Lawyers And World-Models

This is a set of short vignettes, posed purely as food for thought, to expand thinking and understanding of how other people outside of rationality-sphere understand and navigate social “games”.

I’m deliberately using “he/they” to refer to all characters in these stories, as opposed to any other pronouns, identifying details have been removed etc etc.

The Automobile Accident And The Expert Witness:

Lawyers in the United States are known for being incredulous about literally everything. There was, once, a lawsuit I was privy to, pretty standard-faire. The harmed family was suing an insurance company for money. They had hired an expensive, high-falootin’ $200/hour forensic engineer to take a look at the evidence of the car wreck that had killed their family member and reconstruct it. Before the first big hearing began, they’d taken this engineer to some expensive venue for lunch.

The clients had taken their time, and wound up 5 minutes late to the initial hearings their expert witness was to give. The jury and everyone had already been seated and everyone was waiting. As they walked in, the opposing lawyer got up and stood, and shouted. Their face was red, and beady, I like to imagine they had a vein sticking out of their forehead: “I WOULD JUST LIKE EVERYONE TO NOTICE THAT THIS OTHER PARTY WAS LATE! THIS SHOWS THEIR EXPERT WITNESS IS NOT TAKING THIS SERIOUSLY,” and on and on in front of the jury for a good 30 seconds before the judge told them to shut up.

The engineer was offended- his good name sullied, they went through, he gave his testimony, and afterwards, approached the other lawyer, apologizing for being late. “Hey, I know, I warned my clients we would be late and tried to hurry up,” the other lawyer had been offended by their being late right? This claim had repercussions for the engineer’s reputations in the future!

The opposing lawyer pooh-pooh’d them, saying “Oh, don’t worry, it’s fine, you didn’t offend me.”

The Fender-Bender

An individual had been in a car wreck 5+ years before. It was, by the pictures, a normal fender-bender. No repairs even needed, just a little scratch of paint on a busy traffic day, in the middle of the worst rush-hours of the year. They’d been driving an old Dodge Neon, and as traffic is, they got into a normal wreck. They were young about 19 years old, and still on their parent’s insurance at the time. They went their way, gave police reports, and assumed their insurances would handle everything.

Eventually, however, a traffic accident lawyer got a hold of the 3 people in the other vehicle, and basically found the teen was on their parent’s insurance, which went up for $300k+ in damages, and all they saw were dollar signs. But, there’s often a process for this, and it took nearly 5 years before the kid’s then-insurance said “sue us”.

When that day came, the once-teen, then in his mid twenties, was called in to give his recorded testimony as a defendant in the case. But, saying the quiet part out loud, we all know they weren’t really the defendant. If they didn’t have a good insurance policy, the other party would never have gone for it.

In these cases, as a defendant witness, your lawyers would often love if you could convincingly forget certain details. So what they will do, they’ll take access to all of the evidence, and they’ll pick which ones to show the defendant. And they’ll ask questions, and they’ll nudge the defendants in certain ways. They’ll never say a certain thing to say is good, but they will smile and get a certain… gleam in their eye when in the pre-witness practice sessions, witnesses will go down a certain path.

When the opposing lawyer, in the real, recorded testimony session with a court recorder and all presents that one police report the defendant filed away, the look of surprise on the defendant’s face being palpable and real, the defendant’s lawyer will have a stone cold expression on his face in the meeting… But then during a short drink-break, he’ll be grinning ear to ear.

Why is he grinning? The defendant may never know, but the lawyer will give a quip about how he “forgot” to show them that report. Later, the case would settle, instead of their asking of $300,000, $30,000 to cover some shots. The plaintiff’s lawyer would take $25,000 of that and after 5 years, the trio were $5,000 richer.

The Chilli Cook-Off

A middle school in a high-end neighborhood was holding a fundraiser, inviting everyone to cook and bring chilli. A particularly avid lover of spicy Chilli showed up. He’d cooked a normal chilli, and then a much, much smaller that he considered radioactively spicy. The idea was to take from the large Crock-Pot of chilli, and then add a touch of the radioactive sauce to their bowl, and stir it, letting chilli-eaters mediate how spicy they wanted it.

Quite clever, really.

Until a guy showed up, looked at the ultra-hot bowl, ignored the spicy sign, and poured his small styrofoam bowl exclusively from the radioactively-marked chilli bowl. The man took a scoop, and said “it’s not that hot,” even with beads of sweat dripping down his face. To his credit, he finished his bowl of chilli.

The man, we would later learn, after he got out of the hospital, was a lawyer.