Comment by busyant
19 hours ago
I was deposed once.
It was 6 hours where the opposing counsel tried to rattle me / get under my skin with insulting questions.
To be clear, I was only an expert witness in the lawsuit (drug + pregnant lady + birth defects). It paid extremely well, but was something I would never want to do routinely.
At the end of the deposition, the lawyer had to catch a flight to the west coast and she asked ME if I would drive her to the airport* (she said she'd pay me my hourly rate)!
At that point it was clear that the insults were just theater and "part of the job", but I took it all too personally and told her I had to get home.
* She was late for the flight and Uber wasn't a thing yet.
> At the end of the deposition, the lawyer had to catch a flight to the west coast and she asked ME.
Was the lawyer that hired you present when she made the offer to pay you? If not, I'll cynically assume she was trying to entangle you in some conflict-of-interest ploy to keep you from being called as an expert at the trial.
Theater insults are as much insults as any other. In the context of law process, even worst I would say.
I don't think you can be a lawyer if you take cases personally. At some point you have to defend a rapist who is clearly guilty.
Serious question, do you?
Yes. The goal is not to get the rapist off, the goal is to make sure the process is working correctly and the plaintiff has done their due diligence.
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No. Tons of lawyers never even touch criminal law. You do not need to be a defense attorney to be a lawyer.
Someone has to or there can not be a conviction. Clearly guilty is something that can only truly be said after the decision.
Unless you want to completely overturn the way criminal trials are conducted in the Anglo American judicial tradition.
it's not that they don't take it personally and actually feel the pain/ disgust / fear / <whatever>, it's that they hold the tenets of law as absolute and the most important part of the system. This definitely takes a particular type of person.
This is because Christianity played a major role in Western law. While the laws and courts predates Christianity, after the fall of Romans, much of it was rediscovered through Church.
Many of the courtroom customs were partly influenced by this. For example the Robes/gowns or the emphasis on "law as an absolute", higher standard that sits above personal feelings is also inspired from Christian natural law ideas (i.e rulers and judges under a higher law) even though those ideas were built on Roman foundations.
So the kind of person who can treat the rules as more important than their own feelings isn't that surprising in that tradition. It requires a certain bit of.. religiosity.
agreed. both of my sisters-in-law are lawyers.
whenever some unsavory person is in the news being defended by his attorney, most of us get upset, but they say stuff like, "his attorney is just doing a good job defending his client. that's how this works."
I get it, but I'm not built for it.
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