The Legal Profession: Unnecessary Roughness

Warning: The following is a personal musing, not an article on a civil rights-related topic.

I have always been attracted to instances that display man’s inhumanity to man. No matter how many times I have seen them before, I am repeatedly spellbound by the documentaries that play every other hour on A&E and the History Channel that detail the calculated horror of the Holocaust. I watch documentaries and movies on slavery, Jim Crow and assorted genocides all over the world throughout history with a morbid fascination. Oppression, atrocities and the victims’ fight back from the brink of destruction are addictive. I cannot turn my head from a train crash. And now, I work in a “BIGLAW” law firm. In the corporate department, which is supposed to be the more amenable, friendly practice in comparison to its adversarial cousin, litigation, I am a frequent witness to and a participant in, senseless, heinous acts of wanton verbal violence: lawyers and clients turning rabidly on each other in a purposeless quest to vent, relieve stress, establish domination, seek revenge and pass on a legacy of cruelty to the new crop of lawyers. Charming.

I have been asking myself how I, one who considers herself a lover of justice and good relations, ended up in a profession that puts such a premium on meanness for the sake of itself. But then I remembered how I sat, almost hypnotized, watching “Mississippi Burning”, “Schindler’s List” and the latest PBS documentaries on slavery in America. I marveled afterwards at how humanity repeatedly claws itself out of the pit of its own baseness and I realized that somehow unbridled condescension and derision are the necessary predecessors of the evolution of the realization that it is inappropriate to for lawyers to treat each other worse than New Yorkers treat their dogs. Insistence on good relations and manners will spring from demands that the status quo is unacceptable. We don’t have to yell, we don’t have to be nasty; I am sure we can close deals without being hateful and boorish. I am sure cooperation would decrease the stress and create better outcomes for everyone involved. I even hear rumors that the legal profession is one of the few in which such unrestrained impoliteness is expected and accepted. I am sure that we can do better.

In seeking my own small sense of revenge, I am tempted to post the names of the awful, mean, horrible, no-good, gutterslime lawyers who have revealed their worst sides to me. But the change in culture has to start somewhere. So let it start with me.

Just as a point of clarification, this current culture of verbal violence does not reign merely in New York; my most recent experience with pointless disrespect was with an attorney in Tennessee. Rudeness in the law knows no bounds.