I think you could even say that exactly 50% of them were in the bottom half…

2. Lawyers are people. Roughly 50% of them were in the bottom half of their graduating class, and, although that doesn’t necessarily correlate with competency as a practitioner, it might.

3. Pre-paid legal, at least from the outside, looks a lot like insurance defense work: trying to juggle a very large caseload that you bid at cut rates.

4. Regardless of any of the above, the lawyer has an ethical duty to zealously represent the interests of your sister. She needs to communicate with him and if she feels he is not doing his ethical duty, she should consider hiring her own attorney.

5. Most, not all, but most of the lawyers I have met are decent, hardworking people who generally identify with their clients and do their best to help them through difficult situations. And most, not all, but most do not deserve the reputation that is thrust on them like in this post. Some, of course, are just jerks. Just like the population at large from which lawyers are derived.

At any rate, good luck with your sister, I hope everything works out.

They didn’t do the repairs they agreed to after the home inspection, did some repairs in a completely different and unacceptable way. This was after I had agreed to move up the closing date TWICE at the request of the sellers. Their lawyer was disagreeable on absolutely everything, and was nasty to our lawyer in every phone and written interaction–she even got nasty about where the closing would be. My lawyer was baffled as to why they would make the real estate sales process so difficult.

At the closing they basically refused to do anything about the repairs they skipped and did wrong, so we were left with “take it or leave it” with a very different deal to what had been agreed to. We came VERY close to walking away from the table, but in the end we decided it was better to take the deal than to start a lawsuit for our earnest money and start looking for a house again.

We were also selling our previous home at the same time, and that process was in stark contrast to the other one. We used the same lawyer, and the buyers made it as easy as I could have possibly imagined. They offered, we countered, they accepted, they SKIPPED the home inspection, and they closing was effortless.

One other key point–our buying experience was a FSBO, so no real estate agents were involved. When we sold, we used agents. I think that can make a big difference as well–the agents get paid to make the deal happen, which means a big part of their job is keeping everybody happy. Without the agents, the primary interface point is the lawyers, who have no vested interest in seeing the deal close.

You nailed it about insurance. In this case it’s legal insurance, but health insurance has the same agency problem. The consumer isn’t the payer (at least not directly and sometimes not mostly). As a result, there’s no incentive to keep costs down on the consumer’s part (not the issue here) and there’s little incentive for the provider to give good customer service. They get paid either way.

this upsets me, because our company truly is trying to make a significant difference on the justice system in america, because frankly, it’s messed up and it needs to change now.

i hope she gets this whole mess resolved soon, and with as little headache as possible.

feel free to contact me to see if my company may be able to rectify this situation at no cost.

p.s. love the lawyer jokes!

Tell another joke, we get paid by the hour.

but seriously, this guy is incompetent, so it goes…and yes i do enjoy the cash

As for your sister, well, I hate to say it, but you get what you pay for. She might want to simply fire her attorney and hire another independent of her office so she can get the legal advice she needs. I’ve had many, many occasions to use attorneys (as buyer, seller and for general business) and I will forevermore advocate finding yourself the best lawyer you can afford for EVERY instance in which you find it necessary to have one. Scrimping on an attorney will almost always be trouble. One bit of advice my Grandfather gave me was this,

“Always be willing to pay top dollar for medical help, legal services and anniversary gifts because if you go cheap on any of them you could very well wind up dead.”

And I’ve never found fault with that advice.