Lawyering job losing nobility

I have now been practicing law for about ten years and I have encountered difficulties but not the ones that I thought I would encounter when I started. When I went to law school, I thought that the law was going to noble, rigid, and the clients will be respectfully and would work with your tirelessly to achieve the results (while recognizing that some clients may not have less money). When I graduated from law school, I started working on criminal, immigration, family, and other matters and expanded my practice into related matters. Since I began practicing, I have noticed several things that are annoying doing private trial work:

1. Clients are not your friends. They are not the types of people that were described in law school. A percentage of law clients are abrasive, dont take no for an answer, make threats (not all friends are actionable), shout and scream, dont cooperate, and often times shift facts to make you the bad guy (ex: you called them many times for an appointment, they dont care and they complain you didnt send a formal appointment letter when they miss deadline). It is difficult to say anything to some private clients that they dont want to hear without a screaming match starting and threats for refunds, etc. Some clients look for reasons to sue the lawyer and look for flaws in the lawyer more than working on the cases. Clients are often times stingy and greedy and lazy and will not cooperate or pay unless they are in jail or there is some other sort of exigency. The clients' family members are often a**h***s too and make unreasonable demands such as for a lawyer who has over hundred cases (at least) to visit their loved one in jail repeatedly when such visits are not necessary for the representation. Clients will lie. Clients will ask you to stay at home to make a phone call in the evening and will then cancel the plan. If you try to talk the client out of the evening call, the client will get upset and say you are inconsiderate for non-accommodating his work schedule. A lot of times you cant pick and choose clients because a volume of clients is needed and you need to pay bills. Most private lawyers I know make $50k-100k a year and have to chase some of the worse people in the community for the money.

2. Other people in the profession are not necessarily friendly. Opposing family law counsel will try to provoke you just to gain a miniscule advantage in a case or to look good in front of the client. Other lawyers may get upset about the types of cases you are taking. Judges and other court officials may mess with you and for instance call your case last for purely political reasons that have nothing to do with your performance. Sometimes you will have to say someone else in the system screwed up (it is not necessary to represent a client) but other people will still get mad at you.

3. Being as a lawyer does not bring you nobility. It brings you the opposite. A lot of times telling other people that you are a lawyer will only bring negative comments like "omg you represent child molesters..." "omg you represent Honduran migrants who take our jobs." Once they hear about other issues in the firm and the pay, people often tell you that things like "you are not going to find nobility in law anymore" and "law is just a facade for the power structure" and things like "maybe you should switch to computer programming. maybe they will pay you over $100k for a lot less stress". When I ask the same types of people to hire me, they make statements like "you are very smart dude but you dont have right connections. I hire lawyers with the right connections and if I wanted to learn about law, I would talk to a professor."

Has anyone else heard similar things? Do you feel like the practice of law is not what people think it is and it has lost its glamour?

Ha! I hope this doesn't offend anyone but I don't get the feeling there are a ton of lawyers here.

Except for me. But I don't practice any longer. I work in government. But I still touch base with other practicing attorneys so I get it.

A lot of ignorant people will come to me and think I was crazy to leave the practice of law but I saw the reality of the situation early on. There is a reason there were "scam" blogs a few years back. Law is a scam. I always try to discourage people to come into law if I can.

My husband is a lawyer. He works for a government agency in our country that provides free family and civil legal assistance to people that are considered vulnerable based on social worker evaluation. Some own like seven properties, but that's a subject for another day. There are people gaming the system.

He's experienced a lot of what you've mentioned in point two. It almost seems like some clients are more disrespectful because their services are free. He has to explain things many times to some people and they still think they know more about the law than him. He's lucky he works mainly remote these days, because some people have gotten violent because they don't like his answers. One of the weird things is that each municipality or group of smaller municipalities has a designated office. But, people come from other areas and want to be served in his office. When he tells them they have to go to their closest office, some get mad. I'm not sure what the point is with that. Why do they need to go to his office?

Don't even get me started on the people that want to unearth cases from years ago where the state of limitations has far passed. Those are mostly people looking for an inheritance, etc. They're the most insistent and won't listen to anything he says.


It's not an easy job at all.