> Unfortunately there is such thing genuine authority
> and real expertise. Not all lawyers are competent and
> half of them are below average, but if you are sued
> for real money or, God forbid, have trouble with the
> cops, you want the help of someone who knows the rules
> and can put her or his hands on the right levers to do
> something to stop the machine from rolling over you.
> Likewise with physicians; if you are sick, you want
> someone who might know something about how to make you
> better.
Part of the animosity towards lawyeys comes from the fact that the legal system )predominantly put in place by lawyers) in unnecessarily fucked up in a way that directly benefits those lawyers.
My last trip to the courthouse was to file a quit-claim deed on a piece of property I inherited. It should be simple process. No liens on the property, owned by the same person the last 40 years, blah, blah. I only need to transfer legal ownership from a trust to my SO. One form, one office.
Every trip to the state building ended with the admonishment, "get a lawyer". Fuck them, I already have more than one and that lawyer did nothing I could not do and tried to do. In the end the state accepted the exact same form with the exact same description of the property from my lawyer that they refused to accept from me. I won't go into all the details but the entire process was total BS. This was hardly an isolated instance. I was billed $75 to fill out a form (I had already filled it out and needed to provide the info anyway) and deliver it. He didn't even do it himself but rather had a clerk do it. I have dealt with dozens of lawyers in several states and while none of them were assholes who cares? Almost without exception they did something that any normally intelligent person could have done if the institutional hurdles in place did not exist.
The powerful members of the legal profession do their damnedest to make certain they are indespensible in as many peoples lives as they can in order to increase their income stream. This is not wild conjecture on my part either.
So many lawyers like to use the doctor analogy as andie does above but doctors knowledge is a specialized knowledge about physiology and chemistry. Physical systems they had nothing to do with creating. They don't have specialized knowledge about a deliberately obfuscatory system that they implemented themselves often times but not exclusively for personal gain. This is a big difference and most common folks are bright enough to see this difference and not fall for this poor analogy to explain the necessity of lawyers. The fact that there are decent and nice lawyers is of no consequence to this fact.
John Thornton