[conspire] On communication with lawyers

[Rick Moen]

Quoting a pair of lines from a wonderful cult film:

  Rex O'Herlihan:  You're not a good guy at all!

  Bob Barber:  I'm a lawyer, you idiot!  
  [shootout occurs]

-- Rustler's Rhapsody, 1985, w/Tom Berenger
http://funny115.com/movies/rustlersrhapsody.htm

(And by the way, the reviewers are dead-wrong with their 18% Tomatometer
score:  This is one deeply hilarious albeit obscure movie.)


For differing reasons, Deirdre and I aren't spooked by lawyers (unlike,
e.g., the way many techies freak out when you remind them of the basic
truth that anyone may sue anyone over anything, and that it could cost
serious money).  Both of us have a good gut-level understanding of how
lawyers work and communicate -- such that we sometimes forget how damned
peculiar they are, and how most people don't 'get' Lawyer 101 at all.

This will be a bit of Lawyer 101.

Here is the really important bit to not just understand, but also follow
its ramifications:  Any lawyer is a hired gun whose main weapon is words.  
If you're hearing in professional context from a lawyer, and he/she
isn't _your_ lawyer, then _everything_ that lawyer is saying to you 
is either (1) something he/she is required to say or (2) something whose
sole purpose is to manipulate you.

Towards this end, there will frequently be some mixture of barefaced
lies, misrepresentations, lying through omission, deliberate
non-sequitur logic, tactical vagueness, and selective and misleading
truths.  You will learn to no longer be surprised when your questions
are routinely ignored, the things you broadly hint should be explained
remain mysterious, and there continues to be an utter absence of the
normal give and take people otherwise have in conversation.  It's _all_
weaponised.

And that's their _main_ job skill.  Yes, they're also legal technicians,
but mainly what they do is bullshit and manipulate people.

And sometimes, even with my long experience, I teeter on the edge of
falling for this sh**.  (I _hope_ I seldom actually fall for it.)


There's a story about recent matters that ideally I'd post fully here,
but I have to elide many of the details for people's privacy.  It's the
lingering aftermath of my mother's estate, following her death in 2011.
Part of her estate ended up in a trust to benefit one of my relatives,
with me as the 'remainder beneficiary' -- a gruesome concept meaning
that if I'm still alive when my relative dies, I get everything in that
trust.

The trust is administered by (of course) the trustee, a gentleman who's
also a lawyer (among other things).  The lawyer-as-trustee also of
course _has_ a lawyer.  So, when I hear from this lot, I get a 
double-lawyer effect -- for starters.

The lawyer-as-trustee recently casually lobbed in my direction a
proposed modification of my mother's trust terms that would have
eviscerated key part of Mom's trust plan, asking me to please consent to
this.  To his evident surprise, I wrote back 'no', explaining why in
some detail and attempting to suggest better ways to accomplish what I
guessed he was aspiring to do.  (He can petition the court for changes
without my approval, but then runs the risk that I'd show up with hungry
attack lawyers of my own, objecting and arguing against.)

Some other stuff followed, and then The Letter.  The Letter was written 
to me by the lawyer-as-trustee's lawyer, condescendingly telling me
what I had said (twisting it into what I did _not_ say), making a number
of remarkable representations, and reaching some even more remarkable
conclusions -- all with the obvious aim of reality-distortion.  Hidden
in that pack of lies, obfuscation, and manipulation were two actual bits
of data:

1.  Lawyer-as-trustee will drop the proposed modification (not file
    it as a petition in Probate Court).
2.  In the future, lawyer-as-trustee will seek my 'consent' in 
    writing to certain major disbursements from my relative's trust.

I came close to falling for that.  I thought, 'Well, it's a nuisance, but
I suppose I can sign and send back that I'm OK with distribution for 
X, then distribution for Y, etc.'  And I sighed, because I'd thought I
was done with all this bullshit when Mom's estate finally was wound up,
and I didn't actually want to get sucked back into it.

But then I stopped and thought 'Wait, what?'

Things you sign for a lawyer (someone else's) formalise an agreement.
You give something up; you get something in return.  Mom taught me:  
Always think about what it is you're giving up, and what you're getting.

In this case, lawyer-as-trustee would at intervals send me a 'consent'
form to sign, each time signing away a legal right (the right to object
in Probate Court to a trustee action).  In return, I would be getting...
nothing at all.  Also, I'd be doing this gratuitous work, signing away
my rights, for free.

And, if you don't stop and think such matters through, you might
mistakenly think it's something you 'had to' do, or alternatively 
make the even bigger mistake of being flattered over being consulted on
trust decisions -- which is not actually the case at all.

Having thought the matter through, I sent lawyer-as-trustee a two-page
letter back that boiled down to 'I'm liking "no", here.  I hope that
works for you, as it does for me.'

Because, as it turns out, I don't work for him -- free or otherwise.
Nor is he offering anything I want.

But lawyers routinely make cheeky, brazen requests -- because doing so,
very often, works.  And because, as John D. Rockefeller said, 'The meek
shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights.'