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Throughout history, lawyers of any kind, personal injury, no win, no fee specialists or otherwise, have rarely been popular. Perhaps it is because they are only abstract and distant figures in most people's lives until some terrible event such as a divorce, workplace injury, car accident or criminal incident necessitates contact with them.
This detachment would explain why it is so easy for many people to dismiss or trivialise their humanity. Take the following popular joke, a typical example of how many people regard lawyers:
Q. What do lawyers and sperm have in common?
A. One in 50,000,000 has a chance of becoming a human being.
There are many more like this, and it says much that this particular chestnut had to be sifted from hundreds of other, less restrained, jokes.
In the UK, attitudes towards lawyers are comparable to those in the US, where a Harris Poll found perceptions of the profession have taken a serious nose-dive over the past twenty years.
In the introduction to the poll, the study's authors wrote, "Recent Harris Polls have found that public attitudes to lawyers and law firms, which were already low, continue to get worse. Lawyers have seen a dramatic decline in their "prestige" which has fallen faster than that of any other occupation, over the last twenty years. Fewer people have confidence in law firms than in any of the major institutions measured by Harris including the Congress, organized labor, or the federal government. It is not a pretty picture."
It may come as a surprise to some people that in the US, the legal profession is even becoming unpopular with itself. This phenomenon is attributable to a decade-long surge in the number of legal malpractice cases being filed by claimants dissatisfied with the legal representation they have received.
An incident of legal malpractice can generally be described as one in which a lawyer was negligent in some way, such as by failing to submit vital evidence, falling short of a deadline or not pressing hard enough to win a client 100% compensation.
Lawyers who take on legal malpractice cases are usually drawn from professionals who have experience in the personal injury claim sector, this is because they are generally those best suited to resolving issues of negligence and liability. However, within the legal ranks there is still a lot of stigma attached to this kind of litigation, as there is a perception that legal malpractice lawyers are "traitors" jeopardising the interests of the very profession that employs them. Taking on one of these cases can even go so far as to wreck a lawyers career, making him an outcast from his peers and ensuring he never again receives any kind of referral or nepotistic favour.
As one US commentator commented, most within the industry "think suing lawyers is not honorable work, and they don't want to dirty their hands with it. I've had people from all over the country call and say they can't find lawyers to take their cases against other lawyers."
Lawyers hating lawyers can lead to all kinds of ironies and will surely spurn a raft of hilarious new jokes.
In fact, through a former colleague who now works as a no win, no fee lawyer in the US, I've recently been exposed to what may be the first of these. It may not be big on imagination or invention, but it is almost certainly represents a watershed moment in the history of lawyer jokes:
Q. What do legal malpractice lawyers and sperm have in common?
A. One in 50,000,000 has a chance of becoming a human being.
