>Right, like I said, you guys go all free market.
>Consult any legal quack you like, let the market sort
>it out. The ones who fall for suckers who have not
>been to law school or passed the bar, they will lose
>their money ortheir freedom, but hey, at least we will
>have the freedom to get our legal advice from anyone.
I thought you were the advocate of the market? You sure change your tune fast when it looks like it might be applied to you, don't you? OK for the plebs you reckon, but not good enough for your exalted profession. Don't panic though, I'm not advocating that lawyers be forced to sell themselves on the free market like common prostitutes. My solution would be to simply reform the courts to get rid of the archaic bullshit, so that everyone can represent themselves. And provide for universal no-fault compensation, thus eliminating half the work of the legal profession at a stroke. But don't panic, even unemployed lawyers would be protected from starvation by my universal guaranteed income. ;-)
> > What's more, I've never heard of a doctor presuming
>> to charge a client an enormous hourly charge to go
>> off to the library for many hours to educate
>> themselves about the client's medical problem.
>
>I leave that to the Drs, but I well tell you this,
>Bill: if a Dr has to do research on yr problem -- and
>it may happen now and then -- he's gonna change you
>the equivalent of an enormous hourly rate. He's not
>gonna do it for free.
I'm covered by Medicare, the government health system. And if i can't find a doctor who is prepared to bulk bill the government, I'll just clog up the public hospital waiting room.
>As for lawyers, what you are paying for is in fact
>what you describe as our self-education. It is called
>legal reserach. We know how to do it, you don't.
I can get by. They can teach you how to research facts in law school, but in my experience it is altogether another thing to teach people how to UNDERSTAND the law.
> We
>know what's imporetant, you don't.
I can work that out simply by reading relevant court judgements. Anyone can, if they are prepared to put the time in. I've done it lots of times. You have to keep in mind that when someone is researching for themselves they have the advantage of a personal interest to motivate them, and the luxury of being able to concentrate ALL their time on just that one case. You can't buy that sort of dedication Justin.
> We know how to
>present it, you don't. That's why people are willing
>to pay my perfectly ridicuously hourly rate.
I think people are willing to pay it because they are lazy and a little intimidated by all the absurd rituals. I can appreciate that, it is a lot of hard work to do all the research and preparation for a court case. If you have the money to pay a good lawyer it must seem a hell of a lot less trouble. I've often wished I had the money to pay someone else to save me all that trouble.
But then I often wish I had the money to pay someone to mow the lawn and weed the garden too. And at least people in that line of work don't puff themselves up and insist that their clients can't possibly do as good a job as a professional. They know they are just hired help, they know their place in the scheme of things. Unlike lawyers.
>And, incidentally, we do try to minimize costs even to
>out corporate clients by having a lot of basic
>reserach done by lower-billing associates. I do drafts
>before a senior partner looks at stuff.
I'm sure that's considered the ultimate in cost efficiency in the profession.
>Only
>> lawyers suffer from the delusion that their clients
>> should expect to be bled several hundred dollars an
>> hour by an "expert" undertaking on-the-job training.
>> If a doctor tried that, he would have his heart
>> ripped from his chest. A doctor has to know how to
>> perform the operation before he's allowed to do it,
>> let alone allowed to charge for it.
>
>You are, as usual, an arrogant and ignorant buffoon.
Come again? Arrogant, moi? But I'm not the one insisting that no-one else is capable of reading and understanding a legal statute or a court judgement.
>Maybe you don't have medical residents in Australia.
>Myae your Drs come out of med school somehow knowing
>everything without havinbg worked on it. Somehow I
>doubt it.
>
>>
>> Representing yourself is, in some cases, legal. In
>> other cases it isn't. In any event, as you point
>> out, not everyone is up to representing themselves.
>
>Almost no one one is. I haves een it done competently
>two or three times out of hundreds and hundreds of
>cases. The fact of the matter, Bill, is that what I do
>is really really difficult.
Yes mate, I don't doubt it for a second. But that doesn't mean that someone else can't learn to do it, without benefit of a law school.
> > Though it depends on how much money you have whether
>> the quality of legal representation you can afford
>> will turn out to be better than self-representation.
>
>No, even a very bad lawyer is almost always better
>than none, even if the client is smarter than the
>lawyer.
That's simply nonsense. Sure, the lawyer may be able to follow some of the more arcane rituals and understand the Latin jargon a bit better. But that's all bullshit anyhow. Mostly its completely unnecessary bullshit, designed to mystify the process. In the end, if you just march into court, fail to bow to the judge and call him "Your Honour", talk out of turn or forget to stand up at the correct times, it makes no difference.
In fact, there's only one absolutely golden rule for representing yourself in court. In my considerable experience. You can be rude to the judge, laugh at the silly rituals of the court and demand exemption from the more arcane rules of court. Simply ignore the threats and pathetic legal tricks of the opposition. But one thing you must observe religiously is to be courteous and respectful of the court clerks. Those people have REAL power, they can forget to mention some important step you have forgotten, if they take a dislike to you. or simply forget to file your documents at all, even if you manage to get them right first time. But if they like you, and remember that they have to deal with arrogant lawyers all day every day, so you have to be really tiresome not to appear a terrific fellow in comparison to the class of people they usually deal with, they can give you all sorts of tips.
So always suck up to the registrars and clerks, no matter how lowly they are on the totem pole. They'll tell you all the tricks. A lot of the clerks really hate and despise lawyers, whose arrogance and pomposity they have to put up with day in and day out, so it doesn't take much to get them barracking for you. In their own quiet and understated way. Treat them like gods.
>And sometimes poor clients get good lawyers,
>whether public interest or pro bono, or just good. A
>solo practitioner just won a patent case in in Chicago
>against Microsoft and its huge law firm (Sidley Austin
>Brown & Wood), scoring a judgment of more than a half
>billion dollars.
>
>
>> Sometimes it is better to have a fool for a client
>> than to have a fool for a lawyer. Personally I could
>> never afford the sort of lawyer who would do a
>> better job than I could do myself. A top lawyer
>> would be worth the money, but I simply don't have
>> the money so its moot.
>
>No, you might have a case that a public interest or
>pro bono lawyer would take, you might find a good
>lawyer like the guy who won that case; I don't know if
>contingency fees are permitted in in AU,
We have contingency fees, but not as you know it. Lawyers can't charge a percentage of damages. Although things are changing, the lawyers want to be able to do that, but the other professions are keen to prevent it, they think it will mean more litigation for damages if US-style contingency fees become legal. Of course lawyers are always free to take a case with payment of the USUAL fees being contingent on victory. But this isn't very attractive, they have come to expect the usual fee even if they lose.
> but in the US
>almost all plaintiff tort and civil rights work is
>done on contingency -- you don't pay unlessyou win --
>and many of the lawyers are awesomely good.
>
> A crap lawyer is worse than
>> no lawyer. But because of the system, they get to
>> charge ridiculous prices.
>>
>
>No, as I said, even a bad lawyer is almost always
>better than none. And it's not "the system" that
>enables charging high fees, but the relatively
>scarcity of legal talent.
Well in Tasmania the law prevents a corporation of any kind from being a party to a case before the Supreme Court, unless represented by a registered legal practitioner. So if the corporation is sued, or wants to sue, even on a minor matter, it cannot be self-represented by an authorised company officer and must hire a lawyer.
This law, which dates back to the very beginning of the founding of the colony of Van Diemans Land, is strictly enforced by the court. A company secretary cannot make any kind of appearance of any kind for the corporation. This is simply designed to protect the financial interests of the legal profession. It creates certain anomalies too, because it means that an individual can sue a corporation in the Supreme Court without being required to retain a lawyer (thus gaining the advantages of being able to pursue the case without having to spend tens of thousands of dollars) while a financially-challenged corporation would be hampered by the need to pay a parasitic lawyer to handle the action. I admit to having taken advantage of this once myself, forcing the organisation in question to hire a cheap and thus incompetent lawyer. The other side just had to give in to me and consent to the onerous court orders I was demanding. Otherwise I would have been free to engage in all sorts!
of legal procedures that would have resulted in massive legal bills which would eventually have bankrupted them. Don't feel sorry for them though, they tried to dud me, thinking I wouldn't be able to enforce my clear legal rights. I had right on my side. But it wouldn't have mattered if the issues weren't so clear cut, since I was in a position to pursue the case without fear of financial consequences (I'm already penniless) and they weren't.
Now you may very well argue that a bad lawyer is better than none, but the area of corporations law that I am involved in - co-operatives - is a mystery to most lawyers. Whereas I am at least familiar with all the provisions of the over 500 page Act. Most lawyers have never even heard of it, because it is only a couple of years old. The big danger with trusting a lawyer to deal with it is that he will make certain assumptions based on familiarity with Companies law which will not be valid.
I had a meeting with a lawyer a few months back and was struggling to even convince the poor ignorant fellow that there was any such thing as the Tasmanian Co-operatives Act. In fact he flatly denied it existed and kept trying to refer to another statute for registering another type of corporation.
I was only shopping for a lawyer because of the aforementioned restrictive trade practices of the Supreme Court. It was completely hopeless, I could see it was going to cost thousands of dollars to bring him up to speed on what I already knew. Lawyers, even the most incompetent drongos, adopt the standard pompous attitude that they know everything and everyone else knows nothing. (I had done all the necessary legal research and written it up into a detailed legal submission, but the chap I saw quite unashamedly informed me that he would have to go off and research it all again and it would cost me a few thousand for him to do so.)
There was no question of him simply taking instructions and doing what he was told of course. It would be necessary to pay him to do all the research I had already done.
Actually, a case involving precisely the same issues was taken on for free by a big law firm in Western Australia. But that sort of thing isn't on the cards here in Tasmania. One of the problems being that the lawyer for my opposition, the local council, is actually very clever and experienced. An arrogant prick who makes stupid mistakes, but on balance still very competent. So a lot of his colleagues are somewhat afraid of him.
What my little organisation needs is a good Senior Counsel (a QC in the old parlance). I'm considering applying for a special government grant for that purpose.
> So, in a sense, the market
>system, but the monopoly of lawyers on thepractice of
>law has nothing to do with it. Getting rid of that
>wouldn't affect high end legal practice one jot.
Maybe not, I'll concede that. But I think you'll find that getting rid of the monopoly would make it harder for stupid and inexperienced lawyers to charge $200/hour to muddle their way through to ignominious defeat over and over again.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas