Re: Great news about my court case - get yourself a lawyer

[Nina]

It's so true about people who have attorneys being treated differently.  This is not a very significant example, but it opened my eyes to this very fact and changed the way I pursue disputes.  On one of the many relocations of my youth, I actually had a job waiting for me in NY city.  The company I would be working for paid for my moving expenses and I hired Mayflower to haul my stuff from CA to NJ.  I had neatly marked all my boxes and when the drivers arrived they wouldn't wait for me to inspect all the boxes.  I signed off, but I included a note saying that I had not inspected everything.  Sure enough several of the boxes marked "tools" were missing.  (Another lesson is to mark your boxes in code!).  My significant other and I fought for months with the moving company, through phone calls and letters, each time they would put us off.  (We were insured for loss and damage btw).  Finally we spoke to an attorney about it.  While we were in the attorney's office, after a 10 minute conversation mind you, he picked up the phone and that quick we were okayed a check to cover our losses!  Made me want to spit! Nina [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: No offense taken. Merry and I actually talked for a while about this very thing-- how the city attorney and the city council started acting differently once Merry announced to them she was going to take the case and put together a team of lawyers to fight it. She said the "team" was going to be her, the criminal attorney Hideyo found, and Hideyo's boyfriend, but she did not say that to the city people. She just said a "team" would be litigating it, and she said they all seemed very surprised and then started acting cooperative.  I myself, in my jobs as a legal aid lawyer, have seen over and over how differently people with lawyers are treated.  It is really shocking and appalling.  One of my jobs right now entails going through and reading most of the hearing decisions that come out of the MA (I am telecommuting) welfare system (administrative appeal decisions) to try to get a sense of systemic problems that are occurring and to post relevant decisions on a website where legal aid lawyers can see and use them.  Most of the decisions are in cases where the person did not have a lawyer.  There are so many decisions that are denied appeals, where if the person had had a lawyer I know they would have won because they were completely in the right.  It makes me very depressed. Michelle