Plaintiffs’ Lawyers Are Gross

Plaintiffs’ lawyers are gross. We stink up our opponents’ pristine conference rooms. In reality, the odor emanates from the dark and murky water where we spend most of our time.

Some of you clicked on this post to have your suspicions confirmed. Others clicked on it because you found the title offensive.

The truth is that plaintiffs’ lawyers are gross. But maybe not like you think. To some extent their grossness makes them good. But if left unchecked, it can lead to their self-destruction.

This column comes to you from St. Louis. I’m a captive of the airport. It’s late. I’m waiting to catch a flight back home.

It’s my son’s fifth birthday. We did the airport FaceTime birthday cake thing. My wife put the kids to bed. We talked a little more than usual about the week that transpired.

After hanging up the phone, she sent me the last obligatory “good night, safe travels, be careful” text before she went to bed. The last line of her text simply read:

“Your job is really messed up.”

It wasn’t the first time that my pediatric nurse of a wife sent me a version of this text. It won’t be the last. She tends to subconsciously (or maybe consciously) throw it out there like a life preserver when she senses me beginning to drown in the darkness of my cases. It’s a reminder that things are starting to get especially dark and I have a tendency to become consumed in the darkness.

Sponsored

The last couple of weeks have been dark.

I met with the parents of a young boy that was electrocuted. I tried to say something comforting. The words came out all jumbled up. Since that conversation I’ve come up with at least a dozen more comforting things I could have said. Hopefully I’ll remember them next time.

We started evaluating a fire case. People died. Children included. A family is devastated.

A lawyer called about co-counseling on a case involving a car accident that resulted in one death and multiple others being severely injured.

I’ve begun prepping for a catastrophic injury trial. There is no escape from the array of depressing facts that must be consumed and organized for presentation to a jury.

Sponsored

These stories are not unique. The American Association for Justice (formerly the American Trial Lawyers’ Association) boasts a membership of 56,000 plaintiffs’ lawyers and legal professionals. Each one of these plaintiffs’ lawyers could offer you at least one story a day on the depths of darkness in which they navigate on behalf of their clients.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers willingly consume sadness. We are in the business of worst possible days. Clients call upon us after a tragedy shakes the very foundation of their lives. It can happen on a Monday. It can happen on a Saturday. It can happen on Christmas Eve. It is almost always unexpected and it is usually some degree of terrible. It is someone’s worst possible day. It is within those very dark places that we meet our clients as a broken version of themselves.

Empathy, that ability to understand and share the feelings of another, is a gift that most decent plaintiffs’ lawyers are blessed with. But true empathy can’t be faked. At least not well. It requires the lawyer to wade neck deep into the dark and murky water of each client’s painful experience.

Once we find ourselves emerged in the depths of their despair, we realize that nothing that we can possibly do will ever be enough. No amount of money that we can “win” for them will ever fully ease their pain. And yet we tackle their cases with a blind aggression that turns our insides into hamburger meat. We pathologically believe that if we just work hard enough, if we just “win,” we can somehow make “it” better.

It’s hard to emerge from that kind of murky water clean. In reality, with a steady case flow, it’s hard to ever truly emerge from that water at all. The result is that we often wander around being varying degrees of damaged and gross.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers constantly wrestle with how best to nurture their empathy while protecting themselves against drowning in the darkness. It is a delicate balance. Failure to find that balance can result in simultaneous professional success and personal defeat.

Some of us begin to run away from our empathetic gifts that led us to the profession in the first place. The sadness takes its toll. We find ways to distance ourselves from our clients. We become hardened.

Others of us resort to a host of anesthetics ranging from compulsive exercise to self-destructive substance abuse to temporarily numb the pain.

Most of us fall somewhere in between. We find ourselves constantly searching for ways to move more easily between the murky water of our profession and the five-year-old’s birthday parties of our personal lives.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers are gross. We stink up our opponents’ pristine conference rooms. Some believe the odor stems from the caricature like features of cheese, flamboyance, and opulence that we are often collectively branded with. In reality, the odor emanates from the dark and murky water where we spend most of our time.


Jed Cain is a trial lawyer and partner with Herman, Herman, & Katz, LLC in New Orleans, Louisiana. Jed writes about family, the law, and Louisiana current events at Cain’s River. He can be reached by email at jcain@hhklawfirm.com.