I am a lawyer. There, I’ve said it. We all know that the first step to recovery is admitting your condition, so there you go. My main client refers to his brother as a “recovering lawyer”.

The law was not my first ambition.  When I was in grade school I wanted to be an architect. My frame of reference was Wilbur on the Mr. Ed television show of the early 1960’s. He was an architect – and he lived in southern California, had a cute blonde wife and a talking horse (Mr. Ed, for those who are not my age or thereabouts) and rubbed elbows on the show with players from the Los Angeles Dodgers.  What could be better I thought!  Later I realized that this was not a feasible plan when I discovered I couldn’t put my tinker toys together or draw a straight line.

Around the time of this realization I was drug by my family to my cousin Joe’s graduation from undergrad school at the University of Virginia (I was 9 years old). Joe was entering the law school at UVA after his graduation and since I idolized him  (still the best athlete ever from Christiansburg High in my humble opinion), I was interested in what he was doing. Three years later we returned to Charlottesville for his graduation from law school and his procession down the lawn. I didn’t have a clue what lawyers did but figured that if it was good enough for Cousin Joe it was good enough for me.

When I proclaimed this interest to my Mom and Dad at the dinner table a few months after Joe’s graduation, it brought a response that I laugh about to this day. It was the fall of my 7th grade year. I went into the living room to do homework after dinner (supper in our house) and overheard my folks talking as they did the dishes. Having heard my career choice, my father said to my mom “well, maybe he’ll go into politics”! 

I am not sure where my father placed lawyers on his scale of respectable ways to live your life but apparently it was somewhere below politicians. At that time politicians had not yet slithered somewhere below Florida real estate developers in public opinion. My Dad’s wishes for me remind me of the wonderful lyrics from the Jimmy Buffett song “We are the People our Parents warned us about”. Rather than “a Jesuit priest or a Naval Academy grad” as Jimmy sings, however, I was supposed to become a “Methodist minister or a West Point grad” – or maybe a doctor.  But a lawyer?

The Christiansburg of my youth did not have or need many lawyers – in my memory, no one sued anyone, no one got divorced, and no one committed a crime. The lawyers probably did deeds and wills and some small business transactions.  My father liked and respected some of the lawyers we had in town, but he didn’t care for the kind who sued or “caused trouble”. 

I think I made the right career choice – I did not have the “scientific” brain required of med school nor did I like blood or the other nasty stuff. I was not disciplined enough or serious enough for the military or the ministry. But I liked problem solving and had good common sense and integrity (yes it’s important for lawyers) gained from my parents. I also had wonderful English teachers in high school (take a bow Ruth Fisher) who made me enjoy writing – another critical skill for good lawyers. Plus, on the scale of whatever I had talent for, everything else fell far below lawyering except maybe for being a sports writer or an author of greeting cards.

I have learned that the practice of law is a stressful way to make a living. Unlike almost every other job, there is someone on the other side trying to prevent you from being successful. Whether it is litigation (which in its current form spawned the UFC) or business deals, there is someone on the other side trying to achieve a better result or “get more” for his or her client. Surgeons do not have someone trying to knock their instruments out of their hands or hide charts on them. Teachers do not (usually) have another person in the class room yelling “I object” or “we will never agree with that”. Pharmacists don’t have folks altering their prescriptions on them in the midst of filling them. People in these other jobs have everyone behind them – everyone wants successful surgeries, educated kids, safe prescriptions. But lawyers – particularly those in private practice who have many clients to work for who don’t give a darn that another client may need something as well when they need something today – constantly have their self-worth on the line. This leads to personality disorders and high bar tabs at bar association functions.

We all hear how unpopular lawyers are and we all have heard a million lawyer jokes (my favorite is how lawyers are now used in lab experiments instead of white mice because there are more of them and the lab workers don’t get attached to them). I take solace, however, that in those polls where people rank law near the bottom in popularity as a profession, they tend to rank their personal experiences with their OWN lawyers at or near the top. It’s the other guy’s lawyer people don’t like, not their own.  Duh.

Lawyers have given us a lot – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, voting rights for women and the end of segregation to name some of the most significant. They have also given us pill bottles that are impossible to open, warning labels telling us not to stick things in our eyes or ears that we would never consider sticking in our eyes or ears, and a high degree of difficulty in trying to obtain our own medical records. 

In my life experience, some of the very best folks I have known are lawyers (especially my partners and other colleagues at my firm) and some of the worst folks I have known are lawyers (list furnished on request).  I am not writing to defend the profession – but I will say that lawyers only reflect what society wants – and, as they taught us in law school, the legal system is a better way to resolve disputes than dueling in the street.