Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for July 31, 2019

A lawyer dies suddenly and tells Satan, “I’m only 29 years old.”

Satan says, “Not by your billable hours.”

A mother and her daughter walk past the graveyard, and they notice a stone saying, "Here lies a lawyer and a good man. The girl stares for a second, then turns to her mother.

“Mommy? Why are there two men buried here?”

“A tragedy just happened! A bus full of lawyers went off a cliff!”

“So what’s the tragedy?”

“Three seats were empty!”

Lawyer joke day I guess. Maybe we should make it a national holiday or at least 1 day a year like we make everything else.

Hot dog = $5 + Billable time 1 hour (1 hour minimum at $300 per hour) = total cost of hot dog $305

I lay down $5 and Bob hands me a hot dog and tells me what I owe for the billable. “I didn’t give you an order” I say.

Lion sees another lion eating elephant dung. “Why are you eating that?” “I ate a lawyer. I’m trying to get the taste out of my mouth”

Leaving out the billable hours joke for a moment, a question for people who live in cities where they actually have these food carts. Is $5.00 for a hot dog realistic? Seems kind of steep.

Terrorists hijack a plane load of lawyers. They demand a million dollars else they will release one lawyer an hour.

They say everyone hates lawyers until they need one. I don’t need one, so I guess that means I still hate them…?

Why doesn’t a rattlesnake bite a lawyer? Professional courtesy.

Remember, if it wasn’t for lawyers, we wouldn’t need lawyers.

I grew up in a family of lawyers and judges. To this day, I don’t find anything funny about lawyer jokes.

I wish some places would do this. I always seem to be in line behind someone who has to discuss the entire menu, the worker’s family and education, everything that’s gone wrong with the world for the last century,…

Before we disclose the ingredients of your hot dog we’ll have to run it by legal.

What if you have a hot dog guy on retainer?

Next order, please. Just make it brief

At my stepson’s wedding, his bio-dad and his dad – both medical-malpractice defense attorneys – were lamenting the prevalence of lawyer jokes.

So I asked them “Do you know how many lawyer jokes there are?”

“Hundreds!”

“No, just 3 – the rest are all true.”

How much for the bun and condiments, I wonder?

Okay, okay . . . 1. Anybody familiar with the Andy Carpenter series by David Rosenfeld? 2. Disclaimer. The two times I engaged a lawyer in my lifetime, both were knowledgeable and fair. Reasonable fees, too. 3. Anybody know what the suicide rate for lawyers is? Once heard dentists had the highest suicide rate of all professions, but lawyers seem much more widely disliked. . . 4. A favorite all-time cartoon shows two lawyers standing in a law library with shelves of law books extending in all direction ad infinitum. One lawyer says to the other: “And to think it all started with just ten commandments.”

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” – Shakespeare; Henry VI Part II, Act IV, scene II, spoken by “Dick the Butcher.”

Billable hours make life livable. And, they pay for my Porsche.

Well, that’s one way to keep the line moving.

Here’s the thing, guys…lawyer jokes aside…this strip was never meant to be funny. It’s a sad commentary, and it’s totally true.

Might just be a good way to get people to stop hemming and hawing over their order while the line builds up behind them. I know the feeling.

I was billed for a phone call to my lawyer, the purpose of which was to correct numerous errors he had made in a document he was preparing for me. He acknowledged the errors and accepted the corrections and thanked me for bringing them to his attention. And yet somehow in lawyer logic, he felt entitled to get paid for the work I did for him. I did pay him, but the price he paid was the loss of his reputation with me. I don’t know if lack of scruples is a prerequisite for getting into law school, or if it’s a course they have to take in order to graduate. Or perhaps law just attracts such people. I’m sure one or two scrupulous ones sneak by, but I don’t think I know any personally. I think the prevalence of lawyer jokes isn’t coincidental.