Part I: An Introduction to the Typical Lawyer
Part II: How to Feed a Lawyer
Let’s establish something right from the start. While Part I of this Introduction to Lawyers suffered from a serious fault--specifically, it failed to take lawyers seriously and treated them in an overly-comic manner--I was fully aware of this problem as I was writing. Part I was designed as a sort of comic “hook” meant to sugarcoat this essay for readers who have trouble paying attention. Now that we have advanced to Part II, however, there will be no further sugarcoating. It's not only the sugarcoating that's going to end right here, but also the blood and gore, which was another thing I added to Part I to get around the fact that lawyers, unless they happen to have been recently indicted, just aren’t all that entertaining.
What I’m trying to say is that anyone who came here seeking some lighthearted entertainment should probably return to Part I. Frankly, that’s what I would do if given a choice. If you fail to heed my warning and decide to stick around for the rest of this essay, I suggest you put on your thinking cap. You're going to need it.
So, how does one feed a lawyer? Over the years, most commentators have found it nearly impossible to generalize about a lawyer’s eating habits. Some lawyers, for example, like eggs, while other lawyers find eggs disgusting. Consider my own situation. Although I like eggs, whenever I dig into a runny yellow yolk I can’t help thinking that it’s also how snakes get their nourishment. Yuck. What makes the mental exercise of generalization even more difficult is that some egg-loving lawyers only like them when they are cooked a certain way. As most know already, there are a variety of ways to cook eggs. There are poached eggs, fried eggs, and scrambled eggs. There are hard-boiled eggs. There are soft-boiled eggs. There is eggnog. How is one to generalize in the face of such a list?
To save time, let’s not even try. The important thing to remember is that if you ever stumble upon a lawyer eating eggs, he’ll probably be eating breakfast. It won't surprise you that everything you’ve heard about breakfast is true: it's one of the three most important meals of the day. Only fools would skip it, which makes me think of a lawyer named Phillip. Phillip was a perfectly-manicured and extraordinarily well-dressed transactional lawyer who never missed breakfast. Oddly, however, Phillip never ate breakfast at home. Due to his extreme morning grumpiness, Phillip’s wife had decided long ago that Phillip’s breakfast had to be consumed somewhere other than at their house. Each day, Phillip would rise before dawn, shower and shave before his wife woke up, and then leave for work. On his way there, he’d always stop for breakfast at the same greasy little diner, which was called, quite aptly, “Eat.”
One day when Phillip was turning into Eat, he was cut off by one of those construction workers who are always driving around in battered blue pick-up trucks very early in the morning. Owing to the fact that Phillip hadn’t had his breakfast yet, he was still extremely grumpy. Almost without thinking, he blared his horn at the construction worker and raised his middle finger. This was a mistake. The construction worker did a U-turn and chased Phillip and his shiny black BMW through the parking lot, then out onto the main drag, then over many connecting roads, and finally out onto the highway that led away from town.
Phillip had never been so scared in all his life, except for the three times that process servers had been waiting for him in his law firm’s reception area. At speeds approaching a hundred miles per hour, he called for help on his cellphone. The panic he was feeling made it difficult to communicate. Someone must have gotten the idea, in fact, that he was the culprit, since by the time the police intercepted the chase, the construction worker in the pick-up truck had disappeared. But the chase continued anyway. It was probably Phillip’s extreme morning hunger—the fact, that is, that he had skipped breakfast—that made it so hard for him to figure out what to do. All he could think about were the three police cars in his rear-view mirror, the helicopter overhead, and the thing that looked like a roadblock about a half-mile up the road.
As a lawyer, Phillip was naturally paranoid; now his paranoia took over and fueled his state of panic. Thinking that he had to get away, Phillip crashed through the roadblock, lost control of his BMW, and drove down an embankment. From there he veered across the access road, jumping curbs on both sides, and crashed through the glass front of a Blockbuster video store. There Phillip's car came to rest. A few months later he was indicted. While all his friends agreed that the indictment made him seem much more entertaining than the typical transactional lawyer, what’s most important about Phillip is not his indictment or the anecdote about his failure to eat breakfast, but where, on the day of his crime spree, his car came to rest.
Do you remember where it was? Go ahead and think about it. In the meantime, I think an apology is in order. Here it is: I’m sorry. To be frank, everything I’ve written so far about lawyers and their breakfasts was just a self-serving ploy designed to get readers thinking about where Phillip’s car came to rest: inside a Blockbuster video store. While Blockbuster normally contains hundreds of worthwhile movies, it’s my belief that very few would serve as a proper introduction to lawyers. Which leads me to a second belief, already stated in Part I of this essay, that the best hope I have of escaping the legal profession is to convince a Hollywood movie mogul to buy the rights to this essay for seven million dollars. It’s why Part I contained all the blood and gore, and why Part II contained a car chase. While neither the blood and gore nor the car chase had much to do with lawyers, it’s just the sort of thing I’ve heard that Hollywood movie moguls like to see when they’re developing new movies. And that's why I wrote this essay the way I did.
Will I ever be able to escape the legal profession? I’m not sure. The only thing I'm sure about is that you’re not reading this essay because you care about me. You’re reading it because you want to learn something about feeding lawyers. So here you go. The truth is that it’s probably best not to feed lawyers at all. Since most lawyers are intelligent enough to feed themselves, it’s better to let them make their own decisions about their diet. If you insist on ignoring my advice, remember that a lawyer’s digestive system is usually very sensitive. Avoid anything that might sit in the lawyer’s stomach more than a few days. Plain vanilla yogurt is just fine. So are jelly beans. But peanuts, birdseed, or pieces of stale bread are completely out of the question.
Next up Part III: How to Dress a Lawyer
[Like this post? It's one of many included in my book How to Feed a Lawyer (And Other Irreverent Oberservations from the Legal Underground). Details here.]
Hah, it wouldn't surprise me if that guy was my Dad. The construction worker, I mean. "Those construction workers" driving around very early in the morning in their beat-up pickup trucks work harder than most lawyers, and they're usually hungry, too, despite the two doughnuts they had at about 4 a.m. I'm glad I'm a lawyer. And also that I don't have to drive with Dad anymore.
Posted by: Ang. | January 19, 2006 at 07:42 PM
"Variety of ways to cook eggs....There is eggnog" ! hahah... cute.
Posted by: ThatGirlFriday | May 28, 2012 at 12:34 AM
Goodness graciousness this is too entertaining Im biting my tongue to stay solvent and its just. not. working.
Posted by: ThatGirlFriday | May 28, 2012 at 12:39 AM