Talk:Lawyer
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[edit] Archives
This talk page had become unhandily large, so I archived it all, without editting or favoring any part. If something has been archived in error, feel free to bring it back. rewinn 02:05, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] New Topics
This is in reply to Rewinn's comment as of December 9, which I just saw because I spent most of last week and this week in depositions. I disagree with the proposed dramatic revision because (1) that would be the third major version in three years, when the second version is not even complete; (2) the current version has achieved incredible stability compared to the last version, which was heavily modified on a daily basis and was rapidly heading in the direction of entropy when I introduced my dramatic rewrite of it; and (3) I am not sure Wikipedia needs a detailed treatise for laypersons on the various branches of lawyering. Most Wikipedia visitors are looking for a light overview, not a dissertation! And I thought providing in-depth detail on law in plain English for laypersons was the job of Nolo Press and its equivalents in other countries (where such equivalents exist).
Also, Rewinn, if you read more carefully that particular paragraph you were criticizing, you would realize that it already mentions the exception for public defenders. With regard to the law of the lawyer-client relationship, I don't think this article (which is treating the topic of what lawyers do at a very high level) needs to get into the nitty-gritty details of American professional responsibility law. I just reviewed my own notes from law school on the subject to refresh my memory. Yes, there are weird cases we all had to read in Professional Responsibility like DeVaux v. American Home Assurance Company, Togstad v. Vesely, Otto, Miller & Keefe, and Lucas v. Hamm, but those cases are outliers. Most states are not as extreme as Minnesota was in Togstad! The vast majority of lawyer-client relationships in the world begin with a conversation between lawyer and client.
As for the other part of what I think you are getting at, I know there are problems in some parts of the United States with plaintiffs' firms that have so heavily automated the lawyer-client relationship that very often the plaintiff's deposition is the client's first contact with a real lawyer (as opposed to paralegals or secretaries), but you need to realize that the U.S. is the outlier on that issue because we allow contingent fees, class actions, and generous discovery. In the vast majority of countries, firms are much smaller, contingent fees are banned or heavily regulated, class actions are very difficult to file, and discovery is not as easy. And many of the remedies achieved by formal litigation in the U.S. are provided by administrative mechanisms elsewhere (for example, New Zealand has a no-fault injury compensation scheme and many Scandinavian countries have ombudspersons). So it is primarily in the U.S. where huge plaintiffs' firms aggressively utilize paralegals and an avalanche of advertisements to develop an army of plaintiffs who play the "litigation lottery." This is a difficult point which takes at least a year of law school to fully understand (thus the frequent but unjustified complaint from conservative laypersons that America is "overlawyering" itself to death). This complex quirk of the U.S. lawyer-client relationship, in my opinion, is simply inappropriate for a high-level general overview of what is a lawyer.--Coolcaesar 08:02, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
