Have You Ever Needed a Lawyer?

My brother does divorce/custody matters and he says that half the people he meets don’t fight enough and the other half fight way too hard.

 

High end criminal law is not for the faint hearted or usually for the clean.

Of all of my law school friends, by far the richest one does police brutality/wrongful conviction law in Chicago.

 

The one of my brothers who's a lawyer is rich, but he's in commercial real estate law. Never seen a courtroom. So there's ways and ways, like in any profession.

 

Talk to prospective lawyers. This is a job interview of sorts and you're hiring someone who does legal care just as you would hire someone who does medical care.

If they don't want to spend ten to fifteen minutes discussing what they will and won't do and for how much, what kind of retainer they need, etc., they're probably already handling as many clients as they can.

If you don't trust who you're talking to, walk away. You don't have to like them the way you like your buddies from the fantasy pool.

Everything is billable. Everything.

 

Family law is miserable. Nearly every real estate lawyer I know is pretty darned happy.

 

I've had to deal with lawyers a few times. The results were mixed.

Once was my mother's estate. She named my older brother as the executor. The attorney was an old family friend. His wife and my mother had been best friends since they were children, so he knew us both our entire lives. The day we sat down with him, he warned us against letting the situation tear what was left of our family apart. He reminded us that our mother would want us to look out for each other. We both promised we would do it right. I kept my word. My brother didn't. They attorney went over and above trying to make things right, but the situation did not end well. It still hadn't been fully resolved when my brother died this past fall.

I was also in an accident and went with my insurance company's attorneys when he sued me. He claimed phantom injuries and got more money than he should have, but I never paid anything beyond a small bump in my premium.

The best experience I had with a lawyer was when my wife and I were taken to court by the town we lived in. (It's a long story, not worth getting into the details.) We contacted a lawyer, who we later found out had once been the town attorney. Apparently, he didn't like the guy who was holding his old job very much. Our lawyer knew of a quirk in the town code that got the judge to throw out the case. The town attorney was furious. He was so sure he had us and so pissed off at the ruling that he wouldn't stop arguing until the judge threatened to charge him with contempt of court. That was a hell of a lot of fun.

 

I love it when lawyers get to put on their capes and save somebody's tuchis. I have a paralegal cert... (Of course I do!) and used it and my social work-y bona fides to do public legal outreach and consumer info for a while. That's as specific as I'll get. So, the thing is, I'm a little protective of lawyers because people either think they are some kind of walking, talking magic human who can ju-ju all of the bad stuff away with annotated code and the still-beating heart of a virgin or they're all Matlock-like PeePaws who make the booboos all better, at least the ones who weren't suckled on adder's milk by Satan's concubines.