WHO DEFENDS THE DEFENDERS?

As most of you know, I'm a lawyer. I work in specialties that attract clients with serious personal problems, not all of them connected with their current legal problems. I handle family law, landlord-tenant problems, and employment issues. Occasionally I deal with minor-league criminal cases, usually as a favor to friends.

So, like most lawyers in those specialties, I get my fair share of "crazies." You know, people who use the legal system instead of psychotherapy or social work. They may not necessarily be clinically diagnosable (though some of them unquestionably are), but they're definitely on the down side of normal. Flaky, as my husband sometimes puts it, "like rush hour at the baklava factory." (For the culturally deprived, baklava is a very sweet Greek pastry made out of filo, or very thin very flaky covering, around a filling of nuts and honey.)

This is not necessarily a laughing matter. The first year I was in practice, my life was threatened twice. That was the same year that a lawyer on the West Coast got shot and killed by his client's soon-to-be-ex husband. It was also the same year that a lawyer here in Cook County was shot and killed by his own client, a wife about to lost custody of her children. Before the police caught up with her, she had murdered her children as well. A year or so later, also here in Cook County, a judge and another divorce lawyer were shot and killed by a husband tired of being hauled into court to make mandatory payments for life insurance. Some years later, I did some research for an article on the subject, and discovered that threatened and actual violence against lawyers was frighteningly common. Still is. It tends to cluster in the area of family law. In the course of researching my article, I interviewed several colleagues, who mostly said it goes with the territory. One said, "If your life doesn't get threatened every so often, you're probably not doing your job."

Last year, as some of you may have heard, an unrepresented litigant in the federal court for the Northern District of Illinois killed the mother and the husband of a federal judge who was presiding over his case. It wasn't a divorce case, of course--the feds don't do divorce. Instead of his children, the litigant had lost his home and his savings.

All of this came back to mind this week because the other day, as I was leaving the courthouse and walking across the plaza, a colleague stopped me to ask, "What do you do about difficult clients?" Turns out he has been asked to represent a man whose real estate case seems to be meritorious and winnable (again, it has to do with loss of his house), but who is bad-tempered to the point of being abusive to my colleague's staff. Some of the staff are scared of him.

I gave him all the usual advice (what does it say about the profession that this is usual advice?) about having a few physically fit and imposing-looking staff people around when scary clients come to the office (I used to have an officemate who had worked in the violent ward of a mental hospital before going to law school, for instance,) but that wasn't what he was looking for. I pointed out, rather unnecessarily, that if this guy wasn't his client yet, he certainly had no obligation to take him on. Also that a lawyer's first duty is to his staff's personal safety. Nobody goes to work in a law office to get her head blown off.

My colleague, of course, already knew all that--he's been in practice at least as long as I have. What he wanted to know was, assuming that most lawyers are smart enough to avoid taking on scary clients, where are those scary litigants going to go for representation, and what's going to happen to them in the court system?

Which in fact leads directly back to the dreadful fate of Judge Lefkow's husband and mother last year--the man who killed them had been dumped by at least one set of lawyers, and had no representation when he snapped.

There are no legal aid organizations set up specifically to deal with crazy clients, although there are a number of good organizations that work with people with various kinds of physical and mental disabilities in handling problems that arise from those disabilities.

Crazy people have the same right to representation, under the Sixth Amendment, as anybody else. On the other hand, if I were in the business of defrauding consumers, it might make sense to choose "crazies" as my victims, since they would probably have a really hard time defending their rights. And I think there are some con artists out there doing precisely that, or at least choosing victims who are more likely than not to have mental health problems.

Even crazies have some control over their choice of victims. What does it say about the legal profession that our faces appear so often on their dartboards?

Part of it, undoubtedly, is that our profession brings us into contact with people during some of the worst times in their lives. We may become linked in their minds with those bad times. And we can rarely make everything all right again, even if we succeed in winning the case. Even the process of winning takes time (lots of it, in Cook County, which is the largest court district in the country), and money, and a lot of unpleasantness. Given the law of averages, we lose roughly as often as we win.

But I think a large part of it is that these days, lawyers are everybody's favorite bad guys. Well, not just these days. Even back in Shakespeare's time, lawyers were not well-loved by the public. "The law's delay" was one of Hamlet's reasons for considering suicide. Jack Cade's revolutionary manifesto started out "Let's kill all the lawyers."

Criminal defense lawyers are widely considered to be sharks, pond scum, at least as loathsome as their clients. The most popular cop and lawyer shows have succeeded in convincing most viewers that innocent people don't need defense attorneys, and guilty people don't deserve them. (This has been known to cause serious problems for innocent people accused of crimes.)

So when someone on the thin edge of sanity decides to take out his aggressions, he probably has an easy time choosing a lawyer as a target. It's not like killing a schoolteacher, or a preacher, or a doctor, after all. He may even feel he's doing society a favor.

I take exception to this attitude not only because I am a lawyer, but also because, however flawed the legal system and its operatives may be, in industrialized societies, we are the only alternative to resolving conflicts by intimidation, bribery, and violence. So far as I know, there is no recorded case in history of a lawyer murdering a client. Which, given the frequent and extreme provocations, is a remarkable testimony to legal ethics. It doesn't solve the problem posed by my colleague, of course. But what does it say about the profession that my colleague considers the plight of unrepresented crazies a problem?