Sleazy Lawyers Part I

Recalling "Serpico" and "And Justice For All", two great Al Pacino movies, I’m drawn back into this issue of sleazy lawyers, more so from the latter than the former. I have a number of thoughts on this.

 #1. Sleazy, dishonest lawyers are much rarer in the circles I practice in than the public seems to believe. Most lawyers I’ve dealt with can be trusted to honor their word. Recognizing that they are on the other side, and represent adverse interests to your client’s position, you can still work amicably with them. Indeed, frequently the clients are wrapped up emotionally in the case and take everything personally, so the lawyers act as rational parties to throttle their clients and moderate their behavior, expectations, and demands. In the case of criminal matters, the state prosecutors (called Commonwealth’s Attorneys) vary from laid back to uptight, and some of the female ones – sorry, ladies – can be especially difficult and arrogant, like they have something to prove. However, the Federal (US) prosecutors, aka US Attorneys, with whom I’ve dealt, have been remarkably polite and "velvet glove" – to the point where you might forget they’re on the other side of the case.

 #2. Sleazy lawyer, sleazy client. On the rare occasions I’ve found sleazy lawyers on the other side, 100% of the time it’s because their clients are sleazy. Honest, decent clients seem to want to hire honest, decent attorneys. And the smarter, more devious sleazy clients sometimes hire decent lawyers to make their own case look more honorable. However, an honest attorney will not acquiesce in taking a dishonest or unethical position or tactic, so sleazy clients frequently jump from various lawyers in the course of litigation, stacking up delays while the new attorney gets a continuance... and ultimately withdraws when he/she finds ethical representation impossible. When a client comes to my office after having gone through several prior lawyers, that puts up a red flag. If it looks or smells bad, best to let the client go.

 #3. What is "sleazy"? The bar rules dictate that a lawyer represent his client’s case as zealously as the law and ethics allow. Aggressive lawyering is encouraged – so long as it doesn’t cross certain lines, which can admittedly be quite vague. While blackmail and extortion – and threatening criminal charges to force a settlement in a civil suit, or likewise threatening to make bogus sexual abuse allegations in a child custody dispute – are forbidden, any civil matter which involves various competing claims of varying strength and importance will boil down to negotiating the "cards on the table" and hopefully reaching a mutually acceptable agreement, which may involve waiving certain good faith claims or withdrawing ones which are less genuine but were only raised to "up the ante" and force an outcome on other issues. Ultimately an adult client can knowingly waive certain claims, and bogus claims will ultimately be exposed as such in court should the proponent be foolish enough to insist on bringing them before a trier of fact...at least in theory. ("Legal Myth #1: To succeed, a lawsuit must have merit.").

 #4. I had the bad experience to have to deal with a sleazy lawyer in the context of a lawsuit against me personally. I won’t mention names, but the lawsuit was (A) served on me by a process server I had recommended to the lawyer, (B) on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving; (C) the lawyer threatened bar sanctions against me not because of a good faith belief but merely out of spite; (D) his complaint was full of outright lies and falsehoods; (E) until the very end, and after two years of litigation and countless legal fees, he refused to negotiate in good faith. Had he done so at the beginning, he would have gotten the same thing he ultimately settled for, much quicker and less expensively for both of us. This was, bar none, the worse experience I had with another lawyer, and he surpassed in greed and dishonesty by several degrees of magnitude any other lawyer I’ve ever met. My own attorney was shocked and incredulous at the claims made by this man. Fortunately the nightmare is over.

 #5. In Brazil, lawyers have to take different exams to be federal civil attorneys or prosecutors, or even judges. Supposedly having a rigorous bureaucracy like this will weed out bad lawyers and judges and improve the system, right? Uh-uh. There are plenty of corrupt judges at all levels in Brazil. Unfortunately, passing a series of tough exams is no guarantee the candidate will be morally honest. But at least we know the crooked judges are competent!

 #6. I decided to become a lawyer in high school – I was good at writing, history, and debate, and didn’t want to spend 10 years in school to be a doctor (and was not nearly at good in science as I was at history). I also learned that the majority of politicians were lawyers, so the road to Congress and the White House went through law school. Eventually in college, as a government & politics major, I learned too much about politics: that politics was a nasty business full of moral ambiguities and compromises, best left to the smarmy frat rats and other slimy creatures. And of course the campus politics at the University of Maryland, College Park – with the joke of a Monarchist Party – further convinced me to stay light years away from any political involvement, at least as a candidate myself. But this didn’t discourage me from being a lawyer, per se, it merely killed any interest in personally entering politics.

 As for lawyers vs. politicians in sleaziness: most people would probably think of this as "crocodiles vs. alligators", i.e. hardly distinguishable, morally or otherwise. But I believe that as a practical matter, in the aggregate, politicians tend to be more sleazy than lawyers, by the nature of their business: courting public favor, whichever way the wind blows; telling the voters what they want to hear; and being put into positions of extreme temptation for bribes, kickbacks, and other "perquisites" which come with the job. Of course, I’ll concede that most of the lobbyists responsible for those temptations, bribes, etc. are themselves...attorneys! And lobbyists are all too frequently former politicians, whose value as such – having access to the right people and knowing what to do, how much to pay, whose ass to kiss, etc. - makes them such effective lobbyists. But it’s POLITICS that’s the mess and moral cesspool, not the legal profession itself, however many politicians are or were lawyers.

Immoral vs. Amoral

This is a revisit to the earlier "good vs. evil" blog entry. It occurred to me that "evil" is somewhat simplistic in describing the behavior, and more importantly, the ethical motivations, of those who fall into that category.

 The "immoral" are those who have moral standards and ethics, probably fairly close to the "moral", but who, for whatever reason, choose to ignore them. Most likely the reason is because morals get in the way of getting them what they want: money, power, sex, etc. They either cannot achieve these goals morally, or simply find it easier and more convenient to do so immorally. If people get hurt, too bad for them. That’s life. If the "easy" thing and the "right" thing were always the same, we would always be angels and there would be no problem (at least from those who might otherwise be immoral). The issues and problems arise when the "easy" way is not the right way. That’s when moral choices have to be made, and which choices are made determines our moral guilt or innocence.

 The "amoral" are those without any moral standards at all. They do not know right from wrong. Left to their own devices, they do as they please without any hesitation, guilt, or shame. The only thing stopping them from committing crimes is concern over "retribution from authority figures" (to paraphrase Beldar, the Conehead father). The extreme example is the Mob assassin who cold-bloodedly kills his target and then goes off to lunch without so much as a second thought. Not all amoral people are this dangerous, but they are certainly more dangerous and less trustworthy than the immoral, since they have no internal standards to control their behavior.

 The major difference is shame and guilt. While the amoral are immune to this and cannot be shamed into behaving "good" – criminal laws and vengeance from their victims are the only restraint they obey – the immoral can sometimes be affected. Criticize an immoral person and the likely result – assuming they intend to continue their behavior anyway – is resentment. Do so to an amoral person and they will simply ignore you. Any "guilt" or "remorse" they display is insincere, designed only to placate those unexplicably bound and motivated by these alien ideas called "morals."

 Which is not to say that the "moral" are perfect. Ultimately the temptations we face in our lives overcome our resistance and get the best of us – some more than others. But our guilt affects us and drives us to resist, to some extent, and ideally take full responsibility for our mistakes and failings. We will sin, we will fail, despite our best efforts, but the end result will inevitably be far better, for us and all concerned, than if we made no effort at all or worse – as the amoral do – never even cared in the first place.

 There may be hope for the immoral. They may tire of their ways, grow wracked with guilt, or otherwise choose to abandon immorality. They have some frame of reference, some moral state of grace to which to return, that they recognize as good, however far from it they may have strayed over the years – which is the whole point of the parable of the prodigal son.

 I’m less sure there is hope for the amoral. They simply have not developed moral standards, and I don’t see what would cause them to suddenly develop morals and a conscience at any point in their lives. It’s not there inside them to return to...it simply doesn’t exist, it wasn’t created at the time it was supposed to be established inside them. "Right" and "wrong" are vague terms with little meaning, concepts which other people understand and care about, but not them.