[lbo-talk] Kill all the lawyers

[budge]

On Thu, 31 Jul 2003 at 9:53am andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
>
> It's not always successful even with a trained lawyer,
> most of whom are idiots like everyone else -- my
> sister asked me to read her new will,  I told her I'm
> not a wills trusts & estates lawyer, but I'd look, and
> her WTE lawyer had a perpetuities problem in the will;
> lawyers will  know what I mean, and the rest of you
> jsut need to know that if uncorrected, it would make
> the will invalid. Her WTE didn't catch it, but it took
> a lawyer to catch it. If you don't care whether you
> will won't give the devsie you want, whether your
> contarcts will be enforceable, whether your house deed
> is valid, whether you get the recovery that is coming
> from you when someone hits your car, feel free to
> represent yourself or use a paralegal. Probably 7
> times out of ten everything will be OK.

First: i don't lawyer bash (well i don't bash them anymore
than any other profession including my own) so you can put
your defensiveness away for now.  i think your being
defensive caused you to almost deliberately miss the point,
which is that a HUGE amount of legal work will not benefit
more from having a JD do it over a paralegal.

for example, when i got divorced i did my own.  there were
no children, no large shared asserts (no house), and the
divorce decree complete with papist sounding legalese took a
couple of pages of paper.  it is legal for me to do my own,
but it is not legal for my paralegal friend to help me do my
own (so he, of course, didn't ;).  but i just happened to be
able to look at a copy of his divorce, heh, heh.  as long as
all the correct incantations are in there, there is nothing
to go wrong with a simple no-fault divorce.  so i could have
paid a lawyer $300 to do this, or if i'd been allowed, i
could have paid a paralegal, say $75, but in the end i did
it myself.  there is no value a lawyer could have added.

OTOH, when i got sued over a traffic accident, hell yes i
hired an attorney to negotiate a settlement.  and it was
money well spent.

even in medicine, the gods are relinquishing some power to
PA's and NP's.  but not lawyers to paralegals or legal secretaries...

--
no Onan

"superior sound quality"