Customer Reviews

The Moral Compass of the American Lawyer: Truth, Justice, Power, and Greed

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I am a paralegal, and have worked in the legal field for 23 years. I could not put this book down. I have been talking about it since I turned the pages of the first chapter. I recommend it to everyone; I plan to read it again, and when it is not in use, I place it in plain sight of the lawyers with whom I work. Langford and Zitrin have written an important commentary about the practice of law that is easy reading for non-lawyers without being condescending. But their book should be required reading for every lawyer. It is as if someone finally mentioned the elephant in the center of the room.

How did the profession get this far afield? Clients are served less and less while more lawyers are churned out of law schools, and competition is fierce. Money talks; clients at the lower end of the economic scale get less effective counsel or simply try to solve problems without representation. The legal profession has evolved into a business to survive; but, along the way, its vision has deteriorated with regard to justice, public service, and what is morally right.

The fact pattern presented at the beginning of each chapter had me guessing about its outcome as I read on regarding actual, related cases. The anecdotal evidence of injustice and moral dilemma is overwhelming. These are not just occasional news items. They are things that happen every day to lawyers and ordinary people.

I loved their straightfoward and common sense proposals for solutions to make the practice of law better for everyone involved. If only the legal profession, which, as they point out, largely regulates itself, had the courage to implement them.

Just read it, okay?

I am afraid that I don't share other reviewers' enthusiasm for this book. Others have noted that it is rather short on solutions to the problems that it outlines. However, it seems to me that this book doesn't know which audience it is aimed at.

My instincts tell me that it is aimed at the general public - not least because of the breezy, senasationalist tone it adopts. There's an awful lot of scaremongering of the "Gee - isn't it awful what these lawyers are doing?" variety. Indeed, I don't take issue with the factual accuracy of the behaviors instanced by the authors. However, my gripe is that the authors do not put these acts in proportion - the lay reader will come away from this book without any idea at all as to how common are these practices that the authors catalog.

The reputation of the legal profession in the United States is at a pretty low ebb. This book will do nothing to improve public perceptions of it. I do not claim that all is well and the public has nothing to worry about - however, the public does deserve to know just how widespread are the practices that the authors describe. The subtitle for this book might just as well be "lawyers are bad for your wealth" yet the public cannot do without legal services. We can expect those who read this book to view their visit to a lawyer's office with as much enthusiasm as a visit to a dentist or a proctologist. Frankly I think the public deserve to be better informed than this on the issues raised by this book.

Lawyers will find little surprising here - other than the impression that the temple of the law is falling about heads and we know nothing, or care nothing, about it. Zitrin and Langford produced a useful casebook on legal ethics - although not as good as Professor Rhode's - but their legal scholarship has taken second place to legal journalism with this book. The book is short but its scope is all encompassing. The inevitable result is a superficial treatment of important issues and a general lack of reflective insight.

If lay or professional readers want to know just how thought provoking and readable a good reflection on the "state of the profession" can be, I urge them to read Michael H Trotters's "Profit and the Practice of Law: What's happened to the legal profession?" and compare that with Part Two of this book.

Zitrin and Langford challenge those in the legal profession to aspire towards a higher standard than the billable hour. They do well at illustrating the ethical conflicts lawyers face daily with examples from cases that stretch the limits of honest representation. In the end, however, attorneys looking for ethical guidance or for ways out of the ethical dilemmas and conflicts Zitrin and Langford present, will be a little disappointed as the authors only catalog the extremes and the abuses without ever offering solutions; these extremes and abuses are the same cases and examples lawyers were presented with in law school and agonized over in ethics courses. A young member of the profession looking for some guidance from these experienced attorneys will unfortunately find no guidance forthcoming, so in this respect, Zitgrin and Langford do no more than cast stones. Yet the book is extremely valuable as it forces the attorney to return to those law school hypotheticals and ethics dilemmas and wrestle with them once again, this time from the perspective of one who has experienced the pressures to pad the timesheet, to withhold the discovery request, and to justify what most folks would call "lies" as zealous representation. Zitrin and Langford also illustrate that there is often a huge gap between what is ethical and what is moral, and for these reasons, this book should be taught in the law schools along with the Model Rules and the case books.

Intended for popular consumption, Zitrin & Langford provide a riveting, accessible exploration of the ethical ambiguities posed by the adversary theorem in legal practice.

The adversary theorem, the core of American legal practice, asserts that zealous advocacy on behalf of clients will serve the ultimate cause of justice even if lawyers engage in otherwise questionable behavior because the competition between lawyers who engage in the same practices ensures that justice will ultimately prevail.

Folks looking to denounce lawyers lightly will find little sympathy for lawyers by reading the cases in this book. Rather than consider the implications of the billable hours or the justifications for Frank Armani's interpretation of confidentiality, they'll rush to denounce. It's always easy to pre-judge. That's why lawyers exist.

Zitrin & Langford are less interested in denouncing the adversary theorem than in examining its effect in the real world. The proposals they offer mesh with developments that occurred after their book. The American Bar Association revised its model rules in 2002. Harvard Law School added a pro bono requirement for all students. Law firms tout their pro bono service prominently on their websites, sometimes more prominently than they tout their client list.

Zitrin & Langford add considerably to serious discussion about the application of ethics to legal practice - a perpetual discussion that will last so long as humans disagree.

The book completely hooked me, and I wished it wouldn't end. It reads like a thriller; each chapter discusses a different issue, and you really want to know what happens to the protagonist. While the subject matter may sound esoteric and dry, this book certainly isn't; and I think it should be essential reading for non-lawyers. I learnt a lot, especially about how I may be screwed by class-action lawyers without even knowing it! The other thing I learnt was how good it is to be an unethical lawyer: you can make a damn good living with hardly any risk!

We've all heard the lawyer jokes. We all suspect that "guilty" or "not guilty" is determined largely by how much you're willing to pay for representation. We think there's only a tenuous relationship, at best, bewteen "truth" and "justice". And we believe slimeball lawyers - the ones who ignore professional ethics and responsibility - are the root problem of a deteriorating US legal system. What this book does, and does well, is illuminate problems of legal ethics and morality, and in a highly engaging style. The authors present numerous real-life accounts - many nearly unbelievable - of the actual behavior of some lawyers. And they put them in the context of our flawed legal system. But they also show how it can be improved. Provocative and highly recommended.

If it were humanly possible, I would personally place a copy of this book in every bookshelf. It's a wake-up call to the legal profession, uncovering the dirtiest secrets of the practice. But more importantly (though perhaps unwittingly), the authors have provided an advice book for anyone who may ever have to deal with a lawyer, be it their own or an adversary (in other words, just about anyone). It accomplishes this by informing the reader through example after example, case after case, of the hidden conflicts of interest that premeate the legal process, some of which are harmful to society, the client, or both--and most of which would be extremely difficult to pick up on without legal training. Before you talk to your personal lawyer (or an insurance company's, or a class-action lawyer, etc.), and chances are you will at some point in an unexpected event, you need to know what may be going on in his or her head. A central premise of this book is that the legal code ethics that are overwhelmingly endorsed by the profession and the Bar itself do not correspond to everyday ideas about morals or the "right thing."

As a non-lawyer..."other professional"...I appreciated the authors down-home writing style which avoided, as much as possible, legal jargon. It was fun to read about, and have confirmed by experts, the abuses of trust we know happen throughout the legal system. The only "critical" comment I have is that the authors could have been a little more hard-hitting in their final "CAN IT BE FIXED" chapter. I expected a scalding "fix-it" and only got a tepid "this can be done." Loved the book anyway!!

This never happened before! Six of us sat down to a Mother's Day dinner in a good restaurant and we wound up talking only about a book I was reading on the Law and ethics. For three and half hours we talked about the book and never mentioned a word about any senior citizen's illness or a child's celebration. Instead, we were caught up in a stirring exchange of opinions about the book and the ethical dilemmas of the American Lawyer. None of us were attorneys.

The reason for our absorbed attention was simple and personal. When you speak of ethics; you are speaking of your self. Your opinions expose who you really are. You have to ask yourself, "If I was a lawyer; what would I do? Take the easy way out; take the money and run? Would I stop to seek the truth and make sure there was justice for all? Would I make sure that Society was served and protected?"

Zitrin and Langford have written a remarkable book for the layman. It enlightens you on the Law but it also demands an inner examination of oneself that we will only allow on rare occasions. It is a book worth reading. By the way, the first chapter is a thriller; worth the price of the book all by itself. It would make a great movie or TV show.

Richard Zitrin and Carol Langford have written here a book that will not only introduce the law student to the sleazier side of law practice, but also warn the "law consumer" what to watch out for (or perhaps what to look for by way of "zealous representation").

But this is not only a catalogue of egregiously unethical practices by real-world lawyers. It also contains interesting tidbits of great relevance to those who want to know what's wrong with the legal profession.

(For example, here's a point libertarians will enjoy. Lawyers once tried to get around the silly practice of accounting for everything in "billable hours" by settling on standard fees for certain common legal tasks. What stopped them? Antitrust law. It seems adopting industry-standard fees is a form of collusion in restraint of trade. Thank heavens; the current system is _ever_ so much better.)

Not long on solutions, this volume is still a solid overview of the sort of nonsense engendered by the adversarial system. It's also a list of good reasons to look into alternative dispute resolution the next time _you_ have a legal problem.

For law students, I'd personally recommend supplementing it with any or all of the following: Mary Ann Glendon's _A Nation Under Lawyers_; Deborah Rhode's _In the Interests of Justice_; and Philip Howard's _The Death of Common Sense_.