Suspect your lawyer and control your elephant

As most of you know, I started the full-time copyedit phase of my job; I spend six hours a day (on average) reading the Cause of Action book my company publishes. This is the third edition; it comes out in January. Contact me for ordering info if you are a Texas lawyer/law student or just phenomenally bored.

The Causes of Action book basically tells you all the major reasons you can sue someone and how to prove your case if you do. Sometimes this is irrelevant and mind-numbing (Usury, Abuse of Process, and Conversion), and sometimes it's fascinating, usually in a sick way (Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress, Defamation, and Fiduciary Duty). And sometimes you get a mixed reaction that makes you go, hm, this is why Law and Order has been on T.V. for the past 75 years. For example, Premesis Liability. Doesn't sound terribly interesting, and in fact I thought I was going to have to have an extra shot of caffeine to get me through it. However, included in Premesis Liability is the idea of Attractive Nusiance, whereby children wander onto property and drown in pits or get killed by arcing electricity because they don't know better. Then the premesis owner has to pay through the nose.

Right now I'm reading the Legal Malpractice chapter, which is interesting but it's not doing anything to convince me that attorneys are nice and/or competent people. There are a disturbing number of cases that are like, "Attorney conspired to lengthen trial to increase fees" and so on.

The best chapter I've read so far has been Animal Actions. Mostly it was people being bitten by dogs or attacked by rabbits or something, although I did learn that bees are tameable, and if your bees attack someone you're liable. But the reason this was the best chapter ever was because of what I call the "Siegfried and Roy" subsection on Wild Animal Actions. Unfortunately we mentioned no cases involving white tigers, but there was an elephant escape, a deer attack (yeah, I didn't know deer were particularly vicious), and a contrary, irritable, and nervous type of horse named Crowbar. Good times.