Perception Is Not The Truth: A Decent Attorney Digs Deep
Some Attorneys keep files on a variety of metro areas to follow trends. They may have a list the looks like; File Baltimore, File Los Angeles,file Cincinnati. They might be concerned with Boston foreclosures or Cincinnati debt relief. These records could contain a slew of cases filed in local courts, each case representing a family in crisis. The court house halls are filled with men and women trying to find their way in a Byzantine system. Judgements are recorded, often based in precedent or legal calculations that parse the facts and boil the issues down to big words and conceptual ideas of contracts and obligations. Often these lives are decided by legal doctrine in black and white. On the good days the law works and justice is served. On the worse days the real story gets lost and the winner is the one who best twisted the fact to support their version of the case.
Laws attempt to take a world filled with shades of gray and create black and white rules to follow. Often laws shift and evolve attempting to mend its inherent flaws, but always too late for those that showed the need for a remedy. Slap open a file, pull out a case and there on the table is a story told from two perspectives in an obscure language designed to savage the competing version of the truth while hiding the vulnerable elements of the story behind a wall of obfuscation. What is absent is the unvarnished truth and the real human story.
A man walks into a classy bar in the middle of town. He stands at the counter to get a drink and looks like he just came from a long day at the office. The bartender, managing a bar three deep in happy hour customers, hears him call for a scotch and water. A woman comes in and sits next to the man. She notices he is slurring his words and notices him swaying. She sees the bartender set a drink in front of the man and notices four drained shot glasses near him. The man leaves the bar, gets in his car and kills three people including him in an auto accident on the way home.
The business is sued and the court finds them negligent in serving the man alcohol and responsible for contributing to manslaughter. The court case destroys the business. The woman testified that the man was already drunk and said she saw four empty shot glasses sitting in front of him. The bartender stated honestly that he didn’t remember serving the man more than one drink and thought he would remember a guy doing four shots. Under questioning he admitted that he didn’t remember the man at all. The man had consumed enormous amounts of scotch at other bars, but that part of the story never made it into the record.
The truth is often obscured by the facts and the dualing versions of the case. In this case everyone, including the bartender, assumed the appearance was the truth. A good attorney would have known that truth can be as elusive as the end of the rainbow.