The Brockovich Report

I'm going out on a limb to make an analogy here. It's not going out on a limb because it's dangerous. It's going out on a limb because I'm not a lawyer, and only lawyers can make official "pronouncements" about law. But we're all entitled to our opinions.

So here is one more opinion. (Believe me, I have a lot of them. ) There are a couple of ways that building a lawsuit is like building a house. I'm just going to mention two: it has to rest on a solid foundation and it takes lots of hands.

The foundation part makes basic sense. You have to have a case. There has to be some tangible thing that happened. If something might have happened, or it is just hearsay or gossip, there's no case. If you heard it happened, or your friend said it happened to him, there's no case. Or--you won't believe what happened to my cousin's niece's next door neighbor's roommates in-laws. Plenty of those come thru my mailbox--where something might have happened, but we're not exactly sure what.

Let me invent an imaginary case here: The sun rose, and you got out in it and got a sunburn--you can't sue the sun. Now, if you slathered yourself with a sunscreen and the person next to you didn't use a sunscreen, and you're burned worse and now you have malignant melanomas...then maybe you've got something. In either case, you're not suing the sun. Your suing the ones at fault--maybe some crook down the road who sold the sunscreen maker baby oil but claimed it was paba. It's still going to be hard to prove because that melanoma could have had a gazillion other causes. And you still have to prove it and look for the deceit, to connect the dots. But if it is an event that clearly happened to you, that's a foundation.

You can't build a case if the foundation is jello.

Now...about a case needing about a lot of hands. There is usually a lot of people involved in a case. Sometimes there are lots of people to interview. Sometimes there are intermediaries. Even the intermediaries have intermediaries. Sometimes a lot of people have been affected, and they all need to be heard. Sometimes there is some kind of cover-up and it doesn't show up until you've talked to a couple hundred--or a couple thousand--people. (If it's a corporate cover up, there can be a lot of payrolled people aware that something fishy is going on.) Every single person who helps ferret out the deceit is part of the solution. And with all of these people involved, you really do need people skills. It helps to genuinely like people.

Ever since it came out, I've gotten mail from law professors and students who use "Erin Brockovich" the movie as part of some legal learning experience. In fact, right now I have an email from the Deputy General Counsel for the Office of the Comptroller in Massachusetts who also teaches 1st year legal research, who is saying that "I use the movie Erin Brockovich as a teaching tool, to demonstrate that being able to connect with people is more effective than legal skills."

I am flattered that the movie is being used that way. And maybe it is a good thing.

In the course of getting justice done, there are lots of people involved. The law is all about people. Sometimes the legal system and lawyers seem to forget that. The law is not just a bunch of rules. The law is rules whose intent (is supposed to be) helping civilization be fair and reasonable. It's not a civilization of Martians we're talking about, nor robots; it's people.

Lawyers tend to get very compulsive and nit-picky when it comes down to looking at details in legal gobbledygook which is what they do. They're very good at arguing the fine points or putting on their close-up glasses and decoding all that fine print the rest of us skip over. But a lot of the time, lawyers don't deal well one-on-one with the people they have to interview, or the very people who have hired them. They have to take off those close-up and impersonal glasses to deal with the people.

Maybe being a lawyer is just one of those professions where the meat of the job gets in the way of the meaning. Like when you go to a doctor's office, and the doctor--who may be quite excellent at medicine--is terse and rushed and you're in and out the door with a diagnosis without feeling you've ever actually been doctored.

Now, I'm not chewing out doctors here, I've had some very kind doctors who relate well. I've had some who don't. I've known some really fine lawyers who relate well. I've known some who don't.

I'm just glad that someone engaged in the profession of teaching lawyers how to be lawyers is taking the time to remind them that they need to be people too.