My Uncle Hank (actually great uncle) told me about this organization called HALT. It stands for "Help Against Legal Tyranny", which sounds pretty strident. It's actually a pretty reasonable sounding legal reform organization. One of their projects is keeping the definition of "the practice of law" from being overly inclusive, or in other words, limiting even really common legal tasks to lawyers as opposed to paralegals or other non-JDs. They argue that lawyers tend to try to monopolize the market for legal services.

Uncle Hank told a pretty good lawyer joke at lunch today, but the thing that made me uneasy was that there was nothing in the joke that was lawyer-specific. You could take the joke and take out "lawyer" and plug in, say, some ethnic group and it would be a horrible joke saying that you hate all members of that ethnic group and want them all to die (by jumping into San Francisco Bay under the supernatural influence of a mystical object, in this case).

I have this fantasy that I will grow up to be the lawyer that eats other lawyers. For example, I wonder if you could do a class action lawsuit of insurance customers against plantiffs (and especially their lawyers) who instigate frivolous lawsuits that drive up insurance rates for everybody else.

I might feel very differently about all this in a few months or by the end of three years. That's one big reason why I'm keeping track of these thoughts here.