The first thing we do…

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

— William Shakespeare

Henry VI, Part II, Act 4, Scene II

“Hell is empty, and the dev­ils are here.”

— William Shakespeare

The Tem­pest, Act 1, Scene II

My pro­fes­sion is much maligned. Attor­neys have a pub­lic approval rat­ing right up there with that of tele­mar­keters, door to door sales­man and Con­gress. I don’t dis­pute that there are uneth­i­cal attor­neys just, as there are uneth­i­cal accoun­tants, uneth­i­cal doc­tors or uneth­i­cal auto­mo­bile mechan­ics, etc. I also don’t dis­pute that the malign­ing of attor­neys is not a new phenomenon.

Shake­speare had a par­tic­u­lar fond­ness for attack­ing the pro­fes­sion. In fact, he attacked attor­neys so often that I have an entire 80 page book, called Shakespeare’s insults for Lawyers, full of quotes from his plays and son­nets that gen­er­ally put the legal pro­fes­sion in less than a pos­i­tive light. (Then again, I also own a book called Drac­ula was a Lawyer. When you’re in this pro­fes­sion, peo­ple tend to give you birth­day and Christ­mas presents that have a legal bent.)

Peri­od­i­cally, though, I come across a com­ment on the legal pro­fes­sion that strikes me as being par­tic­u­larly over the line. Such was the case this past Sun­day when I took a moment to read an edi­to­r­ial by Ben­jamin Marrison.

Mar­ri­son serves as the edi­tor of a cer­tain major met­ro­pol­i­tan news­pa­per in a city just to our south. His edi­to­r­ial dealt with the issue of pub­lic access to records and in par­tic­u­lar to records of stu­dent ath­letes at OSU. I should note at the out­set that I’m absolutely an advo­cate of the open­ness of pub­lic records and pub­lic pro­ceed­ings. I have, for sev­eral years, argued against the sense of secrecy that per­vaded the juve­nile jus­tice sys­tem for decades. As such, I have no qualms about the gen­eral point that Mar­ri­son was try­ing to make.

Unfor­tu­nately, dur­ing his argu­ment, Mar­ri­son chose not to go after those in charge at OSU who make pol­icy deci­sions nor the leg­is­la­tors who write edu­ca­tional pri­vacy laws but instead to lay the blame for the lack of dis­clo­sure at the hands of OSU’s attor­neys. He didn’t lament the word­ing of laws that pro­vide for edu­ca­tional pri­vacy. Instead he wrote, “attor­neys con­ceal the names of ath­letes in records” in order to hide their mis­deeds, using the mere name of the pro­fes­sion to attempt to give the state­ment a neg­a­tive bent. He then lauded the work of his reporters, neglect­ing to men­tion that it was per­sons in the same pro­fes­sion — attor­neys for the paper and for the Ohio News­pa­per Asso­ci­a­tion (an orga­ni­za­tion that the Gazette is a mem­ber of) that fight on behalf of news­pa­pers to try to con­vince courts to give a nar­rower read­ing to pub­lic doc­u­ment exemptions.

Lawyers have few defend­ers in the court of pub­lic opin­ion. Pub­lic dis­con­tent toward the pro­fes­sion is under­stand­able. Peo­ple tend to come to court and to need the assis­tance of an attor­ney at the worst moments of their lives — a crim­i­nal charge, the death of a loved one, a divorce or a motor vehi­cle acci­dent. When they do hire an attor­ney, they have a rea­son­able expec­ta­tion that their lawyer will do all that it is eth­i­cal to advo­cate their posi­tion, a posi­tion that is likely to be exactly counter to the posi­tion that is held by the other side in the case. In the OSU exam­ple, lawyers for the uni­ver­sity were hired specif­i­cally to argue on behalf of their client, just as lawyers for the news­pa­pers were hired to advo­cate the oppo­site posi­tion. It is unrea­son­able and unjust to expect the legal pro­fes­sion to uphold its duty to indi­vid­ual clients and then to malign lawyers for doing so.

Just 48 hours after read­ing the Sun­day edi­to­r­ial, I was starkly reminded of decency of those who prac­tice law in this com­mu­nity. On Tues­day evening no fewer than 14 attor­neys entered the halls of the Andrews House and vol­un­teered hours of their time to pro­vide free legal advice to a record high 29 clients at the monthly legal clinic — clients who would not have had access to legal ser­vices otherwise.

Their ser­vice reminded me of why I entered the legal pro­fes­sion and why I’m proud to be a mem­ber of the Delaware County Bar Asso­ci­a­tion whose mem­bers, despite being the butt of count­less legal jokes, give so much back to this com­mu­nity in their time, tal­ents and pub­lic service.

David Hej­manowski is a mag­is­trate and court admin­is­tra­tor of the Delaware County Juve­nile Court and a for­mer assis­tant pros­e­cut­ing attorney.

Posted by Dave Hejmanowski on Sep 23 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.