I Can Use This: All lawyers are sleazes

What's unusual about the quote in the title of this article? Realistically, I've heard it often throughout the years, but never from a lawyer. The most recent time, however, came from an attorney who was doing some legal work for me, but let's go back to the beginning.

My first exposure to a lawyer was my grandfather. Born in March 1884, he forfeited his high school education at the end of the eighth grade to help support his family. However, he was a brilliant, well-read young man with a huge interest in the law; despite his lack of formal education, he some years later passed the entrance examination to law school and graduated a full-fledged lawyer in 1911 when he was 27 years old. My grandfather was a humble, honorable, ethical man who could never have been sleazy in any area of his life.

Grandpa married my grandmother in June 1913, and they were inseparable until her death in 1964. In their 50½ years of marriage, however, he never practiced law. Why? Grandma believed the law would not offer the steady income she wanted for their growing family. Instead, he worked at a variety of other occupations—often as an accountant—until her death in 1964. Then he was offered a position in a local law office, and he accepted. He was 80 years old.

Not all attorneys, however, were like my grandfather. The first time I needed one, I learned that the hard way. On my first visit to his office, he made a physical pass at me. I didn't see that one coming. Shocked, I never again went to an appointment with this lecherous lawyer unless someone accompanied me into the inner sanctum of his private office. (Why did I stay with him rather than hiring another lawyer? I had already paid him, and I didn't have the money to pay another one.) 

Enter my next experience: a legal aid attorney who was a kind, gentle young man. We had moved to another state, and a contractor recommended by our real estate agent took all the money we had given him to start building our house and then filed bankruptcy. With our attorney, we went to court to get our money back, and the judge ordered him to return half of it to us. (We later learned we were the only clients of the contractor who sued him to get any of our money back.) Chalk one up for the good guys.

Decades later, I needed an attorney to handle some business; although he did a good job for me, he's the one who told me "all lawyers are sleazes". I was stunned by his words even though I had had a bad experience with one attorney, but I remembered what he said.

Enter L.S. Lane, the novelist. In my second book, Tormented Tango, my three protagonists are attorneys. One, a woman, is a trial lawyer. Another is a district attorney. The third begins the story as a prosecutor in the DA's office. A fourth lawyer also works for the DA. The purpose of the story is to show the attorneys as human beings, some who are good people and some not so much. 

Do I succeed? Only my readers can judge whether or not I believe "all lawyers are sleazes".

Editor Linda Lane has returned to her first love, writing, after retiring from editing. Her character-driven novels, although sometimes a bit literary in nature, remind the reader of genre fiction because of their quick pace. They also contain some elements of romance, mystery, and thrillers. You can contact her through her website: LSLaneBooks.com