I have a few acquaintances that call me every few months, and when they do, their questions boil down to two unuttered concerns, the first being, they don’t want to pay a lawyer (usually me) for legal services. Now, these same people have no theoretical or actual problem paying rent, paying for a car lease, a trip to the doctor, a taxi, or tax preparation. They’ll pay for glasses for their children, and groceries and clothing. They’ll pay for movies and dinner out, the latest versions of Wii and Xbox and Nintendo DS. They’ll buy an overabundance of birthday presents for their kids to be loaded through the back doors of their homes while simultaneously leaving through the front door with last year’s toys destined for Goodwill.
Why do these people not want to pay for an attorney? Does any person pay for an attorney in a way other than reluctantly? Well, yes, some people do.
And corporations do. Large corporations may have a hundred attorneys on staff, and still manage to farm out work to specialist law firms that charge $1000 per hour of work. Complain about big business, the economy, and lawyers all you want, but no one has ever said, “That bank went bankrupt because it paid its lawyers too much.” Successful corporations know that lawyers provide services that range from necessary evils such as compliance and damage containment to business builders such as acquisitions, franchising, and exportation.
So many people, however, have an aversion to visiting a law office, which might be explained for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that attorneys are expensive. (Let’s put aside the fact that there are bad attorneys out there. I recognize and agree that there are many.) While theoretically, at least, we can see the benefit of having an attorney negotiate for us a favorable business deal, we dread the idea of paying the lawyer for her expertise in assuring that we got the best deal. Same thing for settling an accident or criminal charges.
Even worse than the fees, though, might be the connection between the attorney and a bad event in a person’s life. I’m convinced that the source of most anti-attorney feelings is the idea that a person who feels victimized should not have to pay for anything. The person, after all, is already suffering, and the attorney is simply getting him to where he originally was. Or more often, the lawyer is supposed to “make those b$#%^s pay,” yes?
When things go wrong in a marriage, for example, it is easy to resent having to pay a lawyer to get through the painful process as intact as possible. In the US, with the exception of faulty real estate closings, the attorneys most likely to be sued for malpractice are over “bad events” like divorce and crime.
When an ex-husband has had to give up the good car, the house, the bank account, child support, and alimony, he might find it difficult to see that his pension, the stocks, the vacation home, his prize boat, and his way of life remain with him—due largely to a
hard-working attorney who might have had to work around sticky issues of abuse, abandonment, or infidelity. The problem with that mindset, though, is that the lawyer did not cause the divorce. The lawyer did not cause the accident. The lawyer did not convince the client that having two wives unaware of each other was a good idea. The lawyer did not breach the contract. The lawyer did not force the client to drink and drive, rob a convenience store, or beat his no-good brother-in-law with a shoe. The lawyer, though, is there to help her client get through it.
So pay her already!
Contrary to popular belief, I am not that fun at parties and iftars. My acquaintances do not love me for my bubbly personality, but (I do hope) I provide them something of value when they call me.
It took me a while to figure out my phone acquaintances’ second concern, but this is it in a nutshell: they want to feel safe. Talking an issue out, or at least being able to tease out what issues exist in a tangled and convoluted set of facts helps to make people feel
a bit more in control of a situation that might otherwise seem out of hand. For that, I am grateful and happy to help.
That said, the number of new people to receive my personal number these days is exactly zero.
