Frederick Fane Shantz

          I have a confession to make.  I am a lawyer.  Worse, I am a litigation lawyer.  For more than 25 years I have made my living by prosecuting and defending civil lawsuits arising out of everything from car accidents to misuse of company secrets.  And yet if I had a quarter for every time someone told me, “Gee, you don’t look like a lawyer,” I would have been able to retire years ago.  After all, what do people think a lawyer looks like?  One Halloween I think that I came pretty close: I made up my face in bright red, attached some horns to my forehead, and stuffed play money into all of the pockets of my three-piece suit. 

          Being a member of one of the country’s most maligned professions, I have developed a pretty thick skin when it comes to my occupation.  But after the continual lawyer jokes (some of which I actually do find amusing), the veiled barbs overheard at cocktail parties, and the endless assaults in the media, I am still troubled by the precipitous decline in society’s perception of the legal profession over the past fifty years or so.  How could the models for Perry Mason and Atticus Finch of To Kill A Mockingbird have become the Bad Guys that everybody loves to hate?  There are, of course, the garish billboards and obnoxious television advertisements.  There are the reports of enormous jury verdicts for seemingly trivial injuries.  There are the over-publicized criminal trials that sometimes seem to be tailored to the media like a national sporting event.  It is easy just to blame the lawyers involved.  Easy, but incomplete.  The lawyers are only a part of the issue.  Ultimately, they are nothing more than mirrors of the society that they serve.

          Americans, as a whole, have become increasingly reluctant to take responsibility for their own actions and their own mistakes. Whether fueled by anger or greed, their first reaction to any personal crisis, self-inflicted or otherwise, inevitably seems to be, "Someone will pay for this."  Headlines of unjustifiable multi-million dollar verdicts only feed plaintiffs' unrealistic expectations and numb the juries, the courts, and the public to the consequences of these awards. First and foremost, Americans need to learn that life is not a lottery.

          Although my work now is largely limited to representing defendants, when I used to represent plaintiffs in personal injury cases I would sometimes be approached by clients who had been only slightly injured in an accident, but who saw the prospect of an enormous verdict and wanted to cash in on their experience. After listening to their description of the accident and their injuries, I had a standard response to such clients:  “Well, I have good news and bad news.  The good news is that you are not really hurt.  The bad news is that you are not really hurt.”  They usually understood my point. 

          Moreover, it is not the lawyers who hand down the staggering verdicts that receive so much attention.  Behind nearly every multi-million dollar verdict is a jury of six to twelve average people who actually decide the amount awarded.  Very few of those juries have any lawyers on them.  Although the plaintiff may have had an attorney who argued in favor of that enormous award, there was another attorney in the court room who argued against it. Confronted with a sympathetic plaintiff or an unsympathetic defendant, many jurors abandon any sense of economic reality and return crippling verdicts without ever considering the deeper consequences to their insurance rates, their businesses, their communities, and to society at large.

          That is not to say that some of these verdicts are not justified. I am familiar with a several plaintiffs with catastrophic personal injuries whose cases have resulted in enormous awards.  I know that those individuals will not be spending the money that they have received on new cars and vacation trips, and I would not willingly subject myself to their suffering and that of their families for any amount of money.  For those people, their lawyer, like their doctor, was simply a necessary part of the process of trying to rebuild a broken life.

          A number of years ago I heard a story of a doctor who was so incensed at his medical malpractice insurance premiums that he refused to treat attorneys or anyone who worked for them.  I recall wondering who he was going to contact if his son were imprisoned for a crime that he didn’t commit or if his daughter were paralyzed in an automobile accident.  Lawyers don’t seem so bad when you need one.

          In Upstate New York, where I practice, lawyer advertising seems to be on the increase.  It ranges in content and delivery from tasteful to acutely embarrassing.  Yet for each person who decries such advertising, there is another making a note of the advertiser’s telephone number.  If people did not respond to those advertisements, they would quickly become too expensive to support.  Yet, all too often, when someone needs a lawyer they do not know where to turn.  Although in the future we may devise more effective ways to bring lawyers and prospective clients together, those advertisements will continue as long as they bring clients to those who sponsor them.

          Believe it or not, I am proud of my occupation.  I am proud of the heritage of Atticus Finch.  I am proud of the confidence that my clients place in me.  Is my profession imperfect?  Absolutely.  But so is the society in which we live.  Only when our society changes will those who mirror it change accordingly.