by S. Sponte, Esq.
After almost twenty-five years at the bar, I fancy myself a pretty good lawyer. Just ask any of the colleagues with whom I practice or any of the judges before whom I practice, and they will all tell you the same thing – that I fancy myself a pretty good lawyer.
And if the passing years have taught me anything, it is that the practice of law is definitely not a profession for the lame of spirit. Lawyering is to other professions what hockey is to other sports. It can rip out the hearts and stomp on the souls of its practitioners, oft times leaving naught behind but an empty, wasted shell, an attorney devoid of feelings, bereft of sensitivities and at best suitable for nothing but family law.
For years it has been known that as a profession lawyers suffer from the highest incidence of depression. It is also well known that veterinarians are the least likely to be so afflicted. To me it makes perfect sense. I mean, wouldn’t you be a lot less depressed if your clients couldn’t talk?
It has been conclusively demonstrated that neither experience nor ability offers much insulation from the ravages of barristry. That’s quite understandable since such attributes are not the principal stuff of lawyering anyway. You no doubt recall the landmark 1977 Weisbaden study of Julio Farblundgit, PhD. in which he convincingly demonstrated that chimpanzees could be successfully taught to prepare and argue cases before an appellate court.
“Getting them to write the briefs was easy,” he said at the time. “Getting them not to eat it was harder.”
Farblundgit also dressed some of the animals in judicial robes and as an experiment tried furtively to pass them off as appellate court judges. However his simian jurists were soon discovered when they unthinkingly got their opinions out in record time.
This is not just another one of my typical mindless philippics, not at all. As astonishing as it may appear to some members of our local bench, this time I have a case right on point. I refer here to the sad matter of a local colleague who’s had a bit of a breakdown.
He’s been practicing law for more than thirty years, and in that time he has established a well-earned reputation for honesty, integrity and ability. But a few weeks ago he arrived at his office early as usual, sat down at his desk as usual and then spent the rest of the day just staring blankly at his diploma wall. At first his secretary just figured that he was lost in either contemplation or irresolution, she couldn’t tell which. She didn’t realize how truly disoriented he was until late in the day when a law book salesman phoned and he agreed to take the call.
My colleagues are all quite upset by this unfortunate incident and they’re all thinking the same thing, apart from who’s going to get his clients. They all wonder how this could have happened.
I happened to have had lunch with him in the courthouse cafeteria just a few weeks ago. In between the water course and the potato chip course he said something that, in retrospect, seemed to be a terrible harbinger.
He told me he was representing the husband that day in a protracted divorce case. He had prepared the property settlement agreement with disclosure of assets that was not only full but apparently honest as well. Yet no sooner had the blood dried on the signature page than the wife petitioned to set it aside.
“There’s no way she can win,” he said. “I told my client that justice demands that he prevail.”
His first mistake was believing it. His second mistake was telling that to the client. At the time I took his remarks about justice to be the direct result of his failure to scrape all the green stuff off his sandwich.
When the court ruled for wife, the client demanded an explanation. He got one, but he was not the least bit mollified by the rationalization that Judge was just having an off day.
Now I know that despite our profession’s best efforts at better public awareness, the law is still perceived by most lay people as the last best hope for justice, equality and fair play. Where they get that notion is simply beyond me, but the problem for my colleague is that despite his years at the bar, he still believed it as well. No wonder the bloom’s now off his rose. He has obviously succumbed to the dynamic tension that constantly exists between the idealization of law and its much grimmer reality.
I remember a lecture I heard early on in my law school career. It had to do with the suspension of disbelief. “You must,” the professor said, “learn to suspend your disbelief in order to most effectively argue your client’s cause. The biggest mistake a lawyer can make is to believe in the client’s cause.”
That’s true enough, but only as far as it goes. The real key to long-term survival in this game is suspension of disbelief in all things.
Oh, I know, we all need something to believe in, and I’m no exception. Since I do not have a lot of faith in our legal system’s ability to consistently churn out the right result, and since I am not able to put my trust in a system that is less predictable than the weather, I have chosen instead to renew my long held belief in the tooth fairy. With her it’s always the same – lose a tooth, get a buck. Teeth are a diminishing resource, true enough, and the compensation may not be all that great, but a buck is still a buck and promises get kept, and that’s something worth believing in.
Copyright 1993, S. Sponte, Esq.