This Just In: Trial Lawyers Linked to Tentacled Sea Creatures

Always on top of late-breaking news, the Los Angeles Times catches up to the ATLA/AAJ name change story with an editorial in today's edition.  The Times is no more impressed than anyone else:

ATLA's name change, apparently triggered by the successful efforts to demonize the term 'trial lawyer,' is a classic example of abstract euphemism replacing — and distorting — a perfectly specific phrase.  George Orwell denounced such linguistic evasion in his classic 1946 essay, 'Politics and the English Language.'  'The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,' Orwell wrote.  'When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.'

And is there a more 'exhausted idiom' than the unassailable ideal called 'justice'?  Trial lawyers, by comparison, are controversial, and rightly so.  Conservatives insist that they do more harm than good by seeking huge jury judgments from which they take a disproportionate cut.  Liberals counter that without enterprising — and, yes, self-interested — plaintiffs' lawyers, injustices would go unchallenged and workplaces would be less safe.

It's an important debate, and one that trial lawyers should be eager to join without shrouding the work they do in generic language. . . .

So far, the decision to become the American Association for Justice seems to have earned the trial lawyers nothing but scorn.  A professional negligence claim against their high-priced Re-Naming Consultant may be in order, to recover for the substantial emotional distress even now being sustained by the organization's thousands of members who have become the objects of so much pointing and laughter.

"The American Academy of Inky Cuttlefish" -- now that has a nice ring to it.