"No wonder lawyers are paid so much money (and will likely continue to make egregious amounts of money in the future); people who follow pop culture (e.g., all Americans) relate to us, and our usual legal process. See, our (typical) legal process is but a microcosm of the pop culture world: 1) find an urgent/cataclysmic situation, I’ll call it a “man without a fish,” 2) react in a way that “gives a man a fish,” but doesn’t change the underlying structure that allowed that man to be fishless in the first place, and 3) move on.

I see it in all pop culture AND legal capacities; we love vulnerable people. It makes good stories and for lawyers, well, it makes good money. Heck, for many Americans, there’s a win/win–we scour the cnn.com and anyghettousa.com headlines for some poor suckers who just lost their house, we give some money/clothes/facebook headlines to the cause du jour, and voila (!), we have a conversation piece for our liberal friends for a few weeks, and our consciences are simultaneously absolved. Yet after those clothes are gone and the facebook statuses are long forgotten, little DuQuan Jenkins from the hood is, well, still in the hood and we haven’t really made his life any better.

For lawyers, the equation is slightly different–we scour hospitals/barber shops/old lady’s conversations for some poor sucker who is in a horrible position (perhaps a small mom and pop business who is being sued for a slip and fall), we give a bit of our time and pretend that we’re really friends with these folks, and then voila(!)–we hit them with a bill for “X” thousands of dollars, and their immediate emergency is over but they’re really not any better off for our involvement in their issues."

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Gyasi Ross: Lawyers, Haiti, Natives, etc… (Thing About Skins and Other Curious