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[Linguoboy]

What exactly distinguishes an effective lawyer from one considered less competent? If the law prohibits theft, it seems like anyone caught stealing (assuming the same item and circumstances) would face the same consequences regardless of who represents them in court.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Pardon me, but that's the best joke I've heard about our justice system in a while.

Yet popular culture and the news make it clear that the right lawyer can somehow make an enormous difference. What are the good lawyers doing differently that makes them so valuable?

A whole range of things. Here's some off the top of my head:

1. A lot of cases get decided on trivial technical details. A very competent lawyer with a thorough knowledge of the finer points of the law can spot these and use them to his client's advantage--sometimes even getting a case dismissed outright because someone forgot to dot an i or cross a t.
2. Expensive lawyers are masters of delay tactics. Look at how Trump's legal team have managed to draw out his dispute with the IRS for over a decade. A lot of cases are won simply by exhausting your opponent, by making it so onerous and costly for them to keep contesting that they settle or abandon the lawsuit altogether.
3. Good lawyers also know human psychology. This can help in everything from jury selection to knowing how to butter up a particular judge to spinning the facts of a case in such a way as to get everyone else to see them in the best possible light.

There's a lot more than that, but that should do for a start. [Disclaimer: IANAL but my father was and two of my siblings currently work for law firms.] Lawyering is ultimately a form of negotiation and surely you recognise that some folks are much better negotiators than others?

[Linguoboy]

- For the major motion picture The Interpreter, this language was invented based on a mixture of local languages. (Answer: Ku)
- This fictitious language, from a major multimedia franchise, clings to a word order opposite that of English (namely, object-verb-subject). (Answer: Klingon)
- Khal Drogo speaks Dothraki, a language invented for Game of Thrones. For the HBO television series, this consultant was hired to expand it. (Answer: David J. Peterson)
- Sindarin and Noldorin are languages of the elves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Who in this setting spoke Khuzdul? (Answer: Dwarves)
- This movie in the Disney Animated Canon features a constructed language aimed at evoking historical, now-extinct, languages. (Answer: Atlantis: The Lost Empire)
- Michelle Fromkin created Pakuni, a constructed language from this 1970s time-travel television series. (Answer: Land of the Lost)

I wouldn't expect a person with "a normal-person amount of linguistics knowledge" to be able to guess the answer to any of these questions except the Disney one and maybe the LotL one. I have an abnormal-person amount of linguistics knowledge and I would only have gotten half of them.

The only conlangs an ordinary person have heard of are Klingon, Elvish (they know Quenya from Sindarin), and Esperanto. They might remember there was an invented language in GoT or Avatar but don't count on it.

[malloc]

1. A lot of cases get decided on trivial technical details. A very competent lawyer with a thorough knowledge of the finer points of the law can spot these and use them to his client's advantage--sometimes even getting a case dismissed outright because someone forgot to dot an i or cross a t.

What about felonies? Could someone really shoot an infant in the face and avoid conviction simply because someone forgot to dot an "i" while writing the police report and the lawyer noticed this?

[zompist]

1. A lot of cases get decided on trivial technical details. A very competent lawyer with a thorough knowledge of the finer points of the law can spot these and use them to his client's advantage--sometimes even getting a case dismissed outright because someone forgot to dot an i or cross a t.

What about felonies? Could someone really shoot an infant in the face and avoid conviction simply because someone forgot to dot an "i" while writing the police report and the lawyer noticed this?

Linguoboy's response was maybe a little unappreciative of lawyers. Not surprising if he knows a lot of lawyers.

One person's technicality is another person's respect for law. Put it this way: do you want the Bill of Rights to mean anything? Then the prosecution has to follow its rules, and face penalties (like losing a case) when it ignores them.

Everybody hates lawyers till they need one. Then they want the canniest bastard possible. I'll give you an example, though it's not criminal law. When we bought this condo, we got a real estate lawyer, which is routine. At the closing, he found something that immediately saved us a thousand bucks. Not a trick or something shady, but something he knew and the other lawyer didn't. If you needed a lawyer, you'd want one like that.

[quinterbeck]

Thanks! Some ideas there I hadn't thought of

I wouldn't expect a person with "a normal-person amount of linguistics knowledge" to be able to guess the answer to any of these questions except the Disney one and maybe the LotL one. I have an abnormal-person amount of linguistics knowledge and I would only have gotten half of them.

The only conlangs an ordinary person have heard of are Klingon, Elvish (they know Quenya from Sindarin), and Esperanto. They might remember there was an invented language in GoT or Avatar but don't count on it.

Good news is the answers are multiple choice, so I don't have to depend too much on the players knowledge. But I want them at least to be able to make a good guess

[Linguoboy]

Good news is the answers are multiple choice, so I don't have to depend too much on the players knowledge. But I want them at least to be able to make a good guess

In that case, the only question I would avoid is the Dothraki one. It’s not a fun one to guess when you haven’t the slightest idea who any of the consultants might even be. At least with the Ku question you can have fun with alternative language names. (For instance, you could make the alternatives “Ido”, “Lojban”, “Toki Pona”, and “Afrihili”—or just pick some names from the Amusing Language Names thread.)

[Raphael]

The only conlangs an ordinary person have heard of are Klingon, Elvish (they know Quenya from Sindarin), and Esperanto.

Pedantic question: Am I right to assume that you meant to write "they don't know Quenya from Sindarin"?

[Moose-tache]

linguoboy pointed out some differences between an OK lawyer and a very good one. But the biggest differences are seen at the other end of the scale. The single biggest determining factor in the quality of your representation is whether you have your own lawyer or an overworked, undermotivated public defender. Plenty of cases are won simply because the defense never caught a mistake or never bothered to challenge a key piece of testimony.

[Ares Land]

What exactly distinguishes an effective lawyer from one considered less competent? If the law prohibits theft, it seems like anyone caught stealing (assuming the same item and circumstances) would face the same consequences regardless of who represents them in court. Yet popular culture and the news make it clear that the right lawyer can somehow make an enormous difference. What are the good lawyers doing differently that makes them so valuable?

OK, not a lawyer, I merely have an excessive interest in 'true crime' stories.

I think this may be a surprise to some, especially to Americans (*) but lawyers are really essential to civilization.
My apologies for the long post, but it's not a very intuitive idea, and it needs a proper demonstration.

(*) You guys do have an awful lot of lawyers.

First off: I'm not a lawyer. Besides, while I've picked up a little about French legal proceeding, but don't know that much about American ones, except from the 'Your Honor' and 'objection' stuff we've all learned from TV. That said, while I may make mistakes, I don't think there's anything deeply wrong with what I'm about to say. Oh, and I'm focussing on criminal lawyer here, BTW

So, first off, law is highly technical. It needs to be: because we adhere to the rule of law, the circumstances have to be spelled out somewhere in excruciating detail. These can be spelled out in law codes, or based on precedent. That's why judges and lawyer are professionals, and just like any technical trade, they use a lot of specialized vocabulary.
Criminal trials involve protocol, and a good deal of it. Part of it is because it looks cool to give the proceedings the appropriate gravitas, but it mostly serves the purpose of taking care of the details (who's the judge? are we trying the right person in the first place?) so everyone can focus on the legal business.

All of this is obscure to outsiders. It's not that law people are deliberately being obscure: it's just that in daily life, we never have to speak about "benefit of bargain" or whatever and we get to see a criminal trial maybe once or twice in our lives.
So if you and I were to stand trial, we'd be completely lost, amidst people who enact strange rituals and speak an incomprehensible jargon. Facing time in jail, we'd be stressed out of our minds, and nobody would be inclined to show the slightest patience (first, because there's no time for that, second, because there's a fair chance everyone's convinced you're guilty already.)
So we'd need a guide and an interpreter, and that's what a lawyer is.

That's true for you and me, and all the more for actual defendants. The vast majority of defendants are from unprivileged social classes while judges are overwhelmingly in a high social position. That'd be a grave source of misunderstanding even under normal circumstances.
Sometimes lawyer arrange for an actual translator as well. (The court provides a translator as a matter of course, but if the evidence in your favor has to be requested from your home country through the Ruritanian embassy, you're out of luck. That happens a lot to asylum seekers.)

Of course that role can make a role of difference. If you're at least aware of what's going on and able to translate your case into the appropriate lawyerese, you're going to make much better an impression than if you try to do it alone. For that matter, judges don't like people who defend themselves alone (if it's allowed in the first place): first, yes, that's unfair, but some of them'd rather talk to another white law school graduate, second, all of them are chronically overworked: they don't have the time to go through the basics.

And we're not done yet!

A good criminal lawyer will know about criminal cases, police procedures, and how judges and police think. Typically layfolk don't.

Case in point: the most common strategy is to lie outright. The defendant just didn't do it. The thing is, it rarely works. Neither police nor prosecutors are stupid: the evidence is right in front of the judge and lying will just make infuriate the judge.
(Not that judges are ornery types, but the best case scenario is to reinsert criminal into society: there's no hope of reinsertion if you don't even admit you did wrong.)
Or maybe the opposite occurs. Maybe the evidence isn't just that compelling. Police, prosecutors and judges are under strong pressure to send criminals to jail. The thing is, on a societal level, we've made a collective committment not to send innocent people to jail.
The judge might be sorely tempted to judge on incomplete evidence: it's the defendant's lawyer's job to show where and how it's lacking. I think Americans judges and juries need to be convinced beyond or within reasonable doubt, or something. Typically a lay person won't know where 'reasonable doubt' lies: a lawyer will.
Again, a competent lawyer has a better chance of convincing his client to forget about stupid strategies.

Then, assuming the defendant is proved guilty, there's the question of the sentence.
There are precedents to consider. A lawyer digging up obscure precedent feels like cheating, but really it's not. If Bob gets ten years for aardvark-bothering, how is it fair, when aardvark botherers typically get five years?
Plus, the judge might not be aware of the precedent, or the prosecution (which is very sad about the poor aardvarks) conveniently 'forgot' about it.
Besides, in real life, the circumstances are never the same. Maybe Bob's just turning his life around, maybe it's just a juvenile mistake, maybe in his case jail would only make things worse and community service would be better suited. Considering this is the judge's duty of course, but he or she needs help. (a lawyer can focus on his clients, indeed that's what he's paid for; a judges has a dozen of trial cases to consider, and all sides to consider.)

What about felonies? Could someone really shoot an infant in the face and avoid conviction simply because someone forgot to dot an "i" while writing the police report and the lawyer noticed this?

In spirit, it's not entirely wrong. And it's not a bug in the judicial system, it's a feature.

In crime fiction, the cop hero is often grumbling about the paperwork, and disregarding the rules. In fiction, we accept that Harry Bosch doesn't follow procedures, because we're privy to his thought and we know he's the good guy. In real life, the case might be assigned to the good guy (most of the police force, I'm sure)... or it might be assigned to the racist lazy bun who just pin the stuff on whomever looks most shady.

The rules and paperwork are certain counterproductive, and there's certainly paperwork for the sake of paperwork, but at heart they're in place to make sure the police doesn't go around doctoring the reports, beating the perps or making up evidence.

Let's make up a particularly outrageous example.

Charlie Manson comes back from the dead. Soon after, women are killed, HELTER SKELTER is written in blood, the works.
Manson shows up in court; there's DNA and everything.
Manson's amoral attorney points out something wrong with the DNA evidence. The timestamp on the report isn't in the proper font or something: Manson is free.

Well, that's actually a net win for society! Why is that?

• Maybe the timestamp is wrong because the report is a forgery. They just didn't have any evidence and they wanted to stop Manson because it was too late. Actually, Manson didn't do it. It was actually John Wayne Gacy.
• Maybe Manson did it. But there just wasn't any evidence. So then? We can't convinct people without evidence! Shouldn't we make an exception for Charlie Manson? But how do you know it was Manson without evidence?
• Maybe the lawyer was just nitpicking and it worked. I talked about rules and procedures earlier; if you have rules and they aren't enforced, you don't really have rules. Too bad for Charlie Manson, but the 'DNA report timestamp' rule will be enforced in the future, which will save innocent people down the line. (If you don't require evidence to be lawyer-proof, well, police just makes it up and lots of people end up in jail. Source: any dictatorship ever.)

In practice, judges are not stupid. You need a pretty serious violation to make an entire judicial procedure invalid, and a simple mispelling won't do it. Yes, it's probable a lot of killers get away since they're not allowed to torture prisoners; but you get a whole lot less false confessions too. Again, we don't mind Batman torturing people because we know he's the good guy. But in real life, we prefer when the police officer in charge of our case isn't allowed to beat us up, you know, just in case he is not Batman. If ACAB now, imagine if the rules were more lenient... What I say about police applies to judges too. Remember the saying: 'hanging judge'?

Credit where credit is due: most of this I learned from the blog Journal d'un avocat, and this post: https://www.maitre-eolas.fr/post/2004/0 ... -coupables (How can you defend the guilty?). In French, unfortunately, and once again the Machine Uprising fails to deliver: Google Translate mangles it horribly. @zompist: I suppose you could use as a resource for designing Verdurian law

[Ryusenshi]

What Ares Land said.

Keep in mind that in the majority of trials, the facts are not under dispute, only the penalty. Yes, you bothered an aardvark, and everybody knows it (you may want to deny it at first, but your lawyer tells you there's no point, as the evidence is airtight). The question is how much you get for it. You face 10 years in prison, the maximum penalty for aardvark-bothering; but you may get away with 6 months on probation. The DA will try to present you as a hardened aardvark-botherer; your lawyer will try to present you as a decent person who made a mistake and is already turning their life around. A "good" lawyer will help you get a lighter sentence.

[malloc]

Ok then, thanks for the explanations. This is just something I have always wondered, having heard on the news and in popular culture about lawyers making a huge difference in your legal outcome. I am not arguing that we should ignore technical considerations or procedures by any means, of course, and understand what Ares Land means.

[zompist]

So if you and I were to stand trial, we'd be completely lost, amidst people who enact strange rituals and speak an incomprehensible jargon.

That reminds me of the astonishing linguistic muddle of courts in Pakistan.

First, the lawyers and judges speak among themselves in Urdu, the national language— which almost no one in Pakistan speaks natively. (The major languages are Panjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, and Balochi.) So the defendant probably doesn't understand a thing.

But that's not enough! The laws, to this day, are written in English. (No one has ever had the time or political capital to translate the entire corpus of law into Urdu.) So any discussion of the actual law will be in English.

[Qwynegold]

Hi everyone. It's hard for me to return here because I get anxiety when I try to return to a space I haven't been in for a long time. I really want to be active here again though.

Oh no! >_< Why is that?

[Richard W]

That's great. It really could use all the Scots speakers it can get (I don't know Scots myself, r else I would join too)

One problem is that it needs Scots writers. It seems that being a Scots speaker but only being able to write in English isn't good enough! I'm not sure how well spellcheckers could fix that - it's hard to correct a document that has been through a spellchecker with a random selection of corrections.

[MacAnDàil]

Certainly that is a point, which is why it is all the better that some of the people now participating are from the Scots discussion groups and Scots literature, as well as the blog, I participate in, Mak Forrit.

[Torco]

So if you and I were to stand trial, we'd be completely lost, amidst people who enact strange rituals and speak an incomprehensible jargon.

That reminds me of the astonishing linguistic muddle of courts in Pakistan.

First, the lawyers and judges speak among themselves in Urdu, the national language— which almost no one in Pakistan speaks natively. (The major languages are Panjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, and Balochi.) So the defendant probably doesn't understand a thing.

But that's not enough! The laws, to this day, are written in English. (No one has ever had the time or political capital to translate the entire corpus of law into Urdu.) So any discussion of the actual law will be in English.

You really can't conworld that. but whoever did, i congratulate.

[Kuchigakatai]

I'm Ser but now going by as Nectar.

[kodé]

I'm Ser but now going by as Nectar.

Sweet.

[dɮ the phoneme]

Kinda thinking about changing my user name again, maybe to dlzh. It feels a bit more elegant, being just ASCII, but I'm not sure. Opinions?

[Kuchigakatai]

I don't think anyone can give you much of an opinion on usernames at all... Your username can hardly bother anyone, unless you're being hostile with a username in a script like Chinese or Gujarati, or that consists of punctuation (I recall a guy in another forum who used to go by as ''', i.e. three single quotes, who people ended up calling Maggy as he was Hungarian (Magyar)).

Now that that one-liner from kodé made it to the Quote Thread though, I guess I'll have to change my username again. Sigh, I actually liked Nectar...