Quotes & Sayings About Good Lawyers

I am quite content to come home and go to Farming, be a select Man, and owe no Man any Thing but good Will. There I can get a little health and teach my Boys to be Lawyers. — John Adams

All real estate agents should be put on a decommissioned naval frigate which is then towed out into the deepest part of the Atlantic and sunk. It's rather unfortunate that, in recent years, real estate agents have become comedy betes-noires. Rather like lawyers or used car salesmen. Every time they mention their job they probably get people amusingly making the sign of the cross at them or are subjected to some good-natured, humorous ribbing. This has the effect of distorting what I'm trying to say here, which isn't in the nature of a smiling roll of the eyes and a "Tsk, real estate agents, eh?" but rather "All real estate agents should be put on a decommissioned naval frigate which is then towed out into the deepest part of the Atlantic and sunk. — Mil Millington

Emotions are reserved for juries and, in that case, a good lawyer can really lay them on when the time is right, better than the best Academy Award winning actor — Kenneth Eade

Criminal court is where bad people are on their best behavior. It's much more dangerous for lawyers and judges in family court, where good people are at their worst. — Richard Dooling

Good stories are not written by people who live in a city of dirty strip malls, forced to listen to the machinated opinions of lawyers, bean counters and statisticians ... Good stories strong enough to love are created by those brave enough to live. — Spencer Antle

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. — Sean Combs

It may, at first sight, be matter of surprise to the thoughtless few that Mr Brass, being a professional gentleman, should not have legally indicted some party or parties, active in the promotion of the nuisance, but they will be good enough to remember, that as Doctors seldom take their own prescriptions, and Divines do not always practise what they preach, so lawyers are shy of meddling with the Law on their own account: knowing it to be an edged tool of uncertain application, very expensive in the working, and rather remarkable for its properties of close shaving, than for its always shaving the right person. — Charles Dickens

If that makes your lawyers or managers happy, well, good for them. You still have a lot to worry about. — Tom Christiansen

I think you've got good people and bad people in everything you do. If you start making a big deal of it, then it's a problem. It's like in life. We've got bad doctors and lawyers. We've got bad priests! We don't target every priest and say he's bad. You have to go to church and you have to go see some doctors. Some people have to be good. — Master P

Murray observes further that we have entered a peculiar age, an age in which physicians and lawyers are more plentiful than good plumbers. — Leonard Sax

It is good to see women doctors and lawyers and executives. I can visualize a woman president. If I were British, I would have supported Margaret Thatcher. But no benefit to anyone can come from women serving in combat. — Jim Webb

Sometimes one of the justices, because they're, you know, they're brilliant lawyers themselves, can put the question in a particular way so that, even if you've prepared to talk about the topic, the question is put in such an excruciatingly difficult way that there's just no good way to handle it. — Donald Verrilli Jr.

He did what good lawyers always do. He shifted his argument in the direction his audience was already going. — Jeffrey Toobin

The opinion of all lawyers, the unanimous cry of the nation, and the good of the state, are in themselves a law. — Voltaire

I cannot write as well as some people; my talent is in coming up with good stories about lawyers.That is what I am good at. — John Grisham

At its core, bitcoin is a smart currency designed by very forward-thinking engineers. It eliminates the need for banks, gets rid of credit card fees, currency exchange fees, money transfer fees, and reduces the need for lawyers in transitions ... all good things. — Peter Diamandis

Despite his elegant appearance, Mr. Gweta's most striking asset was his alluring personality. Professor Khupe had met few such men in his life. Their warmth made everyone feel like they were their best friend. They were good men. However, they tended to be morally ambidextrous. If a stranger confessed to having been involved in a horrible crime, they would reserve judgment until they found out whether the confessor was the victim or victimizer. Once they knew, they would immediately lend their sympathies to the confessor's position. Their worldview was simple. They supported the first person to confide in them. Such men made good lawyers. — Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

This was the difficulty with laws and with legal language: they used language which very few people, apart from lawyers, understood. Penal Codes, then, were all very well, but she wondered whether it might not be simpler to rely on something like the Ten Commandments, which, with a bit of modernisation, seemed to give a perfectly good set of guidelines for the conduct of one's life, — Alexander McCall Smith

Songwriting is a craft. Writing good songs on a a consistent basis doesn not happen spontaneously. In fact, most of our best songwriters learned to write good songs by writing a lot of not so good ones. Education matters in songwriting, just as it matters for physicists, chemists, doctors, lawyers and MBAs. Education lays the foundataion on which to build experience. — Michael Kosser

I played a lawyer once, and I had about three or four weeks before we shot, so I was able to go to court and watch lawyers at work. Some were good lawyers and some were bad lawyers, but it was essential. The more time you have to prepare, the better. Always. — Ben Bass

And the lawyers! Of course, I say it's a pretty good thing what happened to them, because it was a bad thing for them, which couldn't help to be a good thing for everybody else. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Americans have grown a great deal more realistic about lawyers and the law. I think that's all for the good. A lot of people will say to you these days, 'If you are looking for justice, don't go to a courtroom.' That's just a more realistic perspective on what happens in the legal process. — Scott Turow

Battledore and shuttlecock's a wery good game, vhen you an't the shuttlecock and two lawyers the battledores, in which case it gets too exciting to be pleasant. — Charles Dickens

I'm amazed at how [police officers] don't want to come to court. They want to make the case and they want it to get prosecuted, but they don't want to come testify. Sorry, but the ultimate way of writing your report is telling it to a jury. When I was a defense lawyer, I used to think all police officers were liars, but now I find that there are only a few. Most of them are pretty straightforward and do a good job. But there are some, and if I know that they are liars or I know they tend to exaggerate, I try to take that into consideration when I'm dealing with their cases. — Mark Baker

When it comes to arrogance, power, and lack of accountability, journalists are probably the only people on the planet who make lawyers look good. — Steven Brill

People expect Byzantine, Machiavellian logic from politicians. But the truth is simple. Trial lawyers learn a good rule: 'Don't decide what you don't have to decide.' That's not evasion, it's wisdom. — Mario Cuomo

To the best of my recollection, I became a philosopher because my parents wanted me to become a lawyer. It seems to me, in retrospect, that there was much to be said for their suggestion. On the other hand, many philosophers are quite good company; the arguments they use are generally better than the ones that lawyers use; and we do get to go to as many faculty meetings as we like at no extra charge. — Jerry Fodor

Ah . . . listen. It's better for your case, and your fancy lawyers would back me up, if you and I aren't seen running around together. Primary investigator and defendant. It doesn't look good." "You mean I can't - " Mavis shut her mouth, regrouped. "All right then, we won't go running around together. Leonardo can work here. Roarke won't mind, will you?" "On the contrary." He took a satisfied drag on his cigarette. "I think it's a perfect solution." "One big happy family," Eve mumbled. "The primary, the defendant, and the tenant of the murder scene, who also happens to be the victim's former lover and the defendant's current. Are you all insane? — J.D. Robb

I may have been prejudiced against lawyer members of Congress, having run against one or two and having been threatened politically by a few others, and also because my own professional background was academic, principally in the liberal arts. Good lawyers, I asserted in campaigns, can be found in the yellow pages of the telephone books. Good historians, or political and social philosophers, are not so easily found or classified. — Eugene McCarthy

I think that the difference between 'The Sopranos' and the shows that came before it was that it was really personal. There had been a lot of dramas, a lot of really good ones, a lot of really bad ones, but they were always franchise shows about cops, or doctors, or lawyers. They weren't about the writer himself. — David Chase

All the lawyers and the business stuff is work, but actually creating stuff isn't work. It's good effort. It's hard work. But, it's not work. It doesn't feel like work because the result is very rewarding. — David Copperfield

The young bloods of the South; sons of planters, lawyers about towns, good billiard players and sportsmen, men who never did any work and never will. War suits them.. They are splendid riders, first rate shots and utterly reckless. These men must all be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace. — William Tecumseh Sherman

Lawyers rarely test their power, or the power they promote, against this simple pragmatic question: "Will it do good?" When challenged about the expanding reach of the law, the lawyer answers, "Why not? — Lawrence Lessig

Federal authorities have informed Martha Stewart's lawyers she will be indicted for her role in the ImClone insider trading scandal. Good news for Martha - stripes are back in this year. — Craig Kilborn

But I have a flash of Good News from the Police Atrocity front, which is heating up in Denver. ... Stand back! Good News is rare in the Criminal Justice System, but every once in a while you find it, and this is one of those times. To wit: the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers has formally entered the Appeals trial of young Lisl Auman - the girl who remains locked up in a cell at the Colorado State Prison for the Rest of Her Life with No Possibility of Parole for a bogus crime she was never even Accused of committing. She is a living victim of a cold-blooded political trial that will cast a long shadow on Denver for many years to come. Lisl is the only person ever convicted in the United States for Felony Murder who was in police custody when the crime happened. — Hunter S. Thompson

Of course, you can't literally think like this all the time, or you'd drive yourself crazy. And so for most lawyers, a house is, finally, just a house, something to fill and fix and repaint and empty. But there's a period in which every law student - every good law student - finds that their vision shifts, somehow, and realizes that the law is inescapable, that no interaction, no aspect of daily life, escapes its long, graspy fingers. A street becomes a shocking disaster, a riot of violations and potential civil lawsuits. A marriage looks like a divorce. The world becomes temporarily unbearable. He — Hanya Yanagihara

Cagey trial lawyers have figured out there's a pretty good likelihood their case - no matter what its merit - will literally get its day in court because of favorable judges. — Dennis Hastert

If you have a lawyer, sometimes you can get out of trouble. I've gotten into a lot of trouble because I didn't have a lawyer. I've also had some bad lawyers, too. But the good ones, the ones I liked, they became me. They became whatever situation I was involved in. When I felt pain, so did they. When I succeeded, so did they. They became me. They became whatever the situation was that they became involved with. — Mike Tyson

The older lady harrumphed. "I warned you, daughter. This scoundrel Hades is no good. You could've married the god of doctors or the god of lawyers, but noooo. You had to eat the pomegranate." "Mother - " "And get stuck in the Underworld!" "Mother, please - " "And here it is August, and do you come home like you're supposed to? Do you ever think about your poor lonely mother?" "DEMETER!" Hades shouted. — Rick Riordan

The purpose of the University of Washington cannot be to produce black lawyers for blacks, Polish lawyers for Poles, Jewish lawyers for Jews, Irish lawyers for Irish. It should be to produce good lawyers for Americans and not to place First Amendment barriers against anyone. — William O. Douglas

If your lawyers tell you that you have a very good case, you should settle immediately. — Richard Ingrams

Freud pointed out, in his Problem of Lay Analysis , that it is extremely unlikely that a young man who would throw the best years of his life into the cloistered drudgery of getting an M.D. degree, could possibly make a good psychoanalyst; so he preferred to look for young analysts among the writers, the lawyers, the mothers of families, those who had chosen human contact. But in their economic wisdom, the Psychoanalytic Institute of Vienna (and New York) overruled him. — Paul Goodman

A whore should be judged by the same criteria as other professionals offering services for pay - such as dentists, lawyers, hairdressers, physicians, plumbers, etc. Is she professionally competent? Does she give good measure? Is she honest with her clients?
It is possible that the percentage of honest and competent whores is higher than that of plumbers and much higher than that of lawyers. And enormously higher than that of professors. — Robert A. Heinlein

Patent lawyers had only lately ascended to the aristocracy of the American bar. Trained not just as lawyers but as scientists or engineers, and working in small, specialized firms, they were at one time rudely dismissed by corporate lawyers as gearheads in green eyeshades, not good enough at science to be scientists, nor sufficiently talented at law to be real lawyers. Then came the intellectual property revolution of the 1990s, and these onetime outcasts found themselves ruling the last vibrant corner of the American economy. — Paul Goldstein

We are very good judges for the mistakes of others, but very good defence lawyers for our own mistakes. — Nicky Gumbel

Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters need worry less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship. — Neil Postman

A bottle of Stag's Leap Artemis Cab was open and hardly touched. That would be Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, thought Sunny, not to be confused with Stags' Leap Winery or the Stags Leap District. How many hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of dollars did the lawyers get to sort out that tangle of suits and countersuits? And, in the end, it all came down to the placement of an apostrophe. The place where one stag leaps versus the place where multiple stags leap versus the declarative statement that multiple stags are inclined to leap around these few acres where very good Cabernet Sauvignon grapes are grown. — Nadia Gordon

Let's be clear: all professions look bad in the movies. And there's a good reason for this. Movies don't portray career paths, they conscript interesting lifestyles to serve a plot. So lawyers are all unscrupulous and doctors are all uncaring. Psychiatrists are all crazy, and politicians are all corrupt. All cops are psychopaths, and all businessmen are crooks. Even moviemakers come off badly: directors are megalomaniacs, actors are spoiled brats. Since all occupations are portrayed negatively, why expect scientists to be treated differently? — Michael Crichton

Robert G. Ingersoll was a great man. a wonderful intellect, a great soul of matchless courage, one of the great men of the earth -- and yet we have no right to bow down to his memory simply because he was great. Great orators, great soldiers, great lawyers, often use their gifts for a most unholy cause. We meet to pay a tribute of love and respect to Robert G. Ingersoll because he used his matchless power for the good of man.

{Darrow's eulogy for Ingersoll at his funeral} — Clarence Darrow

What do you call 500 lawyers lying on the bottom of the Ocean? A good start.. — Danny DeVito

I like to be on TV when interviewers are good. I like it especially when it's live. When they can cut things, I don't like it as much. Sometimes they cut something and say, "Well, you would get in trouble, you would get a lawsuit." I tell them, "Well, I don't want my lawyers to be unemployed. — Karl Lagerfeld

There'll be lawyers in heaven before you see somethin' so good again. — Colum McCann

I love these members, they get up and say, 'Read the bill ... What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?' — John Conyers

Two-thirds of all preachers, doctors and lawyers are hanging on to the coat tails of progress, shouting, whoa! while a good many of the rest are busy strewing banana peels along the line of march. — Elbert Hubbard

good lawyers know the law and that great lawyers know the judge? — Ashwin Sanghi

Lawyers are the new three-button, white-collar, cuff-shooting cowboys. They fulfill all the cowboy criteria. Workingmen with arcane skills. They can be both good and bad, sheriffs and gunslingers. — A.A. Gill

We sometimes disputed, and very fond we were of argument, and very desirous of confuting one another, which disputatious turn, by the way, is apt to become a very bad habit, making people often extremely disagreeable in company by the contradiction that is necessary to bring it into practice; and thence, besides souring and spoiling the conversation, is productive of disgusts and, perhaps enmities where you may have occasion for friendship. I had caught it by reading my father's books of dispute about religion. Persons of good sense, I have since observed, seldom fall into it, except lawyers, university men, and men of all sorts that have been bred at Edinborough. — Benjamin Franklin

AS IT TURNED out, Rylann wasn't quite as good as she'd thought she was.
Over the last five years she'd prosecuted cases, she'd become quite skilled at reading defendants and their lawyers at the initial court
appearance. Given Quinn's obvious nervousness, she'd originally predicted that his lawyer would be calling her within two weeks to negotiate a
plea agreement.
Instead, it took him two weeks and three days to make that call. — Julie James

Today, lawyers are attacking more; they're attacking everything. A good example is the O.J. Simpson case. — Joseph Wambaugh

If we're picking people to draw out of their own conscience and experience a 'new' Constitution, we should not look principally for good lawyers. We should look to people who agree with us. When we are in that mode, you realize we have rendered the Constitution useless. — Antonin Scalia

Show me why your regulation of culture is needed. Show me how it does good. And until you can show me both, keep your lawyers away. — Lawrence Lessig

It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers. — Charles Dickens

Persons of good sense, I have since observed, seldom fall into disputation, except lawyers, university men, and men of all sorts that have been bred at Edinburgh. — Benjamin Franklin

People make this kind of money. Lawyers are just good at figuring out how to siphon a piece of it their way. — Elizabeth Camden

In my opinion, legal training only makes a man more incompetent in questions that require knowledge of another kind. People talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales by a blind Justice. No man can judge what is good evidence on any particular subject, unless he knows that subject well. A lawyer is no better than an old woman at a post-mortem examination. — George Eliot

Lawyers are very, very good at keeping you out of prison, but they will sacrifice your reputation and credibility to do so. — Barney Frank

Many of the points made by the antiwar movement have been consciously assimilated by the Pentagon and its lawyers and advisers. Precision weaponry is good in itself, but its ability to discriminate is improving and will continue to improve. Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in themselves, but when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect. — Christopher Hitchens

I think functioning as a business manager can be a hindrance to having a real dialogue with the artist. I do think that artists need good lawyers and accountants, because they're dealing with serious money. But an artist who stands behind a manager? That's a little different. I think that can be a bad buffer. — Larry Gagosian

As I believe I have said, everyone in prison is an innocent man. Oh, they read the scripture the way those holy rollers on TV read the Book of Revelations. They were the victims of judges with hearts of stone and balls to match, or incompetent lawyers, or police frame-ups, or bad luck. They read the scripture, but you can see a different scripture in their faces. Most cons are a low sort, no good to themselves or anyone else, and their worst luck was that their mothers carried them to term. — Stephen King

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. — Daniel H. Pink

There is more to American politics than fat cats and their political friends. There are serious-minded liberals who fight the good fight on many issues, ecologically oriented politicians who remain true to their cause, and honest people of every political stripe who are not beholden to any wealthy people. But there are not enough of them, and they are often worn down by the constant pressure from lobbyists, lawyers and conventional politicians. — G. William Domhoff

Yes, but bad language is bound to make in addition bad government, whereas good language is not bound to make bad government. That again is clear Confucius: if the orders aren't clear they can't be carried out. Lloyd George's laws were such a mess, the lawyers never knew what they meant. And Talleyrand proclaimed that they changed the meaning of words between one conference and another. The means of communication breaks down, and that of course is what we are suffering now. We are enduring the drive to work on the subconscious without appealing to the reason. They repeat a trade name with the music a few times, and then repeat the music without it so that the music will give you the name. I think of the assault. We suffer from the use of language to conceal thought and to withhold all vital and direct answers. There is the definite use of propaganda, forensic language, merely to conceal and mislead. — Ezra Pound

A nation not of men but of laws, intoned John Adams as he, among other lawyers, launched what has easily become the most demented society ever consciously devised by intelligent men. We are now enslaves by laws. We are governed by lawyers. We create little but litigate much. Our monuments are the ever-expanding prisons, where millions languish for having committed victimless crimes or for simply not playing the game of plausible deniability (aka lying) with a sufficiently good legal team. What began as a sort of Restoration comedy, The Impeachment of a President, on a frivolous, irrelevant matter, is suddenly turning very black indeed, and all our political arrangements are at risk as superstitious Christian fundamentalists and their corporate manipulators seem intent on overthrowing two presidential elections in a Senate trial. This is no longer comedy. This is usurpation. — Gore Vidal