Perception Is Not The Truth: A Good Lawyer Digs Deep
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010Some Attorneys keep files on a variety of cities to follow trends. They may have a catalog the looks like; File Baltimore, File Los Angeles,file Cincinnati. They could be interested in Boston foreclosures or Cincinnati debt relief. These files might hold a slew of cases filed in numerous jurisdictions, each case representing a family in crisis. The court house halls are filled with men and women struggling to regain ground in a volatile world. Decisions are handed down, often based in precedent or legal calculations that parse the facts and boil the issues down to big words and conceptual ideas of contracts and obligations. Often these lives are decided by legal doctrine in black and white. On the best days the law works and justice is administered. On the worse days the real story gets lost and the winner is the one who told the best tale and adroitly manipulated the few agreed upon facts to their own advantage.
Laws attempt to take a world filled with shades of gray and create black and white laws to adjudicate. Often laws shift and evolve attempting to mend its inherent flaws, but always too late for those that showed the need for a remedy. Slap open a file, pull out a case and there on the table is a story told from two perspectives in an obscure language designed to savage the competing version of the truth while hiding the vulnerable elements of the story behind a wall of obfuscation. What is missing is an objective perspective and the real human story.
A guy walks into an upscale bar in the middle of town. He sits down to order a drink and looks like he just got off work. The bartender, managing a bar three deep in happy hour customers, hears him call for a scotch and water. A woman comes in and squeezes in next to the man. She notices he is slurring his words and wobbly on the chair. She sees the bartender set a drink in front of the man and notices four drained shot glasses near him. The guy leaves the bar, gets in his car and kills three people including him in an auto accident on the way home.
The business is sued and the court holds them accountable for serving the man alcohol and responsible for contributing to manslaughter. The civil case destroys the business. The woman testified that the man was already drunk and said she saw four empty shot glasses sitting in front of him. The bartender stated honestly that he didn’t remember serving the man more than one drink and thought he would remember a guy doing four shots. Under questioning he admitted that he didn’t recall the man at all. The man had consumed enormous amounts of scotch at other bars, but that fact never made it into the record.
The truth is often hidden behind the facts and the dualing versions of the case. In this case everyone, including the bartender, assumed the appearance was the truth. A good attorney would have known that truth can be as elusive as the end of the rainbow.