Kill All the Lawyers

            “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” This famous line in Shakespeare’s Henry VI has often been put forward by critics of the legal profession as the solution to everything that ails the world from the threat of nuclear annihilation to hangnails.

            Critics have a point. When we witness what’s going on in Washington these days, where there is an infestation of lawyers pacing the halls of Congress, we are justified in wondering if we would be better off without them.

            Lawyers invade the airways, as well. Who is not disgusted with ads from legal vultures who feed on the misery of victims?  Their false commiseration is nothing but a ploy to enrich themselves on the carrion of pain and suffering.

            Then there are the lawyers whose expertise is in crafting the actual laws that govern us. Their language is called legalese. Its purpose is to bury the essence of a law in verbiage so lengthy and obtuse that only other lawyers, paid unconscionable hourly fees, can decipher. For example, The Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, is 2,300 pages long (a pile about two feet high), not including 20,000 additional pages of regulations. Are we surprised at the mess it created?

            Closer to home I was impressed the other day by an offer to switch to DirecTV as my supplier of television service. The offer sounded too good, so I insisted on seeing it in writing. Within minutes I received the quoted prices and something called DirectTV Residential Customer Agreement. Talk about legalese. The agreement spelled out the company’s and my contractual obligations in page after page written in language that I could not possibly have understood without the aid of legal assistance. I counted the lines of type. I could be off by one or two because my eyes were bleary by the time I got to the end. The number of lines: 788. That’s not a typo. Yes, 788 lines of splendid legalese.

            I did not take the offer.