No more attorney jokes, please. Stop the hate!
Those of you who know me know I try not to take myself or anything for that matter too seriously. Life is short, after all.
But I think it’s high time we re-think our collective perception of attorneys, particularly personal injury attorneys.
Why do people think we are scumbags? There are probably several reasons, but I think most of it boils down to three things:
- We profit from people getting hurt.
- Just plain not true. Injuries happen without us, regardless of our profession being in existence or not. We just help afterward. In fact we offer a valuable service to injured people. The logic that you should dislike us because of when we interact with people would also dictate that you dislike doctors, nurses, EMTs, and firefighters. You don’t see a lot of jokes about them, though, do you?
And frankly, we wouldn’t be necessary if insurance companies/defendants did the right thing, so if you’re going to hate on someone, hate on them. We are not a problem, we are a solution.
- We have horrifically distasteful commercials.
- We are probably guilty on this one. But why judge us? First, not all attorney commercials are bad, and we are businesses that need to advertise, too. Second, there are tons of other industries with bad commericials – do you hate insurance companies? drug makers? ESPN?
- Our profession inflates damages for our clients and increases expenses for everyone out there.
Just plain not true, again. Victims should get paid what they deserve in our system; we just try to make that happen. If you had a choice between losing a leg and getting $1million, or keeping your legs and getting no money, you would choose keeping your legs, right?
We just try to make sure people get what they are owed. Once again, if insurance companies paid people adequately when they should, there would be no need for us.
The McDonalds coffee case is often cited to me as an example of “the system” gone crazy.
Everyone cites this as a ridiculous case where a lady got burned on something that she knew was hot and got millions out of it. That is not exactly accurate. The particular restaurant in question was cited for coffee being about 3 times as hot as it needed to be before this incident. When the coffee spilled on this victim, it fused certain parts of her anatomy together. Normal coffee wouldn’t do that, and I bet for darn sure if that happened to you, you’d want something out of it.
I recently had a call where a defendant, who knew my client, said my client was suspect JUST because he called an attorney.
I was somewhat offended to hear that. Particularly in light of the fact that if this defendant had been more responsible, and had been more inclined to take responsibility for his negligence in the first place, my client wouldn’t have needed me. So how am I the bad guy in this?
And when did we, as a culture, decide that we need to deride people for their chosen profession? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we spent less time talking crap about people and more time being responsible for our own actions? I think so.
Think about this: Do we hate people who stand up to bullies who pick on the little guys? No. We applaud them. So why would you hate personal injury attorneys?
Next time you’re thinking about an attorney joke, think of the good we do, and think how things wouldn’t be any better, and would probably be much, much worse, without us.
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