In fact, we just finished watching Michael Clayton (with George Clooney) yesterday. Very good movie, and certainly that corporation needed to be sued. When such an act can prevent further harm, then it is a worthy cause.

As far as “God help me if I really are injured,” What if that injury involved no one to sue? What would I do then?

Then why worry if there is someone to sue? Really? Why waste the time and energy hurting someone else? That wouldn’t heal me, emotionally or physically. My only caveat would be medical costs. But then, I couldn’t sue anyone if I had cancer either.

Life happens, and sometimes people are involved.

So sure you go ahead and cling to your belief that all plaintiff’s lawyers are evil ambulance chasers, and that you are the only person worthy of deciding who should and should not be sued. Clearly this is a personal issue for you, and no one will ever change your mind. You should probably remove that part of your blog description that claims to be interested in rational thoughts, though, as you clearly enjoy fervent beliefs more than making rational distinctions amidst an entire profession of people.

God help you when you really are injured. Be sure and show your blog to the attorney you try to get to spend their own money prosecuting your case.

I don’t know if you’ll come back and see this answer.

There are too many plaintiff lawyers and by experience I have found that they will try to prosecute a weak case. When I was in my early twenties, a lady turned left onto a road in front of me. She claimed my lights weren’t on, and I knew they were on. The insurance company stopped helping us after they called 60% her fault, and we couldn’t afford to replace our old but very reliable car.

So I tried to call a lawyer. I was young, clueless, and there are advertisements everywhere. Was I hurt? Well, a bloodless scrape on my ankle and a very minor bruise.

But this guy was going to go after her for injuries! That was how he would make his money. When I pulled out after a couple of days, because he was acting without integrity, he was extremely rude.

I’ve seen other cases. Everyone has heard about frivolous and just plain greedy cases. There are enough litigation lawyers that will do anything for a buck that the whole process reeks to an honest person.

Are there cases where people need to be sued? Yes.

But that doesn’t make ambulance chasing a reputable practice. That doesn’t make the original suit that came against Flea right. If anything, that mess proves how broken the litigation process is.

To quote your own words:

“Do you think they aren’t human?”

I also find it ironic that so many people earnestly believe that most, if not all, plaintiff’s cases are without merit or plaintiff’s lawyers prosecute cases with bad facts to make money. This theory ignores the economic reality of being a practicing plaintiff’s lawyer. A contingency fee means you do not get paid unless you recover money for your client, so you simply cannot afford to spend hundreds of hours on a case with no merit.

But don’t let all of these pesky facts get in your way, after all it’s so much easier to blame everything on those pesky plaintiff’s lawyers!

I suppose you could make the bar exam more difficult and at the same time limit the number of tries to pass the bar exam, although some states still have a glut of attorneys even with low pass rates (the California pass rate when I took the bar was below 50%). There is a valid need for attorneys who represent plaintiffs or classes of plaintiffs who do not themselves have the power to bring change to defendents/companies who really are in the wrong. If all attorneys worked for the big companies or big firms that represented the big companies, then there’d be no one out there to help the little guy.

Regardless of what a better ratio of attorneys to non-attorneys might be, there are to few attorneys who look their client in the eyes and say “you can’t be serious, despite what you may be able to extract from the other side, you should do what is morally right here.”

Anon,
Just because I steer clear of the courtroom doesn’t mean that I don’t have the knowledge necessary to judge the merits of legal arguments. I spend most of my time drafting agreements to avoid arguments or advising clients of the strenghts and weaknesses of their positions and likelihood of success in court. However, I firmly believe that law is not rocket science, or physics or microbiology, etc. If only practicing trial attorneys were “qualified” to judge the merits of a case (or the wisdom of blogging about trial strategy during a trial), the jury pool would shrink significantly.

I wish him well, and hope his future is less dire than it seems at the moment. Making the front page of a newspaper was a very high price to pay for his jokey alter ego, but hubris is a bitch.

You apparently haven’t tried any and appear to know nothing about trial practice. Are there frivolous claims? Of course. Are there bad doctors? Of course. However, neither justifies a wholesale indictment of either system.

As for Moof, whether or not he’s a good guy is not the issue. Good people are negligent all the time. I’m sure you’ve inadvertently run a stop sign a time or two, you were just lucky no one was in the road at the time. However, without reviewing the evidence, you can not make a judgment on the legitimacy of this case.

Regards – Shinga

Very interesting. A solution could be a limit on how many lawyers are allowed to enter the field. Is that what bar exams are supposed to do? Should they be more rigorous?

Anon,

We don’t have to try every case to know that some of them are frivolous. We already know that judges throw some out on that basis alone. What of the ‘fringe’ cases, that the judge almost threw out but decided was okay?

I am sure that in order to avoid cognitive dissonance, to avoid pangs of conscience, to be confident in front of judge and jury, lawyers trying frivolous and weak cases convince themselves as well.

Moof,

Thank you.

Liz,

I know that the bulk of his writing about the trial regarded the trial itself, but there were several instances in which he noted his feelings regarding the death of the child.

Everyone who has said Flea was stupid, juvenile, etc

The only difference between Flea and all of us is that Flea managed to be stupid and juvenile publicly. Maybe we should be a little more compassionate and stop pointing out the obvious. It doesn’t help or change anything.