I don’t think I men­tioned it, but last August, right after I took the bar exam, I moved out of my law school apart­ment in Lesser North­east Key Mid­west­ern Swing State City and (shud­der) moved back in with my mother in Greater Key Mid­west­ern Swing State City, because I didn’t have a job. I still don’t have a job, but I do have an inter­view this week, so that might change.

When I was in Lesser North­east Key Mid­west­ern Swing State City Just 20 Min­utes South of Greater North­east Key Mid­west­ern Swing State City, I had AT&T’s U-​​Verse prod­uct, which deliv­ered inter­net and tele­vi­sion over a cop­per pair. It’s almost exactly like DSL, except instead of run­ning cop­per to the CO (and lim­it­ing band­width by dis­tance), it runs cop­per to a very nearby junc­tion box (called a Video Ready Access Device or VRAD) and fiber from the VRAD to the CO. This lets them offer much more band­width so they can send TV sig­nals along with it. It was a won­der­ful ser­vice with com­pet­i­tive pric­ing. I never had prob­lems with it. (I had switched to them after my ear­lier tra­vails with Road­run­ner through Time Warner Cable.)

I had to give up the U-​​Verse when I moved out. Now I’m in an older neighborhood–the house was built in the 20s–that doesn’t have U-​​Verse ser­vice yet, so we’re stuck with cable. And guess who the local fran­chisee is? Time Warner Cable. I’ve been fight­ing with them to improve our ser­vice ever since. Last night was par­tic­u­larly bad, and in frus­tra­tion I tweeted:

This morn­ing, I got this response:

I then sent this email, which describes all the dif­fi­cul­ties I’ve been hav­ing with the ser­vice here:

Dear Time Warner Cable Peopleguys,

BH, via @TWCableHelp on Twit­ter, asked me to send you trac­erts con­cern­ing the packet loss prob­lem I have been hav­ing since August 2009 and haven’t been able to resolve.

My tweet last night
@TWCableHelp’s response this morning

I have attached three files. The first, [omit­ted] is a Ping­Plot­ter Pro dataset con­tain­ing full trac­ert data from me to Google since 4/​21/​10 (exclud­ing some small gaps when the soft­ware wasn’t run­ning). It con­tains ping times for each hop, packet loss, and jit­ter. You can dis­play it and explore it using Ping­Plot­ter Pro. If you don’t have Ping­Plot­ter Pro, you can down­load a free 30 day trial at www​.ping​plot​ter​.com. I rec­om­mend this, as it will give you the best pic­ture of what is going on here on our end of things.

The other two are screen cap­tures from Ping­Plot­ter show­ing the data.

The first, [omit­ted], shows the cur­rent* state of the route above and the last seven days on the graph (the red humps indi­cate packet loss over the route). (Here, “cur­rent” means “aver­age of the route data from 10:37:57am to 10:40:12am EDT this morn­ing,” which is when I took the screenshot.)

The sec­ond, [omit­ted] is another screen­shot, this time show­ing data from last night (10:12:57pm EDT). As you can see, utterly unac­cept­able lev­els of packet loss.

Here are the symptoms:

In the evenings, we expe­ri­ence prob­lems with our inter­net ser­vice AND our tele­vi­sion ser­vice. On the TV side of things, HD chan­nels will block up, audio will drop out, and the screen will go blank. (Since the guide upgrade a few months ago these have hap­pened more fre­quently, and the blank screens have been replaced with a “please wait” mes­sage.) This hap­pens unpre­dictably and usu­ally on higher-​​numbered HD chan­nels only. Usu­ally there are no prob­lems with non-​​HD chan­nels or local HD chan­nels. The guide is extremely slug­gish in the evening, and chang­ing chan­nels can take up to 45 sec­onds in some cases. On the inter­net side of things, the inter­net is use­less between about 9pm and mid­night for any­thing other than load­ing sim­ple web pages (very, very slowly). We can­not do any­thing more inten­sive than that. Down­load­ing email is a chore. Videos on YouTube, Hulu, &c, will not load. Most dis­tress­ing, I get dis­con­nected from World of War­craft, which I am usu­ally only able to play in the evenings due to work, and then can­not play for long due to the high packet loss. (World of War­craft is not a high-​​bandwidth appli­ca­tion. It relies on data being reli­ably and quickly deliv­ered between server and client, not on cram­ming large amounts of data down the pipe at once. Latency, as you can see from the dataset, is rel­a­tively low, though it does spike dur­ing peak hours along with the packet loss. The unre­li­a­bil­ity of packet deliv­ery to the game server is what causes dis­con­nects result­ing in non­playa­bil­ity. We require bet­ter reli­a­bil­ity of packet deliv­ery, not more band­width or lower latency.) Speed tests (run at Speedtest​.net) typ­i­cally indi­cate much slower speeds dur­ing the late evening hours.

Here is what we have tried to do about it:

The prob­lems started up last August (August 2009). We had a tech­ni­cian out who replaced the drop from the pole to the house. That mit­i­gated, but did not resolve, the prob­lems. They were man­age­able until the begin­ning of 2010, when they became much worse. In the past few months we have had tech­ni­cians out on at least 5 sep­a­rate occa­sions. They have ver­i­fied that there is no prob­lem inside our house, or with the drop from the house to the pole. (I have stopped deal­ing with the national sup­port desk because they are com­pletely unhelp­ful. I have been deal­ing directly with the local main­te­nance office for the past month. I will not call national sup­port desk ever again unless it is to close the account. I can only tol­er­ate being told to power-​​cycle my modem so many times.) On the last tech visit (which came with two tech­ni­cians, instead of the usual one), we were told that the prob­lem is area-​​wide and caused by sat­u­ra­tion of our node’s band­width, prob­a­bly caused by all the col­lege kids halfway across town, who are, inex­plic­a­bly, on the same node. They looked at the graphs and could see the node band­width cap­ping out at night. They said they would look into mov­ing us to another node, or mak­ing a hard­ware upgrade some­where, but I haven’t heard any­thing from them since, and my calls are now going unreturned.

Here is what we want, thought we were pay­ing for, and have dis­cov­ered we are not getting:

Reli­able deliv­ery of pack­ets at all hours. Watch­able prime time HD programming.

I expect you will need our account infor­ma­tion to look up our ser­vice his­tory and see what can be done. I won’t give that out in an email, so you will need to phone me. My cell phone num­ber is [omit­ted] (the account is not asso­ci­ated with that num­ber). You can call me any time. If by chance I do not pick up, leave a mes­sage and I will call you back within an hour. I will expect your call within 24 hours. Before you call, please make sure you have actu­ally read this email and looked at the attach­ments — I do not enjoy retelling the story to every sin­gle per­son I speak with about this issue. And I do not enjoy being asked to power-​​cycle my modem or router or restart my com­puter. The prob­lem is com­ing from out­side the house.

Yours,

Qwertz
Greater North­east Key Mid­west­ern Swing State City

I got a call back in just a few hours. Let’s see what happens.

One who would defend the [Con­sti­tu­tion] must share his fox­hole with scoundrels of every sort, but to aban­don the post because of the poor com­pany is to sell free­dom cheaply. It is a fair sum­mary of his­tory to say that the safe­guards of lib­erty have often been forged in con­tro­ver­sies involv­ing not very nice people.

Kopf v. Skyrm, 993 F2d 374, 308 (4th Cir. 1996). Judge Hall was writ­ing about the Fourth Amend­ment, but the sen­ti­ment applies most admirably to the First Amend­ment as well, as another 4th Cir­cuit panel noted recently in Sny­der v. Phelps, 580 F.3d 206 (4th Cir. 2009).

In that appeal, the 4th Cir­cuit panel reversed a $5M judg­ment against the deplorable Fred Phelps (of West­boro Bap­tist Church fame) and two other mem­bers of his family-​​stroke-​​church for extremely dis­gust­ing and offen­sive state­ments made at and con­cern­ing their protest of the funeral of Marine Lance Cor­po­ral Matthew A. Sny­der on March 10, 2006. The panel ruled that Phelps et al. should have pre­vailed at the trial court as a mat­ter of law because their state­ments were pro­tected by the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause and the Supreme Court’s New York Times v. Sul­li­van, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), and Milkovich v. Lorain Jour­nal Co., 497 U.S. 1 (1990) lines of cases apply­ing the Free Speech Clause’s pro­tec­tions to the pros­e­cu­tion of civil suits.

Accord­ing to the panel, the state­ments made by the church mem­bers (which I will not repeat here, but which can be found in the panel’s opin­ion here [PDF]) were either gen­eral state­ments of pub­lic con­cern that a rea­son­able per­son would not pre­sume to refer specif­i­cally to any mem­ber of the Sny­der fam­ily, or were state­ments so hyper­bolic and con­tex­tu­ally related to the church’s broader protests that a rea­son­able per­son could not con­clude that they made any state­ments of objec­tively ver­i­fi­able fact.

The panel’s rea­son­ing based on exist­ing case law is sound, and I think that this is legally and morally the cor­rect out­come, given the unfor­tu­nate con­text (dis­cussed below). Mr. Sny­der has appealed to the Supreme Court, and the Court granted cer­tio­rari ear­lier this month.

Today, Drudge Report links an Asso­ci­ated Press arti­cle in the Wichita Eagle (here) report­ing that the 4th Cir­cuit has also ordered costs of the appeal to the 4th Cir­cuit to be paid by appellee, Mr. Sny­der. The arti­cle states that the brief opin­ion did not give rea­sons why Mr. Sny­der is being required to pay the costs of an appeal ini­ti­ated (and even­tu­ally won) by Phelps. But this assess­ment of costs against appellee is not all that mys­te­ri­ous. The Fourth Circuit’s Local Rule 39(a)(3) states that “if a judg­ment is reversed, costs are taxed against the appellee.” (Here.) Note that costs do not include attorney’s fees. This is not a fee-​​shifting rule, but a cost-​​assessing rule, and a typ­i­cal one at that. The AP arti­cle reports on an ordi­nary and expected con­se­quence of los­ing an appeal, not on some­thing inex­plic­a­ble or even con­tro­ver­sial. What the AP arti­cle (and other mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions of this rul­ing) does reflect are the sym­pa­thy the pub­lic feels for Mr. Sny­der and the vague sense that there is some­thing unjust going on in this case.

It seems unfair that Phelps should be able to harangue the fam­ily mem­bers of dead sol­diers at their loved ones’ funer­als and be pro­tected from suit by the First Amend­ment, so it seems addi­tion­ally unfair that the fam­ily mem­bers might have to pay money to Phelps as a result. But the law here is cor­rect and moral within the con­text of the cur­rent pub­lic prop­erty sit­u­a­tion. And Mr. Sny­der is not required to pay Phelps’ lawyer. He must pay for his own, and for the court costs incurred in argu­ing the appeal.

This would have never hap­pened if the gov­ern­ment didn’t own the streets and side­walks near St. John’s Catholic Church in West­min­ster, Mary­land. If such prop­erty were pri­vately owned, Phelps would be stuck spew­ing his nau­se­at­ing bile from his own prop­erty back in Kansas. Ratio­nal peo­ple would decline to per­mit him to use their prop­erty for his pon­tif­i­cat­ing (a word I’m sure he’d never use him­self, given its papal ref­er­ence). But since the gov­ern­ment owns the roads and side­walks, it must make the rules nec­es­sary for their use, and those rules must com­port as closely as pos­si­ble with the pro­tec­tion of indi­vid­ual rights. In the con­text of speech from pub­lic prop­erty, this means that gov­ern­ment can only place rea­son­able time, place, and man­ner restric­tions on speech. This has led many (40, accord­ing to the 4th Cir­cuit panel) states to attempt to enact restric­tions on pick­et­ing near funer­als (specif­i­cally to com­bat Phelps), and Phelps has been suc­cess­ful in hav­ing some of these statutes thrown out where they were not drafted prop­erly and dis­crim­i­nated on the basis of content.

[Side­bar: In a recent pod­cast, Dr. Leonard Peikoff addressed the ques­tion of the pro­pri­ety of per­mit­ting the gov­ern­ment to reg­u­late the dis­play of porno­graphic mate­r­ial on pri­vate prop­erty in such a way that it is promi­nently vis­i­ble from pub­lic prop­erty. After mak­ing it clear that this would not be a prob­lem if all prop­erty were pri­vately owned, Dr. Peikoff sug­gested that the gov­ern­ment would have to make the rules, and that it could legit­i­mately pro­hibit con­duct or dis­plays that would “raise objec­tive ques­tion” or would be “objec­tively taken to raise fear in peo­ple as to what’s com­ing next.” I’m not sure exactly what the stan­dard Dr. Peikoff would use is, based on these state­ments. Per­haps I will ask him to clarify.]

Phelps’ behav­ior is dis­gust­ing and, in a civ­i­lized soci­ety, he would be shunned and denounced as an idiot. In a cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety, he would have no plat­form from which to speak except that which he could earn for him­self. But in our mixed soci­ety, where the gov­ern­ment con­trols the roads, what is the proper limit placed on speech in and around pub­lic property?

I talk about gay mar­riage a lot because I believe that it has inter­est­ing fea­tures and con­se­quences beyond those com­monly sub­ject to dis­cus­sion. For exam­ple, in my Law Review arti­cle, “Same-​​Sex Mar­riage and the Fed­eral Spousal Priv­i­leges,” I argue that vari­a­tions in state laws deal­ing with gay mar­riage cre­ate a sit­u­a­tion where fed­eral courts may be faced with a novel choice-​​of-​​law ques­tion: To which state’s laws should a fed­eral crim­i­nal court look to deter­mine the valid­ity of a mar­riage for pur­poses of apply­ing the spousal tes­ti­mo­nial and com­mu­ni­ca­tions priv­i­leges to same-​​sex mar­riages under Fed­eral Rule of Evi­dence 501. (That arti­cle was fin­ished in April, 2009, and has not been updated since. I may update it soon and share it here if I can­not find a print pub­li­ca­tion inter­ested in car­ry­ing it.)

(I am not opposed to same-​​sex mar­riage on prin­ci­ple, but my posi­tion is much more com­pli­cated than can be expressed by a sim­ple answer to a “are you for it or against it” ques­tion. I will fully describe my, so far as I can tell, unique posi­tion on same-​​sex mar­riage in another post.)

Recently, another issue has caught my atten­tion. This one is not a legal issue, but a con­cep­tual one. I have always found myself a bit non­plussed when­ever I hear some­one men­tion his hus­band, or her wife. Despite the fact that I know that the speaker is gay and may even actu­ally have gone to the trou­ble of going some­where to get legally mar­ried (same-​​sex mar­riage is not legal or rec­og­nized in Key Mid­west­ern Swing State), it still strikes me as odd that a man should use the term “hus­band” to refer to his spouse, or a woman can be mar­ried to a “wife.” The reac­tion I have is one that, could it be summed up in a phrase would be “but he’s not really your hus­band, even though you two are mar­ried.” In other words, I feel like the speaker is or ought to be rais­ing his hands above his shoul­ders to the level of his ears and repeat­edly curl­ing the mid­dle and index fin­gers of both hands in a down­ward motion while say­ing the word “hus­band” or “wife”.

There’s a video on YouTube for every­thing:

This men­tal response of “there’s some­thing not quite right about that usage” is sub­tle, but con­sis­tent, which makes me think it is not incon­se­quen­tial and deserves inves­ti­ga­tion. There are two pos­si­bil­i­ties: either I sub­con­sciously do not accept a man in a same-​​sex mar­riage as a proper unit of the con­cept “hus­band”; or such a per­son is not prop­erly a unit of the concept.

The sim­ple def­i­n­i­tion of “hus­band” is “a mar­ried man”. And if def­i­n­i­tions were inter­change­able with con­cepts the mat­ter would be closed. But the con­cept actu­ally sub­sumes all the fun­da­men­tal prop­er­ties shared by its units. So the ques­tion is: is hav­ing a wife part of being a “hus­band”? Is being pos­sessed by her hus­band part of being a “wife”? Other con­cep­tual evi­dence sug­gests that it is. A gen­der neu­tral con­cept for a mar­ried per­son exists: “spouse”. It doesn’t carry all the fine points of the masculine-​​feminine rela­tion­ship and so is a broader con­cept than “hus­band” or “wife”.

Here’s where Rand’s Razor comes in. It directs to con­cep­tu­al­ize only to the point nec­es­sary, then stop. Fur­ther group­ings should be iden­ti­fied descrip­tively. Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-​​Synthetic Dichotomy” in Intro­duc­tion to Objec­tivist Epis­te­mol­ogy 94–96 (Plume 1990). Assum­ing “hus­band”, “wife” and “spouse” are all proper con­cepts, then there must be some­thing essen­tial and fun­da­men­tal to the con­cept “wife” other than the fact that wives are women. If not, then there would be no need for the con­cept “wife,” because this group­ing of female spouses could be iden­ti­fied more eas­ily in the descrip­tive terms I just used.

Addi­tion­ally, I am reminded of Hank Rearden’s walk home with the bracelet in Atlas Shrugged — the bracelet which he intended for his wife, but not the woman to whom he was mar­ried. These con­cepts “hus­band” and “wife” carry with them a great deal of other very sig­nif­i­cant fea­tures that deal with the inter­play of the mas­cu­line with the fem­i­nine. These fea­tures are, both in my expe­ri­ence and, I believe, as a mat­ter of prin­ci­ple, fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent in and, in some instances absent from, same-​​sex rela­tion­ships. In short, these con­cepts do not apply merely because a unit to which they are applied meets the def­i­n­i­tion. Men and women in same-​​sex mar­riages do not seem to belong in the con­cepts “hus­band” and “wife” because same-​​sex mar­riages have very dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ships and inter­per­sonal dynam­ics than opposite-​​sex mar­riages. There is cer­tainly a masculinity-​​femininity dynamic at work in same-​​sex rela­tion­ships, but it is very dif­fer­ent from the masculinity-​​femininity dynamic that is part of the het­ero­sex­ual marriage.

I see a few pos­si­ble conclusions:

1. Expand the con­cepts “hus­band” and “wife” by drop­ping those con­cepts’ cur­rent ref­er­ences to the gen­der of the unit’s spouse and the het­ero­sex­ual masculinity-​​femininity dynamic, effec­tively ren­der­ing them fully equiv­a­lent to the phrases “male spouse” and “female spouse”, even though Rand’s Razor would then dic­tate aban­don­ing the con­cepts “hus­band” and “wife” alto­gether in both gay or straight rela­tion­ships in favor of the descrip­tive iden­ti­fi­ca­tions within the mas­ter con­cept “spouse”;

2. Assume that “hus­band” and “wife” did not include the gen­der of the unit’s spouse and the het­ero­sex­ual masculinity-​​femininity dynamic as an essen­tial and fun­da­men­tal fea­ture of all units in the con­cepts in the first place, and then adhere to Rand’s Razor and aban­don “hus­band” and “wife” for gay and straight mar­ried peo­ple and use “spouse” as the con­cept and iden­tify sub­sets descrip­tively, despite the fact that “hus­band” and “wife” have ven­er­a­ble con­cep­tual pedigrees;

3. Describe gay mar­ried men as “gay hus­bands” (or some other descrip­tive vari­ant on the con­cept “hus­band”), even though this would be like say­ing “this is a hus­band, except that it lacks sev­eral essen­tial fun­da­men­tal fea­tures of hus­bands” and reads to me like a stolen concept;

4. Develop entirely new con­cepts for gay spouses, which would need to have a lot more dis­tin­guish­ing fea­tures than a sim­ple gender-​​specification, such as impli­ca­tions about the sex­ual dynam­ics involved, in order to jus­tify treat­ing them as con­cepts in their own rights;

5. Use the exist­ing con­cept “spouse”, which does not include gen­der or sex­ual dynam­ics, and merely use the descrip­tive “gay spouse” if fur­ther speci­ficity is needed.

If there is in fact a con­cep­tual prob­lem with includ­ing men mar­ried to other men in the con­cept “hus­band”, then num­ber 5 is my pre­ferred solu­tion. I would appre­ci­ate com­ments, but only if they deal with the con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion issue I am dis­cussing. I do not need com­ments telling me that I’m a homo­phobe because I refuse to treat gay mar­riages as con­cep­tu­ally equal to straight ones. I’ve already told you that I agree that they should be polit­i­cally and legally equal, and that’s not the issue I’m dis­cussing in this post.

Update: 12th April, 2010. There has been some mis­un­der­stand­ing about the pur­pose of this post. The pur­pose of this post is to explore the cause of my per­sis­tent, nag­ging neg­a­tive emo­tional response to same-​​sex cou­ples using the words “hus­band” and “wife”, be it sub­con­scious con­cep­tual error or some­thing else. Please review the comments.

Via Paul Hsieh at Geek­press, “16 Things Your Lawyer Won’t Tell You”, a piece pur­port­ing to arm con­sumers of legal ser­vices the bet­ter to keep tabs on their lawyers, but which ulti­mately severely mis­rep­re­sents the pro­fes­sion. The over­all prob­lem with the arti­cle is that it assumes that it is immoral for a lawyer to make money off his clients’ legal woes. Here are the most mis­lead­ing points from the arti­cle, and my expla­na­tion of why they are misleading.

1. I use forms but charge you as if I did it from scratch.

Lawyers who cre­ate and sell oper­a­tive legal doc­u­ments (wills, con­tracts, trusts, &c.) do use forms. They are forms the lawyer has cre­ated him­self using many dif­fer­ent sources and his skill and knowl­edge of the law. The first time a lawyer cre­ates a doc­u­ment, he may spend hours on it, research­ing how to draft it prop­erly to meet the client’s needs. The next time, he will spend less time on it, because many of the par­tic­u­lars are the same for the sec­ond client as for the first. But some things will change, and a good lawyer will add those changes into his form, mak­ing the form bet­ter and more flex­i­ble. Even­tu­ally, the lawyer has a robust form that takes only a few min­utes to fill in and cre­ate a doc­u­ment of equal or bet­ter qual­ity than the first one he drafted. At this point, many lawyers will use a doc­u­ment assem­bly pro­gram like Hot­Docs (now a Lex­is­Nexis prod­uct) to com­plete forms dynam­i­cally and rapidly.

The lawyer cer­tainly spends less time cre­at­ing sub­se­quent ver­sions of the doc­u­ment than he did in first devel­op­ing the form. Yet he charges each client the same. Why? Because he is sell­ing a prod­uct, not his time. The arti­cle implies that a lawyer should bill based on how long some­thing took. But if lawyers did this, they’d never get that first client to swal­low a $5000 bill for a $250 doc­u­ment! The doc­u­ment is worth exactly the same to the client whether the lawyer spent 20 hours or 20 min­utes draft­ing it. Because the doc­u­ment is worth $250 to the client, there is absolutely noth­ing wrong with this prac­tice. The arti­cle, on the other hand, implies that lawyers should not take the value of the ser­vice or prod­uct to the client into account when set­ting prices, some­thing that is a per­fectly accept­able prac­tice in any other busi­ness trans­ac­tion, with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of doctor-​​patient trans­ac­tions (but that’s a topic for another day.)

2. I hand off work to peons but charge you a lawyer’s rate.

This one is mis­lead­ing on two counts, one minor and one major. The minor one is that a lawyer would never refer to his staff as “peons”. The major one is that it fails to define what work lawyers del­e­gate to non-​​lawyer office staff. Typ­ing. Fil­ing. File retrieval. Data entry. Mail­ing. Proof­read­ing. Some­times para­le­gals will pull, read, and ana­lyze case law or statutes or do other basic legal research, which is then sub­mit­ted to the lawyer, who then uses his skill and knowl­edge to apply the law to the client’s sit­u­a­tion and advise the client accord­ingly. Con­trary to the article’s sug­ges­tion, lawyers do not bill clients a lawyer’s fee for work not done by the lawyer. The lawyer charges a fee for a ser­vice, and over­sees the non-​​lawyers assist­ing him in pro­vid­ing that ser­vice, review­ing and (most impor­tantly) inte­grat­ing their work into the whole ser­vice pack­age. Again, the piece wants lawyers to bill only on the basis of how much phys­i­cal labor they per­form, with­out account­ing for added value to the client gen­er­ated by the lawyer’s other skills. The piece sug­gests that lawyers should be required to do all their own typ­ing. (Inter­est­ingly, doc­tors are forced by law to do a lot of sec­re­tar­ial work them­selves, such as fill­ing out billing sheets, wast­ing a lot of time that could bet­ter be spent with patients.)

8. I don’t know much about the law.

This is the only point the arti­cle admits, albeit only implic­itly, is mis­lead­ing. The arti­cle is talk­ing about spe­cial­iza­tion. No lawyer prac­tices equally in every area of the law. Every lawyer knows more about some areas of the law than oth­ers. This does not mean that every lawyer “[doesn’t] know much about the law.” Know­ing about law isn’t just know­ing about statutes and case law in a par­tic­u­lar area, but also know­ing how they fit in with the legal sys­tem, how they impact soci­ety, and how all of it is evolv­ing. Few lawyers can rat­tle off case names and statutes with­out look­ing them up, because there is no need to mem­o­rize such things in most areas. The law changes con­stantly, and even spe­cial­ists must expend a great deal of men­tal energy to keep up with the lat­est devel­op­ments in their fields. (Last I checked, a car­di­ol­o­gist who has to refer clients to an oncol­o­gist for can­cer treat­ment doesn’t get smeared with the claim that he doesn’t know much about medicine.)

9. I don’t refer you to the best lawyers.

True. I refer you to the spe­cial­ists most likely to be able to help you. “The best”, is as much as they exist, typ­i­cally charge huge fees, or have case­loads that won’t allow them to take on your case. I’m going to refer you to some­one who knows the area of law bet­ter than I do, and who I think or know will take your case. I’m not going to waste your time. All refer­ral fee arrange­ments require client autho­riza­tion, and most of the time clients are happy to agree to them.

10. Your bill is only a guesstimate.

Attor­neys bill clients in six-​​minute inter­vals. But don’t let this level of pre­ci­sion fool you—not all lawyers are fanat­i­cally star­ing at their stop­watches to ensure you are not get­ting overbilled.

The arti­cle takes two com­mon, but exclu­sive prac­tices and ignores their exclu­siv­ity. A lawyer who bills by six-​​minute incre­ments (usu­ally only the largest firms bill this way) are fanat­i­cal about record­ing times. Lawyers who bill in larger time incre­ments are able to be less fanat­i­cal. Lawyers who bill by the ser­vice, rather than by the hour (the vast major­ity of your solo and small-​​firm lawyers) don’t have to worry about time because they don’t bill by it. They charge a flat fee for a phone call or a doc­u­ment or a depo­si­tion, as the sit­u­a­tion allows. Your bill is no more a “guessti­mate” than a doctor’s bill is, or the bill of any other ser­vice provider. Your bill will be a rea­son­able one for the ser­vices provided.

11. I don’t have to tell you how I screwed up in the past.

Lawyers, like doc­tors, engi­neers and archi­tects, are often sub­ject to com­plaints from clients. Clients will file ethics charges with the state, and then the state will eval­u­ate them. As with com­plaints about doc­tors, engi­neers and archi­tects, the vast major­ity of com­plaints to state offi­cials about attor­neys do not go any­where because they are friv­o­lous. On the occa­sions where some­thing is amiss, the lawyer (like the doc­tor, engi­neer or archi­tect) will be dis­ci­plined by the state bar, and that dis­ci­pline will be a mat­ter of pub­lic record. And like doc­tors, engi­neers and archi­tects, lawyers are not required to announce every com­plaint or dis­ci­pli­nary action against them to every poten­tial client. The arti­cle is extremely mis­lead­ing in how this is worded, because it sug­gests that lawyers don’t have to tell you these things even if you ask, which is com­pletely false.

13. Medi­a­tion might be the bet­ter choice.

Actu­ally, it is far more often the case that the client will be the one try­ing to avoid alter­na­tive dis­pute res­o­lu­tion. Lit­i­ga­tion is expen­sive for the lawyer, too. Not just for the client. But clients are usu­ally the ones push­ing for their day in court when the choice is between ADR and lit­i­ga­tion. Your lawyer will advise lit­i­ga­tion in a sit­u­a­tion where both would be appro­pri­ate only if he hon­estly believes the ADR will not vin­di­cate your rights. This is most com­mon in arbi­tra­tion sit­u­a­tions, not medi­a­tion. Many courts across the coun­try now require the par­ties to attempt medi­a­tion prior to advanc­ing litigation.

15. I’m train­ing junior attor­neys on your dime.

This one suf­fers the same prob­lems as #2. Firms that charge by the hour do not bill senior attor­ney rates for junior attor­ney work. Firms that charge by the ser­vice are not charg­ing by the hour. They pro­duce a uni­form qual­ity prod­uct and charge uni­form prices accord­ingly, regard­less of how the work is generated.

So many lawyers are good peo­ple, but they get such an insanely bad rep­u­ta­tion. It can­not be sim­ply that peo­ple believe they are enti­tled to the ser­vices of lawyers (a belief per­pet­u­ated by bad law that actu­ally says they are) because peo­ple also believe they are enti­tled to the ser­vices of doc­tors, and doc­tors aren’t nearly so maligned as lawyers. Like doc­tors, lawyers help peo­ple every day, mak­ing their lives incal­cu­la­bly bet­ter. Like doc­tors, they ask for com­pen­sa­tion for this help — com­pen­sa­tion to which they are morally enti­tled — and yet, for this, they are hated. Don’t get me started on lawyer jokes. You already know how I feel about those.

Lawyers and doc­tors both save lives, though in dif­fer­ent ways. What do peo­ple expect? That young peo­ple should put them­selves through the hell of law school and the bar exam, incur in excess of $100,000 in stu­dent loan debt, work tire­lessly in a field that is con­stantly chang­ing and fre­quently extremely stress­ful, and receive noth­ing, or merely enough on which to sur­vive, in exchange? That’s cer­tainly what Con­gress intends to do to doc­tors. Clearly, this is the work of per­va­sive altru­ism. But here is some­thing I do not under­stand — Why has it attacked the pro­fes­sions so disproportionately?

Update: Com­ments closed due to their com­plete inap­pro­pri­ate­ness for pub­li­ca­tion. None will be posted.