JSB's Whiz Bang #9

Special Lawyer Edition

Ah, lawyers—a never-ending source of humorous smackdowns. Not that we don’t deserve them. “Woe to you lawyers!” Jesus said. And many a judge has said “Whoa” to lawyers. In the age of Artificial Intelligence, this is common. (Ironically, when I was practicing law, some judges accused me of HAVING artificial intelligence.)

A recent California appellate decision (this is true) sanctioned a lawyer $10,000 for turning in a brief that was generated by AI. The names of the cases the bot cited were legit, but it “hallucinated” language the lawyer included in his brief to “prove” his point. Unfortunately for the lawyer, the appellate judges actually looked up those cases and found that the quotes didn’t exist in any of them. They not only dinged the lawyer ten grand, they required him to apologize to his client and also passed his name along to the State Bar. Ouch!

Lawyer jokes are so familiar I shan’t repeat them. You’ve heard them all. There was a guy in my Sunday School class who would come up to me every week with a smile on his face and tell me a “new” lawyer joke. I’d always finish it for him. His smile would fade. “Oh, so you know that one.” I’d buck him up with, “But it was funny the first fifty times I heard it.”

My favorite lawyer funnies are the malaprops captured in court transcripts. In the “heat of battle” of a trial, sometimes a lawyer’s tongue outpaces the lawyer’s mind. As in the following:

“Was it you or your brother that was killed in the war?”

“The youngest son, the 20-year-old, how old is he?”

“Were you alone or by yourself?”

“How long have you been a French Canadian?”

“So you were gone until you returned?”

“Now doctor, isn’t it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn’t know about it until the next morning?”