5

I’ll Be Suing You

It is normally my pleasant duty to report on the little extravagances that make life worth living and a dollar worth earning—the civilised rewards available to anyone with a healthy streak of self-indulgence and a good credit rating. This month, however, we shall be looking at one expensive habit—alas, becoming more widespread every day—that offers no enjoyment of any kind to the millions of poor wretches who are forced to pay for it. In theory, it is the pursuit of justice. In practice, it consists of handing over large sums of money to the kind of people you wouldn’t want to meet in your neighbourhood bar.

There is something horribly wrong with a world in which there are more lawyers than good chefs, and yet every year the law schools unleash a further plague of them, letting them loose on the streets to jabber about malpractice, malfeasance, alimony, palimony, torts, and suits and God knows what else, causing dread and apprehension in the hearts of simple, honest citizens like you and me. Indeed, there are several office buildings in mid-town Manhattan (lawyers have a liking for choice real estate) where you risk an injunction merely by stepping on someone’s foot in a crowded elevator. The foot turns out to be attached to a pillar of the legal profession, and before you know it you’re facing charges of attempted grievous bodily harm as defined in and pursuant to the case of Schulz v. Donoghue, 1923.

I am not alone in my misgivings. Lawyers have been the object of heartfelt invective ever since man developed the intelligence to spell ‘litigation.’ “A peasant between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats,” says the Spanish proverb. “Lawyers and painters can soon change black to white,” says the Danish proverb. “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” says Shakespeare. Benjamin Franklin, Thoreau, Emerson and many other good men and true have also expressed themselves in pungent and unflattering terms on the subject of our learned friends. How can it be, then, that despite centuries of well deserved unpopularity there are more of them around than ever before?

There are many contributory factors, but perhaps the most basic is the language problem. For their own obvious ends, lawyers have perfected an exclusive form of communication. It has a passing resemblance to English mixed with a smattering of dog Latin, but to the man in the street, it might just as well be Greek. Thus, when he receives a writ or a subpoena or one of the other countless arrows in the legal quiver, he is completely mystified. What does it mean? What can he do? What else but hire an interpreter—who is, of course, a lawyer. And there we have the kind of situation that lawyers love: the two sides can settle down to a protracted exchange of mumbo-jumbo, most of it unintelligible to their clients and all of it charged at an hourly rate that defies belief.

Then there is the law, not made by man but dictated by human nature, that requires that idle hands find mischievous employment. When there is not enough work for the legal population, you might reasonably expect the number of lawyers to decrease, with the less successful leaving to try their luck at something useful, like plumbing. Not a chance. If there is not enough work to go around, more work is created. Subdivisions of the law and their specialists spring up to make daily life more complicated for us and more remunerative for them. The result is that you find yourself having to deal with not one lawyer but a whole platoon of them.

The first, let’s say, specialises in real estate. He will uncover the booby traps hidden (by another lawyer) in the fine print of your apartment lease. You will need a second to explain the subtleties built into your contract of employment, a third if you should disagree with the Inland Revenue about the size of your contributions to the national economy, a fourth if your doctor makes a slip of the scalpel, a fifth if you get divorced, a sixth… But the list is already too long and too depressing, and we haven’t even begun to venture into criminal law or that most overpopulated branch of an overpopulated profession, corporate law. Lawyers are everywhere except under the bed, and that might not be too far away if their numbers continue to increase.

And why do we need them? Self-defence. Because the other side—be it landlord, employer, ex-wife, or whoever—has elected to have a long and expensive argument rather than a quick, cheap one, and has retained a professional representative to do it. It’s no good thinking that you, a rank amateur, can conduct your own case. Innocence will get you nowhere these days, and ignorance will cost you dear. You wouldn’t be able to understand more than one word in ten anyway. There is no alternative but to fight fire with fire and to employ your own legal bodyguard.

So we have to assume that lawyers are necessary. But that doesn’t explain why they are so heartily detested, so frequently reviled and even, dare I say it, distrusted. To understand why these attitudes exist, we must look into the mind of the beast himself and see what it is that makes the lawyer tick.

His guiding principle drummed into him from his first days as a callow student, is never, under any circumstances, to admit to being wrong, partly because his professional reputation for omniscience would suffer and partly because it might expose him to the awful possibility of a negligence suit. Now, it is obviously easier to avoid being wrong if you can avoid stating a clear opinion that may later prove to be arrant nonsense. This is why there is great fondness in legal circles for two well-tried secret weapons that have enabled generations of lawyers to retain the appearance of wisdom without the effort of original thought.

The vaguer of the two is the Grey Area, into which the lawyer dives like a rabbit down a burrow if anyone should threaten him with a loaded question. On the face of it, he says, you seem to have a strong case. He nods encouragingly and peers at you over the top of his half-glasses. But there are some aspects of it, some mitigating factors, some imponderables, one or two possible extenuations—no, it’s not quite as cut and dried as it looks to the layman. In fact, he says, this particular instance is rather a Grey Area.

The law, as you subsequently discover if you’re unfortunate enough to be involved with it often, is almost entirely made up of Grey Areas, and they are deeply, deeply valued for providing opportunities to say absolutely nothing in a highly professional manner. The only glimmers of clarity in this fog of obfuscation occur when your case happens to be an exact replica of another case on which judgment was pronounced fifty years ago and hasn’t been challenged since. This is when the second secret weapon is triumphantly produced.

Precedent! What a wonderful labour-saving, definitive thing it is. When a lawyer is stuck for an answer, he consults precedent. When he wants to flatten an opponent, he quotes precedent. When he disagrees with some proposed legal novelty, he argues that there’s no precedent for it. But what exactly is precedent? Somebody’s opinion, grown old and respectable with the passage of time, but still only an opinion. ‘Precedent’ is probably the most popular word in the legal dictionary, and it has a great advantage over the Grey Area because it permits lawyers to be decisive without having to take any responsibility for the decision.

But enough of these disparaging comments on the devious nature of the legal personality. Let us now move on to the matter of fees and costs, because it is here more than anywhere that the ordinary man’s attitude towards the legal man changes from mild suspicion to violent outrage.

We have all read about cases where the costs run into hundreds of thousands of dollars and the settlements into millions. But those figures are so ridiculously overblown, like the budget deficit, that is impossible to take them seriously. They’re not real. They do, however, provide us with dramatic examples of that compulsion, common to all lawyers, for extracting every last cent from a situation. This is not necessarily to make the punishment fit the crime or to put a true and proper value on justice. It is the natural and inevitable consequence of the pound of flesh mentality.

All lawyers have it. They can’t help it, it’s in their genes, and it shows itself at every level from the multimillion dollar lawsuit down to the smallest, most fleeting incident. If a pound of flesh isn’t immediately available, a couple of ounces will suffice. I myself have been charged £150 for a cup of coffee and a ten-minute chat, but at least the chat took place in an office. A friend of mine was actually billed for a phone call he made to his lawyer inviting him out to dinner. I didn’t ask if there was a further charge for time spent eating of the free dinner, but it wouldn’t have surprised me.

I don’t have the exact figures, but I am told that the current growth rate in the legal profession is, in relative terms, far greater than the growth in population. Lawyers are being hatched like chickens, and it is only a matter of time before the entire country is overrun. Everywhere will become like those parts of Los Angeles where lawyers outnumber people. The more affluent families will have live-in attorneys. Litigation, once the hobby of the rich, will take over from baseball and football as a leisure activity, and Berlitz will offer courses in Legalese. I have seen the future, and it’s a Grey Area.