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"                      <p class=\"imgtitle\"></p>           Doctors cannot treat patients without it. Contractors cannot build homes, nor can plumbers plumb.<br /><br />Liability insurance is a state requirement here in Texas, and not just for professionals and skilled tradesmen. You have to pay for it, too, if you wish to get behind the wheel of a car.<br /><br />In these litigious times, almost everybody doing anything of import has to protect themselves against the possibility of being sued. That's except for lawyers, of course, the ones doing the suing.<br /><br />There's a movement in Austin to change this. Last week, a state Supreme Court task force voted down a measure to require Texas lawyers who don't carry malpractice insurance to tell potential clients beforehand. Supporters plan to keep trying; next month they'll  take their idea to the Texas Bar's Board of Directors.<br /><br />The concept's rationale: we mere mortals might then decide for ourselves whether we want to take the risk of hiring a non-insured one.<br /><br />Predictably, lawyers are crying foul. In a lawyer poll--80,000 are licensed to practice law in Texas--70 percent opposed the idea, using arguments that wreak of irony if not hilarity.<br /><br />Some lawyers contend letting clients know they are insured will prompt clients to--get this--sue them.<br /><br />\"It's.. like painting a target on your back,\" complained Plano attorney Charles Awalt, as quoted in the Austin American-Statesman.<br /><br />Then there's the cost. Paying a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per year in premiums, many solo practitioners say they cannot afford to insure themselves and stay in business.<br /><br />Our hope would be that insurance costs would serve as a deterrent against lawyers prone to behaving badly.<br /><br />Cannot afford insurance? Too bad. Maybe you shouldn't be practicing law in the first place.<br /><br />Moreover, lawyers surely can't suggest that medical malpractice insurance makes doctors a target, or auto insurance puts a bulls-eye on drivers. Lawyers making such a claim about malpractice insurance are being disingenuous.<br /><br />It's our view that rather than deserving special treatment, lawyers should be held to the highest standards of all. They hold a monopoly on practicing law and have been granted special and immense powers and responsibilities as sworn officers of the court.<br /><br />That means they should be at least as sensitive as an electrician to the possibility that they could make a mistake, and that their clients might need to be made whole.<br />"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://setexasrecord.com/stories/510609441-lawyers-insure-and-tell>