What I think about Lawyers

I tend to think of them the way I think about programmers or authors; they tend to be specialized in a field that requires excellent language skills, reading, writing, etc, and have to deal with overly long documents at times (where search/replace may be a big factor). The general public tends to underestimate the skills needed to deal with such documents and the hard work put in to get the job done. I do think some lawyers are overpaid however, compared to the other similar job types. I can't say much about their ethics, that seems to vary from person to person.


There is a general impression that lawyers today are not held in high regard. There is enough evidence in film and media to suggest that the view of lawyers as 'dishonest, arrogant, greedy, ruthless buckets of slime' may cause some anti comfort for people in the profession. The abundance of movies and television series’ portraying a cut-throat lawyer who does anything for his next ‘score’ doesn’t help with this image.


When lay people are asked about lawyers the general consensus is that they are losing confidence in their professional knowledge and training. This suggests that there is a concern that professionals are not what they used to be - well-trained, ethical people committed to serving the public. This could be due a number of factors. The number of legal practices has increased substantially over the past couple of decades, which drives up the competition to sign potential clients. In today's day and age where the allure of earning more money is evident in our everyday lives, ethics can take a ‘back seat’. Ethics is concerned with deciding what is the right or wrong thing to do. In deciding what to do and how to be, ethics requires lawyers to look for coherent reasons for their actions and character that show why it may be right or wrong to act according to our financial interests, or to do what others expect in certain situations; The right or wrong action.


It seems to be one of life's mind boglers that law defends its status as a profession based on ethical commitments, and yet lawyers are often conceived as a bunch of salesmen like characters with no moral values (ethics). People have started to question whether they can trust the legal system to sort out issues of truth and justice.