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Loucks posted:Was it the mental health struggle or the suicide attempt that amused you most? dpkg chopra posted:Rarely helps and is mostly used by the worst people alive. Man y'all would hate AA meetings
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Jan 27, 2023 17:25
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Toona the Cat posted:My newest client is a 3 week old on morphine to treat heroin withdrawal. If it wasn’t for dark humor, this job would be impossible. Really? I'd have thought a baby on an opium high would giggle at anything.
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Jan 27, 2023 17:34
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JohnCompany posted:Really? I'd have thought a baby on an opium high would giggle at anything. yea but they act like a little baby when they get dope sick
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Jan 27, 2023 17:58
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drk posted:There's a thread below from someone who tried it out for three different things. For those three requests, it produced: Frankly, the program didn't do half bad from what I can tell.
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Jan 27, 2023 20:30
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BigHead posted:Don't forget most alcoholic! Also Most Divorced, I believe
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Jan 27, 2023 20:30
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blarzgh posted:Also Most Divorced, I believe Access to means, I guess
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Jan 27, 2023 20:50
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blarzgh posted:Also Most Divorced, I believe Well, until Toona shifts career again.
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Jan 27, 2023 20:56
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I am a lowly paralegal, but it still amazes me when I see opposing counsel talking with each other and the conversation is civil, professional, and even friendly. Is this a new trend or are lawyers just too often unfairly portrayed as bloodthirsty warmongers?
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Jan 28, 2023 19:19
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Christe Eleison posted:I am a lowly paralegal, but it still amazes me when I see opposing counsel talking with each other and the conversation is civil, professional, and even friendly. Is this a new trend or are lawyers just too often unfairly portrayed as bloodthirsty warmongers? My take is that generally speaking being unfriendly to the other side is a tactical error. I'm a professional; my personal feelings aren't relevant and the other side's personal feelings are a vulnerability it is my duty to take advantage of by being as affable as possible. Sometimes this means smiling and nodding my way through a *lot* of Trump Talk Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Jan 28, 2023 |
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Jan 28, 2023 19:48
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Christe Eleison posted:I am a lowly paralegal, but it still amazes me when I see opposing counsel talking with each other and the conversation is civil, professional, and even friendly. Is this a new trend or are lawyers just too often unfairly portrayed as bloodthirsty warmongers? At times, it's a tactical decision like any other. I've mentioned in this thread or the A/T one that I knew a lawyer in a previous job who would endlessly torment two particular judges and one of my coworkers. He did that because those judges and that coworker would take the bait, get pissed, and make mistakes. Dude got a murder conviction and lots of other stuff reversed on appeal because of that strategy. The only other contexts I've seen hostility in is an OC we were convinced intentionally suborned perjury, then perjured herself in the ensuing malpractice case. Another guy got caught telling a child DV victim that the government was going to jail him if he showed up to testify. But those are single acts of assholery, not necessarily blanket dispositions. The default interaction, which is the vast vast majority of the time, is keeping it as professional as possible. Heck a lot of places will fire lawyers if they cause embarrassment to their firm or to their AG. My shop is clear that they'd fire anyone who behaved like a dickhead child. To be clear, I and a lot of other lawyers can litigate like bloodthirsty warmongers. That's part of the job. But it's possible to do that while being professional.
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Jan 28, 2023 20:23
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Christe Eleison posted:I am a lowly paralegal, but it still amazes me when I see opposing counsel talking with each other and the conversation is civil, professional, and even friendly. Is this a new trend or are lawyers just too often unfairly portrayed as bloodthirsty warmongers? I think the consensus among non-psychopaths is that this job is hard enough as it is.
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Jan 28, 2023 21:16
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:My take is that generally speaking being unfriendly to the other side is a tactical error. I'm a professional; my personal feelings aren't relevant and the other side's personal feelings are a vulnerability it is my duty to take advantage of by being as affable as possible. You can be both a total unwavering rear end in a top hat and a very effective lawyer, but then you can never, ever find yourself in the position of needing a professional courtesy in return. Need to do that hearing another day because your kid is sick, or lost your copy of the thumb drive containing discovery? gently caress off, tell the Judge you screamed at yesterday. You’d also have to be willing to… live like that, constantly aggrieved and pissy, without letting it cloud your strategic judgment. Lawyers who play the game that way tend to suck even more than normal lawyers, interpersonally. Just suppress your feelings of anger and aggrievment at the pub like everyone else, bro. Or as least disassociate during some other, weird obsessive hobby.
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Jan 28, 2023 22:20
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Also you can loathe opposing counsel and still be polite to them.
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Jan 28, 2023 23:46
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Not in litigation but generally it's because you never who'd going to help you down the road. Being an unnecessary rear end in a top hat harms your career.
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Jan 28, 2023 23:50
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Back home we had an expression called "Being polite doesn't make you less brave". I've always tried to apply that in my professional career. Some people have truly taken me to my limit. One experience that comes to mind was an rear end in a top hat building developer who had double sold my client's property during development and then denied that my client's documents were actually real. We finally reached an agreement after months of negotiations. I insisted on the agreement being notarized (this wasn't in the US, non-notarized agreements have less evidentiary value), we get together to sign, and the developer looked at me and said that he had "half a mind to walk away because I had insulted him by insinuating that the agreement needed to be notarized. He was after all, a man of his word."
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Jan 29, 2023 00:40
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A Tasteful Nude posted:Or as least disassociate during some other, weird obsessive hobby. more lawyers should play tabletop
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Jan 29, 2023 00:58
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There is one attorney that everyone in my office will engage with for 5 minutes to hear his position before telling him "ok, I'm done" and ending things. Every case with him is the same conversation and email for 3 months until eventually the case resolves the way it should have in the first conversation. He doesn't just miss the forest for the trees, he doesn't even notice the trees and looks down at the path at his feet. He can only deal with one fight at a time and out of survival my whole office is super short and frankly rude to him because there's no value in actually talking to him. Otherwise, being polite is always more helpful than being pugnacious. Good criminal lawyers should recognize a likely resolution before a case really gets going.
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Jan 29, 2023 01:04
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A Tasteful Nude posted:You can be both a total unwavering rear end in a top hat and a very effective lawyer, but then you can never, ever find yourself in the position of needing a professional courtesy in return. Need to do that hearing another day because your kid is sick, or lost your copy of the thumb drive containing discovery? gently caress off, tell the Judge you screamed at yesterday. You’d also have to be willing to… live like that, constantly aggrieved and pissy, without letting it cloud your strategic judgment. Yeah, there are definitely some lawyers I know who are reasonably effective attorneys and total assholes almost all the time. You use the tools you have and some people's personality types, not being an rear end in a top hat just isn't going to be a good strategy for them because they don't know how to pull it off, and vice-versa. And they have to, as you say, live like that. That said I think overall it's generally just a less viable tactic. A friend of mine (he's in my D&D group!) had a murder trial, his furst murder trial as a defense attorney, last year against one of those rear end in a top hat attorneys I'm thinking of. Whole thing was on video but there was a strong self-defense argument.My friend just played it straight and leaned into being new and obviously just barely knowing what he was doing, "I'm too awkward to be lying to you" type approach. Prosecutor managed to make himself look more aggressive than the defendant in front of the jury. The prosecutor's second chair called a friend of hers after the trial was over. "I just lost a murder trial where the whole thing was on video." Pook Good Mook posted:There is one attorney that everyone in my office will engage with for 5 minutes to hear his position before telling him "ok, I'm done" and ending things. Every case with him is the same conversation and email for 3 months until eventually the case resolves the way it should have in the first conversation. The other side of this coin is, there's one prosecutor I deal with, actually a great guy, but I have to block out a half hour minimum for any call to him. Guy just loves to talk. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Jan 29, 2023 |
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Jan 29, 2023 04:12
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:
I bailed on law and do digital forensics and incident response now. But they keep sticking me in the meetings with lawyers because I can translate computer toucher into law toucher. I had a meeting a while back with the client org and their counsel and a regulatory agency overseeing the client. We spent longer trying to hang up the call than we spent covering the incident. After the call one of my analysts said "I can tell all of you are southern lawyers because a southern lawyer is incapable of being the first person to hang up the phone."
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Jan 29, 2023 13:00
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I dealt with basically no assholes in crim law and around 50/50 rear end in a top hat/decent person doing plaintiff’s work. Some of the assholes are the reason I ultimately said gently caress being a lawyer.
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Jan 29, 2023 15:25
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I’m working a big case right now with like 30 parties and three times as many lawyers on the email service list, and lawyers for three of the parties are having a spat and copying everyone on their snippy emails to one another and it’s honestly kind of embarrassing for them.
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Jan 29, 2023 17:06
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"Please refer to my 01/17/2023 email where your question was sufficiently answered."
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Jan 29, 2023 17:08
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That's generally what it is. You don't want to be the people that other ppl make fun of behind their back. Which seems to happen a lot lol.
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Jan 29, 2023 17:09
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dpkg chopra posted:"Please refer to my 01/17/2023 email where your question was sufficiently answered." I just got one with that exact language yesterday in fact.
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Jan 29, 2023 17:25
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There was one particular divorce attorney I really disliked and couldn't even be civil with outside of court. But, she was a fantastic litigator so I referred my sister to her for her divorce. It was enjoyable seeing her make some other poor bastard miserable.
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Jan 29, 2023 17:44
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Phil Moscowitz posted:I just got one with that exact language yesterday in fact. I love those because you can tell the person took longer to search for the specific email, than it would've taken to just answer the question, even if the question was bullshit.
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Jan 29, 2023 17:44
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Toona the Cat posted:There was one particular divorce attorney I really disliked and couldn't even be civil with outside of court. Was she your first or second wife’s lawyer?
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Jan 29, 2023 20:50
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Prosecutor managed to make himself look more aggressive than the defendant in front of the jury. I love this anecdote - I've long espoused the theory that criminal jury trials (once you know what you're doing procedurally and technique wise) are mostly about projecting the right vibes and telling the more resonant story. The trial is PART of the story – the prosecutor hulking out in Court at an aw shucks newer lawyer is the perfect thematic hook for a not guilty ending to that particular story of self defense. An old trial lawyer once told me that the jury will always fundamentally believe both sets of lawyers and the judge all secretly know the "real story" of the case and are dishonest liars by default - they're looking for the downtrodden truth-teller in the room who’s trying to get "the right result," regardless of legal niceties. Unlike lawyers who’ve poisoned their brains with law and procedure and the fundamentally dehumanizing effects of both: Normal people love, and resonate with, good stories. You’ve got to tell one… and make the jury part of creating the “happy ending.” It helps when the facts don't really suck, though.
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Jan 29, 2023 20:51
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My thought (which is not original at all) is that the jury absolutely thinks the lawyers and judge are part of a club and will go have drinks afterward, and the lawyer who can get past that and make the jury trust them is the one who will win the case. It starts in voir dire and the entire trial process is about gaining and keeping credibility with the jury.
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Jan 29, 2023 21:01
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Hell yeah - trying to use bene gesserit truthsaying powers to sus out and strike bad juriors is important to atempt, but largley a crap shoot. The real purpose of voir dire is to ask act cool and nice and creditable, so you can start to be the good guy.
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Jan 29, 2023 21:05
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Phil Moscowitz posted:My thought (which is not original at all) is that the jury absolutely thinks the lawyers and judge are part of a club and will go have drinks afterward, and the lawyer who can get past that and make the jury trust them is the one who will win the case. It starts in voir dire and the entire trial process is about gaining and keeping credibility with the jury. my thought, from serving on a jury, is the jury has not the faintest idea of the rules of evidence, mostly the rule against hearsay but beyond that they really do try to get to the right result and only even occasionally speculated what was in the documents they couldn't see
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Jan 29, 2023 21:08
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If you could choose to do every trial without a jury, would you? Curious as I'm from a country with no jury trials except for certain criminal cases, so while I academically understand the advantages of the juror system, I've never have to actually practice in it.
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Jan 29, 2023 21:11
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dpkg chopra posted:If you could choose to do every trial without a jury, would you? I guess it depends on whether you think they're more fair on average than your typical judge, and I have absolutely no idea where I'd land on that right now. Immigration court, where I practice, is a bench trial and the judges are former ICE prosecutors and also are literally part of the DOJ -- but would a panel of everyday citizens be more sympathetic and fair-minded? Same question for any other judge in a different kind of court, since they are often former criminal prosecutors. But on the other hand I just had to serve on a criminal jury and we voted to acquit, and I feel like no judge would've let the defendant walk.
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Jan 29, 2023 23:45
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dpkg chopra posted:If you could choose to do every trial without a jury, would you? The received wisdom is that want a bench trial when the case is either extremely complex and turning on matters of law that a jury won't understand, or when the case is so one-sided that it should've been dismissed out right and it's not worth the time and delay of going through a jury trial. The general truth is that any trial at all means someone is making a horrible mistake, because if the lawyers on each side are competent they should be able to make an intelligent guess as to who will win, and if the clients are sane they should be listening to their lawyers. If you're going to trial at all it means you couldn't work it out which means at least one lawyer or the other or at least one client or the other is about to look like a giant idiot. The main advantage of the jury system is that jurors are much more likely to listen to defendants and believe them than most judges are, because most judges get lied to constantly and become very cynical and judgemental. edit: I forgot murders. Murders go to trial because the victim's family never agrees to any decent plea offers and the defendant never gets offered anything that isn't functionally a life sentence anyway. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Jan 30, 2023 |
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Jan 30, 2023 00:21
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I am forever thankful that my practice does not involve jury trials at all.
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Jan 30, 2023 02:24
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Nonexistence posted:more lawyers should play tabletop Had drinks with a BigLaw partner yesterday and was delighted when he saw my kids reading the Monster Manual and asked “is that 5E?”. We may end up getting a game going (although based on my own time practicing I assume it will be cancelled 9/10 times for client stuff).
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Jan 30, 2023 02:34
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I have a lot of meetings. I used to have conversations. Then I realized if other lawyers are involved I need to be able to say "well looks like we're out of time."
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Jan 30, 2023 03:34
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incogneato posted:I am forever thankful that my practice does not involve jury trials at all. The only time I have stepped foot in a courtroom professionally was to get sworn in the second time. My first state let me do it in front of a notary.
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Jan 30, 2023 04:05
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incogneato posted:I am forever thankful that my practice does not involve jury trials at all. Same. It would also be a terrible idea for my field to involve juries since everything is about obscure theoretical legal interpretation and the facts are almost always 100% clear and uncontested.
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Jan 30, 2023 04:49
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I feel that juries generally get things pretty much right in patent cases, shockingly enough. Assuming the judge does not a thumb too strongly on one side or the other.
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