You may have heard the one about why some medical labs have started using lawyers instead of white rats in their experiments.

Three reasons: There are more lawyers than rats; lab technicians sometimes get attached to rats; and there are some things a rat just won’t do.

Like most lawyer jokes (and Polish jokes, and so on), this one depends on unfair stereotyping. But the punch line also rings a little bit true-truer, at least, than it would if the class being stereotyped were, say, bankers, or doctors, or corporate fat cats, or journalists, or even used-car salesmen.

It rings true in a way that helps explain why lawyers in this country-unlike those in Germany, or France, or Italy, or perhaps even England-have been so roundly vilified as a class, for so long, by so many people.

See, e.g., Will Rogers ("I have always noticed that any time a man can’t come in and settle with you without bringing his lawyer, why, look out for him."); H. L. Mencken ("[T]heir professional aim and function [is] not to get at the truth, but simply to carry on combats between ancient rules."); Carl Sandberg ("Why is there always a secret singing/ When a lawyer cashes in?/ Why does a hearse horse snicker/ Hauling a lawyer away?"); Ambrose Bierce ("Lawyer: One skilled in circumvention of the law…. Liar: A lawyer with a roving commission."); Mark Twain ("What chance has the ignorant, uncultivated liar against the educated expert? What chance have I….against a lawyer?"); Benjamin Franklin ("God works wonders now and then/ Behold! a Lawyer, an honest Man!").

Some leaders of the bar have suggested that lawyers are unfairly vilified because they often defend unpopular people or causes. That may be part of the explanation, but not the biggest part.

It might help explain cracks like the one by Rex Stout: "If you want to take dough from a murderer for helping him beat the rap you must be admitted to the bar."

But it doesn’t explain, for instance, Karl Llewellyn’s ironic exhortation (in The Bramble Bush) to aspiring lawyers: "There may be a pleasant paunch upon your client. His wallet may look fat. Suppose now that his case does not at first blush seem appealing. Then what to do? Courage, my friend, there is another ethic! There is that admirable ethic of the profession which makes it clear that the lawyer is neither judge nor jury;… For your totem, for your ideal, you can then take the squid, the cuttlefish…. The spine is absent, but the beak is strong.")

So what is it that a white rat won’t do, but many lawyers will do? Cheat on their spouses? Or on their taxes? Abuse their kids? Send out inflated bills or otherwise defraud their clients?

That’s not it. While some lawyers do all of those things, there’s no reason to think that lawyers do them any more than doctors, or journalists, or other occupational groups.

No, the joke rings true to a lot of people because of what many lawyers in this country-including many at the top of the profession-do for their clients: bend, distort, conceal, cover up, obfuscate, or misrepresent the facts, in ways that are simultaneously (1) regarded by ordinary people as just plain dishonest, and (2) defended by many lawyers and legal experts as embodying the finest traditions of the bar, and of legal ethics in our adversary system.

Simply put, a lot of lawyers devote a substantial part of their professional lives to hiding or distorting the truth, as O.J. Simpson’s lawyers are famously doing right now. It’s not just criminal defense lawyers who do it. Prosecutors do it; corporate lawyers do it; personal injury lawyers do it; legal services lawyers do it. And a lot of them are proud of it. They call it "zealous representation."

Perhaps this is as it must be, given an adversary system of justice that stresses lawyers’ roles as loyal champions of their clients and guardians of their secrets- especially the dirty ones. Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect that lawyers as a class can ever be persuaded or compelled to honor their theoretical (but largely unenforced) obligations of candor to courts and adversaries as much as their loyalty to the folks who pay their fees.

In the context of the civil discovery rules, as Professor Monroe Freedman pointed out in his insightful column ("Masking the Truth to Resolve Competing Duties," Legal Times, Sept. 11, 1995, Page 22), "A lawyer is bound to learn as much as possible about a client’s case and keep in confidence what she has learned. She is also required to turn over sensitive (read ruinous) client information upon demand by an adversary…. [T]here is an obvious tension between those policies that has not been resolved. The result is that lawyers have developed the practice of reading discovery requests extremely strictly (read disingenuously) and the courts have condoned that practice."

Freedman went on to cite a case in which a big law firm (Seattle’s 200-lawyer Bogle & Gates) withheld smoking-gun documents from the plaintiffs in a personal injury case, through stratagems including representations to opposing counsel and the court that were (in my opinion) deliberately or recklessly false and intended to deceive. And yet Bogle & Gates was able to find 14 leading litigation and legal ethics experts to swear that its conduct had been ethically impeccable and that it represented standard operating procedure in the adversary system; three of the experts even said that Bogle’s conduct was required by its ethical obligation of zealous representation. (See my "Sleazy in Seattle," The American Lawyer, April 1994.)

What all this suggests, as Freedman wrote, is "that lawyers throughout the bar (including those who later become judges) had known for decades that discovery rules were being systematically frustrated by disingenuous responses to discovery demands…. It tells us that the price of not resolving the competing values of confidentiality and disclosure has been equivocation, disingenuousness, and dishonesty on the part of lawyers. And it tells us that both the bench and the bar have condoned and encouraged that conduct"

Freedman concludes that the fundamental problem is not this disingenuousness and dishonesty, but rather the discovery rules, which he says should be either abandoned or restricted. The alternative of "tak[ing] the discovery rules at face value," he suggests, would mean "abandon[ing] the American lawyer’s traditional ethic of client loyalty"; this could not be done "short of mass purges like those Stalin employed to get rid of landowners who couldn’t adjust to Stalinism."

Freedman may be right (if a bit hyperbolic) about the difficulty of getting lawyers to stop engaging in deception on their clients’ behalf. But I respectfully disagree with his conclusion. Whether or not restricting discovery makes sense as a way of cutting down on litigation waste, it would hardly dent the problem of lawyers resorting to disingenuousness and dishonesty on behalf of their clients.

Given what Professor John Langbein of Yale Law School calls "the license that we give lawyers to engage in truth-defeating distortion and trickery at trial"- and, I would add, elsewhere-lawyers would still have strong incentives to bend the truth.

The fundamental problem, in my view, is that the adversarial ethic has run wild in our legal culture, as in no other, almost to the point of devouring the truth-seeking ethic.

The adversary system helps get at the truth, and serve justice, insofar as it challenges lawyers to make the best available legal arguments for their clients, and to dig out and stress those facts that help their clients. But the adversarial ethic becomes an engine of fraud, waste, and injustice when carried to the point of hiding, reshaping, and massaging evidence in ways that foreseeably conceal or distort the truth. So far as I know, the zeal with which lawyers seek to rearrange evidence in this country-especially through the deeply distortive coaching process known as witness preparation, which often takes the form of perjury-facilitation-is unparalleled elsewhere.

This problem of lawyers whoring for their clients is not limited to the litigation context. A stunning example of the profession’s commitment to a gonzo-adversarial ethic was the series of votes by the American Bar Association’s House of Delegates, in February 1983, to beat back the so-called Kutak Commission’s proposals to tighten lawyers’ obligations not to assist clients engaged in business or financial frauds. Rejecting these proposals by lopsided margins, the delegates voted instead for a model ethics code that would not merely permit but require lawyers to keep the secrets of clients engaged in ongoing frauds, even if the lawyers learn that their own services have been used to conceal the frauds.

During one of the debates, former ABA President Robert Meserve warned that the amendment at issue "lets the client conscript the lawyer into supporting the client’s misrepresentation, and makes the lawyer an accessory to fraud" The amendment then passed by a landslide, amid much self-congratulatory rhetoric about the grand tradition of "zealous representation." I was there. I felt like vomiting.

Would it really take a Stalinist purge for lawyers to be required-on pain of civil liability and professional discipline-to make it clear to their clients that their services do not include misleading other parties or the courts, or using deceptive stratagems to evade discovery obligations?

Sure, such a caveat would prompt some clients simply to lie to the lawyers who deliver it, and to hide from them any embarrassing documents that may be sought in discovery.

But at least, then, the lawyers would not be part of the cover-up. And at least that punch line-"there are some things a rat just won’t do"-wouldn’t ring as true as it does now.