From then on, we were simply different people. Not new people; different.
Mite angry? Yes, I’m angry; I’d be a lousy lawyer if I weren’t. I suppose it’s as if I’ve got this permanent boil on my butt and can’t quite sit down. Which is not the same, you understand, as being hounded by greed; although I can see, of course, that it probably some times looked like greed to certain individuals who were not lawyers, when they saw a person like me driving all the way up there to the Canadian border, practically, saw me camping out in the middle of winter in a windy dingy little motel room for weeks at a time, bugging the hell out of decent people who were in the depths of despair and just wanted to be left alone. I can understand that.
But it wasn’t greed that put me there; it’s never been greed that sends me whirling out of orbit like that. It’s anger. What the hell, I’m not ashamed of it. It’s who I am.
I’m not proud of it, either, but it makes me useful, at least.
Which is more than you can say for greed. I That’s what people don’t get about negligence lawyers good negligence lawyers, I mean, the kind who go after the sloppy fat cats with their corner offices and end up nailing their pelts to the wall. People immediately assume we’re greedy, that it’s money we’re after, people call us ambulance chasers and so on, like we’re the proctologists of the profession, and, yes, there’s lots of those. But the truth is, the good ones, we’d make the same moves for a single shekel as for a ten million dollar settlement.
Because it’s anger that drives us and delivers us. It’s not any kind of love, either love for the underdog or the victim, or what ever you want to call them. Some litigators like to claim that. The losers.
No, what it is, we’re permanently pissed off, the winners, and practicing law is a way to be socially useful at the same time, that’s all. It’s like a discipline; it organizes and controls us; probably keeps us from being homicidal. A kind of Zen is what. Some people equally pissed off are able to focus their rage by becoming cops or soldiers or martial arts instructors; those who become lawyers, however, especially litigators like me, are a little too intelligent, or maybe too intellectual is all, to become cops. (I’ve known some pretty smart cops, but not many intellectual ones. ) So instead of learning how to break bricks and two by fours with our hands or bust chain snatchers in subways, we sneak off to law school and put on three piece suits and come roaring out like banshees, all teeth and claws and fire and smoke.
Certainly we get paid well for it, which is a satisfaction, yes, but not a motivation, because the real satisfaction, the true motivation, is the carnage and the smoldering aftermath and the trophy heads that get hung up on the den wall. I love it.
That’s why I spent most of six months up there in Sam Dent, practically becoming a citizen. Not my idea of a winter vacation, believe me. But anytime I hear about a case like that school bus disaster up there, I turn into a heat seeking missile, homing in on a target that I know in my bones is going to turn out to be some bungling corrupt state agency or some multinational corporation that’s cost accounted the difference between a ten cent bolt and a million dollar out of court settlement and has decided to sacrifice a few lives for the difference. They do that, work the bottom line; I’ve seen it play out over and over again, until you start to wonder about the human species. They’re like clever monkeys, that’s all. They calculate ahead of time what it will cost them to assure safety versus what they’re likely to be forced to settle for damages when the missing bolt sends the bus over a cliff, and they simply choose the cheaper option. And it’s up to people like me to make it cheaper to build the bus with that extra bolt, or add the extra yard of guardrail, or drain the quarry. That’s the
Mite angry? Yes, I’m angry; I’d be a lousy lawyer if I weren’t. I suppose it’s as if I’ve got this permanent boil on my butt and can’t quite sit down. Which is not the same, you understand, as being hounded by greed; although I can see, of course, that it probably some times looked like greed to certain individuals who were not lawyers, when they saw a person like me driving all the way up there to the Canadian border, practically, saw me camping out in the middle of winter in a windy dingy little motel room for weeks at a time, bugging the hell out of decent people who were in the depths of despair and just wanted to be left alone. I can understand that.
But it wasn’t greed that put me there; it’s never been greed that sends me whirling out of orbit like that. It’s anger. What the hell, I’m not ashamed of it. It’s who I am.
I’m not proud of it, either, but it makes me useful, at least.
Which is more than you can say for greed. I That’s what people don’t get about negligence lawyers good negligence lawyers, I mean, the kind who go after the sloppy fat cats with their corner offices and end up nailing their pelts to the wall. People immediately assume we’re greedy, that it’s money we’re after, people call us ambulance chasers and so on, like we’re the proctologists of the profession, and, yes, there’s lots of those. But the truth is, the good ones, we’d make the same moves for a single shekel as for a ten million dollar settlement.
Because it’s anger that drives us and delivers us. It’s not any kind of love, either love for the underdog or the victim, or what ever you want to call them. Some litigators like to claim that. The losers.
No, what it is, we’re permanently pissed off, the winners, and practicing law is a way to be socially useful at the same time, that’s all. It’s like a discipline; it organizes and controls us; probably keeps us from being homicidal. A kind of Zen is what. Some people equally pissed off are able to focus their rage by becoming cops or soldiers or martial arts instructors; those who become lawyers, however, especially litigators like me, are a little too intelligent, or maybe too intellectual is all, to become cops. (I’ve known some pretty smart cops, but not many intellectual ones. ) So instead of learning how to break bricks and two by fours with our hands or bust chain snatchers in subways, we sneak off to law school and put on three piece suits and come roaring out like banshees, all teeth and claws and fire and smoke.
Certainly we get paid well for it, which is a satisfaction, yes, but not a motivation, because the real satisfaction, the true motivation, is the carnage and the smoldering aftermath and the trophy heads that get hung up on the den wall. I love it.
That’s why I spent most of six months up there in Sam Dent, practically becoming a citizen. Not my idea of a winter vacation, believe me. But anytime I hear about a case like that school bus disaster up there, I turn into a heat seeking missile, homing in on a target that I know in my bones is going to turn out to be some bungling corrupt state agency or some multinational corporation that’s cost accounted the difference between a ten cent bolt and a million dollar out of court settlement and has decided to sacrifice a few lives for the difference. They do that, work the bottom line; I’ve seen it play out over and over again, until you start to wonder about the human species. They’re like clever monkeys, that’s all. They calculate ahead of time what it will cost them to assure safety versus what they’re likely to be forced to settle for damages when the missing bolt sends the bus over a cliff, and they simply choose the cheaper option. And it’s up to people like me to make it cheaper to build the bus with that extra bolt, or add the extra yard of guardrail, or drain the quarry. That’s the
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