The link worked fine for me.
As to how lawyers work (and I sleep with one, so I have some close-hand knowledge):
Attorneys represent people who believe they need justice (at least in the context we've been discussing, there are of course other reasons people hire attorneys). They are not there to "create" cases. In fact, there is the offense of barratry, pretty much specific to attorneys, and being defined as the vexatious and persistent incitement of lawsuits. An attorney who commits barratry goes beyond ambulance chasing, and will eventually be disbarred or worse.
But I digress. An attorney is only a learned spokesperson for a client and will usually tell a client that his or her lawsuit has or does not have a chance of winning. There is also the problem of frivolous lawsuits, which an attorney is trained to recognize and avoid at all costs, since he or she is the one who'll get disbarred if there are too many of them. It is not the attorneys who are causing all of the lawsuits in the US; it's the greedy plaintiffs who hope to get something for nothing. Without plaintiffs there wouldn't be anywhere near as many attorneys as there are now. They'd all starve to death.
I believe that most educated people would recognize a lawsuit based primarily upon greed as opposed to one in which there truly was or was perceived to be an injury requiring redress. And most of them would believe that most of those Ann listed are, on the surface at least, lawsuits based upon greed.
I'll give you a concrete example. My brother drives cars about 20 years old because he cannot afford anything else. Some time back, he said to me, "And this guy skidded up behind me and missed the rear end of my truck by about two inches. If he'd hit me, I'd have sued him and they'd have given me a brand new truck."
It was literally impossible to convince him that the person's liability to him (other than for injury) would have been limited to the value of his truck (probably $500 or so). "Nope, they'da owed me a new pickup truck. And I'da gone for the expensive one, you can bet your ass." It is this attitude that you can get something for nothing that in the end demonizes the legal profession. People tend to think that attorneys are the cause of this greed, and not simply the spokespersons for it.
Many attorneys won't touch this sort of case, though there are others that go out of their way to take them. Here in Denver we have a guy named Andy Cameron who is always advertising for people with personal injuries to call him so he can get "as much money for you as we can." Believe it or not, in one of these commercials he is sitting at a desk with a dog sitting on a chair beside him. The ad captions the dog as "legal analyst." Peggy assures me that in North Carolina Andy would have been disbarred long ago for having besmirched the legal profession.
But these are the bottom feeders and are in no way indicative of the overall ethics and quality of the legal profession, which I personally hold in high regard.
Oh! Almost forgot. In the article tsuwm mentioned, there is the following:
Alan Dershowitz, when criticized for some of his stratagems in criminal defense--things like telling the client on first meeting, "Don't tell me whether you're guilty or not; it would tie my hands to know; leave me free to come up with the best defense"--has defended himself by saying, Look, if your kid were arrested and charged with something, you'd want a lawyer just like me.
The reality of it is: If a defendant tells an attorney that he is guilty, the attorney is ethically barred from putting on a not guilty defense. His or her only actions involve getting the best possible sentence for the culprit.
An attorney for a defendant has an ethical duty to present the best possible defense, which may mean playing the race card, as happened int he OJ case, or the SODDI* defense, which was in essence the defense used by Terry Nichols to escape the death penalty. It's the way our system works, and it certainly beats systems in other countries where a person may be convicted and executed without even having an attorney (Afghanistan comes immediately to mind.)
TEd
*Some Other Dude Did It
