Commentary: Letter to the Editor

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Dear Mr. Ziemer,

I am writing to agree with much of your rant (“Wanted: Litigators, not social workers,” April 19 about the trend to make social workers out of trial lawyers. My problem is that you use the term “litigator” to describe the attorneys who actually used to, and continue to, try cases. I sense that reluctance to use the correct term is the result of your infatuation with the Federalist Society and their corporate master who have decreed that any use of the term “trial lawyer” may not be employed unless accompanied by appropriate vituperation. Yet the tone of your commentary suggests that you still feel vestigial pride in your former efforts on behalf of the common people, thus “litigator” is your way of saying what you think without irritating your political bedfellows and those Federalist Society Babes. Your feeble attempts at political satire have led me to conclude that the “Peter Principle” is still good law, at least in your case. You have been promoted from a trial lawyer of some ability, to a perceptive and sometimes gutsy critic of what passes for learned decisions from our high courts these days, to a lame Beck/Limbaugh clone. What have you got on the publisher?

The last thing “litigators” want to do is face a jury. One of your heroes, J.P. Morgan, perhaps said it best: “Well, I don’t know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell how to do what I want to do.”

The moral of the story is this: Don’t call anyone who prosecutes or defends criminal cases a “litigator” without his or her express or implied permission, as when they are fellow members of the Federalist Society; those spiritual descendants of the Tories that fought with the British against the Patriots in that forgotten war called the American Revolution.

Very Truly Yours,

Thomas J. Kelly
Tom Kelly Law Office, LLC
Spring Green, Wis.