quotations about lawyers
Lawyers were notorious for finding cases in the most unlikely places, especially ones with huge potential damagers awards.
JODI PICOULT
Handle with Care
Ours is a culture dominated by experts, experts who profess to assist the rest of us, but who often instead make us their victim. Among those experts whom we are often victimized the most notable are perhaps the lawyers. If you as a plain person take yourself to be wronged and you wish to achieve redress, or if you are falsely accused and you wish to avoid unjust punishment, or if you need to negotiate some agreement with others in order to launch some enterprise, you will characteristically find yourself compelled to put yourself into the hands of lawyers--lawyers who will proceed to represent you by words that are often not in fact yours, who will utter in your name documents that it would never have occurred to you to utter, and you will behave ostensibly on your behalf in ways that may well be repugnant to you, so guiding you through processes whose complexity seems to have as a central function to make it impossible for plain persons to do without lawyers.
ALASDAIR MACINTYRE
"Theories of Natural Law in the Culture of Advanced Modernity"
People who are striving to become lawyers aren't usually doing it because they have a keen interest in law, nor do they care about helping people. To a lawyer, those things are usually not even secondary.... The primary concern for most lawyers centers around how to extract as much money as possible from the client. The more the merrier.
AARON ROSS
The Final Chapter
Now, lawyers have a reputation for being ruthless, money hungry and blood sucking parasites. And this is not just a silly rumor.
AARON ROSS
The Final Chapter
Lawyers are like catfish. A nibble here, a nibble there ... before you know it the principal's gone, you've got a pile of bills, and not much else.
MEREDITH BLEVINS
The Vanished Priestess
Most of the dishonest lawyers are the product of dishonest clients--the demand creates the supply.
MORRIS SALEM
"Reflections of a Lawyer"
The question arises ... whether all lawyers are the same. This is like asking whether everything that gets into a sewer is garbage.
FLORYNCE R. KENNEDY
Color Me Flo
Lawyers are shy of meddling with the Law on their own account: knowing it to be an edged tool of uncertain application, very expensive in the working, and rather remarkable for its properties of close shaving than for its always shaving the right person.
CHARLES DICKENS
Old Curiosity Shop
Lawyers belong to an exclusive club -- almost as exclusive as a Ted Cruz study group. This club has served clients nobly for eons, solving people's most pressing problems. Put it this way: When the Ontario Securities Commission drops a subpoena in your lap for insider trading, do you call your dog or your lawyer? That should tell you who man's best friend really is. All we ask in return is you pay us for every minute we talk, think, or write about your matter -- and don't begrudge us a "premium" now and then (throw us a bone, so to speak).
STEVE DYKSTRA
"The View From Up North: The Accountants Are Messing With The Lawyers Again", Above the Law, April 6, 2016
It is the business of a lawyer to find a hole to creep out of any law that is in his way; and if there is no hole, to make one.
W. OUSELEY
attributed, Day's Collacon
Lawyers are not just passive witnesses to the wrongs of their clients. Not only must they tolerate projects of which they disapprove, but they must actually lend their professional efforts to those projects.
TIM DARE
The Counsel of Rogues
Lawyers are like spiders, they've eat up all the flies, and I guess they'll have to eat each other soon.
THOMAS CHANDLER HALIBURTON
The Clockmaker
Lawyers are like priests; people come to them and disburden themselves of their troubles, and get consolation, if they pay well for it; but there is one point in which they don't treat them like priests; they don't confess all their sins; they suppress them, and often get themselves and their counsel into a scrape by it, that's a fact.
THOMAS CHANDLER HALIBURTON
Sam Slick's Wise Saws and Modern Instances
Lawyers are pulled in various directions by a diverse cast of characters. The client wants to win, but doesn't want to spend much money doing it. The client believes that the lawyer's fees are outrageous and pays the fees sporadically and only after much complaining. The opposing lawyer's sworn duty is to assail the lawyer in every way possible, make the lawyer look foolish, deride his every statement, and run him out of town on a rail if possible. The judge has no patience with the lawyer, sets impossible deadlines and demands consistent obeisance. Back at the office, the lawyer faces all of the challenges of running a business. The various associations prod the lawyer to join committees and perform pro bono work, in addition to monitoring the lawyer's conduct to ensure that he has not run afoul of the Canons of Professional Ethics. All the while, the specter of a malpractice claim hovers over the lawyer with Damoclean menace.
KENNETH MENENDEZ
Taming the Lawyers
We have the heaviest concentration of lawyers on Earth -- one for every five-hundred Americans; three times as many as are in England, four times as many as are in West Germany, twenty-one times as many as there are in Japan. We have more litigation, but I am not sure that we have more justice. No resources of talent and training in our own society, even including the medical care, is more wastefully or unfairly distributed than legal skills. Ninety percent of our lawyers serve 10 percent of our people. We are over-lawyered and under-represented.
JIMMY CARTER
remarks at the 100th anniversary luncheon of the Los Angeles County Bar Association, May 4, 1978
The lawyer's pouch is a mouth of hell.
HENRY GEORGE BOHN
A Polyglot of Foreign Proverbs
With crime near a record low and bankruptcies plunging, many lawyers are pleading relative poverty.
MITSURU OBE
"Japan's lawyers have an odd problem: not enough lawsuits", Market Watch, April 4, 2016
Your lawyer is your true mercenary. Under his code honor consists in making the best possible fight in exchange for the biggest possible fee. He is frankly for sale to the highest bidder.
DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS
The Deluge
Another striking feature of trials at law is the apparent equality of the contest. An unsophisticated observer would suppose that as one side must be right and the other must be wrong, it would clearly and speedily appear which is right and which is wrong. But two skillful lawyers are like two experts at any game of skill or endurance, and the result is that the clearest case becomes at least somewhat doubtful, and the event quite problematical. The arguments on both sides seem irrefragable as they are separately presented. The advocates elude one another's grasp like weasels. They are lubricated all over with the oil of sophistry and rhetoric. It is quite as difficult to put forward a suggestion that is not plausibly answered, as it is to make a run at baseball, or a count at billiards after a skillful player has left the balls in a safe position.
ANONYMOUS
Albany Law Journal, Oct. 1, 1870
Those lawyers and men of learning, and monied men, that talk so finely, and gloss over matters so smoothly, to make us poor illiterate people swallow down the pills, expect to get into Congress themselves; they expect to be the managers of this Constitution, and get all the power and the money into their own hands, and then they will swallow up all us little folks, like the great Leviathan.
AMOS SINGLETARY
attributed, The Case Against Lawyers