What to expect when hiring a Portuguese lawyer?
There are certainly honest, capable and well-meaning Portuguese lawyers who are worth all their fees (unfortunately, from my perception, not more than one in 100), even if the corrupt and inept Portuguese justice system does not let them do their job. This article is not about them.
Nevertheless, the Portuguese justice system is a monstrous fraud, and Portuguese lawyers are, for the most part, vultures and parasites around it, profiting at the expense of the endless poor and defenseless victims who feed this great scam. So these lawyers are in fact legalized swindlers working in tandem for such inhuman institutionalized fraud called Portuguese “justice”. The day you need a lawyer in Portugal is the day your life ends!
The best you can hope for by hiring a Portuguese lawyer is that this lawyer, even if honest and competent (you need to be very lucky), will be totally useless and you’ll burn a lot of money, lose countless precious years of your life and your sanity, health and family life will be profoundly affected, because your case will collide with a wall of an inherently corrupt and appallingly incompetent Portuguese justice system from which nothing good will ever come out to bring justice to the victims, quite exactly the opposite invariably happens.
Portuguese lawyers are generally incredibly bad professionals on all possible levels; they are dishonest, lazy, ignorant, stupid, rude, incompetent, and extremely uninterested once you get to know them for a while. Many of them are clearly shameless crooks who have graduated from law school only to be able to cheat at will without fear of consequences, since they are already very conveniently and comfortably on the side of “the law”. There are horrifying stories about this happening all the time, unfortunately, very little is widely known as almost nothing is reported in the Portuguese media, as usual.
They’re not even real lawyers in the true sense of the word like in the rest of the world, they just do the bare minimum of paperwork for you since you can’t send the documents to the courts yourself. Most of them don’t even do that properly.
The deeper your troubles, the more they laugh, because their happiness and the size of their bank accounts are directly proportional to your level of unhappiness and despair.
Just to give you an idea of how bad and arbitrary it is to consult a Portuguese lawyer, if you consult 10 Portuguese lawyers, they will probably tell you 10 very different things about your case. This simply means that they really don’t know anything about their profession and that they don’t even know the true meaning and deontology of the law and the difference between right and wrong, or simply that any approach will do because Portuguese justice is a fraud anyway. So, you can be sure that they will just say what you want to hear until they have milked you dry. After you’ve been burned, they’ll just spit out pearls of wisdom like the ones that follow.
PEARLS OF WISDOM FROM PORTUGUESE LAWYERS:
- Justice is luck. (yet their fees are always guaranteed)
- The judge can do whatever he/she wants, regardless of what the law requires.
- It is perfectly acceptable for court cases to be shelved and dismissed, on a large scale or not, whenever there is too much work and for that reason alone. (and that’s the way it should be, were the exact words my lawyer used)
- Justice usually only acts when the crime appears in the news (and even that wouldn’t make any difference, because Portuguese people don’t give a sh*t about each other, Portuguese people are not the least sympathetic). So even if that were true, would it be okay that the other 99.9999999% have no right to justice?! My lawyer wanted to tell me (had the nerve) that I would have a much better chance of getting justice if the crime was shown on the TV news. (gasp!)
- He can literally do whatever he wants with the money (responded very arrogantly, referring to my stolen money and the thief company’s bank accounts), so there is no need for accounting and knowing/tracing where the money went, as it happened to me), withdrawing all the money from his customers and take it home with him, in other words, embezzlement IS LEGAL in Portugal.
- Do not call the thief a thief, do not call the criminal a criminal, because according to my lawyers and the judicial system, they (the crooks) are all very respectable citizens and even sophisticated, in the words of one of my lawyers, even after having stolen more than five million euros from so many victims. This is Poortugal, this is criminals protecting criminals and this is the rule, because there are so many crooks peeking around every corner in Poortugal, that any decent person doesn’t stand a chance.
- If someone is going to steal, then steal a lot! (my lawyer said, laughing! It’s hard to believe, but the lawyer actually said this to me and the other victims/witnesses inside the courtroom, just before the hearing).
- Do not ask for (fair) compensation because the lawsuit will lose credibility. The lawyer still had the impudence to add, this isn’t America, hahaha! (So you are only allowed to ask for a humiliating pittance!)
- Don’t lie to the court! (the lawyer had the effrontery to say this to my wife’s face, almost shouting! Portuguese can be so insanely rude! It’s so infuriating.)
I can conclude that many of these aberrations are phrases that lawyers hear in courtrooms from the mouths of the corrupt and very stupid Portuguese judges, then the Portuguese lawyers just parrot the same stupidities without thinking, which seems to be quite a difficult task for many of them, but even though saying so many barbarities and the unleashed impudence, I must say that these lawyers of mine presented some valid work, albeit little and due to the evidence of my case being blatantly obvious, which would have been perfectly of value to my case if the Portuguese courts were not a total FRAUD.
Of course, the overwhelming majority of these Portuguese lawyers would NEVER be qualified and accepted to practice in any country in the civilized world, for the simple requirement of competence, let alone for reasons of honesty and ethics. Although in Portugal every mediocre crook is just one more in a crowd of endless others just like him, so no one can stand out in a negative way.
The rudeness, stupidity and incompetence of a Portuguese lawyer can be absolutely appalling, although certainly not all lawyers can be as execrable as my experience with them was. I often had to control myself because some (many) of these situations were extremely infuriating and provocative, but in Portugal we are always hostage to the crooks because there are so many of them and they are everywhere, especially in the places where we need help the most. So, there really is no choice in Portugal, as everything is so bad and horrible! Poortugal is primarily a society of crooks from top to bottom, protecting each other’s backs.
Regardless of everything, the corrupt and incompetent Portuguese judges and the judicial system are the main culprits for the fact that Portuguese “justice” is a tyrannical fraud. While these lawyers are extremely happy to be part of this fraud, to be able to profit richly along the way from its endless victims.
This extremely bizarre and crazy Portuguese behaviors, not only in these matters, but in all strata and areas of Portuguese society, cannot be attributed only to pure rudeness, dishonesty and stupidity, it must be something else! There is a hidden mental deficiency among the general Portuguese population, which is not diagnosed because it is truly endemic, but which is clearly perceived from the outside by anyone who comes from a developed country, after having lived there for some time and, above all, after having had to deal with the Portuguese institutions and the Portuguese people for some time, especially in serious matters.
In Portugal, crooks and idiots occupy most of the places of power and the other idiots and crooks are at the bottom, aspiring to be like them one day. It’s a never-ending cycle of crooks feeding from the bottom to the top.
It is no coincidence that Portugal is in a state of terminal cancerous corruption and that the majority of Portuguese MPs are precisely (dishonest) lawyers.
Important note: This article and all the others on this blog are not about the 5% of decent Portuguese who care and who deserve all my sympathy and I sincerely wish them all the best, because I know what it is to be a person of integrity in Portugal. Nevertheless, the reality in Portugal is so severe and so ingrained in all strata of society that I have no other way to denounce it than to generalize.
A country where criminals and the powerful are systematically protected to the detriment of victims and its citizens is the definition of a dictatorship, which is why Portugal should leave the EU.
PORTUGAL ROBBED ME €130.000 EUR AND SIX YEARS OF MY LIFE!
Your comments are most welcome and appreciated, so please feel free to leave your comments at the bottom of this page.
I found this blog when I googled “why Portuguese lawyers are so bad”. Reading the various posts, I noticed the red flags that I undervalued and got caught up in the web for several years. Now I’ll be able to kick this scum.
Some Portuguese advogados lawyers operate without a signboard and I have been scammed by one such lawyer on Faial island. Took money and did not do anything.
My experience with corruptugal
Hi there,
I absolutely love your website! It brought a massive smile to my face last night! What an absolute shithole Portugal is. I have no idea why it is a member of the EU, it should be removed immediately.
In May 2021 I reported my ex-partner for domestic violence. Subsequently, he also reported me (he is Portuguese so this was to be expected. They like taking revenge). It is now 3,5 years later and the only things that have happened are:
– he has been charged (we know as my lawyer consulted the Court file but I have not been formally informed).
– the case he launched against me has been closed (which he could appeal).
First, I would like to ask you: do you know a good, punchy criminal lawyer in Corruptugal who is proactive and works hard? (my lawyer is a lazy fuckwit who doesn’t do what he says he will do). Is there anything I could use as a threat since this is now taking more than 3,5 years? By threat I mean, something that would shock the EU, ECHR or something? Trials have to be fair (Human rights law in Europe), and a trial can’t be fair after taking 3,5 years since the complaint was made.
After this saga is over, I would love to contribute to your website by writing a story about my experience. I would like to start an anti-Portugal campaign where people are discouraged from going there on holiday. Nobody should fund this shithole.
I look forward to hearing from you and please continue adding more stories to your website. The truth must be shown to the world; corruptugal is shit.
Have red your comment. I have been through horrible judicial things too in Portugal. My ex family in law has deep pockets and are well connected. They made my life hell. Used the biased not impartial judicial system to chase me away from PT. Now I don’t dare to come and visit my son. A complete nightmare. Btw, I reported this everywhere, the EU, the ombudsman, unfair trials, embassy, got email from my ministry of foreign affairs. They all write that they can’t do anything. My ministry of foreign affairs wrote me literally ‘ we can understand that you feel powerless against the Portuguese lawmakers ‘ but we can’t intervene in an independent Member State. I wished we could start a petition and make a lot of noise. I am in.
Hello,
Thanks for the words of encouragement, I’ll never stop.
You are absolutely right, slow justice is not justice, and in Portugal justice is not even slow, it’s completely stagnant and non-existent. In Portugal, 3.5 years means that your case hasn’t even left the first shelf, the normal time for Portuguese “justice” is almost always 10 years upwards, and often 20 years! An absurdity, an insanity! Very sadly, the ECHR has very little power over Portuguese courts, except in cases of flagrant human rights violations, but the deceitful Portuguese courts always do everything to make it look like they are complying with all international laws, but they are not. Portugal can’t be healed as long as the Portuguese are in charge, so to speak.
I really wish I could help you, but it’s actually easier to find an oil well with a pickaxe than it is to find a good, honest Portuguese lawyer. That’s not to say there aren’t any, but they’re a rarity.
I wish you all the best. By the way, great name Corruptugal 😀
This does seem to be the case.
I have just recently discovered this at a considerable cost financially and in time spent trying to receive replies and answers from a lawyer in Portugal.
Happy to take the fees but appalling service thereafter.
Hardly worth complaining to the ordeim dos advogados as all other lawyers will happily take the fees and then protect their colleagues.
A client filed a criminal complaint against an Algarve-based real estate lawyer, and also then filed a complaint to the Law Society. She requested the matter be dealt with in Lisbon, given the “coziness” of the Algarve legal community. The criminal complaint alleged 6 serious breaches of the criminal code, inter alia complicity in theft of real estate property, extortion, and false accusations of crime.
She today received the response from the Algarve Ethics Committee, signed/dated 16 November 2023, stating – “In celebration of World Youth Day, the lawyer has been granted an amnesty from any misdeeds, even if there are criminal allegations pending…”.
The lawyer is in his mid-40’s, but does indeed behave like a child!!
#algrab