desert turtoise wrote: Sun Dec 01, 2024 8:58 pm
The American justice system is setup to encourage young people to gain wealth by becoming corporate lawyers. Did you know recruits just out of law school are signing for $200k corporate slots their first year of employment ?
So I am a CA LS who happens to live in Mexico. Fortunately, the legal system is simplified here in both civil and criminal cases. The party who is able to pay the judge wins the case. The other party understands that and lengthy, costly litigation is minimized. Sometimes the corrupt system is the better system.
I got a good chuckle out of this. I don't mean to pick on you, but it gave me a good laugh.
It is the recruits out of the top law schools that get that money, the Top 14 to be exact. Everyone else for every other school, its only the top of their classes that get a slot in a firm like that, and even then they have to be pretty lucky. They work or worked pretty hard to get to that level where they get paid that much. It didn't just happen.
Most people who get a slot with those firms don't want it and want to do other things with their lives to make a bigger difference in the world. That's what realistically qualifies them for those slots to make that much money and to go to those schools. They have ambition, drive and a vision for what our world could be and those schools gave them the tools to change the law, not just use it. Thats why they get paid so much. Because they know how not just to win for their clients but also to change the law as they go in favor of their clients.
At the higher levels, its typically a revolving door between politics and private practice. Thats where the political appointees go between administrations on both sides. Thats why the money rolls in. Because the partner on your case when you are being investigated by the SEC used to be the head of the SEC in the last administration or something. The system is what it is, its been around for a long time. Both sides of the political spectrum support it. Its not really going anywhere. But it has also always been there.
Our system is over 200 years old. It could probably use a little tweaking. But don't pretend that those guys 250 years ago didn't have good ideas. I've been on a Federalist Papers kick lately, so to quote Madison:
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
The judicial/legal system we have today all comes from our constitution and our system of government they gave us. If you are saying Mexico's system is better, you are implying that we should change to their system. And if we are going to change it, by definition, you are saying the founders got it wrong, and it needs to be changed. Most of what most people are actually pissed about comes from the things we have done to adapt our founder's ideas to the modern age. Not the underlying system itself. But again... what's the solution? We were a country of about 3 million people at the founding and scaled by a factor of 100. Things had to change and we had to build the government after they died. To expand on Federalist 51 implication, our government reflects our human nature. Its a reflection of who we have been and how we have adapted our founder's ideas over the past 2 centuries. And in comparison to Mexico..........
As far as this whole post.....it’s a shit show. Contrary to what I have seen implied here, there is no right answer. The original article in that magazine is both right and wrong. People squeeze through all the time without liability, and some people who don't deserve it get liability for no reason. Life is a shit show. It really is. I've seen blatant errors that I was so sure I was going to be deposed about or potentially named because millions were on the line on something that I knew was a blatantly negligent boundary decision. Nothing ever happened. The things I have seen my firms or people I know named in....they did not deserve it at all and people just dragged it out to get payouts when they didn't deserve it. Just wait to get named in an ADA lawsuit as a small business. You will know what I mean.
At some point, you just have to accept that you have no real control over it other than the decisions that are in front of you and that the system does well in the aggregate, even if it gets it wrong sometimes. My biggest problem with surveying after having pretty decently dived into the system for California is that I question whether it does well or provides value in the aggregate anymore. At least compared the advancements we have made in the last 50 years in modern technology. Half the conversations I ever hear about is how surveyors question the accuracy of modern technology. Looking backward at labor-heavy past methods, saying those are the only ones that can be trusted instead of going forward towards innovation in our industry. The world is moving on. We cannot be a profession that constantly looks behind us, being an anchor on society that drags it down. I'm pretty fearful that is who the surveying profession has become.
Also if you’re wondering, surveying licenses are one of those things we created after our founders died off. It’s something we did to adapt their ideas to a growing nation because we couldn't just send every boundary issue to the courts. But just because it’s an old idea doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not a fundamental idea that cannot be changed. Governments evolve with the people they are governing. Constantly.
Assuming we get past this little hiccup at the Supreme Court. (again, I massively disagree with not filing an amicus; it became a 100% unnecessary risk to not file something the second it went to conference and they asked for a response, even if the risk of them granting cert of low, the consequences if they grant it warrants a response) The absolute best thing that could happen right now is that young people start joining the CLSA and that young people get the PLS. With all due respect, there are way, way too many old voices and not enough young ones here. Really with everything I am seeing in Surveying. I know union chiefs who left the industry in their late 20s after 10 years in to pursue other fields. Its not good. It really isn't.
To give you a direct example of all this so you know I am not bullshitting because the surveyor who signed it (one of my old mentors) has passed. He did not make the error, and he was a good guy who put up with a lot of shit from higher-ups at the company with incredible skill, (he was the survey department head) but he didn't catch the error by unlicensed staff. We were the surveyor for both of these new buildings. This blue line was mistakenly placed for the building on the bottom. I think it was a 5' error in our boundary determination for the building on Hawkings. Overlap between the parcels. We said 5' of land existed that did not exist. 3 other PLSs confirmed it was placed in error internally because we were so worried about what to do. As in, we remeasured like 4 or 5 times, I think, with multiple different crews? These buildings went up without any concerns. One after another. If you are wondering, I was the one who found the error, not the one who made it. If I know the old owner, he found a way to weasel out of it somehow with a zoning variance or something due to housing needs. I never found out whether it just was never discovered, and everyone (including all the LS's) swept it under the rug or if a deal was made because I left before the second building got started. My guess is that they swept it under the rug because both buildings went up way too fast for there to have been any kind of disagreement or complication. I think there was only a year between them being built.
Again, life is a shit show. There is no right answer for the civil cases. Make the best decision you can right in front of you and try to live up to your own ethics. That's all you can do. Hopefully the 4 LS's let you into the profession judged your ethics well. If not, that's kind of on them, and the board is probably coming for you eventually anyway because some people here will try to put you on the Board's radar to try and come at you from the licensure perspective. The board is going to do what it is going to do and this whole fear tactic thing that the board is going to come down on you is getting a little old. Its the SME's at the board that are running this thing and it seems like it could be getting pretty damn out of control because we didn't do anything to follow our founding father's guidance when we made this system for determining board violations.
To tie this whole SME thing back into Federalist 51's determination: You all gave the SMEs the rights to control you, but you don't have a single damn control over them. The way I see it, you have 3 options:
- Make an actual standard of care for California that SME's will not be able to deviate from. This is the easiest and simplest and requires very, very little change to our current structure at the board. Every other state has done it, almost every other profession has done it (including attorneys, which says something), and its what I am was trying to do to get some kind of order back into this system. (again, I did publish a draft standard of care).
- Put some kind of check on SME's by having some kind of election once every few years from all licensed surveyors as to who gets to judge the actions of other surveyors outside of a court of law via board violations. Basically, make the SME's semi elected offices from within the pool of licensed surveyors in California (follow our founders ideas and basically create a republic)
- Remove the SMEs from the equation altogether for licensed professional violations and force the board to have every surveyor judge the decisions of all licensed surveyors who come under rule violations every year. Once a year, everyone with a license gets to vote on the actions of each surveyor that comes up for violation every year. All of our funds we currently spend on SME's with enforcement of licensed persons get a summary created by the board and everyone with a current license gets to vote on whether or not the surveyor broke our standard of care (this may seem enticing, but our founders would have been against it, they were pretty against a direct democracy)
Otherwise, I am just going to say it: this system with the board and SME's is very ripe for corruption. I don't have specific evidence that it has happened, but this shit stinks. Anyone can anonymously report someone to the board and then someone get paid to review that case? I would be absolutely amazed if that hasn't been exploited yet.
But in summary, from a civil perspective, unless you are an a**hole that pisses people off all the time so they want to sue you, there is no use worrying about a civil suit. Its either going to happen or its not going to happen and there's not a lot you can do about it. In my opinion, any surveyor's primary concern should be with an overzealous board action that (potentially??) has ulterior motives in reporting you to the board anyway. Ask practicing surveyors. Everyone with experience knows: the biggest fear for someone with a license in surveying is the board, not the courts. And it seems like its completely out of control. Thats is not how its supposed to work. You aren't supposed to fear an unelected body of bureaucrats.
I don't really have any reason to blame staff at the board, either. Their only job is to implement the system you give them, not change it. They are civil servants. Not policy makers. If you want things to change, tell them they have to change it.
In any case, enjoy the forum content.