Well, if nothing else, they could always run for elected office – bu they might be over-qualified!

This is because the ‘dullard’s point’ is that lawyers are worthy of ridicule because they are bad.
And the problem with this description is that it is designed to miss the point entirely.

I’m sure that the overall general population does not possess the overall capabilities of the population of lawyers.
This is to be expected, as the general population does not possess the college degree necessary to enter law school, much less pass the bar.

However, when you get away from HOAs and School Boards and begin to compare apples with apples, many of the lawyers I’ve dealt with personally begin to fail miserably at just the tasks you highlight when compared to a group of educational peers. Perhaps it is a sampling problem, but there seem to be many such ‘poorly correlated’ samples. This wouldn’t be so bad were the billings for this degree of incompetence at equal or less than the said peers.

But that’s not the case. Time and again I have witnessed personally many cases where the lawyer absolutely fails to grasp a ‘complex problem’, compute single pages of information (or single sentences for that matter), or handle any counter argument at all. That is, if you can read past their errors in grammar, spelling and reason. One of my favorites is the continued mixing of the name of their own client with that of the opposition in the filed complaint. Always hilarious to have an expensive attorney file paperwork with the court that alleges their own client as the source of the problem.

And lets back up from these rather subjective points. Let’s talk about the law, of which ‘lawyers’ should have a reasonable understanding. How about the ability to serve the opposition? Nope. How about the capability of understanding procedure related to the cause of action that the lawyers wrote and filed themselves? Nope. How about failing to follow written instructions from the client that ends up damaging the client’s case and the client financially? Seems there’s always an excuse.

There is, however, one action that lawyers seem to be quite capable of, and that is billing. No slip listings, no notations, no phone records, no personnel records, yet clients again and again are presented with large bills and absolutely no backup. Not thousands, but hundreds of thousands, and all of it completely without verifiable support. Dare the client challenge this behavior and they are the recipient of a lawsuit from their prior attorney, complete with motions to quash, writs of attachment, violations of confidentiality, etc. Sounds like a specific case? I wish it were that simple.

Please refrain from the lecture regarding the low end versus the high end. I’ve seen both ends, and I can tell you that both resemble the rear end. Successful, unsuccessful, Ivy League, State College, there are no useful correlations or predictors.

For the level of education mandated to practice law, along with the high hourly fees charged, the great majority of the lawyers I have come in contact with are shockingly inept.

Are they all inept? Of course not, and I wish I could recommend the talents of some of the posters and commenters here, as this level of discourse would be most welcome. I can, however, guarantee you that the ABA is not interested in actually conducting oversight into the specifics of their members’ actions. Talk about don’t ask don’t tell.

I realize it’s hard to resist bashing lawyers. It’s such a dullard’s point that it’s silly to even pay attention to it.

But really… lawyers are much better writers than the general population or the population of virtually any other profession I’ve encountered.

Sure, the low end is worse than the high end, so some lawyers are aware of lots of problems in some other lawyer’s writings. But attend an HOA meeting, or a school board meeting, or even a boardroom meeting after spending a lot of time discussing complex problems with lawyers. It takes me a lot of time to readapt to dealing with people who can’t compute a single page of information or handle a counter argument.

I realize this is elitist, and there’s always a bigger fish, but lawyers are a smart group of people when compared to any random assortment of folks out there.

Lawyers also cause a lot of hassles and costs and are also pretty powerful as a group, so they are angrily bashed. I get it.

I agree that the problem isn’t partners who insist on great legal writing, but those who try to play some kind of stupid and expensive game with their power. There’s a reason the bar won’t let MBAs run law firms… they would eliminate so much of the crap that occurs in them that the legal field would lose a mountain of billables.