by Sean McManus
Staff Writer
Tod Aronovitz doesn’t like lawyer jokes. And he really doesn’t like the one published in The Lakeland Ledger quoting David Letterman as saying it was so cold in New York recently that he saw a lawyer with his hands in his own pockets.
But Aronovitz, a Miami lawyer and the current president of The Florida Bar, has a point. In a recent editorial in The Miami Herald, he pointed out that the very institution the public relies on to curb corporate abuses by executives at places such as Adelphia Cable and WorldCom, is the one that faces chronic cynicism about their own corporate malfeasance.
“Can we rely on one mistrusted institution to remedy another?” asked Aronovitz. Armed with a few hundred thousand dollars from lawyers across the state who dug into their own pockets, Aronovitz has initiated a public relations campaign designed to propel lawyers from the image of the sharply dressed, power lunch-eating shark into the hard-working, justice-loving, pro bono-type he says most lawyers are.
And he’s got his work cut out for him. According to a survey cited in the National Law Journal last week, based on focus groups conducted in five cities, only 19 percent of people have confidence in lawyers. And lawyers were repeatedly described as “greedy, manipulative and corrupt.” Seventy-four percent of the respondents thought lawyers were more interested in winning than seeing justice served, and almost as many thought lawyers cared more about money than their own clients.
But while people think lawyers search for loopholes to free clients who may be murderers, rapists or corporate raiders, 71 percent of people polled said that they needed a lawyer on some occasion during the past year, and only half of them planned on it.
Hank Coxe, a lawyer at the Bedell Law Firm who is active in The Florida Bar, said the major problem is that negative perceptions of lawyers triggers negative attitudes about the judiciary as a whole.
“If people don’t have confidence in those who counsel them, it leads to skepticism about judge’s decisions and about the credibility of those who make laws,” said Coxe. According to Coxe, the Dignity in Law campaign, which targets 1,000 journalists and government officials, will highlight the good work lawyers do every day, not just run splashy television spots showing lawyers shaking hands and kissing babies.
There are a few theories on why people have such negative perceptions of lawyers. Aronovitz, and others, have said television shows like “Ally McBeal,” “Judge Judy,” and “The Practice” warp the way people think of their profession.
Judge Pauline Drayton-Harris agreed.
“The biggest problem is that television portrays lawyers and judges as greedy, corrupt and silly,” she said. “There are just a lot of misconceptions about there about what it is that we really do.”
And some say the perception of lawyers as ambulance chasers is perpetuated by the billboards and commercials asking only for injury cases.
“It’s like any profession,” said Coxe. “One bad seed can ruin it for everybody.”
But lawyers are sick of being at the bottom of a ladder that contains crooked chief executives and auditors and investment bankers who are blind to cooked books. Coxe said Aronovitz will be in Jacksonville soon to kick off the initiative locally and tell the members of the city’s legal community how they can reverse some of the negative stereotypes.