Amy Lu's View

April 14 is Be Kind To Laywers Day.

Obviously, there is a favorite lawyer in my life, and I try to be kind to him every day–admittedly to varying degrees of success. (Although things have been going quite well for Chamy during lockdown, I’m sure in part because Chad has a “home office” space on an entirely different floor from where I spend most of the days. And we have a fully stocked bar.)

Speaking of our bar, and kindness, Chad just made me a Negroni while downstairs on an online geeking break.

“Lawyers are very important people to me.”

Janet Reno

Because I’m married to a lawyer, I’ve had the good fortune to meet, be friends with, and get drunk with, many lawyers. Simply put, they are almost always awesome. Sure, they’ll do some tedious deep conversational dives about things I don’t know or care about, but that’s just because I don’t know or care about what they’re talking about. I could easily list 10 popular conversational topics that I also don’t or care about, but don’t want to be a hater. I can also get bored when my librarian peeps get fixated on yapping about librarian life.

Chad is not sensitive about being a lawyer–he loves a good–or even a mediocore–laywer joke as much as the next person. Actually, he loves them more. He only gets really annoyed at other lawyers who are incompetent, needlessly adversarial or jackassish, or write poorly and use unnecessary “lawyer language.”

(I will try to refrain from too much bitching about what bothers me about popular misconceptions about the library world, but here are my top ones:

• Librarians just know shit (we know how to find shit out)
• The interwebs killed Dewey Decimal (not related–Dewey Decimal is an address for a book, doesn’t matter how you look that address up–card catalog, Google, seance)
• Libraries are quiet

And this isn’t a misconception, but I HATE it when things are alphabetized by articles–I’m looking at you, The Current!)

Some commons misconceptions I, as a non-lawyer, have observed about lawyers and the law:

• Lawyers are not all fabulously rich
• Lawyers are not all extremely arrogant (at least not because they are lawyers)
• All states have “no-fault” divorce, so you don’t have to prove any wrongdoing…the court doesn’t really care why you want a divorce or how much of an asshole you think your soon-to-be-ex is.
• “Fair” and “right” isn’t always the same thing as “legal.” The legal system is often about upholding larger societal principles and rules, even if you individually got screwed.

And “Harvey Birdman, Attorney At Law” is the best legal show ever, followed by “Boston Legal”–DENNY CRANE!