Don't watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
That should be more offensive than cartoons. In a just world.
It's not as if the victim had the luxury of many choices of law firms, or any capacity to oversee their work. Their access to legal services is presumably similar to their access to medical care. There's nothing amusing about this outcome. It's seriously depressing that "the coked-up cartoon-dragoon attorney" is the best representation that person, in their helpless situation, was able to navigate to.
https://www.propublica.org/article/louisiana-judges-ignored-... ("Louisiana Judges Systematically Ignored Prisoners’ Petitions Without Review" (2023))
It's the type of story that sensitizes you to awareness of the pattern.
That the victim in the OP story got access to an attorney of any color—even dragon-purple—actually puts them above the median.
[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/09/judges...
"Ciavarella disposed thousands of children to extended stays in youth centers for offenses as trivial as mocking an assistant principal on Myspace or trespassing in a vacant building.[3] After a judge rejected an initial plea agreement in 2009,[4][5] a federal grand jury returned a 48-count indictment.[6] In 2010, Conahan pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy and was sentenced to 17.5 years in federal prison.[7] Ciavarella opted to go to trial the following year. He was convicted on 12 of 39 counts and sentenced to 28 years in federal prison.[8] Conahan, who had been released to home confinement in 2020, had his sentence (due to end in 2026) commuted in 2024 by President Joe Biden."
His constituents petitioned him about the crooked jails, and... Biden heard them; and freed the jailer.
The willingness to take the optics hit to allow him a little more freedom, a little earlier makes me question what everyone else is leadership is doing, they must really relate to him.
"There but for the grace of God go I"
[0]: https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/...
The breech of formality isn't being turned into a big deal because it might bias case outcomes; in that regard it's a rounding error washed out by innumerable more substantial sources of bias. It's being made into a big deal because formality is the wall between outcomes of cases and feelings of personal culpability for the people who are involved in that process. All of the formality and decorum make it easier for judges and lawyers to emotionally distance themselves from, very often, ruining peoples' lives.
Also, just because the other potential sources of bias you brought up exist doesn't mean new ones should be let into the process. I wouldn't be against solutions to remove the ones you mentioned. But I don't think you'd be entirely convinced that just allowing cartoon dragons would decrease bias by making people more empathetic.
Trying to make this about "more significant and well known biases" when all I'm arguing for is not introducing additional biases is a logical fallacy. And allowing cartoon watermarks in court documents would not help with the "more significant and well known biases" that you're more concerned about, anyway, so I have to wonder why you feel strongly enough that this should be allowed that you'd write off opposition as "bikeshedding."
There are certainly bad judges that hide behind "the authority vested in them by the court," but reductively asserting that formality is about maintaining authority misses the point (and the operating philosophy behind creating a fair and impartial court) by a country mile.
If the complaint is true, then yes it is offensive and the results will be more serious than being required to refile the complaint without the watermark. The process of determining if the complaint is true or not is the justice system.
The posts on this HN story demonstrate exactly the point the judge is trying to make. This sort of optics issue looms so large in human brains that it is indeed generating accusations that the court case is not being taken seriously because the court must obviously be spending all of its attention on this visually appealing story, even though in the grand scheme of things it is a tiny fraction of just the effort that will be spent on this case overall. Justice must not just be just, it must be seen to be just, and this sort of behavior is an impossibly attractive nuisance for people. Even those defending the picture are still being sucked into a sideshow.
It's also why the court prefers that people settle with each other outside of court processes. The court is a brutal cudgel. It has exceptional power to change outcomes but this use is almost never the ideal outcome for anyone involved.
And, by the way, I'd recommend a bit less credulity about this kind of lawsuit. While there is no doubt that a lot of terrible things happen in America's prisons, it is also extremely common for inmates and former inmates to file exaggerated or even frivolous claims about the conditions of their confinement. It's understandable. Prisoners have a lot of time on their hands and being incarcerated sucks even if your rights are not actually being violated. Not saying which this is -- I have no way of knowing. I'm just pointing out that it's a mistake to take the allegations in a legal complaint at face value.
It seems pernicious to suggest distrust of claims. Like Blackstone's ratio[1], presuming good faith and investigating, then addressing abuses of the system, seems like the ideal process. The ideal likely ending up unsustainable due to staffing constraints.
[1] "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
Maybe they're healthy and are complaining about nothing, but if they aren't healthy then it is almost certainly the case that their medical care is substandard if it exists at all.
I used to work in the federal court system so I've seen both sides of this close up. I've worked on cases (many of them) where prisoners' allegations of hideous abuse were extremely credible including cases where the plaintiffs went on to win at trial, get sizable settlements, etc. At the same time, our courthouse had an entire office dedicated to triaging the enormous number of suits filed by prisoners, only a small percentage of which had any merit. (And this office is, by and large, staffed with very compassionate attorneys who do that job because they're interested in helping prisoners--these are not, on average, people who want, or have any incentive, to just sweep things under the rug.)
That's why I believe both that our prison system is rife with abuse and that the average prisoner complaint has a good chance of being bogus.
Sure. That does seemingly contradict the notion that I should take the filings with a grain of salt, though. I shouldn't be surprised if it's true, but I shouldn't think it's likely to be true? I think you need to pick one.
What is your experience with these that is the basis of you sharing these opinions?
As for my experience: I'm not sure what more information you want beyond what I have already given, except to add: my job in the federal courts included reviewing and advising judges on the small fraction of claims that made it through the triage stage I described earlier and might have had a decent chance of success, as well as occasionally reviewing claims that would otherwise have been filtered out at the triage stage to provide a second opinion.
Then mix in the fact that, as a prisoner, you have a lot of time on your hands and one of the few things you can spend your time doing is visiting the prison law library. Even better, if your lawsuit actually goes somewhere, you might have the hope that prison officials will have to take you to court appearances. This stuff would indeed be pretty annoying for most people, but less so for some prisoners (especially compared with their limited alternatives).
Prisoner lawsuits are so plentiful that there is actually a federal law that specifically restricts them, called the Prison Litigation Reform Act[1]. It doesn't block suits altogether, but it limits the situations where a plaintiff can file a suit without paying the filing fees. I have, at best, mixed feelings about it (which parallel my complicated feelings towards prisoner suits generally). But the law's existence helps to illustrate the scale of the problem.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/images/asset_upload...
https://www.propublica.org/article/louisiana-judges-ignored-... ("Louisiana Judges Systematically Ignored Prisoners’ Petitions Without Review" (2023))
We’re assuming the defendant is without means. If I were in jail, I’d probably spend a decent amount of my spare time filing this sort of thing. If it were hopeless, I could also see myself just trolling. What else will I spend my money on?
They aren't going to work on contingency if they think your case is frivolous.
I think the poster was trying to make the point that in a "just" society, the story would be about how this individual is in this position and only has the choice of this attorney, and not instead about the purple dragon.
His website, which also features the purple dragon and a bunch of busted links in the footer, says that the firm "integrates AI to lower the cost of legal services."
Hopefully this lawyer is making sure this AI isn't making up the cases it's citing, which is a continuing problem: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ai+make+up+legal+cases
That's why lawyers exist, by the way. Outside of small claims court, laymen aren't equipped to navigate it without stepping on every possible rake imaginable.
Has anyone at any point expressed otherwise? You're tilting at windmills.
The problem is you don't "watermark" court filings in the first place.
That's generally not a thing. Court filings have strict requirements around formatting. This isn't any different from trying to file in Comic Sans or a 48-pt font.
Unfortunately this stunt is functioning as free publicity for this firm, because it's getting written about...
For example, the Northern District of California rules require a 12-point standard proportional-width font, with no more than 28 lines per page 8½ inch by 11 inch white paper with numbered lines. This is their way of requiring double-spacing and enforcing the page limits[1].
BUT - The rules don't say anything about requiring the paper to be portrait rather than landscape. 28 lines on a landscape page would allow for a lot more text.
Alas, I'm not daring enough to try it, as the intent of the rule is clear, and I'm sure no judge would take kindly to it.
Some courts have moved to word count limits, requiring a certification of word count at the end with a lawyer's signature.
[1]: https://cand.uscourts.gov/wp-content/uploads/CAND_Civil_Loca... (Civ. L.R. 3-4(c)).
Yeah I suspect a lot of their cases going forward will be on contingency.
This comment had me spitting my coffee. How do they even come up with this.
We do it so it's obvious it's test data, and also we're lazy to think of more "real" data.
Just say some users expect real(ish) data for testing. I had a client who was totally not happy when he saw Batman and Superman in the test data.
I was giving a demo on how to set up multiple computers in a federated setup using Active Directory, ADFS, etc... I had about 5 VMs named things like Hank, Peggy, Bobby, Boomhauer, Bill, and a test user HHill, 123 Rainy Street, Arlen, TX -- someone screenshotted and took notes during the demo and now that's in some formal training somewhere material. Thankfully, it's all internal.
When I and doing dev work and I need an available port, just any port, I use 666 -- because it's never used by anything and also DOOM. I gave a sprint demo and I used 660 instead of 666 to demo that the customer can specify the port number of screen X. Someone put that in the internal and also customer facing documentation... so now my company's product is default setup on 660, even thought it's completely user-configurable. Thank God I didn't demo with 666...
I mean, I get the motivation: You're working on a boring, dry, SeriousBusiness project, and have a creative itch that needs to be scratched. We all have a nonzero desire for a little joy and irreverence at work. But, man, scratch that itch with hobby projects, not stuff that's going out into the public! Or start a "wear a funny shirt day" at work or something like that. I know this is unpopular and makes me look like Debbie Downer, but our projects already have enough technical risks without deliberately adding more.
For a project that involved creating fake companies and user records, I purposely choose to use characters from Star Trek, Star Wars, and the Simpsons for each of the different companies. They're whimsical, non-offensive, and as an added bonus, if I see Homer Simpson listed alongside James T. Kirk, I instantly know there's a data integrity problem.
[0] Recent example: tissue sample, species: dog, tissue type: bone. Valid combination, just not present anywhere in prod.
Well, the problem is, in almost all the examples here so far, said stuff was not meant to go out into the public. If your customers end up seeing your product's test data and---heavens above!---variable names, there is an organizational issue that needs to be addressed, cutesy stuff or no cutesy stuff.
Also, isn't the point of QA testing just to throw all and any data to your system? Would you rather have a system that's tested against the eventuality that someone abuses UTF-8 in a textbox or a full SeriousBusiness system with zero whimsy and cutesy stuff? Someone's whimsy cutesy stuff is someone else's street address.
I think you just put a finger on why I absolutely loathe SeriousBusiness Banking Software: they were designed, implemented, and tested in a vacuum that even normal users end up putting a toe out of line that just breaks the assumptions of the spec. You have to be extremely average down to your name to peacefully coexist with them.
Variable names are different, and I'll give you that, but creating humorous dummy data in lower environments shouldn't ever be an issue. Injecting a little fun legitimately helps overcome despair, and the harder and more difficult your project/company is, the more it needs a dose of lightheartedness.
No matter what the scrum boards that reduce us to story points say, we're all human beings. When everything is very high stakes, you're in a perpetual state of fight or flight. It's literally physiologically bad for you. Blowing off steam helps.
As a test of our new Sev1 alerting system, I created a phony alert "The hordes of Mordor are descending upon our data center".
It was well received by the team.
I can't remember the details, but I've heard a story multiple times about a fake-sounding name being used in testing -- I think US military payroll? -- and causing problems when a real person had that name. Can anyone here remember this?
In any case, "batman" is just about plausible enough that it could be real. I tend to use names like "Mr. Testy Testalicious" which (a) contain the string "test", and (b) are so wildly absurd that I'm confident nobody will ever collide with it.
Tim: There’re so many places we could start, but in the process of doing homework for this, I found mentioned, and I wanted to do a fact check on this, of you having plane tickets automatically cancelled, and other issues related to your last name. Is that accurate? Did those things actually happen?
Caterina Fake: This has happened to me many times, in fact. And I discovered that it was actually the systems at KLM and Northwest that would throw my ticket out, my last name being “Fake.” And I have missed flights and have spent way too many hours with customer service trying to fix this problem. Here’s another thing too, is that I was unable for the first two years of Facebook to make an account there also. And probably all of my relatives.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160325-the-names-that-b...
So, as a public service, I’m going to list assumptions your systems probably
make about names. All of these assumptions are wrong. Try to make less of
them next time you write a system which touches names.
> People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.
So... what? What do I do with this? My program has to use something to represent text, and since I fail to be a large multinational consortium, I can't invent my own character set and expect it to work.
Also:
> Confound your cultural relativism! People in my society, at least, agree on one commonly accepted standard for names.
This is pretty much true in countries with naming laws, yes.
> People have names.
People in a database will have certain records which will not be NULL. Whether you call one of those records a 'name' outside the context of that database really isn't my concern.
Unicode is the best if I want to communicate with other people. I lived through the 1990s; you won't convince me that playing "guess the encoding" with dozens of subtly-incompatible standards (and non-standards, and almost-standards) was a good time, or that having to override a web browser's helpful guess was fun.
Try to understand these issues or rather how they could affect your business processes and software implementations down the line rather than dismissing them on a technical level.
You can store the Unicode representation just as you normally would. But what you don't do is assume that your Unicode representation is the only representation of the actual name.
More concretely, there are names that have multiple equally valid ways of writing them. You can probably expect that usually the same one is used, but you should absolutely not require this when building your business processes.
Even more concretely, as an example there are transliteration or simplification / shortening rules that allow people with otherwise strange or long names to buy an airline ticket. The actual, real name may not be any of the ones you have in your system. This matters e.g. when searching for someone or in customer support.
As for people without names (or unknown names), you should probably recognize that the handling might differ by country. E.g. records with "John Doe" in the US might have to be handled differently: analogous to "NULL != NULL" in SQL John Doe != John Doe. Or maybe even "Jane Doe == John Doe" in some cases. See also "Fnu Lu" (First Name Unknown, Last Name Unknown) used in the US.
And although I don't have knowledge about all the countries in the world, it may very well be that this leads to situations where the "no name" has to be handled specially or at least understood to be a special case, completely differently from other cases.
Maybe don't rush to remove your "legacy" encoding support because "everyone is using UTF-8"? Or at least check with some Japanese users with obscure names first.
It lists a few people, like "Daniel Batman (20 March 1981 – 26 June 2012) was an Australian sprinter." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Batman
A few DDG searches finds others with the surname Batman who are not famous enough to be on Wikipedia.
He was a kind of founding father. He negotiated a fake treaty to steal the land from the local Kulin nation. He wanted to call it Batmania.
Also responsible for organising hunting parties for bushrangers and multiple massacres and genocide of aboriginal people in NSW, VIC, and TAS.
Total fucking cunt.
Sorry, Richard. I hope you were more amused than annoyed.
Now all I can think of is, "of course, you'll be playing the part of Sans Testicles."
[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/adele-dazeem-idina-menz...
Ralf Kramden 1060 W. Addision Chicago IL 60613 United States
I’d not considered that they might be the only client where everyone was fluent in Latin.
The Carthusians didn't use computers, and the Jesuits didn't need his help.
He is, himself, a weird character.
Every other environment had standard boiler plate corporate logo + whatever product name. We kept the meme stuff in Dev just so you could be visually reminded, "Oh right, this is the crazy broken one."
Queue 7 years later, an emergency where we just had to impress a new client with a demo of how the product would work. And of course, the only thing that was really in a semi-ready state...was Dev. We couldn't move it over to a different one for some stupid reason or another.
Number one comment after the demo? "This looks very unprofessional. We do not want a dog logo on the login page. Is your team taking this seriously?"
Sales & Marketing got wind of how consistent the data was in it and wanted a copy they could use in presentations and for trade-show exhibits. We all said absolutely not. But they went around us and got a copy anyway.
It did not go well when a potential customer made a comment about the name during a demo.
Lesson learned. Always use the word "Test" in your test data. Always.
What would've been a great use for the lawyer's dragon documents would be to clearly mark incomplete/unapproved drafts, for internal review only.
Because, obviously, there was no way that you would accidentally submit a filing to the court with a huge purple cartoon dragon on every page.
Depending on the lawyer's personality, a big purple dragon might also double as lighthearted stress relief, when billing 12+ hours a day, of high-stakes work.
The fake reviews and broken links would seem to be real problems. Adding watermarks to documents that should not contain them is also problems. "Integrating AI to lower the cost of legal services" may also be a problem.
However, I have never understood notions like this: “it is juvenile and impertinent. The Court is not a cartoon”
Is like my great grandpa scolding us at the dinner table for laughing and talking.
It's more like a non-familial, formal dinner setting. Think about a job interview where the CEO and interviewer take you and another interviewee to dinner in a fancy restaurant. You turn up in jeans and sneakers with your buddy and you laugh and crack jokes together, the other interviewee turns up in smart clothes and talks soberly. In a few cases (and perhaps only seen in Holywood movies about the American Dream) the CEO may love the irreverence and impertinence and see it as a strength and sign of strong individuality, in almost all cases the bosses will not appreciate it and you will not get a job. Great grandpa loves you, the boss at your place of work doesn't.
Candidate: "Dress for the job you want"
Boss: "Hired! Welcome to Fort Knox"
"Okay, what's the punchline?"
"… and orders a Flaming Sambuca"
"… so I asked him for a light"
But nah, probably better to nitpick over the details.
Would it make more sense if it was a funeral instead? A wedding?
(I encourage anyone who does interviewing to have a similar policy - if someone flys in to talk to you that means you are buying them meals anyway. Ensuring there is time to talk about things that might or might not matter is important)
For engineers we wouldn't go to a fancy restaurant. However I'd expect executives probably would.
I don’t work in tech.
I’ve found it helpful to use lawyers who know the courts and people of the courts where my case is going to take place.
This is about a woman whose entire life hangs in the balance. A higher standard of care and professionalism is expected.
Plus, depending on where you live, judges may decide to hand out punishments for whatever power-tripping reasons they see fit. There have been plenty of videos online of judges handing out sentences to (black) people for not responding in whatever the American version of the Queen's English is. It's an absolutely fucked up system, but when you're operating in such a system, an appropriate amount of fear and respect for the judge is necessary.
You can play games with the court in your own time, but don't risk your clients' lives because you feel compelled to add your stupid mascot to official documents.
And to be honest we can waste our time indefinitely trying to argue the meta here that “maybe Jake is not that bad”, and let him catch us on his gaslighting trap, but the truth is that yes, he is the asshole playing with people’s lives, not the judge.
Eventually you realize that a) no one cares, your work isn't _that_ unique and valuable and b) if someone wants to use your stuff, they will find a way..
The idea of a giant watermark behind text that can just be scanned and OCR'ed anyways is this kind of silly.
Formal answers to goofiness (voluntary or not) will always amuse me.
Someone did comment about the appropriate color to be used (grey63?) but i haven't really heard from experts on what would be good outcome, if this was any other forum and watermarking was still acceptable.
Would love to hear such thoughts!
And as a furry I appreciate their logo in general.
What do you call someone who likes dragons? Scalies?
I'm under the impression that such taxonomies are less important to these in-groups than whether you're just into the aesthetic or get off on it sexually as well.
'You still use the term furry, really. "Furry" has become an wide umbrella term used for artwork featuring fictional anthropomorphized animals and tends to cover any species - so this would include fur-less animals such as reptiles, amphibians, birds, and even insects.
"Scalie" is used to describe art/characters featuring anthropomorphized reptilies and dragons. Fans of them would still be furries tho.'
I, personally, find that actually more understandable (as someone that isn't in the group) than I do, say, most religions and their belief in a higher power. That's not to in an attempt to offend or belittle either group (or the overlap, religious Therians), just a view from my particular perspective where it's really no more strange than anything else people do. If it makes them happy, lets them connect with others, etc. who am I to judge?
There are, of course, outliers that literally believe themselves to be shapeshifters or whatever, but, okay? As long as its not impacting their day-to-day too much, many of them are still probably mentally more healthy than a lot of other people.
It is really hard to actually describe what this means, though. What's the actual distinction between "they so strongly identify with the animal" and "they are the animal, trapped in a human body"? Is it just the desire to tell us "ok but you know you really are human, right?" I know my body is a human body, I know my DNA is human DNA, but that doesn't say anything about the mind inside this body, the concept of self. What I experience can best be described by a thought experiment: imagine that, through some magic spell, an animal was put into the body of a human and had to learn how to fit in to human society. What would that animal be feeling after all that? Probably the same way I feel.
Ultimately though, it doesn't really matter how one tries to describe this. None of the descriptions will be sufficiently accurate. But what matters is that treating me as the animal whose identity I claim makes me happy, and it doesn't harm anyone.
What if someone comes to court wearing tattoos are they more guilty?
First, the order being reported is made against the lawyer, not against the lawyer's client - And it is in order not to do this in future. So, while your observation is good I think the conclusion you draw from it doesn't follow.
Secondly, one aspect of your good point is that arguments are filed in a very plain format. The point being that the format does not detract from the message. In this case, the format heavily detracts from the message. Have you seen the PDF? It's absolutely nuts. I hope he doesn't turn up to court wearing a dragon mask.
I suspect the client will be billed for the revisions, though.
Beyond that lawyers are governed by state bars and rules of professional conduct — as an example the Florida bar has taken action against an attorney that used to advertise himself as a “pitbull.”
Regarding tattoos courts have rules of decorum, which generally cover appropriate dress/attire in the courtroom. As far as tattoos, I’ve been to thousands of hearings and can give a single anecdote. It was a drug possession case and the defendant was allowed to transfer their case from circuit felony to drug court - basically allowing completion of drug classes while on kind of pretrial probation in exchange for either a nolle pros (dismissal) or withhold of adjudication. The drug court judge gave the defendant a hard time at this initial hearing over having a drug molecule tattooed on their neck - questioning if drug court was a good fit for someone the seemingly was pretty committed to drugs (based on the neck tat). The drug court judge can see a hundred or more defendants a day, they’ve seen it all and aren’t passing judgement, its just that their experience allows them to read people extremely well and they had legitimate concerns because getting in trouble in drug court can result in automatic conviction of the original charge + having to deal with any new charge.
A rule of thumb professionalism and decorum go a long way in court - this attorney could be decent, but as a potential client any lawyer using a gimmicky dragon in a suit in their paperwork should probably raise some red flags for you.
Judicial process historically has a certain seriousness flair and a code of conduct based on it. Making fun of the judge or the court of law is a quick way go get removed from the process or fined, or even jailed. As well as performing marketing stunts like this.
I would follow up with, if the shoe was on the other foot, do you believe that a lawyer with tattoos and or purple hair should be allowed to practice?
We may never agree? But I think that we should be more tolerant of individuality than prejudice.
There is procedure and standards in document filing for a reason, this is more difficult to read than a white background.
I'd be comfortable establishing a stronger dress code for courtrooms - wear business casual or some such - but dyed hair and tattoos aren't easily fixable mistakes if you get called to court, so they have to be permitted for at least the defendant. For attorneys, it's probably fine to say that those with purple hair and tattoos can practice but not appear in a courtroom to represent a client. They can prep and file a patent but not represent you in a trial. That is, of course, if most people would hire an attorney with purple hair and tattoos. I would not do that unless I wanted to somehow get the death penalty for a speeding ticket.
If you were a brilliant lawyer strongly committed to your craft, you would not get tattoos or dye your hair purple. The reason is simple: too many people would see it and think less of you. As such, it makes you less able to effectively defend your clients. When your job involves appealing to society on behalf of someone, you do not make a middle finger to that same society an immutable part of your appearance unless you are very thoughtless, also not a characteristic I want in a attorney.
There's also the fact that law, more than most disciplines, is premised on adherence to old, old forms of tradition and ritual. In britain they still wear powdered wigs, for goodness' sake. The law still uses Latin terms though it's decades to centuries since educated men learned it in school. Our legal tradition in America is old, with Common Law in some ways tracing back to William the Conqueror. The other major legal tradition on which I've read, Justinian's Codex and its evolution into the Napoleonic Code, dates back to the 500s AD. Discarding old customs, even if you think them outmoded, trampling social niceties because you find them outmoded, is a really bad sign for a capable attorney.
This would also be true in e.g. M&A. Even if Cravath's fieriest new partner looked like that I'd hesitate to hire him. Patent law might be an exception, but if I needed to actually go to court, WilmerHale's top guy would still be a liability. Even in a bench trial the judge could see it as disrespectful or look down on my representation because of it. You see my meaning here?
On the table, the surgeon's appearance has little or nothing to do with his ability; in court, a lawyer's appearance can be crucial.
Your surgeon paradox says that if someone is successful despite not looking the part, they must be all the better. But are there lawyers with face tattoos or crazy hair that are considered successful in high stakes criminal law in front of juries? For corporate or patent or tax law, that is so much about a deep intimate understanding of hundreds of thousands of pages of ultra specific “loopholes” and optimization strategies, I would not be surprised if there were lawyers who look very alternative. But criminal law lives and dies on persuading people who are not legal experts.
[1] https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/can-an-o...
He's also a USMC veteran. Stereotypes can be funny like that.
Yes, they should be allowed to practice, because a lawyer’s tattoos and purple hair do not have anything to do with court documents and readability of those. Exceptions obviously apply, as not all tattoos are created equal, and having a visible gang-affiliation tattoo or a tattoo saying “cop killer” (which actually happened, but to a defendant) might be problematic as a lawyer.
Here is an analogy that might help: my employer might not care if someone communicates in offtopic employee chats using gifs and emojis, but I can easily see an employee getting fired for doing the same thing either to an external customer or in cross-org sev 0 incident threads.
Just tattoo 'cop killer' on your forehead and see if they give you parole.
[1] https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/f/305...
That question is for the jury to decide for better and worse. There are lots of good points to a jury trial which is why free societies usually (always?) have them in some form. However one downside is you will once in a while get someone on the jury who judges you not on the facts of the case but on things that shouldn't matter.
Overall it is still better than the alternatives in my opinion, but it does mean you need to figure out what your local cultures are and avoid offending them (note cultures is plural - figure out them all).
It's the same reason why you can't send documents written in yellow font on a blue background - technically not against the rules, but no judge will suffer through reading it.
>>What if someone comes to court wearing tattoos are they more guilty?
Obviously you can just choose not to watermark the document, tattoos cannot be removed that easily. And yes, there are various situations where you'd be asked to cover your tattoo if it was inappropriate for the situation too.
Using those particular color choices might not actually be suffering. It used to be a desirable color combination for word processing. I don't know if judges tend to review pleadings on screen or on paper though. On paper, black on white would be preferred, of course (unless the court had blue legal paper to print on)
And specifying the style of something that they are able to change easily helps that.
Unfortunately, it's true - that's how it will be seen. :(
The legal profession has done better. Just look at the opinions from the Supreme Court. Single spaced, nice typeface, good margin. Hallmarks of elegant typesetting and optimized for readability. Why aren't legal filings standardized based on this format?
Until then, we'll be seeing this...
> Federal Magistrate Judge Ray Kent of the Western District of Michigan was unamused by a recent complaint (PDF) that prominently featured the aubergine wyrm.
(Emphasis mine.)
Stop Purple Dragon Cartoons from popping up while I'm reading an article.
Stop the 15 second Purple Dragon commercial that plays every G D time I watch an online video.
Stop screaming at me to buy Purple Dinos while I'm pumping gas that already I'm paying out the A on to fill my tank.
(I'd be curious to know if anyone lives next door to one of these gas stations; it must be obnoxious being subjected to that 24/7.)
It's not professional - It's a bad look. Liberty Mutual - I'm talking to you. Et al. Y'all have gone off the rails.
Procedure or order can't be more important than deciding cases.
What is the act of deciding cases if not a carefully constructed procedure meant to keep order? What is the harm of telling a lawyer to try again, this time following the rules?
In Swedish courts the court evaluates evidence as it likes. If the judges and sort-of-half-judge-half-jury-Nämdemän agree that something can be concluded, then they're allowed to conclude that.
Obviously procedure is useful, but hearing the complaint is more important.
It's also worth noting that the local rules for just about every court prescribe document formatting - so it's not like any of this should come as a surprise to the attorney.
Putting this another way: If a professor tells you to submit an essay in 12 pt Times New Roman, and you turn it in using 16 pt Comic Sans - it's entirely within the professor's right to say the formatting is so distracting that it makes their job difficult and ask you to print out a revised version before they'll grade it.
If anything, it scans like the court is concerned, like you are, that this vulnerable person’s case isn’t being presented with the seriousness it deserves.
If it is a serious matter you deal with what you have.
> Respectfully submitted,
DRAGON LAWYERS PC
I bet the lawyer could flip it now if yes.
Arguably, the dragon exhibits a trespass against the dignity of the court itself.