COOPERATE AND GRADUATE

“Cooperate and graduate,” that used to be the word in Army schools. Work with your buddies so that everyone gets through and a good result is achieved. It never ceases to amaze me how many clients are unable to adopt that attitude with their lawyer.

For example:

The speeding client who, having been advised to go to driver improvement school BEFORE the court date in order to show some good faith and repentance, does not do so, confident that their charm will outclass the officer’s radar gun in front of a judge you’ve seen in a thousand cases.

The grand larceny client, caught with a piece of construction equipment in his yard, recently re-painted with a not-so-good homemade paint job and with an extra digit added to the serial number, persists in claiming that he bought it from a buddy for a really good price, and had no idea it was hot.

The Social Security claimant that. after you’ve sent his doctor a functional assessment to fill out and a letter to the client saying MAKE AND KEEP AN APPOINTMENT WITH YOUR DOCTOR, THIS IS IMPORTANT, HE HAS A FORM TO COMPLETE ABOUT YOU, never does so.

Boundary-line and partition disputes — often involving family members (remember Jarndyce v. Jarndyce?) where clients on both sides have been nursing a resentment, which usually has nothing to do with the line or the property and  is seldom revealed, and are congenitally incapable of ascribing any good-faith action on the part of the other party or their counsel. It is impossible to break down this animosity on either side, and enormous amounts of time and energy are expended in finding Realtors, surveyors and inspectors with no connection to either party or either lawyer. Nobody seems to care if the house rots down while the trial is pending or everyone’s cattle constantly stray into the road, and the court usually decrees a solution that could have been negotiated in the first six months of the dispute.

My favorite is the client who, having spoken to lawyer so-and-so in the street knows he has a winner, or even better, the client who, having consulted judge so-and-so knows he can’t possibly loose. Of course he never paid the lawyer to look into the facts of the matter, and the judge is actually a FORMER judge — we won’t go into the reasons for the honorific!

After twenty-some years of this work, I’ve become a bit more astute about human nature, and try to protect myself against these cases, although I do sometimes get snookered. The initial interview is important. I remember asking a client in an assault case where he kept his stick in his truck, that I kept mine right behind the drivers seat, convenient-like! I asked the construction equipment guy how new the equipment was, what he paid, and then made an observation about the value of my ’67 Ford 8-N tractor that I use to bushhog the pasture. My recollection is that Oliver Wendall Holmes said that “ninety percent of the practice of law is in telling your client that he is a damn fool and should quit.” Just the other day I advised a client that “they didn’t have a dog in that fight,” and when they didn’t seem to understand, I said “let me make this a little clearer — it’s none of your business.”

Do physicians, accountants, or morticians run into this same problem? I don’t know. I spend my spare time with musicians and artists, and they’re not giving me any answers.

My point is this: explain your problem to your lawyer, get a clearly stated proposed course of action, and if you can accept it, follow through. If you don’t get a plain talk explanation of things, or if you can’t accept the advice put on the table, say thank you, pay your fee for the consultation, and go elsewhere.

Life’s too short to do it any other way.