#Client Advocacy

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[techinnoverse]

Top 15 Accident Lawyers in the US

Introduction: 18-wheeler accidents can be devastating, causing severe injuries or even death. In the aftermath of an accident, you may be left dealing with physical, emotional, and financial stress. In such situations, it is essential to have the best possible legal representation to help you seek justice and recover damages. Finding the right 18 wheeler accident lawyer can be challenging, as…

[kaurwreck]

One of my law professor once said, "You're a lawyer defending your case. There's gotta be blood. It has to be bloody because you're not nice. You shouldn't be nice. You're a lawyer. And you're here to win your case." and although im aware that he said it mostly as a joke—before he said that he pointed one of my classmate to tell him how they'd defend their company in the face of lawsuit and got a little disappointed with how tame my classmate answer was—i can't help but be curious of your thought on that as someone who's working in the field

We are ethically obligated to be zealous advocates for our clients. However, it is immensely difficult to advocate for your client effectively if you've managed to make everyone else involved, including the judge and opposing counsel, angry.

To provide an example, when I was a paralegal at a plaintiff-side workers' compensation firm, opposing counsel once forced our horrifically injured client to travel an hour to our office for a settlement conference, despite not having the authorization to settle for anything close to an amount he should have recognized as reasonable. My attorney, rightfully and righteously furious, laid into him in the middle of our office, humiliating him in front of the parties and our firm. Four days later, my attorney realized we needed a deadline extension, for which we'd have to request opposing counsel's permission. Opposing counsel was gracious enough to agree to the extension, but he very well could have said no after how we spoke to him, and that would have damaged our client's case.

More recently, as a transactional attorney, I was tasked with drafting a disengagement letter addressed to a manufacturer who had failed to design the product my nonprofit client ordered to my client's specifications, which had, for lack of a better term, fucked my client re: my client's other obligations. The law and facts were on our side; if the matter went before a court, we very likely would have won, and easily at that. (For frame of reference, my client serves disadvantaged children. Even the optics were on our side.) But, my client is a nonprofit, and every penny spent on litigation would have been a penny taken from my client's mission. Thus, to zealously advocate for my client, I couldn't go balls to the wall such that the other party became incensed and filed suit or protracted our disengagement process.

You don't have to be nice, but you have to be professional, thoughtful, and strategic. You don't win lawsuits and negotiations from drawing blood. You do so by achieving the outcome that your client asked you to achieve.

[carriesthewind]

Gonna have a little treat tonight, on the grounds that I completely bled through and over my (first) large pad within 5 hours of getting to work today. :(

[uncanny-tranny]

Talked about this in a tag rant, but in mental health advocacy spaces or mental health awareness spaces, it is imperative that we stop treating cognitive behavioural therapy as the Only Option or the Best Option. As a survivor, having CBT therapists coach me through ongoing abuse was very unhelpful at best. At a certain point, going to my "mind palace" did not help me go home to a place that was a threat to me.

Yes, there are good uses for CBT. No, that doesn't mean that it is the only option for helping people who are struggling. It is dangerous to prop up CBT as the only option. It is dangerous to not inform a patient about all treatment options and what would look best for them (it's also dangerous how insurance may only cover CBT therapists, too. It is extremely dangerous.)

[savage-rhi]

Magenta 🤬

[fatalelity]

in a world with so much medical gaslighting, doctors who don't listen to patients and dismiss their concerns .... yeah we need more docs like addie and izzie.... we need more people who will not only LISTEN to us but also advocate for us even when we feel like giving up

izzie might notve been suitable for being a surgeon or just the residency process and that's fine but izzie is by no means a bad doctor at the beginning. she only worsened when her only viable mentor away —— as in addie was discouraged from harnessing her compassion and instead leaving her to be ridiculed

fuuuuuck we need more compassionate doctors and izzie couldve been a really fucking amazing one on the show if the narrative wasn't so pressed on punishing people who cared about patients tbh

[powpowhammer]

It's the advocate system they have in several other countries!

[tonyglowheart]

not 2 be a "bad" "feminist" but like. okay I know the guy who plays Nate is problematic and etc, but like. like I tried to like Leverage Redemption, but it just. is too flanderized and doesn't quite manage to like both write real-feeling characters nor grasp the charm that made Leverage "work" for me, so like. watching Leverage Redemption mostly has me wincing, and like. does not hold the same place in my heart that Leverage does....

[silhouettecrow]

365 Days of Writing Prompts: Day 164

Adjective: Small

Noun: Devil

Definitions for those who need/want them:

Small: of a size that is less than normal or usual; not great in amount, number, strength, or power; not fully grown or developed, or young; (of a voice) lacking strength and confidence; used as the first letter of a word that has both a general and a specific use to show that in this case the general use is intended; insignificant, or unimportant; little, or hardly any; (of a business or its owner) operating on a modest scale; (archaic) low or inferior in rank or position, or socially undistinguished

Devil: (in Christian and Jewish belief) the chief evil spirit, or Satan; an evil spirit, or a demon; a very wicked or cruel person; a mischievously clever or self-willed person; fighting spirit, or wildness; a thing that is very difficult or awkward to do or deal with; (informal) a person with specified characteristics; expressing surprise or annoyance in various questions or exclamations; an instrument or machine fitted with sharp teeth or spikes, used for tearing or other destructive work; (dated) (informal) a junior assistant of a lawyer or other professional

[loversword]

sick for the whole weekend and called out today and probably can't go to the gym this week rraaghhh

[liangdraws]

Láadan, I get why she thought it'd be easy - picking the easiest consonants and vowels to say for the base form - but she fully expected the speakers to just do that without thinking about it. Admirable goal, creating a language you can't gaslight someone in - but that onus is on the speaker. (I'd say the billion ablauts of every verb saying how happy you are about it, that was more intimidating to its users than a particle would have been.)

This is why conlangers shouldn't study Navajo. It is by far an outlier in terms of how much complexity is in the grammar alone, and studying it will make it sound like the native speakers use all this grammar. Which they don't, when it's implicit, which the textbook can't tell you (since nominalized verbs usually need more structural support than unambiguous nouns, it varies highly).

The biggest conlang I had inspired by Navajo, Hlūf, I had to make a billion features optional, because of the story:

"Apisawekumumehaeskelelewihē" is how the textbook will tell you to write "Alright (concessive), let's suppose she causes you to be hurt over and over again." This is how you'll speak if you're giving a speech in parliament.

"Api, asa kumumehaᴉhwē aoe 'kelel?" is how a native speaker would assemble the sentence using a local system of mutations, and thinking through the sentence as it's being said.

"Appi assa wıᴉ kūhru *gestures of repeated punching* moha, meha meha owë?" is how my protagonists will say it.

That's supposed to be a native English speaker in a foreign land, making a clumsy pidgin out of the dictionary terms - isolating lemmas, using extra pronouns, and second-language-errors like mixing up "kumu" with "kūhru," meaning "to make" like crafting an object, not like causing an emotion.

So there was a justified artlangy excuse to make the language "complicated" - the story requires non-linguist readers to tell the fluent from the clumsy speakers at a glance. Over the course of the story, the reader should hopefully remember a couple words, and the isolating pidgin will make it so eventually they can recognize a suspicious keyword. Even spoken aloud, this wouldn't work. But you can pick up the pattern when reading comic speech balloons "fluent speakers use long words and choppy speakers use short ones." They may not know what verb conjunct slots or oligosynthesis are, and neither did I when I was a kid, that's okay!

Making a language "complicated" can have many reasons!

Valyrian is impressively complicated and difficult to learn, is it so complicated on purpose or did it surprise you with how complicated it turned out?

When it comes to complexity and language, any complexity you add to the morphology is complexity you take away from the syntax, and vice-versa. For example, when you learn all the noun cases of Finnish, it buys you having to remember fewer constructions with adpositions—or fewer verb augmentations, if the language went that way.

Syntactically, Valyrian is usually (MODIFIER) NOMINATIVE-NOUN (MODIFIER) OTHER-CASE-NOUN* (ADVERB) VERB. It's quite simple. There's not a lot you have to remember, and things can move around a little bit, if it feels right. You don't have to remember a ton of auxiliaries with different applications and slightly different usages. For the most part the heavy hitters (the nouns and verbs themselves) take care of things rather nicely. This is what complexity within the words themselves buys you: simplicity elsewhere.

The reason you get this is because all languages are doing the same thing: describing human experience. And humans are the same language to language. The other small tidbit is that when creating a naturalistic language—and it doesn't matter what method you use—you are, unconsciously or not, aiming for the lowest common denominator in terms of grammatical complexity. You don't have to do that, but generally if you're trying to create a language for humans with no other goals, you do. With a language like Ithkuil, John was intentionally pushing away from what is standard in human languages, and so there are needless levels of complexity that push beyond the boundaries of ordinary human language.

Now, when I say "needless", this is what I mean.

In Turkish, if you want to say "The girl is reading a book", you say:

Kız kitap okuyor.

Turkish is a language with noun cases, but you only see the nominative here. Why? Because the girl is reading A book. When the object is indefinite in Turksih you don't need to use the accusative case—in fact, you shouldn't. If you wanted to say "The girl is reading the book", that's when the accusative case pops up:

Kız kitabı okuyor.

Okay, with this in mind, you've introduced—just in the nouns—four possibilities:

Nominative + indefinite

Nominative + definite

Accusative + indefinite

Accusative + definite

In a maximally complex language, all of this would be marked. In Turkish, only one of these is marked. (Well, maybe two, if you were to say Bir kız for nominative + indefinite. Turkish has an indefinite article that pops up sometimes.) Certainly there are languages where all of these have some sort of marking, but then those very same languages will have other situations where maximal marking is possible but not present.

Human languages all have this in common. There are areas in the language where more categories could be marked but are not. It doesn't matter what the language is. This is because humans have limits for how much junk they'll tolerate in the language they're using. It isn't long before something that could be inferred from context is inferred from context. It collapses every so often (i.e. too little is marked and so marking pops up), but the unconscious goal is for the language to have a balance between morphological and syntactic complexity and also explicitness and implicitness.

A language doesn't have to do this, though, and so conlangs can be more or less explicit/implicit. Can they work? Certainly, but they may be more than humans will comfortably tolerate, and so humans may not want to use them.

Take Láadan, for example. Had Láadan been created later it might have had a better shot at being used, but this was 1982 before conlangers had started getting together. Láadan primary flaw is that it's trying to be a deep philosophical experiment while also trying to be a language a lot of people speak. That was never going to work. Suzette Haden Elgin lamented that maybe women didn't want a language of their own to use, and so the experiment was doomed from the start. A simpler explanation is she saw an ocean and built a train to cross it.

In Láadan, every sentence begins with one of six speech act particles (copied from Wikipedia):

Bíi: Indicates a declarative sentence (usually optional)

Báa: ndicates a question

Bó: Indicates a command; very rare, except to small children

Bóo: Indicates a request; this is the usual imperative/"command" form

Bé: Indicates a promise

Bée: Indicates a warning

And then in addition to that, every sentence ends with one of the following (also copied from Wikipedia):

wa: Known to speaker because perceived by speaker, externally or internally

wi: Known to speaker because self-evident

we: Perceived by speaker in a dream

wáa: Assumed true by speaker because speaker trusts source

waá: Assumed false by speaker because speaker distrusts source; if evil intent by the source is also assumed, the form is waálh

wo: Imagined or invented by speaker, hypothetical

wóo: Used to indicate that the speaker states a total lack of knowledge as to the validity of the matter

This is too much! Evidential systems in language exist, but they are so much smaller than this, and usually the markers pull double duty—and there's often a null marker.

Again, though, it's about the goals! This is fine for a philosophical language. And if it was simply a philosophical language, then how many people "speak" it is irrelevant. For example, John Quijada doesn't lament that after twenty years there isn't a community of Ithkuil speakers—indeed, he's baffled whenever he hears of someone who wants to try to "speak" Ithkuil. It's not designed for that, and so the metric isn't a fair one. Based on the structure of Láadan, I'd argue the same: the number of speakers/users isn't a fair metric, and shouldn't have been a design goal. Because while a language like High Valyrian looks more complex, with its declension classes and conjugations, Láadan is more complex in that it exceeds the expectations of explicitness a human user expects from a language.

Long answer to the question, but no, High Valyrian ended up as complex as I intended, and I don't think it's more complex than one would expect from either a natural or naturalistic language.

[lawofficeofryansshipp]

Ryan Shipp, Esquire: The Tenacious Landlord Attorney Who Gets The Job Done

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[anyataylorjoys]

Now her management agencies WME and Sugar23 are looking to pull the plug on her for starting a fundraiser for the UNRWA which is providing aid to Gaza after funding was pulled when Israel claimed they are in cahoots with Hamas. God forbid she raise money so people don't starve to death and can have access to sanitation products. This world is evil.

Fundraiser link in her bio:

[fantastic-nonsense]

I know it's cold comfort to everyone protesting and watching the protests against US funding of Israel right now, but the needle on Palestine has already moved further than I would have ever thought possible in so short a time.

For nearly 75 years, the conversation around sending money and weapons to Israel has remained staunchly ingrained in the American public imagination as something that is both good and uncontroversial. 2014 (the first time Israel's brutality against Palestinians truly went worldwide on social media) was the first time I believed that public sentiment change was possible. But that was a cracked door of genuine sympathy. Israel's behavior this time has blown the door wide open. I've seen more movement on the issue of American military aid and political support to Israel in the past 6 months than I have in the past 10 years.

When I did my graduate thesis on how to advocate for more effective international arms control against state actors who violated human rights, I was explicitly told by my client to stay away from Israel for the case study portion. They were an exception to every law and rule we had, so it was useless to talk about them. Fast forward two years, and we are having genuine conversations about Israel's ongoing, routine human rights violations and the need to condition their military aid that I would have considered impossible last year.

I never thought I would see AIPAC talked about in Democratic circles like they talked about the NRA. I never thought I would see people who work in the political sphere and aren't explicitly doing human rights advocacy talk about the Leahy Laws and the human rights conditions of the Foreign Assistance Act in relation to Israel. I never thought I would see federal politicians repeatedly call out Israel's brutality on the floor of Congress. I never thought I would see "normies" talking about the state-level anti-BDS laws that the pro-Israel lobby has advocated for and helped pass over the past decade. Hoped and wished it would happen, sure. But thought it actually would? No. But it's finally happening!

And if there's a silver lining in this whole awful mess, it's that it's clear Israel has lost the long-term war of public opinion. Every single poll of under 30s (and to a certain extent, under 40s) is pretty clear on that.

Regardless of what happens here in this moment, Israel's unique relationship with the United States is done the second the current crop of legislators retires or is pushed out of office. We're starting to see politicians who are willing to have that conversation already, thanks to everyone who has gotten involved in state and federal elections and helped support candidates who value human dignity and sympathize with Palestine. Within ten years at most—and more reasonably within the next five depending on how 2028 shakes out—the funding conversation will look VERY different (as long as you all keep voting, anyway). Progress is slow, but it IS happening.

[genderkoolaid]

We don't have good statistics or estimates for the population size of transmasculine sex workers. Part of that is a lack of data on sex workers in general, but part of it is that trans men are often not visibly trans when they participate in sex work. A lot of the trans men and transmasculine people who sell sex do so under a female persona. The escorting profile of a trans man might be indistinguishable from the profile of a cis woman – intentionally on his part – to attract as many clients as possible. This means that in practice, this segment of the transmasculine population are recorded as cis women. If we were to assume the population of trans men selling sex was accurately reflected by the profiles visible on escorting sites, we would likely come to the conclusion that trans men are a tiny group within sex work. The reality is that even openly trans men are much more likely to engage in more informal kinds of sex work, such as on apps like Grindr or with people they meet and in social spaces, just like cis gay men who sell sex. The transmasculine people who claim to be cis women whilst working do share needs with cis women who sell sex, but such resources do not serve all the needs of those hidden trans people. Trans men who are not socially or medically transitioning are driven to sell sex by the same forces which push women to sell sex, with the added pressure of saving money towards transition care and the certainty that they will not be able to sell sex under a female persona forever. Their clientele are also much more likely to shift towards gay and bi men when they do come out, which will change the experiences they have at work and may change their health concerns. [...] [...] So on what basis do I assume the real numbers are so much higher than the few ads we can find online? The impetus for my initial wondering was prompted by the fact I sold sex for many years before I even came out to myself as trans. And I continued to work under a cis female persona until I had been on testosterone for several months. I’m not arrogant enough to think I’m an exceptional case, so I kept an eye out for others like me.  As I began to speak about my experiences in sex worker group chats, on social media, and in meetings with advocacy organisations, I began to hear from many others in the same situation. Every time I speak up, I hear from more trans men and non-binary people who are hidden. No advocacy group is going to find these people unless they identify themselves this way, and transmasculine people are unlikely to do that when an organisation is explicitly geared towards women. I’ve heard from more trans men working under female personas than the total number of openly out trans men advertising across all of the escorting sites I use. I’ve never explicitly asked anyone if they have this experience – they’ve all come to me. And with every story I hear there’s a common thread: they want to medically transition, but fear losing their entire income when they do. Top surgery is a definitive end to being able to work as a cis woman for most, but even testosterone alone can be prohibitive given enough time. By three months on testosterone, clients were beginning to suggest I was a trans woman who’d had genital surgery, and were much more violent with me. This kind of violence rooted in transmisogyny won’t be everyone’s experience, but it happens.

Also, for those interested, check out Jack Parker's Transmasculine Guide to Sex Work