Types of Lawyers #11: The Lawyer from the Planet Og
The lawyer from the planet Og arrived on Earth last month from a galaxy far, far away. His mission: to conduct research for Chapter 45 of Volume 768 of the popular Ogian reference work, The Very Large Guide to Lawyers of the Universe. The chapter's title: "American Lawyers."
The lawyer from the planet Og is very far from home, and his assignment was an unpopular one. He’s not sure why he drew the short ogstraw, but it was probably as retribution for the way he suffocated the entire lawyer population of Andromeda 765. It was a group of lawyers that would have annoyed any sentient being.
Although the American lawyers might not be much better, the lawyer from the planet Og finds them at least minimally intriguing. He has so many questions. For example, why are American lawyers so numerous? On the planet Og, there’s only one lawyer for every billion Ogians. While it’s true that Ogian lawyers have thirty individual brains, all capable of reasoning in separate parallel networks, the American ratio still seems completely out of whack. Could it be that American lawyers have only half a brain?
And why are American lawyers so angry and high-strung? Is it because they think about their day-to-day business using all the wrong metaphors? The lawyer from the planet Og has heard how American lawyers conduct scorched-earth discovery to prepare for trial, use battle-tested litigation tactics to persuade juries, and tell each other war stories about how their cases end.
Is it the stress of their jobs that makes them all so angry? Then why don’t they adopt new metaphors to think about the way they practice? Are American lawyers so much creatures of their own past that they are unable to imagine a different future?
These questions are interesting, but they pose another problem. Although there’s so much to learn, the research must be completed in only 1,589 Og rotations. Yesterday, the lawyer from the planet Og made an important discovery: though their fellow citizens always turn to them in times of crisis, American lawyers are very unpopular. In some circles, in fact, they are even hated and despised.
It’s this discovery that has given hope to the lawyer from the planet Og. That's because the most efficient way to study the American lawyers would be to transport them all to his home planet. And now he knows it’s feasible: when the one million American lawyers are abducted for research purposes, it's clear they won’t be missed. Even, that is, if they’re never able to return . . .
Related posts:
1. Types of Lawyers #9: The Lawyer on the Run
2. The "Types of Lawyers" Category--all types-of-lawyers posts
How come he came to earth to study all the lawyers on the planet but he's just looking at the American ones?
Posted by: Scheherazade | October 25, 2004 at 09:39 AM
Scheherazade: I'm sure glad you checked in today, as several of my best editors were out this morning trying to get flu shots.
The goof you point out is so astonishingly obvious that I'm surprised I didn't see it myself. While such goofs must normally wait for the next edition of this weblog to be repaired, I took the liberty of inserting a new sentence to end paragraph 1. Thanks again for the input.
Posted by: Evan | October 25, 2004 at 10:14 AM
Evan, please excuse the hyper-BackTracking that just occurred, trying to ping you -- cold fingers and an old brain are to blame. Please delete all but one -- or leave them as proof that this American Lawyer has mixed/nixed/fixed one too many metaphors.
Posted by: David Giacalone | October 25, 2004 at 02:41 PM
I did not see the focus on American lawyers as a flaw in this posting, Mr. Schaeffer. If radio waves are monitored from Og, in order to decide where to spend time most effectively, the American Lawyer would surely stand out as the subject of far more radio and tv broadcasts than those of other nations.
Posted by: Prof Yabut | October 25, 2004 at 03:10 PM
This is all old news for those who read Og-erlawyered.com.
Posted by: Ted | October 25, 2004 at 06:15 PM
OgreLawyered
underserved clients -
wrong planet
Posted by: haikuEsq | October 25, 2004 at 08:10 PM
Ted: It's no time to get smug. You're getting abducted too.
Posted by: Evan | October 25, 2004 at 09:11 PM