Tag: lawyers

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The Ungrateful Passengers of Flight 1549

Passengers who have received some of their luggage say they are grateful, but not all of them are ready to absolve US Airways of responsibility for injuries, emotional distress and losses they claim to have suffered.

The airline’s insurance company, A.I.G. Aviation Adjustment Services, has started offering each of the passengers $10,000 in exchange for agreeing not to sue the airline, some passengers said. Ms. Lightner, who lives in Tega Cay, S.C., said she had received a two-page contract from the insurer but had not decided whether to sign it.

NY Times, May 18, 2009

Everybody has heard how the heroic captain, Chelsey Sullenberger, landed his crippled Airbus A320 safely into the Hudson River, January 15 this year. The Airbus320 struck some large birds– Canada geese– as it was taking off from LaGuardia Airport, New York City. The geese were sucked into both engines causing catastrophic failure. The jet was not high enough to glide for any distance and, after a brief, hair-raising exchange with the LaGuardia air controllers, Sullenberger safely glided the A320 to a landing in the Hudson River. All passengers and crews were rescued by ferry boats and other craft that reached the plane within four minutes.

Nobody is suing the geese.

The passengers have been offered $10,000 by the airlines. For what? I don’t know. It sounds to me very much like an accident. Usually, passengers sue an airline if a plane crashes due to some incompetence or negligence. On the surface, it appears, to the contrary, that the cause of the crash was an unavoidable accident, that the crash was not caused by any deficiency in the Airbus 320, and that the crew of Flight 1549 performed extremely well. Who do you sue?

Well, if you’re a lawyer, I imagine you could make the case that the airline should be responsible for the general existence of risks and accidents.

It doesn’t seem to matter nowadays. For one thing, lawyers seem to believe that every lawsuit, no matter how frivolous, should be negotiated and settled with an undisclosed amount of cash and a confidentiality agreement. This is usually cheaper than going to court. The lawyers suing on behalf of the passengers know this and hope to score a big fat settlement quickly and bloodlessly, because the negotiators for the airlines are other lawyers.

Could it be that there is no negligence, no fault of the airlines.  Just a bunch of lawyers arranging a deal together that benefits them more than anyone else.

The Ditch Switch

“The Flight crew did not activate the “ditch switch” during the landing.” Wikipedia

The function of the ditch switch is to close all external outlets and openings in the event of a crash landing on water, to prevent the aircraft from sinking too quickly. In all the coverage of the event immediately afterwards, I never heard this mentioned even once. For all the accolades Sullenberger received, he apparently forgot to do something important: hit the ditch switch. Had there been loss of life, because the aircraft sank quickly after ditching, and had the cargo doors not been ripped open anyway, this fact would probably have been pivotal to our assessment of Captain Sullenberger’s performance.

It wasn’t his only mistake: he initially gave Air Traffic Control the incorrect flight number. None of this alters the fact that Sullenberger performed extremely well doing the one thing he is really paid to do: land the plane safely.

June 15: I just saw a documentary on Flight 1549 which noted the issue of the “ditch switch” and claimed that the air plane was sinking quickly at least partly because of that mistake.

I have not read anywhere that anyone thinks the crew of Flight 1549 should have been able to avoid the flock of Canadian Geese. Can they do that? Do they watch for flocks of geese, from the air traffic control tower for this reason?

I do know that they do take some measures to discourage birds from hanging around near the runways. Would that be the basis of a lawsuit? They didn’t do enough to stop the geese from flying into the path of an airliner?

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Those Whacky Lovable Lawyers!

“Lawyers are often asked to offer their views on complicated questions with significant real-world consequences, and the idea that offering the wrong answer could implicate an attorney in criminal wrongdoing is a frightening prospect to many in the profession. It is not surprising, therefore, that lawyers are reluctant to condemn fellow lawyers on the basis of the advice that they give.” Washington Post, December 17, 2008

Wow. Those lawyers! And I’m sure I’ll hear some more complaining about how lawyers are unfairly targeted for vilification and abuse…. but maybe the lawyers should get together and disbar Mr. Woo, a Bush Administration flunky, and Jack Goldsmith, a law professor (!) responsible for the muck- worthy insidiousness above.

Mr. Goldsmith asserts here that lawyers that advise government officials to do something illegal shouldn’t be held accountable because otherwise, in the future, they will hesitate to offer good advice to the government, like, “hey, why don’t you torture them”, or “arrest and detain them without evidence or due process”.

The discussion relates to the question of whether Bush Administration lawyers and other officials should ever be investigated for authorizing acts of torture. Hell, no, says Mr. Goldsmith. It will have a chilling effect on the ability of lawyers to encourage breaking the law in the future.

Normally at this point I would think of some kind of analogy to try to make clear how wrong I think it is to torture people. But that would be an insult to the idea that torture itself is about as evil an act as one can imagine. And the fact that you start thinking, “does someone need to explain to the Bush administration why torture is wrong…. do they not understand what torture is? Do they not care that, in the future, they won’t be able to complain about American soldiers being tortured because our enemies will be more than happy to adopt our rationale?

We know what will happen: the torturers will be forgiven because they only obeyed orders. The authorizers will be forgiven because they didn’t actually carry out the torture. Everyone else will be pardoned by Bush.

Will Bush pardon them all? It almost makes we weep to anticipate that Bush will probably pardon them without admitting that any of them did anything wrong. Even a child knows that you can’t be forgiven for something you won’t admit you did. It would not be enough to merely force them to acknowledge committing crimes before they are pardoned for them, but it would be infinitely better than what will happen.

Ford pardoned Nixon in a similar fashion. Nixon, if he had something like integrity, should have refused the pardon. He should have said, “but I didn’t commit any crimes.”

What if Obama chooses, for political reasons, not to prosecute the Bush torturers. But what if Obama changes government policy. If he says we will not torture any more because torture is wrong. Torture is illegal. It is immoral. It is deeply offensive to human dignity and constitutional democracy. Then how can he not allow the Justice Department to investigate allegations that government officials broke the law? That would also be repugnant.

Stay tuned…

 

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Complexity as War on the Consumer

There are two ways to cheat consumers. One is to simply lie to them. This method is fraught with peril, however. After all, there are still a few laws around that protect consumers from something called “fraud”, which is a fancy word for “lies”. And nobody likes to be called a liar.

And nobody needs to lie. The second method is safer, and just as effective.

Make it so difficult and annoying to exercise your rights as a consumer (or patient, or citizen) that most people will just give up and go away.

Complexity is your friend. Complexity is your ally. Complexity is a blunt force instrument of such potency that entire industries and professions have sprung up from it’s forehead like the children of Zeus: lawyers.

We see it in everything from operating manuals to software to insurance policies to health care agreements to employment contracts to amusement park disclaimers. We see it in the forms you fill out to claim the “benefits” you are entitled to under insurance policies or government funded entitlements. You even see it on every piece of software you run on your computer– the EULA (End User Legal Agreement) which means nothing to almost every person who clicks on “yes, I agree”. They don’t know what they are agreeing to. It doesn’t matter that they don’t know what they are agreeing to. The point is that there is a lot verbiage in there can be roughly translated as “you have no rights whatsoever”.

It’s a good turf on which to choose your battle. You will always have allies among those who believe the common folk should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, take a course or two in American law, or lay out $15,000 for lawyers. And you have many other allies among similarly interested corporations and government functionaries who know very well that they might be in the wrong but count on the numbing effect to make you go away.

Some companies even ask you to sign employment agreements that are absolutely illegal because they abridge rights that are guaranteed to every employee under state or provincial law. For example, the organization I work for, Christian Horizons, asks employees to agree that any “wrongful dismissal” issues will be settled by an arbitrator appointed by— guess who?– Christian Horizons. In reality, if you were “wrongfully” dismissed, you retain every right to bring your case to the Labour Relations Board of Ontario, no matter what you signed. I’m not worried because I happen to work for a good, ethical organization, but I still disagree with that provision of the employment agreement.

In this province, you cannot sign an agreement giving your employer a right to cheat you.

Why is there no Greenpeace or World Wildlife Federation or Amnesty International for understandability? We are trying to preserve the environment, unusual species, and the ozone. Why doesn’t someone form an organization to protect language from similar exploitation and abuse?

Complexity is more than a strategy to diminish our rights. It is an assault. To be human is to use language. The highest achievements of humanity, of nation, of history, of culture, is expressed in language. The most intimate human feelings, the great principles of morality and ethics, and even our spiritual aspirations are expressed in language. To pervert, twist, and abuse language, is to abuse humanity.

The strategy of these corporate lawyer hucksters is not really to express complex legal and contractual details. The real purpose is to express nothing, and thus, everything. You might have a right, you might not. The agreement might stand up in court, but more likely, it won’t.

Judges are not entirely stupid. Sometimes they say what everyone thinks: nobody reads those things and nobody understands them. Sometimes, however, they will say, “You should have read the agreement carefully.”

Yes, yes: here on page 59, paragraph 113c, section iii, it says that you accept liability for all damage caused by misuse intentional or not, or actions construed as misuse for the purposes of this agreement as specified in section ii, paragraph 78, notwithstanding any non-specified damages resulting from uses construed to be within specified actionable exceptions deemed applicable”.

But most people don’t know that judges will sometimes rule against these agreements. They assume that if they sign some kind of complex agreement, they are bound to observe the terms. Sometimes they are. It doesn’t matter. The lawyers enter the picture, like a long row of fat, disease-ridden can-can dancers, and the performance begins.

You don’t have to get to court, or to any kind of judgment or agreement. You just have to realize that it will cost you enormous sums of money to even make a contest of it.

The solution is quite simple. There should be a law that specifies that all contractual agreements, warranties, and conditions must be written in plain and understandable English. A panel of grade six teachers should be set up to review any questionable documents. This panel should be empowered to declare null and void any agreement that is not understandable by a reasonable person with a reasonable degree of effort. A consideration will be the fact that the average person is inundated with dozens or hundreds of these agreements every year, and can’t possibly spend every waking hour reviewing them all to see if he or she is in full compliance.

Added May 1, 2003:

The RIAA recently sued four students for facilitating the sharing of pirated music files on their university networks. However, as usual, it is reported that they plan to settle out of court. So they are using the potential complexity and inconvenience of court action to club the students into submission, without actually having to prove their case in court.

Wise decision on their part: they might not win. I have yet to read or hear of a single court case like this in which the RIAA actually won a judicial decision saying that copying of music for personal use is illegal.

I thought, at first, that this would be one– but of course! The inevitable out-of-court settlement!

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The Lawyers of Walkerton

The Robin Sharpe case, the Walkerton water scandal, the church-run residential homes scandal, the tobacco lawsuits, the Columbine shootings…. all, and many others, in their aftermaths, are linked by one dominant thread: after the initial catastrophe, the lawyers quickly stepped in…. to ensure that a multitude of new catastrophes will follow.

Bankruptcy, despair, and personal destruction aren’t as dramatic as school bombings or water poisoning, so they don’t get as much extensive coverage in the media. But they are equally real and sometimes more disastrous for people than the initial misfortunes that first brought the litigants to the courthouse.

The Survivors of “Survivor”, the tv show, did well to leave the island alive– but they foolishly voted a lawyer, Stacey Stillman, off the island in the third round. She’s now suing two of the contestants and the executive producer. Did she not agree to the basic rules of the game when she signed on? Sure, but no person should be forced to honor an agreement that relates somehow to his or her personal integrity.

I have to take you back on a brief side-trip to Roald Dahl’s childhood. Roald Dahl, whose father died when he was very young, was shipped off to a British residential school by his mother. At this residential school, misbehavior– real or imagined– was punished with the rod. The miscreant was ordered to drop his pants and bend over and then was thwacked repeatedly with a wooden stick until he was bruised or bleeding. The flogging was performed by upper-class boys or the head-master– the scions of British upper-class snobbery, the flower of all that was civilized in the Western World, in their own estimation. The same people who looked down upon the native peoples of Africa as “savages”.

I have never heard of any of these men being sued, years after the fact, by any of their students, least of all Roald Dahl. Why not? Isn’t this abuse? Roald Dahl’s mother, a lovely woman by all accounts, certainly didn’t approve. Roald Dahl didn’t approve. Who gave them the right to do this? In a court of law, would any reasonable person believe– today– that this kind of discipline is justifiable?

Do they still do this? Seems impossible, don’t you think? Certainly, no teacher of any school, private or not, in North America, could get away such singular brutality today. Or could they?

But a 13-year-old girl in a high school in Toronto can ruin a teacher’s life by asserting that he spoke the word “breast” in front of her and nudged her once as he passed her desk and looked at her in a “lewd and inappropriate way”. His name appears in the papers. He is suspended from his job. He is shunned by his friends and colleagues. His wife leaves him. It is later found that the girl was lying– but no matter. The man must spend the rest of his life under a cloud of suspicion that is named “was once charged with sexual abuse”.

And what shall we do with the girl? Not a blessed thing. A verbal warning, perhaps. I assume that might have been done, but the official record is that nothing was done. Our society, down on it’s hands and knees examining every crack in the floor for the slightest sign of a pin of sexual harassment, stands aside while the elephant of personal destruction does headstands on the ottoman.

A woman gets drunk at an office party. Her employers offer to pay for a taxi to take her home. They offer to call her husband. She turns them down, heads off in a car and goes drinking at another bar somewhere. Then she gets into the car again and smashes into a pickup truck. She suffers permanent brain damage and can no longer work. A court awards her $300,000 from the employer– the same employer that tried to stop her from driving home by herself– on the reasoning– if you could call it that– that they were one-fourth responsible for her accident. But if she is 3/4 responsible, then she owes herself $900,000, money which she does not have. It appears that the logic of the law, in this case, is that he who has deep pockets will pay, one way or the other.

And Roald Dahl’s teachers– one of them went on to be the man who put the crown on the head of Queen Elizabeth– a man who made a young boy expose his buttocks so he could whack him so hard with a birch stick that the boy couldn’t sit down without pain for weeks– Roald Dahl’s teachers…. probably thrive in doddering retirements in the countryside of England, proud of their contributions to civilization.

Back to the law– the problem is, I don’t think our society really does think the law makes sense anymore. Most people seem to find many of these ruling bizarre. Not all of them really are bizarre. The newspapers do like to exaggerate. But we do seem to have completely lost sight of the purpose of the law– to provide the rules for justice and fairness– because the law has become a tool in the hands of schemers to extract wealth from vulnerable parties. It’s become a game that consists completely of technicalities. The schemers are not necessarily the litigants– they are the lawyers, who usually end up with most of the settlement anyway. It is indeed not unusual for the lawyers to end up with all of the settlement, or even more than the settlement, as in the tobacco cases in the U.S.  [A court later lowered the fees.]

In the case of Walkerton, the law should have provided that the injured parties received compensation for pain, suffering, and inconvenience caused by the mismanagement of the water purification system. Instead, every party, regardless of injury, is going to receive $2,000. And the six lawyers who partnered in the class action suit will receive $5 million.

What? How can this possibly make sense? How can the only party not injured by the actions of the Walkerton municipal water utility end up with more money than any of the injured parties?

The situation was thus: the genuinely injured parties stood to gain much more than $2,000 each, since any right-minded jury would award the family of one of the dead or seriously sick children much, much more than that. But this would require years of litigation, expert witnesses, medical records, motions and counter-motions, suspensions and delays, and so on, all of it fought with the utmost vigor by the party with deepest pockets, the province (and the province’s insurance companies).

The province was not necessarily primarily responsible for the water disaster: the town of Walkerton was. But the province has some indirect responsibility– and deep pockets.

It doesn’t make sense. The people of Walkerton are still free to demand more than $2,000, by proving hardship above the average, I suppose, to an arbitrator appointed by a judge. I suppose this will result in smaller, more reasonable settlements, and appears to cut the lawyers out of the equation. It is quite possible that the conduct of the lawyers in this case was quite reasonable. Except for the $5 million.

What has really happened is this: the lawyers, taking advantage of their position as gate-keepers of the legal system, were empowered to go into the treasury together (both sides, holding hands and singing “tra-la-la-la”) and decide how much money should be given out to the residents of Walkerton, and, while they were there, with no one other than fellow lawyers to look on, they stuffed their own pockets full. These lawyers purportedly represent the two adversaries in our legal system. But the real adversaries in our legal system are the clients and the lawyers. The lawyers have figured out a way to do their business that guarantees benefits to themselves regardless of who wins the actual case.

“Here, you take some.”
“But do you have enough?”
“Well, I could take a little more, perhaps…”
“Please do!”
“Oh, but only if you do.”
“Well, if you insist….”

As in most cases, you have lawyers for one side sitting down with lawyers for the other side. And they say to each other– your clients are slimy bastards who committed horrible acts that resulted in incalculable pain and misery for my clients and you will have to pay enormous sums of money to them because even though money can’t buy love, it is necessary to make a symbolic gesture of culpability. But first, lets take care of each other. We’ll tell our client that they are getting piles of money and that our services are free. We’ll make it clear, in devious, subtle ways, that if they don’t accept the agreement we recommend to them, they’ll be in court for decades and never get a cent after the legal bills. In return, you get to charge your client enormous sums for pretending to have saved them millions of dollars by negotiating the lesser of two evils in return for which they pay our outrageous legal fees as well as yours.

But won’t your clients say, shouldn’t all those millions going into legal fees be going to us? Why are you making it look like it doesn’t come out of our settlement by saying that you are getting paid directly by the defendant, instead of billing us? Why do you guys get a percentage anyway, instead of a decent fixed rate for the number of hours you actually worked?

Ha ha ha ha! Okay? Done.

The law has become so arcane and complex that lawyers function like priests, interpreting the will of an omnipotent but unknowable God who periodically lashes down from his mountain top with random acts of wanton destruction and misalignment.

We live in a democracy. You would think that our legal system represents the will of the people, popularly expressed. But the lawyers have succeeded in establishing an exclusive cooperative monopoly on access to “justice”.

The government should do three things.

1. Review all of the laws and get rid of the ones that obsolete, irrelevant, or more than 30 years old, unless a really compelling case can be made for keeping it. (I expect that “homicide” should stay on the books.)

2. All the retained laws must be simplified and rewritten so that an average Grade 6 student can clearly understand them.

3. Lawyers fees should be regulated. I don’t mind so much if they are paid a decent wage, but “decent wage” should be defined as “less than a million dollars” and “not a percentage of the settlement they negotiated with other lawyers”.

Lawyers don’t have to dig holes in the ground in the winter or handle garbage or toxic sludge. They don’t have to change diapers or clean toilets. Why should they make more than $30 an hour?

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Bankers and Other Vampires

The next time you go to a bank or a lawyer for anything, I’d consider wearing an armored turtle-neck sweater if I were you.

It is no coincidence that most of the lawmakers in our civilization are lawyers and that many of laws unduly favor the lawyers with opportunities to sink their fangs into you.

Case in point: have you ever bought a house? Buying a house is a big, complex action that requires inordinate legal expertise and wisdom and mountains of documentation. Does it have to? No. Then why does it? Well, the mountains of incoherent legalese and mumbo-jumbo is like a stun gun: it’s designed to immobilize you until various interested parties can sink their fangs into your neck.

First of all, there is the Real Estate Agent. The Real Estate Agent receives a percentage of the value of your house as his pay. This system is not without its advantages. If the agent doesn’t sell your house, he doesn’t get a penny. But if he does sell your house, he gets 5% of the value. This doesn’t entirely make sense. If your house is worth $50,000, the agent gets a reasonable $2,500. How much time does he invest in selling your house? A week of full-time hours? So he gets about $62.50 an hour. Excessive, but not absurd.

But if your house is worth $150,000, the agent gets three times as much, or $7,500. Does it take three times as much work to sell a $150,000 house? No. It takes about the same amount of time, if not less, because there are buyers for every segment of the market place. Even if it took the agent the equivalent of two weeks full-time work to sell this house, he would earn $93.75 an hour. Not bad. No wonder the lawyers want to get in on the action.

Unlike lawyers, however, Real Estate Agents only get paid if they are successful in helping you sell your house. That’s admirable. But why don’t people sell their own houses and keep that money for themselves? Oddly enough, it might because some people confuse the function of the Real Estate Agent with the function of the lawyer. They trust the Real Estate Agent. They feel the Real Estate Agent will keep them from making a foolish mistake, like accidentally buying a trailer in a swamp, instead of a nice bungalow on a crescent. Or selling your house to one of those crazy people who go around looking at houses and making offers on them but don’t actually have any money with which to buy one. But, actually, it’s the lawyer who makes sure that you don’t make a big mistake. Like sign a professional major league baseball contract instead of a mortgage.

It is pretty outrageous that the Real Estate Agent holds on to the $1,000 deposit on the purchase of your house. What’s he doing with it? It’s your house, not his. Why didn’t he turn it over to you immediately, like he should have? Why not? Because the check was given to another Real Estate Agent by the purchaser. So the two Real Estate Agents get together: “I know—let’s keep the money.”

Just imagine how your boss would react if you went out to deliver one of your company’s products to a customer and decided to keep the payment in your pocket for a few months. You’d be arrested. You’d be fired.

The lawyer handles the legal mumbo jumbo of buying a home. What exactly does he do? Well, a lawyer’s time is very valuable. You don’t want to call up a lawyer and burp on the phone or anything—you’ll get a bill. Lawyers are very good at keeping track of their valuable time. And the first thing a good lawyer does is make sure that he doesn’t have to waste a lot of his valuable time by actually doing any work. He hires a law clerk to do that. And you will probably discover that almost all of the work done on your purchase or sale is actually done by the law clerk, who probably makes about $8.75 an hour. The law clerk is happy to work for $8.75 an hour. You see, one day, a law clerk is going to be a lawyer. But the only way the other lawyers will let him become a lawyer is if he first agrees to work for $8.75 an hour for a lawyer for a few years, gaining valuable “experience”. His function is similar to that of a hospital intern: we can ruthlessly exploit you, so we will. But you will have your turn…

When we sold our house, the lawyer’s fee was $450. Add to that about $45 in “disbursements”, including $12 for photocopying and $9.33 for postage. Then there is $50.00 for the registration of discharge. I think he calls the bank and says, “Is the mortgage discharged?” The bank says “yes”. Done. Kaa-chink. $50.00. The fee for buying the house we moved to was $500. But wait! Would a lawyer be satisfied with a paltry $500, when he’s got his hands on your $173,000? There is the “Title Searcher’s Fee”– $75.00. What’s that? I thought that’s what the law clerk did for the lawyer’s fee? There’s no business like show business: charge people for a particular service and then surcharge them for everything that actually costs you money to provide. See “Shipping and Handling” (Amazon.com).

There is an “executions certificate – $77.00”. What’s that? I have no idea. Do I want to make a fool of myself by asking the lawyer what it is and why I should pay for it? He’s already got my money.

There is “subsearch of title – $5.00”. Why, that seems very reasonable. You charge the client $500 for a service that doesn’t include “subsearch of title”. What am I paying $500 for, then?

There is “paid for letter searches: tax certificate – $20.00, Planning/Zone Certificate: $75.00”. Looks like every city department wants their fangs in you too.

There is “conveyance costs”. Oh please…. What is a “conveyance”? $8.50.

There is Courier, Postage, Fax, Photocopies: about $60.00. Here again we have a smart businessman surcharging a customer for services that should be included in the given price for a specific service. It’s like your mechanic charging you $5 for “rag wipe”.

Then the mysterious “levy surcharge”—another $50.00. We go from a $500 lawyers fee to a total of $931.05. Altogether, selling the old house and buying the new, the lawyer gets about $1600.

And finally, after all those exotic little quaint and mysterious charges: “Paid Registration Costs: $100”. After all the subsearches and conveyances and courier and levy surcharges and executions— what! Still not “registered”? What’s the point of registering it when we’ve already paid a fortune for conveyances and subsearches and levies? After all that, registration still matters?

Then the government, of course, bares its fangs: Land Transfer Tax: $1464.00.

Then there is something called the “Levy Surcharge” for $50. There is no explanation of what a “Levy Surcharge” is. If you look up the words in the dictionary, you have, essentially, a phrase that means “charge extra bill”. Maybe the lawyer just wanted another $50, so he added a bill for the bill.

What is even more infuriating is that if I sold this house tomorrow to somebody else, his lawyer would charge him just as much for all the same services my lawyer just provided, and the city would charge him just as much as well, even though the facts of which these various certificates testify have not changed one whit.

As I check over the other documents associated with selling and buying a home, I notice this one: “Inspection and Appraisal: $187.25”. This little gem is something that the bank does to make sure that you’re not taking a mortgage out on an outhouse instead of a four-room bungalow. Well, why should I pay for them to do that? They are the ones that are in the business of lending money for profit. Why don’t they send one of their clerks out to the house to have a look at it, on the bank’s time? How long does it take to ascertain that a house exists and that it is selling at, roughly, current market values?

About a month after the purchase, I received my bank statement. It showed that $498.78 had been charged to my account as a “check posted by branch”. This was not a check posted by branch. This was piece of paper initialed by several people at Scotia Express that said: “give us some money out of this person’s account”. Did my bank say, “Wait—you can’t take money without permission, or without a signed authorization by the owner of the account.”? Are you kidding? Like the Real Estate Agents and the Lawyers, the bankers know how to scratch each others’ backs. They just said: “you’re a bank? Here. Take it. Take as much as you want.”

This amount is supposedly an “interest adjustment”. They probably thought I’d be so totally confused by now that I would just kind of nod and smile and let this one slip pass me. Well, they’re right. However, I do happen to have a document that says that the “interest adjustment” is $216.46. Do I want to spend all day on the phone trying to get through to people at the bank who can talk coherently about my mortgage? You bet.

This kind of wheeling and dealing is what really bugs me. It was our house that we sold, not the lawyer’s. Why does he take his fee right out of the transaction, instead of sending us a bill and waiting to get paid like everyone else does? Maybe he’s worried that if he screwed up, (as a lawyer on one of our previous home purchases did), he wouldn’t get his money.

What a strange world it would be, in which lawyers don’t get paid if they screw up.

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Exxon Sues Itself

I’ll bet I know something about the 1994 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince Edward Sound that you don’t know.

The Exxon Valdez was the worst oil tanker spill of all time, polluting more than 1000 miles of Alaskan coastline and endangering a vital, delicate ecosystem. Lawsuits followed of course. BIG lawsuits.

The plaintiffs in the case against Exxon were awarded $5 billion, which is about as much as Exxon earns in profit each year. That’s a pretty fair fine, I think. What’s the use of a five or ten million dollar penalty when a corporation sees an amount like that as a mere operating expense? Do you think $5 billion is a deterrent? I think it is.

A group called the Seattle Seafood Processors banded together to sue Exxon for compensation for lost income and all that jazz. Exxon settled with this group out of court. The settlement was SECRET. They get to settle out of court, and we get to wonder if they got anything, and Exxon gets to hide the cost of the settlement from their stockholders, the media, the public, and the other plaintiffs. Maybe there was something about their case that was peculiarly alarming to Exxon. Whatever.

Anyway, people did find out eventually that the agreed upon amount was $70 million. Good deal, right? I mean, these guys get to take a vacation and everything – they can’t fish anymore—and get paid for it! How much do you want to bet that they just laid off all their workers and kept the money for themselves? Well, hell, why not? This is America.

But here the story gets interesting. If somebody does some damage to you and you sue them and then you settle out of court, your case is done, right? You are out of the picture. You sign an agreement saying that Exxon has compensated you for your losses and you have no further claim.

That’s what you think. What happened is this: the Seattle Seven continued their lawsuit, with the full knowledge and consent of Exxon. The very lawsuit they had settled! And they won! Big time! $700 million! Hurray for the lawyers, who get to collect about $100 million of that for themselves. Hurray for America! Hurray for everyone!

Wait a minute. It seems that Exxon is now taking the Seattle Seven to court. What! How can this be? What a strange reversal! Did the Seattle Seven dump a bunch of dead fish on Exxon’s front lawn or something? No! It seems that Exxon had a secret deal with the Seattle Seven that stated that, in exchange for the $70 million, the Seattle Seven would continue their legal action and, if they won, Exxon would collect all of their winnings.

I am not making this up.

Whoa Nelly! What a concept! Exxon was betting that the Seattle Seven’s lawyers were really, really good, and would win a much larger settlement in court than $70 million. The Seattle Seven were pretty stupid, don’t you think? Why didn’t they hire worse lawyers (if such a thing is imaginable)? Then they wouldn’t have been out $630 million.

But wait! Hold on to your hats! The Seattle Seven don’t want to give the $700 million to Exxon anymore. They want to keep it all for themselves! Well, for themselves and their lawyers. Exxon is quite upset about this turn of events. That’s why Exxon’s lawyers are taking the Seattle Seven to court. Give us back your money!

Do you have this all straight? Yes, you’re right: Exxon sued themselves. Can you picture their lawyers in their solemn robes, celebrating after the verdict? Woohoo! We got $700 million! We’re rich! Now we can pay off our lawyers!

Strange story, isn’t it? Why did Exxon make this preposterous deal? Nobody knows for sure. The only people who benefit, of course, are the lawyers. The lawyers who negotiated the deal for the Seattle Seven probably got most of the $70 million. The lawyers who won the lawsuit probably got about $200 million—I am NOT kidding. Contingency fees typically end up in the 25-40% range. Exxon’s lawyers got money too. How much? Well, if the tobacco industry settlement is any guide, they probably persuaded Exxon to sign an agreement paying them a percentage of the difference between the maximum amount of liability given a worst case judgment, and the deal that was actually struck. It sounds like they didn’t do very well. I’ll bet they thought the maximum liability would be somewhere in the $500 – $750 million range. I’m just guessing now. I’ll bet they expected to earn $100 million by keeping the liability below $1 billion.

I’ll bet they didn’t offer to give Exxon a refund of their fees because they did so poorly. That’s not the way life works for the rich, my friend. If you are a baseball player and you hit 30 homeruns, you will get a new contract worth $10 million. If you then hit 5 home runs, do you give the money back? Are you kidding? Do stock brokers convicted of swindling people out of millions of dollars suddenly walk or take public transit?

But if you are supposed to load a truck in two hours and you do it in eight instead, do you think you’ll get paid?

The only advantage to Exxon—had the settlement agreement with the Seattle Seven stayed secret– is that it looks like they are paying a lot more damages than they really are. The $700 million is part of a shared settlement with fishermen and hunters and others who were harmed by the Exxon Valdez disaster. The total of the settlement is $5 billion. It’s hard to believe that Exxon could be so stupid as to figure on coming out ahead of this deal. On the other hand, this is a corporation that hired an alcoholic captain to steer a vessel loaded with oil through one of the most hazardous and sensitive coastal ecosystems in North America.

Maybe the $700 million is tax deductible. Actually, since it is subtracted from their earnings, it quite probably is tax deductible. Who does pay the taxes on the $700 million? The Seattle Seven? For money they will never receive? Exxon? For a judgment they are paying themselves?

Exxon, incidentally, has not yet paid a penny of the $5 billion, though the judgment was awarded five years ago. Exxon is sitting on $5 billion that it owes other people. If you were sitting on $50 that you owed Exxon, you would be in jail in very short order, my friend.

A judge, meanwhile, has annulled the secret agreement between Exxon and the Seattle Seven and ordered Exxon to pay out the $700 million. Exxon is appealing. Well, why not? They have lawyers.

Well, let’s say you are as outraged as I am about this deal.

What are you going to do? Get a lawyer?

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The Wilder and Crazier Lawyers

New Approach to Gun Control

Since the lawyers have finally taken care of the evil tobacco industry, let’s think about some good things lawyers might do for us.

I have an idea. The lawyers sued the tobacco industry because the tobacco industry markets a product which has been proven to cause serious medical problems for the consumers that use it, and which costs our society billions of dollars to provide medical treatment for these consumers.

That line of reasoning sounds simple and logical enough. But the tobacco industry is just a start. Why not sue the companies like Browning Arms (Utah, makers of the Browning shotgun), or Smith & Wesson that make guns? Here again we have a product which is bad for the consumer, but which the consumer stupidly buys anyway, deluded into thinking the product enhances his manhood or femininity, and which causes death and untold suffering, and which costs us taxpayers billions of dollars every year to provide medical treatment for the casualties.

This is really not much of a stretch, folks. The government routinely analyzes products or activities that are harmful to the public and, if it is proven that the harm they produce exceeds their usefulness or value, they enact legislation to prohibit or restrict it. The government does this for pornography, cigarettes, alcohol, toxic chemicals, radiation, drugs, and so on. The government even assumes that anyone who buys a recordable CD might be thinking about duplicating a copyrighted piece of music. It doesn’t wait to see if you are actually going to do it or not. It ASSUMES you are, and taxes you for it. Gives the money to the recording industry so they can pay their lawyers.

Now, the government looked the tobacco industry and came to a weird conclusion. It said, well, you do a lot of damage to people’s health. You lie to them and deceive them. You probably put additives in that increase the users level of physical addiction. Pay us and we’ll let you continue to do these bad things.

If Mosanto corporation, for example, produced a fertilizer that caused cancer in the people who eat the food grown with it, would we accept a payment from Mosanto in exchange for letting them continue to sell it? Only if we were complete idiots.

Guns are dangerous. Only an idiot would believe they do more good than harm. Think about it. Would we be safer in a world where everybody had a gun, or where nobody had a gun?

Since the government has already made a bargain with the NRA to allow the continued sale of almost any kind of gun you can imagine, we have no alternative but to hire lawyers and sue the gun industry.

Of course, if the end result is an agreement similar to the one reached with the tobacco companies (Clinton had a much better proposal but the tobacco lobby bought off enough Republican Congressmen to get it killed) what we will end up with is this: the gun lobby acquires immunity from further prosecution in exchange for about $250 billion dollars, almost all of which goes to the lawyers anyway. The $250 billion dollars are earned back by the gun lobby mainly by applying surcharges to sales of weapons to the military and police departments. Not only does the taxpayer get to fund the legal challenge, they also get to pay the penalty. And the icing on the cake: we have the same problem as before, except that it’s worst, because the gun manufacturers will have immunity from prosecution.

We could do the same for weapons manufacturers. Sue them for hundreds of billions of dollars for all the suffering and death they contribute to people around the world. Give all the money to the lawyers. We get to continue providing weapons to every 2-bit revolutionary or reactionary government in every sad, pathetic little starving country in the Third World, while, once again, the lawyers make a killing.

Don’t look at me. You elected the fools.

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Those Wild and Crazy Lawyers

Quick– who made more money this year? Microsoft Corporation or a couple of lawyers in Texas?

Right. The lawyers. Well, almost. You see this group of lawyers represented the State of Texas in negotiating a settlement (read “sell-out”) with the tobacco companies. In exchange for lots of bucks, paid to the lawyers— ooops! Paid to the Plaintiffs! That’s you and me! —the tobacco companies get to continue marketing death and disease to American children. What a wonderful country!

So how much did the lawyers bill the State of Texas for their noble services, defending the innocent consumer against evil, ruthless, greedy corporations?

How much you say? Well, these are lawyers, after all. So the amount might be a little excessive. What d’ya think? Take a guess? How much should a lawyer be paid for a couple of years of work, doing research, bribing employees to turn over internal documents, and ordering health studies already paid for by the tax-payer through government funding of Universities and Research Organizations? How much?

$10 million?
$20 million?
$50 million?

Oh, come on now. These are REALLY SMART TALENTED LAWYERS. After all, the average lawyer would have tried to get tobacco companies out of the business altogether. But that would have made the tobacco companies very unhappy. So these superior lawyers actually found a way to make everybody happy. The government gets money. The tobacco companies get to stay in business. The taxpayer gets to continue smoking away.

$100 million?
$200 million?
$500 million?

Come on– don’t be shy! These the same intelligent, compassionate, competent professionals you see every day in the movies and on television, except that you never see the scene where they present their bills and take almost all of the settlement money they weaseled out of the greedy, amoral, unfeeling corporation. How can a lawyer live off of a measly $500 million dollars nowadays? Be reasonable! There are SO MANY expenses. Postage. Clerical work. Filing. Thinking. Reading. Subscriptions. Donuts. Get SERIOUS!

$1 billion?

A mere BILLION? When Michael Jackson makes almost a tenth of that? When Bill Gates makes ten times that much! And how much more important is a Texas lawyer than the owner of the greediest corporation on the face of the earth? Give me a break.

$5 billion?
$10 billion?

Now you’re getting reasonable! But not too reasonable.

$25 billion?

Right on! Yes, these Texas Lawyers are asking for $25 billion dollars for negotiating— GET THIS– a $17 billion dollar settlement. In other words, for recovering $17 billion dollars from the tobacco companies for the lucky tax payers of Texas, they ….. well, they want to keep all the money. Yes ALL of the money. YES, ALL OF THE MONEY. But that’s not all folks! The taxpayers of Texas, in compensation for all the medical costs of taking care of all of the victims of smoking addictions, get to PAY these Texas Lawyers an additional $8 BILLION! You lucky Texans! Not only do you get to have tail-gate parties at Huntsville State Prison where they execute completely worthless, disgusting, evil, unredeemable human beings almost every night— you also get to pay a bunch of lawyers $8 billion dollars for……. well….. for…..

Well, fortunately, the lawyers and the tobacco companies got together and decided that it wouldn’t be fair to hit the citizens of Texas with such a large bill. They said, “What? Are you crazy?” Well… And they decided that those Texas Lawyers should ONLY receive $3.3 billion.

Whew! Here I was all upset over nothing! A mere $3.3 billion! How many lawyers were involved? The New York Times doesn’t say, but several other states had teams of three or four leading lawyers and their staffs. But– get this– some lawyers represented as many as 30 states. Do they get paid once? Are you an idiot? Does Michael Jordan get paid once even though he plays in 30 different stadiums?

Well, yes he does. But that’s Michael Jordan. He’s not a lawyer.

One of the lawyers for Florida, Steven Yerid, said the costs are justified. Why? Because that’s how much lawyers should make? Because their work is so terrible, so risky, so dangerous, that even a $14.95 an hour coal miner wouldn’t take it on? Because they are so smart that they scare Stephen Hawkings?

No. He said the fees were justified because “the costs come from the industry”. In other words, we’re justified in taking any money we can lay our grubby hands on because we are lawyers. We just ARE.

Furthermore, he says, the lawyers might have ended up with nothing if they had lost the case. So, because these lawyers might not have won the case, they are entitled to demand as much money as they please.

Remember, this line of reasoning is coming from a lawyer, someone you might need to depend on for your life if you’re ever charged with a serious crime in Texas.

Pity me. I thought this case was about public health and liability. Instead, it is clearly some new kind of industry, in which clever entrepreneur can sue somebody out of the blue on the off chance they might collect a few billions. Who do they sue next?

What does the public have to do with it? Go suck a camel.

The industry will pay it? Ha ha ha. The industry?!!! Where does this idiot think the “industry” gets its money? From the smokers! So, not only will very little of this money from the tobacco companies actually find it’s way into the medical facilities of Texas (aren’t most of their medical facilities used to gas convicts anyway?), but the smokers will pay more for cigarettes in order to pay the lawyers who negotiated a deal in which tobacco companies can now market their disease- causing product with impunity.

Now, who was this lawsuit supposed to benefit?  Who were the victims of the corporation’s malfeasance?  Who was harmed by the evil practices of these public entities who profited from their misery?  That’s right: the smokers.  The same people who are paying for the settlement!

There are some scandals that shock you. There are scandals that boggle the mind. There are scandals that baffle you, because the scale of the moral atrocity is so far beyond normal human experience that you can’t even begin to comprehend it. The Savings and Loan Scandal. The loans to 3rd World Dictatorships at usurious interest rates. Windows 95.

And then there is the king of all scandals, the mind-blowing, baffling, stunning, incomprehensible, MOTHER of all scandals. And this is it.

So while you’re sitting there eating your chips and watching the sanctimonious republicans try to impeach the president for consensual groping in the Oval Office— consider where your hard-earned tax dollars are really going.

And weep, wail, gnash your teeth, bash your head against the wall….. what else are you going to do?

Get yourself a lawyer?

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Lawyers

I used to be in charge of benefits administration at a small social service agency. It was my job to evaluate and understand all the provisions of our benefit package, in order to explain them to new employees and file claims.

I must have been more stupid than most: I got out the policies and actually tried to read them. Every word. Well, not exactly every word. I figured it would take two months or more to read every word, and another ten years to fully understand it. But I did read a lot of inscrutable text about all the subtle little conditions and notwithstandings and wherewithals and provisions. I discovered that our liability coverage had so many exceptions to it that I doubted that it actually covered anything. Sometimes I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It sounded so contrary to good sense that I thought I must have misunderstood it.

I phoned our agent and asked him to explain. In the back of my mind, I think I expected him to say that the small print didn’t mean anything because, of course, no reasonable person could ever find enough time to read it and, therefore, no one could ever really agree to it. That’s not what he said. He said that of course the small print applied. It’s all part of the agreement. He tried to convince me that all insurance companies had the same basic agreements. I called some of those other agencies and found out that that was not true. When I told him we intended to cancel the policy, he offered to cut our rates in half. Just like that! So much for the assumption that they were making a “reasonable” profit.

We cancelled anyway and switched to another company with more agreeable small print.

Did you ever think about the fact that the biggest agreements of all, God’s covenant with us, is phrased in the plainest, most straightforward language you can imagine? I will be your God. You will be my people. I will send a Redeemer. I will never again destroy the earth with a flood. He who believes in me shall never die.

The small print exists because lawyers write most of these agreements and, like many other professionals, they, consciously or not, want to ensure that they will always have plenty of work. It is there because insurance companies want to be able to protect themselves against having too many claims filed. It is there because banks don’t want you to know how obscene the interest rates on charge cards really is, or how much power they have to destroy your life if you forget to make a single payment on a loan.

Did you know, for example, that a lot of home-owner’s policies have a provision that during any extended absence by the homeowner, the insured house must be entered and inspected by someone every day? And there you were in Florida in your lawn chair feeling so comfy and reassured.

A lot of people won’t believe this, but there is no need in the universe for small print. It should be abolished, banned, exiled, censored, shredded. The law will not collapse. The courts will not be inundated with frivolous claims. Injustice will not prevail. In fact, I am quite sure the opposite will happen.

A holding company in Toronto which rented 30,000 apartment units tried to eliminate all the small print in their leases. The new lease agreements basically said “You agree to pay so much money every month so you can live in this apartment at this address. You agree not to damage the apartment. We agree to maintain the apartment. If you don’t pay the rent, you have to leave. If we don’t maintain the apartment, you don’t have to pay the rent.” Done. In plain English. What happened? The company saved thousands of dollars in legal fees every year because everybody understood the agreements and, as a result, were far less inclined to challenge or break them. The tenants loved the agreements. They understood them. They had the wonderful feeling that they weren’t about to be tricked or cheated because they didn’t have the time to read twenty pages of incomprehensible legalese.

The only drawback… ahem… is that most lawyers would be put out of business.

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Lovable Lawyers

A law firm in England checked on an employee who hadn’t shown up for work. When they found he was dead, they notified the family, then sent them a bill for $26,520 for the hours it spent on handling the affair.

After a public outcry, the firm backed down.

And you thought lawyers were heartless!