Vet Your Lawyer

I wanted to share this with you because I thought it was instructive. I don’t know the author, a family lawyer in Virginia, and I only excerpted a portion of his list, but I thought it made a good point, although perhaps a bit too caustically. Even though family law is a notoriously emotional area, a breakdown in mutual respect and communication between attorney and client is a disaster no matter what your legal issue. This is why it is so critical that you let me help you find a lawyer you can respect and who likewise respects your input.

The complete original is here.

2. Get your law from the internet.

Or from cocktail parties, or the Women’s Center, or your friends at the gym; or better yet, even from some 1983 book you found at the public library. Surely if your lawyer says it’s not that way, he just hasn’t heard the latest, and deserves not to be paid for presuming to practice law while uninformed. That article you read, in an on-line version of a Canadian newspaper, says you have an absolute right to divorce on grounds of three months’ separation, and of course that means it’s perfectly all right to shack up with your boy friend, and if the lawyer says otherwise, argue with him about it. He shouldn’t be able to charge you for the time, because he’s wrong. When the judge says that you’re wrong, well then she must be wrong too.

The internet today is such a wonderful thing that it is invested with an aura of total authority, and an amazing number of clients cannot grasp the simple realization that if anybody can put anything on the internet, the internet can be wrong. And of course an astonishing number of clients cannot imagine that it makes any difference that something which is the law in Wisconsin or California or Hawaii or someplace; like let’s say divorce upon six months’ separation, kids or no kids, for example; would have to be the law here. They are used to reading national media (like the internet) that totally ignore state lines, and they treat the very concept of state cultures, state government and state law with contempt. They immediately become hostile when anything like a requirement of state law is even mentioned, and figure that if Virginia has a law that doesn’t allow something, it will bloody well change when their case comes along, because it has to. After all, everyone knows that the law is made by judges deciding individual cases, and that lawyers make the law by convincing judges that “social reality” and the progress of mankind demand that the law be changed to reach the right result. There is very little appreciation of the fact that most judges will choose to follow the existing law rather than the client’s feelings, or the latest poll or talk-show expert; and lawyers who try to tell clients otherwise are regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned, and therefore not worth listening to. This is all very nice, but in law practice it happens to be a disaster that is hurtling down the tracks toward the uncomprehending client.

3. Assume that the law has to make sense to you.

As in the above example, the lawyer who tells you to show up at your hearing on grounds of divorce with a witness to help prove that you are a Virginia resident and been separated from your wife for a year must be just making a big pedantic deal out of nothing to churn up his fees, because that doesn’t make any sense. Everybody knows that you all have been separated for a year, and after all, you have your military orders to show that you were posted overseas and that Virginia was your Home of Record as far as the U.S. Navy is concerned. And if the judge or commissioner doesn’t like it that you show up without a witness, well the overwhelming persuasive force of your winning personality will just blow all that dissatisfaction away. It couldn’t possibly take two witnesses to prove a thing like that, because it just plain doesn’t make sense.

The trouble with such reasoning is that the requirements of the law which don’t make sense to you are still the law.