When someone wants to learn how to do something today, all they need to do is Google it. That’s true of reglazing a broken window, unclogging a pipe or performing an impromptu appendectomy.  It’s overwhelmingly true of hiring a lawyer, and there are, at this moment,  more than 75,000,000 results to a search of this question.

For the most part, the results exist for the purpose of steering the ignorant and pathetic to websites that funnel potential clients to desperate lawyers, who fee-split share advertising costs with the website for the referral.  Savvy consumers, of course, ignore these links, recognizing them for the shams they are.  Instead, they seek out independent voices, people with no financial interest in their advice, such as people who appear to be legitimate media columnists offering what seems to be “common sense” advice.

And this is what made Carolyn Elefant’s head explode.  Some guy named Warren Boroson, who writes a financial column in New Jersey (oxymoron?) posted Why every middle-class family needs a lawyer.  It’s a silly bit of writing, reflecting the typical naivete of someone with limited math skills and disinclined toward thinking.  The column first explains the “why””

I was thinking of this the other day when I learned that a young friend of mine was unhappy about paying a $300 hospital bill. He had already paid a few hundred to physicians relating to the same incident.

Seems that he was eating out — and swallowed a bay leaf, which had been left inside a burrito. He was in such pain, he had to be taken to a hospital, where he was anesthetized and the bay leaf removed from his throat. He’s still paying the bills.

Yes, HE’S paying the bills! Not the damn restaurant! He never even contacted the restaurant about the matter. For all he knows, the restaurant is still slipping bay leaves into innocent people’s gullets. And he never even contacted a lawyer!

A lawyer, if he or she was any good, would have contacted the restaurant and demanded that it pay all the young man’s medical bills. And maybe suggested that the restaurant shell out something for the young man’s pain and suffering, too — based on what such cases have been fetching in recent years. I would guess: $50,000 at least. The restaurant no doubt has insurance to cover such contingencies. Of course, if the restaurant proved recalcitrant, the lawyer could actually have filed suit.

But no, the young man did nothing. He didn’t even have a lawyer.

When you PI guys are done chuckling, now you know why you got a call from Jersey yesterday from some nutjob who demanded his $50 grand from Taco Bell, and was doing you a huge favor by letting you collect it for him. 

Boroson raised a laundry list of trivial issues where a lawyer would come in handy. Indeed, few of us would argue the point of how handy we are.  On the flip side, he doesn’t seem to grasp that lawyers aren’t dying to fight that $127 repair charge for the KitchenAid mixer that leaked oil into your cupcake batter. Not even in the vain hope that next year, the client will sue his neighbors for making too much noise at night. This is one of the bizarre dreams of folks who don’t get the idea that lawyers work for a living.

So New Jersey’s most brilliant financial advisor offered a short list of things the middle class client should consider in finding a lawyer:

Some other advice about hiring a lawyer:

• Ask up front what he or she charges — and what his or her assistants charge.

• In general, avoid solo practitioners. Their ethical standards tend to be lower than those of lawyers in partnerships. (Comments the lawyer: “Many solos specialize in fairly narrow fields and opt to be independent.”)

• Complain if your lawyer doesn’t return your phone calls promptly, or in general doesn’t keep you informed. (Lawyer: “But be reasonable. If you lawyer-hop, no good lawyer will take you on as a client.”)

The parentheticals are some unnamed lawyer’s reactions to Boroson’s advice, as related by Boroson.  And no doubt you see what set Carolyn off.  What, you wonder, is the basis for such a remarkable assertion? While the column offers nothing,  Boroson’s comment to Carolyn’s post provides a clue:

Even among physicians, solos are less ethical–and more likely to have problems, because they aren’t working directly with physicians who could monitor their conduct.

This reminds me of the old joke about the client who paid in cash, and while counting the money, the lawyer found that two $100 bills were stuck together, giving rise to the ethical dilemma: Did he have to tell his partner?

The internet is lousy with insufferably simplistic, assumptive “advice” from people like Boroson, whose reach far exceeds their grasp. Frankly, I’m happy he didn’t tell his readers to only hire lawyers with iPads, because that means they’re “cutting edge” and cool.

But while his assertion is simply wrong, and his reasoning is fundamentally flawed, there is an aspect that can’t be so easily dismissed.  And as much as Carolyn, the foremost advocate for solo practitioners in the blawgosphere, tries to fight it, the fact of the problem can’t be denied.

What the heck are you talking about, you ask?

You’re inviting foolishness by writers like Boroson with deceptive legal marketing.  Every lawyer website claiming to be the best lawyer since Clarence Darrow, to be experienced despite being admitted yesterday, to puff our victories and ignore our defeats, feeds the perception that lawyers lack integrity.  And sadly, this is more prevalent with solos and small firms, who are struggling to create an internet presence that will bring them business at the price of honesty. 

It’s disingenuous to promote legal marketing with the proviso that it be entirely ethical and accurate, pretending that the race to the bottom isn’t happening and dismissing the dishonest as if what they’re doing doesn’t relate to the rest of the profession.  From the outside, we’re all just lawyers, and as some slime their way into the gutter, their stench attaches to all of us.  Expecting the public, or New Jersey financial columnists, to spend the time to differentiate the integrity on a lawyer by lawyer basis is foolish. They won’t spend the time. We’re not worth the time.

And so we’re painted with a broad brush, wrong as it may be, as lacking the ethical standards necessary to represent the guy who ate a bay leaf.  No matter how silly Boroson may be, we’re wrong to ignore how legal marketing has fed into this perception.  And if you don’t like being called unethical because some other lawyer has chosen to walk the boulevard in hot pants, then do something about it. 

Don’t blame Boroson (or any of the other clueless people offering ignorant advice on the internet) for assuming the slime of the legal profession reflect all of us.  That’s the view from the outside.  Either stand up and do something about it or don’t complain.