I've done a lot of filing documents with courts over the years though and I long ago decided that this "fuck them" attitude is not the right way to go at all. On the contrary, I always approach them in a humble and respectful way. (Which is extraordinarily alien to my nature, so if I can do it anyone can.)
The way I look at it is, these poor bastards have to deal with lawyers every day of the week, who treat them like shit for the most part. They just have to take it. So (a) They deserve a break and (b) I can't compete with lawyers as far as being contemptuous and threatening, so it might completely disarm them to be treated the exact opposite to what they have come to expect.
And it usually does work, at worst (I'm thinking here of the local Magistrates court staff) it at least doesn't seem to do any harm. In fact, these court clerks can be extremely helpful, give you lots of advice, on arcane procedural matters and suggest things you might never have thought of. (Of course they always seem to like prefacing their remarks with the reminder that "...this is not legal advice", as if telling you which form needs to be filled in, or what filing fee exemptions are applicable, is "legal advice".)
Plus, at the back of my mind, I've always had the lingering suspicion that if some nobody like me ever really pissed them off, they might just as easily lose some important document down the back of a filing cabinet. So my respect is not entirely feigned. As a matter of policy, while I wouldn't think twice about taking the piss out of a judge, I always defer to court clerks, as if they Gods.
That might be where you went wrong.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas
At 8:48 PM -0500 19/5/06, jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net wrote:
>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
>
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