Again, it’s open season on lawyers

By Lester Tate

With about a month remaining before the Nov. 2 general election, our television airwaves and mailboxes are filling up with campaign ads, and it won’t be long before our phones are ringing off the hook with “robo calls” on behalf of one candidate after another.

In addition to being in the thick of an election year, those of us in the legal profession also know it’s also open season on lawyers. With each election cycle, it has become increasingly in vogue for some politicians to disparage lawyers in their campaign messaging. I suppose it is not as plausible to blame the world’s ills on other unpopular groups, such as used car salesmen.

Oddly, these attacks have increased even as the policymaking influence of the legal profession has sharply declined. The number of lawyers in the Georgia General Assembly has dwindled to an all-time low of 38, or about 16 percent of the combined 236 members of the Senate and House of Representatives. That number will possibly be reduced even further by the time the 2010 election is over.

The national percentage of lawyers serving in state legislatures has also declined to about 15 percent. Yet lawyers somehow remain an easy target for those seeking political power.

Texas Trial Lawyers Association President Tex Quesada of Dallas said recently, “As a general rule, the trial lawyers are attorneys who are representing small businesses or families who have claims against insurance companies, or Wall Street bankers, or oil refineries.” They “tend to make powerful enemies among very powerful groups.” By the same token, when lawyers who defend the same insurance companies, Wall Street bankers or oil refineries run for office, they are open to criticism for siding with the powerful and against the average citizen.

Not one American would give up our Sixth Amendment right to counsel, but lawyers who have represented criminal defendants are especially vulnerable to smear campaigns. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, while running for office in 2006, was accused by his opponent of being “soft on crime” because he had once represented a criminal seeking parole. Patrick responded, “I have on occasion represented the unsavory defendant. And you better be glad somebody does because that’s what puts the justice in the justice system.” There are two sides to this coin as well, because prosecuting attorneys who hold or seek elected positions often have to defend their records when a certain case is singled out for political exploitation.

And so it is that an entire profession is attacked, despite the fact that it is the very same profession that articulated our American way of life in the form of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Gettysburg Address. The attacks continue, despite the fact that the 2000 U.S. presidential election was settled peacefully in a courtroom, when it would have been contested violently in the streets in many countries without our common law tradition.

The cause of justice is undermined every time a candidate launches an attack on lawyers simply for political gain. Particularly abhorrent are the attacks that come from candidates who are lawyers themselves. A lawyer who attacks our profession is, at best, a hypocrite and, at worst, an outright charlatan.

Regardless of the angle of attack, politicizing how our justice system works in an effort to win votes is wrong. It has often been said that it is easy to hate lawyers until you need one. Likewise, it is apparently easy for many politicians to bad-mouth lawyers — except, of course, when they are asking us for campaign contributions.

S. Lester Tate III of Cartersville is president of the State Bar of Georgia.