When the good folks at NACM East Coast gave me this soapbox, there were very few conditions. Relevance was, of course, paramount. These columns will all have something to do with the field of credit and collections. Indeed, some of the columns that will appear either from myself, or other members of my firm (such as Glenn Heiser's guest column this month on the General District Court in Virginia), are technical and comprehensive.

But there are just some things that are so basic and fundamental that I see every day (indeed, many times every day) that they compel me to write a column. I will take this opportunity to unburden myself of one of my greatest pet peeves.

My complaint is a simple one: why does everyone believe in his or her ability to be his or her own lawyer? An individual who is clever enough to not fly his or her own airplane on vacation, remove his or her own appendix, drill his or her own teeth, file his or her company's corporate tax accountings, plumb or wire his or her house, brew his or her own beer or wine, cut his or her own hair, dispense his or her own medication, or issue his or her own traffic tickets will insist on being his or her own lawyer. Each one of these occupations requires lengthy periods of training and state licensure. Many people who would otherwise consider themselves intelligent believe that they can be their own lawyer.

Before I go on to discuss the results of this paradox, let me state that there is indeed law that allows one to represent oneself at court. Not one's spouse, child, parent, friend, aged neighbor, good buddy, coworker, dancing partner, or any other individual. Neither can a non-lawyer represent a corporation. But why would anyone want to? Lawyers are required to go to law school, which consists of three grueling and difficult years. It is difficult to fake or pretend to know all that is learned during those three years. I would not want to be operated on by a doctor who didn't go to medical school but thought that he could fake it. I would not want to board an airplane with someone who was not a licensed pilot, and never trained to be one, in the cockpit.

Some lawyers I have spoken with believe that there is a philosophical basis for this paradox. This is predicated upon confusion between "justice" and "law." Justice is an abstract philosophical concept. Courses that are taught in justice begin with the writings of the great Greek philosophers. There are many thoughts on the origins of justice, to include large philosophical schools that contend that justice is subjective. If justice is to be subjective, then each party to a contest has a completely different idea of what is just. As an experienced attorney, I can tell you with certainty that this idea is a common belief. Other schools of thought believe that justice derives from a higher authority; the religious origins of these schools are well-known and well outside the scope of my soap box harangue, as well as the latitude allowed me by the good people at NACM East Coast.

However, law is not the same as justice. Law consists of a series of rules. These rules mirror justice in the same fashion that when I attempt to dance it looks like what Fred Astaire used to do. For example, the statute of limitations for a written contract in Virginia is five years. This does not mean that a case can be filed six years later if the cause is just or the people are nice. It is a rule. In law school, at least in the first year, the professors always tease students with cases that are obviously unjust but are subject to compelling rules and outcomes that simply don't "feel right." There are always those cases from the 1800's when widows and orphans were tossed out into the snow by cruel, malicious landlords, usually wearing stove pipe hats and twirling their moustaches. But legally, the landlord is in the right. Therefore, law and justice are two different things.

But I digress, although I digress into an interesting area. So why would an otherwise reasonably intelligent debtor seek to practice law for himself or herself without a license? Perhaps these individuals represent themselves out of ego. Frequently, those debtors who represent themselves in legal matters, especially in court, demonstrate huge egos that sharply contrast with small amounts of knowledge. In fact, ego may very well be a significant factor in explaining this bizarre phenomenon. We all have those moments of tremendous ego; these moments are frequently accompanied by feelings of outrage and lack of control. Yet, no matter how outraged I may be, I would never climb into a boxing ring with Mike Tyson (or any other boxer, competent or incompetent, young or old, big or small). I would hope that no matter what level my outrage had brought me to, my common sense would stop me before it brought me actual injury.

We live in the age of specialization. You won't catch me flying airplanes, performing surgery, drilling teeth, handing out traffic tickets, investigating crimes, or any of the many other things for which a license is required. This is because I am not a pilot, doctor, dentist, police officer, or any other trade requiring a license, except a lawyer.

The next point I need to make is that not only should non-lawyers stop pretending to play lawyers in real life, but lawyers themselves narrow their focus and specialize. While I do know and understand the basics of how to act in a traffic court (the judge is the one in the black robe that everyone faces, right?), I do not do enough of it to be very good at it since I focus on the collection of debts. Furthermore, the same lawyer that got your neighbor's drunken son out of the DWI, filed your coworker's bankruptcy, got money out of an insurance company for an accident, or handled a relative's bankruptcy may not be the same one who can recover on an unpaid commercial obligation. Not so long ago, one of Fairfax County's finest police officers disagreed with a minor aspect of my driving. While I have the greatest respect for law enforcement, as well as those police officers who put their lives on the line on a daily basis, I did not feel that I had done anything wrong. It had been years since I had been inside a traffic courtroom, so I asked an old lawyer friend of mine who practiced traffic law regularly to help me out. With his able assistance, the charges against me were dropped.

In the twenty years that I have been practicing law, my practice has focused on the collection of debts. I have seen and learned a lot of things in those many years. Other lawyers have chosen to consult me on some of their tougher collection questions. A good friend of mine brought me a case in which he was unable to collect from a gentleman who ran his construction business on a cash basis. Indeed, I was able to determine that on an annual basis, this gentleman handled about one million dollars in cash to support this business, with no records. I was also able to determine that he owned some real estate which was subject to my client's judgment. We have recently filed an action to seize and sell that real estate.

In another matter, I have recently been consulted by an attorney who has a judgment exceeding a million dollars against a company. I suspect that the company was shallowly incorporated, may not have had any other purpose except as a shield for personal assets, and carried several other badges of fraud. I cannot tell you where this matter will go, but I can tell you my suspicions.

Which leads me to my final point of this column: huge amounts of money are thrown away by non-lawyers pretending to be lawyers, and commercial creditors sending claims to agencies, people, attorneys, or others who do not collect debts regularly. Sometimes, other lawyers consult me on how to collect a debt. I do this on the phone or sometimes with a greater degree of formality, to include participation in the actual recovery itself. While I certainly do not collect them all, I do make recoveries. But the amount of money that is simply not collected is a huge, pointless waste and squandering of good financial resources.

As a kid, I remember listening to my uncle, who was a CPA, tell a story about a client of his who was testing packaging. The packaging had to carry the client's product through the bumps and lumps of shipment, both nationally and internationally. The delicate instruments (I believe these were watches) were wrapped in this packaging then dropped. They were dropped from successively higher towers until either the towers became too high to send someone up, or the delicate item itself was destroyed by the crash to the ground. Needless to say, thousands of dollars of perfectly good merchandise was destroyed in this testing. My uncle, trained as an accountant, and mindful of waste, could not bear to watch this process and found reasons to excuse himself from the site. That is precisely the way I feel when I see creditors trying to collect money by themselves, or otherwise sending these to attorneys (or even collection agencies) who, frankly, do not know what they are doing. Sometimes these people are successful. Sometimes blind squirrels find nuts.

So there are three lessons I convey in my column this month:

• If you are not a lawyer, you should not pretend to be one.
• Not all lawyers know all things; send a commercial claim to an attorney who does collections work.
• The amount of money that is thrown away by the failure to heed the two simple suggestions above is a number, although impossible to determine, that would truly astound us all.