Sucker Law

The Sucker Law firm, was actually short for Sucker, Liar, Bungler, and Cheat. In the law world, though, they were generally referred to as “those assholes over at Sucker,” or just “Sucker.” Sucker was infamous in a world where infamy was pretty much the standard. Where other law firms would manipulate damning evidence to make it look less damning, or try to get it excluded on technical grounds, Sucker attorneys would literally manufacture exculpatory evidence for their clients. You may wonder how any lawyer could get away with something like that. In a world, though, where most cases settle out of court, there was little danger of Sucker’s contempt for the federal rules of evidence being exposed for what it was. This danger was diminished even further by the fact that Sucker specialized in representing colleges and universities. Mostly, they defended these institutions against discrimination lawsuits from students and faculty who rarely had enough money to see a case all the way to trial and frequently had to pull out even before a satisfactory settlement could be reached. That meant Sucker rarely had to face the possibility of exposure, and so far, had managed to avoid exposure even in those few instances where that possibility had loomed threateningly.

The culture at Sucker was, to put it mildly, pretty nasty. Law firms in general are not warm, fuzzy places to work, but Sucker set a new standard of misery for its attorneys. They used every trick in the book, padding hours, overstaffing, making sure that Sucker himself was assigned to every single case they took on so that the firm could bill his hourly rate, in addition to the lower rates of the other attorneys assigned to the cases. Sucker excelled in the creation of what was known within the firm as “fake motions,” or motions that had no chance of being granted, but which provided unparalleled opportunities for padding clients’ bills. Sucker held the record for firms in the tri-state area for number of documents filed in a case with over a thousand documents in what should have been a straightforward discrimination suit, you know, the kind of suit where you had maybe a hundred docs filed at the most.

Sucker did well for a long time. They made money hand over fist. Jock Sucker had discovered, you see, that while personal injury cases were where the big awards were to be had, they were also both costly and risky. Companies tended to spare no expense in defending themselves and going up against them, even for a stellar graduate from a top-tier law school, could involve years of hard work with no payout whatever at the end. Add to that the complication that Sucker wasn’t a stellar graduate of a top-tier law school, but had graduated near the bottom of his class at the now defunct for-profit Louisville Law Academy, and plaintiffs’ personal injury law was simply out of his league.

On the other hand, Sucker discovered quite by accident, that the one place where even the most feeble-minded attorney could clean up was in representing universities in discrimination suits. Like corporations, universities always had their own in-house counsel. Unlike corporations, though, universities seemed to have no standards whatever in terms of who they hired for these positions. They paid less than in-house counsel for corporations (which in turn paid less than any actual law firm) and so, in the world of law, where money is the standard for everything, in-house counsel for universities tended to be the real bottom of the legal barrel. Everyone knew this, of course, but few people worried about it because they figured that any case that the in-house counsel couldn’t handle themselves, would be farmed out to outside counsel, whom, it was assumed, would be more competent.

The only flaw in this system was that the in-house counsel were the people who secured the outside counsel, and being the legal-losers they tended to be, they were unusually subject to obsequious flattery and tended to hire outside counsel based on how effective such counsel was at flattering their egos rather than at winning cases. But again, this rarely mattered because most students and faculty simply couldn’t afford to see a case all the way to trial and so the legal ineptitude of both in-house and outside counsel rarely interfered with the system of law firms that represented colleges and universities bleeding these institutions of what little money they had.

And bleed they did. Most people are afraid of lawyers, even upper-level academic administrators and members of boards of trustees. These people tend to feel, a feeling reinforced by in-house counsel, that they don’t know anything about law. So, rather than keeping watch on what their in-house counsel were doing, they tended to give them an absolutely free rein, a situation exacerbated by the fact that most colleges and universities have legal insurance, so even if their annual legal bills were in the millions of dollars, they generally paid little attention to why. The fact that a law firm paid by the hour had no incentive ever actually to settle any lawsuit, seemed to escape the notice of academic administrators and legal insurance meant that they probably wouldn’t have cared much anyway at a time such as that in which our story is set, when enrollments were declining precipitously and filling seats was a far more urgent issue than reducing legal costs.

Everyone knows the saying that there is no honor among thieves. Few people realize, though, in our smash-and-grab society, that there isn’t much happiness either. Attorneys in general, and the attorneys at Sucker in particular, quickly learn, though few would admit it consciously to themselves, that happiness cannot be obtained by screwing over innocent people, (people who had already been screwed over pretty brutally by their employers), no matter how lavish a living one made doing it. So the attorneys at Sucker were mostly miserable, mostly in perpetual bad moods, and constantly sniping at one another.

They were making money, though. They were making money hand over fist and had been doing so for some time. The problem was that every time a Sucker attorney got away with some sort of fraud or other, the firm as a whole became cockier. That was its undoing. Like Icarus, Sucker ended up flying just a little higher than they should have understood they would be able to get away with. That is, everything was going along more or less fine, until the irresistible force of Jock Sukker’s love of money encountered the immoveable objects of Constance Alethea’s commitment to her vocation of teaching and the fact that she had unlimited free legal support in the form of her boyfriend, the obscure, but brilliantly talented plaintiff’s employment law attorney, James Justice.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When Whoretensia Lügnerin was assigned to defend Cliff Edge College against Constance’s charge of sex discrimination the firm was still doing well. True, they had lost a very high-profile academic freedom case, but they had not yet seen the mass exodus of clients they would later experience. In defense of the debacle Whoretensia made of Constance’s case, I am compelled to point out that she, Whoretensia was, like most attorneys, way overworked. She didn’t bother to do any research concerning whether Weasel’s depiction of Constance’s character and situation in the department was accurate. What attorney in Whoretensia’s position would have wanted to do that, anyway? Weasel’s depiction of Constance was a godsend. Here was an arrogant, bullying, uncollegial, piece of academic deadwood, the kind of “scholar” with which the academy was littered and whom humanity as a whole would be better off without. This was the image of Constance that Whoretensia, and the Sucker firm more generally, needed to promote to win the case, so why bother to do any actual research to determine whether this picture was accurate? There was little danger, after all, that it would ever be exposed as inaccurate, even if that were the case.

Or so it seemed, at the time, to Whoretensia.