In honor of some of the things I hear in the EMS world, I decided to see how they’d translate to the legal profession.
If these new lawyers would spend some time as legal assistants before going straight to law school, they’d understand how the legal system really works, not all that book learning.
- Lawyers save clients, legal assistants save lawyers.
- If I work as a paralegal for a few years, can I just apply for transition to attorney and pay the fees? After all, my attorney has been letting me do attorney work and just making sure I don’t screw it up.
- Our state has a special kind of paralegal that can do everything a lawyer can do, but they don’t get a full law school education. They call a senior attorney or a judge if they need to do certain legal skills. We couldn’t afford lawyers in our community anyway and there’s no law school nearby.
- My bar exam cut off after two and a half days, did I pass?
- Lawyer: I’m here to sue your butt, not kiss it.
- My law school professor said….. (Actually, this might work since law school professors are supposed to be subject matter experts in their field.)
- Even though the law says no, I’ve seen it work with a jury!
Yet, if you put in the EMS analogies to these statements, you’d see how common they are to EMS. Maybe this is why lawyers are presumed to make “big bucks” and EMS providers don’t “get the respect we deserve.”
My advice for improving EMS? Let’s police our own profession. Let’s get rid of the idiots. Let’s improve the minimal standards above and beyond “minimal competence.” And I guarantee the wages and working conditions will improve. Just ask the nurses that we continually have an inferiority complex with.
