I’d be bored to death if I spent all my time with other businesspeople, bankers and lawyers.
The billable hours is a classic case of restricted autonomy. I mean, you’re working on – I mean, sometimes on these six-minute increments. So you’re not focused on doing a good job. You’re focused on hitting your numbers. It’s one reason why lawyers typically are so unhappy. And I want a world of happy lawyers.
Without legal aid, and the dedicated lawyers who deliver it, our system of justice would quite simply collapse.
I started shooting ‘The Defenders’ two days after I wrapped’ Friday Night Lights.’ I was doing research for ‘The Defenders’ throughout – interviewing lawyers and sitting in courtrooms just to watch – but there’s something fun about throwing yourself in the water and learning by doing.
I was trained to be an actor, not a star. I was trained to play roles, not to deal with fame and agents and lawyers and the press.
I like to bitch and moan about lawyers, but they often have actually good points.
That’s why I left Germany and went to L.A., that’s why I hooked up with the lawyers, that’s why I hooked up with a big management company – just to protect us, to keep the kind of image I could live with.
It has something to do with the facts and the law and who the judges are. So I think lawyers sometimes exaggerate their role in winning and losing. Lawyers do have a role, and a major role, but they’re not the only players in this game.
In recent years personal injury attorneys and trial lawyers have attacked the food industry with numerous lawsuits alleging that these businesses should pay monetary damages to those who, of their own accord, consume too much of a legal, safe product.
I think lawyers who engage in pro bono service to protect those who cannot help themselves are truly the heroes and the heroines of the legal profession.
The reality is that most celebrity defendants are extremely unknowledgeable, naive, and vulnerable, and if they get into trouble, they usually call their lawyer friends who handle criminal cases, and if they don’t know any, they call their business lawyers, who then refer them to lawyer friends of theirs.
Man, I just feel blessed… I was in a situation where the only way I could come out of it was by putting my faith in God. No matter how good my lawyers were, no matter how much celebrity I had, everything was just stacked up against me.
I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible.
We got dragged through a system and got burned by crooked lawyers, and the list goes on and on.
The big corporations have a team of lawyers and accountants to help them. It’s the small businesses, the mom and pop shops, that get lost in the layers of red tape.
From the beginning, Mandela and Tambo was besieged with clients. We were not the only African lawyers in South Africa, but we were the only firm of African lawyers. For Africans, we were the firm of first choice and last resort.
I’m sure I took some licks at the system, and at trials and lawyers in general. I’ve seen enough of them for so many years both as a cop and a defendant in defamation cases.
I’ve paid an awful lot of lawyers to protect what I’ve built. I can only hope the money was well spent.
Tort reform is important. We need to prevent trial lawyers from killing good jobs.
Lawyers should not be charged with the same crimes as their clients. Trials related to political charges are not in accordance with human rights.
Civilizations are not remembered by their business people, their bankers or lawyers. They’re remembered by the arts.
My parents lived in a poor rural community on the Eastern Shore, and schools were still segregated. And I remember when lawyers came into our community to open up the public schools to black kids.
I have been surrounded by some of the smartest, brightest, most caring lawyers, by agents who are willing to risk their lives for others, by support staff that are willing to work as hard as they can.
We’re talking about the lawyers for the United States of America. And I think it’s very, very important that the lawyers be comfortable being very candid and open about their views on very sensitive issues affecting the United States.
Everyone wants to say they hate lawyers, and yet I’ve never met a parent who didn’t want their kid to be a lawyer.
Lawyers are like rhinoceroses: thick skinned, short-sighted, and always ready to charge.
If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of the lawyers.
Lawyers advocate more so than state their own positions.
