Legal Self-Sufficiency. The Reality? Hidden Costs.

The publicity is great about legal self sufficiency - the witness list includes

Walter Cronkxte. So many lawyers offered their services to Lehder that prison authorities had to appoint a secretary for their precious prisoner.


After you read that, you can understand why scientists have recently decided to use attorneys instead of monkeys for laboratory tests. It seems that attorneys have several advantages over monkeys for these purposes: There are more of them, they're more like human beings, and there are things that a self-respecting monkey just won't do.

What happens is this: Lawyers are trained according to the theory that more is better. More complexities, more intelligence, more hours of hard work, more caffeine. But when they come up against real-world problems, their intensity leads them to focus so much on the details that, unless there's a lot of spare time and a huge amount of coffee available, they may never be entirely ready to appraise the big picture.

I'll give you an example. After I left the practice of law, I scratched around in various jobs (including the headhunting spot) for more than a year. I finally succeeded, however, in landing a Lotus position, if you will, preparing Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets for a tax-oriented law firm.

My purpose in this job was to take the place of a guy named Johnson, who was going off to seek fame and fortune elsewhere. When Johnson explained my duties to me, he seemed arrogant. He said, "I do the spreadsheets in summary form, and I don't go into a lot of detail on the calculations, because the lawyers here don't understand what I'm doing, and if I try to explain it to them, they just get bogged down in it."

My approach, by contrast, was to provide everyone with full details on everything. It was up to them to decide whether to read it, but this way I was covered. Besides, I believed that everyone made mistakes, and that full disclosure of the background information made it easier for us all to find those mistakes before they did any damage.

Technically, I'm sure I was right. But practically, I was wrong, for two reasons peculiar to lawyers. First, the more information they get, the more they want. As long as Johnson had kept things vague, the lawyers had been too busy to go looking for trouble. But once I implied that they should understand what I was doing, they got nervous and began to explore. As a result, my projects grew from Johnson's one-page spreadsheets into these giant data verification nightmares, as the attorneys insisted on getting only the most exact inputs for every single calculation.

And second, my full-disclosure approach made me look bad. You'd think I'd learn after a while. You may recall my story about the partner who had seemed eager to treat my rough draft as though it were a final version, and to criticize what he considered a shoddy effort. In the same way, when the attorneys in this firm began to see mistakes in my spreadsheets, they weren't ready for it. Johnson's less detailed presentations had concealed the nitty-gritty calculations.

In short, the attorneys may well have had superior analytic abilities, but they went so far with them that the clients wound up paying a lot more than the projects deserved. Maybe law school does give you superior training, but only for its own purposes. While you're busy polishing some skills, others will get rusty. You don't get something for nothing.

The Plan? Legal Self-Sufficiency. The Reality? Hidden Costs.

Some people go to law school to learn how to handle their own legal affairs. Maybe they're tired of getting yanked around in court. Maybe they are thinking of starting their own businesses and want to nail down all angles.

These are not dumb motivations. Law school might help with these things. But there are some respectable costs and risks in self-representation for anything more significant than small-claims court. If you become an entrepreneur who falls back on legal skills once in a while, you won't be nearly as experienced in the courtroom as a regularly practicing attorney. Even the best lawyers hire others to represent them sometimes.

After losing patience with my first divorce attorney, I took over the case and handled most aspects of my own contested divorce. And as the philosopher said, a A divorce is essentially the absurd."393 I spent two years at it, produced a paper file that weighs 60 pounds, and learned a lot about matrimonial practice. But how frequently do you hope to use that kind of knowledge for your own purposes? Once every couple of years, at best. All I knew was that, in retrospect, even though I had won some important points, I had basically lost two years' worth of free time for the sake of self-defense.

In the most pessimistic view, it worked out like this: I married a woman whom I wouldn't have married if I hadn't gone to law school; I did it mostly because she was a steady friend during some tough years when I needed that. Having married her, I drove a wedge into the relationship because of my commitment to pass the bar exam and succeed at the firm, no matter what it meant to her needs or wishes. As I furthered my legal training, I became increasingly tough on her. When we broke up, I did not shrink from a highly confrontational course. When she responded by hiring an equally confrontational attorney, I upped the stakes by pretending that I had nothing more important to do than to fight her. I won, but I also lost.

Nothing is free. Litigation has its price, and when you figure in all the hidden costs, it may not be cheaper for you to learn how to handle your own cases or to live your life as though you were free to sue whenever you'd like. Litigation really can lead you away from your primary goals. Law, like anything else, is much easier to practice on someone else.