On Empathy

I really pondered whether to post this at all.  Ultimately, I decided to, but with some hesitation.

When people who intend to go to law school, or those in law school, are asked "why do you want to become a lawyer" a common answer is "I want to help people".

Indeed, if you read interviews of young lawyers that tends to show up  as well, and if you read late career interviews of lawyers, there sometimes, but not always, is an effort at autohagiography in this regard.

Any occasional reader of this blog would realize that there's a lot of cynicism that's expressed here about certain things, and one of those things occasionally has to deal with this topic.  Suffice it to say I've been deeply skeptical of a lot of the propaganda lawyers put out about their occupation and, additionally, I've occasionally pondered why they put it out.  Is it advertising, or is it verbal laudanum?  Or both, or some of each.

Anyhow, for almost all of my career as a lawyer I've been exposed to the really vigorous propaganda that's put out by "trial lawyers" on the nature of their purpose.  

I should note here, before I go on, that "trial lawyers" are far less than 50% of all lawyers.  Lots of lawyers don't go anywhere near a courtroom.  Probably less than half engage in litigation frequently.  Of those, most who do are lawyers in the criminal law arena, whom "trial lawyers" don't really count as "trial lawyers" unless they also do that in addition to plaintiff's work in civil litigation.  And, for some weird reason, "trial lawyers" don't include those who do defense work as "trial lawyers", even though they very clearly are.

So we're talking about a minority of lawyers here.

Anyhow, it's really common to read trial lawyer assertions about their deep compassion for mankind.

And for some, it's really, really true.

But I've come to the conclusion that for a lot of them, that's pretty much merely propaganda.  

Now, some of that may be my cycnical nature, to be sure.  But the origin of this post comes from an event last year in which I spent almost all day, on a Saturday, as a defense lawyer working to make sure that a massive disaster didn't happen to a plaintiff, working to contact people and arrange for a type of rescue, if you will.  I was aware of the situation as the pliantiff's lawyer informed me, but that lawyer didn't do anything to effectuate the rescue.  

It was as if they really didn't care.

More recently I've experienced another incident in which it seemed as if the plaintiff's lawyer really didn't give a carp about the fate of plaintiff.  In another situation I sat through an event in which the plaintiff's lawyer somewhat made fun of an excused a deeply held belief of the plaintiff as it wasn't something, probably that, he expected a middle class lawyer to understand or even accept.  Frankly, being eclectic, or having a very different world view, I didn't find the subject's belief to be odd at all and I was appalled by the subject's representatives reaction.  Following that, I endured another event in which I tried to make certain that a result wasn't going to have a detrimental effect on a person in real terms to sort of receive a yawn from the person representing them.

More recently, however, and the event that sort of pushed me over the edge here, I was out for a family medical matter of real importance and received a series of pushy emails from an impatient opposing lawyer until I reacted extremely sharply to it. Even then, I didn't really receive an apology for it.

Having said that, I did receive a real expression for concern, under somewhat similar circumstances, from another lawyer representing a plaintiff.

One of the really dispiriting things about practicing law is the long slow disillusionment that accompanies it. Law students are told by their friends and family that lawyers are really smart, and the fact that you are in law school means you too are really smart.  Soon after practicing law you learn that there's a lot of lawyers who are very far from smart.  And if you are like me, and had an unusual background before going into law, you were already shocked to find that law school is extraordinarily easy.

A later shock comes when you realizes that the concept that all jurists are chosen from the smartest and wisest simply isn't the case.  There are some extremely smart judges, and there are some extremely good judges who may not be geniuses, but they're really good.  But it becomes clear after awhile that politics and political agendas enter the selection process.  Indeed, at one point a friend of mine, a really good lawyer, was told by somebody in the know, that lawyers with established civil trail practices really ought to stop putting in for judgeships as they "didn't need" the positions and therefore wouldn't be considered.  I'm not going to go into criteria on what it takes to become a judge, but after having been asked to apply again and again, it became pretty clear to me I lacked some criteria that I really couldn't do anything about, but which really ought not to matter. That was disillusioning.

And as a sort of final disillusionment, at some point it becomes very hard not to view civil litigation as being mostly about money, and mostly about money for the lawyers engaged in it.  It's hard to feel that its about justice, or redressing wrong, when so many of the lawyers engaged in it really don't seem to care about the actual parties.

Not that this is universal.  Oddly enough, in litigation, I've found a fair number of defense litigators who actually are deeply empathetic towards people, and towards the plaintiffs they're opposing among those.  And I've seen some plaintiff's lawyers that even though they had a rough exterior, would go far out of their way to help people, including strangers.

So maybe I'm just deep in my cups due to recent events.  But I don't think so.  I think the law, or rather civil litigations, has an empathy problem.  Money is the root of that.

St. Paul wrote that "the love of money is the root of all evil."

That's pretty much what civil litigation has become for lawyers, I fear.  An expression of the love of money.