A friend of mine is a criminal defence lawyer. I get the impression he really enjoys his work – he gets to meet a lot of people he never normally would (bikie gang members, terrorists, murderers, drug dealers, drug addicts, etc) – and he feels safe in doing so (he tells me that defendants trying to harm their own lawyers is quite rare, rare enough that he isn't worried about it).
Once, at a work function (previous employer), I met one of the lawyers from the contracts department. He was telling me how he used to live in a rural area doing agricultural real estate transactions, now he had moved to the big city to do in-house contracts review for a multinational software company. He was a "top performer" (indeed, this was a function to reward people who'd been nominated as "top performers" by their management)–but he didn't give me the impression he really loved what he did, more that he was just doing it to support his family.
I think criminal defense is a great service to humanity. It's hard to estimate how many are wrongfully accused, but surely there are many. Further, things like the plea bargain system or parole regularly lead innocent people to proclaim their guilt. It's very messed up and must be a terrible trauma for some. Lastly, I think even guilty people deserve humane treatment and perhaps forgiveness.
I would agree here, on the condition of rehabilitation.
Obviously our "justice system", isn't.
Edit: Speaking of the US above, no experience or knowledge about other countries systems. It appears I've found a new gap in my knowledge, anyone have a good intro to how courts work in their country?
In Germany, they use the inquisitorial system. There is no jury, only judges. In smaller matters, it's one professional judge and two lay judges. In bigger matters it's 3 professional judges and five lay judges. The professional judges hold the ultimate decision, and the lay judges advise (but they do have a lot of influence). And of course one can appeal.
There is no such thing as plea bargaining (which is considered a perversion of justice) or bail (which is considered to be jailing the poor). People are rarely jailed pending trial (unless their place of residence cannot be established, or they're considered a flight risk - a very high bar to pass). There's no "perp walk" or handcuffs or any of that humiliation stuff (unless you actually ARE being a pain). After the verdict, you're usually given a month or two to tie up your affairs outside before being ordered by mail to report to prison.
The relationship between lawyers is one of cooperation (albeit with the agenda of pushing towards their point of view). The purpose of the court proceedings is to get to the truth of the matter. There are no theatrics, no grand speeches, no "chewbacca" defense. Withholding evidence or deliberately hampering the other side is severely frowned upon. "Winning" the case is not the point; representing your side well is. Lawyers have no election aspirations, and thus no public to impress with their prosecutorial prowess. One cannot become a judge without years of training and a degree (there's no such thing as elected judges).
The result is a very calm, organized court proceeding, because everyone involved knows the law and is committed to it. You can't bamboozle with doublespeak, shady arguments or unproven methods because there's no "man on the street" juror to deceive; only the judges, who are trained to know better.
Anyone can sit in on a proceeding (I've done so). There's very little ceremony, and often it's just a bunch of people sitting around conference tables in a small room.
My lawyer friend and I are both Australians, and he works as a criminal lawyer in the Australian legal system.
The US inherited the basics of its legal system from that of England. Australia did too, along with many other countries. So at a very high level, the basics are the same. But, there has been a lot of divergent evolution, so as we drill down into the details lots of differences come up.
I think one huge difference is not really legal but social – Australia has always been a less violent society, with less violent crime and less social conflict than the US has, which reduces political pressure for punitiveness in the legal system. On a per capita basis, the US homicide rate is 5 times that of Australia, and while these numbers go up and down, I think it has been consistently significantly higher than Australia's, for many decades.
I don’t really know. My uneducated impression is that Australia’s prisons are harsher than those of many Western/Northern European countries but not as bad as those of the US-but I don’t know of any hard data on the issue. Rehabilitation is officially an objective and of course the prison system makes some attempts but we can always question if they do enough.
I have a theory that lawyers in many ways are not unlike a security engineer:
you get the satisfaction of exploiting the system, bending the rules to your advantage, making the impossible work. and when you’re good at your job, you get paid well ( lawyer by many more times of course )
I believe it has one of the lowest job satisfaction of any white collar jobs. I've wondered that is folks didnt have the massive student loans to pay off early on if they would stick with it.
I can't speak to the general case, but I know that my brother didn't. As an ADA (living in an expensive US city) his salary is less than a first-year public school teacher with a bachelor's degree.
Lawyers aren't tracking & billing in 6 or 10 minute increments to punish their clients, they do it so you only pay for the time they actually spent on your account. It's beneficial that, if they get a 5 minute phone call while preparing a document for you, you don't get billed for the time they were on the phone.
Yeah, it's wicked beneficial that you're paying $40 or even $80 just to say hello and ask how their weekend was. I understand that from the other side, talking to you is working and they wouldn't be doing it if they weren't getting paid. But when one's rate is in consultant territory (as opposed to lower contractor rates based on bulk time) then that type of overhead should already be built in. And sure billing increments are theoretically orthogonal to billing for overhead, but it's galling to see "1.1 hours" knowing that 6 minutes of that was overhead that didn't get rounded down.
OK... so don't call someone who bills you for their time and make smalltalk. That seems pretty self-evident.
If I start a meeting with a consulting software engineer and spend the first 5 minutes making small talk, that's fine, but my company is gonna pay for that time. The same thing is true for lawyers.
Yes, that's the obvious conclusion. But surely you can see how clients needing to deliberately refrain from standard pleasantries doesn't contribute to lawyers having a good reputation.
Lawyers must hate their work.