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Mere PR campaign won't change public's low view of lawyers
© St. Petersburg Times You might have seen the news the other day that the new president of the Florida Bar, Tod Aronovitz of Miami, is tired of lawyer jokes. Aronovitz is asking Florida lawyers to chip in as part of a $750,000 campaign to improve the image of lawyers. He's even hired a public-relations firm. I have a long memory, and remember that the American Bar Association tried this same sort of thing back in 1993. The ABA paid a consultant $170,000 to improve the image of lawyers. It didn't do any good then, either. If anybody asked me, I could save the Florida Bar three-quarters of a mil. I would say: Look, all that good stuff that you want your PR firm to say about lawyers is perfectly true. I know a lot of lawyers who have helped their clients overcome injustice. I am on the side of little people who have to fight big people. And they do need lawyers to do it. So, thanks for that. But if the Florida Bar's theory is that putting all this into an ad campaign will improve the image of lawyers, it won't. No one is going to listen to you. No one is going to slap his or her forehead and say: "Goodness gracious! Lawyers are the true defenders of our liberties! I have been wrong about lawyers all these years!" Nope. People tell lawyer jokes as a defense mechanism, because a certain percentage of lawyers exist for the sole purpose of finding a new victim from whom to extract money. Every small business owner dreads the lawsuit that will destroy all their efforts. Every big business knows it is a cost of operating. Now, I understand that lawyers do not sue -- clients sue. There are a lot of people in the world looking for an easy buck. But how do you think they got that way? Who do you think enables them? In 1996, when a guy got stinking drunk, then broke into a Tampa Electric Co. substation and got shocked with 13,000 volts, he sued the bars that served him alcohol, as well as the electric company. This required that an actual, living, breathing member of the Bar take the case. In the mid 1990s, when a blind man's seeing-eye dog stepped on a woman's foot at a Bradenton shopping center, and the woman found out the blind man didn't have much money himself, she decided to sue the guide-dog trainers for "mental pain and suffering." It took a member of the Bar to file that lawsuit, too. Ooooh, you must be awfully proud. Mr. Aronovitz, if you really want to improve the image of lawyers, my suggestion would be to haul these lawyers down to the town square and rip up their licenses. You could even hold an annual contest for the stupidest lawsuits, and drum the winners out of the profession. I understand how alien this concept must seem. How many lawyers do you discipline for driving a mom-and-pop business out of existence? How many lawyers do you discipline for traveling around the state, drumming up plaintiffs? How many lawyers do you discipline for driving doctors out of the practice of delivering babies, because they can't afford the insurance? The answer is zero. I imagine that you think the very idea is nonsensical -- which is exactly why you will not be able to change the public image of the legal profession. If a lawsuit can be won, then by your definition the plaintiff is in the "right." And if somebody loses their business, or leaves their profession, it is because they were "wrong," and by God, they deserved to suffer, if not to be destroyed. But we ought not have to live in a society in which it is considered better for the defendant of a nuisance suit to pay the suing lawyer to "go away." So, there, you have my advice for improving your image. Punish your profession's excesses. If, however, what you actually are saying is, "We want to be able to keep behaving exactly the same way, but just have people like us better," well, you are out of luck. -- You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.
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Times columns today Howard Troxler Gary Shelton From the Times Metro desk |
