Book Review : I’ll have the law on you: The selected letters of John Fytit

LawTalk - the official magazine of the New Zealand Law Society.

20 April 2016

I’ll have the law on you: The selected letters of John Fytit

By Paul Brennan

Queensland lawyer Paul Brennan has done his bit to show that lawyers have a well-developed sense of humour. His character John Fytit began appearing in Mr Brennan’s legal cartoons in 1992. Fytit developed, moving from a bitter sole practitioner to become the confident advice-giver in a fictional legal Agony Aunt column which appeared in the blog 101 reasons to kill all the lawyers(“I didn’t want to depress the entire legal profession by having 1001”). Paul Brennan has now decided that it is time to kill off his hero, and John Fytit has passed on at the age of 51. His selected letters deliver advice on a diverse range of matters including failure to recognise a client, being put out to grass, the do’s and don’ts of gossiping, smart phones and the law, and challenging a will.

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Law & Disorder Law Student Cartoons

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Books about law and lawyers

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FAQ

Q. Will it give me an insight into my lawyer husband?

A. No, nothing that you have not suspected over the years.

Q. Do you do exchanges?

A. No, you married him.

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Book Review : Insufficient Legal Content

For lawyers, the accusation of "insufficient legal content" is up there with being no good in bed and a lousy driver.

A letter from the Law Society Gazette, Law Society of Ireland highlights the traditional cunning in writing long and turgid legal books to avoid scrutiny...

Book review – I’ll have the law on you, the selected letters of John Fytit

Thank you for sending us a copy of your book so that the Gazette Editorial Board could consider it for possible review.

The board decided at its meeting today not to assign your book for review, as it was deemed to have insufficient legal content for the Gazette readership.

Yours etc.

Reply :

Have the solicitors of Ireland not got enough legal content of their own to be going on with without making demands on mine?

This sounds like the work of some fresh-faced chancer in the Society’s marketing department, eager for promotion who has convinced the Board that Irish solicitors want legal content.

Unless this is some sort of new EU quota, I am afraid that this is all the legal content .........

Regards

Paul Brennan

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The Great Unread

As a law student, I spent many hours reading law books. It was the longest week of my life.

Then I discovered that law students don’t read law books. They are to be carried, taken home once, then placed on bookshelves and finally sold to next year’s law students in pristine condition.

For lawyers, unlike participants in the four-minute mile or the Tour de France, taking shortcuts is understandable when reading traditional law books. But still, we legal authors find it difficult not to include everything that we know and a great deal that we don’t know.

I wanted to write law books that people including lawyers would have the satisfaction of reading cover to cover. I was prepared to take the risk that they would discover that my books were total rubbish as opposed to traditional law books where they could never be sure. This new approach called for law books to be either shorter or more interesting. 

I soon found that I could leave out a few hundred pages, and readers either didn’t notice or didn’t mind. In my first book “Law for IT Professionals” I was complimented by one reviewer (there was only one) for summarising the rest of the law in eighteen pages, or was it thirteen.

Other legal authors found that my brief and short (“BS”) approach to law suited them too and cut hundreds of pages from their titles. They found as I did that they were far easier to carry around and introduce into conversations.

One disappointment is that the second-hand market in short law books is disappointing. On one occasion, I happened to be in Dymocks in Sydney and on requesting my own book (posing as a discerning reader) I was told, “You are in luck, they are now fifty per cent off.”

(c) Paul Brennan 2015. All rights reserved. 

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Employees, “Pick up your banner and move forward...”

Almost ten years ago, I established Employee Legal Awareness Day. This year, it was mentioned by the United Nations (slightly) and various other organisations and companies around the world.

One website suggested that the day could be used by employees for protest and street demonstrations. Although this is not quite what I had in mind, it is probably the sort of encouragement that propelled lawyer, Fidel Castro to his destiny. 

We have already started planning next year. Will the Soviet Union be turning up? I don’t think so. Why do you ask?

(c) Paul Brennan 2015. All rights reserved. 

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Employee Legal Awareness Day takes place each year on February 13^th. It is to emphasize the importance of legal education for employees and small businesses to reduce their risk of legal problems. Comrades (with or without banners) welcome. For more information contact Paul Brennan at info@brennanlaw.com.au.

Robots to Replace Young Lawyers by 2030

A report claims that robots will replace young lawyers by 2030.  

Despite Moore’s Law, to create a robot that knows everything is far too ambitious. I suggest that they start by replacing sole practitioners and work their way up to young lawyers.

Legal robots (“Law-bots”) would offer solutions to the many problems that have beset clients for millennia. For instance:

1. Law-bots could be programmed to have a sense of humour.

2. Airborne Law-bots called “Drones” could attend the scene of legal arguments to quickly resolve legal disputes. The prospect of more than one Drone turning up, some equipped with armaments, would need to be thought through. 

3. Law-bots could be programmed to always say yes to business deals. There would need to be the necessary adjustment to professional insurance contributions and an increase in Litigation-bots to deal with the fall out.

4. Trial by combat could be reintroduced with 300 lb Law-bots acting as champions. 

5. Judges would delight in a volume dial/stop button for Trial Attorney-bots.

6. Judge-bots could be programmed not to listen without nodding off.

7. Lawyers could offer value by diversifying their product offering. From a superior Rolex-bot with gold trim for expensive disputes to the Home Law-bot dealing with domestic arguments and folded away when not in use, even doubling as a dishwasher.

There would be female F-Law-bots to demonstrate the profession’s commitment to diversity and equal opportunity. However, they would not be programmed to wash up, or collect the dry cleaning to prevent any claims of Bot-Abuse. 

Above all Legalbotics would offer substantial savings e.g. In-house Law-bots would not need five star hotels and share options.

Law-bots are an opportunity for lawyers to relaunch their brand and create a new image which would make legal jokes a thing of the past. 

This is our chance to throw off the glasses, the comb over and release the Dalek, or indeed the R2-D2 within us.

(c) Paul Brennan 2015. All rights reserved. 

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Sex in the Dock - The Lady Chatterley’s Lover Trial

In 1960 at the Old Bailey, Penguin faced prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act for its publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence who had died in 1930.

In the book, Lady Chatterley has an affair with her husband’s gamekeeper as her husband is unable to have sexual intercourse due to a WW1 injury.

Did the book tend to deprave and corrupt? If so, was its publication 'for the public good' on the grounds of its literary merits?

Apart from the “f” word being used 30 times, the Prosecutor listed sexual intercourse taking place “thirteen times” including in “her husband’s house,…a hut,…the undergrowth,…when stark naked and dripping with raindrops…" He concluded, “And finally…we have it all over again in the attic in a Bloomsbury boarding-house.”

The Prosecutor asked, “Would you approve of your… young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book?... Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or servants to read?”

The Defence said that society cannot fix its standards by what is suitable for a 14-year-old.

Over a six-day trial there were a number of witnesses, including:

1. Author Rebecca West who gave evidence that the book had literary merit, but was badly written by a man who had no sense of humour and no background of education in his home.  

2. The Bishop of Woolwich who agreed that Christians ought to read it. This led to the headline in the evening papers, “A Book all Christians should read”.

The Defence contended that Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra may as well have been a “story of a sex-starved man copulating with an Egyptian Queen.”

The Judge summed up suggesting that the jury think of “factory girls reading in their lunchtime.”

After a six-day trial, the Jury found Penguin not guilty.

(c) Paul Brennan 2015. All rights reserved. 

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What type of degree is best for a legal career?

How to Get Stuffed

I learnt something interesting the other day. Apparently, the LL.B (Hons) law degree is hopelessly out of date when compared with the highly complex and totally cool Juris Doctor law degree that my son has just started. I am so pleased that he felt able to share this with me and his mother who was also hoodwinked into taking the LL.B (Hons) degree.

I must concede, who would want the indecipherable “LL.B (Hons)” after their name when they can have a title which incorporates the word “doctor” - an acknowledged babe magnet.

Of course, having been sold a pup several decades ago, it is too late to try and get my money back as the University of London is probably long gone by now.

Looking at the syllabus of the Juris Doctor I note with some relief that they still teach contract law, because if they had got rid of that half my practice would have gone.

Note:

(i)                   The University of London does continue and has on public display Jeremy Bentham (author, jurist, philosopher and legal and social reformer), who died and was stuffed (possibly by his parents) in 1832 after making some injudicious comment about the LL.B (Hons) degree. Here is a photograph ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham.

(ii)  LL.B is short for Legum Baccalaureus meaning load of old cobblers in Latin.

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# 44. The Twelve

The Twelve


Lawyers are hated for being arrogant, pompous, aggressive, tactless, confrontational, pedantic, expensive, unscrupulous, ruthless, negative, devious and slow.
For many centuries, lawyers have been tight lipped about these 12 legal characteristics or “the 12” as they are known, but many now admit to feeling pressured by clients and others to live up to such a high expectation.
Lawyers have come to resent the daily drudge of being right all the time and find themselves bucking tradition by speaking to their staff normally rather than in the more customary “irritated” tone of voice.
“Sometimes, I have what my secretary calls a “normal day”, said one lawyer, “staff found it strange, at first”.
A recent study has found that lawyers are living off a reputation earned centuries ago and many, now, rely on their secretaries to add the sort of unpleasantness normally expected of lawyers. However, without Law School training, many secretaries struggle to meet such an exacting standard. Clients, who believe that their lawyers are too arrogant to see them, would be shocked to learn that it is a fear of being found out that is driving lawyers into isolation. However, the cracks are starting to appear. “ I find my lawyer quite nice”, said one client who did not wish to be named.
Senior lawyers blame legal education. “They come out of law school, they don’t know how to behave and would not know a Res Ipsa Loquitur if it hit them on the back of the head”, said one Managing Partner of a large law firm, “We have become so concerned that we have decided to take legal education in house. Basically, clients do not want advice, which is easy to follow, they can get that anywhere”.
Top Legal bodies believe that increasing demand for lawyers has flooded the profession with people who cannot be trusted to display the right attitude. While stressing the importance of women in the legal community a spokesman said, “They made a promising start in the 1980’s and we had hopes of adding “scary” to the list. However, while they have an excellent command of the 12, they have developed a less than obvious style, which has made them approachable and that is the slippery slope”.
The profession has turned to training organizations which have demonstrated success with medical, dental and other receptionists. One legal spokesman said, “We were interested to know how receptionists are able to generate such aggression and ill will among clients and patients with such minimal interaction”.
With lawyers in disarray, some accountants have seized the opportunity to develop their own 12 with a view to increasing their charge out rates. One accountant said, “We have been working on “pedantic and slow” for quite a while, however we are now ready to tackle “expensive” and “negative”. With “boring”, “incredibly tight” and “no sense of humour” under our belts we only need 5, or is that 4, more”.


(c) Paul Brennan 2010. 

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