Tag: Assessing a case

Too Good To Be True: Why You Shouldn’t Take That Big Case

Hey you little legal morons, all you solos and baby lawyers out there struggling to make ends meet.  Sure, the office may be cramped and filled with files, but you’re living the dream of a day-to-day small time lawyer.  Certainly you may be driving Uber to keep the lights on during the slow months, and your bank account may always be on the verge of being overdrawn, but that’s how this law thing is supposed to work, right? And at the end of the day you know that it’ll all be worth it if you can just land that one big case that’ll rake in the hours and the dough, bringing you from the edge of the red to firmly in the black and making it clear that you’re a real player in the legal game, right?

Wrong, dipshit.  Because as Captain Ahab learned, sometimes when you get that white whale you’ve been chasing it may turn right the fuck around and kill you.  Then some asshole writes a book about your horrible defeat at the hands of the big case and it opens with “Call me Justice Scalia” or some shit. I don’t know, I never read Moby Dick after I figured out it wasn’t fucking erotica or some shit.  But even without the strong analogy, the fact remains that one big case can sink your little law office faster than an Italian ferry loaded down with passengers.  The fucker’ll blow your finances up quicker than a Southwest jet engine. It’ll ruin your goddamn future.

So you probably shouldn’t take that big case.

Continue reading “Too Good To Be True: Why You Shouldn’t Take That Big Case”

Representing the Reprehensible: Part 2 – Tips for Representing Nazis

So on Monday I spoke a little bit about why it’s important for lawyers to provide representation to people we may find completely devoid of morals.  The take away from that is even if the person is someone you’d be happy to see locked away in a basement subsisting on bread, water, and the occasional print-out from the Stormfront website, everyone deserves to have good legal representation and we don’t get to draw the line at only the people we like or those whose views we always agree with.  When we became lawyers, we became servants of justice, and sometimes justice, like your brother who lives in a basement subsisting on bread, water, and occasional printouts from the Stormfront website, has some really weird and detestable buddies you’d rather not associate with. Them’s the breaks, though, and we have to really accept it. While we have our personal morals and ethics, the idealized lawyer is professionally a true neutral.

I say “the idealized lawyer,” because at the end of the day we’re actually humans, not machines that just appear in court and “Beep Boop” our way through arguments, and we all have our limits. However, as I’ve talked about a couple times in the past, the limit is the lawyer’s issue, not the client’s issue, because it’s the point where our client is so amazingly, beyond the pale fucked up that we cannot represent them because we may subconsciously sabotage their otherwise meritorious claim.  But if we can swallow our bile just long enough to make the argument, there are some steps a decent lawyer needs to take in handling the Reprehensible client.

So…you know, let’s talk about that and lose me some readers.

Continue reading “Representing the Reprehensible: Part 2 – Tips for Representing Nazis”

Representing the Reprehensible: Part 1 – Boozy Rambles

Good  morning, or afternoon, or whatever time of day it is! Look guys, I’m not only writing a blog, I’m a practicing attorney, and that means from time to time shit runs late, like it did today and last week and…shit, I mean…every week since I took that ill-advised trip to the mountains to remember what it felt like to unclench my asshole for a few days. But that’s well in the past now, and it’s time for me to start doing shit that I’m supposed to be doing again, like updating this thing and passing on profane wisdom to those who need a swift kick in their perpetually idealistic asses. Which…you know…include letting people know that sometimes you’re going to represent people you abso-fucking-lutely despise.

I’m not just talking about your run of the mill “Oh, clients just flat out suck” type of person you despise either. Nope, not today my merry little shitstains. Today I’m talking about the client who causes your skin to crawl and your brain to say “Nope, fuck you man, you want to take this case you can talk to your ass cause that’s the one making the arguments.” I’m talking about the representation of the world’s reprehensible folks. You know the type I’m taking about, the one’s who go on and on about the purity and strength of the “White Race” while looking like Skeletor and having someone they can call “Sister Momma” with a straight face.

“Fuck them, Boozy,” people who definitely are Muggles will say as they read that paragraph, “Tell us why they don’t deserve a lawyer!”

I’m about to piss a lot of those fucking Muggles off though, guys, because here’s the simple truth: Lawyers aren’t supposed to make moral or judgment calls about their clients (even though we totally do), and that doesn’t just apply to the fluffy, furry, fuzzy fun fuckers…it applies to the hardcore Neo-Nazi assholes as well.  Because that’s our goddamn job.

I can hear the sounds of the non-lawyers blocking me on Twitter and removing the site from their news streams even as I type that. Well, good fucking riddance.

Continue reading “Representing the Reprehensible: Part 1 – Boozy Rambles”

Clients are F’ing Liars: Dealing With A Client’s Knowing Omissions

It’s Monday, which means I should have spent my weekend working on a nice post for you guys and digging into a post for Wednesday, leaving me free to come up with and post something for this week’s Friday entry. What I did instead was drink copious amounts of Sour Monkey from Victory Brewing Company, then wash all of that down with half a bottle of Booker’s bourbon while playing games on my new computer. The end result is I don’t really have shit for you today, and trust me, I felt bad about it.

I mean, when I started this site the whole idea was to post something three times a week. Multiple times now I’ve failed to do that. I’ve gotten busy, or fallen behind on shit, and decided that the blog entry is the last thing I needed to be worrying about. Some of you out there are saying “Oh, Boozy, don’t worry about it man! We know that sometimes you’re going to be busy or overwhelmed, it’s cool to take a break every now and again.”

No, motherfuckers, no it isn’t. Because that would make me a liar, and I fucking hate people that lie to me about shit. You know why? Because I have to deal with clients, and clients lie all the fucking time. Those assholes are giving me money to help them and they lie about shit.

And look-ee here, just like that I have a reason to be a salty bastard this early in the morning: Bitching about clients that lie.

Which is every client.

Because all clients lie.

Continue reading “Clients are F’ing Liars: Dealing With A Client’s Knowing Omissions”