In defence of lawyers

What do you call a bus at the bottom of the sea with 50 lawyers in it?

Somewhere in a film I once saw, someone (I think Danny DeVito) makes a wise crack, asking “What do you call a bus at the bottom of the sea with 50 lawyers in it?” Answer: “A good start.”

People revile lawyers so much that even lawyers laugh at that joke. If it were a race rather than a profession that the quip targeted, there would be outrage. Blacks, Jews, even prostitutes, crypto-currency traders – no laugh but a bristle of indignation instead. So why are lawyers such easy game?

Of all the lawyers that engage in court actions, and even in multi-partite actions, you can pretty much average out that 50% of them lose their cases. That doesn’t mean they’re poor lawyers, but a moment’s reflection will tell you that the other 50% win their cases. Some sell their loses as wins by arguing they contrive a settlement, but a settlement is then really a lose-lose; although, if your prospects of winning were poor from the outset, then you may win more by losing a little than if you’d tried to win everything and lost the lot. Five years for culpable homicide, instead of 20 years for murder, for instance.

But even the lawyers who win their cases aren’t necessarily good lawyers. I won in responding to an appeal once because the appellant led his case on false premises: he cited all sorts of grounds of action in delict and damages for being forced out of his flat so that the housing association, my client, could do up the building; I simply told the Sheriff Principal that he and the association had a contractual agreement that he would move out, and after 15 seconds of pleading, the appeal was defeated. I wasn’t a good lawyer, I simply knew what the ground of action was.

There are four types of people in the world, aside from those who know nothing about what you think.

1. Those who hope you’re right.

2. Those who hope you’re wrong.

3. Those who know whether you’re right or wrong.

4. Lawyers.

Lawyers have no opinion (other than about themselves). Look on some of their websites or their profiles in LinkedIn. They have no opinion about anything. They may specialise in oil and gas or personal injury cases, but they will raise an action as easily as defend one, so, that’s just their expertise, not the side they will take. Lawyers are innocuous and benign, and therefore not dangerous, unless you’re opposite them in a case where you have no case. That’s not danger on their part, however; it’s stupidity on yours.

Those who hope you’re right will pat you on the back and encourage you to fight their battles for them, as they sit and watch you get battered to death.

Those who hope you’re wrong will flame you on social media and make your life hell.

Those who know whether you’re right or wrong will say nothing, because they have nothing to contribute to your knowledge. Their knowledge is for them and they will neither encourage you nor detract from you. They will remain silent. They are your Facebook friends who never post anything, never like anything and never engage with you on the subjects that you post on. Often, because what they know is too dangerous for you to know.

The appellant in my case was (1) to his lawyer and (2) to me. The housing association was (2) to the appellant and (1) to me. The Sheriff Principal was (3). So – who was a (4)? Well, we all were, actually. And that’s why you should never be gleeful at hearing about a bus full of lawyers at the bottom of the sea. Lawyers do no one any harm – it is litigants who do harm. Like it is not guns that kill, it is killers who kill. If there were no such thing as lawyers, litigants would shoot each other in courtrooms. Lawyers keep the peace. By applying the law. The law is sometimes wrong, however. But that is not the doing of lawyers, it is the doing of lawmakers, and lawmakers are elected by litigants, whether they’re in a courtroom or not.

Of the four categories, the most dangerous are (1) and (2); the ones you need to be careful of are (3), though as long as you do not provoke them to confirm your rightness or wrongness, they, too, are benign. And (4) are always benign.

Once you have turned the world upside-down, you will start to see it for what it is. Because, it is an upside-down world that we in fact see, and that vision is corrected by our brains, which we add a goodly portion of self-interest to as we turn it. If we recognised the world as it truly is – upside-down – then we would banish our self-interest and see it for real.

What do you call a bus at the bottom of the sea with 50 litigants in it? Answer: A good start. A good lawyer is one who stops his client becoming a litigant at all and thus saves him from drowning at the bottom of the sea.