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, no 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 who profit at the expense of the endless poor and defenseless victims that feeds this big scam. So, these lawyers are in fact, legalized swindlers working in tandem for such inhuman institutionalized fraud called Portuguese “justice”.
The best you can hope for when 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 invariable happens.
Portuguese lawyers are generally incredibly bad professionals at all possible levels; they are dishonest, lazy, ignorant, stupid, rude, incompetent, and extremely uninterested after you know them for a while. Many of them are clearly shameless crooks who graduated from law school just to be able to cheat at will without fear of suffering any consequences, as they are already very conveniently and cozily 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.
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 milk all your money. After you are 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 used by my lawyer)
- Justice usually only acts when the crime appears in the news (and not even that would make any difference, because Portuguese 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% had 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 taking 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 Portugal, this is criminals protecting criminals and this is the rule, because there are so many crooks peeking around every corner in Portugal, that any decent person doesn’t stand a chance in Portugal.
- If someone is going to steal, then steal a lot! (said my lawyer laughing! It’s hard to believe, but the lawyer actually said that 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 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 a quite 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 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, any mediocre crook is just one more in a crowd of countless others equal to or worse than 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 abhorrent fraud. While these lawyers are extremely happy to be part of this scam to be able to richly profit 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 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 living there for some time and above all, having to interact with the Portuguese institutions and the Portuguese people for some time, especially in serious matters.
In Portugal, crooks and idiots occupy most places of power and the other idiots and crooks at the bottom, aspiring one day to be like them. It’s a never-ending cycle of crooks that feeds 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.
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