1 + 1 = 3

One of my favorite fall-back jokes goes:

Ask an Engineer "what is 1 + 1?"
"Two point zero, zero, zero..."

Ask a lawyer "what is 1 + 1?"
"Sometimes 2, sometimes not..."

Ask an accountant "what is 1 + 1?"
"What number would you like it to be?"

I have learned that 1 + 1 = 3. Or at least it does when paying lawyers.

I have a male friend who is going through a nasty divorce. And apparently such divorces are lawyer intensive. He hired a lawyer and she hired one and since she hasn't worked in years he gets to pay for both. In what seemed like good logic to him at the time, he decided to hire a second lawyer for himself. He hired a lower priced (but still costly) lawyer to handle all the routine and time consuming stuff. Then he hired the "heavy hitter" (read: expensive!) to make sure he had the best representation. It makes sense so far. But what happens when you hire 2 lawyers? Their charges triple! The situation grows exponentially. Not only did the lawyers have overlapping billable time overhead for research time and meetings with him, but frequently his 2 lawyers planned and communicated with each other, which is also charged to my friend at full rates. And then add her lawyer to the loops. As things have progressed (not well for him) the 3 lawyers have been doing all they can to ride the gravy train as far as it will go... That is, until his money is gone.

At this point, he says that giving into her "unreasonable" demands at the beginning would have been a better outcome then his current situation. So now he realizes that he paid a lot of money to get a worse outcome, following the counsel of his lawyers. Too bad he can't hold his lawyers accountable for the unfavorable outcome they guided him to.