Lawyer PR

Lawyers, those manipulators of the system and destroyers of lives who latch onto any affluent arm like a pack of ravenous leeches, are starting to get wise to their well-deserved reputations; now they're starting to fight back in their commercials.

You've heard people calling for tort reform, right? Especially in cases of medical malpractice, lawyers sue doctors so much (You didn't give my client a lollipop? I'll see you in court!) that it's a big risk to insure a doctor for malpractice. Such a risk that insurance companies, using such arcane tools as mathematics and cost-benefit analysis, have to charge extremely high rates, since their costs of insuring a doctor against malpractice now have to consider the great likelihood that, oh, just about everyone will get sued for malpractice, and the insurance companies will have to foot the bill.

I suppose you could see this from different perspectives. You could bemoan the quality of medical education that graduates doctors who are pretty much incompetent across the board. That would be the case if the lawyers were suing for, er, what's the word? Oh, right, non-frivolous reasons.

The other perspective is that lawyers are simply bleeding a nobler profession of its cash-rich blood. To hold this view, you'd have to entertain some crazy notions, like lawyers, having legal expertise and having entrenched themselves by making laws and contracts impossible to interpret by a layman, have a racket going where they go around suing people because they can. People are so fearful of these lawyers that they often settle just to avoid the risk of putting a case before a jury, where the plaintiff will trot out some sob story, the jury will shed a pair of tears each, and some rich defendant, a bad, evil person because he's rich (hooray socialism), will have to fork over way more than he has for doing nothing wrong.

It's interesting, isn't it, how lawyers have manipulated this game? I mean, if this is all about making rich people pay, why not go after the way-too-rich-for-the-measly-work-their-associates-do-anyway lawyers?! But it's not. It's about lawyers convincing you that some other group is evil and profiting off your misery, when it's the lawyers doing it. Way to be tools, I guess.

The idea came for this article while watching television, and seeing commercials for law firms where paid actors say, "Everyone always hears that lawyers are the problem. But when I had my accident, the insurance company wouldn't give me my money. They're the real problem!" Yeah, don't even consider the reason that insurance rates are so high or that insurance companies have to work their asses off to avoid paying claims, because lawsuits have driven their costs up and thinned their profit margins.

It's cool. Lawyers are the answer. It's like the lottery. If you win, you're happy, and screw everyone else. If you can get a big settlement from an insurance company, and everyone else has to suffer with higher rates, who cares? See, now you're thinking like a lawyer - I want the whole pie, and screw everyone who goes hungry because of it. I'll draft a brief showing how they were greedy and evil for wanting to eat anyway.