As David Nir pointed out in today's Elections Roundup, something unexpected has happened to Charlie Crist. Let's see how David sets it up, under the category of "Where Are They Now?":
[T]his is just unspeakably sad. You're going to have to click the link and watch the video.
Don't worry -- I've saved you the trouble! Here's the video:
According to one comment on the YouTube page, it's gone viral! Posted just two days ago -- and I was viewer #33,592! Can you imagine the humiliation? Poor Old Charlie Crist!
You laughed, didn't you? Hell, I laughed too. How pathetic! Pitching for plaintiffs on TV! Can you imagine? Does "unspeakably sad" even come close to capturing it?
And then I went the Politico comments page (feel free to click the link now) and one of the commenters gave me a kick right in the face, one that I richly deserved:
This guy was nearly a VP candidate. If he had never embraced Obama's stimulus he would be a senator. Now he is nothing. Bizarre. -Ben
Posted By: Ben | May 04, 2011 at 09:49 AM
No, that wasn't it. Let me see if I can find it.
An ambulance chaser. Who would have thought? This guy will be one of those people dressed up as the Statue of Liberty on the street corners next tax season. Geez...How low can this guy get! LOL!!
Posted By: Waterboarding is fun | May 04, 2011 at 09:59 AM
No, that's not it either. I'd like to think that the username is a hint that the author is being facetious, but this is Politico we're talking about. Let me look down one more:
Hilarious that people are bagging on Crist for working to help people that have been injured. What's better, this line of work or taking the standard lobbying job where you are just cashing in on your connections? It was brave of him to take a gig where he can actually help someone.
Posted By: CM | May 04, 2011 at 10:56 AM
Yeah, that's the one I was thinking of.
I'm a plaintiff's attorney. I don't advertise on TV for two reasons: my practice is not that large and even if it was I can't afford it. And even I fell for the "oh, this is such an unspeakable comedown from being Governor" bit. I share my shame with you -- because you probably share your shame with me. I think we ought to talk about it.
I don't do personal injury work. My father did, though -- among other solo practices like family law, criminal law, wills and minor criminal cases (for which he too often would not get paid. His rule was: "you may stiff me once, but I won't let you do it twice.") I do plaintiff's side employment law -- discrimination, harassment, whistleblowing -- along with a few other more arcane things on the side. So I don't get called the term that you see appear twice in the first nine comments about Crist: "ambulance chaser." (I get called a lot of lot of things, but not that.)
Let me make a few points about plaintiff's law:
(1) Most lawyers from elite schools are taught to look down on small-scale plaintiff's law. Criminal defense, corporate law (which I did for three years at a white shoe firm in Manhattan), being a prosecutor or a federal public defender, appellate law, mergers and acquisitions, securities law, tax law -- those are fine. But dealing with individual plaintiffs, especially of the lower classes, that's, well, degrading -- unless, perhaps, you're doing the kind high-end civil rights or immigration cases that have a shot at going to appellate courts -- often in conjunction with a non-profit and/or a law school with a large firm behind them for clout.
This sort of "slumming" is fine for the pro-bono portion of one's practice -- at my old firm, I did a lot of asylum work, helped out some renters, and managed the firm's response to Katrina -- but it is not to be one's practice, for reasons that the reaction to Crist's commercials eloquently demonstrate. Such work is understood as noblesse oblige. The notion of advertising like this is infra dig. (Yes, I'm using Latin to be a little obnoxious, to fit the theme of the paragraph.)
(2) What Crist is doing here isn't ambulance chasing. Ambulance chasing has an actual meaning: people who would follow ambulances (or have others do so) so as to slip their cards into the hands of people in the emergency room or the family waiting for word of them. That's unethical. (Surprise! Legal ethics, not an oxymoron!) But advertising on television like this is not unethical and has not been for years. (You might do a lot of unethical things once you get someone to call or come into your office, but you might also do a lot of ethical and useful things.)
Here's a dirty secret: laypersons tend not to understand the law. They don't know what causes of action exist; they don't know what behavior on the part of defendants was entirely legal; they may overestimate the defenses that Human Resources Departments (in my practice area) are trained to present to implies as de facto implied threats. When you go to a lawyer, you're seeking someone who can answer the question that usually has no simple answer: "do I have a case." I submit to you that as progressives, in a system where scant resources go into the enforcement of codes and companies rely on people not going ahead with their cases so they can keep on profitably acting illegally, we want people asking themselves that question. If seeing the former Governor "humbling himself" on TV leads more Floridians to check to see if they may have a case worth pursuing -- that's great. That's the private legal system doing the job that the public sector leaves undone.
(3) As Democrats, this sort of slagging of plaintiff's lawyers ought to piss us off something fierce. Plaintiff's lawyers are one of the solid bases of our party, because they (we) have a stake in the law being fair to the average citizen and some of us make enough money to fund the party and its candidates. You hear about how "trial lawyers" are screwing up our society? They aren't talking about those lawyers defending corporations and the like. Successful trial lawyers give a huge amount of support to the party, financial and logistical, which is why with initiatives like limitations on damages and "tort reform" the Republican Party seeks to undercut their income -- for much the same reason as they are doing so with public employee unions.
Think of Joel Hyatt, founder of Hyatt Legal Services and an early practitioner of television advertising by lawyers. ("I'm Joel Hyatt and you have my word on it.") He's the business partner in Current TV with Al Gore and now Keith Olbermann. He was the Finance Chair of the Democratic Party and its Senate candidate in Ohio in 1994. Is this an embarrassing path for Charlie Crist to follow?
In Orange County, California, where I practice more politics than law, the Party Chair, the person who I believe to be its largest donor, its most prominent person on the State Party, and the Regional Director for most of the County are all plaintiff's trial lawyers. So are many officeholders and candidates. I don't recall seeing any of them advertise on TV -- but perhaps they're doing well enough without it. Without them, the Democratic Party would have little more money than it could wheedle out of the unions. I continually see, on this site, comments expressing the prejudice that such lawyers are rich and scheming, arguing for various sorts of "reasonable" tort reform. In fact, plaintiff's lawyers are a lot like actors: some do very, very well and most get by. And, like actors and academics and too few other professions, the income of plaintiff's lawyers goes disproportionately to the Democratic Party. Sure, there are exceptions among defense lawyers and corporate lawyers and tax lawyers and the like -- but they're nothing like plaintiff's lawyers overall.
I don't know whether David Nir has ever been a plaintiff's lawyer (though I know that he went to a good school, because I looked it up); I don't write this diary as an attack on him. He has demonstrated all over the place that he's a good guy. As with other prejudices, you tend not to see them and feel them until you're sensitized to them. In fact, I feel that I'm much more guilty than him because I had the same sort of reaction to seeing Crist's ad that he did -- and that, I'll bet, most of you did -- and I should have really known better. (Too new to the field, I suppose to have lost the socialization I was "raised with.") So, with this self-criticism, I want to turn my error into a learning opportunity for us all.
There's another "Where are they now?" feature in David's diary today:
Does it get more perfect that this? Former Missouri Senator and U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has accepted a job as ethics counsel for Blackwater! A match truly made in the fifth bolgia of the eighth circle of hell
That, of course -- like being a lobbyist for private schools, or for the MPAA, or for some business group, or inside counsel for a megacorporation or as a rainmaker for a white-shoe firm -- is the sort of job that a former Governor like Crist is expected to take. That's not "unspeakably sad."
When we shrug our shoulders at John Ashcroft's career path and make sport of Charlie Crist's, something is indeed wrong -- but it's not something wrong with Crist. It's something wrong with us. It's Ashcroft, not Crist, whose choice is "unspeakably sad."
Congratulations on your new position, Gov. Crist. I hope that you help lots of people. I wish every prominent lawyer did.