how lawyering can be snobbery

Today’s Continuing Saga of Crisitunity’s Dull Life involves the property management of my house. Our living room has these large windows, and some months ago we noticed that one of them was leaking. We pulled up the shades, and there was baaad stuff going on in this windowsill; the paint was cracked and discolored and water was leaking freely. As the weeks wore on, the leak got worse and spread to the other side of the window, and it became clear that there is probably rotted wood at the top of this sill. I called the community management people in late June (even though we own the house, any problems of the exterior of the house are taken care of by them) and asked them to come take a look at it. The woman I talked to asked me what month I first notified them about this leak, which was ominous, and I said this was the first time. I have sent several emails since then and have heard squat. This is the same woman, by the way, who signed the letters which explained the ridiculous re-paving project that we went through in early August. Because that project sucked so hard, I assumed she was pretty busy for a while there, but I still expected to hear something. It’s been more than two months and five increasingly severe emails, and nothing. I called today, and found out that this woman no longer works there. Surprise. Shock. So I left a message for someone else, and I’m hoping for a somewhat fast resolution.

I don’t think that fixing it ourselves is a good idea. Partly because it will probably be expensive, partly because it’s not our responsibility, and partly because I think the association would be mad at us if they found out. So I think we’re stuck waiting for them to get back to us. I saw the management association’s construction truck in the driveway of our next-door neighbors on Monday, and I wanted to wait by the truck until they came out and ask them how I can get that truck into MY driveway, but I had other things to do.

I do have something else to talk about that I think is rather interesting: why the unauthorized practice of law is litigated the way it is in America. (Tanaudel, I’d be interested to know if you have similar stuff going on in Australia.) Courts have a good deal to say about it without actually saying terribly much, but the key element in common with all the issues therein, as far as I can tell, is that you can’t give legal advice to anyone without being a lawyer. Legal advice is anything that will change a person’s legal status – everything from “you should sue that guy” to “this is what ‘absolute divorce’ means”. This doesn’t apply to ordinary citizens, because talking to your friend about your divorce is fine; if your friend is a paralegal, you might think that she has some special knowledge to contribute to your divorce, and any questions she answers of yours can be constituted as legal advice, in theory. It’s related to the concept of a special duty that licensed professionals have to the public, and their ensuing reputation.

Anyway, where I’m going with this is wondering why the courts haven’t defined clearer and more useful lines as to the kinds of legal advice that can be given by nonlawyers. Clerks at the estate office can easily answer questions about which kinds of answers you should fill in on forms for estate filing, but they won’t, because by state law they’re not allowed to. The reason is that if they give you bad advice, you are screwed, and no one’s civilly liable. (Nonlawyer assistants are accountable to their lawyer supervisors, who can be sued, reprimanded or disbarred for problems like this, but if there is no supervisor, liability is a little tougher.) There are very simple legal problems, which wind up being expensive or unsolvable legal problems for indigent clients, for which paralegals could be qualified to give solutions, but they can’t. I find this terrible. I think there should be a way for qualified nonlawyer assistants to give legal advice of a certain ilk to clients who can’t afford to pay a lawyer.

Examples include things like defending a DUI by yourself, getting a divorce (in states where the divorce laws are less complicated than Maryland’s), filing a small estate, getting a power of attorney, writing a will, real estate transactions, etc etc. People who go pro se (filing a legal pleading of some kind without hiring an attorney) seem to me to be at an awful disadvantage, because if you don’t even know as much as I know (which is very little in the scheme of things), how the hell do you know where to begin? I asked in class last night if we were allowed to point people in the right direction – by telling them where the statutes related to their case were located, telling them which state government office to call for information, etc. – and he said no, because what if they didn’t know to check the pocket part (updates in the law)? What if the person you directed them to gave them the wrong information?

So basically, either you have to help yourself entirely, or you have to turn everything over to a lawyer. There’s no middle ground where a knowledgeable nonlawyer can help you. Part of what bothers me about this is that there’s no law saying that lawyers have to know everything about everything. They could well make the same kinds of mistakes that nonlawyers can make.

I have an ugly suspicion about all this. I think lawyers want things to be this way so that the dignity (and a yicky form of snobbery) of their profession can be preserved. I don’t think they care very much about the clients they work with; I think they’re only interested in what they can get out of the profession, whether intellectually or monetarily. If they really wanted to help, the courts or the American Bar Association would set up some kind of program requiring a certain amount and kind of pro bono work from every lawyer in the country. (I think some amount of pro bono work is required for all the lawyers in Maryland in some way, even if it just helps you get a break on your malpractice insurance or something, but the requirement is a joke – 10 hours a year or the like.) Or they would do studies to discover what kind of legal work the middle and lower classes can’t afford, and most need, and license nonlawyers to assist in specific ways with that work.

I don’t see anything wrong with a profession that wants to preserve its profitability, but I think the fact that you’re dealing with people’s freedom, their wealth, often their personal happiness, means that legal services should be concerned with more than just fees and rules about who can say what. There ought to be a higher bar (heh) set for what kinds of advice nonlawyers can give, in my view.

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