WOE UNTO YOU, LAWYERS!

And so most parking checks are not plain pieces of cardboard with numbers on
them. They have numbers on them all right, but on the back of the check or at the
bottom is printed in small type “The owner of the car covenants that the bailee will
not be held liable or responsible for the loss, theft, and/or damages of articles, etc.” –
or words to that effect. Courtesy of the legal advice, The Law has been carefully
placed on one side of the potential lawsuit – without so much as the knowledge of
one of the “parties to the contract” that it has been placed there – just in case.
It is the same – on a much larger and more complicated scale – with leases. It
is the same with mortgages. It is the same with insurance policies. It is the same
with stock issues and bond issues and all the other legal devices by which business
concerns of all kinds and shapes earn, beg, borrow, or steal other people’s money to
use for themselves. There is always that big block of small type, sometimes running
to several pages, which the ordinary purchaser or tenant or borrower or lender or
investor does not bother to read and probably could not understand if he did read it.
That block of small type is put there at the advice of lawyers, and what it means is
that is any trouble should arise over the little business arrangement, the ordinary
purchaser or tenant or borrower or lender or investor is almost surely going to lose if
he should be fool enough to carry his complaint to The Law. For the other fellow –
the company or the individual with money enough to afford it – has been canny
enough to buy The Law in advance.
Of course it often happens in the world of finance and industry that both sides
of a business deal are able to hire legal advice right from the start. That is the
lawyers’ heyday. Counsel for each side, without so much as a minor lawsuit
anywhere in prospect at the time, will fight to outdo each other in the clever
manipulation of legal language and the careful building of legal fences, so that their
clients’ interests may later be defended, if necessary, in strict accordance with
principles of Law. Yet unless one set of lawyers is much smarter than the other set
of lawyers, both sides might just as well dispense with their lawyers altogether, so
far as driving a reasonable and profitable and fair business bargain is concerned.
The hitch is that as soon as one side resorts to legal advice, the other side has to use it
too in self-defense. Thus everybody loses except the lawyers, who go merrily on
selling The Law.
But since most business transactions involve a big fellow and a little fellow –
a company, for instance, that can afford legal advice and a customer who can’t – The
Law is usually weighted to one side from the very beginning. It is weighted by
lining up beforehand, in the written terms of the transaction, the legal language that
will fit right into legal principles in any lawsuit that might later arise out of the
transaction. And it is in this fashion, even more than by the hiring of smart
word-jugglers to represent you in court or by the purchase of a court hearing to begin
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