What Do Lawyers Do

I remember when I was about ten years old asking my dad what lawyers did. I remember a perplexed look on his face when I asked him this. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what a lawyer did, but how to explain this to a little kid.

“A lawyer he said,” after thinking for a bit, “basically helps someone tell their story to a judge.”

“Why can’t the person just tell his own story to a judge.” my dad responded.

“Well, a lawyer knows the legal system,” he said, knowing that he wasn’t really answering my question.

If I had had the Internet back then, I think it would have been easier to get an answer. I might have stumbled upon Mesothelioma Lawyers, which has a picture of a man hugging a kid who coincidentally looks a lot like I did as a kid.

It might have given me a positive image of lawyers, which is hard to come by these days. I think it’s easy to look at “bad lawyers” and generalize all of them to the point that we forget there are some out there who went into law to help people. And these are the lawyers we should look to as the example, not the ones who in jokes we deem lower than catfish.