As Corruption is Exposed, People Will Become Litigious

In this post, I want to talk about how people will become more litigious given the present world situation unfolding.

This word is pronounced luh-tidge-iss, and it's a term for people who file a lot of lawsuits. It is usually used in a negative and judgmental way, but as I will explain, it might not be so bad to be known as litigious.

Here is an example: young lawyers often have to file lawsuits on ALL their cases until they develop a reputation with insurance companies.

You have to be prepared to go to the mat in order to gain respect, and I think that's what we all need to do to gain the respect and to stop getting pushed around by people with their own agendas.

I've been a paralegal for a long time and I have experience in many areas of the law. My last contract doing paralegal was working for personal injury lawyers, and since the pandemic, it seems to me that personal injury lawyers are busy.

My theory on this is that low income people use injuries as a side hustle. I'm not judging people here – stay with me for a moment. If you are stuck in a low income lifestyle and don't have a way to earn more money, what are your options?

After you've returned all the useless stuff to the store to get your money back, (LOL – I've done this) then what do you do? You realize your economic position might be in bad shape and you are pushed to do things you would previously have never done before.

One of them might be suing people to get your money from them, suing them to make them pay you, or suing them for the harm they have caused you.

The days of blowing off losses and putting up with that stuff are quickly coming to a close, as people realize the breadth and depth of how corporations have absconded with our resources.

I have been pessimistic about the legal field for a long time. And, yes there is rampant corruption happening.

But there are some positive changes happening that you might not know about.

For starters, in Arizona there is now a license available for non-lawyers with experience to represent people in court in certain jurisdictions. This is a Licensed Limited Legal Practitioner (LLLP) license, and the Arizona Supreme Court created this to give average people a way to access affordable representation.

Second, I recently sued an attorney from Maryland because he did not pay my bill. I am currently in Illinois, and I sued him in Small Claims Court in Illinois.

I requested a fee waiver and the judge granted my request, so I was able to initiate my case without the $300 filing fee, and more importantly, to BE HEARD. The judge was fair, even.

In case you are wondering, I did not win the case. I did however beat this attorney on a Motion to Dismiss, which I may post here on the website.

I would argue that even though I didn't win the case, I won the war. And it didn't cost me a dime to pursue my case, which is pretty wild considering where we've been in the legal system.

Say what you want about so called blue states – but I had a fair hearing and I was less angry about losing the case because I was heard. I think a lot of people would be less angry if they had an opportunity to be heard.

It didn't change the fact that the guy didn't pay me, but he heard me too, and I'd argue that he has been put on notice. It was worth pursuing for that reason alone.

He might feel shame, which is good for him. Maybe this was God giving him a chance to wake up and stop exploiting people. I don't know what the lesson was for him. I have some ideas.

What I am getting at here is that I am TIRED of being exploited by lawyers. And I know that average people everywhere are getting tired of being screwed by people who think they are entitled to our resources.

I think we have to become more litigious. It's one way to push back on the exploitation.

Now, to be clear – I am not talking about filing frivolous lawsuits. I'm talking about situations where you legitimately have a reason to file a lawsuit. In small claims court in particular, the rules are relaxed and more informal, and the judge is required (but doesn't always) to allow pro se people extra time and leeway to navigate the entire process.

I also want to talk about lawyers, too. I have a unique perspective on them, having worked for them, with them and now suing them, and they are part of the problem.

I'm not saying all lawyers are bad, but they are all part of the same system and in some ways are all limited. Their investment in law school and their legal career means they are less likely to take risks or to lower their rates. And sometimes you have to hire them, because they have specialized knowledge.

Most of them are leveraging paralegals like me to do all the work, and paralegals are tired of them, too. I am an experienced paralegal and I can tell you that most of them are terrible, very expensive, don't listen, are arrogant beyond comprehension, and often don't actually know what they are talking about.

I saw this over and over in the Great Recession.

As a result, I think people are going to have to bypass them.

I recently interviewed for a job with a law firm in Phoenix. These people were desperate for help. The interview was with a younger male attorney and an older attorney, the founder of the firm.

The interview was a strange mix of desperation and pressure. When I asked the junior attorney if he ever took time off, he started talking about how busy (aka important) he was and how he's a workaholic.

The guy was an arrogant jerk. I told them point blank that I am not interested in grinding 60 hours a week. The two of them were stunned that a woman, who in their view should be begging for the job, told them that she doesn't want to work 60 hours a week.

Of course, there were the fake reassurances that if the work is done you don't need to be here, but we all know employers lie to you up front and then change the rules. I'm not falling for that, either. We're going to have everything hammered out on the front end and in writing because I don't believe you.

I never heard from them again. Rejection is God's protection!

Now, obviously that's just one interview but I'll bet this has happened to you or someone you know.

American workplaces are parasitic and they drain us of our life force, and now that people are saying NO MORE, it's creating all sorts of bizarre outcomes.

I talked about this in another blog, but these people who are formerly powerful people are losing access to you and your valuable resources, and they just don't know what to do.

You can tell how valuable you are to them just by looking at the level of anger they express publicly about you. "People don't want to work anymore" and that kind of bullshit narrative is just showing us how important we are to them.

You see, we were all told that we were expendable, meanwhile they were making a lot of money off of us. And we know that now and have pushed back.

And they are pissed, so they do all sorts of bizarre stuff to try to corral everyone back into the old paradigm where they had control.

They are creating fake job postings for jobs that they have no intention of ever filling, using job postings to gather information about candidates, salary ranges and mining for other data and lots of other strange things.

I suspect the job websites are just huge data mining operations and that they are selling job search data. I wouldn't be surprised if they were all fake.

I know this is kind of a tangent, but it does tie in with the point of this blog post.

As a paralegal, it has become obvious to me that working for lawyers is not going to work for me.

And I would extend that to people representing themselves. If you must hire a lawyer, hire a female lawyer. If you can't afford a lawyer, consider hiring a paralegal to help you navigate the process, or hire a paraprofessional to represent you, if you can.

Paralegals will increasingly be competing with lawyers going forward. They are the ones doing all the work the lawyer charges $500 an hour for.

I have a master's degree and two other degrees and extensive experience, and I don't want to make $40K for the rest of my life. I have my own educational investment and loans to pay, and I'm tired of lawyers controlling how much I earn.

The good news is that things are changing, and the legal profession will shift with or without attorneys. The LLLP program in Arizona is a perfect example of how the legal system is going to bypass lawyers.

I personally am not wild about getting an LLLP license at this point, I had a Certified Legal Document Preparer license for a couple of years, and people didn't want to pay for that either. My work would either be devalued because I was not an attorney, or people still couldn't afford $75 an hour.

Aside from that, I anticipate lawyers filing more unauthorized practice of law complaints against paralegals to retaliate.

I expect that my perspective will soften as time goes on, but I would rather influence the discussion from the outside, whatever that looks like.

And that doesn't mean that these options will not be good for some other people, either. But we'll see what happens.