A Family at Law

The Joys and Follies of Growing Up in an Eloquence of Lawyers

By Amanda Kern

Image Credit: Tingey Injury Law Firm, Upsplash What do you call a family full of lawyers?

Shysters. Ambulance Chasers. Quacks. Scammers. Hey, that’s my family you’re talking about!

Growing up in a family of lawyers is great because it teaches you insults that none of your friends know. I could spit the word pettifogger at annoying classmates before I could even read.

In all seriousness, a group (or family) of lawyers is called an eloquence. Like many blood lines tainted with a fortitude for jurisprudence, the tradition of legal prowess started with my grandfather. As the son of German immigrants, he naturally lacked any typical inclination for human empathy, a trait that quickly proved useful once he settled into law school. As an estate planning lawyer by trade, he spent most of his days contemplating the impending deaths of his clients. Needless to say, this line of work took its toll over time, carving out a grim and narrow outlook on life that left him a rather severe and somber shell of a man. We like to joke that my grandfather only decided to have children as part of his own estate planning – he needed an heir to run his practice after he died.

Imagine being my three year old father, lulled to sleep each night as my grandfather read him bedtime stories from Black’s Law Dictionary. While in law school, my father met my mother, a law clerk for her uncle’s family law practice. Naturally, my father’s parents were delighted when he brought my mother home. Raised by yet another line of legal brethren, she had the neat and polished air of a woman who could raise a whole litter of legal envoys. My parents were happily wed just months after meeting. They certainly gave my brother and I a childhood worth envying in many ways, but like any family, we experienced our share of challenges.

Image Credit: Mikhail Pavstyuk, Upsplash

Vacations proved themselves to be more stressful than relaxing for our father as he performed the mad dash between remotely managing his practice and pretending to enjoy his time away from work. He once drove the family station wagon forty minutes away from our rented cabin to the nearest McDonalds just to get cell service so he could talk to a client on the verge of a breakdown. He came back with a stomach ache that makes me suspect he stress-ate his way through a few Big Macs on the way back. Though our mother never said anything in front of us kids about his incessant need to work, our father could be seen covertly sneaking glimpses at his Blackberry on the beach or in the hotel room in such a way that made me think maybe she had said something about it in private.

Image Credit: Tingey Injury Law Firm, Upsplash

I sometimes pitied our father for the kinds of clients with whom he frequently dealt. Family law can be quite emotional, and when emotions run high, people can turn ugly. For my eleventh birthday dinner, we made reservations at a fancy little cafe. Everything was going swell until we found ourselves accosted by a man going through a brutal divorce that included a custody battle, the most volatile of situations in family law. As he headed out of the restaurant, the man spotted my father, who represented his ex wife, and took a detour to our table. He hurled a slew of ready insults that ended with, “…pig, how can you live with yourself?” To our surprise, it was my mother who came back with the snappy retort. “The same way most people do – with a stiff drink, telling us about all the stupid idiots he had to deal with at work all day.” The man was eventually escorted out, but the shock of my mother’s quick wit has lingered for years. We laugh about the incident to this day at most holiday dinners.

Another classic dinnertime recollection is the time our mother thought our father was cheating on her with his office secretary. Lawyers are notorious philanderers, and the irony of a family law attorney with a mistress seemed fitting for that time of our lives. For nearly a month straight, our father came home an hour or two later than he normally did. He’d slip out on weekends claiming to have “business engagements,” though the beads of sweat lining his forehead as our mother’s eye bore into his gave him away. One night, our mother, thinking herself wise to my father’s deceit, followed him in our neighbor’s car. When she arrived at a video production studio, she was confused, and upon confronting her husband, learned that he was making a VHS mashup of all the family footage he’d acquired since they married to give to her for Christmas. They watch the video every year during the holidays and force us to gather around the television with them while laughing about the infidelity that never was.

Holidays continue to present their own special kinds of challenges. My brother grew up to become a family law attorney like our father, so while most people look forward to reconnecting with their loved ones over holidays, things look a bit different when you gather three generations of bull headed attorneys at one table. Lawyers have a tendency to hit the sauce hard, so once the wine begins to flow and all niceties are lost, polite conversation turns to spirited debate and frequently descends from there into madness. Have you ever heard a staunch republican, a stubborn democrat, and a die-hard libertarian discuss local politics? Probably not, since you’re still alive to read this article.

Image Credit: Piotr Makowski, Upsplash

Sure, having a brood of familial legal hound dogs in your corner has its advantages. That underage drinking thing that happened back in 2009? Nope, wrong, never happened. Don’t even know what you’re talking about. Not pointing fingers at anyone in particular, but there may have been an irresponsible bonfire party in the middle of an abandoned corn field that attracted the attention of some local troopers. Tipsy teens scattered in all directions, but some were faster than others and several kids were apprehended and placed into custody. Apparently kicking your way out of the back of a cop car, attempting to flee police custody, and getting caught by the cops for the second time in one night is totally fine as long as your parents belong to the same country club as the judge assigned to the case. Dumb luck or legal jiu jitsu? We’ll never know because according to the expunged record of the person that shall not be named, it didn’t occur.

Don’t worry, my brother and I turned out just fine despite a rocky series of high school mishaps. Like our father, my brother always knew he was destined for law school. Academics just come to some people naturally, and despite his many, many teenage misadventures, my brother graduated with a 4.0 GPA. While I spent my junior year studying for the ACT, he spent his junior year studying for the LSAT. For a brief time of my life, I envied the attention showered upon him, the praise and adoration he received for punishing himself with a life dedicated to long hours of reading and studying. How is it that we both spent our college years chasing beer kegs, yet he somehow managed to stay the course towards law school? How is it that someone who caused more headaches for our parents than I ever did found a career of such wealth and prestige while I fell into a series of pretentious English Literature classes that have only led me to a wealth of debt? It took some time, but I’ve accepted my place among my familial eloquence of lawyers, and even find frequent moments to share laughter with (or laugh at) the hilarity of their highly stressful legal lives.

So here we are now, my brother’s wife newly pregnant, our parents over the moon to become grandparents, and me, writer and black sheep of the family, ready to become aunt to the next generation of constitutional progeny. Sometimes I wonder if my grandfather envisioned the family turning out this way when he cursed us to multi-generational penal code stewardship. It seems as though I’ve managed to dodge the curse altogether, just so long as I don’t fall in love with a lawyer.

Image Credit: Tingey Injury Law Firm, Upsplash

Three Jokes Your Lawyer Friends Won’t Laugh At:

1. How many lawyer jokes are there, anyway? Three. The rest are true stories.
2. What’s the difference between a vacuum cleaner and a lawyer riding a motorcycle? The vacuum cleaner has the dirt bag on the inside.
3. What’s the difference between a good lawyer and a bad lawyer? A bad lawyer might let a case drag on for several years. A good lawyer knows how to make it last even longer.

Jokes courtesy of ParalegalEdu.org

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