It's something I was taught in law school: if the facts are in your favor, but not the law, argue the facts; if the law is in your favor, but not the facts, argue the law; if neither the law nor the facts are in your favor, then base the argument on emotions.
I recently finished reading John Grisham's The Whistler, which I believe, is his current paperback -- the guy cranks out a book a year and it can be hard to keep up. It's lesser Grisham though it has a great hook (to me): lawyers who investigate judicial misconduct bring down an organized crime ring operating out of a Florida Indian Casino. There are murders, explosions, gun shots, idealistic and overworked and underpaid protagonists, and lots and lots of lawyers who have chosen to go over to the dark side.
The Firm was released while I was in law school. I read it quickly, then read A Time to Kill. I remember seeing The Firm while I was doing my LL.M. internship in Copenhagen, Denmark and attempting to explain to about 20 Danish lawyers what mail fraud is. I eagerly consumed Grisham's next five or six novels, then I got burnout fatigue.
A lot of Grisham's work follows the same basic plot template: the idealist beaten up by the system, the crooked big law firms which bilk clients and flaunt ethics rules. There's usually a crooked politician, untrustworthy law enforcement, but always, in the end, the good guys triumph. And after awhile, I kind of got tired of it. I was being beat up by the legal system (long hours, crappy pay, idiot judges, stupider clients -- I used to work for Donald Trump's law firm, so when I say stupid clients, believe me, I mean stupid clients).
I returned to Grisham about 8 or 9 years ago, about the time I was laid off. Maybe his writing had improved. Maybe he had tweaked his template a bit. Maybe, after what I had been through, I was just more receptive to what I had previously so enjoyed in law school.
Here are some basic things I have really come to appreciate about Grisham: the man writes a great hook; the books are page turners that can be read quickly (this is a complement because once I start reading his stuff, I have trouble putting it down); and the guy really gets what the life of a lawyer is like better than anyone else I have ever read (Vince Gilligan and his Breaking Bad writing staff also do a fantastic job with this and I'm convinced that they must have a former attorney on the staff).
The life of an attorney sucks. The stress is never-ending. The pay really can be crappy. Big law life is awful and lots of time is spent on document review, a soul-crushing experience that saps the life out of every human being and which has become my speciality. It's a life of fine print and 4/5ths of most attorneys never see the inside of the court room. The debt is endless.
Grisham captures all of that perfectly. But he also captures why I, and others like me, actually went to law school. It wasn't about money. It wasn't about prestige. It's because most of us actually wanted to make a difference in life. We go in full of hope. We graduate with high expectations. Then we discover reality. If we went to the right law school, we can get a big firm law job and make big dollars working 80 hours a week 52 weeks a year. A select few get clerkships and work for federal court judges. Most of, especially those of us who went to mediocre law schools, find that work is scarce.
People think it's just easy to "hang up a shingle" and start suing people. But you need money to do that. You have to pay staff. You have to pay court fees and filing fees and court reporter fees and investigator fees, and expert witness fees, and taxes, and don't forget those damn student loans. If you become a personal injury attorney, you also have to front your client's medical expenses. It can take years for a case to come to trial, and during that time, the opposition attorney will flood you with discovery -- they'll try to hide things from you in millions of pages of documents, or they'll just not file it and hope that you never see it.
Grisham gets this reality. His protagonists are almost always some overworked first year attorney at a huge law firm, or some down-and-out personal injury attorney barely surviving. Most of us attorneys never face the danger that Grisham's heroes face, but yeah, the stress, the exhaustion, it's all real.
But here's what Grisham does that I have come to appreciate. He remembers the "why" part: about how we all went to law school so we could make a difference. That's what his people do. They fight for the little people. They remember that the law is supposed to be about justice, that all parties are supposed to be equal, that the scales are not always supposed to be tilted in favor of big business or the government or organized crime.
The legal system, as it is currently set-up, sucks. Tort reform has made it impossible for injured parties to be fairly recompensed, even if a jury should rule in their favor. Big corporations do throw out time and money with the goal of destroying the will of opponents.
I was a automobile insurance defense attorney when the first round of tort reform passed in Texas in the mid-1990s. I still remember one insurance adjuster -- I took orders from him, not the driver of the car even though the driver was technically my client -- who knew my client had caused a wreck and had caused injuries and who didn't even really dispute the medical damage. He told me to drag it out, to run up the fees and to sap the plaintiff's attorney of his money. The goal wasn't to win the case. The goal to destroy the plaintiff's attorney so that even if he should win the case, that he would recover no money because his expenses were more than what the jury rewarded.
That's the world that Grisham writes about. Only in his world, his attorneys win out. They use the legal system the way the legal system is supposed to be used, to right wrongs, to reward the injured and punish the bad guy.
What Grisham does is argue emotion. He has his facts. He has his law. But he knows the reality is that law and facts now rarely matter in the U.S. legal system. So he uses emotion to win his cases.
Comments
Post a Comment