Shon Hopwood: The legal profession puts itself on an unsupportable pedestal

I went to law school with eyes wide open. I experienced the legal system firsthand, serving time in federal prison for my role in five bank robberies. While in prison, I worked with many lawyers on the outside and often reviewed the work product of countless criminal defense lawyers. I saw a fair amount of bad lawyering and questionable ethics; many of the cases I won helping other people in federal prison involved claims of gross lawyer incompetence. Then I went to law school, where I was told that the legal profession is all honorable and that most lawyers are ethically upright and concerned about the public interest. I also heard that people without integrity are barred from the practice of law through the bar’s character and fitness test. This optimistic view of the law and lawyers left me perplexed because my experiences with both were very different. A first-hand witness The contradiction between how lawyers discuss the profession versus its reality…

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