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When You're Talking About Lawyers,
There's No Such Thing As a Free Lunch.
I would like to
welcome you to this month’s Lawyers Stink E-mail Newsletter. Today we’re
going to take an honest look (something most lawyers know nothing about)
about how conniving lawyers (is there really any other kind?) lure
unsuspecting Americans into their evil clutches every day of the week.
Call lawyers whatever you wish, but they’re no dummies (OK, that is
debatable). Let me rephrase that. When it comes to finagling money from
their clients, lawyers have absolutely no peers.
Lawyers readily recognized the undeniable fact that they could not run
their houses of ill repute without a steady influx of customers. So
lawyers had to put on their thinking caps and started working on devising
a way to make a trip to the lawyer’s office sound so tempting that
literally no one could turn down the offer. Through their collective
brainstorming, these lawyers hatched a brilliant plan that has worked
probably better than they ever dreamed possible.
What was this devilishly successful marketing gambit? Lawyers would
advertise to one and all that the first consultation with them would be
free. That’s right - free! The lawyers realized that absolutely nothing
lures in prospective customers better than offering up something for free,
gratis or on the house. Nobody but nobody likes to scoop up freebies more
than your average American.
Just watch the feeding frenzy unfold whenever a business offers just about
anything for free. Free samples of food at the grocery store are a sure
fire bet to attract a crowd tout-de-suite. Free pens or key chains offered
up by a local business will be gobbled up in no time at all. Americans
just love free stuff. If it’s free, Americans want it and they want it
now.
So when a lawyer rolls out the red carpet and is willing to meet with you
or me for free, especially when they might be able to hoodwink a nice
settlement out of someone who has supposedly wronged us, the offer is just
too good to pass up. It would take a group of lawyers, who don’t do
anything for free (and don’t try to sell me on all of the pro bono work
they do) to come up with a marketing ploy like this. Trust me, if there is
one thing we know for certain when we’re talking about lawyers, getting
paid is the name of their game.
When the lawyers con people into coming over to their offices for that
free first consultation, one of two things will generally happen. If the
client’s case presents the lawyer with a legitimate chance of shaking down
someone else for a quick score, then the lawyer will in all likelihood
snooker the client into signing a contingent fee agreement.
Now please understand that I didn’t say the client’s case had to be a
clear cut one. Not at all. After all, you don’t have to be right in
America’s courtrooms in order to extort money from someone else. The case
just has to be good enough for the lawyer to tighten the screws on the
other party and get them to cough up a tidy settlement.
This contingent fee agreement between the lawyer and his or her client
will stipulate that the lawyer will receive anywhere from 33% to upwards
of 50% or more of any money the lawyer recovers - plus any expenses
incurred by the lawyer on the client’s behalf. The expense add-on
stratagem is another ingenious scam lawyers pull on their clients, but
we’ll save that rant for another time. Suffice it to say that when the
lawyer is through piling on all of the additional expenses he can soak the
customer with, the lawyer’s share of the action can add up to 70% or more
of the take.
On the other hand, if the client’s case isn’t going to fly under a
contingent fee arrangement (in other words, there’s no realistic chance to
bamboozle some cash from the other side), the lawyer will either ask for a
sizable retainer from the client right up front or tell the freeloader to
hit the road.
What happened to the free part of the deal? Good question. You see the
lawyer wasn’t about to share give his time away. The free first
consultation is nothing but a come on designed to get the client in the
door. Once the lawyer has the client right where he wants him, then and
only then does he proceed to take the client to the cleaners. And I mean
steam cleaned at that.
That’s not to say that lawyers aren’t getting a whole lot of cooperation
from plenty of Americans looking to cash in our their own legal lottery
jackpot - because they certainly are. Through the relentless repetition of
their something for nothing rhetoric, where they will “fight for our
rights” and “you pay nothing unless we collect”, lawyers have masterfully
managed to foster a fractious sue or be sued culture among Americans. In
Chapter Seven of It’s Time to Wake Up and Smell the Lawyers, we examine how
Americans routinely play right into the lawyers’ hands (click
It Takes Two
to Tango to review excerpt from Chapter Seven).
Americans are flocking to lawyers in droves, suing the heck out of
everybody in sight in hopes of cashing in big time. Lawyers, in the mean
while, are laughing all the way to the bank as they continue to dupe the
public with their alluring promise of free this and free that. Listen up
America - the words free and lawyers don’t go together!
Hopefully, before it is too late and lawyers own everything in sight
(they’re well on their way already), America will realize that when it
comes to lawyers, there never has been and never will be such thing as a
free lunch. It’s Time to Wake Up and Smell the Lawyers. Free lunch? What a
joke.
Speaking of jokes, if you like jokes about lawyers (and who doesn’t?),
click Funny Lawyer Quotes, Jokes and Cartoons or
Lawyer Joke of the Day
and you’ll be treated to some of the funniest lawyer jokes around.
And if you have a funny lawyer joke you’d like to share with the rest of
America, you can contribute it to our ever growing list of lawyer jokes by
clicking The Lawyer Joke Exchange.
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