Mississippi Bar journal ad read: “Three leaders who really knew how to streamline a legal system.”

The ad's text is worth repeating here:

“The first thing we do, lets kill all the lawyers.”
Yes, Shakespeare really did say that. We know, because we get ribbed about it a lot.
But what most people don't know is that Shakespeare had a villain, a would-be tyrant, speak that line. Lawyers, because they stood for individual rights, would have thwarted the characters plans.
Granted, that's just a play. But many times in real life, tyrants have done away with (or at least drastically reduced the role of) the law and lawyers.
Hitler did it. So did Stalin, the Ayatollah, Saddam Hussein and many others.
Tyrants can't afford strong legal systems. A system like ours, one that protects the rights of all people, gets in their way.
Our system may be slow. It may be inefficient. It may seem unfair sometimes. But it ensures that no one, no matter how rich or powerful, can take your rights away.
Of course, the system works best when you know how to make it work. And the most important thing to know is, rich or poor, you have the right to a lawyer.
Without lawyers, there would be no legal system. Without our legal system, there would be no justice. And without justice, it wouldn't be America. At least, not as we know it!
Remember that, next time you feel frustrated with our legal system.
And consider the alternatives.

Yes, dear reader of “Thoughts About Lawyers,” that was the message addressed to the lawyers of Mississippi.

The point was well-taken; I couldn't disagree with respect to the basic facts supporting the message.

My uneasy stance is twofold:

First, what if the members of the organization disseminating the message conclude only lawyers may and can control our conduct in society?

And then we cannot and must not ignore the fact that there are (and there are too many to tolerate “the exception confirms the rule” principle) lawyers who use and abuse their privilege and calling to abuse and use our legal system for pecuniary and other self-serving gains.

Yes, we do, indeed, need lawyers unless we want to succumb to the dictatorial powers of a totalitarian regime.

Our vigilance, however, must not allow abuses to rear their ugly heads — self-serving abuses by lawyers who take advantage of their authority and function.

And some (they are certain individuals who have a face and a name) fall prey to human weaknesses. They are the ones who must be held accountable for their sins.

I'm being reminded, as a child (the cruel war, the one that was labeled number two, had just ended) we used to go out into the wheat fields following the harvest in search of food. Of the wheat collected, before it became palatable and free of chaff, the arduous task of separating the edible from the dirt, dead, and outright dangerous consisted of shaking — as hard as possible — a tray of which the bottom was a mesh with large enough holes to let the chaff and dirt fall through.

It was, indeed, a labor-intensive task. The result — we children looked at with pride and feelings of accomplishment — was the clean basket-full of wholesome wheat ready to fill our stomachs and nourish us.

The profession of lawyers requires such cleansing process.

Who furnishes the tray fitted with the right-size holes at the bottom? Who will do the shaking?

You would think the bar associations throughout the land would be the logical choice; after all, they represent the lawyer profession and in their quest of administering their members' conduct require that each lawyer seeking membership swear the “Oath of Admission” and be guided by the “Rules of Professional Conduct” and “Creed of Professionalism.”

There are simply too many cases of lawyer misconduct that go unchallenged to make the oath and creed a Potemkin village, “an imposing or pretentious facade or display designed to obscure or shield an unimposing or undesirable fact or condition” (see Merriam-Webster).

Volunteers are needed to decide on the size of the holes. Will it be you?

Next question: Who will shake the tray? Should it not be the highest court in the state? After all, the bar association is an official arm of the court. That's why lawyers are “officers of the court.”

What do you think would happen if we, all drivers on our streets, ignored, or worse, abolished traffic lights?

I wish our law schools would succeed instilling in the graduate the understanding that lawyering is a noble task, administering and seeing to it that we — that's all of us on this wonderful Earth — live with each other in harmony.

Were it not for the respect I developed for lawyers I have worked with during the past years, my assessment of the profession could easily have been formed in superlative negative terms.

Gerry Spence, a lawyer close to my heart and that of millions, shares his thoughts in one of his many books, “With Justice For None.”

Speaking before his lawyer brethren, he gives them this secret: “It is the magic of CARING for one's clients.”

Addressing the cry of “Too many lawyers!” Mr. Spence challenges: “Yet today there are not too many lawyers, but TOO FEW — too few of the right kind; too few who are trained as fighters; too few who will represent the people.”

Let me share one regret (most likely, an ardent wish will fleet like any dream).

I wish the many righteous lawyers who serve the public would come forward and do one single thing — drum the bad lawyers out of the profession. Then, indeed, we could enjoy the grand lifestyle.

                      Miami, Florida                   HD

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