I don’t know who said it (I’ve never been able to find the quote), but this is some of the best advice I ever heard: “Always beware the man who stops digging for gold and starts selling maps to the gold mine.”
A lot—probably most—of the personal injury lawyer billboards and TV ads you see—ALL. THE. TIME.—are from lawyers who don’t live here.
The state bar makes us say where our “principal office” is on all advertisements.
Some lawyers—if they do it at all—try to get around this by muttering their city name at the end of their TV ads or writing it in fine print at the bottom of their billboards.
Others claim to have an Austin office or a 512 phone number, but when you drill down to the bottom of their gobbely-gook website, it says “by appointment only” (that’s lawyer-speak for “I don’t have an office and will come to your house or meet you at Starbucks”).
We think that’s dumb.
My father-in-law—an old-school, small-town, Texas trial lawyer—has a shirt someone gave him that says “A good lawyer knows the law. A great lawyer knows the judge.”
It’s true.
Any lawyer knows—or should know—the law.
That’s what law school and the bar exam is about.
But a GREAT lawyer knows the judge. And the court clerk. And the baliff. And the staff attorney, and the sheriff’s deputies manning the metal detectors at the door.
Because that’s how you win cases—it’s personal.
It requires someone who lives here.
There are a lot of great Austin lawyers. We’re proud to work with them. You should hire them (we’d love it if you hired us too).
But out-of-town lawyers who are paying lots of money just to advertise here should stay home.
I have a simple rule when deciding whether to take a case:
If someone’s really hurt, they’ll go to the doctor.
If they’re not, they won’t.
Instead, they’ll probably ask me something like, “what do you think I should do?” or “I wanted to run it past you first.”
And I’ll say, “no thanks.”
I famously do not get involved in my clients’ medical treatment—for better or worse—unless I absolutely have to.
If my clients have no other way to pay for treatment (no health insurance, their provider won’t take it, or they can’t afford it) or have no idea where to go for it (they’re new to town, don’t have a primary care doctor, or don’t know where to find one), I may help them make financial arrangements or find a trusted medical provider.
But, when I do, I always give them the dead-straight instruction: “Never take medical advice from me. Do everything your doctor says—nothing more, nothing less.”
Medical decision making is between two people: you and your doctor. No one should get in between those decisions—especially your lawyer.
If a lawyer tries to tell you what your injuries are, what medical procedures to get, or where to go to get them, they’re most likely doing it to help them—not you.
I’m disgusted when I hear about unwitting clients getting unnecessary medical treatment and even serious surgeries just because their lawyer recommended a certain “course of treatment.”
Some lawyers are so blatant they send almost all their clients to the same doctors, who diagnose the same injuries, and do the same procedures.
The only people benefitting from that arrangement are the lawyer and the doctor.
We don’t do it and neither should you.
Voting shouldn’t have to be this hard.
Texas has a long and sordid history of voter suppression. The state’s recent battle over its draconian mail-in voting rules is another example.
To show just how hard it is to vote by mail, I’ve made this simple and easy-to-use, step-by-step guide.
Go to the Texas Secretary of State votetexas.gov website
Print an Application for Ballot by Mail form
Verify you are over 65, disabled, out of your home county, or in jail (huh?)
Complete Sections 1 through 8.
Sign and date Section 10.
Get a witness to sign if you need help.
Get a stamp (it’s not prepaid postage, silly).
Go online and find the mailing address of your county’s Early Voting Clerk (don’t mail it to the Texas Secretary of State, you numbskull, or it’ll be rejected because, why not?)
Mail the application to your county’s early voting clerk so they RECEIVE it (not postmarked) at least 11 days (why 11?) before election day (because it’s easy to control when mail gets delivered, right?).
Get your Ballot by Mail (cross your fingers!).
Fill out your ballot (this is the easy part).
Get another stamp (because you should have to PAY to vote)
Go online and find the mailing address of your county’s election official.
Mail your ballot to your county elections official so they RECEIVE it by 7 p.m. on election day or by 5 p.m. the day after election day if it is postmarked by 7 p.m. on election day.
THAT’S IT! You’re all done! Wasn’t that easy?
Here we go again.
This morning I sat down at my desk and read the following headline on CNN.com:
“Vegan man sues Burger King claiming Impossible Meat Whopper is cooked on same grill as meat”
Add this to the long list of crazy and stupid lawsuits filed by crazy and stupid people and/or their lawyers for hundreds of years.
There’s even a website (funded by a little-known and under-financed lobbying outfit called the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) called facesoflawsuitabuse.org (wisely renamed from iamlawsuitabuse.org) dedicated to exposing stupid lawsuits.
Their “most recent” list of crazy lawsuits includes “Man Sues Popeyes Over Chicken Sandwich Shortage” and “Man Sues Godiva Over Labeling”.
Haha.
But, here’s the deal: All it takes to file a lawsuit is $307 and a piece of paper. Anyone—and I mean anyone—can walk into the courthouse on any day and file a lawsuit against anyone (or anything) else.
This means that some absolutely insane people (or their equally insane lawyers) are going to file lawsuits about absolutely insane things.
But it also means that you or I can walk into the courthouse on any given day and sue, let’s say, the President of the United States for using a charity for personal gain, or Purdue Pharma (and their billionaire family owners) for selling billions of dollars of highly-addictive drugs to heartland Americans who probably didn’t need them, or Johnson & Johnson for making baby powder laced with asbestos (no joke).
It’s the way the system is intended to work. Believe it or not, the founders thought the risk of a crazy person filing a stupid lawsuit was better than the risk that a really powerful person (AHEM!, like the president or the US Chamber of Commerce) would try to do something bad.
And, don’t worry Chamber of Commerce-lovers, there are still lots ways for courts to reject, dismiss, even punish people for filing stupid lawsuits. And it happens all the time.
This one’s about a Texas Supreme Court decision about a doctor who was ordered to pay $1.4 million in sanctions when he filed a stupid lawsuit against a hospital and medical school. Ouch!
There are hundreds (or thousands or hundreds of thousands) of other examples.
But no well-financed websites promoting them because—surprise!—they were all filed by morons.