I can't get my head around why most lawyers portray themselves as "smart", why people genuinely buy into law firm gimmicks or stereotypes that they are "where bright / intelligent minds meet" or some bullsh*t. It is as if law requires any intellect at all. There are truly smart and intelligent people who win medals at STEM Olympiads and engineer spacecraft to reach new heights for mankind, and then there are these lawyers who have average or below-average intelligence who brag about how intelligent they are, b*tching about words in a Word document everyday.
All you need is some degree of literacy in your own native language (English) and nothing else, not even a degree nowadays considering solicitor apprenticeships are a big thing now. Anyone who is literate enough to read newspapers can already roughly understand a judgment, law, or a legal textbook. Latin jargons can be Googled in an instant. (If English is not your native language just use Duolingo for a year or two.)
All a lawyer ever does is reading tedious amount of paperwork, checking formatting and cross-references, copy-and-pasting document templates then changing the names of parties, doing some legal research to find things that are already there instead of creating something, and that's about it. Nothing that the average person cannot do. Nothing that AI cannot do faster and cheaper now or in the near future.
Law school is only about hard work, reading, memorising and applying arbitrary laws, statutes and case law which are just manmade rules and formalities which happen to be in a law book. There is not a purely logical reason why a parking penalty should be e.g. £100 instead of £94.5, £35 or £1000. Law school essays are usually bog-standard essays with the same structure as ChatGPT answers that anyone can write after a few Google searches. There is nothing in academic law that can be justified by pure logical reasoning, whereas mathematics, physics, and engineering (& most of STEM) are probably the truly intellectually stimulating subjects that requires any raw intellectual power.
I have worked in law firms and either (i) a lot of them or (ii) virtually all of the lawyers or partners are just dumb people who are not nearly smart enough for any STEM subjects, so they chose soft mickey mouse subjects such as English Literature, Religious Studies and Psychology etc for their A-Levels. If it takes talent to recognise another talent, then the "Talent Acquisition" specialists / recruiters are probably the last things you would entrust the task of talent-spotting with, probably CDDs in humanities A-Levels and some mickey mouse literature degree from Arse-end University. I also have evidence that a lawyer / solicitor / professional from a Magic Circle law firm in London who laughed at and made fun of an IP client's scientific documents as if genetic sequence is gibberish / typed by a pet animal who sat on a keyboard. This is honestly embarrassing for the whole legal sector / industry.
If law is truly intellectually challenging and stimulating then why is law the most boring job ever according to surveys and polls? Those who embellish their training contract / pupillage applications well enough to bag a place are probably also liars.
The billable hours model is a counterproductive system that rewards inefficiency. Law firm IT systems / databases are purposefully made as tedious and primitive as possible and require tedious manual entry in order to churn out more billable hours to invoice to the clients. The legal industry is literally dragging human progress down.
Law firms portray and think of themselves as some unique leading institution that delivers unique solutions. It's not like there is any creative, artistic, or scientific element. Every piece of legal work is the same tedious boring dull paperwork review etc where you either f**ked up or you didn't.
Any lawyers (solicitors and barristers alike) here who would like to disagree?