On Lawyers and Pit Bulls

Let me go on record from the outset - I generally like lawyers.  I admire their vocation, especially litigators and constitutional lawyers, albeit for different reasons.  Call me crazy, but I even enjoy jury duty as a chance to watch lawyers at work.  Maybe I'm biased because I know some good ones personally, but I like the way lawyers think, reason, work with evidence and the art of rhetoric.  I almost went to law school myself back in another day.  Some would say I didn't trade up very much, but that's for another time.

I appreciate the value of a good lawyer.  I once needed one.  I hired the biggest, meanest pit bull I could find.  In our adversarial legal system, you don't want a Bichon Frise in your corner.  A few phone calls and a couple of pieces of heavyweight letterhead and my legal troubles vanished into the depths of Hades with the father of lies from whence they came.  Hence, my appreciation and admiration.

In a recent letter to the Council of Presidents (CoPs - Are Lutherans acronym-challenged or is this just me?)LCMS, Inc. CEO Gerald Kieschnick denies he ever personally threatened our boys Todd and Jeff with a lawsuit by saying "I have not filed, initated, supported, or encouraged any lawsuit against Rev. Todd Wilken or Mr. Jeff Schwarz, nor have I ever had a desire to do so."  I'll leave the thoughts and desires of the man to God who searches the heart.  But let's parse that sentence.  Of course Pres. Kieschnick didn't "file, initiate, support, or encourage" anything.  The lawyers for LCMS, Inc. did that.  That's what you hire lawyers to do.

Here's what was written on that infamous piece of letterhead of December 16 :

While it remains our strong preference to continue negotiations and resolve this matter amicably between the parties, unless your client is willing to negotiate in good faith to finalize a mutually acceptable agreement in the near future, along the lines that we were discussing last summer, we will be left with no alternative but to recommend that The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod prosecute the opposition against Madsen's application and take action against your clients to enforce its rights to the trademark.

Take a moment and admire the beauty, the form, the craftsmanship.  No one is threatening anyone with anything directly; that would be illegal.  It's all couched in that wonderful passive voice.  "We will be left with no alternative...."  Nice!  

Oh, there are alternatives aplenty, like letting go of a dead trademark, but once you bring on the pit bulls, they know only one way of doing business.  All the LCMS, Inc. Board of Directors and CEO Kieschnick had say to the legal suits was "defend our trademark."  And the lawyers know what to do.  Let's face it, if you really want your trademark badly enough, you have to be willing to go to the legal mat to defend it, including suing your own mother.  Look at what the recording industry tried to do to college students with their mp3 downloads.  It goes with the trademark turf, kids.

In intertestimental Judaism there was an office called the shaliach (from shalach, "to send," kind of like apostolos from which we get apostle).  A shaliach was an authorized legal representative who could conduct business in the stead and by the command of the one who sent him.  The saying went, "To deal with a man's shaliach is to deal with the man himself."  So when you sick the legal pit bulls, you have to take responsibility for what they do.  If you don't want threatening letterhead, don't invite the lawyers into the conversation.

A good captain goes down with his ship; he doesn't toss the deckhands overboard.  I know that doesn't seem terribly fashionable in our day, but I'm sure there are still some old-fashioned captains around somewhere.  Call me a hopeless romantic.  A man needs to take responsibility for his shalachim and call the dogs off when the cost is not worth the fight.   Lawyers are used to be rolled under the bus.  That's why they get paid $250 a billable hour and laugh at us during happy hour.  Leaders need to take responsibility for corporate actions, including those of their own shalachim.

(Lawyer joke:  What do you call a shark and a lawyer swimming together?  Answer:  a big fish and a predator.  Sorry, couldn't resist.  My lawyer friends know better ones than that.)

If we are actually going to take 1 Corinthians 6:1-8 as inspired apostolic admonition of how to run a church in a God-pleasing manner, it means that we need to try our level best to keep the lawyers out of our family skirmishes.  

You know how it is with pit bulls; sometimes they attack the family's children.