NO SOLICTING ALLOWED is a sign you often see at the door of establishments and other places. Doctors surely are not allowed to solicit so aren't salesmen, prostitutes and other professionals but lawyers are exempt. As a matter of fact they seem to be encouraged and fed information by the powers at be judging by the unsolicited letters people receive from lawyers offering their services. I certainly received my share over the years. Once I even found out first about an unpaid speeding ticket when I received a letter from a lawyer I did not know offering to represent me! LAWYERS DO HAVE THE POWER AND THE ACCESS. Look at who is governing us. Not a theocracy, a bureaucracy (that too!), an autocracy or even a democracy (fallacy!) but a Lawyocracy (term coined under the Clintons and certainly very much alive under the Obamas).What fuels this intensive soliciting is the contingency remuneration of most lawyers, especially in Personal Injury or liability law. Think about it: the more misery you are in, warranting hopefully a larger settlement, the more money your lawyer makes as a percentage! Hence the terms: bottom-feeders, ambulance-chasers, etc. In Western Europe, lawyers are paid hourly like any other professionals. If that was the case in the USA, think how many frivolous lawsuits will be avoided from the get-go and think how much money the healthcare system will save especially. Why should lawyers be the only professionals paid based on outcomes? Why not accountants for instance or doctors? The latter spend the longest and costliest amount of time studying and the rest of their life being credentialed and recredentialed, scrutinized and regulated, only to find their income going steadily down from year to year. In part because of the lawyers, they have to pay higher and higher malpractice insurance premiums to boot. Forget about any bonus for a good outcome but good forbid one single negative outcome befalls a doctor.
Perhaps the most striking abuse of this contingency remuneration is the CLASS ACTION SUIT. All that the firm needs is about five complainants with similar gripes and they have the all too lucrative class action suit, meaning they can be looking for settlement multipliers. Look at how much money was made by the lawyers in the tobacco settlement, the asbestos settlement, and even the Holocaust survivors’ settlement! The math is frightfully simple: Let us say a law firm is awarded a million dollar settlement for a class suit of 100 plaintiffs. The firm will take about $350,000+ off the top and the 100 plaintiffs will divide amongst themselves the remaining $650,000 meaning $65,000 each which is only about 1/6 of what the lawyers made! That is all the more unconscionable as those plaintiffs could be dying form cancer or be Holocaust survivors or worse. Where is the fairness in that?
Nothing classy about these Class Actions which recently seem to be targeting more and more the Healthcare industry, i.e. pharmaceuticals (1-800-bad-drug) and medical devices manufacturers (hips, knees, etc.), thus raising the costs for all of us healthcare consumers and insurers. How is that addressed in OBAMACARE? I doubt it is since lawyers undoubtedly take care of their own.
To illustrate the above, I was personally the victim of a Vespa accident 24 years ago. Of course I had to hire a lawyer who was promptly referred to my ICU bed by my orthopedist, with documents in hand to sign (with my left). I did not play my role very well like my lawyers instructed and discharged myself AMA from the ICU to go back to work. I also did not follow the script at the deposition (I was simply glad to be alive despite having been pinned under a truck). When I explained that very fact to the junior lawyer and that I was not a freeloader but would rather work hard and earn my living the old-fashioned way for myself and my family, he said outraged something that I will always remember: “what about my kids?!”
Last summer, while on vacation at DR I met a lawyer who was awarded a 9.5 million dollar malpractice settlement (his share about 1.6 millions). It was a slam-dunk case and he lucked out because of religious connections. All he had to do is write a long letter to the CEO of the hospital. That put his rate at about $10,000 a minute. Not too shabby!
I also have another legal friend who has for me a standing offer: "Refer to me a paraplegic or better a quadriplegic and you will not have to work another day in your life." Believe me I have been looking!
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