Of All The Silly Things To Do
In the late 80s I had a wild hair…why don’t I go to law school and become a lawyer after I leave the USAF? How naive. How silly. I had no idea what I was getting into and my day-to-day life was not very “stable.” However, full speed ahead and damn the torpedos.
I bounced the idea off a lawyer friend of mine (yes, lawyers have non-lawyer friends). He said, “How was your LSAT score?”
“What the hell is an LSAT?” I replied, which should have been my first clue. He told me and I frantically searched for a testing time before the milestones I’d set for myself. Remember, this was BEFORE the days of the internet. I was lucky, I found one at the perfect time. I went to the test, scored in the mid 90s percentile and looked for a school to attend. Since I was working at the Pentagon and living in Virginia, I looked to schools that I could get to on the Metro. The Georgetown school had no metro. George Mason U had no metro. George Washington U did have a metro. What I didn’t know was that the law schools of most DC universities and GMU were near metro stops. No internet. No brain. I applied to what was then called the National Law Center of George Washington University. I was accepted. They must have needed students.
My law school classes met Monday through Friday nights from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. I was still working and traveling extensively. In fact, for more than half of my law school attendance, I was on travel 50% of the time. Academically, I sucked.
After graduation in 1993 I took the Virginia State Bar exam and passed on my first attempt. Which was good because GWU didn’t teach Virginia law. I started practicing immediately but…surprise, surprise, I wasn’t very good at it. I hated the research and details. And, I was working for me, and, I didn’t pay myself very well. Sigh. I was fair in court and won the few cases I had which made my clients happy. Sadly, they couldn’t afford to pay me. Fortunately, I had not given up my “day job” and so could afford to not get paid by my clients. But, my wife and I talked: two young girls (one a baby), humongous law school debt, and high stress double life…it was time to quit one of the jobs. The paying job won out.
I’d practiced for five years with a variety of cases, mergers & acquisitions, contracts, adoption, traffic, criminal, and… I forget all of them. I worked hard but wasn’t very good at details of the law, didn’t enjoy the law (except the courtroom), and because of that I felt there was a potential for not properly serving my clients. It was time to hang my shingle in the closet and go back to normal life. I did have a broad exposure to the discipline and appreciate the attorneys who helped me muddle through some of the more difficult issues. There was no internet that worked well (that was reasonably priced) consequently asking for help or going to the library was my only recourse. But it got me to wondering.
How can an attorney represent someone who is obviously, without a doubt guilty, but still pleads not guilty? I know, I know, to ensure that proper justice is done but that’s not why some of those attorneys practice. They look not for justice but for the win. They file motion after motion after motion to tie up the system and make the little guy (or the government, believe it or not) spend all their money. They know they’re sitting next to a guilty person and yet they act as if he is the child of Jesus. And they will put on a show that would make Barnum & Bailey weep with envy.
I am heartened by the jury system…most of the time the juries can see through the theatrics, but not always. The OJ trial comes to mind. And I look at what’s happening in the news today and wonder … what can the lawyers be thinking. But then, I wasn’t a good lawyer, so what would I know?