Scripting News: Why lawyers are special

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Why lawyers are special

In a comment on yesterday's Lawyers essay, Dan Stoval says lawyers are "no better, no worse than any other profession."

Of course other professions and trades have unethical and incompetent people, and of course there are lawyers who are principled and competent, and there are lawyers who are good some days and bad others.

But -- people are scared of "outing" lawyers who misbehave because when a lawyer gets mad, he or she can destroy you. I suppose a doctor can too, but that's a little too scary to contemplate -- let's hope that doesn't actually happen. But lawyers try to destroy people as a matter of everyday business. Non-lawyers just accept it with a shoulder-shrug.

My point is that now it's time to go through that, and use our new tools to at least let each other know which lawyers are the good ones.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:39 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

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Mar May