Lawyers must hate their work.
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 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?
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 )
case n point: defending OJ
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.
