Creditwrench
Senior Member



Joined: October 16 2004
Location: United States
Online Status: Online
Posts: 153

Posted: January 08 2005 at 8:44am | IP Logged

Quote: Since you are so free with your "advice" I'm sure you will be happy to explain how one could walk into an attorney's office and know that the attorney either is or is not competent.

Enormis Said:

Quote: The simplest way is to ask them or you local bar association.

Yes, that is the simplest way indeed. It is also the simpleton's way. I've personally done that on multiple occasions. Not only have I called the Oklahoma Bar Assn. looking for an attorney to handle some cases of various types but since we are specifically talking about FDCPA and consumer protection issues I'll stick with those kinds of cases. I've called the OBA and gotten the usual list of 3 attorneys from which I could pick and choose and done that more than once. I've also received such a list by consulting NACA (I think that is the name of it) which is a well known organization that recommends consumer advocate attorneys and got a list of attorneys and I've also asked an attorney in California whom I know and highly respect as arguably being one of the most competent in the nation to recommend consumer advocate attorneys here in Oklahoma.

Most of the attorneys that have been recommended to me by those resources expressly denied having any real knowledge of FDCPA at all, many of them even said they had no interest or experience in the subject at all and some said they used to do some of that work in Oklahoma but were no longer taking such cases and after actually going to the offices of a couple of them who said they would give me a consultation told me that they would have to spend a lot of time at the law library to research what I was talking about and wanted to know if I was willing to pay for their research time at fees up to $250 an hour.

One attorney I spoke with, a MS. Libby Mercer here in OKC proved to be an extremely knowledgeable person in the area of FDCPA but said that her area of interest and expertise was in dealing with car dealers and the sale of "lemons" to consumers and she also said that the reason she didn't really want to take on any new FDCPA type cases was because she didn't want to have to spend any more of her time educating judges whose eyeballs simply glaze over when she starts talking about FDCPA. She says they have no idea what FDCPA is all about and don't seem to want to know anything about it either. I have consulted with Attorney David Szwak in Louisiana who is considered by many leading authorities including a well known collections industry magazine to be one of the top if not the top consumer advocate attorney in the nation and who has sued more debt collectors and won than any other attorney in America. He referred me to some dumbo in Tulsa and claimed that the Tulsa attorney was one of his associates. Tulsa is about 1 1/2 hours from OKC by freeway and so 3 hours minimum travel time isn't really acceptable either.

I've spoken to well over a dozen consumer advocate attorneys here in Oklahoma and not one of them were both knowledgeable and willing to take a case dealing with FDCPA or FCRA.

Is Oklahoma the only state so devoid of good competent attorneys? No, it is not. In fact, the vast majority of states seem to have no such a thing as a competent consumer advocate attorney. And that is just in the area of consumer advocacy meaning that the consumer has actual, factual and well documented evidence of wrong doing and wishes to be the plaintiff in a lawsuit. If the consumer is in the defendant's chair they can forget about getting any help at all unless they have big bucks to spend on their defense and even then they will stand an extremely poor chance of getting a successful defense.

The only really good attorneys I know of are WestCoast Litigators in San Diego and they only work in Orange County and in some rare instances will go to L.A. on a case.

California does have a few fairly good attorneys scattered around the state. Indiana also has some really good ones such as Clifford Sheppard who is pretty famous for his involvement in the Spears v. Brennan and other somewhat similiar cases.

So we have those really competent attorneys plus Edleman & Combs or whatever their name is in Chicago who some say is great and others decry them and we most likely do have a few others scattered around the nation that I may not have heard of who are competent consumer attorneys so long as the consumer is the plaintiff but with the possible exception of WestCoast Litigators there are none that I have ever heard of who are competent defense attorneys. Even if there were, the average consumer hit with a judgment cannot afford the money a good competent attorney would charge them.

Quote: In the legal world, competence refers to experience or education related to a specific discipline.

That may very well be the definition of competence in the legal world but it is not my definition of competence nor is it the definition of competence in the eyes of most people that I know of. The only real way to determine the competence of an attorney is to go to the local courthouse and do a personal records check on that attorney and see how many cases they have handled in the area of interest and then check to see how many they actually won or lost. In my opinion a competent attorney may have only a very few cases of a particular type but has won most if not all of them. An attorney who has lost most of his cases cannot be considered very competent. Another way is to be sufficiently educated in the subject matter at hand to be able to determine whether or not what the attorney says in an actual office interview makes sense or not. One cannot determine the competency of another if he knows nothing about the subject matter at hand. That does not mean that the average person seeking the advice of an attorney or other professional needs to know as much as the professional to make the judgment call but he should at least have a little knowledge about the subject. Far too often however he just has to blindly rely on the professionalism of the person he is consulting. That is not the best position to be in to say the least.

In fact, if I had to rely on the advice of an attorney in the area of consumer protection I would be much more inclined to rely on the competence of an attorney who is in the business of debt collection rather than one who claims to be competent in the area of
consumer protection.

I had one such experience back about 1967 when dealing with a landlord in Denver. I had already laid the groundwork for possible future problems when I first started dealing with him about 2 years prior to that so that when trouble did arise I had an unbeatable case against him to start with. When the trouble actually began I went to an attorney who is famous in Denver for being a hard debt collection attorney to deal with and had him take my case. He won it easily and got a nice settlement out of the landlord. While I might have wished for a better settlement it was at least just and fair.

But even so, most debt collection attorneys are not all that competent either. I often run into cases in which the attorney claims that the defendant has not adhered to the rules of civil procedure yet violates them himself in the same document in which he complains that the defendant has violated them.

In fact, from what I have seen, most debt collection attorneys are anything but competent. If that were not so then why would it be that a very famous law office put out a large volume of books they update every year and often more than that which attempts to cite cases in which attorneys have been blindsided by consumers and teach the purchasers of their books how to keep from being blindsided?

Quote: For example: if you were arrested on a charge of beastiality and you contacted an attorney who specializes in probate, they would tell you up front they were not competent to represent you. That doesn't imply they're idiots, it's simply not their area of practice. Michael Jackson doesn't have patent law attorney's representing him on criminal charges, they would be incompetent for that purpose. For Mikey, criminal attorney's would be competent.

Most criminal defense attorneys are not all that competent either. If they were then our jails would not be so full. What most criminals do not understand is that the first allegiance their defense attorney has is to the court and the court system. Another thing that they do not understand is that the only representation their attorney is obligated to give them is to try to ensure that they get a fair trial and that their rights are not violated. Public defenders are not obligated to go out of their way to do the leg work that might be required to uncover evidence and testimony to get them acquitted nor are they required to carefully examine each and every document or piece of evidence submitted by the prosecution to be certain of it’s accuracy nor it’s veracity. That much is at least evidenced by the cases involving the lady forensic expert named Joyce Gilchrist. here in Oklahoma City in which she was recently fired from her post for fabricating evidence and making false statements before the courts in order to obtain convictions. She was so good at fabricating evidence that the defense attorneys called her “Black Magic”.

And there was the case of the fellow who spent 15 years in jail for a rape he did not commit but was convicted anyway. That one cost the State of Oklahoma a couple of million dollars or more and there were a total of at least 15 others who had also been wrongfully convicted and committed as a result of the “Black Magic” of Joyce Gilchrist.
If criminal defense attorneys were so competent they would have done away with Black Magic long before they did. So did those 16 or more people wrongfully convicted as a result of patently false and fabricated evidence get a fair trial and were they represented by a competent attorney? I don’t think so and neither did the State of Oklahoma.

Also, what about the hordes of cases nationwide in which judicial incompetence has been the subject of criminal appeals cases? There have been more than 150 cases in Oklahoma alone in which the subject of the appeal was the corruption and judicial incompetence of those on the bench who were supposed to be doing their job correctly and fairly. Nationwide the number of such cases is somewhere in the thousands and that only counts those cases which were taken to the appellate level. So not only are there hordes of incompetent attorneys in the area of criminal practice but there are obviously also hordes of incompetent or worse judges sitting on the benches of America.

Incompetency is so rampant in the American system of justice that it very well may be considered to be the norm rather than the exception.

Quote: My suggestion that a person spend a few bucks on competent legal, council rather than falling for your credit repair scam, indicates someone should seek council competent in the practice of law relative to FDCPA matters.

Your suggestion is not one that anyone with an ounce of brains would dare to follow if they had any hope of winning. The evidence and proof of that is easily determined by checking the search engines for such terms as “judicial incompetence” or “judicial malpractice” or any one of a large collection of similar search terms and one will quickly see that there are millions of webpages out there dealing with those topics.

If your advice were of any value whatever there would not be those millions of webpages out there nor would there be any horror stories in our newspapers nationwide such as the ones generated by Joyce Gilchrist here in Oklahoma City and repeated in multitudes of other outrages all over the nation. They are not rare isolated cases of public officials gone beserk with power but rather they are rampant all over the nation. And the number of such instances nationwide that have gone unpublished would far exceed the number of those that have gone unnoticed by the press or have yet to be uncovered.

And corruption and greed and incompetency is not limited to the justice system either. Here in Oklahoma we have had a multitude of cases such as our Governor Hall and Governor David Walters, the now ongoing case of Carrol Fisher and many, many other government officials at the state and local levels who have been convicted of a whole range of crimes ranging from simple drunk driving up to the theft of untold millions of tax dollars, outrageous kickback schemes, employees who were paid high salaries for work never performed, rape, child molestation and just about every crime known to man.

So with all of the evidence to the contrary, there is no real way that the average man on the street can rationally expect to find any such animal as a competent attorney.

Is it any wonder then that people turn to those who are what you call “scam artists” to find a successful resolution to their problems? Is it any wonder then that people do not answer a summons to court for a debt they owe when they know that the outcome is already predetermined and that no one will listen to a word they have to say unless they are knowledgeable in the law themselves and have a solid defense that is unbeatable or nearly so?

Sadly, the evidence and proof that your so called advice is a much greater scam is all too readily available by doing a simple search in any search engine.

Enormis, while your advice sounds logical and correct on the surface of it the practical application of it will more than likely lead to nothing but grief. It is of no practical value whatever and in fact will cause those who heed it nothing but more misery than they already have. It is worse than useless.

About the only good it will do is to become an article on my blog which will help to keep people from being hurt by paying any attention to it whatever.

Thanks for giving me some new editorial subject matter. As usual, you have done me a lot more good than harm.

Have a nice day.






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