Super-fun stuff from the legal world

Now, even though EFL is filled to the rafters with the incompetent, the insane, the pathologically dishonest, and the plain perverted, I don't want anyone out there to think that other fields are perfectly normal. However, I am presented with a dilemma: While I spent five years at different law firms, they were either a) staid corporate hacks who paid me outrageous sums to file papers that prevent their clients from paying outrageous sums or b) desperate P.I. (personal injury) hacks who barely paid me a nickel and seriously expected me to do their work for them.

(Sample convo: "Did you argue it with the judge?" "No...ummm...you're the lawyer so it's like, your case and you gotta argue it like they been saying for the last six months." "Oh I'm the lawyer, am I? Well that's just perfect.")

Out of the two, the P.I. hacks were, if not more fun, definitely more interesting. At one stage they shared an office (which they didn't pay for) with a criminal lawyer who of course moved out to avoid being mooched, which led to their eviction a few weeks later. I liked the criminal guy fine, except that he had notions that eight dollars an hour was a princely wage in Brooklyn. But (hence the dilemma), most if not all those stories are confidential. Which means I gotta go elsewhere for my entertainment and we'll get there shortly.

Anyway, that is just an intro to the wonderful world of American law. (As I mentioned before, the U.S. economy seems to be largely based on selling drugs and buying houses and suing the people who sold us structurally unsound houses while on drugs. Thus, lawyers play a large part in this.)

Lawyers, I have discovered, like to blog. Which takes us to today's tidbit from a public defender in the South Bronx. (I have more than a passing familiarity with the area as I once had a chance to rent a studio there for three hundred bucks. And I'd get a discount on every third bullet I dodge.)

So I am reading this, including the links to previous entries that it references, and it's downright fascinating. By the way, I am not saying that I will not meet someone like this in my TEFL career. There is always hope.