One of the very biggest and sleaziest scams, and one that everybody, and including seniors, needs to be warned about, is the particular one I am about to describe and that many lawyers engage in.

In it, and after you have a signed contract with the lawyer, the lawyer later tries to get more money out of you by "informing" the judge that there are certain oral understandings superseding the written contract.

The lawyer does not disbarred and/or sent to prison for pulling that scam, since: one, most judges are also lawyers, and therefore the lawyers, and including the lawyers in judges' robes, stick together and help each other out in their various scams and schemes to rip off members of the general public; and two, the California State Bar, in other words the agency that pretends to regulate CA's lawyers and also pretends to be interested in protecting the general public from crooked lawyers, is actually a useless joke.

In fact, the California State Bar has a whole series of methods it uses to protect crooked lawyers, and such as: one, "private reprovals" in which it sells a crooked lawyer a coverup or a pardon in exchange for a bribe that it pretends is a fee for a course; two, a secret system of two sets of books; three, cute word games, and such as its expression "no public record of discipline," and even though the lawyer may have been repeatedly privately disciplined; and four, for those few lawyers it disbars (and it almost never disbars the more powerful and more politically connected ones, and no matter how corrupt they are, unless their crimes have been repeatedly mentioned in the newspaper, but generally only some of the less powerful ones) if it later reinstates them, it then "improves" and "edits" the history on its public website to make it look the disbared lawyer was never disbarred but instead was only suspended for a time.

Basically, if you want to be a crook and a thief, but don't want to go to prison for it, then the best way, and particularly in California, is to get a law license. In other words, the lawyers, and including the lawyers in judges' robes, think that lawyers are not subject to the law and that the law does not apply to lawyes, so therefore they stick together, protect each other, and put the fix in for each other.