Goodman - Dont go to jail!: Saul Goodmans guide to keeping the cuffs off

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Saul Goodman, at your service. Have a seat; lets talk about how Ill extract you from the fresh pickle youve nestled yourself into.

Imagine that the preceding statement was accompanied by a firm, warm handshake. An old friend strength grip with reliable business acquaintance brevity. Thats what youd get if you walked into the air-conditioned offices of Saul Goodman & Associates in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a refuge from the dry hellscape outside.

In this topsy-turvy economy of ours, Im always open to new business. I figured Id take a different lawyer tack and put something out there that tells prospective clients more about how I might approach the job of representing you, sprinkling in a few of my perspectives on life, the law, and everything.

Starting with: privilege. Its a heavy wordgot a lot of baggage on it these days. In the context of the attorney-client relationship, though, privilege is a wonderful thing. It means you get to tell me whats going on without having to worry if its ugly or sounds bad or feels more rotten than that jack-o-lantern your neighbors left out past New Years. Im here for immoral support, and that means breaking down your case and looking at all its unattractive parts so that we can be honest about what needs to be done. Its all between us, our little Cone of Silence.

This, what youre looking at right now? This is privileged. Unless you picked this book up at the library, it counts as the proverbial dollar in my pocket, and everything I tell you from here on out is just between us. Your secrets are safe with me under threat of disbarmentand as long as youre listening, Im going to use this opportunity to give you a picture of why I do what I do and how this advice might be of use to you in the future.

Dont get me wrong; Im damned sure not trying to make a lawyer out of you. There are too many creatures swimming, floating, and sinking in the attorney pond already. If anything, we could stand to fish out a few whose lack of legal talent could be better misused elsewhere.

I cant provide some kind of encyclopedic look at the legal system, either. Forget the lawyer pondthe legal system is a vast, endless ocean filled with sharks and krill and unrecycled bottles of Diet Coke. And as pretty as a tropical fish might be, most of what youre going to catch out there is your boring, run-of-the-mill tuna. Nobody wants to look too closely at those floppy things except other fishermenor, in this case, other lawyers. What I can do is bottle up the most useful parts of that deep, expansive body of knowledge and offer you a few delicious drops of my legal cod liver oil. You know, for your health.

Were I a poet, I would pen this as a real guidenot just to surviving, but thriving, reviving, and moving on. I mean, if I wanted to get really Pollyanna about this grinding monster of a legal system that chews people into pieces and spits them into sunless cells every day of the week, I could say its about renewal! Renewal of the righteous rule of law, each and every day! Renewal of the person! In some cases: yay, prison! Get renewed and ready for your life after correction via the healing power of twenty-three-hour lockdown in cellblock eight!

But you and I, we know things dont work that way.

That doesnt mean Im ever going to advise anyone to give up. In this quiver full of legal arrows on my back there isnt a single dud labeled, Accept Defeat. Not my style. No ones looking for an attorney like that, anyway. A lot of people have walked through my office doors trapped inside some kind of glass box of empty desperationI dont think a single one of them was looking for a guy who would say, Yeah, this sucks, plead guilty, tee times in thirty. Legal practices are chockfull of those types. Weve all seen them: they work in big, shiny office buildings and have junior attorneys handling all the grunt work while they lean back in their ergonomic office chairs and rub magazine samples of Davidoffs Cool Water onto their wrists.

Oh, fine. In fairness, no working lawyer would do that anyway, as it would ensure disbarment faster than a buttered bullet can pierce a slice of toast. Thats not to say they dont try.

Anyway, Ive filled this treasure chest of a book with thoughts for your application and enjoyment; youre welcome. The law itself is a disorienting clown show of the random and the insanely, restrictively organized. If Im being truthfuland I am, as you grant me a little reverse privilege here and will thus keep everything I say between usIm amazed the law works as well as it does sometimes. It can feel like the legal system is just one seemingly pointless new statute or one crazed Supreme Court ruling away from completely falling apart.

Look at some of the nutso laws that are still in place: in New Mexico, theres still a law that says idiots cant vote. It was created more than one hundred years ago when assholes used the word idiot to describe people who had some kind of learning disability, but its still on the books. Its not enforced now, though, because imposing the modern definition of idiot would impede a majority of our beloved brethren from exercising their civic duty. In Massachusetts, there are still laws banning Quakers and witches. The state of Georgia has a law that criminalizes putting donkeys in bathtubs.

Im not licensed in Georgia, but if you go there with the intent of lighting some candles and letting poor Eeyore enjoy a therapeutic soak, Ill track down someone good to represent you. We wont let anyone stop you from keeping your ass clean.

The law can be completely bonkers, but it still works. Attorneys are one of the big reasons why. Were up there scurrying along the battlements and manning cannons and you can fill in some more military images if you want, because Im belaboring the point, which is: when you lawyer up, you have a kind of soldier on your side.

What youre reading doesnt detail legal strategies and it also doesnt delve into just how much slow, tedious, eye-shriveling work can go into this trade. If you hate mind-numbing forms, thorny contracts, and endless blocks of text that contain umpteen semicolons and only one period, never even for a moment consider going into law.

If were digging through discovery of the financial sort for one case, one day, we have to plow through countless pages of spreadsheet printouts trying to spot just one teeny-tiny set of specific numbers. We get all up in that haystack looking for a hay-colored needle. The next day, we could be reading police reports that manage to make a gruesome homicide sound dry and tedious. And we have to fill out forms and write letters galore pretty much every day. There was a kind of deliberate, serious TV show in the late 1970s about a law student, and it was titled The Paper Chase for a reason, because thats what we do. Sometimes I have nightmares Im trapped in a Sisyphian document review session, endlessly combing through the same box over and over again until paper cuts have rendered my fingerprints unrecognizable, my locked-jaw molars ground down to the gums.

This is one guys ad hoc look at how it works, from his own perspective. Im okay if it pisses you off a littlenot at me, necessarily, no, but at the way things work sometimes. And the way they dont. Sometimes the law doesnt quite serve everyone as it should. Too often, the law works against the regular guy. The working man. Average Joe Johnson and his garden ephemera store. Single-mom Suzy and her booming wedding photography business. Its set up to work to the states advantage. People laugh about attorneys who put their faces on bus benches and make flashy commercials, call us ambulance chasers or whateverbut we arent aiming at the country club set. Those people have white shoe firms on retainer, one quick phone call away. Small practices scrapping away are doing it for the folks who work in the country clubs. Who ride a bus or two to get to the daily grind. So thats where I put my faceright where those noble Americans can see it and rest their weary backs. Lawyers like me arent superheroes, no, but were doing a job plenty of other attorneys turn down in order to pursue the scent of that sweet, sweet corporate green. The system sucks and someone has to fight it on your behalf. Im that guy.