Attorneys as GoonSquad for Gotham Underperforming Teachers

In terms of image, attorneys seem to be losing ground.  For example, pop culture - e.g. "CSI," "Cold Case," and "Without A Trace" - all have the bad guys "lawyering up."  That makes things tougher on underpaid civil servants like Horatio.  And the cruelest cut of all is that those lawyers are scripted to comport themselves like lowerlifes than their clients. In fact, with my thick northern New Jersey accent I would be a shoo-in to be a defense attorney on any crime show.

Well, even more ground will be lost in Gotham.  As you might have heard from THE NEW YORK TIMES article or Walter Olson's Overlawyered.com piece, the Bloomberg Administration is going to rid the educational system of "underperforming" tenured teachers via lawyers and some consultants.  This extreme measure aka the GoonSquad will cost the system $1 million a year.  It is viewed as necessary because tenured teachers are notoriously hard to dislodge. 

Lawyers, of course, are masters of documentation and presenting that data in the worst possible light regarding the alleged miscreant.  But, just about anyone who has been a supervisor or manager in any organization also knows how to document - quite effectively.  That's exactly how myriad underperformers or disrupters in the workplace get ousted.  And the process, even in these days of class-action employment lawsuits, hardly costs $1 million a year.

So, why the lawyers?  Why would lawyers accept this tawdry role? And how can the system justify the expense of using lawyers at the front end of the ousting procedure?

If the writers weren't on strike, this would be prime meat for late-show jokes: Million-dollar lawyers with clipboards to get wage war on laziness in PS 23.