I know lawyers get a bad rap and it's well-deserved in many cases, but I think of a labor lawyer who took on the case of a cleaner in her 70s who died of a heart attack on the job but whose family was denied benefits, so the lawyer did the same work she did at the time of death cleaning stairs and recorded his heart rate demonstrating that it's a significant physical strain for a thirtysomething man, to say nothing of a lady twice his age, winning the case for her family. Working-class solidarity ftw
@Satsuma Yeah, other than corporate bottom-feeders, who are a small though visible minority, lawyers and even most prosecutors are just everyday people doing their jobs
@ljwrites @titania yeahhh attorneys for insurance companies definitely fall into an acab adjacent territory where even if youre a decent person normally you’re perpetuating a bad system professionally
but i dont think they’re worse than the doctors they consult with and i *mostly* dont see ppl saying doctors are an intrinsically evil profession the way you see pop culture w/lawyers
@Satsuma doctors take an oath to "first, do no harm".
also I'm not talking about health insurance, suppose that could have been clearer. think more like, "you are driving on the highway and the car you are in is hit by a semi being driven for a large corporation by someone who is clearly impaired, their insurance company wants to argue that you were negligent and so they are not entirely at fault for the accident" -- sibling is the attorney that tries to argue that you as the driver were negligent too. 😬
@Satsuma or, another classic example of insurance in the 'states: a commercial property you are on fails to do regular maintenance on their walkways, you trip and suffer a horrific injury, their attorney wants to prove that since alcohol was served at whatever commercial event, the fault actually lies with the bartender that served you and/or you for allowing yourself to be overserved.
these are actual cases she's litigated. like. I don't think there's any defense for that?
@titania @Satsuma @ljwrites Yeah. My brother was a lawyer and took the other ends of those cases.
Not the people with semii or even the ones with Mercedes, the people who couldn't replace their car or pay their injury bills until he argued sufficiently with the opposing insurance company (or, sometimes, the driver's insurance company), working on getting people the payouts they were contractually entitled to.
@ljwrites i feel like the mainstream depiction of a bad lawyer is like, defense attorneys hired by rich mafiosos to let them get out of murder charges but that’s maybe 0.0001 percent of all lawyers