I'm sure a lot of you, especially those of you who work in the legal profession, have heard all of the dead lawyer jokes by now. There's the one about the 100 lawyers at the bottom of the sea being a good start; the one where God threatens to sue Satan, and Satan asks, "Where are you going to get a lawyer?", the implication being that all lawyers go to hell; the one that differentiates a dead dog in the road from a dead lawyer in the road by saying that there would be skid marks in front of a dog; and even the one where the little girl asks her mother if there are two people buried in the same grave since the marker reads, "Here lies a lawyer and an honest man." In theory, the jokes are pretty fun. Anyone who has ever been to law school knows that, after awhile, you actually become a connoisseur of bad lawyer jokes, dead ones and otherwise. After all, isn't it better to laugh at yourself than to have others laugh at you? I even used to have a list of bad lawyer jokes on my sidebar, but it made the blog look too crowded so I took them off.Well, this past Friday a 78-year-old man named Lloyd Cantrell apparently took all those dead lawyer jokes and Shakespeare's "let's kill all the lawyers" line a little too seriously. The man loaded up the back of his SUV with propane and gas and attempted to drive it into the front of a law firm in Dalton, Georgia. When he was unable to do so, he broke a window in the firm's library and threw a homemade bomb inside. The bomb detonated, blowing out all the windows in the building, killing Cantrell, injuring several employees, and eventually causing the firm to catch on fire.
My first thought when the reporters broke into normal programming Friday afternoon is that no area of law is safe anymore. Criminal law is and has always been a dangerous profession. Anyone familiar with the Brian Nichols case here in Atlanta--he's the defendant who grabbed a deputy's gun and went on a shooting spree that left the judge who was trying his case, the court reporter, a deputy, and a federal agent dead--can attest to that fact. However, the firm that was bombed Friday didn't specialize in criminal law, nor was it one of those upscale law firms that have 500 plus employees who all wear designer suits, silk ties, and shoes that cost more than most of us make in a week. I get angry just thinking about the latter type of firms. Apparently, I'm not good enough to do document review in some dark, windowless room in those type of firms, let alone be "real lawyer," but I digress. No, the firm that Cantrell bombed was a fairly small one that specialized in personal injury law in an equally small town best known for its carpet factories and outlet malls.
The last that I heard Cantrell was angry with the firm over some land deal that went bad. I'm not surprised that money was the catalyst. Back in my law clerk days, the civil department at the state court was treated like the building's red-headed stepchild. The civil cases were never considered as important as the criminal ones. However, the civil clerks and I used to say that, if the judges and other powers-that-be in the building ever stopped to think about it, civil cases were actually more important because they had longer lasting ramifications. For instance, if you get a DUI, you go to jail for a day or two, do some community service, complete DUI school, pay a fine, and go about your merry way. Thus, the pain of a DUI, assuming no one gets killed, is short-term. In comparison, if you get a $1 million civil judgment against you or get kicked out of your home, the effects are felt long-term. For a lot of people, money, or the loss thereof, hurts significantly more than a day in a jail.
Maybe now judges like my ex-boss will listen, although I doubt it. They'll probably just chalk the incident up to the actions of a crazy, old man. While I can hope for a change, I think my energies will be better served sending good thoughts to the four employees who were injured, especially the poor attorney who had his clothes burnt off of him in the blast. He is now at the same burn center in Augusta, Georgia that DJ A.M. and Travis Barker were in a few weeks ago, and the latest reports say that he'll be there for awhile. Hopefully, the attorney and his employees will make it through this disaster okay.
