"I sentence you to be a lawyer...for life.": Slate, last week, published a little piece about William Saletan's experiences with traffic court in Maryland/D.C. I laughed and laughed...not at the experiences he recounted, but at his disbelief/bemusement over the encounters. He presumed that logic and fairness prevailed in the justice system. Even funnier, at the traffic court level.

As a practicing commercial litigator, my experiences in traffic court are infrequent, thank god. I usually end up there as a favor to a client or friend. Traffic court may best exemplify the two-headed purpose of government bureaucracy: 1) patronage, 2) revenue generator. The judges are all hacks. I don't mean this in a personal way, but in the sense that the worst thing they're seeing is well, traffic violations. There's not much drama there, much less any high-level analysis or policy-making, and as such, they're lazy and not really interested in working too hard. In Philly, it's about 8 "courtrooms" each manned by one police officer who stands-in for the reporting officer (meaning they don't make the actual officer who found the violation appear - the stand-in simply reads from the citation), plus a tipstaff (think "Bull" from Nightcourt), and a judge. Before them, the huddled masses. Insult to injury to those masses, the attorneys get to sit up front, and go first. Our only other perk is we can avoid the metal detectors.

Anyway, back to the hacks. These judges are only there to generate revenue. They really don't care about what happened, and as such, they are pre-disposed to take the officer's side of things 99 times out of 100. This is why you hire an attorney. With an attorney, your odds increase to losing on the cited violation only about 79 times out of 100. Yes, you can always appeal afterwards and start anew and make a deal with the A.D.A., but it's better to clear it up right away. See, an attorney knows the game. We know that the Court will be more apt to let you off if it can still serve its purpose of making money.

Let' say you get caught speeding 55 in a 35. 20mph over, that's some pretty hefty points on your license, not to mention a fine. But, if your record is otherwise good, and you weren't drinking Bud while you were driving, an attorney can usually get the judge to knock your citation down to a "3111" which is a generic non-point moving violation. $99 later, and you're off the hook and your insurance company is never the wiser.

Now if you're dealing with a mere parking violation, then yes, you simply mail in your check. You lose so much more value in taking time off of work, only to wait for two hours and have the judge not listen to your arguments as he finds you guilty. Why bother? You may very well be smarter than the system, but the system always wins. There's my free legal advice.