Why people dislike lawyers

The first line of a novel I am reading is this: “I remember someone once telling me that you know it’s cold when you see a lawyer with his hands in his own pockets.”

Lawyer jokes have been around for years. They are popular because many people don’t like lawyers. An incident which occurred the other day opened my eyes as to why that may be so. Someone I knew said to me, “Did I see you walking down the street just now?” A normal person would have said, “yes,” since I had just been walking down the street. But because of my legal training, I was compelled to reply, “How would I know what you saw?”

Lawyers are trained to think logically and to separate fact from opinion. When a witness is asked to state what he saw or heard, the witness is expected to simply state the facts without drawing any conclusions or interpreting them. Unfortunately this is not easy to do, because in everyday life, people tend to make judgments about what they see and hear. A lawyer is trained to object when a person puts forth something more than “just the facts.” Naturally, this makes the lawyer seem argumentative since the general public doesn’t always think logically. It was Henry Ford who once said, “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.”

So the reason lawyers are disliked and made fun of is simply that they think logically and the rest of the world doesn’t.