Should Society Condemn all Personal Injury Attorneys
Most medical doctors do great things. Whether they are saving peoples' lives or proscribing medicine for the common cold. Either way, they are helping people. However, like all professions, there are some that do not do the right thing. Sometimes doctors have lapses in judgment. Sometimes they do not have the training or skill to be providing the kind of care they have chosen to provide, and sometimes the profit motive causes them to lose track of why they became doctors in the first place.
A perfect example involves the arrest of Tampa medical Doctor John Mubang in 2008 for trafficking in narcotics and proscribing controlled substances without medical necessity. According to an article in the St. Petersburg Times written by Alexandra Zayas and Letitia Stein, Dr. Mubang runs a pain management clinic in Tampa. He is accused of prescribing powerful pain medicines to anyone that was willing to pay regardless of whether they were in pain. If true, he was basically using his medical degree to legitimize acting as a drug dealer. At least one of his patients has died of an overdose.
Society does not and should not blame the entire medical profession for the actions of doctors accused of things like Dr. Mubang. Of course, the same should hold true for all professions. In other words, no profession should be condemned as a whole just because some in the profession do bad things.
Unfortunately, there are many in the medical profession, politics, and the corporate world that do not agree when it comes to personal injury lawyers. They condemn all personal injury attorneys for the bad things that some personal injury lawyers do. Many of them condemn us because it is our job to hold them accountable. They see themselves as doing no wrong. Therefore, in their eyes the problem must be that those that want to hold them accountable are bad people. In their eyes the answer is tort reform.
The truth is that personal injury attorneys are not bad people. Our goal is to help society by holding wrongdoers financially accountable for the harm they cause. Sometimes, some of us fall short. Just like doctors, some lawyers may have lapses in judgment; some lawyers may not have the training or skill to be handling a particular case; and the profit motive may cause some lawyers to lose track of why they became personal injury lawyers in the first place. When this happens, the individual lawyers should be held accountable. But just like with doctors, the entire personal injury profession should not be blamed for the actions of a few.
