It pays to keep a Lawyer handy.
A Lawyer makes the best friend to have – well in America they definitely do.
Most Lawyers in the USA charge their clients around $200 an hour – there are after all, the staff gym memberships, the car perks and law school debts to pay. But the trouble seems to be that there are simply too many lawyers. The USA has more lawyers than all the rest of the world put together – almost 800,000 up from an approximately 260,000 in 1960. Statistically, the USA has 300 lawyers for every 100,000 citizens. By stark contrast, Britain has 82 Lawyers per 100,000 citizens and Japan a paltry 11 per 100,000.
As a word of caution, you should always remember, that the need for a lawyer can come at any time, and sometimes you can receive a little unexpected flattery or attention from your budding new legal bestie. A few years ago a chemical plant had a small explosion which sent a cloud of smoke over the nearby town of Richmond, California. Within hours, it is estimated that over 200 lawyers and their clerks, paralegals and sales representatives swarmed to the excited local community, handing out business cards, leaflets and little surgical breathing masks. Of course out of further concern for their potential client’s health and wellbeing, they advised the townsfolk to go straight to their local hospital A&E “Just to be on the safe side”, and 20,000 concerned residents flocked there as quickly as they could.
Articles that appeared on the local news channels made it all look like a festive open-air party, even though from the 20,000 or so concerned residents who went to the hospital A&E, only 20 were actually admitted to the hospital for any kind of treatment. Despite the small number of very slight injuries that were proven, virtually all 70,000 district residents filed a lawsuit, presumably with the help of their new legal best friends, who received around $40 million when the chemical company settled the claims for $180 million.
In an almost frothy epidemic of litigation, over 90 million lawsuits are filed in the USA. This works out at around 1 case for every two and a half people. It could be suggested that some of these claims are somewhat adventurous to say the least.
” The extreme shock, anxiety and trauma caused upon discovering that Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Daisy Duck were not real “
It was reported recently that in the state of Washington, a man who has developed heart problems, is suing his local dairy for millions “because their milk cartons did not specifically carry a warning about the risks of cholesterol”.
Currently, 2 parents in Texas are suing a high school baseball coach for keeping their son on the player’s bench during a game. Yes, you’ve guessed it, the son suffered extreme humiliation, embarrassment and of course the inevitable ‘mental anguish’ of not being picked from the bench to play that day.
And let us not forget, that very important recent nugget of a case, where a California woman sued the Walt Disney Company that arose due to her being mugged in the Disneyland car park. It wasn’t the actual mugging that gave rise to her court claim – oh no, it is alleged the suffering was much greater, when being comforted in an office afterwards, her children saw Disney characters taking off their costumes, which caused extreme shock, anxiety and trauma (ptsd?), discovering that Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Daisy Duck were not real – but instead, were people dressed up. The resulting sleepless nights, inability to concentrate at school and the mental devastation mentioned in the claim, pushing the value of the law suit to positively fairy tale proportions.
Long live the lawyer and God bless America!
