LAWYERS WIT & WISDOM
 There is no better way to exercise the imagination than the study of the law. No artist ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.
JEAN GIRAUDOUX, 19 TH -CENTURY FRENCH PLAYWRIGHT
--------------------------------------- Law school taught me one thing: how to take two situations that are exactly the same and show how they are different.
HART POMERANTZ, AMERICAN LAWYER
--------------------------------------- The minute you read something you don't understand, you can be almost sure it was drawn up by a lawyer.
WILL ROGERS , AMERICAN HUMORIST
--------------------------------------- Law school has been described as a place for the accumulation of learning. First-year students bring some in; third-year students take none away. Hence it accumulates.
DANIEL R. WHITE, AMERICAN WRITER
--------------------------------------- Never, never, never, on cross examination, ask a witness a question you don't already know the answer to, was a tenet I absorbed with my baby food. Do it, and you'll often get an answer you don't want.
ATTICUS FINCH, IN HARPER LEE'S TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
--------------------------------------- A lawyer's opinion is worth nothing unless paid for. ENGLISH PROVERB
--------------------------------------- The practice of law is necessarily intertwined with the commercial world. Legal services should be modern, efficient and competitively priced, but they shouldn't be driven by the same bottom-line principles of the corporate world.
JEFF STEMPLE, LAW PROFESSOR, FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
--------------------------------------- Be concise for clients. Less is more. Bravura displays only serve to irritate; brevity is what pays the rent.
JEMES C. FREUND, AMERICAN LAWYER
Hold Onto Your Seat
During a trial at which Carl S. Black was an attorney, an eminent psychologist was called to testify. A severe, no-nonsense professional, she sat down in the witness chair, unaware that its rear legs were set precariously on the back of the raised platform. "Will you state your name?" asked the district attorney.
Tilting back in her chair, she opened her mouth to answer, but instead catapulted head-over-heels backward and landed in a stack of exhibits and recording equipment. Everyone watched in stunned silence as she extricated herself, rearranged her disheveled dress and hair, and was reseated on the witness stand. The glare she directed at onlookers dared anyone to so much as smirk.
"Well, Doctor," continued the district attorney, without changing expression, "we could start with an easier question."
Leave it to Beaver
As a young deputy district attorney in Kern County , California , in 1973, H.Dennis Beaver was trying a consumer fraud case before Judge Walter Conley. But the judge rapidly grew exasperated with the rookie lawyer's line of questioning.
"If you keep on asking these idiotic questions, I am going to send you some place where you have never been," the judge warned Beaver.
"You mean jail, your honor?" Beaver asked.
"No," replied the judge. "Law school!"
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