Dear Lawyers

Dear lawyers,

The hubris isn’t working any longer. The subterfuge, artifice, sleight of mouth, the “terms of art” are failing also. The cat is out of the bag that the entire practice of law is ONLY successful because it is carried on in a foreign language.

As Fred Rodell so wonderfully wrote:

“Yet lawyers can and often do talk about their product without telling anything about it at all. And that fact involves one of the chief reasons for the non-lawyer’s persistent ignorance about The Law. Briefly, The Law is carried on in a foreign language. Not that it deals, as do medicine and mechanical engineering, with physical phenomena and instruments which need special words to describe them simply because there are no other words. On the contrary, law deals almost exclusively with the ordinary facts and occurrences of everyday business and government and living. But it deals with them in a jargon which completely baffles and befoozles the ordinary literate man, who has no legal training to serve him as a trot.”

If this broken construct is to be repaired, I believe it will be repaired by destroying the “practice” of law, and replacing it with the “simplicity” and “availability” of law.

It’s an odd thing when lawyers feel guilt. And yet, there are a few, that feel guilty enough at what is going on, recognizing the part the legal industry plays in this macabre presentation of a “free” society going up in flames, that they are open to discussing how we can work together.

Ego can only take you so far. Ego, however, denies access on the basis of disability, because it is rigid, and non-accommodating.

There. Now you have a reason to hate me. I don’t give a fuck. I have a reason to hate you as well, and yet, here I am, offering a planning session on the bridge that must be built.

P.D., JAY V SHORE