Is Family Law a Masterful Scam? A Criminal Enterprise?

I thought I would reprint my response to a comment on my last post, which was on the issue of alimony reform, as I believe it deserves its own post here. Over the years, I have found some people to be so angry and bitter, after going through difficult experiences in the family law system, that they lose all sense of reality and become paranoid. I have thought about this again recently after reading my colleague, family law blogger Sam Hasler's post Paranoia and Divorce, which links to yet another very thoughtful post by British blogger Marilyn Stowe, Divorce is an emotional rollercoaster – but are you paranoid?

I have heard, read, and otherwise witnessed a surprising number of comments from prospective clients, litigants, and others, who seem truly to believe that the family law system is a corrupt, criminal enterprise. The comment below is a representative sample of that misguided belief. Following that is my response to the anonymous comment.

Anonymous said...
Reprint of blog on Boston Business Journal website in response to Lisa Van der Pool's article 9/18/09
"BBA BACKS BILL TO CAP ALIMONY" Take note. Senate bill 1616 seeks to do one thing and one thing only. That is, to keep the power to control your life, determine your future, and keep you under the jurisdiction of the courts until they feel they are done with you. Family law is a masterful scam not unlike TV wrestling. The lawyers and judges put on a great act in their pretend roles. But, the truth is they all belong to the same organization and they will never act on their own to stifle their own power to run the scam. Any legislator who doesn't act to stop it is an accessory to organized judicial crime. The Bar by seeking to give judges the power to determine alimony duration, knows that 1616 will rely on the honor of "his honor" who in the past has proven that he has no honor in the family court ring. They are all winking at each other because they know how easy it has been to pull the wool over the public's eye in the past. But when it comes to family law, "the emperor has no clothes".

Steven Ballard said...
Anonymous- most posts like yours I do not allow here. Since you make an ad hominem attack on all lawyers and judges in the family law system, rather than upon any single individual, I have allowed it to be published here, but only because it is representative of the response of so many who - though justified in being outraged - go over the top in their paranoia.

While there are very real biases and vested interests, family law is not a masterful scam or a criminal enterprise. People who are divorcing and fighting each other need to take responsibility for their own mistakes rather than simply blaming their lawyers and the system, and subscribing to inane, ridiculous conspiracy theories about lawyers and judges who are supposedly getting rich at their clients' expense.

Those who are in the legal system -especially including those within the most profitable, big law firms, firms which in fact do not even have family law sections, even as loss leaders, because they would be insufficiently lucrative -find comments such as yours to be laughable.

It's sad many people are so bitter that they actually believe this kind of conspiratorial crap. Many hate lawyers and judges so much that they can't even think straight, or examine basic facts.

One of those facts is that there are many very good people who work as divorce and family law practitioners and judges. Most of them in fact work very hard in a very difficult profession, dealing with very difficult people in contentious cases, and many of them also perform important pro bono work and public service in their communities, while generally earning modest incomes relative to others in the legal profession.

Change the law, improve the system, yes. But in your own individual cases, you should always take a good hard look in the mirror before assessing blame for problems in your own home.

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For information about Massachusetts divorce and family law, see the divorce and family law page of my law firm website.

Of Two Alimony Reform Bills, House Bill is Far Better

There are two competing alimony reform bills currently pending in the Massachusetts legislature: Senate Bill 1616 and House Bill 1785. The Senate bill, backed by influential members of the Boston Bar Association, essentially would preserve the status quo. It would merely add language to the statute so as to give judges the explicit ability to set a duration for alimony - i.e. to set a term of years, depending on the circumstances.

The Senate bill would indeed improve current alimony law in this limited way. But it would do far too little. In fact, the Senate bill would not be sufficient to bring Massachusetts out of the realm of the absurd. Even with the passage of this modest single reform in the Senate bill, Massachusetts would remain way outside the reasonable norms for alimony, as reflected by the laws in almost every - if not every single other - state in this country.

The House bill, on the other hand, would effect real reform that would bring Massachusetts alimony law into much closer alignment with the alimony law of other states, as it more closely reflects current conventional wisdom on alimony. The House bill would require alimony awards to reflect current economic and social realities. Thus it would be much less likely that outrageous alimony awards, which lead to illogical and unfair economic results, would continue to be regularly negotiated and ordered in our family courts.

The House bill is much more intelligent, reasoned, and has the support of the Massachusetts Alimony Reform organization. However, unlike the Senate bill, which is now backed by the Boston Bar Association, the much more sensible House bill has a broad base of support beyond the most directly affected interest groups - that is, both those interest groups that have been formed by opponents of the current law, and associations of attorneys who would be more inclined to preserve the status quo. And that is why House Bill 1785 is already cosponsored by a very diverse group of 72 legislators, "liberal" as well as "conservative."

Please read both bills (see links above), and tell your House and Senate representatives which bill you favor. For more on this, see Bar association wades into divorce law spat - Boston Business Journal.


For information about Massachusetts divorce and family law, see the divorce and family law page of my law firm website.

Are We Worse than Thieves? What Rents are Law Professors and Law Schools Seeking?

In his classic 1967 article on rent-seeking (which does not actually use the term because it had not been coined at that time) Gordon Tullock explained that the cost of theft was not that one person's property was taken by another. In fact, that transaction in isolation may increase welfare. The social costs were the reactions of those attempting to avoid theft and those refining their skills. Richard Posner extended the analysis when he wrote about the costs of monopoly. Again, it was not that some became richer at the expense of others but that enormous sums were invested in bringing about the redistribution. In neither case do the rent seeking, social-cost-producing efforts create new wealth.

Still, in the case of Tullock and Posner the social costs were at least about something. There was a "there" there in the form of a chunk of wealth to bicker over. But now we come to law professors and law schools.

Law professor efforts to self-promote have exploded. Included are repeated visits to the Dean asking for one thing or another, resume padding, massive mailings of reprints, posting SSRN download rankings, or, even better, emailing 200 friends asking them to download a recently posted article, churning out small symposia articles because deans often want to see lines on resumes as opposed to substance, playing the law review placement game, and just plain old smoozing ranging from name dropping to butt kissing. Very little of this seems designed to produce new wealth. If fact, think of the actual welfare-producing activities that could be undertaken with the same levels of energy -- smaller classes, more sections of needed courses, possibly even research into areas that are risky in terms of self promotion but could pay off big if something new or insightful were discovered or said. But this is the part that puzzles me. Whether the thief in Tullock's case or monopolist in Posner's, the prize is clear. What is the prize for law professors? Are these social costs expended to acquire rents that really do not exist or are only imagined? What are the rents law professors seek?

Law schools make the professors look like small potatoes when it comes to social costs. Aside from hiring their own graduates to up the employment level, they all employ squads of people whose jobs are to create social costs (of course, most lawyers do the same thing), produce huge glossy magazines that go straight to the trash, weasel around with who is a first year student as opposed to a transfer student or a part time student, select students with an eye to increasing one rating or another, and obsess over which stone is yet unturned in an effort to move up a notch. I don't need to go through the whole list but the point is that there is no production -- nothing socially beneficial happens. That's fine. The same is true of Tullock's thief and Posner's monopolist. But again, and here is the rub. What is the rent the law schools seek? Where is the pie that they are less interested in making bigger than in just assuring they get the biggest slice possible? What is it made of?

At least thieves and monopolists fight over something that exists. And they often internalize the cost of that effort. Law professors and law schools, on the other hand, may be worse. They do not know what the prize actually is; they just know they should want more; and the costs are internalized by others.

Huh?

This is more properly a comment but since Moneylaw is close to dormant I decided to upgrade to an actual post. I read with interest the most recent posts about tax faculty rankings. I did this even though I have complained about drawing any inferences from the rankings other than SSRN may be pretty good at counting.

Beyond my usual concerns about the emails we all get that we have made the top 10 in one of SSRN's zillions of categories and its use of our works to sell advertising, I am also concerned about what those who post the lists believe they are communicating. I do not mean to pick just on the most recent tax listings because I have seen this with other listings.

I see two problems but maybe I am misunderstanding. As I understand it, a tax professor with, say, 10,000 downloads may have written a couple of tax articles that were moderately downloaded and then have 8000 downloads in other areas. In effect, the number of downloads, if it means anything, does not mean how widely downloaded (much less read or relied on) that author was as a tax professor. If you doubt this take a look at the downloads for the top two tax professors and see how many of the articles are actually tax articles. It would be possible to write one article on tax that was downloaded once and be ranking as at the top and, in fact, pull the entire tax department with you. I seems to me that any school wishing to move up could just ask its most downloaded scholar in any field to allow him or herself to be listed as a tax professor and added as a coauthor to one article. Am I wrong on this? By the way this is the charitable interpretation because I cannot tell whether to be considered one has to be a self-professed tax professor and have uploaded a tax article in the past year or just pass one of these tests. If it is the latter, any inferences to be drawn are even more sketchy.

The second problem is with the totals for schools. Isn't this somehow influenced by the size of the school and the number of people there who teach tax? Why not take the downloads of actual tax articles and divide by the number of tax faculty. And, of course, even this leaves out other types of works.

My sense is that if these SSRN rankings were subject to some kind of truth in advertising standards they would be found to be misleading because they seem to have so little to do with the actual tax productivity of a tax faculty or even the interest others have in that faculty's output. And, if the thought that goes into these postings were found in a scholarly article I doubt it would be publishable. In fact, the only place I have seen a similar willingness to stray from what would be acceptable care as a scholar is when academics perform as expert witnesses.

New Tax Faculty Rankings

• Graduate Tax Faculty Rankings (Michigan is #1)
• Tax Professor Rankings (Louis Kaplow & Reuven Avi-Yonah are #1)
• Tax Faculty Rankings (Michigan is #1)
• Tax Faculty Metropolitan Area Rankings (Los Angeles is #1)

Baucus Bullshit

Well, now we know: Baucus outlines health plan without GOP support - AP/Yahoo News. The Max Baucus Plan is awful.

Actually, the Max Baucus Plan Sucks. Well, I'd use even stronger words than that. Baucus Bullshit, I'd call it.

It would cost $856 billion, but some $500 billion of that cost would be paid out of cuts to Medicare. The plan, which would have no public option, would do next to nothing to cut costs, next to nothing to provide competition or otherwise to reduce stealing and killing by the health insurance mafia. In place of the old Kennedy bill, which would have cost much less, at about $600 billion, and which would have had a public option, the "Democrat" Max Baucus has been crafting this crap for the health insurance industry.

And that industry is the only entity that should be happy with it. In fact the industry is directly responsible for it. It comes as little surprise to me that it was actually a former vice president of WellPoint, now working for Baucus, who penned this Bullshit. See The Max Baucus WellPoint/Liz Fowler Plan

Under this plan, in a manner similar to that of the Massachusetts system ushered in by Mitt Romney, the middle class would be forced to buy health insurance from the health insurance mafia - if ineligible for employer-sponsored health insurance - or it would be financially penalized. Far from being "socialistic" this legislation would force individuals to pay too much for crappy coverage directly to the health insurance mafia. It would be like a tax requiring citizens to pay money not to the government, but to a private racket.

Meanwhile, we should expect this same health insurance racket to continue paying out only between 55 to 80 percent of the money it collects from us in premiums to pay claims, while in constrast, the supposedly inefficient government Medicare and Medicaid programs pay out around 95 percent of their funds for actual medical care. The health insurance racket, with the help of its lackeys in Congress, wants us to allow it to keep sucking up 20 to 45 percent of our money for administrative costs and profits, while doing nothing effective to bring overall medical costs down.

Well, I did not expect much more from our Congress. If this passes, in anything like the present form, we will have a "Democratic" bill that truly sucks, and the Republicans will later easily be able to show that it sucks, and then blame the "left" for wasting money on a program that screws the middle class yet again and does nothing to solve any problems. Not enough people will notice that it was the health insurance mafia that brought all this about. Instead they will believe the health insurance racket's propaganda, through the voice of the Republican Party, that it is the "left's" fault.

Machiavelli must be smiling.

Huffington Post on Health Care

More good stuff on the health insurance racket's attempt to prevent even the first step towards its own demise can be found in some recent articles in the Huffington Post. I have my doubts about the emasculated reform legislation that is pending, and am still quite angry that our supposed liberal, alleged representatives in Congress have refused to fight hard for a single-payer system, but if the currently pending health care reform bill, with a true public option, ever sees the light of day, there would indeed be a sliver of hope that eventually we will all have the single-payer system we need, and the health insurance racket would thus end up every bit as dead as the many patients who are now its daily victims.

It is interesting that a majority of doctors support a public option. Majority Of Doctors Back Public Option: New England Journal Of Medicine Study. Makes sense. And to that I say: Why can't we just take it one step further with a single-payer plan. We can't we just pay our doctors for care? Why do we have to pay the health insurance mafia as well?

Economist Dean Baker has predictably intelligent comments on the big government "conservatives" who serve the interests of the health insurance racket while pretending to do otherwise. Dean Baker: The Public Plan Option and the Big Government Conservatives

And finally, although not so recent (this one's from June) here's the following article, about the health insurance mafia. It's an oldie but goodie: Bob Cesca: The Health Insurance Mafia Deserves a Good Screwing

The Health Insurers Have Won Again - Of Course

Well, it seems pretty clear that the health-care "reform" bill will be a joke. Even if it were to have a public option, it would still be a joke, but without one, there will continue to be little to no hope that after several decades of struggle, paralleling the career of our late Senator Ted Kennedy, the good people of this country will ever have a humane and decent health care system.

Of course what we have needed for a long time is a single-payer system, privately delivered - by some of the best medical providers in the world - but publicly financed. It has been very interesting, and ironic, to see that some of the most vociferous supporters of the health insurance racket are in fact older individuals on medicare. All we need is to expand medicare to cover everyone - thus eliminating the waste, greed and inefficiency of the health insurance racket - and then we could join the ranks of the other rich, and not-so-rich, countries, that have long ago created humane health care systems.

But the writing was on the wall a long time ago. In early August, Business Week already reported that The Health Insurers Have Already Won ("The Health Insurers Have Already Won; How UnitedHealth and rival carriers, maneuvering behind the scenes in Washington, shaped health-care reform for their own benefit").

Our supposedly liberal Congressional "leaders" from Massachusetts, which has not a single Republican in Congress, were complete wimps and sounded like it when they wimped out on the issue of a single-payer system. "We don't have the votes," they said, in explaining why they would use their own votes, and clout, in a way to insure that we don't have the votes. Pathetic. Shame on you, Kerry, Frank et al. Your "efforts" should be chronicled in "Profiles in Cowardice."





With "liberal leaders" like these pretending to fight the cause for us, it is no wonder that we the people will once again lose to the health insurance racket, which continues to control Congress, along with all the other corporate lobbies. Whatever shitty bill is eventually passed will simply change our course in an insignificant manner, and the big problems will remain. We will continue to be plagued with an insane health insurance racket and the US will continue to be a place where barbaric social and economic inequality and injustice for the benefit of the rich will be the norm. Brave New Films tells the sad story:




For information about Massachusetts divorce and family law, see the divorce and family law page of my law firm website.

Effective Legal Advertising Requires Frequency, Unless...

There are thee reasons why legal professionals cringe when the topic of law firms and advertising comes up. The first is that the industry is filled with images of lawyers screaming from their desks that they “get paid only if you get paid.” That’s number one. The second reason is that the legal industry remains reluctant to fully embrace a marketing “tool” that only relatively recently has been open as an option to law firms seeking to promote their services. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot I can do about these first two reasons.

But there is something that can be done about the third reason. When people think about advertising, they tend to think about branding and image-building. It’s certainly true that much of advertising in the legal industry, or any industry for that matter, focuses on such activities. Unfortunately, branding/image-building is usually a highly expensive proposition. That is because the cost of purchasing media space in a newspaper or magazine can be extremely expensive on a single unit basis. Effective branding programs require generating multiple exposures of the firm’s message. Prospects must be exposed to threshold levels of frequency. An advertising campaign does no good unless it reaches a certain number of people a certain number of times. Hence, simple math will dictate that several (and that really means “quite a few”) ads times a high per unit cost translates into big-time bucks.

But traditional frequency-oriented branding campaigns are not the only types of advertising approaches available to the growth minded law firm. We have seen firms achieve terrific results utilizing advertising a) as a means for promoting an event or free information, b) associating itself with a cause or organization and, c) in an opportunistic fashion by being placed in special editions of publications which the firm knows will be well-read by key prospects/constituencies. Let’s take a look at each of these.

Promoting a service by offering a seminar, a free guidebook, a “tips” brochure holds many inherent advantages for the astute practice. For one, it allows the prospect to begin a relationship with the firm in a relatively risk-free manner. Second, it promotes the firm as being especially knowledgeable in this particular area of the law. Third, it allows the firm to create a database of prospective client contacts. And finally, seminars, free giveaways and such can be promoted with a deadline, meaning the usual rules of frequency do not necessarily apply. A smaller schedule of ads ultimately means lower overall costs.

Advertising the firm in a myriad of organizational directories, charity event programs, religious directories, etc. is another way of having the firm appear “all over the place.” The actual circulation numbers may be considerably less than traditional publications, but this type of sponsorship advertising allows the firm to be associated with the “movers and shakers,” as well as worthwhile causes/endeavors. And just because the publications may not be slick, 4-color vehicles doesn’t mean that the firm can not use the precious communications real estate as a means for further branding itself. We’ve seen it work.

Finally, in an effort to attract more advertisers, both consumer and business-to-business publications always create “special issues” focusing on a specific topic. For example, a consumer-oriented publication may decide to feature the topic of divorce. This may prove to be a wonderful opportunity for a family law practice to advertise without committing to an extensive schedule. Similarly, a business publication may devote most of an issue to the challenges face by corporate counsel – again a wonderful opportunity for firms seeking to reach this type of decision maker. Sometimes it is even matter of ego. As a business that serves law firm clients, we often consider advertising in community publications (e.g., South Jersey Magazine) that are highlighting the area’s top attorneys – largely because we know that probably every attorney in the area will be reading to see who’s in and who’s out.

The bottom line is that advertising needs to be looked at in the broadest sense possible. And while nothing can replace the importance of frequency in making a message “stick” with prospects, there are creative means for making an impact cost-effectively.

66% of the Time, Every Time

When I began teaching economics something struck me during the first week. I knew a fair amount about economics -- much less than I thought -- but I had received not even a minute's worth of instruction on teaching. All I could think to do was read the book, more or less explain it in my own words using examples not in the book, and answer questions. There were no war stories for a first year teacher of microeconomic theory. One thing that gradually occurred to me is that a knowledge of economics, and then later of law, only accounted for about 66% of what I did as a teacher. And it also occurred me that while students see the professor while he or she is teaching, they only witness about 66% of what goes into teaching.

Other courses, common sense, and day to day experiences inform teaching yet their importance remains behind the scenes. One of the most useful courses I took was a required freshman level course in logic. I am not sure it is required or even offered any more but it did mean that I do not confuse causation and correlation. It also meant that I do my best to correct students who reason like this: "The professor does not need to take role because I attend regularly" Bizarre, right? But I have heard the very same "reasoning" from law professors. For example, "There is no need to have a rule requiring professors to take role because I already take role." I assume professors finding this acceptable also find it acceptable in class.

And then there was statistics. There I learned the difference between reliability and validity. Reliability means the tool you are using when applied to the same data gives you the same result. Validity means the tool is actually testing what you are intending to test. If you've got a tape measure that has been stretched it may consistently measure your waist at 32 inches even though is is 36 inches around. It's just not a valid test of your girth, although can surely be a source of great happiness.

The meaning of a normal distribution also came up and can be understood in the context of reasoning I have heard twice lately: "My method of testing is valid because it produced a normal distribution." I most recently heard this from someone administering a law exam to people with widely varying knowledge of English. The normal distribution means nothing about the validity of the test. My guess is that what she was testing was the ability to understand English. The normal distribution fixation is particularly odd. If the students in the class are normally distributed then, hopefully, the test result will reflect that. On the other hand, getting a normal distribution does not mean the same is true of the class itself. In fact, a normal distribution could just as easily cause concern about the test. Normal distributions are, however, convenient when grades must be assigned.

And now back to logic. Remember your high school math classes. Some teachers said to show your work and then gave you credit if you got everything thing right except, say, the final step. Others just machine graded.The problem is this. In most complex math problems there are many ways to get a wrong answer. Some reveal that the test taker did not have a clue. Some reveal that the test taker forgot to carry the one on the last step. The machine grader gives them the same credit although their knowledge and understanding are quite different. The teacher who requires the student to show his or her work makes a distinction because there is a distinction. Of course, the same is true in law where the issues are not simply complex but more nuanced.

This also relates to the point that students see only about 66% of what goes into teaching. Suppose you give a machine graded exam and there are 10 reasons that could explain a wrong answer. If most of the students are getting it wrong for the same reason, it suggests an opportunity to improve one's teaching the next term. (Unless, of course, the goal is not really to teach but to get a good distribution.) I assume the machine graded test givers just plow along without pin pointing the problem which may reflect their teaching as much as student diligence.

The all time prize for irrational testing actually goes to essay test givers who say something like "Answer 3 of the next 5 questions." There are many combinations of 3 out of 5 and each one represents a different test. In addition, a student could get an 80 of 100 on all five and do worse than a student who scores and 85 on three but would have scored a 60 on the other two. Pretty simple, right? This is, however, popular with the students and you know where that can lead.

I would not want to confuse causation and correlation but there is pattern. All of the reasoning that, at least to me, seems in error does make the lives of those making the errors easier. Could it be that reasoning is driven by convenience and self-interest?