And if you happen to catch sight of my advertisements while driving to your snazzy corner office in a hand-waxed Mercedes, hey—I won’t turn you away, either. You might find that you like the more personal touch you receive from a single-counsel firm that has just the right pinch of razzmatazz.
PART I
How to Be Your Own Attorney
A real, battle-tested, State Bar of New Mexico–certified attorney is about to tell you it’s a bad idea to attempt self-representation in a court of law. Most of the time. I know, I know—you were expecting an honorary law degree on this page, I’m sure. Don’t put the book down quite yet. I’m here to inform you that, contrary to what your dear sweet Mama Bear has been telling you since she made you fess up to Mr. Hill about who touched the classroom’s eye-wash station and accidentally flooded Little Billy’s terrarium: sometimes you cannot handle your problems by yourself. I’m sorry. Sometimes the mud doesn’t turn back into nice, dry dirt.
Trust me when I say that what you’re reading here isn’t meant to make a statement about any reader’s smarts—you’re reading this, so you’re obviously intelligent and have impeccable taste—it’s just about having faith in a certified attorney’s ability to guide clients through the system. And smarts aren’t the only thing that separates a lousy lawyer from the cream of the crop! More often than not, the best lawyer out there is a B+ student with the work ethic of an ox yoked to flaming plow. We want to do our jobs right (for reasonable fees and relevant expenses), and we’ve got a fire lit under our asses!
I’m sure you are an upstanding citizen with two-point-five kids packed in the back of your minivan, a fine American Kennel Club–registered breed of pooch sticking its head out the passenger window, washing the side mirrors with its suburban saliva. Or maybe you’re a confirmed bachelorette with a nomadic streak, moonlighting around the southwest selling hand-painted signs, a few buckets of acrylics, and some scraps of wood tucked away in your motorcycle’s saddlebags. Either way: life is good, right? And for most, life will continue that way. Most people will never have to deal with anything more serious than a traffic ticket.
For that minor, piss-ant traffic ticket, you may be okay handling yourself in court. But the fact is, for just about everything else, you will probably need someone in your corner who knows what they’re doing. A public defender, even. They get a bad rap, but I can tell you that most defense attorneys in the employ of a county or city office are just as passionate as private attorneys when it comes to helping defendants work their way through all the poisoned spike-filled traps hidden in the dark shadows of this treacherous jungle of a legal system. They just tend to have fewer windows in their sardine-can government offices.
Once you’re in the system, you are a lost hiker, separated from your party in the Himalayan foothills. Think of us attorneys as your Sherpas. We are highly skilled mountaineers, and we’ve figured out when to swing our pickaxes into the ice to reach that next giant birch tree of dismissal or protective chasm of continuance. We know how to rescue you from the claws of the assistant DA and keep you from getting overwhelmed by altitude sickness. If you want to turn into Pro Se José and climb Everest alone, no helpful guide to point you in the right direction and carry your sleeping bag, I won’t stop you! But I’d like to make sure you know what you’re getting into, so here are some reasons to reconsider:
• The even money on people defending themselves is they will screw it up. Hell, you’ve probably even heard that dusty old line about actual trained attorneys representing themselves—that we’ll never have a bigger fool for a client. The law is full of rules, subrules, clauses, and demands on plaintiffs and accusers. There are hard-and-fast requirements for submitting particular documents, which must be immaculately worded in keeping with, that’s right, the law. Miss a court deadline for filing for an extension? Soon Oprah’s shouting “YOU get a contempt citation! YOU get a bond revocation!” Think about it. You’re facing, say, a DUI or a simple misdemeanor assault charge. Things are already stressful enough, don’t you think? You don’t want to spend all day studying up at the library computer terminals, wedged in between two public masturbators, just to realize when it’s time to print that the government-funded copy machine is out of paper. There are folks who learned how the system works because we actually wanted to, and we could sure use your business. Not to mention the business of all those Johnny Jack-Offs who refuse to exercise their right to privacy in the comfort of their own homes.
• Opponents will treat you exactly as they treat the most expensive legal eagles in the state. No mercy, folks. Judges and prosecutors aren’t your fairy godparents; they don’t find their sole purpose protecting you and figuring out what will make you happy. They won’t be like Great Aunt Ida at Christmas and applaud how cute you look in that holiday sweater, amidst all that objecting and demanding. No one serves juice and cookies in judges’ chambers. Well, they may serve them to the judge. But lay legal warriors? Nope.
To their credit, judges frequently question defendants who want to act as their own counsel. They’ll try to figure out if you’re sane, then tell you what I’m telling you, if they’re the thoughtful type. The guys at the other table? They are praying to the old gods who eat souls and command sacrifice of little baby bunny rabbits that the judge does not talk you out of doing this. Then, if you go ahead, you will find they will be delighted to show you no mercy. No one will have any patience with the way you keep sliding to the bottom of the legal learning curve. It’s brutal, and it is what men and women like me passed the bar to brave on your behalf.
• Look at how long even the greenest attorneys take to get where you are. This varies from lawyer to lawyer, but some of us spend a decade or more receiving our education, only to perform what amounts to apprentice work. The point being, this is hard work—which is why some in the legal community might feel even more antagonistic than usual if you come striding in proclaiming to represent yourself. You wouldn’t walk up to a zookeeper and say, “Hey, let me feed that ferocious lion today. How hard could it be?” That zookeeper is going to be laughing a lot harder than you are, pal, as he shovels your chewed-up biceps into the hyenas’ food trough. Attorneys can be prickly—sometimes the emphasis is on “prick”—about the difference between what it actually takes to do this job and what people might think it takes as they march in without preparation and try to do it.
Would it help if I compared it to being a dentist? Sure, of course I can open an old toolbox right now and grab some vice grips. Absolutely, I could wipe ’em down, make sure they’re reasonably clean, then stick them in my mouth and yank out this one molar that’s been giving me fits. Then I could pack in some gauze or a wad of toilet paper and wait for the bleeding to stop, provided blinding pain hasn’t laid me out already. I could do all that. But I could also go to Dr. Happy McPainFree on Novocaine Street, have him or her numb my screaming gums, then use what I hope are perfectly sterile instruments to take care of the problem. Still some pain, and it will cost me money, but it will get done right, and hopefully I won’t bleed to death just because of a bad tooth. See, most people know it isn’t wise to throw themselves on the mercy of the tooth fairy. In this case, the tooth fairy is a steel-eyed judge with a penchant for whack-a-mole and the gavel to prove it.