TO-WIT: ANOTHER LITTLE PIECE OF MY HEART
I have a hunch that I’m breeching no confidences when I tell you that our profession is not held in particularly high esteem by members of the general public. While that is certainly not a happy state of affairs, there is good news. The abhorrence is not universal. It is apparently restricted only to those individuals who retain an ongoing capacity to consume oxygen.
The reasons for this seemingly universal state of affairs is also pretty widely known. We have contact with our clients most often when their already quietly desperate lives are careening even further out of control than normal, and we through them into the bubbling cauldron of a system that is cumbersome, unpredictable, expensive, time consumming and adversarial. Sure, that’s just the ticket to calm them down.
Although the level of our clients’ dissatisfaction remains fairly constant, the manner in which its described has changed over time. Greedy, dishonest, abstruse, these are just some of the vituperative nouns previously used to eviscerate us. But now, in this kinder, gentler, more politically correct age, the criticism has taken on an entirely different characteristic.
A recent poll now seems to suggest that the real reason clients don’t like us is that we are simply not sufficiently sympathetic to the various agonies of their lives, we don’t fully understand and acknowledge the dire straights, the horrid convolutions, the unbearable vicissitudes of living that have driven them to associate with the likes of us.
“If only my lawyer was more sensitive ...,” “if only she expressed some honest concern…,” “if only he understood how badly we feel… ,” that’s how members of the public are now phrasing their discontent. Yes, it is kinder, it is gentler, it is certainly less combative.
And if I wasn’t so grateful for the more humane way I’m now being criticized, I might finish their sentences with such phrases as “about leaving my wife of thirty years without a penny,” or “about my going to jail for molesting my minor stepdaughter,” or “about writing all those bad checks…,” but I’m much too sensitive a guy to do that.
I suppose that if our clients have entered into a kind of spiritual glasnost with us by toning down the rhetoric, by putting away the verbal tar and feathers, its only fitting and proper that we try and take the criticisms to heart and do something about it.
2006, S. Sponte, Esq.