Portia Porter Esq. - Can You Stiff Your Divorce Lawyer: Tales of How Cunning Clients Can Get Free Legal Work, As Told by an Experienced Divorce Attorney

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My friends who are divorce lawyers, though, did not get distracted at all. They erupted in outrage at my proposal to betray the location of vulnerable chinks in the bill-payment armor of our profession:

We ought to report you to the State Bar for aiding and abetting fraud, threatened my friends who are lawyers.

Its interference with the contracts, what you are doing. You want the profession to suffer for your private amusement!

Listen to me, I said, Have you read Getting to Yes, in law school... but they did not want to get to anything.

You are betraying our professional guild! complained my divorce lawyer peers, Its an ethics breach! Its treachery! We are writing you up!

Divorce lawyers can be a hard-headed (as well as hard-hearted) bunch.

It seemed my professional peers were seriously determined to report me, even though they at least dimly realized that what I proposed was neither unethical nor illegal. Maybe my mother was right, and my divorce lawyer friends are not, in the end, really my friends.

My mother, always dependable, said: No, I get it. Its like... imagine you are minding a gas station and three masked teenagers come in and try to rob you for the thirty bucks thats in the register.

Exactly, I said.

And then they get all spooked and shoot the rusty rifle they dug up somewhere and smash two thousand dollars-worth of glass, and one of them shoots another in the leg, and then they all end up behind bars.

Yep, I said. Sort of like Donny.

I remember Donny, said my mother.... And you feel bad for these no-goodniks because they are like kids and do not know what they were doing.

I was not sure if she was still with the metaphor or actually talking about Donny. In any event, I was glad that I did not have to resort to the hopelessly careworn example of the hapless bull in the china shop.

Right on, I said. Donny. I wrote about him. But its upsetting to the Union.

Write it anyway! she said. People are going to stiff divorce lawyers either way; always have. This might at least guide them to do less damage to themselves?... Tell the Union to like it or lump it!

Well, dear reader, although the lawyers guild will have to lump it, I avidly hope that you like it.

I am going to open your eyes to how to stiff a lawyer successfully.

Yes, a lawyer.

Doubtless to the eternal displeasure of my legal colleagues, I will tell you the tricks, all illustrated by stories based on my own experience as a divorce lawyer. You may not want to stiff your lawyer, but many people do. In any event, I daresay that you will find what follows to be both surprising and amusing. When you have no experience of stiffing lawyers, it is easy to worry about trivial matters and unlikely complications.

This is a lawyer, after all, you might think to yourself. If I stiff a trained and licensed lawyer, whats to stop my legal beagle from suing me for unpaid fees and getting them? With collection costs. And penalties. And what do you call that punitive thingtriple damages?

Do not let your imagination run amok, entertaining visions of bankruptcy court and debtors prison. None of it will happen. Worrying about such unlikely outcomes only distracts from your real problems.