As a lawyer, I endure daily comments, from friends, family, and complete strangers about what a sleazy profession. I am sure there have been dozens of sleazy lawyers comments in this thread alone. I guess I've gotten immune to such nonsense.

Wrong to disparage an entire profession obviously based on the actions of a few knuckleheads.

I really don't see any reason to apologize. You pointed out some basic truths on how certain occupations 'stretch the truth' (for lack of a better description). You never once indicated that ALL were guilty in each profession of such 'crimes'. And there is truth to what you said that this DOES happen in each profession.

I do find it interesting that those who teach or have taught were the most vocal in taking offense. Maybe, and as it relates to the thread, they other professions are silent here because they are the ones writing the tickets and using old fish. :D

And to someone's comment on "certainly not college professors", I'm hoping that was tongue-in-cheek or included rolling eyes. :)

99% of all lawyers give the rest a bad name...:)...

Nope, as a physician AND teacher's son, I rolled my eyes.

60% of the time, it works every time..............

Its Funny when I went after a (lawyer) I wont say a name:D in this thread I got a PM and he asked me why I wasnt attacking the other lawyer that was also on the list. I found that very ironic....

well Tom
 

with 79% of all statistics incorrect - as a Florida resident I'll take my full 110% - 40% of me believes you - 40% siding with what lawyers have to say - and 35% of me undecided.

I am actually always the guy defending teachers. I think it's beyond bizarre that people get their hackles up about a young guy or girl beginning their teaching career getting paid $21,000 a year, but no one seems to mind much that people are starting at an investment bank at five or ten or twenty times that and doing who knows what. Maybe it the whole summers off thing, but I see my brother grading papers on the weekends, making plans on the weekend, and always going the extra mile. It's a lot of hours if you care about what you are doing. As a society we think teachers of young kids are supposed to be both amazing babysitters and incredible educators, yet we treat them like second class citizens. Here where I live the teacher's unions haven't done them a whole lot of good (e.g., you can't fire the guy who inappropriately touched the kid without 27 hearings and have to keep him in a room somewhere collecting checks), but that's a different diatribe entirely.

I can't think of any other profession where you can be successful by screwing people, and not be doing something illegal. The entire profession isn't sleazy - just certain branches.

Which branches are those?

None of them Peter. They are all nice and there should not be any lawyer jokes.

Totally agree. I also think the law itself encourages a lot of this, but the Trial Lawyers Association resists any meaningful tort reform.

In many disputes, one party is in the right while the other isn't, or one party is reasonable and the other is greedy, and so on. There have to be plenty of times when lawyers think to themselves: "I'm working for the jerk and my job is to help him screw the good guy."

But, lawyers work for whomever hires them, and sometimes that's the jerk.

*Perry Mason was the exception - his clients were always innocent.

A lawyers' job is to use every tool he or she possibly can to represent the interests of his client as long as they are within the ethical rules governing lawyering. A lawyers' obligation is not to you, or me, but to his/her client and the court. If you violate the rules and go over the line you should be punished.
Some times they're not, but for those of you outside the legal system you'd be surprised how many times state bar associations eventually catch up with the bad guys and root them out.

I always thought Johnny Cochrane gave the best legal performance of my lifetime, and I know he pissed off a couple of hundred million people. Was a zealous advocate. Did everything he could to get his client off the crime for a crime every one of us was probably convinced he did. Hell, people represented the Nazis in American courts. Representing unpopular people is I think the most noble part of the profession and upholds the values our country was founded on.

Exactly - they are doing their job as their job is defined.

It's baffling to me that anyone would not understand the jokes and remarks about lawyers. The fact that lawyers are necessary and some of them are wonderful people doing wonderful things, is also understood.

Okay, I'm though trying to fix people on the internet for today.

Lawyers
 

If you are fortunate you may never need one. If you need one, tell them a bunch of lawyer jokes by way of introduction. :)

Someone once told me that teaching is the only career that demands the protection of a union while insisting on being treated as professionals.

There are great teachers out there who are grossly underpaid, but there are crappy ones who never get weeded out because of the union. I've never heard of a union for lawyers. At least they're wiling to make a living on their own merits.

How bout the record business? :)

maybe 40yrs ago.

It is not a union per se but the American Bar Association does a very good job of representing lawyers.

Porn???

I'm not understanding why a few have mentioned they don't know or remember what a specific item is in which they got shilled? Very easy to look up. Legendary's website> history>,month and year> and lot # .

I'm done reading posts tonight because it can't get better. Freaking funny!!

40 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, last week and today.

Insurance. It is the only profession that consists of promising to help someone when they need it then trying to find ways to weasel out of it entirely or at least cut down on the value of the help to be rendered when the other side comes calling. There isn't a single insurance claim I've handled in 25 years of representing insureds where the insurance company hasn't tried to screw the insured out of something, whether by outright wrongful denial of a claim or by using unrealistic estimating tools to try to cut down on the payout.

Well stated and a hearty ditto! I can expand that period to at least 30 years of actual experience confronting that kind of behavior.

Best, Adam,

Larry

+2. Suing insurers for wrongfully denying the claims of their insureds is the only type of case my partners and I handle. If insurers treated their insureds honestly, we would be out of business. We are, however, always busy.

:):):)

::slow clap::


well played, sir.

well played.

That's why I stopped doing insurance defense: I realized the best day ever for an insurer's appointed defense counsel is the day he beats a genuinely injured person out of a recovery.

Adam,

Do you mean insurance companies would try to screw the beneficiary out of a "death" benefit? I suppose there could be a few reasons for the insurance company to try to fight it but in most cases, people just die and the policy was written and paid for to cover just that. :eek:

Uh, yes. I realize that this question was directed to Adam, but I have two of those cases right now. I'm going to trial in one of them in a couple of months. The one I'm going to trial on was an accidental death policy (never get one, they do their utmost to cover nothing) where an 83 year old woman choked on food at a nursing home, aspirated it, and died within a 12 hours of aspiration pneumonitis -- an acute lung infection you can get when you suck food into your lungs. According to them, it wasn't accidental although they really can't explain why that isn't an accident. I mean, she obviously didn't intend to suck food down the wrong pipe and kill herself.

In the second one, the carrier paid the wrong beneficiary after receiving notice that he was the wrong beneficiary. Best as I can tell, the defense is that since they paid the policy benefits, albeit to a person they know wasn't the person designated to get them, they're off the hook. So the answer is yes, they will sometimes do that.

I see this thread has morphed into "bad lawyers" and "bad insurance companies" complaints and I can say from my personal experience the two topics are inseparable. I talked to several attorneys about three years ago who said in confidence that in their opinion, "the insurance industry is now the new organized crime of the 21st century". The planned and calculated bad faith tactics of many of the major insurance carriers is well documented and a great deal of it has to do with lawyers being complicit participants in attempting or successfully fleecing policyholders out of money clearly owed to them.

This happened to my wife with her grandmother. She got hosed on the claim.
I'm sure this isn't uncommon, unfortunately.

Lists
 

We obviously need more lists in here... and Rudy Baylor and Deck Shefflet

These last two pages of posts are the surest way to kill interest in this thread on shill bidding.

Perhaps that's the tactic that CU could use to kill the post over there... :)

I apologize for commenting - normally my non-baseball posts get completely ignored. I only replied because the poster is a lawyer who doesn't seem to understand why people make lawyer jokes, etc. I thought he needed to be woken up. Basically, I was baffled to a point that I felt compelled to respond.

I know a lawyer for a law firm that works only in insurance disputes involving buildings in the Seattle area. I asked him what was his success rate suing insurance companies and he said he's never lost. He said insurance companies regularly break state statutes and their own contracts in the hope that the people won't do anything about it. He said their regular automatic reaction is to deny claims even when the contract says it should be covered.

He said insurance companies regularly want to settle before it goes to court, because their bad practice and rule breaking in the one particular case is often something they do in many to all their cases and they want to avoid a court decision that could be blanket applied to all their cases and contracts. He said he'll find something statute breaking in a particular contract he's working on and the problem for the insurance company is it's something standard they have in many to all their contracts.

A specific example he gave is, at least in Washington State, when an insurance company denies your claims, they are required by state statute to include in the denial letter that the insurance owner has the legal right to dispute the claim within a year. He got a settlement against an insurance company in part because they didn't include that text in the denial letter and the building owner didn't know he had a year to dispute the denial and waited longer. The insurance company wanted the claim dismissed because he waited too long. He said the big problem for the insurance company is he's pretty sure they hadn't been including that text in most of their denials letters.

Just as a follow-up to my prior post, notwithstanding a slew of bad lawyers I've come across in various capacities, I will say that I know several attorneys that are saints, including one who posts on this board. The key litmus test is when money and legal fees were clearly a non-issue and making certain that justice prevails is the bottom line. Yes, there are attorneys that are quite honorable.

Four years ago, my wife started going through chemo. For five months, and had 3-5 different insurance items per week, almost always the same, every week. I would estimate at least 80% of all her claims were initially denied. A ton of them were denied for her doctor being out of network (he wasn't) - over and over and over. I'd fight it on one claim and they'd use the same denial a week later. I eventually threatened a lawsuit and a complaint to the insurance commissioner and that got the issues stopped.

In another case, my insurance company lied to me about coverage for an MRI. It was the end of the year and they were giving me the runaround to push the test into the new year, reseting my deductible. It worked. I had proof they had lied and got my employer to fight on my behalf and get the MRI treated as if it had occurred before the new year.

I probably have another dozen stories.

Suffice to say, there is no doubt in my mind that insurance companies do false denials as a matter of course.

If insurance companies paid claims on time and fairly then lawyers would never be needed to sue them i would think....

If this thread stays off topic it is going to be closed eventually.

Thanks for that message Leon, Getting real tired of listening about insurance companys and lawyers. Wow did this post get way off tract from starting about shill bidding and auction houses

I am sure that tactic was deployed for that very reason. I believe that this is a very touchy subject and many people have they're reasons for wishing this would end and go away.

+1

Its insane and totally ignorant that anyone would think/hope that a matter of this gravity that's been spoken about in alarming detail in this thread would just go away.

Some common sense advise to the responsible parties:
1. Take responsibility for your actions!!!
2. STOP hiding cause we see U
3. Say your sorry and mean it!!!
4. Attempt to make amends to the community as a whole
5. STOP trying to ban the TRUTH

Seems to me that taking responsibility and making amends would be a lot easier than say for instance:
1. Searching the internet in paranoid damage control trying to suppress the truth.
2. Trying to pressure/threaten forums into being a part of the apparent ongoing cover up of bad behavior by discouraging forum management from allowing open discussion in regards to this subject matter which quite frankly has affected most if not all in the hobby on some level.
3. Using designated plants to deflect attention or derail ongoing forum discussions
4. Running internet IP addresses on posters
5. Reiterating the same bogus company line
6. Thinking of new lies to tell and subsequently having to remember said lies.

I can't say Thank You enough to Net54 & Leon again for having the courage to allow an open forum about this subject matter because as far as I can tell in my searches of other sites freedom of speech does not exist unless it sticks to the script.

Ron Kosiewicz

Ron, Thanks for the concise, to the point and accurate post. You nailed a substantial part of what is ignored on this topic. What is truly shaking my head is how this thread derailed and got on topic of insurance companies and mouth pieces talking about cases. If they are genuine posts but just got off topic then they should seek out an attorneys forum, which i'm sure they exist as they love to keep that soap box going(kidding). I was actually just in the audience and decided to joined this forum after the last 2 -3 pages of weird posts . And yes thanks to this forum.
clark J

just got a pastrami on rye at my neighborhood deli...it came with a SHILL pickle!

ROFLMFAO! Was just watching VH1 classic 80 videos. They just played one of my favorites from the Gloved One: Shiller

I got into a bad accident in which a teenage driver totaled my car. Fortunately the teenage driver was insured under parents insurance policy. I am thankful that only the car was totaled and I wasn't shilled.
clark J