Legal, Law & Lawyer Humor #5
I’m a Lawyer who Loves Legal Jokes. I’m not an Outside Taking Shots, but an Insider Sharing, “The Truth, the Whole Truth…”
I once had a judge take myself, and opposing counsel back into his chambers for a recess. He said, “The biggest problem I’m having, in this case, is deciding which one of your clients is lying the most.”
This is why our so-called justice system is called a legal system of red tape. Sometimes any relationship between reality, testimony, and legal reasoning have absolutely nothing in common. Lawyers aren’t trained in logic, but rather in legal reasoning. There’s a big difference.
Again, we lawyers love problems. We know the bigger the problem the more it’s worth, and the more money we can charge. So we tend to make everything as big and as complicated as possible. We love making mountains out of mole-hills.
And we love to argue against our democratic system sometimes — that used to be a republic when our founders established us. Thomas Jefferson said, “Liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.” This is a republic in action.
Someone else has said: “Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting to decide what’s for lunch.” There is a big difference.
Preparing a ‘Last Will and Testament’
We lawyers are a complicated bunch. A lawyer wrote a Last Will and Testament that I was hired to have probated at a formal hearing because there was a contest to the will. The will had been drafted by a lawyer some 20 years earlier. I had read one clause in the will over and over again, and I had NO idea what it was saying.
When I got to the courtroom, I knew I was going to be quizzed about this particular passage, and sure enough, the judge asked for my interpretation of what this clause was saying. I told him I’d read it 10 times and still didn’t understand what it was saying.
He laughed: “Well, I’ve read it more times than that and I still don’t know what it is saying either.”
Many lawyers, like myself, try to write in a way that can be understood, but many don’t. Many think there must be at least 100 words before the first period.
They don’t know what the word ‘brief’ means, which is meant to describe a legal document. Most lawyers write a 10,000-word document and call it a ‘brief.’ At 300 words to the page, that’s over 33 pages. That ain’t brief. (Ain’t is now in a lot of dictionaries, but I don’t use it except for fun)
Of course, a favorite pun is: “Where there is a will, there is a lawsuit.”
A Lawyer Master of Ceremonies
Also, things that lawyers say aren’t always accurate either. They often invent so many stories that they don’t know what is truth and what is fiction. A case in point was the lawyer who was serving as master of ceremonies at a banquet.
He was introducing the speaker and said, “Our speaker made a million dollars in the oil business right here in Colorado.”
The speaker got up and his first words were: “Thanks for that fine introduction, but it wasn’t entirely accurate. — It wasn’t the oil business, but the coal business. — It wasn’t here in Colorado, but in North Dakota. — It wasn’t a million dollars but $250,000. — It wasn’t me, it was my brother. — And he didn’t make it, he lost it.”
Lawyers, the IRS, Economics, and the IRC: The Internal Revenue Code
A prime example of the complexity of lawyers is The Infernal Revenue Code. Oh, excuse me: The INTERNAL Revenue Code. It must have been a Freudian slip. But experts say the average person can only comprehend a maximum of about 40 words in a sentence before the mind just goes on ‘overboard,’ clicks off, and tunes out.
The average length of a sentence in the Internal Revenue Code is 100 words.
— One sentence contains 379 words.
— And another has 385 words.
— The longest sentence in the Code contains 506 words.
Someone has said, “The Code should be held unconstitutional simply because it is so incomprehensible.”
Lawyers and the IRS are No Laughing Matter
An old pastor was on his death bed. His last request was for both his lawyer and an IRS agent to come and visit him. When the two arrived in the pastor’s room, the pastor requested them to sit on either side of the bed.
It was the lawyer who spoke up first: “Pastor, why did you ask us here?” The pastor said, “Jesus died between two thieves, and I want to do the same.”
If a lawyer and an IRS agent were both drowning, and you could only save one of them, would you go have a drink, or go back to work?
A man went to see his lawyer about his taxes. He said he was confused about doing the right or the wrong thing in filing his return. The lawyer said, “A fine is a tax for doing something wrong. A tax is a fine for doing something right. So either way, you lose.”
A man was having a terrible time sleeping. So he asked his lawyer what he should do about it. The lawyer asked him what he thought was wrong and might be keeping him awake that he needed to talk about. The man said he lied and cheated on his tax return. The lawyer said to send the IRS a check for $1,000, with a note saying, “If I still can’t sleep, I’ll send the rest.”
