Lawyers be above
the Profit Motive?
Why should
Sahar Shah defends the idea that law does constitute business - but is no less moral in doing so.
I
won’t feign ignorance about why lawyers are universally hated. After
all, we do all of the following (on hopefully separate occasions): send
people to jail, do everything in our power to ensure that guilty people run
free, lie compulsively, sue people and cheat injured people out of compensation. However, just as Hannibal advised us in The Silence of the Lambs:
serial killers are not born evil: they are a product of their environments.
Similarly, lawyers are not bad—they are a product of the systems within
which they operate. We shouldn’t hate the player—we should hate the
game. And it’s a vicious one that lawyers play. I will try to set forth two
general arguments in this article:
1. Lawyers deserve their pay.
2. Lawyers are not above the profit motive—and shouldn’t be.
For the most part, young people today (or at the very least, those
you would find on university campuses) don’t buy into an Atlas Shrugged
mentality (mainly because it seems so Thatcher-friendly)—we don’t value
talent above all else in the workplace. However, the general principle we
tend to follow in the UK (and the instinctive way we seem to feel about
income) is that the fewer people that can do a certain job, the higher the
salary for that job should be. Higher salaried jobs pay well in order to
attract the best possible people to the job. Across the board, lawyers are
not notoriously well-paid in comparison with other high paying jobs. Legal
professionals earn, on average £70,731 per year, earning less than production managers, marketing and sales directors and aircraft pilots (among
others). This money, I believe, is well deserved. The legal occupation is a
difficult one—they work long hours and perform intellectually challenging
and immensely stressful tasks each day. They also perform an essential
function of society: upholding the tenets of justice, as set forth by our
Government and legal system.
In fact, I will go so far as to argue that some types of lawyers—criminal defence and legal aid lawyers in particular—are not paid enough. And
here we notice the negative consequences of lawyers being paid insufficient salaries—for instance, the number of wrongful convictions per year
is far higher than it needs to be. Defence lawyers lack the resources to do
their jobs properly and at the end of the day—money motivates. Defence
lawyers have the best of intentions, but at the end of the day, are only human—it is difficult to be persuaded to put in all the extra hours necessary
to make a solid case whilst being paid poorly.
In every court case, a lawyer plays the hero and the other has to
play the devil—each must do everything in their power to win. Lawyers
essentially carry out an ‘evil’ made necessary by our legal system. They do
society’s moral dirty work—which is noble, really. But somewhere along
the line, somebody coined the popular catchphrase used by anti-lawyers
everywhere: “They only want your money”. It seems like a bizarre form
of criticism. So do grocery store owners, pet shop clerks, car salesmen,
farmers and essentially anybody with a job. However, supposedly, there is
an element of hypocrisy inherent to this issue: lawyers are supposed to be
doing good in the world. So why are they devoting their time and efforts
to making money and turning a profit? To put it quite simply: because
they have to.
Lawyers—like medical professionals—provide a basic service to the
public but unlike medics, for the most part, they don’t have the luxury
of public funding. The medical and legal professions are too inherently
dissimilar to be compared and I don’t want to complain that the lawyers
are getting unfairly picked on while the doctors aren’t, but—they are. They
don’t have the famed job security that protects doctors, nor do they have a
guaranteed income ordained by the government. In other words, they are
like any other working professionals—so why is it so outrageous that ‘they
just want our money’? The system forces them to become businesspeople,
for all intents and purposes. They do good and necessary work, but at the
end of the day, they expect to be paid for it. And due to the difficulties inherent to the job, it is not contemptible for them to expect to be paid well
for it. Most lawyers, I will go out on a limb to say, begin with the best of
intentions—it takes more than the promise of money to motivate you to
endure years of a law school diet, and the several years of training that follow it. However, the rat race that they find themselves in after law school is
hardly any fault of their own. And after years of gruelling hard work, and
quite a lot of debt: what would you do? Why should lawyers settle for subpar pay? As outlined above—they deserve their pay, but in many situations
(i.e. lawyers in private practice), there is no overhead or external board
guaranteeing this income—they must secure it for themselves.
It’s time we acknowledged a simple truth—lawyers are an indispensable part of Western society. We can’t simply ‘kill all the lawyers’ as
Shakespeare suggested—we need them. We need the law and therefore
we need those that dedicate their lives to studying it and carrying out its
various functions. And if the government does not fund the in