Don’t believe what you read in the (other) papers

Listen to this article

I know that you young people already know everything and hate to listen to advice from old misanthropes, but this is important, so please read on.

This may sound strange coming from someone who earns his living writing for a legal trade journal. But it is essential for all attorneys to not merely have, but to actively cultivate, a healthy contempt for the media and everyone involved in this racket.

At the same time, however, you must also monitor what those clowns are up to. I learned this lesson early in my career and it has served me well over the years.

I was recently reminded of this after reading media accounts of a Wisconsin Court of Appeals opinion resolving a dispute over work hours between the Milwaukee County Executive and the employees’ union.

The issue in the case was the authority of the arbitrator to decide the dispute, something that was clear from the court opinion to anyone who knows how to read. Yet, somehow, someone who makes his living writing stuff for others to read reported that the issue in the case was the authority of the county executive.

It’s far from the first time I’ve had this experience.

Fresh out of law school, I was representing one of several co-defendants charged with performing a certain sex act with a girl who was 16 or 17. My client and I didn’t deny that the underlying act occurred; our defense was consent.

One day, though, I was reading the local daily newspaper’s coverage of the case, and I read to my horror that under Wisconsin law, a girl that age is presumed incapable of consent.

Of course, that is not the law, and it was not the law then. So, I immediately called up my client and asked if he had read the article and what it said about consent. He said he had.

I assured him that that was not the law. He then told me that one of his co-defendants had been told by his attorney that what the paper said was correct. I told him to tell his friend to get a new lawyer. My client did as he was instructed, and the co-defendant did as well.

It was a wise move, and he wound up serving a lot less time than he would have if he had stuck with his original attorney, who knew no more about Wisconsin law than a newspaper reporter.

Put simply, you young attorneys must assume that everything you read in the media about your cases will be wrong, and you must ensure that your clients know that as well.

The above-mentioned episodes could have been the result of simple incompetence, but sometimes, I think the media folks botch their reporting of the law on purpose. I once had a client who received 21 years in federal prison for being a felon in possession of a firearm. In the media reports, however, he got the sentence for shooting a cat with that firearm.

I got phone calls from many people inquiring how that could be. I would explain that my client’s shooting the cat had nothing to do with the case, other than that it provoked his wife to call the police. He was subject to a 15-year mandatory minimum just for possessing the gun as a felon, whether he shot the cat or not.

I don’t think they believed me; I think they thought I was nuts, and decided they would never hire me to represent them.

Unfortunately, to the media types, the story was not how draconian and unconstitutional our federal firearms laws are. Instead, it was about how this defendant got more prison time for shooting a cat than some defendants get for shooting a person.

So, remember, you must disabuse your clients of whatever nonsense they may read in the media. Unless they read it here, of course.