Practice Management

I know all of the lawyer jokes.  For some reason lay people think we lawyers want to hear lawyer jokes.  And on a superficial level some are funny enough.  Take for example the one that goes, what is the difference between a lawyer and a catfish?  Well, one is a bottom-dwelling scum-sucker ... and the other one is a fish.

Every profession has its problems to be sure, but let us face facts.  No profession is as highly regulated in regard to ethics as are lawyers.  Oh, other professions have guidelines, and moral equivalents, but all any outsider need do is read the model rules on lawyer ethics and the comments to the rules.  They are clear, they are onerous in many respects, they are detailed, and a lawyer will darn well lose his or her license if he or she even veer onto the yellow line.

Ethical understandings are beaten home from the point that one applies to law school to the point they are licensed to practice law, and then most states require lawyers to complete ethics training every year.  It is three hours minimum for lawyers every year to maintain a law license in Texas.  And, ethical standards related to a lawyer's license are more strenuous than what would constitute malpractice.

Attorney / humorist Sean Carter in describing the sexual restrictions of the model rules, which prohibit attorneys from engaging with sex with those working for or related to an organizational client, wonders if this means if you represent, let us say, the City of Houston, Texas that you cannot then sleep with anybody living or working in Houston, Texas?

It is a funny thing to postulate, but the point is that rules on lawyer ethical requirements and their commentaries are that strict and that precise.  Bar-tenders do not intend to leave much room for doubt or argument.

And, here is the thing.  Lawyers overwhelmingly comply with the rules to the letter of the law.  I know it, and most lawyers know, that lawyers by and large, at least compared to other people and other professions, are some of the most ethical people around.  Sure, everyone can give me an exception to the rule, but what other society polices this conduct more strictly than do lawyers.

Do you not wish that other, even more vital professions, did this as well?  Especially the sciences and medical schools, and doctors, and drug companies, where even the slightest breach of ethical guidelines can serious injury a whole lot of trusting people.

The first rule of law and the first rule of lawyers in dealing with people in a trusted position is what?

Disclosure.  Disclosure.  Disclosure.  If you have a conflict you had better darn well put it out on the table.

The legal profession does not deserve the rap it gets too often.  Most other professions, however, are simply not scrutinized enough.  Take the recent peanut butter scandal where the food manufacture sent out toxic peanut butter because it was worried about its financial health if it did not.  It sickened and killed people.  Or, the current Wall Street, banking and insurance scandals.

Take the Harvard Medical School ethics quandary reported by the New York Times.  According to the article, in a first-year pharmacology class at Harvard Medical School, student, Matt Zerden, grew wary as the professor promoted the benefits of a cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects.  Mr. Zerden then search online and discovered that this professor was not only a full-time member of the Harvard Medical faculty, but a paid consultant to 10 drug companies, including five makers of cholesterol treatments.

Because of this and other ethical lapses, Massachusetts just past a law requiring doctors to disclose corporate gifts over $50.00.

Harvard Medical School and other institutions are having to struggle with balancing corporate gifts from drug companies and the like with the corruption issues that they bring.

These matters are serious, and they extend beyond medical schools to hospitals and clinics and the undue influence the gazillion dollar drug companies and other providers have over them.

So, although I do appreciate a good laugh once in a while at my expense, and hence the lawyer jokes, I just wish that people would recognize that the problem is not in the legal profession.  It is in medicine, lobbying, toys from China, peanut butter manufactures, and the like.  That although capitalism is maybe a necessary evil, it is also corrupting, and that no profession extols ethics, and enforces ethics better than lawyers on lawyers.